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Twenty years ago this year, Ivor Leclerc published The Nature of Physical Existence (NPE). This was not to be one further elucidation of Whitehead’s "philosophy of organism," but Leclerc’s own detailed recounting of how we must recover a few basic presuppositions if we are ever to elucidate a philosophy of nature worthy of our post-Whiteheadian era -- an era unhappily determined to grapple with the complexities of contemporary science by leaving Whitehead aside.

Following upon his reconstruction of the concepts of infinity, matter and motion Leclerc argued that at the intersection of such basic insights into physical existence, lurks confusion about the status of compound substances. Charles Hartshorne had long since characterized Whitehead’s achievement as recognizing the need for "compound individuals,"’ but Leclerc’s account spelled out the need for re-thinking our conception of "compound substance" -- those physical existents which both arise out of and comprise constituent substances. When and only when constituents act upon each other in a manner which is fully reciprocal, can the relation which arises between/among them emerge as the substantial character of the compound, now a physical existent in its own right. The actuality of the constituents is submerged in this emergent compound, but in a manner which preserves their reality, at least as potential.

I want to spell out, in this paper, what is at stake in these attempts to articulate a philosophic appraisal of complex physical objects. I will highlight this against the backdrop of Whiteheadian thought within which it has been debated by philosophers, and compare this with the philosophic reflections of three theoretical chemists. It’s not so difficult to find physicists and biologists of such a mind, but I think it particularly appropriate for this issue to recount the musings of practicing chemists.

The very phrase, a "philosophy of organism," used by Whitehead so often to capture the tenor of his approach, remains a challenge to attend to the interconnectedness and interdependence which deserves to be appreciated as contributing substantively to any organic whole. The subsequent success of the life sciences in plumbing both the complexities of any organism’s molecular constituency as well as the ecological complexities of each organism’s interdependence within its larger environment, has lent credence to Whitehead’s insight, and these scientific developments have spawned an appreciation in recent years of the philosophical, even metaphysical, implications of our comprehending such complex interrelations.

But Whitehead also warned that, "the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism" [PR 35]. The revolutionary developments already erupting in his own day still confront us with the relativistic and quantum mechanical portrayals of whatever "atoms" are deemed ultimate, and even more so than in the life sciences this development within the physical sciences spawned a continuing spiral of philosophic debate as to their proper interpretation. The classical image of atoms may have been left well behind, but the fascination of ultimate constituents and some systematic portrayal which could account for their unfolding into our known universe is still very much with us.

Whitehead’s own generalization was that whatever we take these constituents to be they must be temporally ordered. His detailed account of this process of actual occasion concresing upon its prehensions of past such actual occasions has provided much fascination, speculation, and frustration. Clearly, for any understanding of compound substances such as Leclerc has proposed, there is a good dose of the latter. Whitehead’s portrayal seems to disallow the reciprocity of action Leclerc seeks. While Whitehead speaks of "mutual immanence," [AI 201] any hope of mutual interaction is dashed on the impossibility of any "acting upon" (see NPE 311-12) one another within the contemporary present. The present is wholly internal. Present "actual occasions" always attend to their immediate past, and anticipate to varying degrees their future, but they never interact with contemporaries. They are literally out of reach.

Any "nexus" of relation, among contemporaries, can only be constructed out of the interrelations apparent among past occasions. It may be projected onto the future, but for contemporaries any such interrelation must be derivative of what they participate in unknowingly. Our nexus of relations will only ever be apparent when we are past. For Whitehead this is the same as saying it will only ever be apparent from the outside.

However these details may be interpreted, the broader context in which Whitehead worked them out for himself must have been one of considerable tension. The tension I have in mind is generated by (i) this process of temporally ordered actual occasions articulating his vision of the metaphysical ultimatum -- atomism -- and (ii) the complex product of this process which he so obviously cherished as an organic interconnectedness -- the web of interrelations which comprise a world so badly misunderstood by the science Whitehead himself prehended from out of his immediate past.

Despite the divergence of these two metaphysical insights, Whitehead may nevertheless be right. And if we cannot avoid the tension between the lure of constituents which are truly atomic on the one hand and the lure of wholes which are truly organic on the other, it may provide what Thomas Kuhn has called an "essential tension"² -- a tension without which, at least in the realm with which Kuhn is concerned, science cannot operate. Perhaps the same is true for the type of philosophic reflection for which Whitehead has served as such an inspiration.

