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We examine Whitehead’s early philosophy of mathematics in this article because it was his only explicit philosophy of mathematics. After Principia Mathematica, Whitehead let major new mathematical developments pass him by, and he never returned seriously to a philosophy that considered those new directions in mathematics.¹

In looking for a work of Whitehead that singularly and most accurately describes his early mathematical philosophy, we should not choose Universal Algebra (UA) and the variety of formalism espoused there. For Whitehead explicitly states in the only review of another’s book he ever made: "I think that the formalist position adopted in that chapter [Introduction to Universal Algebra], whilst it has the merit of recognizing an important problem, does not give the true solution. . ." (SPTC5:239). Whitehead was not a formalist.

Neither should we choose any of the numerous works in which Whitehead establishes mathematics as derivative from the abstract theory of classes or intuitive set theory, because in these works he acknowledges the paradoxes in set theory that drove him to affirm for a time Russell’s logistic thesis that mathematics is the "science concerned with the logical deduction of consequences from the general premises of all reasoning" (MAT 291). Whitehead did not ground mathematics in set theory.

Nor should we center Whitehead’s philosophy of mathematics in the monumental Principia Mathematica and its philosophy of logicism interpreted and restricted by the theory of types. For his original enthusiasm for the theory of types, given in the statement "All the contradictions can be avoided," (MAT 293) gave way to mild revulsion when he realized that "our only way of understanding the rule is nonsense" (MG 111). Whitehead did not remain a logicist.

Formalism, set theory, logicism, and intuitionism are the four major recognized contemporary schools in the philosophy of mathematics.² If Whitehead did not advocate any of these, including intuitionism (which he never engaged probably because of its Kantian roots), what was his position? We believe that Whitehead viewed mathematics as consisting primarily of ideal objects radically abstracted from human experience. In the simplest of terms, Whitehead was an empiricist -- an empiricist with a romantic streak of Platonism. He was not, however, a pure Platonist. Plato accepted his forms as ontologically primary. Whitehead always accepted experience as more fundamental than ideal objects abstracted from it.³

Ours is a simple thesis with respect to powerfully general but unfortunately vague philosophical words, such as empiricism, formalism, intuitionism, Platonism. They obscure many important and subtle distinctions in mathematics and its philosophy. We have an obligation to speak carefully about mathematics and philosophy in order to present our position for consideration and criticism. But where should we start? With what work or works of Whitehead should we begin? Not Universal Algebra or Principia Mathematica, or for that matter, any of his professional mathematical or philosophical works. We best begin with a work written for lay folk, first published by the Home University Library in 1911, called An Introduction to Mathematics (IM). We think that Whitehead spoke more fundamentally in this work about mathematics than he did to professionals in philosophy or mathematics. At least we see a basic continuity in the book between Whitehead’s earliest mathematics and his final philosophy. In addition, the mathematics covered is what an undergraduate today would have in her first courses in calculus. We intend to use this subject matter of mathematics to begin to explain Whitehead’s early philosophy of mathematics, including that implicit in Universal Algebra and Principia Mathematica, as well as to introduce contemporary issues in mathematics that affect an interpretation of his mature philosophy.

An Introduction to Mathematics

Whitehead’s theme, begun in the first chapter and maintained throughout the book and, in our judgment, for the rest of his philosophy, is that mathematics begins in experience and as abstracted becomes separated from experience to become utterly general. "We see, and hear, and taste, and smell, and feel hot and cold, and push, and rub, and ache, and tingle" (IM 4). These feelings belong to us individually. "My toothache cannot be your toothache" (IM 4). Yet we can objectify the tooth from the toothache and so can a dentist who "extracts not the toothache but the tooth," (IM 4) which is the same tooth for both dentist and patient. Whitehead would give later in Process and Reality a metaphysical explanation of how we may objectify precisely an individual thing from vague feelings by his description of indicative feelings (PR 260).

Abstraction is objectification; that is, the activity of abstraction from our experiences produces ideal objects. In the process we "put aside our immediate sensations" and recognize that "what is left is composed of our general ideas of the abstract formal properties of things; . . . the abstract mathematical ideas" (IM 5). Mathematics applies to the physical world because of its abstraction. By abstraction we get to mere things. The configuration of abstract things in abstract space at different (abstract) times is the mathematical science of mechanics, "the great basal idea of modern science" (IM 31). "The laws of motion . . . are the ultimate laws of physical science" (IM 32). Mechanics is the foundation of science. How strange to hear these words from the philosophical anti-mechanist of Process and Reality.

Because we can objectify things as things individually and communally we have a common world of things, which is not only the abstract domain of mechanics but becomes, as extended, the subject matter of arithmetic. Arithmetic, therefore, "applies to everything, to tastes and to sounds, to apples and to angels, to the ideas of the mind and to the bones of the body. The nature of the things is perfectly indifferent, of all things it is true that two and two make four" (IM 2). Whitehead then identifies the leading characteristic of mathematics, not just of arithmetic, as that subject which "deals with properties and ideas which are applicable to things just because they are things, and apart from any particular feelings, or emotions, or sensations, in any way connected with them" (IM 2-3). An abstract or ideal thing that has no reference to "particular feelings, or emotions, or sensations" is what Whitehead later would define as an eternal object (see PR 44). Eternal objects form a realm -- a Platonic realm? Not quite. Whitehead remains an empiricist, but shows early this romantic streak of Platonism that is given expression in his doctrine of the realm of eternal objects.

In the second chapter Whitehead introduces the idea of a variable, which is a letter that can refer to general things of the world. It can also stand for ideal things like numbers and even for other variables, which, of course, may refer to things ideal or physical of any sort. Later in chapter five, statements about variables and numbers, such as algebraic equations, are called algebraic forms, which Whitehead does not define because "the conception of form is so general that it is difficult to characterize it in abstract terms" (TM 45). Finally, in Chapter 6 after discussing generalizations of number, Whitehead introduces the notion of generality, which with the ideas of variable and form "compose a sort of mathematical trinity which preside over the whole subject" (IM 57). In commenting on Whitehead’s notion of generality expressed in An Introduction to Mathematics, Christoph Wassermann states, "Whitehead wants to point out that mathematics always seeks expressions which, taking up the notions of the variable and of form, are able to unite as great a subdivision of mathematics as possible, using only one uniform formalism" (PS17:184).

It is curious that Whitehead does not mention explicitly in this context the formalism that he and Russell had been developing for a decade to unify mathematics, namely the symbolic logic of Principia Mathematica, the first volume of which was published in 1910, a year before the publication of An Introduction to Mathematics. However, he does give a most prominent place to logic by tying it to the importance of variables ("The ideas of any and of some are introduced into algebra by the use of letters" [IM 7]) and proceeds to discuss the quantifiers any and some in a way that clearly indicates a reference to the logic of Principia Mathematica. Whitehead is more forthright about the relationship of logic to the idea of a variable in his review published also in 1910. "This discovery [the generalized concept of a variable] empties mathematics of everything but its logic. For the future mathematics is logic . . ." (SPTCS:237).

The mathematical content of An Introduction to Mathematics begins with standard generalizations of number: from natural numbers to integers, rational numbers, real numbers. In this context Whitehead mentions Cantor’s proof that the real numbers cannot be arranged as countable and comments that this discovery "is of the utmost importance in the philosophy of mathematical ideas" (IM 55). Complex numbers -- Whitehead calls them imaginary numbers -- are presented in a "new" guise as ordered pairs of real numbers. Their addition and subtraction as ordered pairs illustrates the parallelogram law, which Whitehead had shown to be of great practical merit, "It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications" (IM 71). Coordinate geometry is also made practical. The origin of a vector. "the root idea of physical science," illustrates our location in relation to the world as "nearly here" (IM 92). Analytic geometry and conic sections are discussed as illustrations of the principle of generality. In the chapter on functions, Whitehead celebrates the clarity of Weierstrass’s definitions of limit and continuity. After a neighborhood definition of continuity, Whitehead states "If we understand the preceding ideas, we understand the foundations of modem mathematics" (IM 19). Trigonometry is shown in terms of periodic functions. An introduction to series and then differential calculus is given. Finally some brief geometry is portrayed in which Whitehead states that "the fundamental ideas of geometry are exactly the same as those of algebra; except that algebra deals with numbers and geometry with lines, angles, areas, and other geometrical entities" (IM 178).

An Introduction to Mathematics, surprisingly, seems completely uninformed by Universal Algebra or Principia Mathematica, at least in the sense of what might be new or creative in these two major works. It gives no hint of any of the new algebra examined in Universal Algebra, and does not mention formal logic at all. The entry logic is not even in the index. Whitehead seems to be describing the comfortable orthodox analysis of the late nineteenth century as mathematics, with a few nods to the creative work of Cantor and Weierstrass. Furthermore, he sees this mathematical analysis to be an abstraction from the objective physical world and as such constitutes the mathematical basis for science. There is nothing strange or wonderful or even bothersome in the staid mathematics of Whitehead’s work for lay people. He is backing off from the adventuresome spirit in mathematics, never again to be really creative there.

In a summary of Whitehead’s position, mathematics is abstracted from human experience to become ideal objects which initially represent general things that are symbolized in classes by variables. The variables can then become ideal objects as parts of forms, which themselves may become objects in more general systems. Whitehead asserts that mathematicians seek to extend their systems so that operations and relations are defined most generally, e. g., the natural numbers extended to the integers so that subtraction always has meaning, as well as desiring to show relationships between general systems. These general systems and their perceived interrelationships are examined for consistency and completeness by means of logic, which Whitehead believed was a universal language for the presentation of all mathematics. At least for him, at the time immediately prior to the publication of An Introduction to Mathematics, formal logic was an example of the passion of mathematicians to establish connections within mathematics and to attempt to unify the whole of mathematics.

In Universal Algebra Whitehead sought to achieve what he calls generality by trying to unify by a common interpretation apparently disparate algebraic systems that to many did not appear to be mathematics at all. In Principia Mathematica he sought to unify mathematics by logic. Both attempts failed. The supposed common interpretation of generalized spaces in Universal Algebra was not satisfactory. When his system of logic with its assumption of the theory of types was objectified and compared with other mathematical systems, it was shown to be paradoxical. Further, Gödel showed that it was incomplete for arithmetic. That Whitehead’s early attempts at a philosophy of mathematics were inadequate, does not mean that his empiricist position was wrong. We believe that his mature philosophical position, an extension and modification of his earlier empiricism, is an adequate and satisfactory foundation for a contemporary philosophy of mathematics.⁴ Whitehead, however, never re-examined mathematics from his later philosophical position. This is new and fertile ground. In order to cultivate it adequately we have to examine Whitehead’s mathematics and philosophy of mathematics in Universal Algebra and Principia Mathematica.

Universal Algebra

In the next to last decade of the nineteenth century, Whitehead was in his twenties and was working on the applied problem of the motion of viscous incompressible fluids (QJPAM23). His mathematics was at most a sophisticated extension of that outlined above in An Introduction to Mathematics; his philosophy of mathematics was probably also a version only implicitly contained therein. We do not know exactly when he encountered Hermann Grassmann’s Ausdehnungslehre, published in 1844, or Hamilton’s Quaternions, 1853, or Boole’s Symbolic Logic of 1859. He did, however, recognize that the subject matter in these works was quite different from conventional mathematics. He also had the conviction that it was good mathematics. At the age of thirty he began A Treatise on Universal Algebra, which was published seven years later in 1898.⁵ His goal was to present both the old established and the new unconventional mathematics as part of a unified and, using his term, universal algebra.

What were some of the characteristics of the new algebras that challenged the old mathematical analysis? In a review of Universal Algebra, G. B. Mathews gives an admittedly tongue in cheek caricature of this challenge. We present it here not because it is mathematically precise, but because it addresses in simple terms the mathematics of An Introduction to Mathematics, which as we have said is that kind of mathematics contained in contemporary college calculus courses. Even in its misleading clarity, we think that it was this kind of provocation that also motivated Whitehead. (Our readers who did not take mathematics beyond calculus may find it especially engaging.) One can also see the challenge to typically secondary school algebra and geometry.

How did Whitehead attempt to rectify these apparently paradoxical assertions? By insisting that there are no inconsistencies within an individual algebra. This means there is no longer just one algebra or one geometry. There are many self-consistent structures that can lay claim to being algebras or geometries, which may, however, differ from each other. In some of these a + a= a and in others a + a 2a. Whitehead called each of these algebraic structures an algebraic manifold, which in his definition is a set with a commutative and associative operation.

In modern terminology Whitehead’s algebraic manifold is a commutative semi-group. We mention this fact to point out that at this stage in his development Whitehead did not accept, or apparently understand, that a group (or semi-group) structure could be a means of relating his different algebras, which were themselves semi-groups. In "Sets of Operations in Relation to Groups of Finite Order," he chose explicitly to "abandon the idea of a group of . . . operations . . . on some unspecified object, as being an idea which . . . appertains to a special interpretation of the symbols" (PRSL64:319-20). He affirms that the operations must be considered as objects. Whitehead was in a severely objectifying mood, not in a relational one, even though his primary task was to relate disparate algebras. That he did not lay claim to the work of Cayley on the abstract and relational nature of groups published in 1849 and 1854 was a crucial failure of oversight on his part that essentially separated him from the future direction of mathematics.

To show the relationship between algebras, each must be objectified clearly. At least Whitehead did that and created a work that as reviewer Mathews said "ought to be full of interest, not only to specialists, but to the considerable number of people who, with a fair knowledge of mathematics, have never dreamt of the existence of any algebra save one, or any geometry that is not Euclidean" (PRSL64:385-6). We wish that we could have asked Whitehead in his later years about his earlier passion to objectify mathematics to the detriment of its relational aspects. His mature philosophy was so thoroughly relational.

How did Whitehead attempt to relate his disparate algebraic manifolds? He did so in two ways: by interpreting them in terms of the general abstract mathematical properties of space and by asserting a formalist posture on the nature of mathematics. The former is much less interesting than the latter, but we shall say a few words about it. Just as Euclidean geometry can be interpreted in terms of algebra and vice versa, Whitehead saw the new algebras as interpretable in terms of generalized mathematical spaces. This position was never satisfactory, as Whitehead eventually recognized, because of his attempt to interpret objectified algebraic systems in terms of other generalized objectified algebraic or geometric spaces. We now know that there is no one objectified algebra, geometry or other general content that forms a ground for all of mathematics. We must go to a relational route which we shall examine later in much more detail.

Whitehead’s formalist position is stated by him in plain terms:

In contrast to Mathews’s strongly supportive review of Universal Algebra, Alexander Macfarlane took Whitehead to task for his arbitrary, formal approach to mathematics:

Where Mathews thought that Universal Algebra would be an important book for the generality of its formalism. Macfarlane felt that the work suffered by virtue of that same aspect. Macfarlane was right: Universal Algebra has been largely ignored, although not for its alleged empty formalism.⁶

In Universal Algebra Whitehead attempted a synthesis of mathematical experience. As Mathews pointed out, to some extent he succeeded. Such a synthesis should be important, whether written by a formalist, a mathematical realist, or the most ardent, bean-averse Pythagorean mystic. Why, then, has Universal Algebra been of such little consequence? Is it mathematically flawed? To some extent, yes. For example, the classification of algebras into two genera by the law of idempotency (a + a = a) ultimately proves inept, and Whitehead’s discussion of positional manifolds repeatedly confuses the distinct notions of what we now call affine and projective spaces. But we do not feel that these technical mistakes are really at issue, except insofar as they perhaps suggest a false perspective. Newton, after all, did not get the foundations of calculus right, but he suffered neither mathematical irrelevance nor obscurity for his oversights. The failure of Universal Algebra is more subtle.

The list of mathematicians who most influenced Whitehead is remarkable: Grassmann (1809-77), Boole (1815-64), Weierstrass (1815-97), Cantor (1845-1918), Frege (1848-1925), Peano (1858-1932). With the exception of Grassmann, Whitehead was most affected by the work these men did in connection with the foundations of mathematics. Issues of continuity, cardinality, set theory and logic, and the foundations of arithmetic dominate. But more remarkable is the following list of mathematicians seldom or ever mentioned by Whitehead: Dirichlet (1805-59), Kummer (1810-93), Galois (1811-32), Cayley (1821-95), Riemann (1826-66), Dedekind (1831-1916), Poincaré (1852-1912), Hilbert (1862-1943). The work of these men led directly to the key mathematical structures, methods, and programs that have persisted through this century: groups, rings, modules, and field extensions; algebraic and analytic number theory; algebraic geometry; algebraic topology and qualitative analysis of dynamical systems; Hilbert’s twenty-three problems. These domains -- the principal legacy of nineteenth century mathematics -- play no role in Universal Algebra; in this light, it is no surprise that Universal Algebra plays no role in twentieth century mathematics.

The lists above and other evidence suggest not merely that Whitehead backed the wrong horses, but that his horse sense was somewhat eccentric. His mathematical research tended to two extremes: applications and foundations. The mainstream mathematical culture, which, regardless of ontological commitment, is driven as much by esthetics as by science, seems to have had little meaning for him. In spite of his great interests in esthetics generally, he had only a narrow sense of mathematics as, in the words of C. H. Clemens, "an esoteric art form,"⁷ and even less sense of passion for mathematical adventure. Later, he would declare that mathematical form does not even admit emotional subjective form for its feeling (AI 251). For Whitehead, during this time of transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, abstraction is foremost a tool of science, and Universal Algebra takes this view to the limit. Hence, when he surveys the field with a unifying eye, he sees on the one hand, symbolic logic (a + a= a) and, on the other hand, real or complex linear algebra (a + a _ a) and its extensions. The vast middle ground (including number theory and algebraic geometry, for instance) is lost in the deep shadows cast by rational, empirical science. The resulting formalism is too enfeebled to support the objects and methods of twentieth century mainstream mathematics, and the great irony of Macfarlane’s criticism becomes this: the failure of Universal Algebra lies not in relentless, arbitrary abstraction and formalization but in the narrowness of its extensive base.

Principia Mathematica

We have already remarked on the anomaly of Whitehead’s giving a general description of mathematics in An Introduction so Mathematics (1911) without considering any of the results of his work in Universal Algebra (1898) or the first volume of Principia Mathematica (1910). Wassermann attributes this to White-head’s reluctance to presume a technical knowledge of mathematics among lay people. As confirmation, he specifies that Whitehead did include more contemporary mathematical content in the article "Mathematics" from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (PS17:192, Footnote 2) where he was addressing both lay and professional audiences. It is true that the article "Mathematics," in contrast with An Introduction to Mathematics, participated fully in the spirit of Principia Mathematica. For example, after trying a number of definitions of mathematics, Whitehead settled in that article on Russell’s definition of mathematics as the "science concerned with the logical deduction of consequences from the general premises of all reasoning" (MAT 291), In fact, the article "Mathematics" is the most accessible, most approving and best summary of Principia Mathematica ever done by Whitehead.

On examination, however, the mathematical content of An Introduction to Mathematics and "Mathematics" seem quite similar. Remember that An Introduction to Mathematics primarily discusses natural numbers, integers, rational numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, as well as coordinate geometry, periodic functions, series, differential calculus, and geometry. The mathematical content of "Mathematics," as indicated by its chapter headings, consists of Cardinal numbers, Ordinal numbers, Cantor’s Infinite Numbers, The Data of Analysis (in which the rational, real and complex numbers are defined), one paragraph headed Geometry, and Classes and Relations. Whitehead had said in a discussion of the definition of mathematics that "the traditional field of mathematics can only be separated from the general abstract theory of classes and relations by a wavering and indeterminate line" (MAT 291). The definitions of number and geometries depend on the theory of classes and relations (MAT 292). The reason for including classes and relations as part of the content of mathematics in "Mathematics" is that the theory of classes and relations, like all mathematics under the thesis of Principia Mathematica, is supposed to be deducible from the "ultimate logical premises" (MAT 292). However, when we compare traditional mathematical content in An Introduction to Mathematics and "Mathematics," we see little difference. Aside from a very brief discussion of geometry, both begin with numbers, distinguish between cardinal and ordinal ones, and then develop rational, real and complex numbers.

One wonders, then, what was the mathematical content of Principia Mathematica? No less a mathematical authority than Alonzo Church, in his review of the second edition of volumes II and III, claims that in the whole of volume I (over 700 pages of closely argued mathematical logic introductory to the theory of cardinal numbers) and together with volumes II and III (themselves enormous tomes) one gets "cardinal numbers, relations and relation-numbers, series, well ordered series and ordinal numbers, and finally the continuum of real numbers" (BAMS34:237). Not surprisingly then -- given that the rationale for the work was foundational -- there is no significant new mathematics developed in Principia Mathematica. This was probably one of the reasons Whitehead made no reference to Principia Mathematica in his book on mathematical content for lay people. Another reason may have been that Whitehead was already concerned about the paradoxical assumptions in the theory of types through which an attempt was made to develop the real numbers by Dedekind cuts. The foundations for real numbers, which physicists as well as mathematicians must have in order to do their work, were insecure under the thesis of Principia Mathematica.

Whitehead was of two minds in 1910 and 1911, one expressed in Principia Mathematica (1910) and also in "Mathematics" (1911); the other in An Introduction to Mathematics (1911). It is interesting to us that in the book for common people, Whitehead paused and chose the route of caution, prudence, clarity and, if we may say so, integrity. In the article "Mathematics," reflecting Principia Mathematica, Whitehead was so caught up with Bertrand Russell in the professional development of his scholarship that he affirmed positions that later came crashing down around his feet. After some time, Whitehead came back professionally to his empirical roots and began a brilliant philosophical career.

Although An Introduction to Mathematics and Principia Mathematica are similar in mathematical content, these two works differ considerably in their approach to mathematics. We can see this best by contrasting the idea of number as it appears in both works.

In An Introduction to Mathematics numbers apply to everything – "to tastes, to sounds, to apples and to angels, to the ideas of the mind and the bones of the body" (IM 2) -- because the idea of numbers, as well as the idea of mere things, is abstracted from actual things. A cardinal number, say two, in this empirical view is an abstraction from, and therefore a property of, sets of things that have two members, for example a set consisting of a cow and a rock. We say that the set of cow and rock has the numerical property of twoness. From an empirical perspective, it makes little sense to speak of the definition of number; there are many interpretations of number, most of which coalesce to a common understanding through communal experience. To become mathematically precise, however, one has to become systematic, that is, work within some formal system. Within a system a unique definition of number becomes appropriate. This idea of twoness above is not as vague as it sounds, for we can agree on a certain arbitrary model set containing what we call two things, our cow and rock if we wish, got by counting or other means, and declare that any other set has two things if it can be put in one-to-one correspondence (in modern terminology, bijective correspondence) with our model set.

If pushed to be more accurate, we can claim, as is often done, that our model set of two is the set containing 0 and 1, where 0 is the null or empty set {} and 1 is the set containing the null set {}. The model set for two, built up from the definitions of 0 and 1 would be {}, {}and contains what we can determine by counting to be two items. Notice that 0 contains no items and 1 contains one item. This method of determining model sets motivates a definition of the successor of a number as the set containing the number and its members. (The number 2 is the successor of 1 because it contains 1, which is {}, and its member, the null set {}.) What we have done here is (a) accept that mathematics arises from experience, (b) recognize that we can get a general idea of twoness from our experience, (c) accept constraints on our experience -- what we can assert as existing and what we can construct -- by accepting some formal system, in this case a system defining set theory, and (d) acknowledge that we can define precisely within that system what we mean by number, successor of a number and in the process twoness. Even though the definition of twoness within the System is radically abstract, it arises out of a common understanding of twoness in our experience. We should point out that even when we construct mathematical definitions that may have no apparent reference to any items of our experience, we are doing so in terms of our activity, a kind of experience, often subject to the constraints of some formal system.

In contrast, the definition of number in Principia Mathematica has an entirely different feel than that outlined above. First, Whitehead and Russell are looking for the definition of cardinal number. There is little sense of multiple systems with differing definitions of number within Principia Mathematica, because its goal was to unify mathematics by deducing all of it from an ostensibly common logic. Second, the definition of number becomes radically extensive, Thus the cardinal number two becomes a huge set, the set of all sets of doublets. In his review of Volume II of Principia Mathematica, C. I. Lewis clarifies the situation:

Defining a cardinal number as the set of all sets having a certain numerical property is an example of Whitehead’s radically objectifying tendency during this period, as contrasted with a relational one. We have offered a definition of number that is significantly more relational, and certainly less ostentatious. A set I has a certain cardinal number if it is bijective on some model set, that is, if it can be related so that its members are one on one with the model set. In Whitehead’s definition, a set has a certain cardinal number if it exists as a member of the set defining that cardinal number. It is interesting to contrast Whitehead’s extreme objectifying and abstractive position reflected here and stated concisely in Science and the Modern World that "Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction" (SMW 21) with his later statement in Modes of Thought: "Hence the absolute generality of logic and mathematics vanish" (MT 98). We see here an example of the transition from Whitehead’s romantic Platonism (following Russell) to the reclaiming of his empirical roots in his philosophy of process.

To develop cardinal numbers further in Principia Mathematica and avoid inconsistencies required the theory of types, largely due to Russell. (For exampie, the notion of cardinality sketched above leads at once to the anomaly of a set belonging to itself -- a hazard to which no one could be more sensitive than Russell.) Lewis comments on the theory of types: "This theory can not be made clear in a brief space, -- almost one is persuaded it can not be made clear in any space... (JPI1:498). Here is what Whitehead said in 1911 about the theory of types: "All the contradictions can be avoided, and yet the use of classes and relations can be preserved as required by mathematics, and indeed by common sense, by a theory which denies to a class -- or relation -- existence or being in any sense in which the entities composing it -- or related by it -- exist" (MAT 293). But thirty years later Whitehead wrote:

This statement was written some sixteen years after Whitehead had discovered temporal atomicity and developed a thoroughly relational process philosophy on this discovery. We can not help but believe that Whitehead was troubled by the odd mix of formalism and near Platonism expressed in Principia Mathematica and by the inelegant but obligatory theory of types as well, but he did not want to express these concerns professionally in 1911. Instead he wrote a book for lay people in which he was much more relaxed and, without criticizing (or even mentioning) his work in Principia Mathematica, laid an empirical foundation for his monumental metaphysical work of Process and Reality.