But Whitehead’s detailed articulation still seems to vie against Ivor Leclerc. Leclerc picks up on how substantive can be (must be) the relations between physical existents, and furthers this by insisting that any such relations are substantive only insofar as they arise out of actions -- the acting of entities upon one another reciprocally. While this proposal may have been inspired by Whitehead, it leads to a philosophy of nature beyond and different from that Whitehead bequeathed us.

And Whiteheadians were quick to notice. Lewis Ford applauded Leclerc’s drawing attention to this thorny issue, but has struggled to preserve the detail of Whitehead’s portrayal, particularly in the face of what he himself styles the "exegetical debate" over the stature of molecular and electronic "occasions."³ Whereas John Cobb recalled Whitehead’s identification of molecules as "historic routes of actual occasions," Donald Sherburne prefers the designation as "structured societies" -- which leaves open the question of whether both a molecule and its constituent can be "enduring objects" (like a personal society).⁴ Enthused by Leclerc’s reliance upon the Aristotelian distinction between actual and potential, Ford offered an option which might preserve the choice, in Whiteheadian terms. But in any terms, it remains a tug-of-war between the desire to preserve the actuality of the constituents and to acknowledge the actuality of the complex whole they comprise. Ford’s suggestion that we simply reapply the full Whiteheadian analysis at the level of the molecule (a molecule is simply an "actual occasion" of larger scope), brings all the sophistication of Whitehead’s treatment to bear on these opposing requirements, but at the cost of locating its full significance at the molecular level. Once resolved at the molecular level (if indeed it is resolved), the same issue, metaphysically, reemerges at the next level where molecules constitute larger more complex wholes. Not even Ford, I trust, wants to reapply the "actual occasion" analysis at every level.

Part of what Whitehead did appreciate, as he stated in Adventures of Ideas, is that: "The universe achieves its values by reason of its coordination into societies of societies, and into societies of societies of societies" [AI 206]. I shall return to how he suggests we understand value arising from what is being called, in his peculiar way a "society," but the point from Adventures of Ideas is clear enough: however we learn to appreciate the status of a complex whole comprised of constituents, it must be construed in a manner which permits that complex whole to serve in turn as constituent within a larger and more complex level of organic whole. And I do not see how this can be resolved "temporally" into a sequence of roles, first constituent and then whole. The universe achieves its values by each complex also serving as a constituent, at the same time, and each constituent is also complex, with its own constituents, and so on down the line.

What this paper has to offer is not likely to resolve the "exegetical debate" amongst such alternate readings of Whitehead. But the participants in this debate do draw our attention to the level at which the compounding of substances is confronted the most directly. This is to say, not just up into the complexities of organisms where, in Whitehead’s terms, we seek life lurking in the interstices [PR 105-6], nor down into the magical realm of quarks with charm, but focused on chemistry.

It also serves as a warning to us that the tension between organism and atomism, between our appreciation of the physical existence of constituents and of complex bodies, is not likely to be resolved simply by attending more closely to the details in Process and Reality, chapter and verse. Given the tension and consequent ambiguity built into the fabric of Whitehead’s portrayal, it only extenuates the competing claims between organ/cells, cell/molecules, molecule/nuclei/electrons, and also crystal/atoms, metal/electrons, quarks/universe. At that point in Science and the Modern World where Whitehead observes: "The relation of part to whole has the special reciprocity associated with the notion of organism, in which the part is for the whole"; he confirms: "but this relation reigns throughout nature and does not start with the special case of the higher organisms" [SMW 149].

There is a close parallel, here, to the observation made some years ago by Sir Karl Popper concerning the "reduction" of one scientific field or one scientific theory to another. The issue of reduction has been debated extensively over the last two or three decades, and Popper’s observation was that if there are legitimate impediments to reduction, they are unlikely to forestall exclusively the explanations of mental experience, or only appear at the level of living evolving organisms.⁵ Whatever the dependency of a higher field or theory upon the theory from a more basic level (or the limitations upon any such dependency) it should obtain up and down all the levels of complexity we encounter. In other words, these philosophic reflections will be just as pertinent to the assumptions underlying chemical and physical explanations as to biological and psychological ones. I have been concerned to show, elsewhere,⁶ that the same set of epistemological limitations encountered at the transition to the life sciences and cognitive psychology are evident at the level of chemical theory and its dependence upon the quantum theory relevant to nucleic and electronic constituents. I am convinced that these epistemological issues remain obscured by a metaphysical haze. There is surprisingly little clarity about the conflicting implications of how we conceive the status of such whole/part relations. But theoretical chemists themselves have come forward with some intriguing proposals.

It should be pointed out, perhaps, that for the first fifty years or so of quantum chemistry, the results of theoretical calculations were uniformly poor and unhelpful; but this tended to be put off to the enormous complexity of the mathematical techniques -- if only these could be overcome, it was thought, it would become obvious how wonderfully we could depict the results of chemical reactivity and bonding simply by applying calculations to the known constituents. Not until the whole enterprise had matured a great deal, and particularly after the computer made such massive calculations feasible (in other words, only within the last twenty years or so) has it come to be recognized by the practitioners themselves that their task is not so simple.⁷ Beyond all the complications of calculation and approximation there remain considerable problems of interpretation. And there is some appreciation that these reflect a very basic level of confusion about our most basic conceptual schemes. A few theoretical chemists have openly considered the extent to which these are not merely pragmatic issues of how to proceed and how to apply the theoretician’s results (which are considerable) but are issues of philosophical interpretation and metaphysical presupposition.

R. G. Woolley, in a set of articles published in England during the late 1970s (while he was at Cambridge) argued that such basic attributes of a molecule as its shape must be carefully circumscribed on the basis of current theory. His analysis of the idea of molecular structure from "first principles" shows that if one starts from a description of the molecule as an isolated, dynamical system consisting of the number of electrons and nuclei implied by the stoichiometric formula that interact via electromagnetic forces, one cannot even calculate the most important parameters in chemistry, namely, those that describe the molecular structure.⁸

The most extensive application of quantum chemistry can tell us little or nothing about the shape of a molecule, unless it is considered within the context of a particular reaction or particular chemical environment. And in any such case, it then becomes the interactions which experience has shown will have an impact on the molecule which controls the shape it takes and not anything intrinsic to the molecule considered in itself, or explained simply by the quantum mechanics of its constituents. He warns that it may simply be meaningless to presume that a molecule in isolation has any such feature so distinctive as a shape.

Woolley is calling into doubt here what has been a presumption typical of any atomistic approach, virtually since the rise of modern science. And for a hundred years and more, the shape of a chemical compound has been considered among its most chemically significant features. It is not, strictly speaking, that Woolley is denying the significance of structure, but suggesting how misleading it is to conceive of it in isolation.

Hans Primas (a theoretical chemist in Switzerland) has written extensively in the early 1980s about the presumptiveness of chemists who depict their elements and compounds in isolation.⁹ There is no such thing as isolation for a chemical entity, save in the imagination of scientists and their texts, and in their struggle to induce isolation artificially in the lab. But in reality a chemical is always in some environment, and this environment is largely determinative of much we take to be chemical truth.

One clear lesson from chemical theory is that the levels of energy caught up in chemical reactivity, the amount of energy tied up in chemical bonding, is comparatively tiny -- particularly the covalent and hydrogen bonding typical with organic macromolecules, for example.¹⁰ An oft repeated joke is that calculating the energy of the bonds typical between carbon atoms is like determining the weight of a ship’s captain, by weighing the whole ship with the captain on board, next weighing the ship without the captain on board, and then subtracting the difference. What is not a joke is that an entity at the level of a small to medium size molecule can be significantly influenced by a very small perturbance. Virtually all of what is going on in its environment, far from being of marginal concern, will be determinative of its character as that molecule.

This may be more intensely true at the chemical level than for organisms within the ecological context which sustains them. We now realize we cannot fully appreciate the behavior of an organism except within the context of its own niche. But at the chemical level, we may not even be able to know that or what an entity is, in isolation, let alone its behavior.

Joseph Earley (Professor of Chemistry at Georgetown), one practitioner who has become familiar with the reflections and philosophical predilections of Whitehead and of Leclerc, has written recently¹¹ that chemical behavior is of many kinds. Chemists have uncovered a full range of behavior which opens up the possibility of identifying chemical entities of different character -- in the metaphysical sense of differing in their mode of being an entity. He would argue that Leclerc’s notion of "physical existence" applies not only to our more typical notion of a molecule of water, or of sugar, or of hemoglobin (all of similar type), but also to examples of crystals, which are markedly different, and to systems of chemical reaction which persist far from equilibrium. (He also introduces types which are identifiable in some sense only if we look for a short enough glimpse -- a fascinating notion of how identity and interaction is not independent of the time it takes.) Each of these is taken by the chemists working with them as a physical existent of an identifiable kind, and there are many such "kinds."