A final comment on the times of the first quarter of the twentieth century. In the Introduction to the Second Edition of Principia Mathematica published in 1925, Whitehead and Russell, in trying to repair the theory of types by the axiom of reducibility, mentioned a new suggestion proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein for philosophical reasons (PM xiv). This suggestion "that functions of propositions are always truth-functions" (PM xiv) was made in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (TLP), a non-Platonic, tight-knit, precise logical system that had a tangential but critical influence on the logical positivist movement. Wittgenstein, who wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus partly to address problems in Principia Mathematica, was so pleased with his book that he gave up philosophy, because he thought that he had solved all the philosophical problems that could be solved. F. P. Ramsey, in his review of the second edition of Principia Mathematica. proposes that "the whole trouble" with the theory of types "really arises from defective philosophical analysis" (N116:128) and gently chides Whitehead and Russell for not taking more seriously the suggestion of Wittgenstein.

Ironically, it was a visit by Ramsey and his attendance of a lecture by the great intuitionist mathematician Brouwer that set Wittgenstein again to the task of philosophy.⁸ His Logical Investigations in which he established a new -- how shall we say it -- relational philosophy based on simple language games has become the primary reference of the contemporary philosophical position called language analysis and was a massive attack on Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Like Whitehead, Wittgenstein was "born again" philosophically, and also, like Whitehead, repudiated the fundamental thesis of Principia Mathematica.

It should not be surprising that Principia Mathematica has had no significant lasting influence on twentieth century mathematics. We can see early evidences of its failure to engage contemporary mathematicians in a review of the Second Edition by B. A. Bernstein in 1926. "When one considers the caliber of our authors and the fact that the Principia has occupied a prominent place on mathematical shelves for fourteen years, one wonders that the book has influenced mathematics so little" (BAMS32:711). Bernstein gives a number of examples of the source of this failure, as explanations of his general belief "that the authors have admitted into the book concepts and principles based on considerations not sufficiently convincing -- concepts and principles based on views opposed to those forced on mathematicians by the work of Peano, Pieri, Hilbert, Veblen, Huntington" (BAMS32:712).

There is one major mathematical legacy of Principia Mathematica in which it is referenced in the title of perhaps the most significant paper that affects mathematics and its foundations of the twentieth century, "Ûber formal unentscheidbare Säze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I" ("On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I") (UUPM). It was written by Kurt Gödel in 1931. In the article he proved, not just suggested or forcibly argued, that the thesis of Principia Mathematica is false. One cannot deduce arithmetic, much less mathematics, from logic. There is no set, finite or infinite, of well defined axioms from which all the true theorems of arithmetic follow. Two years prior to 1931, Whitehead published Process and Reality, in which the thesis of Principia Mathematica cannot hold, although he never mentions it. Two years later in 1931 Whitehead claims "We cannot produce that final adjustment of well-defined generalities which constitute a complete metaphysics" (AI 145). At that time he probably also believed this statement with the word mathematics substituted for metaphysics.

Whiteheadian Mathematics and Process Thought

So far we have explored the technical shortcomings of Whitehead’s most significant mathematical works, Universal Algebra and Principia Mathematica, and their connections with and implications for his philosophy of mathematics. We conclude with some remarks on what -- with nearly a century of hindsight -- might be considered methodological shortcomings and their surprising relation to his mature metaphysical thought.

Recall the Whiteheadian mathematical trinity: generality, variable, and form. How does one achieve generality in mathematics? We discuss three approaches, admittedly related, but with distinct flavors.

(1) Perhaps the most naive approach is through the generality of objects or forms. To illustrate, consider the set of integers and the set of continuous real-valued functions defined on the real numbers. If we posit these as concrete objects in our metaphysics, what form do they share? It is not difficult to show that both admit addition and multiplication subject to some very familiar laws, upon which we need not digress. The point is that both are subsumed under the modern mathematical structure of a commutative ring, which is therefore an appropriate generalization of both objects. The formalism entifies, at least linguistically -- no ontological commitment is implied here -- and algebraists speak of and study rings. Whatever their abstract properties might be, they are shared by the integers and continuous real-valued functions.

Axiomatic systems such as rings, groups, fields, and topological spaces distill gradually out of mathematical experience. One sees that by the latter half of the nineteenth century the method of generalized forms is beginning to blossom, both as a means to unify mathematics and as a means to isolate the key properties of well-studied objects. But neither in the arts nor in mathematics is mere methodological awareness to be confused with genuine creativity, and the capacity to identify viable forms is a quintessential mathematical talent.

The notoriously austere axioms for an abstract group or a topological space resemble cosmetically any number of simple axiomatic systems that one might construct. Their particular richness derives from two mutually contentious attributes:

Point (i) alone is insufficient. Should we enlarge the definition of a group, we might reach a structure -- a non-structure really -- called a magma: a set together with an operation, subject to no restrictions (e.g., associativity) whatsoever. Magmas are certainly more general than groups, but are they correspondingly more central to mathematics? Of course not; they are so general as to be jejune. One could similarly relax the axioms for a topological space to achieve more generality at the expense of losing the key features of spatiality.

Universal Algebra, in precisely this sense, is a poor framework for mathematics insofar as it unites spatial manifolds and symbolic logic by introducing the common notion of an algebraic manifold (Whitehead’s terminology) or a semi-group (current standard terminology), an object with very little structure or intrinsic interest.⁹ In this case, generalization comes at the expense of abstract sterility. While Universal Algebra does have its moments, it is rich mathematically only insofar as Whitehead transcends the generality of his algebraic manifolds and deals in the specifics of Boolean algebra or Grassmannian manifolds.

(2) A second approach to generalization may be framed in terms of activities rather than Objects. The premier example is logicism, the reduction of mathematics to formal logic. Under this program, geometry and number theory are unified insofar as they are part of the same activity: deriving consequences from the axioms of Principia Mathematica (or, equivalently, from those of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory). We face at once the heuristic paradox, if fields as diverse as, say, geometry and number theory might be flattened by logicism into the same essential activity, how is it that we sense them as diverse in the first place? Moreover, how is it that we so easily distinguish the big theorem from the throw-away lemma and the throw-away lemma from the empty inference -- valid, but with no interest whatsoever? We set this paradox aside, however, to focus on the deeper and more decisive issue: the approach leads to failed levels of description.

Just as a pixel-by-pixel account of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte would be unappreciated as painting, just as a bit-by-bit digitized readout of Ravel’s Chansons Madécasses would be unrecognizable as song, and just as a physician would find a quantum mechanical description of his or her patient irrelevant to a diagnosis, the view of mathematics set forth in Principia Mathematica is irrelevant to the working mathematician. It is simply the wrong level of description for the activity in question. In our opinion, this, and not Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, is the basic functional failure of logicism. We might wonder idly from time to time whether Fermat’s Last Theorem has slipped through the net of the formally decidable, but this is of no consequence to anyone seriously engaged in number theory. As a matter of practice, one does not eschew logicism for its incompleteness but for its ineffectiveness. And. as a matter of esthetics, one does not ask the artist to leave the searing colors and throbbing life of a tropical paradise for a gray, lifeless plain,

(3) The last approach to generalization that we consider is the path not taken by Whitehead, at least not in his philosophy of mathematics. This is a mode of organization stressing structural relationships across distinct classes. We designate this with a word borrowed from the technical lexicon of twentieth century mathematics:functoriality.¹⁰ We shall give one brief elementary technical illustration, but we emphasize that our interest here is only with broad concepts.

Consider the rational numbers, a set in which we can add and subtract subject to an associative law and thus constituting a mathematical group. The real numbers likewise constitute a group with respect to addition, and clearly the reals contain the rationals. We say that the group of rationals is embedded in the group of reals. The point is that the structure of the former fits precisely into the structure of the latter. Now finite groups abound also (the permutations of finite sets, for example) and a structural relationship that one might consider between two finite groups G and His the possibility that H can be embedded in G. One can show that if this is so, then the number of elements that constitute H must divide the number of elements that constitute G. This, then, is an example of functoriality: the relationship of embeddability for groups corresponds directly with the relationship of divisibility for integers. Now witness an example of the power latent in this correspondence: Consider a group G consisting of 128 elements and a group H consisting of 120 elements. There are many possible structures for both G and H, but no matter, we can in full generality assert that H is not embeddable in 0 (to rephrase, H cannot be structurally a part of G) because of the functorial relationship with integer arithmetic: 120 does not divide 128.

While the previous example is trivial (most undergraduate mathematics majors will have seen it), functoriality is a key feature in some of the deepest mathematics of this century. By stressing relationships across classes, it neatly sidesteps the contention between generality and richness discussed above. Functorial relationships allow one to bring to bear the full knowledge of one class to the analysis of another. They bring about unification without retreat to insipid common objects or inept common methods.

Whitehead, a mathematician of note to his contemporaries but of small consequence to his successors, never scented a relational approach to mathematics. Perhaps functoriality had to await the further maturation of cross-disciplinary fields such as algebraic topology and algebraic geometry, but in light of Whitehead’s eccentric tastes, we doubt that fifty years would have made much difference. He seems implicitly to have accepted a condition of ontological stasis for the mathematical world. All the more remarkable, then, that Whiteheadian metaphysics explicitly countenances the occasions of actual entities through the dynamic, relational process of concrescence, a process remarkably similar to the dynamic evolution of mathematical forms. The holism of functoriality is the holism of process thought. We stand in amazement that Whitehead saw this so clearly in his adopted field of philosophy but not in his native field of mathematics.

References

BAMS32 -- B. A. Bernstein. "Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica" Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 32 (Nov. Dec., 1926): 711-13.

BAMS34 -- Alonzo Church. "Principia: Volumes Hand Ill" Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 34 (1928): 237-40.

ESS -- Essays in Science and Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.

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

IM -- An Introduction to Mathematics. (Number 15 in the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge.) London: Williams and Norgate, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911. London: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1948, 1958, 1969.

JP11 -- C. I. Lewis. The Journal of Philosophy 11(1914): 497-502.

MAT -- "Mathematics" in ESS. Published originally in Encyclopedia Britannica, 11^th ed., 1911,17, 878-83.

MFF -- Saunders Mac Lane. Mathematics: Form and Function. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1986, pp. 455-56.

MG -- "Mathematics and the Good" in ESS. Published originally in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941, pp. 666-81.

N116 -- E P. Ramsey. "The New Principia." Nature 116, 2908 (July 25, 1925): 127-28.

N58 -- G. B. Mathews. "Comparative Algebra." Nature 58 (1898): 385-86.

OO -- Murray Code, Order and Organism: Steps to a Whiteheadian Philosophy of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, Albany: State University of New York Press. 1985.

PRSL64 -- "Sets of Operations in Relation to Groups of Finite Order." Abstract Only. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 64 (1898-99): 319-20.

PS 17 -- Christoph Wassermann. "The Relevance of An Introduction to Mathematics to Whitehead’s Philosophy." Process Studies 17/3 (Fall, 1988),

QJPAM23 – "On the Motion of Viscous Incompressible Fluids. A Method of Approximation." Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics 23 (1888): 143-52. "Second Approximations to Viscous Fluid Motion. A Sphere Moving Steadily in a Straight Line." Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics 23(1888): 143-52.

S9 -- Alexander Macfarlane. Science 9 (1899): 324-28. SPTC5 -- "The Philosophy of Mathematics." Science Progress in the Twentieth Century 5 (October, 1910): 234-39.

TLP -- Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated from the German by D. F Pears & B. F McGuinness. First English edition, 1922. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.

UA -- A Treatise on Universal Algebra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898.

UUPM -- Kurt Gödel. "Ûber formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I." Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38 (Leipzig: 1931D): 173-98.

WPRM -- Granville C. Henry. "Whitehead’s Philosophical Response to the New Mathematics," Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy. Edited by Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983, pp. 14-28. An earlier version appeared in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 7 (1969-70): 341-49.

Notes

1. Murray Code has written a good introduction to Whitehead’s philosophy of mathematics in his book (OO) based on Whitehead’s later works. It is not, however, an exposition of Whitehead’s mature position as it could be made relevant to contemporary mathematics. Co-author Henry of this article examined the philosophical development of Whitehead in terms of his reaction to mathematics in an article (WPRM) written over twenty years ago. This present article, in contrast to the older one, seeks to evaluate Whitehead’s early philosophy of mathematics in terms of Whitehead’s mature philosophy and contemporary mathematics.

2. Mac Lane in his analysis of schools in the philosophy of mathematics accepts two others, Platonism and Empiricism (MFF 455-456).

3. Whitehead saw Plato to be of two moods, one in which he thought of mathematics as "a changeless world of form.. contrasted...with the mere imitation in the world of transition," and the other in which he "called for life and motion to rescue forms from a meaningless void" (MT 97). Whitehead was a Platonist in this Second sense.

4. We share this opinion with Murray Code who has expressed it in OO.

5. See "Autobiographical Notes" (ESS 16).

6. In retrospect, Macfarlane’s criticism was not fair. Whitehead understood well that abstraction does not operate under unlimited license, but once a formal system has coalesced, it may develop independently of its extensive base.

7. Personal conversation.

8. See Norman Malcolm and G. H. Von Wright. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir London: Oxford University Press, 1958. 12-13.

9. Journals devoted to semigroups do exist and manage to fill their pages with interesting mathematics, but only through examination of special subclasses. In contrast, both groups and topological spaces are interesting for their bare-bones abstract structure as well as their special subclasses. Consider, for instance, the immense treasure-trove of mathematics engendered by the problem of classification of finite simple groups.

10. Categories and functors were introduced by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane in 1945. See MFF for a technical introduction.

Henri Bergson is credited with a pertinent critique of the mechanistic determinism usually associated with nineteenth- century classical physics. However, his depiction of the nature of things has come to be considered too unsystematic and "loose," even by later philosophers sympathetic to his thought. He laid the foundations of what has come to be called "process philosophy." But his ontological formulations supposedly failed to establish a clear modus for the coming-to-be of "novelty" in the scheme of things. Samuel Alexander and Alfred North Whitehead both built upon his inchoate insights and presented more coherent arrangements. Or, so current wisdom has it.

However, one seminal notion has been buried in Bergson’s writings. This notion, if Bergson has pursued it, might have led to a more effective Bergsonian metaphysics. I will call this unexplored vein of Bergsonian thought "ontological hermeneutics."

Hermeneutics is a method of inquiry or interpretation attracting much attention in the last few decades. Beginning as a means of scriptural investigation, it is now considered a major interpretative approach in epistemology, literary criticism, and the social sciences. To briefly encapsulate, we can say that hermeneutics is concerned with the "tension" or perceived dissonance between the general understanding of some area of discourse, and the components of that discourse. The general "sense" of a prolonged passage, a text, or even an entire culture is contrasted with the (distinguishable) sentences, statements, or sub-assertions that comprise the whole text, etc. Hermeneutics is the "adjusting" process between the sub-units and their more general meaning. Hans-George Gadamer, following the lead of Martin Heidegger and the earlier Wilhelm Dilthey, has developed hermeneutics far beyond its humble origins. Jacques Derrida and the deconstructionists have made extensive use of hermeneutical techniques. But Bergson not only anticipated hermeneutics as a means of interpretation; he also saw the hermeneutic circle as a fundamental modus of being, an ontological structure operant in the world.

First, however, a few words concerning the 1902 article which first presents Bergson’s ontological hermeneutics. Entitled "Intellectual Effort,"¹ the article starts as a fairly pedestrian scrutiny of the then-current notion of the association of ideas, and more "active" methods of cognition, such as "invention." Bergson uses the term "image" to indicate an immediate, direct "finding" which is more "mental" than raw sensation, but less than an "act" of cognitive apprehension.² Roughly, "images" are the "raw material" of "intellectual effort." Being "raw material," the incipient "parts," the images need to be shaped, organized. To be "fitted" and "placed," the images require a "scheme," or an abstract framework. Bergson’s article appears to grant a quasi-Kantian preeminence to the scheme -- at least, at first. But as the article proceeds, he veers toward the realization that both "poles" of the "effort" -- the concrete content of the images and the initial framing concept -- must reciprocally adjust to each other. Bergson seemingly walked into the middle of the hermeneutic circle.

If Bergson had merely presaged contemporary hermeneutics, then the 1902 article might be considered merely worthy of a historical footnote. But Bergson’s ruminations extend the now-familiar part-whole reciprocity beyond its current usage. He clearly implies that the sustained "inventive" effort is a direct disclosure of the "way things work," a mediation of unitive pattern and "material" components. The circle, he suggests, may be at the heart of being.

The segment of his paper specifically focussed on "invention" scrutinizes the amorphous, "loose play of ideas" (ME 122) usually noted in such endeavor. The creation or discovery is not a simple detection of similarity or commonality in diverse mental fragments (images); it is not an association of ideas, Instead, the "play of ideas" is an adjusting in two dimensions: (1) a "horizontal" adjusting among the component fragments; and (2) a "vertical" adjusting of the possible "scheme" and the (sometimes) recalcitrant images. The essential elucidating term here is "reciprocity;" all components are passively or actively mutually adjusting to each other; each component is reciprocating with the emerging pattern; and the emerging whole is generated by, and is generating, major alterations -- or, at least, "fine tunings" -- of each element.

Bergson finds this hermeneutic dynamism even in prosiac mental effort:

Whatever the merits of Bergson’s depiction of the process of remembering a name, he is describing a dynamism of interplay which may be familiar to some readers. But something more significant is disclosed here. Bergson is saying that in all but the most "automatic" cognitive processes, (including the "mechanical" application of a precise algorithm) a "feedback" occurs between the initial guesstimate (Gadamer’s "prejudice"⁴) and the frequently sprawling diversity of facts, material, contents, etc., which will eventually (hopefully) be "brought into line" (grasped, comprehended, "organized").

And, it can be inferred that the "starting-point" of the "circle" is open: the "intellectual effort" can begin anywhere on the circle. It may begin with the "scheme" (motivating initial "idea," anticipation, "prejudice"), or somewhere among the "pieces" Or, it may originate in the "interval" -- anywhere in between the "buzzing confusion" and the tentative encapsulation. The mutual modification or reciprocal adjusting may be "sideways," or "up-and-down," or both. Once the "dynamism" begins, an adjusting interplay between all components and the general pattern takes place, involving "concession," "negotiation," and "struggle."

It is clear that Bergson does not simply mean an empirical "welling up" (emergence) from the contents or fragments (such as Aristotle considered at the end of Posterior Analytics⁵), nor does he imply a Kantian "top-down" imposition of form. We have here a hermenuetic circulation which continues until an adequate "fit" is achieved.⁶ What Bergson adds to all this is his audacious ontological claim: at least some "real" development is analogous to the hermeneutic reciprocity between the emerging organizing pattern and the (potential) "segments."

Before we scrutinize Bergson’s specific ontological claim, let us examine what he says concerning the sophisticated example of intellectual effort, "invention":

We have here a process closely akin to what some would call the "ferment" of creativity -- what Whitehead called the "state of imaginative muddled suspense" (SMW 14). A major adjusting is often required: up and down, and laterally among the (possible) components. Nothing is categorically "fixed" until the final adjustment is achieved. Bergson’s "invention" closely resembles White-head’s "concrescence." All the elements of concrescence may mutually adjust themselves, including the "formative" subjective aim (PR 224/342). The culmination of concrescence is the "satisfaction" of the final adjustment, when the dynamism of all the components, which is in some ways passive and in other ways active, ends in a decided "something," the superject" (PR 45fl1).

The connection between Whitehead’s concrescence and Bergson’s "effort" of inventing is not merely faintly analogical. Bergson’s hermeneutics of invention was not meant to be limited to human endeavors. At the close of his article, Bergson points to a concrescive form of development. The reciprocal "interplay" described in the article is more than a human artificing: it is the possible reconciliation of two apparently incompatible features of the ongoing world -- efficient causation and final causation:

The ontological "operation" disclosed here, does resonate with earlier and later Bergsonian statements. In Matter and Memory (1896), he speaks of the "states" of a duration "melting into each other" (MM244). In Creative Evolution (1907), he refers to the "mutual penetration" of parts (CE 281). In Creative Mind, he writes of a "real evolution" which is "entirely modified within" an "internal modification" (CM 20). What is clearly obvious is that the "interplay operation" of Bergson presaged "concrescive" activity, the linch-pin of Whitehead’s metaphysics. The "microscopic process" of concrescence is a "negotiating" interplay among all past achievements. The "subjective aim" in its initial stage is closely analogous to Bergson’s "scheme." Concrescence is the adjusting process of the diverse elements among themselves, and with the subjective aim. All elements, including the subjective aim, undergo reciprocal modification in the concrescive activity.

What is important for us to realize is that Bergson (and, later, Whitehead) has disclosed a feature of the nature of things which has been neglected by nearly all investigators. Metaphysicians who have taken "development" seriously have either assumed an imposing "form" (the "scheme") as wholly dominant; or they have assumed a "welling up," an inductive summation of the given Concrete elements. To over simplify, they have acquiesced on one side or the other of the rationalist/empiricist (or, realist/nominalist) split. Bergson was one of the first to propose a quasi-hermeneutic adjusting between the form and its contents.

This adjusting "interval" is consonant with Bergson’s own frequently stated stress on the "hesitation," the "delay" of the developmental "unit" (CM 109). As well, it accords with the period of indetermination implicit in Whitehead’s "concrescence": the interplay between a potentially unifying proposal (the subjective aim) and the diversity of antecedent "brute fact" (PR 42/67, 224/343).

Concrescence ("growing together" [AI 236]) is the very process of mutual accommodation of which Bergson writes. The key to ontological hermeneutics is the "working out" of this accommodation through the reshaping of both the initial proposal (the scheme) and the set of elements which will "flesh out" the scheme. Bergson, the "father" of process philosophy, may have uncovered an ontological structure at the heart of any viable process stance. This structure may be more central than such amorphous phrases as Whitehead’s "creative advance" (PR 28/42), Bergson’s "creative evolution," or Samuel Alexander’s "restlessness" of spatio-temporal "configuration" and reconfiguration" (PR 28/43). Excluding Whitehead and Bergson, apparently only Ervin Lazlo has pursued the possibility of a pandemic reciprocal "interplay."⁸

It might be worthwhile for students of process ontology to scrutinize this neglected Bergsonian paper. We need to reconsider the diversity of the world -- possibly, on all "levels," as with Lazlo -- not as overridden material, passively "synthesized," but as active agents, recalcitrantly "negotiating," adjusting, and as altering even the most pervasive and imperative patterns of existence.

References

Works of Bergson

CE -- Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Modern library, 1907.

CM -- The Creative Mind. Trans. Mabelle Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1934.

ME -- L’Energie_Spirituelle, translated as Mind-Energy. Trans. H. Wildon Can. Henry Holt & Co., 1919.

MM -- Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy M. Paul & W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1896.

Notes

1. Le Revue Philosophique, Jan. 1902 (Paris) -- included in Bergson’s Mind-Energy (ME 186-230) (see above).

2. Bergson’s clearest definition of "image" is given in MM:

3. The "interval" that Bergson mentions brings to mind his stress on "hesitation" that he takes to be the sine qua non of real duration (CM 109; see also CE 340).

4. Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer -- transl. by G. Barden & J. Gumming, pp. 238-45, New York, Crossroad Publishing Co.

"Prejudice" is probably an unfortunate usage – "anticipation" or even Gadamer’s alternate term "fore-meaning" (p. 238) might have been more appropriate. Gadamer may have employed the stronger, more emotion-laden "prejudice" as a stark contrast with the Enlightenment’s "prejudice against prejudice" (pp. 239-40).

5. The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon, pp. 184-86 (Book II, Chapter 19), New York, Random House, 1941.

6. What is an "adequate fit," and what are its criteria? This is a central question, beyond the scope of this paper. This appears to have been a problem for Bergson, who (generally) denigrated finite "completions." Only Whitehead, it seems, has attempted an ontological resolution to this problem -- the "interplay" of concrescence ends with the concrete superjective "brute fact" of a finite "decision" (in the sense of "cutting off" (PR 43/68)).

7. Samuel Alexander, "Artistic Creation and Cosmic Creation," Proceedings of the British Academy, v. xiii (1927).

8. Ervin Lazlo, Introduction to Systems Philosophy, pp. 45-6, New York, Breach Science Publishers, 1972.

The purpose of this article is to show the environmental relevance of religious naturalism, in particular a minimalist version with a strong component of radical empiricism.

Aldo Leopold and J. Baird Callicott, among others, speak of the need to extend our moral concern to the land or the environmental community and to develop a land aesthetic. Religious naturalism, in conjunction with the theory and practice of appreciative awareness such as outlined by Bernard Meland, can contribute to the fulfilling of both of these needs. In addition, a minimalist religious naturalism with a pluralistic emphasis and a prophetic principle can provide a helpful sense of the plurality of values and a critical readiness to undergo paradigm shifts, both of which are needed in facing our ever-growing eco-crisis.

I

The purpose of this section is to elaborate a form of religious naturalism based on a minimalist notion of transcendence.

Religious naturalism may be defined as the affirmation that there are one or more aspects of the world to which religious responses are appropriate. In Dewey’s terms, there is a religious quality to experience. In language which I prefer, "divine" or "sacred" refers to the surpassing or minimally transcendent character of some events.

Negatively, religious naturalism would not locate this quality in a being or process called God, with ontologically or axiologically supreme character, which is what both traditional and revised theisms appear to do. There seems to be no God, Soul, or heaven to explain, ground, or give meaning to this world.

I often refer to the divine quality which some events seem to have as "transcendent" or "divine." In order to communicate with some people I will occasionally call it "God," although this is not speaking with precision as a naturalist.

The term "minimalist" religious naturalism gets its name from stressing the value of minimal assertions in religion. The surpassing or transcendent character of certain events can provide resources of healing and criticism. The secular viewpoint tends to obscure this character and renders us insensitive to such events. The maximal views of divinity of theism, on the other hand, expose this character to the acids of disbelief and makes an appropriation of their resources more difficult. Minimalist naturalism is an attempt to illuminate the relatively transcendent character of these resources without making excessive and counterproductive statements.¹

The question of the existence of God is far from settled. If there is no God, is there anything left to believe in? It is the writer’s contention that there is an alternative to the dichotomy between traditional (or revised) theism and secular humanism.