No doubt Earley has his chemistry right. Each of his types is, in some sense, to be treated as an entity we confront and deal with -- apparently chemists do. What I am not prepared to say is that each such example is on an equal footing metaphysically. To capture what I intend here, let me return to Whitehead. He has advised all along that we would be wiser to avoid supposing we really identify enduring objects which persist in themselves over time. The reality underneath this appearance is a temporal sequence of what he dubbed "actual occasions." What seems to persist over time are "historic routes" of these occasions, serially ordered into what he called "societies." And as we noted earlier, this gives rise in his scheme, to structured societies of Societies, etc. There is a limit to how far it will be useful to pursue the niceties of "structured" versus "corpuscular" versus "personal societies," but it will help to recall the context in which Whitehead observes (not unlike Earley) that there can be many ways in which Nature coordinates these societies such that they can persist over time.

The problem for Nature, as he describes it in Process and Reality (Part II, Chapter III, Section VII) is to produce societies which can survive through time but which do not sacrifice all opportunity amongst their constituent actual occasions for what he called "intensity" of experience. Whitehead delineates two ways in which Nature has resolved this problem: there is the tendency to produce a "massive average objectification of a nexus" [PR 101] which can maximize long term survival by minimizing intensity. The other relies upon the novel elements in the environment and uses them continually to adapt the structured society. Each of these two types secures stability amidst environmental novelty, but the former overwhelms and virtually eliminates these intrusions and thereby persists much as we observe in crystals, rocks, planets and suns. The latter takes this novelty in and uses it to maintain intensity. To do so requires more complex structuring, a mode of structuring which makes it possible to rely upon its subservient societies rather than overwhelming and submerging them.

I have stuck very closely here to Whitehead’s own means of expressing this insight, because it communicates to us not only these two alternate paths for securing stability over time, but also provides a strong sense of how the inorganic amassing of crystals contrasts with the required complexity of living organisms. Nature has moved in both these directions, and I suspect that Joseph Earley is quite appropriately warning us there are many other alternatives Nature has devised, forming a whole spectrum of alternate paths. But in Whitehead’s scheme there is an assessment of how each alternate path, each type of physical existent, comes with a different trade-off.

For example, Earley’s crystalline structures, by powerful "ionic" forces overwhelm the constituent molecules which virtually lose their identity as their respective ions are held in deadlock. There persists only massive average interaction, nothing like organic growth, just accumulated bulk, which persists through sheer strength. At the opposite pole which Earley offers, there is the persistence of "dissipative systems" -- a kind of serial order, it seems to me, with a minimum of complexity. By complexity, now, I mean something close to Whitehead’s sense of complexity through the organization of subordinate constituents which never the less continue to play a substantive role in the society they comprise. In this latter example of Earley’s, the constituents’ role is minimized, not because they are under any constraint but because they have little to do -- and particularly because what they do is carried on by minimizing any perturbance from the outside. At this latter pole, constituents are minimally constrained and minimally attentive or sensitive to their environment; whereas at the former pole, they are maximally constrained and unable to be responsive.

In between we have the interesting cases. Those we now recognize as involving covalent bonding, and at a higher level, organic growth. These survive by being sensitive to what may be a changing environment, and then employing various forms of self-adjusting cooperation. In these examples the role of the constituents remains active and crucial. The feature so dramatically present here is the notion, not just of an organically structured society, but also of societies comprised of "subordinate societies" [PR 99f]. If Primas and Woolley are taken seriously, there are no non-subordinated societies. To be in an environment is always to be, in some sense, a subordinated society. Whitehead worried about certain societies being so chronically subordinated that they might not be able to persist outside on their own -- not a very good bet, he thought, for a physical existent. But if there is no "outside" save in our abstractions, the issue needs to be turned round the other way. When and where does the subordination of societies permit the society to persist, inside a larger complex, under some form of subordination?

We have touched on the spectrum of possibilities which Nature has tried. On the massive end of the scale, constituents are all but lost, just as at the other end of the spectrum they persist but carry on with minimum regard beyond their own bounds -- relatively immune to their surroundings. What especially distinguishes these two extremes is that the persisting entity (the complex whole) in either mode is unable itself to play the role of constituent. Dissipative systems persist. but they do not in turn constitute still larger more complex substances. Crystals and rocks persist, but they do not form the constituency of any larger complex they might comprise except in the most passive way. Their passivity as constituents is the direct product of their own mode of stability.

In between, a distinguishing feature of covalent molecules typified in familiar examples like water and organic molecules, is not only the persistence of the molecules, but that they can in turn form the constituency of more complex societies. And this obtains precisely because they are able to play an active role -- one which remains sensitive to their environment. At least some of these more complex entities can, in their turn, play the role of constituent at a still higher level of complexity. Molecules form cells, cells form organisms, and so on in turn.