On the one hand is the traditional assertion of the full ontological status of God. On the other hand is skeptical disbelief. In between, largely unnoticed, there is room for a tentative affirmation of a minimal degree of transcendence. If a strong assertion is hard to defend, then perhaps a more cautious and more restrained model will be better able to answer the doubts of our age while providing some of the support and prophetic criticism which the traditions have offered.

An implication of minimalism is the notion that the divine may best be conceived of as a collection of natural forces or ideals. This idea was clearly stated by Shailer Mathews, by the early Bernard Meland, and by Dewey in his exchange with Wieman. To quote Mathews:

To specify the divine character of events, we may note that the divine is often portrayed in two aspects, as real and as ideal. These two aspects were expressed by Rudolph Otto when he referred to the numinous as both fascinans and tremendum. In Christianity these aspects are often called gospel and law. Ireanaeus referred to the "two hands of God." It is important to affirm both aspects of the divine, because naturalists often think of religion as the pursuit of ideals, overlooking the point that it is also a response to realities.

Thus we may continue our process of approximating an appropriate working definition. The "divine" aspect of events refers to surpassing realities and ideals, to relatively transcendent resources and challenges. More precisely, it refers to the surpassingly creative quality of processes, which quality we occasionally perceive, and also to the continually surpassing lure of ideals, which we occasionally acknowledge. In language I have used elsewhere, "the divine" refers to the situationally transcendent creative character of some processes and to the continually transcendent lure of some ideals. In short, the divine aspect of events, what I call "the transcendent," is their surpassing resources and challenge.

We may speak of the real and the ideal aspects of the transcendent or the divine. The real aspect of the transcendent, defined minimally, is the collection of all unexpected and uncontrollable processes in the universe insofar as they are productive of good. These processes can be called "transcendent resources."

Defined minimally, this real aspect or reality is a collection. It might be a unity or a unified system, but we don’t have enough evidence to assert that. There is some degree of unity, of course, because the universe hangs together somewhat. But we cannot assert that this collection has any more unity than the generic property of being supportive of good.

Some of these processes may be destructive of human good depending on the amount or situation. That is why these forces can be called the transcendent in its real aspect only insofar as they are creative of good.

The ideal aspect of transcendence, defined minimally, is the set of ideals insofar as they challenge us. There are a number of these which people often recognize. The following are four examples. There is the challenge to universalize respect and care. This is the challenge to learn that all humans are members of one family, that all are our sisters and brothers. But it is also the challenge that we have moral obligations which extend even beyond the human community to other living things and their habitats. Then there is the challenge to deepen love. This is the challenge which comes to us to love more fully. There is always more giving and listening, more care and forgiving and support that another person elicits from us. In the third place we have the challenge to seek adequate information and understanding. We all know that we don’t have all the answers. When this is genuinely recognized we accept the challenge to improve our knowledge. Finally there is the challenge to develop strength and sensitivity of character. This is the challenge to develop our human potential to newer levels.

All of these represent continuing challenges to us. They are ever elusive, ever challenging ideals which beckon us on to new attainments. Indeed, these challenges are transformations of our established ways, even potentially revolutionary. We often are not satisfied in our pursuit of meaning and worth, but yet find the quest worthwhile. This continuing challenge of ideals is the ideal aspect of the transcendent.

The ideal aspect of transcendence makes all of our projects questionable, all causes penultimate, all plans debatable. Ideal transcendence gives us the power of negative thinking.

Is the transcendent "God"? A simple "yes" or "no" answer will not suffice. On the one hand, this is a long way from most traditional (and revised) beliefs about God. On the other hand, the transcendent can function in a person’s life, much like the traditional God, as a real resource for living and a continual challenge for growth.

My answer to this question is that whether or not you choose to call the transcendent (as defined minimally) by the traditional name of God is a matter of personal choice and context. It is close enough to the traditional concept that you can extend the concept of God to cover the minimal transcendent.

It helps me to understand and relate to people who are religious to translate their word "God" by my word "the transcendent," although I am aware always that it is not a perfect translation. If using the word "God" offends a person, I am willing not to use it when talking to her. When I need to be more precise, I use the term "transcendent" or "minimal transcendent" to refer to the set of relatively transcendent realities and challenges.

All of this calls for an attitude of openness, of willingness to grow and even to be radically changed. What makes this a religious form of naturalism is not the use of quasi-traditional language like "the divine," or even possibly honorific capital letters. This is a religious form of naturalism in that it calls for and seeks to nurture openness to relatively transcendent or surpassing resources of growth, healing, and transformation, and to the continuing lure of penultimate but greater values. All of us, religious and non-religious people, are subject to the temptation to close ourselves off from superior resources and challenges.

I wish now to explore the ramifications of this minimalist religious naturalism for environmental living. The basic moral principle of this naturalism is that we should be critically committed to challenging ideals and critically open to transcendent resources.

II

The first half of our basic moral principle is that we should adopt and nurture an orientation of critical commitment to challenging ideals. It is a short step from this to the imperative that we should widen our loyalty and care to include the whole human community and beyond to include the universal community and, as far as possible, its members. This will be a recovery, on a naturalistic basis, of the prophetic principle.

In human life we can sometimes see a movement toward reference to the universal community. The societies by which we are judged are often self-transcending, and sometimes the process of self-transcendence does not stop until the total community of being is reached. This process of transcendence is some- times noticeable in our political life, for the transcendent reference groups in a democracy can be widened until they include humanity as a whole and beyond that the total community of being. The imperative is to adopt and nurture the movement toward universal intent, to critically commit ourselves to this process of transcendence.

Much of this is an appropriation, on naturalist grounds, of H. Richard Niebuhr’s radical monotheism and its roots in George Herbert Mead. Josiah Royce, and Jonathan Edwards.³ Radical monotheism, as Niebuhr conceives it, accepts the value of whatever exists. The cause for which it lives is both the principle of being and the realm of being. Niebuhr sees analogies to this in certain areas of our secular life, including our political life in a democracy. I appropriate this, without the principle of being and radical monotheism, in my minimalist naturalism through the notion of critical commitment to ideal transcendence and consequent care for the total community of being.

In developing the notion of a generalized other, George Herbert Mead hinted at the notion of a higher reference group.

Josiah Royce developed a notion of transcending limited loyalties through his notion of loyalty to loyalty. Royce moved from loyalty to a cause to loyalty which loves loyalty, including the loyalty of the stranger and the enemy, and from thence to loyalty to the brotherhood of all loyal persons. Although this community is not realized empirically, to it in ideal all persons belong. The fact that it is not realized empirically means that it transcends any particular community.

Drawing on Mead and Royce, H. Richard Niebuhr discovers a struggle between universal and partial intent in democracy. The patriot is loyal to his country, not just as a community, but as a community plus that to which the co-patriots refer.

In Niebuhr’s analysis the history of our political life is the history of a struggle between a partial loyalty, that is, loyalty to the nation as one among other nations, and a universal loyalty to which the nation refers. He illustrates the mingling of these two loyalties by reference to the dual roots of our democratic ideals. One root of religious freedom, for example, is the need to compromise between conflicting religious groups. This loyalty of partial intent struggles with a loyalty of universal intent which recognizes that religious faith takes precedence over all other loyalties, that obligations to the universal commonwealth take precedence over all duties to the state. These two loyalties are illustrated in the Macintosh case. In his dissent Chief Justice Hughes asserted that: "In the forum of conscience, duty to a moral power higher than the state has always been maintained." Justice Sutherland, for the majority, countered that "government must go forward upon the assumption . . . that unqualified allegiance to the nation. . . [is] not inconsistent with the will of God."⁴ Another example of the struggle between partial and universal loyalty is found in the belief in the equality of all persons. Sometimes it expresses a universal belief that all people have worth because of their relation to a common source of value. But sometimes it is based on a nationalistic faith which does not accord equality to those who are not citizens.

The importance of Niebuhr here is his articulation of an obligation to universalize loyalty, an obligation which, if followed to the end, would result in loyalty to the universal community. This universal loyalty is appropriated within our religious naturalism by the notion of ideal transcendence which involves the lure of loyalty to the universal community.

It seems as if for Niebuhr the drive toward universality stops at the human community. But this is largely because he is discussing our political life. He is quite clear that the universal community to which we owe loyalty is the community of all beings. In this he explicitly draws upon Jonathan Edwards, for whom "True Virtue most essentially consists in benevolence to Being in general" (NTV 3). For Edwards this benevolence is primarily love of God as the greatest and best of beings, but it is also a love for all beings, except for those which are enemies of Being in general. Thus benevolence to a person or private system is a private affection and not benevolence to being in general, unless subordinate to a love of God and benevolence to being in general. Such a private affection is a partial loyalty and can set up enmity against the total system of being.

Minimalist naturalism does not speak of the Lord of the community of beings. However, it does speak in naturalistic terms of care for the universal community of all beings, although ontological reticence requires that this notion be treated as a regulative idea imaginatively entertained.

Aldo Leopold and J. Baird Callicott project the possibility and the desirability of extending the realm of moral consideration beyond the human community to include not only warm-blooded creatures, not only animals who can feel pain, but all living things and their systems and habitats (SCA 237-39, IDLE 76-94). Minimalist religious naturalism does not by itself decide whether species, communities, and systems can be objects of moral consideration, although its rootage in process-relational thinking would affirm this. Further, the practice of appreciative perception is likely to show us that appreciation and discernment of worth need not be limited by a nominalism which gives moral consideration only to individuals, unusual as the idea may seem.

By itself no religious naturalism can solve all specific environmental dilemmas nor shed light on all questions of environmental ontology. But its concern for an appreciative empiricism and its recognition of the continuing lure of challenging ideals does provide a general direction toward widening the sphere of moral consideration and toward including groups, networks, systems, and webs of relationships in this sphere. What religious naturalism can also do is to combine the abstraction of "the community of all being" with a particular affection for very specific ponds, crane marshes, and calypso borealis and draba flowers and other things and places on this Turtle Island. One of my students reported that she learned to love nature by watching, studying, and photographing one polar bear for hours at a time over several weeks. We need to bring the thinness of essays on nature back to the thickness of essays on Walden grounded in woodchucks, hoeing beans, and thawing sandbanks.

Loyalty to the universal community involves a lifestyle of care for others, of respect, defense, and nurture. It will be an orientation ready to accept intrinsic worth and merit, and to learn from all creatures in the universal community of being. It will be an orientation ready to protect or preserve, to nurture or restore any being and its web. This is an open-ended and indefinite responsibility to protect and nurture.

Even though this minimalist naturalism radically reconstructs its Christian roots, these roots must be acknowledged. However, despite these roots, the imperative of universal care is offered with tentativeness for consideration to anyone. It should be capable of appropriation by people of other traditions. Indeed, there are points of convergence as well as dissonance between this imperative and similar imperatives found in other traditions. In addition, a responsible autonomous reflection upon these traditions is to be encouraged as a way of achieving creative fidelity and conversation in the course of appropriating aspects of these traditions.⁵

III

The second half of this moral principle is openness to the real aspect of transcendence. This involves receptivity, including at times a disciplined and active awareness, to the creative or divine qualities emerging in a situation. This receptivity to surpassing qualities is a discernment of worth, an appreciative awareness.

A common approach has been to create a dichotomy between judgments of fact and judgments of value, exiling value judgments to the realm of the arbitrary and subjective. Focusing on the discernment of worth helps avoid the trap of subjectivism. Events and objects do have various types of worth. These are, to a large extent, objective characteristics of these events and objects. True, they are not as objective as some measurements. However, when we refer to something as evil, boring, or gross, this is not usually misleading or inaccurate. There is room for error, individual preference, and cultural difference. Such room does not make these judgments arbitrary nor merely subjective, however.

The term "worth" focuses attention on the objective pole of the transaction between appreciator and appreciated, that is, to the contribution that the worthy object makes to the appreciation of the subject which recognizes its worth. Or else the term draws attention to the worth which the object has to a community of appreciation in terms of which the appreciation of the subject can be apprised. The term "worth" also helps encourage an attitude of openness, the opposite to an attitude of manipulation and control. Finally the term "worth" suggests that the significance of the valuable object may be more than can be presently discerned or than can be presently expressed in language. The term "worth" has a heuristic note, encouraging further openness to and exploration of the worthy object.

When a person seriously makes an appraisal of value, she is underwriting the judgment with her personal commitment. Thus judgments of value have a personal component, as do all judgments. But such commitment is not subjective in the sense of arbitrary or private.⁶

Aldo Leopold, J. Baird Callicott, and Eugene Hargrove are correct. We desperately need a land aesthetic (SCA 280-95. IDLE 239-48, FEE 79-94). Indeed, we need a water and a sky aesthetic. We need to learn to love, not Nature in general, but a particular Walden pond, or crane marsh, or sand country, Big Thicket, or tall grass prairie. We need to see lovingly both the big cat and the lichen and mold. Karen Warren develops a notion of "loving perception," pointing out that we need to approach even so-called lifeless rocks, not to conquer, but to touch (EE 134-38). John Rodman points out that logical arguments will not persuade anyone who looks at nature and sees objects and mere resources. "When perception is sufficiently changed, respectful types of conduct seem natural"’ (ES 167).

How can we learn to love the good earth if we grow up with malls, parking lots, industrial campuses, and plastic plants? We need to develop the perceptual component in our education if we are to raise people who will want to preserve and restore what little of the good earth is left. We need the environmental equivalent of Bernard Meland’s experiments in chapel and classroom at Pomona College with nurturing and disciplining sensitivity to expressions of spiritual outreach (HEHS, ch. VI). We shall need a sense of place. We need poems and new stories. We may even need to dance and learn new rituals as Delores La Chapelle urges (RE 247-50)⁷

What religious naturalism can bring to this task is both the philosophy and the practice of a really radical empiricism. Along this line I commend to your thoughtful reflection certain key writings of Bernard Meland, pointing out that when he referred to sensitive perception or appreciative awareness he spoke not merely of perception, but of a trained and disciplined perception (MMW 144-57, KW 139-49, HEHS chaps. 1 & 5, ECT 43,73).

Meland is attempting to speak of a way of being open to the fullest complexities and concreteness of a situation, to the penumbras as well as bright focal are as.⁸

This kind of sensitivity includes discipline as well as receptivity, for without ii "the appeal to the appreciative consciousness will result in nothing more than relaxing of intellectual effort." This kind of discernment requires, ideally,

IV

We have spoken of the power of religious naturalism to extend our moral concern to care for the totality of ecological communities, to help us develop and nurture a land, water, and sky ethic. We have also spoken of the power of religious naturalism, especially drawing upon Bernard Meland, to develop the theory and practice of a sensitive discernment, the key component in a land, water, and sky aesthetic. We now turn to the power of the pluralism of religious naturalism, minimalistically conceived, to provide us with a sense of the plurality of values. We turn also to the power of a religious naturalism that emphasizes both the continuing transcendence of challenging ideals and the relative transcendence of surpassing resources to give us the challenge and the empowerment to undergo the drastic paradigm shifts which may be needed as we face our exponentially worsening ecological crisis. The drive toward continually transcendent ideals can help us with a critical, reflective readiness to undergo such paradigm shifts, and openness toward occasions of real transcendence can help us with the courage to undergo these shifts.

A key corollary of the metaphysical reticence of this minimalism is the recognition that there is no guaranteed harmony of ends. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. To be sure, there is often some compatibility between some ends. You can often eat a small piece of cake and diet sensibly. But there is no ontological or eschatological realm where all values are compossibile. Choices and trade-offs are often necessary. You may have to sacrifice some goats to save the palilla.¹⁰ Or you may have to jeopardize a few jobs in the already declining timber industry of the Northwest (already devastated by our inane trading policy with Japan) to save an old-growth forest. This recognition of the incompatibility of many values helps to achieve a critical stance toward all ideals. To recognize such incompatibilities provides a sense of critical detachment and a willingness to be corrected. Otherwise you have all the problems which come with those who tout a panacea.

To face the worsening eco-crisis, we will need new paradigms, dominant metaphors, and ruling narratives. We will need new ways of thinking, valuing, and perceiving in economics, political theory, philosophy, liberation praxis, and probably in science. Openness to continually transcendent values is a challenge to the acceptance of present theories, philosophies, and conceptions of the good. This is the prophetic principle in a naturalistic framework. Thus, while it does not automatically accept any radical or novel idea, religious naturalism can help us to be genuinely open to the continuing challenge of the ideal aspects of transcendence, and thus willing to entertain radically new ideas and approaches. As the ecological crisis impels us to undergo profound paradigm shifts, religious naturalism should be able to help supply a readiness to explore trackless places. In addition, openness to occasions of the situationally transcendent, that is, unpredictable and unmanageable resources, can help to provide us the courage to venture into these uncharted places.

References

CETL -- Bernard E. Meland. "Can Empirical Theology Learn Something from Phenomenology?" The Future of Empirical Theology. Ed. Bernard E. Meland. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969.

ECT -- Bernard E. Meland. Essays in Constructive Theology: A Process Perspective. Ed. Perry Le Fevre. Chicago: Exploration Press, 1988.

EE -- Karen Warren. "The Power and the Promise of Ecological Feminism." Environmental Ethics, 212 (Summer, 1990).

ES -- John Rodman. "Ecological Sensibility." People, Penguins, and Plastic Trees: Basic Issues in Environmental Ethics. Eds. Donald Van De Veer and Christine Pierce. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1986. Reprinted from: Donald Scherer and Thomas Attig. Ethics and the Environment. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983.

FEE -- Eugene C. Hargrove. Foundations of Environmental Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989.

GIG -- Shailer Mathews. The Growth of the Idea of God. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1931.

HEHS -- Bernard E. Meland. Higher Education and the Human Spirit. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953. Reprinted by the Seminary Cooperative Bookstore, 1965.

IDLE -- J. Baird Callicott. In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.

KW -- Bernard E. Meland. ‘Kinsmen of the Wild: Religious Moods in Modern American Poetry." Sewanee Review 12 (1933).

MSS -- George Herbert Mead. Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Ed. Charles W. Morris. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934.

MVT -- Jerome A. Stone. The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence: A Naturalist Philosophy of Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

NTV -- Jonathan Edwards. The Nature of True Virtue. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1960.

RE -- Dolores La Chapelle. "Ritual is Essential." Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered. Eds. Bill Devall and George Sessions. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985. Reprinted from: In Context 5 (Spring, 1984).

RMWC -- H. Richard Niebuhr. Radical Monotheism and Western Culture: With Supplementary Essays. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1960.

RS -- H. Richard Niebuhr. The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1963.

SCA -- Aldo Leopold. A Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation from Round River. Eds. Carolyn Clugston Leopold and Luna Leopold. New York: The Oxford University Press, 1953.

Notes

1For a brief elaboration of minimalist religious naturalism together with a critique by Langdon Gilkey, see my article, "The Viability of Religious Naturalism," The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January, 1993). For a fuller treatment and defense of minimalist naturalism, see my MVT, especially chapter one. My critique of revised theisms (Hartshorne, Ogden, Gilkey) is found in chapter five. Readers of this journal will note affinities with the work of Robert Mesle.

2 See also, Bernard E. Meland, "Toward a Valid View of God," Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 24 (1931), 549-557; John Dewey, "A God or The God," The Christian Century, L (Feb. 8, 1933), 193-196; John Dewey, "Dr. Dewey Replies," The Christian Century, L (Mar. 22, 1933), 394-395.

3See MVT, Chapter Three, for a fuller treatment of this.

4U.S. vs. Macintosh, 283 US 605, quoted in Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism. 71n.

5For further elaboration of the appropriation of religious traditions, see MVT. 97-104.

6Dardel Maguire, in his "ethical realism," speaks of the "experience of persons and their environment," of the perception of their valuableness. I have extended this view to the community of all beings. See his The Moral Choke (New York: Winston Press, 1970), 72-73. Douglas Sturm has been using Meland in some fruitful work on a "relational understanding" of experience. See Douglas Sturm, "Human Rights and Political Possibility: A Religious Inquiry," Criterion, Vol. 23, No. I (Winter, 1989). 2-8.

7See her Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life (Durango, Co.: Kivaki Press, 1988).

8For a fuller treatment of Meland, see MVT, 121-27.

9See also Nancy Frankenberry, Religion and Radical Empiricism (Albany: State University of New York Press. 1987), 130-133.

10Palilla vs. Hawaii Dept. of Land and Natural Resources, 47 IF. Supp. 985. For further discussion of this case, see Holmes Ralston, m, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in The Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 264; Christopher D. Stone. Earth and Other Ethics; The Case for Moral Pluralism (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987), 71-72.

Most process-relational theologians wish to claim that God ‘acts’ in the world by offering context-dependent vocations and persuasions. David Pailin, Britain’s foremost exponent of process-relational thought, has recently sought to avoid the traditional ‘aim and lure’ language by speaking of divine agency as a general teleological purpose: a drive or intentional cosmic urge within the processes of reality. In short, God ‘keeps the rules’ by setting the optimum logical limits to the creative advance in which creaturely choice takes place. Interestingly, this view of providence has taken root in the fields both of theology and literature. The Cretan novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, in his autobiography, Report to Greco, eloquently suggests that:

Kazantzakis’ grandiloquent account of the dynamic movement of the Cry shows remarkable similarities to Bergson’s élan vital, and to the understanding of divine agency proposed by David Pailin. Like Kazantzakis, Pailin believes divine agency to involve a ubiquitous providential call forward, an all-inclusive nisus which grounds and cherishes the creative advance. God’s general providence beckons nature, history, and humanity into an open, stochastic future, evoking creative responses from within and for the life of the world. God is supreme, yet indebted to all. God is absolute, yet related to all.

Pailin on Cosmogenesis: God, Creation and Evolution

In the words of Pailin, doctrines of creation are ‘principally concerned with divine creativity in relation to the on-going processes of cosmic and terrestrial evolution’ (GrPR 126). On the subject of ‘cosmic evolution,’ much traditional Western theology has sought to claim that the doctrine of God as Creator which satisfies the concept of God as sovereign is that of creatio ex nihilo. The doctrine itself affirms that the universe is not self-explanatory; that there is no ultimate dualism or pluralism in reality, for all things depend on God; that God is the ontologically, valuatively, and rationally ultimate; and that the cosmos is not an ‘emanation’ of the divine but, rather, is the purposive handiwork of an agential, intentional reality.

The intellectual support for this way of viewing the relationship between God and cosmogenesis is manifold. Indeed, according to Maurice Wiles, the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is ‘philosophically and religiously essential. Creation is creation out of nothing or it is nothing’ (GAW 16). Pailin disagrees, principally on the grounds that how the aforementioned affirmations ‘are to be linked with the actual genesis of everything is profoundly obscure in the present state of human understanding’ (GrPR 126). Pailin remains skeptical about any ‘empirical fit’ between scientific and theological claims. Furthermore, Pailin conjectures that it may well be ‘theistically mistaken’ to argue for a beginning (and an ‘end’) to the creative advance. He insists that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo does affirm the ontological independence of God, but only at the risk of rendering creativity a contingent state of the divine.² Some Whiteheadian scholars happily see God as the first accidental product of primary ‘creativity.’ Pailin is more cautious and offers an alternative to the usual reading of the Whiteheadian texts -- namely that the actuality of the divine is the first consequence of the creative primacy of the divine. The concept of God as personal and ultimate in value entails that creativity must be understood as a necessary attribute of divine existence. It is only possible to be personal by becoming-in-relation-with-others, and so God must always have had ‘some’ world to relate to personally.

Similarly, since aesthetic goodness determines the nature of the divine for God, in order for God to be loving, God’s love requires objects for the divine loving self-expression. God must always have had some or other ‘world’ which he has loved. And so:

It is questionable, then, whether the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo really is philosophically and religiously essential. For, alternatively:

The cosmological significance of the ultimacy of the divine is not, therefore, to be understood as grounded in this traditional way of understanding the work of God as Creator. Indeed, Pailin rejects the metaphysics of creatio ex nihilo as being critically implausible and theistically irrelevant. God’s ultimacy is understood by Pailin to be grounded in the divine ontological ultimacy and a doctrine of creatio continua. In other words, divine agency is not to be understood as a matter of starting and ending a series of events. but rather as a continual activity within the creative advance (GrPR 126-27).

How is it possible, though, in the light of these remarks, to explain the origin of the present cosmic order? Is the universe as we understand it the particular handiwork of God? Pailin follows Hartshorne and Peacocke in claiming that the fundamental structure of the cosmos, or what he calls the ‘cosmic constants,’ is not the result of the divine providential fiat, but is rather an outworking of the divine nature as necessarily creative. God may keep the rules by ensuring that:

Pailin’s theology of creation seeks to provide a framework within which creation is shown to be capable of interacting with God in a way which does not threaten the divine transcendence. Obviously, men and women cannot establish the regularities which govern their own natures. God’s role, then, in our present cosmic epoch is the establishing of basic cosmic laws or ‘constants.’ Some thinkers have criticized Pailin on the grounds that when he uses the term ‘determined,’ he gives the compelling impression that God must act coercively to establish the basic cosmic laws. But such a criticism would be misleading. For the persuasion/coercion dichotomy doesn’t operate at this point. Indeed, if it were to operate at all levels of existence, then we must postulate some form of pan-psychic or pan-subjective account of reality. Classical process-relational thought has happily appropriated panpsychism. But Pailin regards this understanding of reality as critically implausible and modifies his thinking accordingly.

For Pailin, it is arguable that panpsychism, the view that all reality has a psychical character, is an incredible notion. Process-relational metaphysics happily affirms dipolarity as a characteristic of each concrescing occasion. Each actual occasion has a physical and a mental pole. This leads to panpsychism. All actual occasions are thus seen to be treated (at least metaphorically) as subjects able to ‘decide’ about possibilities and ‘respond’ to lures. This is where Pailin is skeptical. It may be possible to affirm that even at the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles there is some freedom, even in randomness, but is it reasonable to argue that they have a psychical reality? Although certain aspects of reality can be explained using this model, Pailin doubts whether all aspects of reality can.