Metaphysically, it is these in-between cases which are in many respects the most fascinating, but which also have been the most problematic to depict. How are we to characterize the status of constituents, in general, in such a way as both to acknowledge the stature of the organic whole they comprise and yet not cover over their status as active contributing constituents? These in-between examples, however they maintain themselves, are precisely those in whom Nature has found a way to maintain this tricky balance -- where as Whitehead mused, Nature seeks a balance between the value of survival and the value of interest, between creativity and intensity.

My aim has not been to solve this metaphysical riddle, nor to add my improvements to either Whitehead’s or Leclerc’s formulae for articulating these relationships. Rather, it seems to me of value to retain this sense of tension as essential to what Whitehead so suggestively termed "intensity." The difficulty in explaining satisfactorily this balance between the actuality of the constituent and that of the complex whole, has so often motivated metaphysical stances which (in effect) attempt to deny it. While we may have difficulty explaining this balance adequately, we can hardly deny its obvious success within Nature. What I propose is that the very role of "constituent" could be used to gauge this success. It should serve as a standard, a mark of distinction, or criterion against which to measure our attempts to articulate metaphysical assumptions adequate to understanding this success.

"The complexity of Nature," as Whitehead affirmed, "is inexhaustible" [PR 163]. On the face of it, it will be difficult ever to articulate one general schema for complex bodies, if only because there are so many variations on complexity -- so many ways to survive. The spectrum hinted at, however, does not range from the simplest at one end of the scale to the most complex at the other, but rather from one mode of simplification through heightened complexity to another mode of simplification. And there may well be many other modes. The highest complexity, however, is found in between, in the mid-range among various modes of simplification; and it is these complex modes which have special "value," which can maintain "intensity," which lead to organic life and all that it entails.

My suggestion is that the role of constituents in any mode is the measure of that mode’s complexity. The criterion of the value preserved (in Whitehead’s sense) will be whether it can in turn serve as a constituent. Perhaps the form of acting which Leclerc suspects is so substantive, is not only that which is mutual and reciprocal, but that which persists in the environment of a complex whole and contributes toward it. The mark of complexity is the ability of a constituent to survive, somehow, within the whole it comprises, and in such a way that it enables that compound substance to survive, to persist through the same period of time, within its own complex environment. The wonder of this natural world is the survival of its "subordinate societies."

References

NPE -- Ivor Leclerc. The Nature of Physical Existence. Muirhead Library of Philosophy. New York: Humanities Press, 1972.

Notes

1Charles Hartshorne, "The Compound Individual," Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Otis H. Lee (New York: Longmans Green, 1936). pp. 193-220.

2Thomas Kuhn, "The Essential Tension: Tradition and Innovation in Scientific Research," in The Third (1959) University of Utah Research Conference on the Identification of Scientific Talent, ed. C. W. Taylor (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1959), pp. 162-74.

3Review of The Nature of Physical Existence by Lewis S. Ford, in Process Studies, 3/2 (Summer, 1973), pp. 104-18.

4Ford locates these debates in Process Studies, 1: 95-98; John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965), pp. 89f; and D. Brown, R. F. James, Jr., and G. Reeves, eds., Process Philosophy and Christian Thought (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 314-19.

5Personal communication within Graduate Seminar, Emory University, where Popper was Visiting University Professor, 1969.

6See my "The Limitations of Physics as a Chemical Reducing Agent" in PSA 1978, vol.2. ed. P. D. Asquith and I. Hacking (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1981), pp. 345-56; and S. Brush’s comments in his Statistical Physics and the Atomic Theory of Matter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 231-32; and more recently, my "The Philosophical Content of Quantum Chemistry," in P. A. Bogaard and G. Treash, eds., Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 252-71.

7See the set of retrospective articles in Wave Mechanics: the First Fifty Years (London: Butterworth, 1973).

8R. G. Woolley, "Must a Molecule Have a Shape?" in Journal of the American Chemical Society, 100:4 (1978): 1073.

9See H. Primas, "Foundations of Theoretical Chemistry" in Quantum Dynamics of Molecules: The New Experimental Challenge to Theorists. NATO Advanced Study Series, vol. 57, ed. R. G. Woolley (New York, 1980), pp. 39f; "Pattern Recognition in Molecular Quantum Mechanics," Theoret. Chimica Acta 39 (1975): 127-148; and his Chemistry Quantum Mechanics and Reductionism (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983).

10See, for example, C. Coulson’s classic text, Valence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).

11 J. E. Earley, "The Nature of Chemical Existence," in P. A. Bogaard and G. Treash, eds., Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 272-84.

1.

In Process & Reality, Whitehead defines the task of "Speculative Philosophy" as "the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted" (PR 3/4).l Whitehead’s suggestion is that a conceptual scheme can be necessary and appropriate to the interpretation of experience, not merely a set of tautologies consistent with all experience. This, I think, is his most important claim, for it is this which enables him to frame an ontology which includes all that there is.

Yet any such relation of necessity and contingency seems to present itself as a dilemma: The claim that there must be some necessary truths arises chiefly from the association of necessity and constancy. If experiences are to be explained, something must remain constant throughout the sequence to be explained. If there are no necessities in reality, it is not certain that anything will be or has been constant. Yet Whitehead was convinced that our experience is Heraclitean: The most basic and important category is that of events. In such a universe, nothing stays the same. Every actuality seems contingent.

The conflict between flux and explanation is perhaps the oldest element in western metaphysics. One can read Plato as struggling to reconcile Parmenides. who seemed to have discovered the logical conditions for intelligibility, and Heraclitus, who grasped the truth about experience. Not unnaturally, Whitehead saw all of subsequent philosophy as a series of struggles with Plato’s problems and insights. And he insisted that the abandonment of this quest was a major disaster:

If we are to understand Whitehead and get to the roots of his problem, we must begin at a level more general than the one on which he opens the discussion in Process and Reality. We need to tackle the relation between the necessary and the contingent, because every attempt to describe the empirical world entails the use of propositions which have logical forms and have a structure which must include variables, some of whose values are states of the world to be described.

Though, in Modes of Thought,³ Whitehead expresses doubts about the utility of some kinds of formal logic for metaphysics, he insists that it contains a vital clue as to how this relation can be expressed:

But we must be clear that it cannot be the case that all those variables are such that, when values are assigned to them, the result is a necessary truth. For unless error is impossible, it has to be a contingent fact that some of the propositions we take to be true are true. And if error is impossible, it does not matter what we say. If it does not matter what we say, we can assert both P and not-P from which everything follows. In that case there is no point in doing anything, including metaphysics.

2.

To get even this far, we have to think about the logical forms within which our assertions are made or within which whatever is true or false can he based. Because we are talking about Whitehead here I shall follow him and call these "propositions" and "propositional forms" (see especially PR 184/280-81). For the point that Whitehead wanted to make is more general than any assertion or statement, and it runs beyond the limits of consciousness. It has to do with the forms which are available for the accommodation of the kind of order of which making sense is the principle sub-species of which we are aware.

These propositional forms must necessarily remain constant through a given assertion. As to what propositions are, more will emerge as I go along, but notice, for the moment, that "proposition" is to be taken just as the name for a certain kind of order which is involved in talking sense and not as the name for some entity, both occult and unnecessary which Professor Quine castigates as belonging to the class of empty verbalisms (LPV 108-09; Q 57).

In practice these propositions and their forms must remain constant through a given piece of theorizing or a given attempt to frame a picture of the world or for any possible expression, conscious or otherwise. For, if they do not, we cannot test our descriptions for consistency and, failing consistency, our picture once again, admits everything whatsoever.

There is an obvious element of necessity in this, but we must move very slowly in setting out just what "necessity" means. Professor Quine’s objection to many of its usual senses is not merely an allergic itch. It has good enough rational foundations. (These are most clearly stated in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," LPV 20-46.)

We might begin, though, by taking "logical necessity" to mean nothing more than whatever it is without which we cannot claim to go on talking sense about the world. This would allow us to take such necessities as either merely belonging to our discourse (even if they are crucial to it), or as built into the structure of the world without, in either case, taking them lightly. But it is part of Whitehead’s argument, as we shall see, that what is crucial to our discourse must have relations to wider structures in the world, if it is, really, to be intelligible at all.

At any rate, since P and not-P entail everything, the basic need for an element of logical necessity in this restricted sense is to make the description of the world selective. For any true statement or proposition must be selective in what it asserts. A consistent system is one for which not every theorem holds. One might think that this is a parochial view, one bound to the sorts of logics fancied by Frege, Russell, Quine and their successors.

But it holds, too, for logics like those of Hegel. Certain propositions which might be thought to be contradictory are regarded by Hegel as dialectical oppositions capable of resolution in a special process whereby their distinctness is preserved in a new unity. But these oppositions are always expressed in concepts which have both a common property and a distinct scope. Being and nothing collapse into one another. But it is neither true that they literally and fully exclude one another nor that they are identical. They have a uniting property, the property of excluding all determinateness. But they exclude determinateness in different ways. "Being" represents what there is by a single predicate which allows no further differentiation. "Nothing" indifferently excludes all differentiation. And so questions can be asked about how they can be seen together. What it is for two or more logical entities to have properties in common which are not shared with some third entity or for logical entities to be distinguishable from one another is, at least, for them to have descriptions which do not include everything.