Clearly, the persuasion/coercion dichotomy applies only to ‘higher order nexus.’ It makes no sense, then, to speak of God ‘coercing’ the inanimate. As a result, Pailin can still credibly affirm that God shapes or determines the cosmic constants which make an open world possible. Of course, there is still one difficulty: the fact that there is no clear borderline between the inanimate and the fully human. Hence it is not clear at what point in the complexity of evolution the possibility of ‘persuasion’ emerges. Perhaps, then, process-relational thinkers need to furnish us with a more lucid and helpful exposition of the distinction between persuasion and coercion.

Some process-relational thinkers have been aware of this need for some time. Barry Whitney, for instance, suggests that we only interpret God’s ‘cosmic constant establishing agency’ as coercive, and not his causal agency within these limits. In his view, that God exerts some coercive power to establish the laws of nature would seem essential for there to be a world at all in which a ‘golden mean’ between risk and opportunity is possible. But once the cosmic constants are divinely constructed, God limits Godself to non-coercive agency in order to allow creatures to make themselves (EPG 129). This viewpoint assumes a panpsychism which Pailin finds untenable. In addition, he may find it theistically mistaken on the grounds that if God were capable of coercion then God ought to display the divine power more often. But to the extent to which Pailin (and other process-relational thinkers) appears to support what Basinger calls the ‘moral’ and ‘utilitarian’ superiority of persuasive power (over and against coercion) by claiming that the process God would not coerce even if this were possible, such a suggestion is damaged (DPPT Ch. 2). Assuming, however, that for Pailin the universe -- as constituted by the cosmic constants -- is the field of divine activity, our task is now that of explicating how Pailin envisages the nature of the ongoing relationship between God and the evolutionary processes of reality.

According to Pailin, the evolutionary processes are only fully intelligible by reference to the divine. And in principle any adequate doctrine of divine creativity needs to be ‘conceptually coherent’; ‘scientifically tenable’; ‘metaphysically significant’; ‘theistically important’; and ‘rationally credible’ (GPR 124, 153). But in practice Pailin’s theology has always been ‘in process’; his views on the nature of the divine creativity in relation to the evolutionary processes are a test-case for Pailin’s attempt ceaselessly to strive for more adequate forms of his vision of God. His five criteria constitute a demanding requirement for any process-relational theism to satisfy. And it is because of this high standard that, over the years, Pailin has felt the need continually to revise his understanding of divine creativity. Illustrating how both searching criticisms and a rigorous concern for exactitude have nurtured the development of Pailin’s ideas from a specific to a general understanding of divine creativity should prove to be an illuminating exercise for our present purposes.

In an early article, ‘God and Creation: A Process View,’ Pailin claimed that process-relational thought could illuminate the nature of the supposed relationship between the divine and the evolutionary processes by offering at least seven ‘areas of insight’ (ER 72-86). Essential, for instance, to the ‘story’ offered by process-relational thought is the affirmation that all actuality is characterized by temporality. Now if God is the chief exemplification of all metaphysical truths, then God must be thought of as having eminent temporality, which is to say, that there never was a time and there never will be a ‘now’ which is devoid of the divine co-presence. God is the eminently temporal circumambient reality. And the dipolar conception of the divine, secondly, is especially perspicacious, for it

Pailin’s process-relational doctrine of God as Creator speaks, therefore, of God’s all-embracing co-presence to the world. God is characterized, thirdly, by dual transcendence. In other words, God is both supremely passible and supremely incremental in experience. This notion itself refers to how everything in the temporal concrescence is experienced and embraced within the divine life. And it also refers to how the divine actively responds to what God experiences by ‘throwing back’ into the creative advance new possibilities, and evoking creative responses from the about-to-concresce world.

In a process-relational world, fourthly, it would be intrinsically incoherent to speak of a being with a monopoly of power. We must assert, rather, that power is relational, and therefore a metaphysically significant doctrine of divine creativity will speak of God persuasively nurturing autonomous beings. But how, fifthly, might we understand the nature of divine providence? In the words of Pailin:

God is the principle of concretion. In addition, and this is early Pailinian theology, God acts specifically within the evolutionary processes, for:

God proffers specific initial aims for subjective becoming, and these are ‘highlighted’ through, sixthly, God’s use of the divine persuasive power. In Pailin’s own words:

This is a highly specific view of divine agency. A similar understanding appears in an article Pailin published in an edited collection of essays on Whitehead’s philosophy (WIP 273-99). Pailin, however, no longer subscribes to the viewpoint expressed in either essay. Maurice Wiles pushed Pailin to consider the plausibility of language about God’s specific luring at the level of human existence (of which we have some intimate experience), rather than at the level of the orders of natural experience where we can only infer (GAW 77). On realizing that the language of ‘lure’ was not obviously valid at the level of human existence (in spite of religious claims about ‘vocation’ etc.), Pailin revised his views on the activity of God as in his Jaspers lecture on ‘History, Humanity and the Activity of God,’ and then, finding the revision comfortable in relation to the historical realm, made appropriate modifications to his understanding of the natural (RS 23).

Barry Whitney has recently suggested that the ‘aim and lure’ language can be retained without the theological and religious shortcomings which Pailin and Wiles have highlighted. In Whiteheadian parlance, initial aims are eternally distinct and definite possibilities, and are therefore ‘specific routes’ envisaged by the divine for men and women. But Whitney challenges the opinion that this is the only way ‘initial aims’ are conceivable. He suggests that initial aims be comprehended as ‘loosely structured ranges of potentiality.’ In other words, God providentially offers men and women a general continuum of potentiality, which is more or less structured as to its particular relevance, and which is made determinate by creaturely choice (SJP 79: 133-43). But is this really an alternative to what can now be seen as an incredible and inappropriate understanding of (specific) divine agency within the processes of history? If God is ‘structuring’ the reservoir of potentiality according to contextual relevance, does this not still appear to suggest specific divine agency? At best Whitney’s thesis merits a detailed response, and at worst he can be charged with performing a little ‘theological sleight-of-hand.’

What, however, is the goal that directs the divine activity? Is it a final consummation of the historical and creative processes envisaged as some form of material state? Pailin does not think so. He suggests, seventhly, that the ultimate telos of creativity is not a material goal (as meaning the opposite of ‘formal’) state, for this would signify the end of everything, including God. If God is necessarily creative, then God never has, and never will be, without some world. God as Creator always has and always will have a creation to relate to and unceasingly love. As a result, the ultimate goal of divine activity is the formal one of an ‘unending process of aesthetic enrichment.’ God’s action is a relentless search to find and draw out from all instances further advances in aesthetic enrichment. Keith Ward has recently criticized Pailin on the grounds that the restriction of the formal divine goal to the proliferation of aesthetic value seems ‘unduly parsimonious’ (DA 23). On the contrary, it would seem that it is Ward who possesses too narrow a view of ‘aesthetic.’ Pailin sees ‘beauty’ as intrinsically good and as that which ought to be sought as such. Instrumental goods lead ineluctably to the actualization of aesthetic goods. Ward’s basic error is to view Pailin’s use of the term ‘aesthetic’ in too narrow terms as referring to aesthetic beauty in a restricted way. In fact, Pailin would be of the opinion that ‘aesthetic creativity’ is a broad ‘umbrella’ concept covering a wide array of actions, thoughts, and dispositions. And all these many actualizations are, in Tillichian parlance, like ‘symbols’ which participate in the Reality which grounds them.

In another recent article, ‘Process Theology and Evolution,’ (ECEP 170-89) Pailin expands on the process ‘story,’ highlighting how this vision of reality claims that God creates the fundamental cosmic constants, setting up the logical limits in which creaturely choice can be made. The significance of life, furthermore, is found in the ceaseless quest for aesthetic creativity and novel expressions of human flourishing. God acts ‘as a localized lure exerting an opposite pull to the move towards increasing entropy’ (the implication of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (ECEP 179). Any change which does occur in the creative advance is a result of the creative self-determining actions of concrescing entities. And, to complete the ‘story,’ God ‘as creator is necessarily limited in the influence that can be exerted over individual decisions’ (ECEP 181). It cannot be overestimated how the publication of this paper marks a shift in Pailin’s thinking. He becomes more direct and penetrating in his criticisms, claiming, as he does, that the ‘story told by process theology about evolution may seem to have a number of attractive features, especially so long as it stays at the level of generalities’ (ECEP 181).

Pailin is sharply critical in this paper of the specificity involved in some process-relational accounts of divine agency. Human biology, for instance, confirms that DNA and RNA macromolecules are constituted by nucleotides which themselves provide the necessary information patterns for genetic development.

Problems arise, however, in the process-relational accounts of specific divine agency when one begins to consider how God might be held to influence a nucleotide to change its structure in the DNA chain. In practice this aspect of the process-relational story’ is ‘too ineffective and too wasteful to be theologically acceptable’ (ECEP 185). In graphic language Pailin contends that such a specific view of God’s action in the world yields a model of the divine in which

If God cannot credibly be held to be directly active in spontaneously and persuasively influencing specific evolutionary changes, then how do such changes Occur? According to Pailin:

Evolutionary changes, then, occur through the dynamic interplay between chance and order. If this is so, do theological claims about divine creativity carry any substance to them? Yes, but it is because of the difficulties in the traditional process-relational ‘story’ that Pailin claims that such talk is ‘much more general than that implied by the traditional religious understanding of God as creator’ (GPR 46). Indeed, it is not at all clear what is to be attributed to God in that process beyond a general urge to creative complexification in the combination of the basic constituents of actuality (GPR 146).

We can now see how Pailin’s understanding of divine agency displays some remarkable similarities to Kazantzakis’ poetic description of God’s immanent and persistent ‘Cry’ forward toward relational transformation. Pailin’s distinctive claim is that God’s action is the divine self-constitution as the circumambient reality; God panentheistically embraces the creative advance, persistently swaying the world toward further combination, complexification, and change which ‘acts in a counter way to the effects recognized by the Second Law of Thermodynamics -- the so-called ‘Law of Entropy’ -- and results in localized centers of energy which we observe within the cosmos (GW: 5).

God as creator allows the potentialities of the universe to develop in a novel and random manner within the structures of the cosmic constants. God as creator:

The unfolding universe is the field of divine activity; the total environment in which everything is grounded in God, and where God confers worth upon everything in the overall temporal concrescence. Such a view has not gone unchallenged. Paul Fiddes, for instance, is unconvinced by this Hartshornean view of God’s creative agency:

Clearly, Pailin’s doctrine of divine creativity may well be theologically unacceptable to those thinkers who seek to say more about God’s specific and constant will and activity. But Pailin resolutely insists that the notion of God acting specifically behind the scenes of the world-stage makes a mockery of our real freedom.³ And as a consequent, theism collapses and intellectually we fall into determinism. In Pailin’s defense, we might say that his doctrine of divine agency does render God ‘inactive’ (in terms of unilaterally willing and changing states of affairs), but God is far from indolent. This is because God’s love is a cherishing, embracing, perfect, ‘worth-conferring’ love. Clearly, God’s love does not have to be an intervening love for it to be ‘active.’

In the divine panentheistic embracing of the creative processes of reality, God can be said to be aware

Pailin, however, is suspicious of any understanding of providence in history which applies to human being the same conception of ‘divine influencing’ that he criticizes when it is used in understanding providence within the evolutionary advance. For, while the problems of using psychical notions of ‘lure’ and ‘persuasion’ for non-human entities do not immediately surface when speaking of conscious entities, Pailin questions whether references to such forms of influencing have any real substance. Envisaging God’s action, for instance, to be that of the divine provision of initial aims is religiously unsatisfactory since it is an activity which men and women are largely unconscious of, and so struggle to perceive and harmonize within any one context (GPR l57)⁴.

Faith in God as the living, dynamic and intentional agent has, traditionally, convinced the believer that -- in principle -- God can miraculously intervene in the historical process. In practice, however, a thoughtful approach to the nature of human experience and sensitive moral consideration suggests that God is not to be identified as so acting, and that traditional views of divine agency are, as a consequence, misguided. At the same time, specific divine luring is rarely, if ever, perceived and grasped as such in the experience of men and women.

A difficulty attends this account, however, for some theologians insist that if God does not entertain particular initiatives and responses to each individual event, then God is -- in practice -- utterly ineffective. As a consequence, it is thought that the historical process is unable to be divinely grounded, and so can only be purposeless. For Pailin, however, the theistic meaningfulness of history need not rest on notions of specific divine agency. In his own words:

And, furthermore, the rejection of specific divine agency, God’s seeking persuasively to sway men and women with ‘context-dependent material goals’ does not, necessarily, entail that history is ‘an ultimately aimless process, lacking an intentional goal’ (GPR 172). Rather,

It is God who is the basic source of unrest in the universe. Divine providence is the ground of the dissatisfaction which men and women feel as they evaluate their previous achievements, become aware of novel, intrinsically good possibilities, and strive to actualize them. God does not seek to offer specific routes for men and women to take up and make their own. But God is at work in the world. For it is the divine who stirs humanity with a broad vision of possible aesthetic values, and wills that men and women strive to instantiate them. Divine agency is "an overall influence which stirs people with a general dissatisfaction at what has already been achieved and, as its obverse, a perpetual desire for what is enrichingly novel" (GPR 172).

God makes a difference to the historical process. As we have seen, the experience of men and women attests to a ‘restlessness that agitates authentic being’ (GPR 172). Men and women do strive for human flourishing. And this willingness to be in step with the rhythmic nature of interdependence is understood by Pailin to be grounded in God, the Supremely Social Reality whose own ‘Musical Offering’ to the world is the ‘ceaseless quest for the realization of novel experiences of aesthetic good’ (GPR 172). To complete the divine-world symphony, God receives into Godself the creative actualization of men and women. The divine then positively or negatively prehends the actions of men and women, taking perfected actuality and ‘throwing it back,’ through the divine superjective character, into the world in order to evoke new creative responses on the part of men and women. God’s activity ‘is experienced by people as a ferment for flourishing that persistently disturbs those who are alive’ (GPR 167)⁵. History and nature, as can be seen, are not ultimately purposeless. Rather,

And so God’s action is rather like that of a courageous playgroup leader, who uses his or her enabling power to stimulate and excite children to realize their potential and work creatively (GPR 174).

Now Pailin’s doctrine of ‘objective immortality’ would appear to be, at least, existentially fruitful. But is there an argument for its being religiously ineffectual? Indeed, what is the religious value and theistic importance of a God who is said to preserve values which appear to be so thoroughly destroyed in our own experience? A related question focuses on the ‘divine receptivity’ and ‘God’s superjective character.’ In Pailin’s understanding of divine agency, these are the twin moments of God’s salvific agency. But it would appear that the divine memory could only be relevant for our salvation insofar as what God receives into Godself makes a difference to the initial aims God offers back to the world in each new present. But Pailin has ruled out all talk of ‘aims and lures’ as incredible. And so while the doctrine of the divine receptivity and God’s superjective character have an intuitive rightness, we do need a more lucid and helpful exposition of how these two aspects of God are related, and how they are immanent in the world.⁶

References

CSG -- Paul S. Fiddes. The Creative Suffering of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

DA -- Keith Ward. Divine Action. London: Collins, 1990.

DPPT -- David Basinger. Divine Power in Process Theism: a Philosophical Critique. New York: State University of New York Press, 1984.

ECEP -- David A. Pailin. "Process Theology and Evolution." Evolution and Creation: A European Perspective. Eds. Sven Anderson and Arthur Peacocke. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1987.

EPG -- Barry Whitney. Evil and the Process God. Toronto and New York: Edwin Melin Press, 1985.

ER -- David A. Pailin. "God and Creation: A Process View. Epworth Review, January 1982.

GAW -- Maurice Wiles. God’s Action in the World. London: SCM Press, 1986.

GPR -- David A. Pailin. God and the Processes of Reality: Foundations for a Credible Theism. London: Routledge, 1989.

GrPR -- David A. Pailin. Groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion. London: Epworth, 1986.

GW -- David A. Pailin. "God and the World: Religious Belief and Natural Science; Creation, Evolution and Miracle." From a private aide-memoire. The University of Manchester, 1989.

RG -- Nikos Kazantzakis. Report to Greco. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

R523 -- David Pailin. "History, Humanity and the Activity of God." Religious Studies, 23/3.

SIP -- Barry Whitney. "Process Theism: Does a Persuasive God Coerce?" The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1979.

WIP -- David Pailin. "God as Creator in a Whiteheadian Understanding." Whitehead and the Idea of Process. Eds. Harold Holz and Ernest Wolf-Gazo. Karl Alber: Munich, 1984.

Notes

11n evaluating Pailin’s understanding of divine agency, I have decided to concentrate on two themes in his writings. Firstly, the issue of the action of God, cosmogenesis and evolution -- a theme which, as I attempt to show, has been treated by Pailin in different ways at various stages in his career. And secondly, the question of God’s so-called ‘special providence in history.’ Unfortunately, it has proved too ambitious to discuss either the significance of incarnational claims in Pailin’s thought, or the ways in which his own process-relational thought may contribute to the development of a credible christology. I wish to acknowledge my appreciation to David Pailin for writing encouragingly to me and for his helpful comments on this paper. And I would mention in particular Betsy Flowers at the University of Texas at Austin, whose friendship, patience and support have meant a very great deal to me.

2Pailin’s current train of thought on the relationship of God to the cosmic constants is especially illuminating. In personal correspondence, dated 9 November 1992, he remarked to me:

31n supplementing my point here about specific providence affecting our freedom, one calls to mind one of Hartshorne’s recurring themes: the power of God is in the worship he inspires. Pailin seemingly concurs. He recently remarked, in the same correspondence cited above:

4lt may be plausible to claim God is efficaciously at work in our human struggle to create a just and peaceful world. But it seems religiously ruinous to claim that, say, Martin Luther King, Jr. was ‘unconsciously influenced’ to step out onto the balcony of his Memphis hotel on April 4th, 1968, in order to meet an untimely death, however much his assassination, in time, effected an attitudinal transformation amongst whites and blacks across America. Our experience testifies to what Pailin has called ‘the difficulty of reaching specific apprehensions of the contingent aspects of divine agency’ (GPR 157). In the light of these remarks perhaps we are resigned to wondering just how far the theologian can credibly transcend the general conviction that God somehow influences human actions whilst, for the most part, men and women are very unclear about the character, goals and effectiveness of such specific persuasive influences.

5This emphasis upon the divine receptivity is crucial for understanding Pailin’s doctrine of divine agency. In personal correspondence, dated 27 March 1990, Pailin remarked to me:

See especially David A. Pailin, "The Poet of Salvation," in Freedom and Grace, edited by Ivor H. Jones and Kenneth B. Wilson, Epworth, London, 1988 for his understanding of the divine receptivity and the superjective character of God as twin moments of the divine salvific agency within a relational world.

6 I ought to remark that the closing points of this article now represent a position which Pailin would want to qualify in important respects. His most recent work, A Gentle Touch: From a theology of handicap to a theology of human being, London, SPCK, 1992. was published in order to revise radically the view of salvation implied in earlier works. It is impossible to do justice to this impressive piece of theological reflection here, but my question concerning the salvific activity of the divine and the possibility of subjective immortality still stands. Clearly, it is difficult to speculate on the precise fate of human beings. Perhaps there will be some form of subjective immortality. Alternatively, there may be some form of objective immortality where our lives are forever cherished by God in the divine perfect awareness. But, given the torment endured by physically and mentally challenged men and women, is it enough to place our ultimate significance firmly (only?) in God’s worth-conferring love?

The crisis of the classical philosophy of the New Age has generated strong criticism of its foundations and different, new tendencies and developments of Western thought. It culminated, on the one hand, in the total deconstruction of the traditional vision of the universe and humanity, and, on the other, in the attempts to build a new organic picture of the evolving cosmic whole, giving birth to humanity with its culture. Process theology was one answer to the urgent problems of our century, proposing a synthetic fusion of scientific, philosophical. and theological approaches to the universe considered as a developing totality. Russian religious thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was also very sensitive about the crisis of classical philosophy; quite strong in the criticism of its errors, but aspiring to work out its own organic vision of the world, it was not inclined to unite science with philosophy and theology. In any event, one could see some parallel moves, lines of arguments in both process thought and Russian religious philosophy that seem to be quite similar. In considering the legacy of Vladimir Solovyev, who was the father of the Russian religious-philosophical renaissance of the beginning of the twentieth century, one can discern important features of a philosophical theology that tries to see the cosmic whole according to the pattern of an evolutionary organic vision.

The European New Age philosophy according to Solovyev’s interpretation was based on abstract foundations that were inadequate for portraying the organic unity of being. "As abstract foundations I understand those particular ideas (specific aspects and elements of the idea of unity) that, being abstracted from the whole and considered in their uniqueness, are losing their true character and getting into contradictory relations and mutual struggle, are pushing the human world into the situation of mental discord, in which we are still remaining" (RON 586). Our capacities to use empirical data and to apply reason for the analysis of such data are important, but taken without a broader perspective to see the unity of existing things, they become merely abstract foundations. The sin of New Age classical philosophy was the divorce between sensible experience, activities of reason, and the highest aspirations of intellect that belong to a whole human personality. Both empiricism and rationalism were depriving humans of their right to see the universe in its totality. Solovyev’s idea was to restore the totalizing organic view of the universe, thus giving humans stable value standards and meaning in life. It was a reaction against the reality of the New Age culture, where the triumph of formal rationality generated a tragic split between spheres of Truth, Good, and Beauty.

Solovyev characterized the spiritual climate in Europe in the following way: "The only essential difference and inequality between people still existing in the West is the inequality of a rich man and a worker; the only grandeur, the supreme power, still having there the real force, is the grandeur and power of capital" (FNCZ 63). Russia is facing similar problems of spiritual order after it borrowed some of the social and cultural patterns of the Western world in the New Age period. Both Russia and the West, according to Solovyev, are in need of a new organic synthetic vision of the universe and humanity to overcome the crisis.

The basic category of Solovyev’s ontology is the bearer of existence -- what really is and precedes being as such. Starting from this point, he develops his organic ontological vision of the universe. "So. the absolute foundation that alone could make our knowledge true and that is proved as principle of our organic logic is defined first of all as what really is and is not being" (FNCZ 219). Every being, every particular thing, belongs to the totality of existence, according to Solovyev. This totality is absolutely unknown, but at the same time one can penetrate into it in any predicate, because speaking about different things, we are relating our images to the totality of existence. This all-embracing unity is present in any fragment of our knowledge. This totality is at once nothing and all things: all that is not equal to anything could be called nothing but it embraces particular things and for this reason it could be viewed as positive nothing, absolute reality. This absolute reality exists through self-denial therefore, it possesses love as the moving force of the universe: "So, when w say that the absolute foundation, according to its very definition, is the unity of itself and self-denial, we repeat, but in a more abstract form, the words of the great apostle: God is love" (FNCZ 234). Absolute unity and freedom from any form are two attributes of this divine reality.

Solovyev’s ontology has a certain axiological coloring, because it consider the totality of existence as having dimensions of Truth, Good, and Beauty. This absolute existence is demanded by our reason as a necessary prerequisite of any particular truth (FNCZ 231). Our will is longing for it as the absolute aim and Good, whereas our feelings are in need of it to find the end of the disharmony in the sensible world under the sign of eternal Beauty. Organic ontology and value theory complement each other.

The sphere of being, comprising the multiplicity of the particular, is at the pole which is opposite to the totality of existence. God, according to this organic theology, is absolutely free, but at the same time God is generating necessity that is prevailing in the order of the created universe. The potency of being in it richness is contained in prime matter. Anything pertaining to the realm of being is born out of the two possible sources -- absolute existence and prime matter. God is pouring her/his creative energy into matter, producing all degrees of the universe. Solovyev was under the spell of Plato, neoplatonic philosophy, the Christian platonism of St. Augustine, and German classical philosophy. This line of philosophy shaped his search for the vision of the cosmic whole as a developing organic totality.

Looking at the hierarchy of the universe, one could find three spheres: 1. freely existing totality or the positive power of being; 2. prime matter as necessity or the immediate force of being; 3. being or reality as the result of their cooperation. The second sphere may be called "essence." "Since essence defined by existence, it is its idea; since being is defined by existence, it is its nature" (FNCZ 201). As a result of the dialectical relation of God with the cosmic whole, Solovyev thinks it possible to give the following scheme: existence, essence, being; power, necessity, reality; God, idea, nature. Through this dialectical motion, God is expressed in something other than the divine self defined through the phenomena that are different from the divine self.

The Christian dogma of the Trinity has, according to Solovyev, considerable philosophical value. The Father symbolizes pure existence as such and in itself. The Son must be comprehended as divine Logos, permitting the existence of multiplicity in the realm of being. The Holy Spirit is the symbol of the return of God to the divine self after the divine journey through nature and history. Materia prima in this system of organic logic is defined through the absolute Logos and is named "idea." Idea is the expression of this absolute existence. "As the expression of the will of the bearer of existence the idea is God, as the content of His image it is Truth, as the content of His feelings it is Beauty" (FNCZ 248).

The system of organic logic differentiates between the concrete aspects of revelation of the divine Logos. Solovyev distinguishes the inner Logos that is dividing the totality of existence from the revealed Logos. Christ himself appears as the third Logos. The third Logos is linked with the concrete Sofia, unifying pure ideas and pure matter.

A.Losev rightly claims that Solovyev’s ontological doctrine can be easily attacked from the standpoint of the orthodox Christian interpretation of these problems. God as the bearer of existence is evidently higher than the Logos. The relations of different aspects of the Logos, as well as his/her ties with the concrete Sofia, are not very clear. His views of the Holy Spirit are also lacking precision (S 66). Nevertheless, one could agree with Losev, who claims that Solovyev’s organic logic is quite original. The Russian thinker wanted to develop an organic worldview as a kind of answer to the urgent problems of his time and to obtain logical foundations for his views. His line of argument is evidently influenced by German Classical philosophy, in spite of the fact that he wants to be in opposition to it. The lessons of transcendental philosophy were not in vain: his logical ability is brilliant, although one could blame Solovyev for a certain inconsistency, inner contradictions in his system. The ontology proposed within the framework of this organic logic sounds quite existential and close to the mainstream of twentieth century religious thought. Solovyev is trying not only to see the universe as the developing organic whole, but also to find a new axiological dimension, which is obviously very important for humanity. In a sense, one could consider his axiological organic ontology as a necessary prerequisite for his anthropology.