But there is more to the issue than this. If we are to have a metaphysic, in the sense of a picture of what makes up any reality whatsoever, we must have some propositions which are true in any possible world. For this it is not enough to have propositions which one takes to be necessary for pragmatic reasons. The pragmatic reasons one has might hold in one world or in the face of one set of experiences, but not in another.

It is sometimes said that the basic propositions of any acceptable logic must be true in any possible world. This must surely be true of the principle of non-contradiction. But logics involve much more than this. Logics, in order to test inferences, must make use of propositional forms which are constructed so that there is some way of determining how propositions can be related to one another. Such propositional forms invariably limit the kinds of values which their variables can take. Thus the commonest of our logics, the logics developed by philosophers like Russell and Quine -- one of the foundational works of which Whitehead helped to write -- are logics of discrete states. That is to say they mark out entities, classes and their members or whatever, which are perfectly distinct from one another and are wholly determinate. Furthermore, they are so organized that propositions describing such states are imagined to have only two possible truth values. But it is by no means clear that the world in which we live consists of such stales. Indeed it is at least for this reason that Whitehead came to doubt the use of such logics in metaphysical construction (MT 105-8).

A logic which permits one to do metaphysics must either reflect or be neutral to the world which is described. It must not, that is, force us to assert that things or events have properties which they do not have. This is a metaphysical or ontological principle as well as a logical one. The possible worlds are all the worlds there are and can be. A world with a description that did not meet the conditions of the principle of non-contradiction, would be a world that could not exist. For it would contain everything.

Logics have another property which we should keep in mind. They are intended, as William Kneale said in the history he wrote with his wife Martha, to be valid for all possible subject matters.² If they were not -- if, for instance, we needed two or three logics, each for a different subject matter -- we could not, in principle, tell how the subject matters were related. If we could not tell how they were related, we would have to express this new discovery in a logic which was adequate to all of them.

Thus, we could not tell whether any logic was better than another unless we could find some way of determining which propositions were true in every possible world, and therefore which were universally necessary truths. Such propositions are often said to be analytic or tautological, but it is because he does not see how one can make the analytic-synthetic distinction anything more than arbitrary that Professor Quine says that he espouses a very fundamental logical pragmatism (LPV 46). He is certainly right that, short of a metaphysical view of the whole, there is no way of making the distinction if one wants something more than a pragmatic result.

Yet to fail to make it is to fail to distinguish between the true and useful. It is not, indeed, that there might not be a pragmatic picture of the world, but rather that such a picture would simply represent the perspective of the particular enquirer in a particular situation. As such, it could have no validity beyond the instant at which it was created. There would be no foundation for any inductive inference. More importantly, there could be no general science, no metaphysics.

Neatly perched on the other horn of the dilemma, however, sits an equally pressing problem. What if one could make a distinction between the necessary and the contingent and could see that there were necessary truths which were other than the simplest tautologies? Suppose one could see that logics of discrete states were or were not necessary?

Then, of course, in the respect in question, the universe could not change. For, if it did, it would have taken some characteristics which nothing in any possible universe could have. Is it possible that this could really be the case? It is worth our while to explore this question for it enables us to see precisely the point at which Whitehead begins his account of the world in Process and Reality.

3.

A difficulty at once occurs. The unchanging characteristics of any world must be universals, forms, or ideas. They cannot be particulars. Particulars always have a reference to places and times. If, as Whitehead insists, a universal is what can characterize many particulars, and a particular is what is characterized by universals, then particulars can have, as such, no features which extend beyond the smallest occupiable place and moment (PR 48/76).

In these terms, there can be no particulars without universals or universals without particulars. And yet any actual world must be one in which particulars have a certain primacy. To see this is a prelude to seeing why it is that Whitehead thinks that there is a certain primacy to the category of events. Ultimately, primacy belongs to events of the special sort which he calls actual occasions. If he is right about this, then, indeed, the dilemma will be very real. I suggest that the dilemma is very real and that Process and Reality is, more than anything else, a device for dissolving it.

The reason for the primacy of particulars is, once again, simply logical. There may be forms of justice and redness. Whitehead insists that there are, though he speaks of them as eternal objects, for a reason which will emerge. But the form of justice is not just, for justice is some sort of relational property which must hold between particulars. And the form of redness is not red, simply because to be red is to occupy a spatial surface in a certain way, and forms do not occupy surfaces. One interesting way to see that this is so is to see that there can be no uni-propertied things. It always takes two or more properties to get anything identifiable. Red things have to exhibit a certain amount of redness, and there is no justice between non-existent persons.³

But it would also seem to be true, and to follow from the same premises, that no particular can ever exhaust the properties which it instantiates. If one has to be red in some particular way in order to be red at all, then there must be other ways of being red, if not in this world, then in some other logically possible one. The old puzzle about how it is that Socrates and Plato can share the same humanity without being the same human being dissolves if one realizes that humanity is such that it can never be wholly exemplified in a single individual.