Solovyev believed "that man is the highest revelation of the true bearer of existence, that all the roots of his own being are in the transcendental sphere and that because of this fact he is not bound with the chains, which school philosophy wants to put on him" (FNCZ 225). Trying to explain the origin of human freedom, the Russian philosopher says that humans resemble God with respect to the autonomy of their actions; they are free as parts of the unlimited universal unity. Speaking about human freedom, he is trying to cope with the Kantian dilemma of freedom and necessity within the framework of the categories of his organic logic. Humanity is a part of what exists eternally, and in this respect, necessity appears to be only one of the possible states of human beings: therefore, humans are able to rise above the circumstances of their lives as free persons. At the same time, a human being is a bearer of a certain individuality, of original thought, is permitting her/him to be different from all other creatures. Being free persons, humans are able to remodel the material, natural part of their very selves. Consequently matter is subjected to spirit in the universe of humanity, obeying the free choices of humans. Accentuating the spiritual part of human life, the activity of is the soul, Solovyev is evidently following St. Augustine and his anthropological doctrine. The aim and meaning of human life, according to the Russian philosopher, consists in the contemplation of God.

In his anthropology, Solovyev is trying to show that humanity is always able to transcend the limits of the human situation, creating a multiplicity of cultural forms. This theme of the cultural creativity of humanity has not been traditional for Christian thought; the opposition between nature and culture appeared as the focus of philosophical attention only in the New Age period. Solovyev was one of the first Christian thinkers to introduce it. He developed his views on humanity’s cultural creativity in the debate with Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed in the coming era of the superman. The German philosopher glorified the process of human self-transcendence. Solovyev is criticizing his doctrine, but he is totally opposed to those who reject its significance. The Nietzschean idea of human self-transcendence is reinterpreted within the context of Solovyev’s thought as the constant desire of the human person to develop all forms of his or her life. The various forms of the cultural activity of humans are directed toward "the form of the perfect unity or God" (IS 615). In this effort to bring eternal values into the context of culture, humanity becomes unified, serving the cause of self-perfection on the way to God.

Solovyev was the father of the Russian religious renaissance of the beginning of the twentieth century with its interest in the problems of culture. His ideas are quite close to Western Christian thought in our century. Looking at the universe as a dynamic developing totality, Solovyev wanted to find in it the value dimension that is so important for personal life. He claimed that the solution of cultural problems and contradictions, the necessity of obtaining the organic unity of humanity’s world, urgently demanded the restoration of the lost harmony between the highest values of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. His ontology and anthropology are closely linked together and open the horizon of his cultural ideal of the revival of the role of religion in the Post-Renaissance world.

References

FNCZ -- Solovyev V. Filosofskie nachala celnogo znanya. Sochinenya, v 2 t. M.: Mysl, 1988. T.2.

IS -- Solovyev V. Idea sverkh cheloveka. Sochinenya, v 2 t. M.: Pravda, 1989. T.2.

KON -- Solovyev V. Kritika otvlechennykh nachal. Sochinenya, v 2 t. M.: Mysl, 1988. T.1.

S -- Losev A.V.S.

Among the major distinctive contributions of Mordecai M. Kaplan (1881-1983) to twentieth-century religious thought is his creative synthesis of modern Jewish nationalism with spiritual naturalism, religious humanism, and process theology. Kaplan’s earlier published essay (1909) dealt with "Judaism and Nationalism" and his last book, consisting of conversations with existentialist theologian, Arthur A. Cohen, was entitled If Not Now When? Toward a Reconstitution of the Jewish People (1973). During the intervening six decades, Kaplan produced an enormous output of essays, articles and books in which he sought to elucidate the significance of the national element in the Jewish religion and the spiritual components of Jewish identity in the light of new developments in the social sciences, philosophy, and theology. Kaplan read widely in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and comparative religion, and kept abreast of advances in liberal Protestant as well as Jewish thought. His published writings and voluminous diary exhibit the gropings of an eclectic mind obsessed with the survival and spiritual growth of the Jewish people, American democracy, and the human enterprise as a whole in an era of crisis and opportunity.

Kaplan’s analysis of Jewish nationalism begins with the Bible, the Talmud, the Midrash, and medieval Jewish theology, while simultaneously freely utilizing modern sociological and philosophical insights. He continuously emphasizes that the essential nature of the Jewish religion derives from the connection established from earliest times between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. In the Genesis narratives, for example, Abraham is depicted neither as a religious philosopher nor as a reformer but as someone whom God "makes his own" and ordains to be the progenitor of a family-nation that would serve as a pilot-people for humanity by keeping God’s way -- the avoidance of violence and the practice of justice under law (Genesis 18:19). To achieve that purpose, the land of Canaan is promised to Abraham’s progeny.

During the years of servitude in Egypt, the Israelites live in a spirit of expectancy -- waiting to be called to their land. Following their liberation, they are compelled to wander in the desert for forty years in order to atone for the grievous sin of accepting the negative report of their own spies concerning the land. The overriding concern of the authors of Deuteronomy is that the Israelites not forfeit their right to the land by improper behavior. The significance of all of the wilderness experiences is brought into focus by pointing out the relation of those experiences to the national destiny of a people dwelling in its own land. Kaplan avers that from the standpoint of the Jewish religion, the reality and destiny of the Jewish people are in fact meaningless unless they are associated with the land.

The Torah or Five Books of Moses may be appropriately regarded as a legal document in which the God of history deeds the land to the Jewish people (FA] 458). In other books of the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible, "no value is so uniformly interpreted and emphasized as the value of the land in its relation to [the people

of ] Israel" (JC 267). The Prophets, even when stressing God’s sovereignty over all of humanity and his eventual establishment of universal justice, emphasize the role of the land as the place in which international disputes will be settled and the divine word sent forth to all of humanity (Isaiah 2; Micah 4). These ideas are further elaborated in the Talmud and the Midrash, the major sources of traditional Judaism, which teach, for example, that the authentic observance of religious precepts is possible only in the Land of Israel and that only there is it possible for a Jew to have direct communion with God. The natural love of the Judeans or Jews for their ancestral land was thus raised to a high pitch of spiritual fervor by their religious teachers or rabbis who accorded it a central role in the Jewish religion. The land was recalled in virtually ever rite of passage, in the prayers recited following meals, during holiday celebrations, and in every worship service.

In a study of religion and nationalism, Ninian Smart writes that the flow of human events in society and individual life is such that entities that have phenomenological reality and a special shape (independent of whether they have actual existence) impinge upon consciousness and feeling. "A nation is a super- individual that is a phenomenological constant resulting from performative acts in which individuals communicate and pool positively charged substance, including the charged space of territory and the charged story of the past." He concludes that the creation of a national consciousness is a feature of true nationalism and that such a consciousness blends awareness, sentiment, and sacrament (RMN 16, 26, 28). Mordecai Kaplan similarly views the peoplehood or collective identity of the Jews as essentially derived from an intense, intimate, and dignified collective sentiment concerning a specific home-country (JC 264).

Kaplan concedes that at the time the ancient Israelites invaded Canaan, they were subject to the same rapacious instincts that periodically motivated hungry Bedouins to seek fertile territory (NZ 142). But the fact that the land was originally acquired by force was erased from the minds of the biblical writers because of the deeply moral and spiritual heritage which the people of Israel developed there. As its ethical conscience evolved, Israel was embarrassed by the way its forbears had come to possess the land and developed the apologetic rationale for its acquisition later recorded in Scripture. This rationale is expressed, for example, in the idea that Abraham’s descendants would be permitted to enter the land only when the sins of the aboriginal inhabitants were sufficient to justify the latter’s dispossession. It is also found in the threat that the Israelites too would be banished from the land if they conducted themselves improperly inside it (Genesis 15:16; Leviticus 18:28). According to Kaplan, contemporary religious thought should interpret the story of the land as God’s gift to Israel naturalistically, i.e., as simply a way of expressing the profound attachment of the Israelite to his nation. "Sensing that the land was an instrument used by God in the making of the Jewish people, Jews have apotheosized the land" (NZ 131).

The biblical rationale for Israel’s possession of the land may appear primitive since it is linked to a view of God that limits God’s divinity and love and guidance of humanity to a specific territory. But whatever constricting influence this view may have had on the Jewish religion can have no contemporary relevance in the light of Jewish influence on the rise of Christianity and Islam. If the Jewish religion had inherently been bound to a narrow national and land-bound interpretation, it could not have given rise to those two world religions. In the conscience of humanity, the history of the Jewish people in its own land has come to function as evidence of God’s self-relevation through human history. Judaism, land-rooted in content but universal in form and reference, demonstrates that "it is normal for religions to convert into means of salvation the experiences arising from the social interaction which a common land makes necessary for a people" (NZ 135).

For Kaplan, modern Zionism, both as an ideology and as a movement, represents the quintessential expression of Judaism in modern times. He views it as the only movement capable of salvaging the collective identity of the Jewish people from the melting pot of modern nationalism. Zionism has been vindicated principally because the Jewish people have been given a new lease on life with the establishment of the State of Israel. It has moreover taught Jews to treat Judaism as an all-embracing civilization which can elicit from them "a sense of spiritual rootedness in Eretz Yisrael, a feeling of oneness with the forty-century-old People of Israel, a desire to understand its language and literature, a yearning to cherish its aspirations, and an eagerness to live its way of life, with its mores, laws, and arts" (GIM 394, 451). Zionism is contemporary Judaism in action signifying, above all, that the Jewish people is actively engaged in adjusting itself to the modern world. It is Jewry’s effort "to burst its cerements, step out of its mummified condition and rise out of the valley of dead bones." It is Judaism in modem dress, the Messiah commuting on a jet plane instead of riding a donkey (NZ 174).

A principal reason why Zionism became necessary was the fact that Judaism everywhere was living on the momentum of the past, and that momentum was being rapidly exhausted. Before it was entirely spent, it became imperative to establish a central organ for world Jewry by creating a majority community of Jews which might control all of the vital forces operating in modern life. In addition, the forces of anti-Semitism and materialist secularism threatened the very survival of the body and soul of Jewry. Zionism was the mighty salvational idea that rescued the Jewish people and released unsuspected creative powers that had been dormant for centuries (QJA 410, REN 118).

Zionism constituted Jewish democracy in action insofar as it embraced the following principles: 1. "The reinterpretation of the messianic ideal from that of passive waiting for a supernatural miracle to the exertion of initiative to throw off the yoke of oppression"; 2. "The refusal to regard the dispersion of the Jews as a divinely decreed expiation or a form of divine discipline"; and 3. "The decision to reinstate Jewish nationhood where it might function as a means of securing the maximum welfare and collaboration of all who came within its purview, in keeping with the highest ideals of democracy (FAJ 361). Zionism should therefore be viewed as both a liberation movement and a salvational ideology, provided that salvation be interpreted in a this-worldly, humanistic manner.

The religious significance of Zionism becomes indisputable when one realizes that "to raise the Jews from a disintegrated and fragmented mass of individuals into an organic unity, whether it be the unity of the Jewish people as whole, or any part of it, is to create the conditions that make the Jewish religion possible" (JC 329). Whatever stimulates creative social interaction among Jews correctly belongs to the domain of the Jewish religion since it makes possible the salvation of the Jew. Zionism’s messianic character is evident in its attempt to end the role of the Jews as a ghost-people, to keep Jewry from retaining the status of an unclassifiable entity, and to reactivate the spiritual purpose to which Jews have traditionally considered themselves covenanted (NZ 177).

The primary function of Zionism today is to stimulate Jews in the Diaspora who possess a sense of adventure and are proficient in one or another field of endeavor to come to Israel and contribute to its upbuilding. But it should also motivate those who remain in the Diaspora to perpetuate their Jewish heritage and foster their Jewish group individuality. They should be encouraged to resist the forces which tend to break up minority groups (IWS 165). In order to accomplish these objectives, contemporary Zionism must repudiate its traditional "negation of the Diaspora" and encourage Jewish survival, and spiritual and cultural creativity wherever Jews live. It should cease viewing the Jews exclusively as a land-bound people. It should also forestall the danger of divorcing the future of the Jewish people from the future of the Jewish religion, and strive to have every Jew realize that Judaism seeks both to provide its adherents with a sense of corporate unity and to help them achieve their destiny as human beings (JWS 149). By changing the priorities of classical Zionism, this "New Zionism" would make the reconstitution and reorganization of world Jewry its primary goal, and the security and development of the State of Israel the major means to that end.

While Judaism transcends political and national boundaries, it requires membership in a historic religious and cultural people. Such "peoplehood" provides faith in God as faith that the universe has the necessary resources, and humanity the necessary abilities to achieve its destiny. While providing such faith to Jews everywhere through Judaism, the Jewish people requires the existence of a creative nucleus in its ancient homeland in order for it to maintain itself in the contemporary world (JWS 149). As far as the Jews of the United States are concerned, they should promulgate "an indigenous civic religion for the American people that shall act as a unifying influence, uniting all Americans regardless of race, creed or status, without being authoritative or coercive." They should seek to have incorporated into American practices and institutions such principles of the Jewish religion as the following: 1. "The people of which we are a part should provide the principal experiences on which to base our awareness of God," and 2. "Loyalty to God should be demonstrated mainly by the practice of righteousness in our people’s political, economic and social affairs" (GJM 477f.).

Kaplan maintains that the Jewish religion can and should be divorced from supernaturalism and come to be associated with the natural processes of body and mind. It must encourage freedom of thought and inter- and intra-religious pluralism. The idea that God’s power is manifest essentially in the suspension or abrogation of natural law makes supernaturalism untenable. It should be replaced with a religious naturalist or "transnaturalist" approach. Transnaturalism is an extension of naturalism that discovers God in the fulfillment of human nature rather than in the suspension of the natural order. It deals with phenomena such as mind, personality, purpose, ideas, values and meanings, which materialistic or mechanistic science is incapable of dealing with. It utilizes symbols, myths, poetry, and drama to convey trust in life and in humanity’s ability to overcome the potentialities for evil inherent in heredity, environment, and social conditions. It views such trust as synonymous with belief in God, since Divinity is the aspect of existence that impels humanity to create a better and happier world, and every individual to make the most of his or her own life (REN 75). God is a process or function rather than a being or substance. The biblical conception of God includes the idea of a metamorphosis in human life that will make possible the establishment of the divine kingdom on earth. The purpose of Jewish life is to promote the idea that human metamorphosis can come about only as the end result of ethical nationhood and world peace (REN 114). The way to prevent belief in God from becoming defunct is to invest it once and for all with "rational and communicable thought," establishing a causal connection between believing in God and being a reliable and kindly person (GJM 489).

Kaplan asserts that humanity would not have come into being were it not for the divine grace that reveals itself in human moral responsibility despite all assumed and actual human depravity (GJM 494). Only insofar as we have a sense of moral responsibility are we authentically human and able to personally experience the revelation of God as "the source of whatever truth and value there is to any of the historical or institutional religions" (GJM 496). Indeed, "religion without morals is magic, and morals without religion is expediency" (GJM 495). Conscience, which dictates what we should do and induces remorse for failure, is the "semi-conscious intellectual effort to experience Divinity, without recourse to anthropomorphic terms, rational propositions or mystic ecstasy" (REN 71).

God, the process in human nature identifiable as holiness or transcendence, becomes the power making for salvation in organic human societies which achieve self-consciousness (INNW 38). Since institutional or public religion is a manifestation of group consciousness, the group consciousness and group conscience of ancient Israel constituted its experience of God’s presence (INNW 32). In individual life, institutional religion renders the individual aware of his or her belonging to a particular religion or religious sect. When inspired by a rallying standard such as the name YHWH (meaning "eternality") in ancient Israel, group consciousness inspires group cohesion and encourages efforts aimed at self-perpetuation (INNW 30).

Religion, according to Kaplan, is a three-dimensional process involving Divinity, salvation, and peoplehood. Out of the quest of social groups for an understanding of the connection between specific beliefs and actions, and the reactions of the universe, as well as the meaning of human salvation, religion grows and develops. The conception of salvation determines one’s idea of God as well as what one’s people must do or refrain from doing in order to achieve thc greatest social good. Peoplehood is the societal structure which through government, economy, culture, and religion provides for personal self-fulfillment, a well as for "a kind of continuing radiation or anonymous immortality" after death (GJM 479-80).

Kaplan’s approach to peoplehood would appear to have the support historian Conor Cruise O’Brien, who writes of rationality, self-interest, an pragmatism as insufficient to hold together a society that has lost the common bond of religion. "It seems impossible," he writes, "to conceive of organized society without holy nationalism, since any nationalism that failed to inspire reverence could not be an effective bonding force" (GL 40).

Kaplan’s innovative definition of Judaism as "an evolving religious civilization" illumines his understanding of the centrality of peoplehood in the Jewish religion, as well as his transnaturalist interpretation of the origin and nature of Judaism. That Judaism is a religious civilization implies that the survival of the Jewish people in the Diaspora depends on its making religion a matter of vital interest (GJM 499). The Jewish religion has to provide a world-outlook and conception of God that can encourage living in a spirit of moral responsibility, honesty, loyalty or love, and creativity (PMJE 299f.). Moreover, the civilizational approach to religion enables the adherent to be loyal to his/her faith without pretensions to superiority, and affords a sound basis for interfaith goodwill (GJM 467).

Kaplan believes that different religions result from the fact that each civilization sees in the important elements of its life media through which its people may achieve self-fulfillment or salvation. These sancta include historic events, heroes, institutions, places, and objects to which sanctity is ascribed. In effect, such sancta, the attitude toward life they imply, and the conduct they inspire, constitute the religion of each people and civilization. Describing Judaism as a religious civilization signifies the fact that the Jewish people has consciously sought throughout its history "to make its collective experience yield meaning for the enrichment of the life of the individual Jew and for the spiritual greatness of the Jewish people" (GJM 459-61). The civilizational definition also makes possible the acceptance by Judaism of the principles of unity in diversity and continuity in change. It is moreover a reminder of the fact that Judaism consists of much that cannot be pigeonholed into the category of religion and that in modern times, "paradoxical as it may sound, the spiritual regeneration of the Jewish people demands that religion cease to be its sole preoccupation" (JC 345). In the sense that existence precedes essence and life takes precedence over thought, Judaism exists for the sake of the Jewish people rather than the Jewish people existing for the sake of Judaism

The Torah of Moses aimed at the Jews becoming a people "in the image of God." But all peoples should seek to become peoples in God’s image and thus bring about the dawn of the Messianic age. The life of all nations must be animated by the divine traits of moral responsibility, authenticity or integrity, loyalty or love, and creativity in relation to all of their own members and to other nations as well. "Only then is the individual likely to achieve those traits in relation to all with whom he [or she] is likely to interact" (PMJE 296).

These are the conclusions arrived at through the decisive confluence of salvational Zionism and religious naturalism in our day.

References

FAJ -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. The Future of the American Jew. New York: Macmillan, 1949.

GJM -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. The Greater Judaism in the Making. New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1960.

GL -- Conor Cruise O’Brien. God Land. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988.

INNW -- Mordecai M. Kaplan and Arthur A. Cohen. If Not Now, When? Toward a Reconstruction of the Jewish People. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.

JC -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. Judaism as a Civilization. New York: Macmillan, 1934.

JWS -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. Judaism Without Supernaturalism. New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1958.

NZ -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. A New Zionism. 2nd ed. New York: Herzl Press, 1959.

PMJE -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. The Purpose and Meaning of Jewish Existence. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1964.

QJA -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. Questions Jews Ask. New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1956.

REN -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. The Religion of Ethical Nationhood. New York: Macmillan, 1970.

RMN -- Ninian Smart. "Religion, Myth, and Nationalism." Religion and Politics in the Modern World. Eds. P. H. Merkl and Ninian Smart. New York: New York University Press, 1983.

In section two of the chapter of Process and Reality which Whitehead called, "Organisms and Environment" he announced that. "the philosophy of organism aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason" (PR 113/172-73). Such a critique of feeling would, he insisted, ". . . supersede the remaining Critiques required in the Kantian philosophy" (PR 113/172-73). The context of this programmatic announcement makes Whitehead’s intentions abundantly plain. The philosophy of organism is to frame a theoretical alternative to the errors inherent in what he termed the Kantian or Hegelian traditions that have regarded experience as, ". . . the product of operations which lie among the higher of the human modes of functioning" (PR 113/172-73). This understanding of experience is responsible for having foisted a serious misapprehension on philosophy, and it is a misunderstanding that is the root of many weaknesses of modern thought. The fatal error is the conception that all. ". . . ordered experience is the result of schematization of modes of thought, concerning causation, substance, quality, quantity" (PR 113/172-73). These categories are essential to human experience, but human experience is complex, and in its complexity abstract because it is tied to sense perception. The philosophy of organism, by contrast, focuses upon the experience constituted by primitive feeling which, ". . . is to be found at a lower level." So the criticism of Kant and Hegel central to Whitehead’s proposal to substitute a critique of feeling for Kant’s three critiques is that neither Kant nor Hegel recognized that the experience with which the former was preoccupied and which Hegel wrote the Science of Logic to transcend is not by any means primitive and absolute. Rather, it is -- and must be understood as being -- derivative and relative to the complexity of the subjects that enjoy it.

If that much of Whitehead’s comment about the three Critiques is clear, it is also the case that prima facie the proposal raises an implausible expectation. For even when it is recognized that human experience is complex and abstracted from the immediacy of feeling, it is still the case that so far as we know only human beings, and, it is important to add for Kant, creatures whose cognitive functions are similar in significant ways to human beings, enjoy the moral experiences which are the concern of the second Critique. Again, as far as is known, only human beings, and those creatures that happen to have cognitive equipment similar to ours, enjoy the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime which occupy the third Critique. In fact much the same rejoinder is apposite when applied to the facile dismissal of the first Critique. Even if it can be shown that human experience is complicated and not primitive it remains possible only because it is spatial and temporal and is organized by the intervention of categories such as quantity, quality, or cause and effect. To that extent Whitehead has overstated his case. The material of the three Critiques is not immediately and automatically obviated by his discovery of the complexity and abstraction of ordinary or scientific experience, or moral and aesthetic encounters. This, in turn, renders the attempt to reconcile Whitehead to Kant (or Kant to Whitehead) at least a plausible undertaking; and I shall suggest here as I have done elsewhere¹ that one important consequence of the undertaking is that positive achievements of critical philosophy -- whether in ethics or aesthetics or the philosophy of nature -- can be placed within a more adequate context than either Kant or those who like Hegel worked with many of the assumptions established by Kant were able to provide for their work.

That first result is, to be sure, a modest discovery and no more than an additional indication that Whitehead was not a Kant scholar.² For readers whose acquaintance with Kant’s work is not so sharply circumscribed, however, something rather more significant is apparent, for despite his having sounded the Aufhebung motif and despite the differences that follow from Whitehead’s conviction about which experience is primitive, there are highly important systematic similarities between the philosophy of organism and themes Kant developed in the critical period. These similarities, I will conclude, highlight and emphasize the importance of Whitehead’s insistence that human experience is an end-point, not the beginning of inquiry.

Although it is quite impossible to document this fully within the compass of one brief study, some of it can be captured with a considerable degree of precision by reference to the treatment of purpose, and purposive organization. On the reading of Kant which is dominant among English language interpreters, that itself is a most dubious, one might say suspicious, program. This largely positivist interpretation of the critical program insists that Kant’s overriding philosophic interest was to salvage what could be saved of the Newtonian philosophy of nature in light of the skeptical attacks embodied in Hume’s Treatise and Enquiries, which seemed to have undermined it entirely by excising necessity from the understanding of the world available to human beings. Whitehead appears to have understood Kant in this way. Indeed, the fact that in a key passage he even uses the verb "save" to describe Kant’s program is a convenient index of how completely he had assumed this perspective (PR 72/111).

There are several important difficulties inherent in such an interpretation with which it is unable to cope successfully even so far as the first Critique is concerned, as the various members of the "ontological school" of Kant interpretation were arguing as early as the third decade of this century. More immediately connected to the issue of purpose and purposive organization, however, is that to regard Kant as preoccupied only with providing a stable foundation for a Newtonian philosophy of nature is a reading of his thought that cannot be sustained at all in light of important parts of the Critique of Judgment. Indeed, that there even was a third Critique is a serious objection to any rigidly positivistic interpretation. After all, Kant had described judgment in Critique of Pure Reason as, "the ability to subsume under rules." That is why although, ". . . the understanding is subject to instruction and being outfitted by rules, judgment by contrast is a particular talent which can never be learned but rather only exercised" (CPR A133/B172). Judgment is only the talent or the ability to capture singular or particular instances under more general rules; and although some cognitive exercises can be learned, this ability to subsume under appropriate general rules is not one of them. The clever person performs the task of subsumption quickly and easily: the one properly described as dumb is incapable of ever achieving the appropriate "fit" of the particular to the universal, although he may well have his fill of whatever can be imparted by instruction, including a full store of universal propositions and particular instances.

There is nothing either original or originating about judgment conceived as the ability to include singular or particular instances under rules. It is a conception completely familiar to Aristotelians, and to the extent that it regards judgment merely as the subsumption of particulars under universals it treats the faculty as static. His correspondence makes it clear that Kant did not remain content with that entirely static conception of judgment for long. As early as December 1787, at least two and a half years before he had completed the Critique of Judgment, he described three abilities or capacities of mind (Vermögen) -- faculties in that restricted sense -- to Carl Leonard Reinhold. These capacities were, ".. the faculty of knowledge, the feeling of pleasure and pain and the faculty of desire." He continued to tell Reinhold that he had, ". . . found the a priori principles for the former in the critique of pure (theoretical) reason, and those for the third in the critique of practical reason. I am also seeking those for the second. . ."³ So by the time he wrote to Reinhold. Kant had come to realize that there is a cognitive function with its own sphere of concern which is somehow related to feelings of pleasure and displeasure. He does not identify this as the ability to judge in the letter to Reinhold, but when he does do so in the third Critique the immediate consequence is that instead of being an ancillary to the operation of the understanding the capacity of judgment will occupy a position analogous to that of pure practical reason. It will need to be understood as an originating cognitive function and operate along with the function of pure speculative understanding and pure practical reason. As pure practical reason copes with the Faktum of obligation and the freedom of the willing agent entailed by that obligation without negating the necessity and universality of scientific law for the physical world, the critique of judgment will explore the domain of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. As Kant put it at the end of the third section of the introduction he published with the Critique of Judgment,

This, Kant concludes here, means that a full-fledged critique of human cognition will involve an analysis of pure understanding, of pure judgment and of pure reason. The powerful addition to the treatment of judgment which is accomplished by the Critique of Judgment is Kant’s assurance that like the other capacities or faculties of pure and practical reason, judgment is pure because it is "legislative a priori" (CJ XXV).

The distinction between determinative and reflective judgment that Kant emphasized so strongly in the discussion of the third Critique facilitated greatly the treatment of judgment as a third cognitive function with a distinct legislative capacity a priori. Determining judgment is constitutive of what the experiencing subject undergoes and for that reason is crucial to the experience of objects. Its function is to determine the concept fundamental to the relevant experience. It is the ability, "to determine a fundamental concept by means of a given empirical representation." Reflective judgment, by contrast, centers upon the principles which regulate the reflexive activity of the subject involved in the experience. It is the "capacity of reflecting about a given representation in terms of a certain principle for the sake of a concept made possible by that principle."⁴ More briefly, reflective judgment is regulative, and not constitutive in Kant’s critical terminology; and this is crucial here because it is its regulative nature that renders it possible for him consistently to add an account of feeling as connected to the faculty of reflective judgment. The function of reflection, or of reflective judgment, is the one in which principles of feeling which are not determinative, but which are none-the-less a priori, can be formulated. These are the principles destined to regulate how subjects organize their internal or their reflective lives, and as such they are not nearly so relevant, or not relevant at all, to how the concepts deployed in experience are determined, or with how they in turn determine the experience. This is why they become essential only as judgment is conceived by Kant’s third Critique to be both legislative and focused upon feeling.

It is important that the significance of Kant’s manoeuvre not be underestimated. By delineating a cognitive function -- now called judgment -- which is subject to critique because it has a recognized legislative function, he has gone a good part of the distance necessary to evade the objection that feelings of pleasure and pain are at a considerable remove from rational principles, even if it is possible to accord these feelings a place in the scheme of things. This means that to a very considerable degree in the third Critique Kant has developed a "critique of feeling"; and that marks a major alteration of, and addition to, the critical philosophy. Even if it is not precisely what Whitehead recommended, it suggests very strongly that the work of the third Critique is not to be dispensed with as easily as Whitehead seemed to believe it could be. Whatever else it means it certainly committed Kant to engage in a rational exposition of the feelings of pleasure and displeasure and to integrate these with the other cognitive functions. More than an interesting coincidence makes that as accurate a brief description of Process and Reality as of the Critique of Judgment, and I will show significant substantiative similarities are connected to these programmatic ones.

The magnitude of the shift represented by Kant’s determination to treat judgment as legislative a priori may be calculated by recalling that just nine years earlier in a long footnote that he appended to the transcendental aesthetic of the first Critique Kant had complained that only the Germans were guilty of having tried to create a "critique of taste," failing to recognize that the basis for such a critique could be nothing more than the hope ignited by Baumgarten ". . . of being able to align the critical judgment of the beautiful with rational principles and thus to elevate the rules of such an evaluation to the status of a science."⁵ This hope, he had insisted, must always be frustrated because feelings or taste cannot be understood as grounded in originating understanding or reason.

The project embodied in the third Critique thus signals a significant and fundamental shift within the critical period itself and is a stern warning against assuming that everything Kant wrote after 1781, when the first Critique was published, was cut from the same cloth. But an even more dramatic example of how Kant’s thought about the beautiful developed over the years of his creative activity is provided by the contrast between the third Critique and the essay he had published nearly thirty years earlier called Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. The work is little, if any, more than an empirical anthropology, a list of the various responses to, and ways of coping with, the experience of the beautiful or the sublime adopted by the national groups Kant was familiar with -- or thought that he was familiar with. The descriptions which constitute the book will either amuse or annoy the reader, but unlike the other work he completed at the time, this essay holds out no promise of philosophic insights yet to be honed. The systematic reason why it does not is because there Kant was without a doubt regarding feelings of pleasure or displeasure as phenomena without a rational, cognitive content, which is to say that he had not yet understood the necessity of a critique of feeling.⁶

This bit of history is useful inasmuch as it serves to illuminate the change within the critical period. From the perspective of Kant’s analysis of cognition and the cognitive faculties, what happened is abundantly clear: When he wrote the first Critique Kant was still thinking of feeling as he had done at least since the mid-sixties, as non-rational and purely emotive. However, in less than a decade he came to realize that judgment is a legislative, cognitive faculty demanding recognition on a level with the understanding and pure practical reason and that it is not merely another function or exercise of the understanding. The immediate implication of that is to expand the architectonic of human intellectual functions. Now science and common experience are treated in the first Critique by pure theoretical reason and the understanding, morality in the second Critique by pure reason employed practically, and the feelings of pleasure which are attached to an exposition of whatever is beautiful by judgment in the third Critique. Instead of being treated as private and thus as entirely uninteresting for rational thought it is appropriate to claim universality and necessity for some of these feelings of pleasure and displeasure. That is what is implicit in any effort to subject them to a critical analysis, even although the analysis is focused upon reflective and not determining judgment.

If feelings of pleasure can be explicated rationally, the objects which give rise to those feelings are elicited into prominence, and for that reason art plays an important role in the book. For art -- what comes of artifice, or techne -- is at times beautiful and as such is essential to stimulation of feelings of pleasure in response to the beautiful object. However -- and this is the element most crucial to the present discussion -- since art is possible only when purpose or purposiveness is realized or enacted in matter, the student is constrained to confront purpose and purposiveness directly. To be sure, such purpose is introduced by the subject and is not a characteristic of the things outside that subject (Cf. CJ §62), but its subjectivity is what insures that purposiveness . . . is valid for everybody (CJ § 57). So, by the time he had completed the third Critique Kant had systematized what he told Reinhold; that the feeling of pleasure constitutes a distinct part of philosophy in addition to its theoretical and practical parts, and that the treatment of these feelings will entail purpose although the field of teleology "will be found to be the poorest in a priori determining grounds."⁷

The description of judgment as a capacity or faculty of purpose and the description of the subjectively purposive in its connection to the beautiful marks an important addition to the structure of Kant’s thought. However, to this juncture it is manifestly only the subjective aspect of purpose and purposiveness that is involved. This is why Kant balances that subjective bias immediately by arguing strongly in favor of an objective, or object based, purpose as well; and the discussion of objective purposiveness and its implication provides the most significant systematic affinities to Whitehead. In the first introduction to the third Critique which Kant did not publish with the book, due in part at least to its length (nearly sixty pages in the Academy edition), he is explicit and clear about objective purpose in nature.

What sorts of objects permit, even require, conceptualization as purposive is explained in the numbered paragraph that follows. In the first place, Kant argues, the existence and the form of the parts of such an entity are possible only through their relation to the whole. Secondly it is necessary that, ". . . the parts [of such an entity] are combined into the unity of a whole such that each is reciprocally the cause and the effect of their form" (CJ § 65). Such entities are, as Kant terms them, "organized beings," and the second part of the Critique of Judgment explains that they constitute such a being just because each part of the organized whole is dependent for its existence and its form upon the relation it has both to the whole itself and to the other members of that whole. Similarly, the form and being of the whole is a consequence of the relationships which pertain between its members or parts. In short, both the parts and the entire entity are simultaneously the cause and the effect of what each is, and Kant does describe them in precisely this way. "I would say provisionally, ‘a thing exists as a natural purpose if it is both cause and effect of itself although in an equivocal sense," (CI § 64). It is an important aspect of Kant’s position here that the beings are organized in virtue of this mutually effecting relation that pertains between its members. That mutual relationship is what distinguishes an organized being from other sorts of entities.

This makes the role played by the conception of purpose most crucial since, "An organized entity includes within itself creative force [bildende Kraft]. and indeed such a force that it communicates to matter which lacks it and organizes matter. Thus the organized entity has a creative propagating force that cannot be explained through motive force (mechanism) alone" (CJ § 65).⁹ Creative force. bildende Kraft, is not merely mechanical power or the communication of motion. Were that all it involved then mechanical laws would suffice and there would be no difference in principle between organized entities and those which are not organized, or what is the same thing between organized beings and mere collections of matter. However, Kant is insisting that there are instances in nature -- instances that are widely dispersed -- for which the mechanical communication of motion does not provide an adequate explanation. These are the entities in which it is essential to think of a creative force that is largely, if not entirely, responsible for the entities’ being what, and as, they are. It is because such beings are organized entities that the force which is essential to their being and nature must be understood as directed or as purposive, for without direction it could never be creative. Lacking purposive direction, any force will be only a disruptive and a destructive impulse. Purpose, in other words, is absolutely essential to the conception of organized entities as constituted by the relations between their members. Not only are the members or the parts of organized beings mutually related, but the purpose or purposiveness of their relation is crucial to establishing the difference between them as organized entities and those beings which are the product of purely mechanical causes. Because in organized entities the parts, ". . .produce a whole from their own causality" (CJ § 65) the parts and the whole require reference to purpose to provide the direction and control of the causality involved. They are organized in terms of, and because of, the purpose relevant to their members.

Organized entities, then, are beings in which the purposive relations which pertain between the members are responsible for what the whole is. As a consequence of their mutual causal relationships such entities manifest an organic unity rather than show themselves as the outcome of mere collection or aggregation. Internally organized beings are organic entities in that sense. Yet Kant’s description of the organized beings makes it plain that the extent of such organized existence is broader than that of the beings which are organic in the sense of living entities. Accordingly, not all organized entities are living although certainly any living being is an organized entity. What is chiefly important in this connection is Kant’s understanding that because of the immanent causality each part manifests, organized entities are those whose parts stand in constitutive relationships with other parts and with the whole, which relation is controlled by purpose. It follows from this description and is equally true, of course, that the organized and organic whole stands in a constitutive relation with its parts, and that these constitutive relations are ones which also involve purpose. Kant did not emphasize the conclusion as strongly as he might have done, but it is a thoroughly consistent reading to argue that for the scheme being sketched the constitutive relations effect, and are affected by, the context that the whole and its members provide. It is the direct involvement of the purposes relevant to the members and to the whole which allows the entities to organize themselves without reference to an external source, and this is vital to Kant’s description. The organized beings, as he puts it, "Organize themselves and in every species of their organized products they follow a single exemplar in general but still with the deviations which are requisite for its sustenance under the circumstances" (CJ § 65).

This means that by the time he reached this section of the third Critique, Kant had developed a scheme which required purpose to be attributed to a wide class of natural entities, the organized beings. The assurance that it is impossible to deal adequately with the experience we have of these entities unless purpose is posited as their basis or foundation is central to the argument. It amounts to the conclusion that only on the supposition that they and their parts entail purpose is the experience of living -- and more generally of any organized -- beings possible, even although it is admittedly quite impossible to capture such purposive relationships within the perimeters set by the categories of the understanding. The crucial purposive relations are not categorical, but the third Critique moves a long way towards the recognition that only when such mutual relations are presupposed can the phenomena of organized and creative life be opened to experience. This conclusion is deeply embedded in the distinctly Kantian conviction that reflective judgment imposes the obligation upon the subject to conceive or think organized entities in this way. That is manifestly not equivalent to determining them to be permeated by purposive relation in independence of any and all knowing or cognizing subjects; but even granting that restriction -- and it is certainly a major caveat -- the third Critique is firm in insisting that organic and organized beings can be explicated only when the complications of the purposive relations that exist between the members and the parts of such a being are factored into the equation.¹⁰

An additional consideration is relevant here. Although Kant does not explicitly say this, it is impossible to evade the conclusion that the purposive element of the organized entity is intimately related to the way in which both its internal and external contexts are essential to its being and its character. All that is requisite to support this result is the premise that entities are organic or organized ones when the constitution of their parts is at least to some extent determined by the fact of their being parts of just that whole, and this is the characteristic of them that Kant uses to distinguish organized entities from those which are not organized. Equivalently, the whole will need to be conceived as being such that its existence and form are determined by just the members that it has. Hence, the members or parts as well as the organic whole itself all are conceived as being simultaneously both efficient causes and results or effects of the organization they constitute. To continue the argument that Kant did not complete, these results will require that for each individual account be taken of the purposes embodied in its becoming this or that member of this or that whole. Any given member or part is the cause of itself chiefly, and perhaps entirely, because it is able to accomplish the requisite and relevant accommodation to the context provided by its whole. To affect such accommodation is patently a procedure that can be accomplished only by a purposive, creative entity, and entities display their purposive creativity in assuming membership in such a whole. A merely mechanical or reactive being could at most repeat what confronted it, and so the member of an organized whole, and the purpose it shows forth, contribute to both the reason for the whole being as it is and to what the member is itself. It would not be just that member were it not a member of precisely that whole. But it is also true -- almost trivially so -- that the whole would not be what it is without that member. There is. in other words, a wide-spread reciprocity of purposive cause and effect posited by, or implicit in, Kant’s description of organized and organic wholes. The purposes of members reflect in the whole, but similarly the purposes relevant to the whole resonate in the individual members. In briefer compass, the purposiveness embodied in both the members and in the whole is simultaneously the cause and the effect of the member and of the whole.

All of this provides the systematic explanation for a passage in the third Critique which causes positivist Kantians great uneasiness because it is a direct refutation of the propensity to read Kant as striving merely to justify rigid mechanism. In the seventy-fifth paragraph which he entitled, ‘The Concept of an Objective Purposiveness of Nature is a Critical Principle of Reason for Reflective Judgment," Kant drove home with considerable vigor the implications of recognizing such a notion of organized entities.

No Newton will ever completely articulate the laws of living, organized, or organic entities just because each such entity -- and each part of such an entity -- is the result of purposes unique, or at least relevant, to it and to its parts.

Far more than this would be involved in a complete account of Kant’s critical philosophy of nature, but it is sufficient to establish that purpose and purposiveness play a much larger role in his thought than has been concluded from a reading of the first Critique alone. The reflective judgment of purpose as embodied in an art work is ingredient in our apprehension of the beauty of that work; but it is at least as important, if not more significant, that an adequate apprehension of nature entails recognition -- more strongly, the postulation -- of objective, purposive, and constitutive relationships between the parts of organized entities and the whole. The organic and organized entities are radically different from simple aggregations of parts precisely because they are wholes in which constitutive relationships pertain between the members of the whole among themselves and between the whole and its members. Further, the relevant relations all involve purpose; and accordingly Kant has argued that nature, at least organized nature which includes -- but is not exhausted by -- all that is alive, can only be understood completely when it is regarded as being organized so that purpose plays a vital role in its being and structure, however determining judgment may treat it. To this extent, and for this reason, Kant is able to contemplate nature as constituting a teleological system of organized beings.¹²

This points to close systematic affinities between what Kant had begun to adumbrate in the third Critique and leading themes of Process and Reality. For example, Whitehead’s description of an actual entity as, ". . . a purposed self-creation out of materials which are at hand in virtue of their publicity" (PR 289/443) is an accurate summary of the relations which pertain in organic and organized entities. Kant’s third Critique contends that these entities can be experienced only when they are thought to involve precisely the sort of "purposed self-creation" Whitehead described. Whitehead, to be sure, was speaking of all actualities and not a sub-class of beings as Kant conceived organized and organic entities to be. That difference may well have significant implications, but not ones that are relevant to the notion of organized being. The members of organized wholes to which Kant attributes purpose and purposive relation are responsible for the whole being as it is, but the whole and the context it provides is also part of the reason why the individual members are what they are. This is equally true of actual entities and of the complex organizations of actual entities that Whitehead termed "societies." Both societies and their constituent actualities are organized wholes, and in their organization they achieve organic unity in just the sense Kant described. For each such organized unity, or society, the nature of the individual members of the whole or of the society is in every case both the cause and the effect of that complex. Similarly, the whole social nexus is simultaneously both part of the cause and part of the effect of the actualities which constitute it. In other words, exactly like the parts of Kant’s organized beings, in divergent senses Whitehead’s actual occasions or actual entities are simultaneously both the cause of themselves and the effect of what they are; and like Kant’s organized entities themselves the social nexus are also the cause and the effect of the individuals that are its members.

Yet Kant does not, and cannot, totally reject materialism and mechanism, and equivalently he is not in the position to affirm the complete generality of the constitutive sort of organization that plays such a leading role in his description of nature. Those restrictions, I shall conclude by suggesting, provide strong evidence in favor of the contextualization of Kant’s results which was mentioned at the outset.

The former restriction is explicit in his conviction that, "...the natural products which previously we took as purposes of nature (Naturzwecke), have no other origin than the mechanism of nature" (CJ § 82) and similar claims abound throughout the second part of the third Critique. Thus, despite the organic conception that is invoked to insure that thought about some of the entities which constitute nature is adequate, Kant remained convinced that the material and mechanistic understanding of nature was an alternative which cannot be evaded. Despite all the diverse purposes that can be conceived as the foundation of natural phenomena, there is no indication that any of them is the result of more than a completely unintentional, non-teleological mechanism (CJ § 82). Neither in the work that he published prior to 1770, that is the "pre-critical" philosophy, nor in the books of his mature reflection, did Kant ever doubt that progress in the understanding of nature was synonymous with progress in the extension of mechanistic laws to ever wider range of phenomena. Indeed, as a sensed being even the moral agent, man, must be apprehended under the universally prevalent mechanism of nature.

Once this is understood, the reason why Kant could not attempt to generalize the notion of constitutive relation implicit in his discussion of organized beings becomes apparent. It is important, indeed it is absolutely essential, to think of certain natural entities as organized and organic beings. But such conception is not knowledge as knowledge is described in any of the three critical essays. Accordingly, to the extent that the science of nature is knowledge, the conception of purposive organic beings must be regarded as secondary or subsidiary for it. Such a conclusion is of course implicit, if it is not explicit, in the distinction between reflective and determining judgment that plays such a large role in the third Critique. All that is achieved so far as purposive organization is concerned is accomplished by reflective judgment after all; and this means that the conclusion of the inquiry will be relevant to the conceptions, or better to the thoughts, about such organized beings that are entertained by human -- and any other cognitively similar -- beings. None of it will pertain to, or be at all determinative of, the nature of the organized beings. Thus although Kant was prepared to extend considerably beyond a narrow Newtonian materialism and mechanism, he did not intend to reject the foundations of the doctrine as misleading. Quite to the contrary, these foundations were to be retained as paradigms of natural knowledge. Since this was so, it was utterly impossible to suggest that the non-mechanistic conception of organized beings has any application beyond the range of the reflective judgment of organized or organic and living things. To have admitted an extension of that sort would have rendered the philosophy of nature incomprehensible by imputing purpose and purposiveness to non-human and perhaps even non-sentient beings and in that it would have introduced a considerable barrier to the extension of the rational knowledge of nature.

That points towards another aspect of Kant’s critique of teleology and teleological judgment. Purpose, he had been convinced since at least the mid-sixties, is a characteristic of human intelligence and human experience and cannot be conceived apart from such a context. This is what makes it cogent and significant to insist that in virtue of their reflective judgment human beings can, and indeed must, think purposefully under the conditions sketched above. However, to go further and posit a general purposiveness of nature was simply impossible for him to accomplish on his assumption that purpose is completely grounded in the subject. Patently, in the context of the Critique of Judgment, that kind of generalization would have collapsed the distinction between determining and reflective judgment. Yet the distinction was essential to the exploration of purpose because it was this distinction that defined the borders of a domain within which notions that are not categorical, not tied to the categories of the understanding and not requiring to be schematized as determinatives of a possible experience, play a significant role.

There is, however, a considerable price to be paid for the move. If the application of purpose and purposiveness is essentially limited in this way to human, or human-like, instances, the danger of quickly reducing an investigation of teleology to the absurd is a very immediate one. The general criticism of purpose, or of the purposive interpretation of nature, where purpose is understood from the human perspective alone, was nearly a commonplace by the middle of the eighteenth century and its recognition wide-spread. Kant had been fully aware of the absurdity that lurks behind any interpretation of purpose conceived in that way at least since his 1763 essay on the existence of God. Then, as the culmination of a probing examination of the problem he had quoted Voltaire’s satirical treatment of the tendency to treat human purpose as paradigmatic. The investigator seeking for human purpose in nature will be led, Voltaire mocks, to exclaim, "See, the reason why we have noses is without a doubt to have a place to put our spectacles."¹³

This, however, brings the discussion round full circle to the interesting and significant point of Whitehead’s criticism of Kant, and is the reason why his contextual argument is of considerable importance here. Kant, like most if not all of the other thinkers of the modern era, had devoted his analysis to human experience and human rationality, and he undertook to regard nature entirely from that perspective. It was that perspective which led to the distinction between determining and reflective judgment and the restriction of teleological judgment to the reflective domain. Whitehead’s insistence that experience and rationality represent a high degree of specialization and abstraction is, I have been trying to suggest, indirectly tested by the examination of purpose present in Kant’s mature thought. The restrictions implicit in his promising and otherwise positive exposition of telic organization make apparent the wide ramifications the starting point has. More explicitly they emphasize and make most urgent the question of whether if Kant’s strategy exacts too high a price, something not unlike Whitehead’s may not be the more reasonable alternative.¹⁴

Notes

1Cf. "The Nature of Nature" in Metaphysics as Foundation, edited by P Bogaard and G. Treash (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992) and "Substance, Relation, Teleology: Whitehead and Kant" in Whitehead and Kant: The Inversion, edited by Ernest Wolf-Gazo and Patricia Mazzarella (Washington: Georgetown Press, forthcoming).

2Although it is not by any means conclusive, the remark at the end of Part II of Process and Reality about objects and thought suggests that Whitehead learned most, if not all, of what he did know of Kant from Norman Kemp Smith. In any case the comment deserves more careful attention than it has received. Whitehead notes there that:

There is of course the vital difference, among others, that where Kemp Smith, expounding Kant, writes ‘thinking,’ the philosophy of organism substitutes ‘experiencing’ (PR 215/328).

3The note which Kant appended to this passage ought to give lie to the impression of him as a dreary pedant. "Lack of judgment is what properly is called stupidity, and such a defect cannot be relieved at all. A dull and limited head which lacks nothing but the appropriate degree of understanding and the appropriate concepts can be trained up until it is learned. But since commonly in such people the other element (secunda Petri) is lacking, it is by no means unusual to encounter very learned men who demonstrate in the employment of their discipline that lack which can never be made good" (AI 34-135/B 172-173). It ought not to be forgotten that by the time he wrote this Kant had spent several terms as dean of the faculty in Königsberg.

4Letter dated 28 and 31 December 1787. Briefwechsel (Meiner: Hamburg, 1972), 335. In this letter Kant forecast to Reinhold that the inclusion of a cognitive capacity to deal with feelings of pleasure and displeasure will, ". . .provide me with material adequate for the rest of my life."

5Section V of the first "Introduction" to the Critique of Judgment, K.G.S. XX 211. See also Ralf Meerbote’s translation and discussion of this text. Kant’s Aesthetics, edited and introduced by Ralf Meerbote (Atascadero: California. Ridgeview, 1991), 10-12.

6Critique of Pure Reason, A21/B35.

7The following excerpt is characteristic of that work: "At the outset of any given acquaintance the Englishman is reserved and quite indifferent to strangers. He has little inclination for the small pleasantries, but on the other hand as soon as he is a friend he is fully prepared to exert himself in order to be useful. He is little concerned about being witty in society or about demonstrating highly-cultivated hesitation. On the other hand. however, he is reasonable and settled. He is a poor imitator, and he does not much concern himself with how others judge him. He simply follows his own taste. In his relations to women he is not much for French politeness but demonstrates a much greater respect so far as they are concerned [than the Frenchman does]. Indeed, perhaps he carries this respect too far inasmuch as in marriage he commonly accords his wife unlimited esteem. He is resolute, from time to time stubborn. He is bold and decisive, often presumptuous; and he works on principle, commonly to the point of obstinacy. He often stands alone, not out of vanity but because he concerns himself so little about others, and he does not easily mould his taste by compliance or imitation. For this reason he is seldom as much loved as the Frenchman, but when known is commonly more highly regarded.... If we make the attempt to apply these notions in some one case, in order to examine, the feeling of honor, for example, the following national differences manifest themselves. Among the French the feeling of honor is vanity, among the Spanish it is arrogance, with the English it is pride, for the Germans it is haughtiness, and for the Dutch it is conceit" (K.G.S.II, 247-249).

8Letter of 28 and 31 December 1787, Briefwechsel 335.

9K.G.S. XX 235, emphasis added.

10Werner Pluhar translates bildende Kraft as "formative power," which tends to suppress to a considerable degree what Kant seems to intend here, i.e., that organic or organized beings are not just formed, but formed from something either identical with, or else very similar to, the purposive elements of its members.

11Kant had begun to discuss organized beings two years before the publication of the Critique of Judgment in an occasional piece. On the Use of Teleological Principles in ‘Philosophy KUS. VII, 157-184. "The concept of an organized being already entails that it is matter in which everything stands to everything else in the relation of means and ends and that this [being] can be thought only as a system of final causes . . ." K.G.S. VII, 179.

12This passage betrays a solid and important continuity with Kant’s earlier philosophy of nature as outlined in The One Possible Basis for a Determination of the Existence of God which he published in 1763. There he had insisted, ". It will be said that it is not possible to discover the natural causes through which the most lowly cabbage is generated according to completely mechanical laws, and yet one dares an explanation of the origin of the universe at large. But still, no philosopher has ever been in a position to render any of the laws of the growth or inner movement of an already existing plant as distinct and mathematically certain as those to which all the motions of the heavenly bodies conform. The nature of the objects is completely altered here. The large, the astonishing, is infinitely more comprehensible than the small and marvelous." Treash translation (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), 189. Kant’s interest in the essay on the existence of God is to demonstrate that physical law holds sway over a much broader array of phenomena than is usually thought, even by Newtonians. That presumption had provided the theoretical basis of his theory concerning the formation of the physical universe first announced in the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755).

13The title of § 82 of the third Critique is "On the Teleological System in the External Relations of Organized Entities."

14KGS II, 131, Treash translation 175.

15Reiner Wiehl develops several of the topics explored here from a different perspective, and in much greater detail in his recent papers. Cf. "Whitehead’s Cosmology of Feeling: Between Ontology and Anthropology" in Whiteheads Metaphysics of Creativity, edited by Frederich Rapp and Reiner Wiehl (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), and especially "Kant’s Criticism of Panpsychism from the Perspective of the Whiteheadian Metaphysics of Subjectivity" in Metaphysics as Foundation, edited by Paul Bogaard and Gordon Treash (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

I

In the first chapter of Modes of Thought, Whitehead states that it is no less the task of philosophy to set out what he calls "...notions of large, adequate generality" (MT 3) than it is to construct complex systematic theories. The former approach he calls the . . ."philosophical process of assemblage" (MT 2). By it, human beings gain those insights that allow them to transcend their individual spheres of interest and become members of the polis, i.e.. "civilized beings" (MT 4). Amongst these generalizations he includes the concept of ‘importance.’ Central to the effort to ascend from the cave is philosophy and central to the philosophical effort is the notion of ‘importance.’

In one of his general and edifying observations, Whitehead links civilization, philosophy and "the sense of importance." In Adventure of Ideas he states:

Again in Modes of Thought, Whitehead accords ‘importance’ a central role in the intellectual search for worth and civilization. As well, he sets out the areas of human intellectual endeavor by which ‘importance’ leads to civilization. He describes morality as ". . . the control of process so as to maximize importance" (MT 13f); in addition, ‘importance’ plays an essential role in logic, art and religion (MT 11).

P. A. Schilpp, in his article "Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy," pays considerable attention to the role of ‘importance’ in Whitehead’s moral thought. He sees it as fundamental to Whitehead’s moral philosophy. However, he does not think it is the "fundamental" concept Whitehead claims it to be, i.e., an "ultimate category," since he sees it as being derived from Whitehead’s notions of ‘interest’ and ‘unity.’¹ He is correct to claim that it is not ultimate. However, it is not the case that Whitehead derives it from ‘interest’ and ‘unity.’ Rather, ‘interest’ is ‘importance’ taken at a certain level of purposefulness, and ‘unity’ is the ideal purposefulness seeks at its highest level of intensity. Schilpp makes his case, in the main, by examining the notion of ‘importance’ within the context of Whitehead’s moral thought, and by basing his observations almost exclusively on Modes of Thought. However, the notion of ‘importance’ is neither essentially a category of practical thought nor one which can be adequately understood by the process of "assemblage."

While Whitehead identifies ‘importance’ most explicitly and dramatically with moral obligation, aesthetic enhancement, logical precision and religious belief, he states they do not describe completely the philosophical scope or role of this concept. Indeed, he claims the true meaning of the term has been eclipsed by its close association with them, and that the concept is more broadly based (MT 11).

First, ‘importance’ is to be found operating outside of human existence. In Modes of Thought, Whitehead describes it as a factor in animal life; indeed . . .embedded in the very being of animal existence" (MT 9). It has "real relevance" in non-human animals, so much so that a primitive sense of moral obligation can be found in the higher species of the animal kingdom (MT 28). Secondly, ‘importance’ is to be found at the pre-conscious level of existence. Whitehead’s description of ‘importance’ as a ". . . fundamental notion not to be fully explained by any reference to a finite number of other factors" (MT 8), suggests that it permeates all levels and types of existence. This suggestion is no more clearly confirmed than in his discussion, in Process and Reality, of what constitutes both a physical object and a ". . . physical field in empty space" (PR 92). Thus ‘importance’ plays a part in what Whitehead refers to as "survival," regardless of the type or level of existence involved.

Finally, Whitehead uses the concept of ‘importance’ to distinguish between ‘order’ and ‘disorder.’ Though the account he gives of this relation in Process and Reality pertains to physical entities, it applies generally. Since no society, being part of some other social order, exists solely within itself, absolute ‘disorder’ is impossible. Rather, ‘disorder’ describes the relevance some other society or set of societies has for a particular society, or set of societies. If the defining characteristics of a society or set of societies have ". . . a lack of importance" for a specific society, they constitute, for that society, ‘disorder’ (PR 92).

Clearly then, ‘importance’ covers the full range of existence: inanimate modes of being, animal life and the civilizing efforts of human consciousness.

However, ‘importance’ is more than just pervasive. In Modes of Thought, Whitehead also observes that ‘importance’ is a "generic notion" and, therefore, has a fundamental role in the philosophy of organism; it is an intrinsic aspect of the central theme of purposefulness in Whitehead’s metaphysics (MT 11). To observe that ‘importance’ permeates all modes of existence is to recognize that it is fundamentally a metaphysical concept. To claim that it is a "generic notion" is to recognize that it is metaphysically fundamental. The former is a matter of the range of its involvement; the latter is a matter of its role in the notions of ‘origin’ and ‘purpose.’

In order adequately to understand the notion of ‘importance’ it is necessary to complement the method of "assemblage" with the systematic approach of Process and Reality.

II

The generic role of ‘importance’ can best be understood by first attending to the distinction Whitehead makes in Modes of Thought between ‘importance’ and ‘interest.’

They are two aspects of ‘importance’ itself. Within the context of his discussion about the practical matters of human experience. Whitehead treats the two terms as synonymous. Yet, ‘importance’ and ‘interest’ differ significantly. The former is described as a basic concept for which no complete definition can be given. It concerns the "final unity of purpose" (MT 12) as grounded on the "unity of the Universe" (MT 8). The latter is described by Whitehead as the condition essential for attending to the "individuality of the details" necessary for expression. The basis for the attention to details is a "perspective" (MT II). Arising out of an ‘interest,’ it gains a content which Whitehead calls a "matter-of-fact," an abstraction from an inclusive and interconnected background (MT 8).

The process of coming into being described by both ‘importance’ and ‘interest’ involves the concept of unity. In the case of ‘importance,’ it is the universe itself in its unlimited and inclusive connectedness. In the case of ‘interest,’ it is the limited, and therefore limiting, universe of societies as ‘enduring objects.’

With the distinction between ‘importance’ itself and ‘interest’ in mind, we can turn to the examination of the general concept of ‘importance’ in terms of Whitehead’s metaphysics.

While the notion of ‘importance’ depends on many of the basic categories of Process and Reality, the following are central to its understanding: the principle of ‘relativity’; the concepts of ‘propositions’ and ‘judgments,’ especially negative judgments; and finally, the ‘principle of intensive relevance.’ These will serve to focus the discussion.

First, we will examine systematically how ‘importance’ is realized in the unity of ‘enduring objects.’

All objects, physical, organic, conscious, or rational, are societies characterized by a ‘personal’ order. They are serially ordered and are so by virtue of the continuation of a common ‘subjective form,’ with, of course, tolerable variations. That ‘subjective form’ involves a gradation of characteristics selected by the ‘members’ from a welter of possibilities. That gradation, of course, rests neither in the possibilities themselves, which are purely logical entities, nor in the previous instantiation of possibilities as objective data, the ‘superjects’ of earlier processes. Such data must be available, regardless of the level of activity under consideration, (PR 273) for there to be any prehension of the possibilities required to realize the ‘subjective form’ characterizing the new emergence into objectivity. However, that gradation is not in itself generically determinant. That power rests with the ‘members’ of the society exercising ‘subjective aim.’ Even in the case of ‘enduring objects’ which are characterized only by "survival" through repetition, the process is an act of conformity by the ‘members’ and not one imposed upon them. ‘Importance’ describes both the ‘subjective aim’ which directs the process of gradation and the gradation itself of the alternatives required to realize the ‘subjective form.’ The former is ‘importance’ as ‘interest’; the latter is ‘importance’ as the description of the ‘subjective form’ realized in the exercising of ‘interest.’ In Process and Reality Whitehead describes the latter aspect as the "defining characteristics" of a society. A society is what it is because it "... elicits that complex into importance for its members. . ." (PR 92). The ‘subjective form’ is not something which has characteristics; it is the complex of characteristics gained from the ‘subjective form’ of its ‘members.’ The former aspect of ‘interest,’ i.e., the ‘subjective aim,’ is the metaphysical re-statement of this observation in Modes of Thought: "Thus perspective is the outcome of feeling; and feeling is graded by some sense of interest as to the variety of its differentiations" (MT 9f).

Again, the ‘subjective aim’ is nothing apart from its ‘interest.’ ‘Importance,’ then, is part of the mundane repetitious world of inorganic or organic objects, as much as it is part of higher levels of process, and describes the generic ordering of that world.

‘Importance,’ as it pertains to thought, is, in principle, the same, though in details radically different. Human reflection involves a judging subject exercising ‘comparative feelings’ in the form of ‘intellectual feelings.’ Such feelings define the subject as an entity which is able to entertain alternative potentialities, invoke them into ‘importance’ effectively to conform with its past, or to revise its previous history, moderately or radically, by recognizing alternatives not commonly part of its own world (PR 267). It is the capacity for radical change that characterizes human existence.

That change occurs dramatically with the ‘negative perception,’ what Whitehead terms "the triumph of consciousness" (PR 161). It further involves the subject prehending a proposition, which, as a datum, is a "lure for feeling." The subject of a proposition is an actuality necessarily present to a prehending subject if the proposition is to be a "lure," and its predicate is a description which may or may not apply to the subject. A proposition is true or false. But that is not a matter which rests with the proposition itself. As is the case with any datum, it merely presents a possibility. Its truth or falsity rests with the judging subject (PR 258; 261).

This is a most important aspect of Whitehead’s metaphysics for the consideration of ‘interest.’ It effectively reverses the commonly held perspective that interest is properly determined by facts, understood either subjectively or objectively, and their truth or falsity. Indeed, as a "lure," a proposition must be more interesting than true (AI 244). So significant is this point for the comprehension of the generic character of ‘importance,’ it merits further comment.

Physical, organic and conscious existence, for the most part, function according to established past patterns. Such ‘conformity’ is extremely important, for it assures the continuity and endurance characteristic of objective existence. Insofar as the previous functioning unity of a society constitutes the central aim of a subject, the subject’s power to acknowledge the "lure" of a proposition describing those conditions necessary to or suitable for its continuity is appropriate. For example, if a life-threatening heart irregularity develops, one does not want to ignore or to deny the truth of the diagnoses of such and the advice which, if followed, would see a return to a conformity indicative of good health. However, a conscious subject which acquiesces to the ‘lure’ of a proposition in circumstances which bespeak the possibility of creative advance has failed to exercise its power to invoke those possibilities by which, either modestly or radically, a potential for novelty might be realized. By not acquiescing to the ‘lure’ of those propositions descriptive of past patterns only but by imaginatively invoking into existence other possible predicates, the subject makes the transition from ‘conformity’ to overt ‘creativity.’² It is the negation of what ‘is’ and the preference for what ‘is not but might be.’ In this case the subject exercises its power to acknowledge and to transcend rather than to acknowledge and to acquiesce. The power does not rest in the intellectual capacity to acknowledge alone but also in the emotive power -- the intensity of feeling -- to enact in a way not in keeping with the assertions of certain propositions. It is in the mode of creative enactment that the concept of ‘importance emerges most clearly as a generic one.

Even at this level, of course, the judging subject may invoke into ‘importance’ a prevailing array of characteristics. But, appearances to the contrary, if it does, it does so by its own power and not because of their ‘importance,’ for it rests with the objective data. It is in the power of the subject, then, to reaffirm what is, to introduce imagined alternatives, or to do both (PR 261).

What are the modes of this transformation from ‘conformity’ to ‘creative advancement’?

With ‘intellectual feelings,’ consciousness functions at a heightened level of ‘intensive relevance.’ The alternatives to what is present are imaginatively felt and felt in sharp contrast to what is present. If the intensity of the feelings of that which is absent is strong enough, it is invoked into ‘importance at the expense of a previous state (PR 273). In all instances, there must be a gradation of ‘importance’ for the emergence of a ‘subjective form.’

The highest level of experience involves ‘intuitive feelings’ and the ‘intuitive judgment,’ particularly the ‘negative intuitive judgment.’ The subject does not just imagine alternative potentialities, but feels that such alternatives, notwithstanding that they remain alternatives, are prohibited by the present state of affairs. It is a ". . .feeling of what might be, and is not . . . a feeling of absence . . . produced by the definite exclusiveness of what is really present" (PR 273). With it there comes a "suspension of judgment," the recognition that what is imagined cannot co-exist with the objective situation.

Whitehead observes that "… suspended judgments are the weapons essential to scientific progress" (PR 275). In science, progress brings back the opportunity to attend to the truth; compatibility returns and the imagination no longer stands in contrast to what is perceived to be.

But imagination need not be bound to seek the "objectifying pattern" of truth. And, with the ‘intuitive negative judgment’ taking consciousness to its highest level, the opportunity is present for imagination to set aside the question of the truth or falsity of the matter. In the case of a dramatic, creative alteration, there must be both a recognition of incompatibility and an "inattention" to truth. The refusal to be enjoined by the truth permits the admission into ‘importance’ of an "emotional pattern" which, because it is not derived, or derivable, from the world of ‘physical purposes,’ comes entirely from the ‘subjective aim.’ In such cases, it is the sense of purpose alone which dictates the whole process of selection, gradation and concrescence. In principle, the process is the same as it is for all other instances: the subject integrates a set of alternatives into a unity which is the objectification of its own ‘subjective aim,’ of its own ‘interest.’ However, now the intensity of feeling is located totally in the sense of purpose involved. ‘Importance’ is entirely a matter of ‘purpose.’ Other feelings are present in the subject but they are ". . . .intellectually separable from the feeling in question" (PR 275). The domination of the ‘subjective aim’ does not preclude, of course, the possibility of its own modification. Accordingly, there may be a change in the sense of ‘importance’ which directs the operation. The increased intensity of feeling of the ‘subjective aim,’ and accordingly ‘importance,’ does not mean, however, that ‘intellectual feelings’ can operate apart from physical entities manifesting ‘physical purposes’ (PR 273).

The two metaphysical aspects of the notion of ‘importance’ were referred to earlier: first, the unity – ‘subjective form’ -- which results from the gradation of alternatives in terms of their intensity and, secondly, the sense of purpose itself – ‘subjective aim’ -- which determines that gradation. It is now clear that both aspects exhibit the ‘principle of intensive relevance’ (PR 148). It is by this principle of Whitehead’s metaphysics that ‘importance’ becomes predominantly one of purpose, rather than structure. As the intensity of feeling increases, the sense of ‘importance’ shifts from a society’s characteristics to its purpose. At the highest level of intensity the subject’s sense of importance may be dominated by its purpose. In other words, ‘intellectual feelings,’ operating at their highest level, lead to "intellectual freedom."

Now we can turn to consider that other sense of unity which gives meaning to ‘importance,’ namely the "Universe."

Societies are what they are because of their interests. And, while that which lies beyond their range of ‘interest,’ as either an entity or possibility, is irrelevant to their specific ‘interest,’ the ‘principle of intensive relevance’ assures it is not absolutely so. Anything in the universe is available for prehension by a subject and, if prehended, falls somewhere in the range of the gradation of ‘importance for that subject (PR 148). There must be, then, the notion of an all-inclusive unity. It is the unity that Whitehead calls, in Modes of Thought, the "Universe," and upon which the ultimate sense of ‘importance’ is based. This meaning of the term ‘unity’ is the basis for claiming ‘importance’ to be "primarily monistic" (MT 20). However, the ‘ontological principle’ and the ‘principle of relativity’ preclude the unity of "extreme monism" (PR 148). It is not an ultimate substance in the manner, for example, of Bradley’s Absolute.

Yet, it exists. The concept of the "unity of the Universe" takes the notion of a unity emerging through ‘process’ and ‘importance’ to its limit. It exists in the inter-connectedness of its membership. More importantly, it is also an ideal for its members, i.e., it is "objectified" by its members (PR 200).

With the introduction of the "unity of the Universe," another dimension is added to the concept of purpose. More accurately, another dimension comes into focus for the judging subject, and it does so only at the level of "intellectual freedom." Behind specific ‘interests’ and their details lies the more general purpose of ‘unity’ itself. It is the desire to realize in a finite entity the ideal of unity; to express in a specific conditioned social order the ideal of unconditioned unity (MT 102f.) The modes of expression of this sense of ‘importance’ or purpose are the areas of human achievement Whitehead sets out in Modes of Thought: logic, morality, art and religion. In each of these areas the creative act is an attempt to give expression to some specific ‘interest,’ but it is, no less, an attempt to do so in a manner which contains the details of that ‘interest’ in an inclusive, sustaining, unified form. If such expressions attend directly and explicitly to the purpose of unity, the sense of ‘importance’ involved yields merely a bare abstraction. If, however, the purpose of unity itself is not involved, the resulting expressions amount to little more than a mere collection of disconnected and incompatible details. This, Whitehead holds, is the "trivialization," of the sense of ‘importance’ (MT 12).

Of these modes of heightened creative expression, religion most explicitly seeks to realize the ideal of ultimate unity in its claims. Accordingly, more than any of the others, it is capable of heightening the sense of ‘importance’ by giving some concrete form of expression to the ideal of the ultimate unity of creativity (MT 28). It may, and too often does, diminish the idea of purposefulness by proclaiming an array of inexplicable dogmas. In the former case, religion metaphorically gives voice to the metaphysical concept of ‘Importance.’ In the latter case, religion degenerates into tribalism. Though not with the same explicit agenda, logic, art and morality also express the notion of unity.

It is significant that Whitehead includes logic but not science amongst the areas of human expression that most exhibit ‘importance.’ The unity of scientific thought is determined by its obligation to attend to enduring entities governed by ‘physical purpose.’ In logic the concept of unity dominates. "Logical enjoyment passes from the many to the one. . . .the many are understood as permitting that unity of construction" (MT 61; emphasis added).

Of course, none of these areas is able to capture in its modes of expression the ideal of unity. Each affirmation of ‘importance’ must transcend itself for the sake of some other purpose (MT 180.

Clearly, ‘importance’ is a basic concept for Whitehead, for it is based on the central idea of his metaphysics, namely purpose. Furthermore, it takes that idea to its ultimate level in the pursuit of the ideal of unity in concrete modes of expression.

III

I want to conclude with a few observations on the importance of Whitehead’s metaphysical treatment of ‘importance’ itself.

In Modes of Thought Whitehead frequently identifies the attention to details as both an expression of ‘importance’ and the "trivialization" of ‘importance.’ Purpose must end in ‘satisfaction.’ It can do so only through its objectification in details. If details are taken in themselves, they are trivial. If the sense of ‘importance,’ however, does not attend to details, it indulges in merely "noble sentiments" (AI 98). Modernity, in both its Ordinary and intellectual life, has come to identify ‘importance’ with the details, treating ‘importance’ as a property of objects or personal feelings. It is little wonder, then, that what vividly claims our attention at one time, or on one occasion, later slips into insignificance. Of course, such is a necessary part of the universe; indeed, it is a necessary aspect of most of it. The absence, however, of that sense of purpose which, Whitehead held, was ultimately derived from the "unity of the Universe" leads merely to organization and to conformity. A. MacIntyre correctly observes, in After Virtue, that managers and therapists dominate too much of the life of modern society.³

Finally, what is the place of philosophy itself amongst these modes of creative expression? In the opening quotation from Adventure of Ideas, Whitehead uses the word "nerves" to describe the role of ‘importance’ in philosophy. It is a most appropriate term, a term of ‘intensity’ and ‘purpose.’ It is the ". . . sense of importance which nerves all civilized effort."

The theme of this Symposium is, "Is Whitehead’s Metaphysics Important?" Its importance rests in returning an interest in the central issue of purpose to the philosophical enterprise and, no less, the ideal of the unity of the "Universe" as a dimension of purpose.

Notes

1 P. A. Schilpp, "Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy," The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (2nd. ed.) (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951), p. 611.

2 It is "overt," since ‘conformity’ is ultimately no less a mode of ‘creativity.’

3A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (2nd. ed.) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p.30.

Modern philosophy is an experiment in dualism. One of its principle problems has been that of making sense of the whole in a way that does justice to the particular character of its parts. For it seems that whenever we attempt to make sense of the whole in a rational, systematic way, we end up emphasizing the universal at the expense of the particular, the eternal at the expense of the temporal, or the necessary at the expense of the contingent. If on the other hand we attempt to redress the balance by adopting a less systematic, more critical stance, then the very reverse seems to result: we end up emphasizing the particular at the expense of the universal, the temporal at the expense of the eternal, or the contingent at the expense of the necessary. This problem is particularly evident in the attempt to make sense of the relation between mind and nature.

Modern attempts to offer a rational account of the relationship between mind (its rational unity) and nature (understood as the realm of finitude, chance, contingency, and decay) have fallen prey to a seemingly simple yet extremely stubborn dualistic dilemma. On the one hand there is a tendency to overlook the role of nature as a condition of mind, and on the other a tendency to put forth a purely natural account of the world that fails to establish sufficient conditions within nature for the existence of mind. The basic problem is that in attempting to make sense of the relation between mind and nature (as so described) there is a tendency on the one hand to have as our goal the purely logical unity of system, that is, a structural representation of the world whose primary source of appeal is the rule of reason. While such an approach does much to satisfy the internal demands of reason and logic, it also tends to assign too great a role to the place of mind or reason in the general scheme of things. For in the attempt to satisfy the rule of reason (narrowly understood), we end up privileging the purely formal, structural conditions of mind over the particular, purely contingent conditions of nature. What results is a highly exaggerated representation of the place and role of mind in the world, and a consequent devaluation of nature and its place as a condition of mind.

To counter this tendency we may on the other hand attempt to develop a more critical, descriptive, naturalistic account of the relation between mind and nature, thereby avoiding the purely logical demands of system and the self-serving rule of reason. By approaching the problem from this more critical stance it may be hoped that a less subjectivist, more balanced account of the place of mind and nature in the general scheme of things will result. And while it is true that such an approach does offer a more "down to earth" understanding of the relation of mind to nature, here there is a seemingly equal tendency to assign too great a role to the place of nature in the general scheme of things, resulting in the general devaluation of reason or mind. In this case it is the more naturalistic conditions of finitude, contingency, chance, and decay which take center stage in the general scheme of things, with mind being placed in the more subordinate, passive role of the "conditioned." As a result mind (or reason) ends up being placed in a purely contingent relation to some finite set of naturalistic conditions to which it is fatalistically enslaved, thereby reducing the rational search for unity of structure to simple naturalistic needs, desires, or drives. Thus whereas in the first case there is a general failing to give nature, as the realm of finitude, contingency, chance and decay, its due place as a condition of mind as well as a constitutive element in the general scheme of things, in the second case there is an equally important failure to account for the origins of the unity of rational mind in nature. By failing to see the place of mind in nature as well as nature in mind, modern philosophy has been unable to put forth an adequate account of the relation between the two, one which would assign to each its due importance as a constitutive element in our experience and in existence as such.

My concern in this paper is not so much why this dualistic problem exists (though I do think an answer can be provided), but to illustrate the nature of the problem as I see it and to point to a possible way out of it. To illustrate this problem I will turn to the works of Hegel and Nietzsche, using each to represent the two sides of the problem as outlined. To help point the way out of the problem I will turn to the writings of Whitehead (particularly his later works), drawing from his work certain conclusions which, while not explicitly stated by him may nevertheless be said to follow from his overall philosophical scheme.

Hegel and the Idealist Philosophy of Nature

The tendency to assign too great a role to reason or mind in the general scheme of things is well exemplified in the works of Hegel. Hegel’s idealism begins with reason and ends with reason. And while it is true that his philosophy of nature does much to recognize the value of nature as a temporal realm of contingent particularity, it fails to acknowledge the evolution of mind from nature, and so fails to properly incorporate the characteristics of nature in a general metaphysic. The picture which results is a rationally one-sided account of the world which fails to give nature its due. Thus, while the philosophical scheme which results satisfies the rational demand for a coherent system, it fails to meet the demands of comprehensiveness and empirical adequacy necessary to all philosophy (PR 3f.).

Hegel defines the philosophy of nature as "the cognition of nature by means of thought" (PN 193). In other words, if nature is to be understood philosophically then it must be grasped in its concept, namely, that which is essential or universal in nature for thought. Thus, for Hegel, to develop a philosophy of nature means "to grasp and comprehend nature . . . , to make it ours, so that it is not something beyond and alien to us" (PN 197). However, while we must grasp nature in its concept, we must do so in a way which recognizes the particularity of nature and preserves the genuine character of the natural world as it really is (with all its finitude, contingency, chance, and decay). Thus if we are to truly understand nature philosophically then we must leave nature as it is. In other words we must learn to comprehend it as the independent realm of finite particularity, that is, as the "other" or object of thought. We must be cautious of trying to explain nature by explaining it away, that is, by transforming it into that which it is not (as we do when we represent nature as something universal, or when we make it a condition of subjectivity). To truly understand nature we must comprehend it as it is. This means grasping nature in a way that makes it ours while at the same time leaves it as it is, that is, leaves it as the realm of finite particularity. Given this then, says Hegel, how is it possible to grasp and comprehend nature, to draw it into our understanding so that it no longer appears as alien to us while at the same time leaving it as it is?

The answer, says Hegel, is to recognize nature as the other of spirit through which spirit (or mind) returns to itself. We can grasp nature, says Hegel, and make it ours, while at the same time leaving it as it is by viewing nature as a means through which spirit may restore its identity with itself. Thus it is by way of the otherness of nature that spirit is able to return to itself in reason, thereby bringing into unity the essential otherness which characterizes the relationship between mind and nature. In framing the relationship between nature and mind in this way we can, claims Hegel, arrive at an understanding of the place of nature in the general scheme of things, which at the same time leaves nature as it is.

By characterizing nature as the other of spirit Hegel does manage to assign nature a significant role in the general scheme of things, one which manages to leave nature and all its particularity fully intact. Nevertheless, in the very process of maintaining the separation of nature from mind in this way Hegel actually ends up placing nature in a subordinate relation to mind. For by defining nature as the otherness of spirit, that is, as that which is totally alien to mind, Hegel fails to recognize the place of nature in mind. Quite simply, he fails to take full account of the origins of mind in nature, and thus is unable to recognize the significant role which those naturalistic qualities such as finitude, contingency, chance, and decay play in mind.

For Hegel, mind is conditioned by nature only insofar as it stands as the particular means whereby mind can achieve the truth. Nature does not stand as constitutive of mind in any genuine sense of the term, except as something to be overcome. Thus while it may be true that Hegel does leave nature alone in some real sense, he does this by relegating nature to the status of mere appearance, whose real value is as a means rather than an end. Nature is relegated to secondary importance in the overall scheme of things. It becomes nothing more than the means for "the liberation of what belongs to spirit within nature, for spirit is in nature insofar as it relates itself not to another, but to itself " (PN 204). In other words, nature’s value lies not in and of itself, but only as the means for spirit coming to know itself.

Hegel does try to salvage the intrinsic value of nature by claiming that in the process of providing for the liberation of spirit, nature itself is thereby liberated, for nature "in itself is reason" (PN 204). However, to identify reason and nature in this way is to value nature only as concept, that is, as spirit (or mind). It fails to assign any genuine value to the open-ended, contingent, particular character of the natural world, and instead views these characteristics as defects or limitations inherent within nature which prevent it from realizing its concept. For as Hegel himself clearly states, nature is "implicitly divine in that it is in the Idea; but in reality its being does not correspond to its Notion, and is rather the unresolved contradiction. Its distinctive characteristic is its positedness, its negativity" (PN 209). In Hegel’s eyes nature is something incomplete, a blemish necessary for the unity of the whole. Its primary value is as a means rather than an end in itself. The relation between nature and mind which results is totally one-sided, leaving the unified, rational character of mind (as totally devoid of nature) as the defining characteristics of existence as such.

Nietzsche and the Naturalistic Backlash

Whereas Hegel may be said to exemplify the tendency to assign too great a role to mind in the general scheme of things, it is Nietzsche who perhaps best represents the opposite or contrary tendency, namely that of assigning too great a place to nature over mind. Nietzsche’s radical critique of reason is in the main a critique of speculative philosophy, and it begins by bringing into question the very goals toward which reason is employed. Now for Hegel, as for most of the philosophers of the tradition, the end of philosophical speculation is the attainment of truth (usually taken in some absolutist sense), and we reach such truth through the proper employment of reason. With this in mind Nietzsche thus begins his radical critique of reason by asking one simple question: what is truth?

In the attempt to understand truth Nietzsche begins an inquiry into its possible origins by examining the role which truth may have played in our natural history. In so doing Nietzsche ends up reversing the priority of mind over nature (which we saw in Hegel) to that of nature over mind. Thus instead of trying to construct a philosophical system which accords with the rule of reason, as Hegel had done, Nietzsche begins by turning reason against itself, uncovering in the process its "irrational" origins in nature ("On the Genealogy & Morals," BWN; Sections 2 and 16; WP, Sections 480 and 481). His naturalistic approach removes the veil of completeness and order which reason brings to the world and reveals instead a world which is essentially incomplete -- an open-ended, chaotic world of pure contingency. Reason, rather than acting as the vehicle for truth has now become the means to untruth, for the rational structures which philosophy has long hoped to discover are now reduced to nothing more than products of our natural history. "Behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demands for the preservation of a certain type of life" ("Beyond Good and Evil," BWN, Section 201). If the world seems logical to us, says Nietzsche, it is "because we have made it logical," not because it is logical in and of itself. The real world is in fact irrational, and the irrational is the real.

Reason, for Nietzsche, is better seen as a principle of distortion and misrepresentation whose value is tied to survival-oriented needs rather than a vehicle for the attainment of truth. For him, it is not the systematic world of the speculative philosopher that is of greatest value, but the natural, chaotic process which lies hidden behind the falsifying face of reason, a process whose true nature can only be known on a purely aesthetic level through experience in its immediacy ("Beyond Good and Evil," BWN Section 213; "Will to Power," Section 794). For it is only experience in this more immediate, artistic sense which is untainted by the distorting lens of reason. This means that the philosopher’s penchant for systematicity (which is characteristic of the rule of reason) must be understood, not as a means for advancing our understanding of the world as a whole, but rather as a self-generated illusion of mind as conditioned by the natural world.

While it is true that Nietzsche’s work does much to restore the place of nature in the general scheme of things, it must also be said that by placing mind in a subordinate relation to a purely irrational natural world he ends up devaluing the rational character of mind in a way that is equally questionable as the idealism he was reacting against. For his purely naturalistic approach ultimately winds up giving priority to the open-ended, contingent, particular conditions of nature at the expense of the rule of reason. The rational character of mind (and of the world) are thereby reduced to nothing more than purely contingent power relations (which manifest themselves in survival oriented needs). As a result the philosophical search for truth becomes nothing more than a chimera, a falsification of the world as it really is.

The main problem with Nietzsche’s claim is that it fails to recognize the place of mind in nature as well as nature in mind. By reducing the natural world and all that is in it to a play of chaotic, irrational power relations, Nietzsche is unable to provide an adequate account of the unified, rational character of mind as conditioned by nature (and of unity in general). In other words he fails to recognize that in order for mind to have originated in nature as he claims, then nature must itself be structured in a way that is sufficient for producing a unified, rational mind. This is not to say that nature must be rational in the stronger sense which Hegel claims, for this is once again to ignore the place of finitude, contingency, chance, and decay as conditions of mind and constitutive elements of existence as a whole. It is simply to say that the relation between mind and nature is a two-way street. By adopting a purely reactionary stance against the idealism of Hegel (and the philosophical tradition in general) Nietzsche ends up providing us with a vision of nature and the world which is overly narrow in scope.

Whitehead and the Immanent Unity of Mind and Nature

For Whitehead, one of the major problems that has "poisoned" much if not all of modem philosophy subsequent to Descartes is this dualistic way in which it treats of the relation between mind and nature (or nature and life as he sometimes phrases it). Modern philosophy has separated mind from nature in such a radical and fundamental sense that philosophy subsequent to and including the modern era has been unable to make sense of the relation between the two. Attempts to restore this division have resulted in a one-sided representation of their relation. "Even when the coordinate existence of the two types of actualities is abandoned, there is no proper fusion of the two in modern schools of thought. For some, nature is mere appearance and mind is the sole reality. For others, physical nature is the sole reality and mind is an epiphenomenon" (MT 150). Such a dualist approach ultimately reduces nature to nothing more than some blind, lifeless mechanism with mind remaining alienated and incomplete.

Given this, then, one of the foremost tasks of philosophy is to restore the unity of mind and nature in a way which makes equal sense of both. To do this, says Whitehead, we must begin to recognize the reciprocal relation which exists between the two; "we require that the deficiencies in our concept of physical nature should be supplied by its fusion with life. And we require that, on the other hand, that the notion of life should involve the notion of physical nature" (MT 150). Phrased in terms of our present discussion this means that our understanding of mind must include its existence as conditioned by nature, that is, as conditioned by the elements of finitude, contingency, chance, and decay. It also means that our understanding of nature should be sufficient to account for mind, that is, that nature must itself contain conditions which are capable of giving rise to the rational unity which is characteristic of mental functioning.

Like Nietzsche, then, Whitehead believes that mind (or reason) has its origins in the natural world. It arose out of nature and is still evolving within nature. But unlike Nietzsche, Whitehead also believes that mind is also present in nature as forming part of its essential character. Because he sees mind in nature as well as nature in mind, Whitehead is able to avoid the slide into the irrational, chaotic world of indiscriminate power relations which we find in Nietzsche. Whitehead adopts a more orderly, systematic view of nature, one whose structures are capable of giving rise to a unified, rational mind, while at the same time preserving the open-ended, fluid character of the natural world which is so prominent in our experience and which Nietzsche so rightly embraced.

To see how Whitehead brings mind and nature together we must return once again to the works of Hegel and Nietzsche. We may say, for simplicity’s sake, that the primary difference which exists between Hegel and Nietzsche is one which arises out of a fundamental disagreement in their understanding of the essential unity which may be said to underlie all things. For Hegel this unity is a structurally complete totality which is accessible to mind. Because this unity is a totality which is structurally complete then it is incapable of being adequately represented in the contingent, finite, temporally incomplete realm of nature. It can, however, be known by mind. In fact the entire character of this structure is such as to allow a complete and explicit representation in rational thought. Since mind is capable of offering a complete and explicit representation of this under-lying structural unity, and nature is not, then mind could not be said to have originated from within nature. Mind, while dependent upon nature as the means whereby it may arrive at the truth, is nevertheless separate from nature in some fundamental sense. Not only is it separate from nature, but it is also a higher form of existence insofar as it corresponds to its concept, that is, it is able to realize its essence, something nature is in principle incapable of doing.

Hence the reason why Hegel gives priority to mind over nature. For nature in its finitude is unable to rise above its own contradictions, something which mind, as spirit, is able to do through the otherness of nature. The only place left for nature in the general scheme of things as Hegel defines it is to stand as the means whereby spirit or mind can grasp this totality by returning to itself through nature in reason.

For Nietzsche, on the other hand, the essential unity which may be said to underlie all things is not a complete totality which we can grasp through reason (as it is with Hegel), but an open-ended, incomplete process or chaotic flux which finds expression in the contingent, finite, temporal process of growth and decay which are characteristic of nature. In other words, for Nietzsche. the unity of the whole is nothing more than the unity of nature itself, a unity which has no hidden structures or Archimedean grounds. Nature is open to us, not through the systematic, orderly reflections of reason, but through experience in its immediacy, that is, aesthetically. Given this, mind or reason becomes nothing more than an aberrant expression of the chaotic forces which lie at the heart of existence as such. If we want to see and understand those forces as they truly are, then we must look not to reason (which acts as a distorting lens), but to our more immediate, primordial ways of knowing, that is, aesthetic intuition (the divine inspiration of the artist) and action.

Hence we can see why Nietzsche places intuition, or better yet, aesthetics, at the forefront of philosophical importance. For as Nietzsche sees it the world as we interpret it is really nothing more than a work of art which we have created through the will to power (which is Nietzsche’s way of characterizing the chaotic nature of the unity which underlies all things). And as with any work of art, it is to aesthetics that we must appeal if we wish to get into the heart of the work, not to reason. Reason, after all, is nothing more than an irrational expression of the will to power. Thus we can see that for Nietzsche any attempt to develop a systematic representation of the world which claims to be in any way complete or true is at best an illusion and at worst a lie. For him, the only sort of ideal that is open to us as a means of discrimination and evaluation is the ‘satisfaction’ of aesthetic self-creation. This leaves reason with little to do philosophically but consume itself in its own contradictions.

Like Nietzsche, Whitehead sees the unity which underlies all things as a unity of process, that is, as a temporally continuous whole which is self-unfolding, open-ended, and essentially incomplete. Unlike Nietzsche, however, White-head’s unity of process is perhaps best characterized as holistic in nature, meaning thereby that every part is present in the whole and the whole in every part (present in the sense of the essential interconnectedness of all things). Such a holistic view is justified, claims Whitehead, first because this sharp division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation. We find ourselves living within nature. Secondly, I conclude that we should conceive mental operations as among the factors

Rather than begin by separating nature and mind in the modern dualistic sense, Whitehead believes that mind and nature are better understood by seeing them as participants in a more immanent relation, one which places us "in the world and the world in us."

Two important consequences follow from this.

First of all, since every part is present in the whole, then mind or reason must also be present in the world, present in the sense that nature is structured in a way analogous to that of rational mind, a way that mind or reason can apprehend. This implies that the philosopher’s penchant for systematicity and an orderly representation of the world is not something peculiar to mind (an aberrant manifestation of some irrational power struggle as Nietzsche would have it). Instead, reason must be present in the world in the sense that nature, like mind, aims at a systematic and orderly representation of realized fact. One such representation is the fact that nature endures. It does so by way of the systematic and orderly processes of causal connection and creative advance, processes analogous to those present in mind. Given Whitehead’s general principle of reciprocity (of the interconnectedness of all things) we are more than justified in concluding that nature possesses structures analogous to those which we find present in mind (though the exact nature of those structures must remain open to particular investigation, that is, they must be discovered through specialized modes of inquiry such as those of the special sciences). This means that, contrary to Nietzsche’s claims, genuine knowledge through reason is possible.

This conclusion is further advanced by our second point. For in Whitehead’s holistic approach to the relation between mind and nature, not only is every part present in the whole, but the whole is also present in every part. This means that not only is structure present in the world in a sense analogous to that of mind, but those structures must be accessible to reason, that is, they are present or open to mind or reason in the realized fact of nature’s web of interconnections (to borrow from Quine). Thus like Hegel, Whitehead sees reason or mind as having the ability to come to know the world as it is. Unlike Hegel, however, for Whitehead reason or mind can never grasp and explicitly represent the world in its totality. This is because as the unity of process, the whole which is the world, is essentially incomplete. Reason, which as realized fact is a finite expression of the unity of process, could never adequately represent the totality of possible interconnections or perspectives which constitute that whole. The scope of reason’s grasp will always be limited by its particular historical locatedness as realized fact, and the finite character of its particular representations must always fall short of the essentially incomplete character of the whole. We may hold fast to our claim that reason can know the world then, but we must acknowledge the limited and perspectival nature of that knowledge, conditioned as it is by our particular place in the world.

Unlike Hegel and Nietzsche then (and the general traditions which each may be seen to represent) Whitehead’s general account of the relationship between mind and nature not only acknowledges the role of nature as a condition of mind (as the general theory of evolution demands), but it also recognizes the place of mind (or reason) in nature. For not only does it assign genuine value to nature by incorporating the characteristics of contingency, open-endedness, growth and decay in a general metaphysic, but it also assigns an important place to reason as a means for making explicit our understanding of the general structures which may be said to underlie the world as a whole. In so proceeding Whitehead can be seen as assimilating the rationalistic insights of the likes of Hegel with the naturalistic intuitions of Nietzsche. By grounding all experience in a unity of process that is structured in a way analogous to that of mind, Whitehead is able to offer an account of the world that conforms to the general character of the actual or realized world (i.e., one that is true) but which at the same time is essentially incomplete and thus subject to an ongoing process of philosophical (and other) inquiry. His reciprocal analysis retains the importance of a rational expression of the real (as the primary means whereby we express an explicit understanding of the world as such, both to ourselves and to others) while at the same time recognizing the aesthetic dimension that is present in any level of understanding (as grounded in the immediacy of experience). Thus we may conclude that the holistic approach to the relation between mind and nature which Whitehead outlines is one which is capable of satisfying the demands of reason while at the same time giving nature its due. For such an approach demands that one’s philosophical scheme be both systematic and coherent, empirically adequate and aesthetically satisfying; it must be beautiful as well as true. By approaching the question of mind and nature in this way Whitehead is able to provide us with an aesthetically rich understanding of nature, which at the same time preserves a necessary role for reason and the search for truth as an indispensable element in the determination of conscious experience, the enhancement of our aesthetic sensibilities, and the general advancement of civilization as such. By adopting such an approach as a starting point for further investigations in this and other areas, we may hope to move toward a richer understanding of the relation between mind and nature as well as existence as such, an understanding which aims at the immanent unity of our ideas while at the same time retaining the importance of difference.

References

PN -- G. W. F. Hegel. The Philosophy of Nature. Ed. and trans. M. J. Petry. New York: Humanities Press. 1970.

BWN -- F. Nietzsche. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. W. Kaufman. New York: Random House, 1968.

Near the beginning of Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Whitehead introduces the problem of perception in terms which would have seemed very natural in the era of Bertrand Russell and C. D. Broad and H. H. Price.

The traditional problem is to explain the possibility and justification of this move, bearing in mind the errors and illusions which sometimes lead us astray.¹

Many contemporary philosophers would refuse to read further, once they come upon the claim that what we see are mere colored shapes. When they look at a chair, these philosophers do not see mere colored shapes, but the chair itself. Whitehead, however, is trying to capture that phase of visual experience which intervenes between the stimulation of the senses and perception-based reports about the environment. It is that experience which is identical when we see a collection of objects reflected in a mirror and a corresponding collection through an open window frame.

I am not suggesting that it makes no difference how you describe visual experience, so long as other people understand the mental state denoted. On the contrary, a proper description is vitally important for theoretical purposes, since an inappropriate conceptualization may frustrate any explanation of the transition from the perceptual experience to justified claims about the external world. This is why those who have recently revived the notion of visual experience, such as John Searle and Christopher Peacocke, have broken away from the traditional story about the awareness of visual sense-data, in favor of the view that perceptual experience has propositional content (Searle) or representational content (Peacocke).²

Describing visual experience as the seeing of sense-data suggests that beliefs about the external world must be reached by a process of inference. Whitehead soon reveals, however, that he is not in the grip of the inference model which his choice of words might suggest. He considers it implausible to assume that a high-grade mental operation like inference is "required to get from the colored shape to the chair" (S 3). The transition is so natural that it is not beyond the capacities of puppy dogs. The perception of the colored shape must be transcended not only to make speeches about the world, but also to interact intelligently with the world in the light of our purposes. The puppy has transcended his perception of colored shapes when he jumps upon the chair before his eyes.

The real question, however, is not whether we make the move from the awareness of sense-data to our knowledge of the external world by a process of inference, but how such a move is possible at all, whatever name we may give to the process. The key to the solution, I think, is the recognition that the awareness of sense-data, although a genuine and conspicuous element in experience, does not exhaust the whole of our experience. The contemplation of colored shapes is not an autonomous function of the human being, but occurs within the context of a rich mental life. The focus on sense-data developed through the Cartesian program of finding a basis in clear and distinct ideas from which to demonstrate the existence of the physical world, thereby providing a conclusive answer to radical skepticism. The irony is that the use of so narrow a basis, proving unsuccessful, feeds the very skepticism it was supposed to contain. If our objective is not to demonstrate the external world, but to explain the grounds for our actual belief, it is legitimate to appeal to factors beyond the sense-data clearly and distinctly perceived.

This is precisely the strategy which Whitehead adopts. The familiar immediate presentation of the contemporary world, which philosophers of the day described as the awareness of sense-data, is called by Whitehead "Experience in the Mode of Presentational Immediacy." But there is more to experience than presentational immediacy.

Presentational immediacy is possible, according to Whitehead, "by means of our projections of our immediate sensations, determining for us characteristics of contemporary physical entities" (S 13-14). This is "a world decorated by sense-data dependent on the immediate states of relevant parts of our own bodies" (S 14), Although Whitehead has talked about the "projection of our immediate sensations," he soon explains that this is misleading. "There are no bare sensations which are first experienced and then ‘projected’.. onto the opposite wall as its color. The projection is an integral part of the situation" (S 14). Nor, in describing the situation, is it entirely appropriate to refer to the wall, since the term "wall," in its usual meaning, introduces information not disclosed in pure presentational immediacy. "This so-called ‘wall’. . . contributes itself to our experience only under the guise of spatial extension, combined with spatial perspective, and combined with sense-data" (S 15).

The important point to notice is that the mode of presentational immediacy is not the mere enjoyment of sensations, but has a cognitive structure. It is not at all like Hume’s bundle of impressions, but has much more in common with Kant’s faculty of outer sense. Both presentational immediacy and outer intuition are cognitions, involving a relation to objects displayed in space. Kant explains the possibility of this cognitive State by an appeal to a pure intuition which provides the required objective domain. Corresponding to Kant’s pure intuition of space, Whitehead presupposes the perception of the contemporary world as extensive continuum. How such a feat is possible is a very good question, since Whitehead rejects the Kantian tactic of grounding pure intuitions in forms of sensibility, together with the idealism which this entails. But whatever explanation is given, some such immediate representation of a contemporary domain of space must be assumed, if we are to justify anything like our customary perceptual beliefs. Even the standard inferential theory must have a place to put the inferred causes of our sense-data.

One obvious puzzle about presentational immediacy has to do with the ambiguous status of the sense-data. On the one hand, the colors we experience appear to decorate external physical objects: but on the other hand, these colors are "dependent on the immediate states of relevant parts of our own bodies" (S 14). Whitehead suggests that these colors "can with equal truth be described as our sensations or as the qualities of the actual things which we perceive" (S 21-22). This permissive stance will satisfy both the learned and the vulgar, to use Hume’s terms. It satisfies the vulgar, because it agrees with common sense that the colors we experience are properties of external things. It satisfies the learned, because it agrees that the sensations experienced are the outcome of a process involving and conditioned by the sense organs and other physiological factors. But how can Whitehead satisfy both parties at the same time without inconsistency?

Whitehead’s central disagreement with Kant, and with Hume, and with the whole tradition to which they belong, is that whatever account is given of presentational immediacy, it does not tell the whole story about experience through the senses. When we reflect on experience, the consciousness of the vision-dominated display is so prominent that there is a temptation to suppose that this is it. The crucial move in Whitehead’s theory of perception is to confront this temptation and challenge the exclusive claim of presentational immediacy to provide the sole basis for perceptual knowledge.

This brings us to the second fundamental mode of experience: the Mode of Causal Efficacy. This is the more primitive form of experience and dominates primitive living organisms. The introduction of this mode is an inevitable corollary of Whitehead’s fundamental metaphysical position. For Whitehead, each actual entity emerges through a process of conformation to the settled data of its immediate past. This process is that conditioning of the present by the past which we call causal efficacy. Whitehead’s revolutionary thesis is that causal connection takes place, not in virtue of the activity of the cause, but through the activity of the effect. It cannot be the cause that is active, because at the crucial point in time, the activity of the cause is over and done with. What is active is not the past, but the present actuality which is in process of becoming.

If causal connection depends on the activity of the present, it is a short step to the position that causal connection is constituted through an act of experience of the past by the present. This is perception in the mode of causal efficacy. It is not just that, against Hume, we have an experience of causal connection: we have a form of experience which is causal connection.

As a component in our total experience, this primitive perception of the settled past may indeed enter into consciousness, and Whitehead believes that it does. But the sense of the conformation of the present to the immediate past, however insistent, lacks the clarity and definition of presentational immediacy. It is "heavy with the contact of things gone by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves" (S 44), but the world it presents is vague and undifferentiated.

The two pure perceptive modes have opposite strengths and weaknesses. Causal efficacy is vague and unmanageable, whereas presentational immediacy provides us with a barren display. Our cognitive development thus requires that integration of the two basic modes which Whitehead calls "symbolic reference." Symbolic reference has its vital importance, because "what we want to know about...chiefly resides in those aspects of the world disclosed in causal efficacy: . . .what we can distinctly register is chiefly to be found among the percepta in the mode of presentational immediacy" (PR 169). Thus, the region of outer space decorated with grey sense-data in presentational immediacy becomes through symbolic reference the wall to which we refer in ordinary discourse, with its solid presence and causal powers.

This symbolic reference requires, for Whitehead, a common ground connecting the two pure modes of experience. This common ground has two components, one of which is "a spatio-temporal system common to both" (S 53). This system "is directly and distinctly perceived in presentational immediacy, and is indistinctly and indirectly perceived in causal efficacy" (PR 169).

The second component is constituted by the sensa, which have a function in both modes. It is this dual function which explains the puzzling ambiguity described earlier. The same visual sensum, for instance, may illustrate an object in a distant region of space, while being given to the subject through its ingredience in the bodily organs of sense. Thus, a gray sensum, although given as characterizing an object in the visual field of presentational immediacy, is not given by that object. It could not be given by that object. Since object and subject are contemporary, they cannot sustain between them a relation of giving and receiving. The grey sensum is given through the appropriate physiological processes in the body, in virtue of the stimulation of the eyes. Through projection, it comes to decorate the contemporary world. Finally, through symbolic reference, it is referred to more remote causes responsible for the physiological processes.

It is only through symbolic reference that perceptual error is introduced. The two pure modes of perception consist in a direct recognition which cannot be mistaken. Even in a so-called visual illusion, where, for instance, the space behind the mirror is illustrated in presentational immediacy, there is no mistake. Error comes in through the interplay of the modes in symbolic reference. Notice that such mistakes are not intellectual in character, since this type of symbolic reference does not involve the operation of thought.

Whitehead explains that the common ground which connects the two pure modes of perceptive experience is no accident. "Presentational Immediacy," he writes, "is an outgrowth from the complex datum implanted by causal efficacy" (PR 173). This suggests to me an emendation of Whitehead’s theory. Although there may be primitive actualities whose experience is completely in the mode of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, when it occurs, always occurs, perhaps, embedded in a context of causal efficacy. This means that no special act of symbolic reference is required to relate the content of presentational immediacy to the datum in causal efficacy. The reference to this datum is built into the very construction of the immediate presentation. The very function of the phase of presentational immediacy is to provide a representation or mapping of the datum, which is dimly discerned at the level of causal efficacy. Thus, the notion of a pure mode of presentational immediacy is an abstraction, reached by deleting the symbolic reference to reality necessarily involved in presentational immediacy as it develops in ordinary experience.

I have a feeling that Whitehead would not be entirely unsympathetic to what I have been saying. He certainly concedes: "When human experience is in question ‘perception’ almost always means perception in the mixed mode of symbolic reference"’ (PR 168). There are, I think, two reasons why Whitehead has presented his account of perception with a different emphasis. One reason is that the picture of sense-datum awareness as an independent and isolated experience dominated thinking about perception at the time. The other, deeper reason is the attempt to bring perception under the general theory of symbolism. This may have distorted his account of the perceptual situation.

As elsewhere in this paper, I am no more than scratching the surface of a complex and difficult subject. My hope is that this scratching may have turned up something of interest.

Notes

1Whitehead concentrates on the sense of sight, which provides the most detailed information about distant objects, but would wish to extend his account, with suitable modifications, to other senses.

2Cf John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapter II, and Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), Chapter I.