There is a basic latitudinarianism built into universes in which properties like humanity are in this sense indeterminate. Indeed, a significant part of Whitehead’s point about the clement of freedom in the world we live in can be expressed in just these terms: Things can never be wholly determined by their Platonic or neo-Platonic exemplars.

This lack of determinacy presents an opportunity for freedom. It permits us to think that the universe, in some sense, contains genuine novelty. Yet it also seems to create a gap which is unfillable, not just contingently, but necessarily. If something is red, it is always some particular shade of red. Perhaps it is vermilion or scarlet. If something is just, it is always some specific just act, the righting of a wrong to some oppressed majority or the rendering of the right verdict in a trial. Does one associate each of these particulars with a distinct form? There are indefinitely many such forms, but none is the form of particularity. Those who think Duns Scotus attempted to find such a form, notoriously find it unsatisfying because it seems that there is an implied contradiction in the very idea of a form of "thisness."⁴

The primacy of particulars is apparently given by the failure of the forms to specify particularity and it does not appear that this gap can be filled. I think a certain insight dawns on one who reviews this situation against the background of Whitehead’s system: The situation which I have just painted has more radical and deeply puzzling consequences than is usually supposed.

For though the particular must be associated with a place and time, it will follow from its very primacy that it is unique. In that case, if it cannot really be said to be a manifestation of any form or any universal, then it cannot be a thing with a fixed place in space and time. For such a designation implies that it can be identified as a subject and then be said to have precisely whatever characteristics are necessary to fix it in this way, A particular has to be an event, and it cannot itself persist, for to persist it must in some respect remain fixed through time.

The most that can be said is what Whitehead actually says: A genuinely basic event, an actual occasion, simply is at its moment, and it perishes with that moment (PR 29/43).⁵ But even this must seem doubtful, for its uniqueness prevents both determinateness and persistence. If "to be" is to manifest being, it cannot really be said to do that.

We can now state our dilemma more clearly: If metaphysics is to be possible, the world and our statements about it must exhibit some necessary unchanging principles. But there is no way in which, apparently, anything which is genuinely real can manifest any such principle, for reality consists of particulars which are, at most, designatable as unique events. A simpler sub-dilemma, suggests that, surely, no world can exist which has a description which fails to meet the principle of non-contradiction, but no real world can have a description which meets the conditions of any principle.

4.

I shall argue that it is through the doctrine of ideas that this dilemma is to be addressed. Ideas have logical properties, some of which are necessary, but also figure in experience, and so they have properties which must be known empirically.

In the terms which I have sketched, Whitehead’s account of the problem about how the ultimate particulars are related to the forms or universals is the doctrine of prehension. Literally or metaphorically, the actual occasions, as he prefers to call these ultimate particulars, grasp the forms. It has always been difficult to find a felicitous way of expressing Whitehead’s point, and some of the difficulty which interpreters have had in plumbing the conceptual depths of Process and Reality derive from this fact. Most simply, the ultimate particulars, the actual occasions or actual entities as they are alternatively called, are to be regarded as open, as occasions for the ingression (to use, once again. White-head’s own word) of the forms. We can see now why he calls the forms eternal objects; for it is by reference to them, in a particular way, directly and indirectly, that the actual entities acquire their content. They appear, that is, in reference to the object, as the ideals which the actual entities imperfectly realize.

This complex set of relations -- ingressions, prehensions, imperfect actualizations -- may seem somewhat odd, but they have at least one simple enough explanation in terms of the science of Whitehead’s time and of ours. There is always a degree of approximation in our measurements and a degree of idealization in our theorizing. Whitehead takes this fact to be a manifestation of the truth about the world, not an imperfection in scientific knowledge. Precise measurements, perfect descriptions, and theories which are absolutely true all have their ultimate homes in the domain of eternal objects, not in the domain of things in the world. In the nature of each actual entity "there is always a remainder" which is undetermined (PR 27-28/41).

The actual occasion is open to ingression and has prehensions, positive and negative. It is not, of course, equally open to all ingressions and equally inclined to all prehensions. But how are we to understand this? It is essentially the explanation of the concept of idea that gives us the clue. Whitehead explicitly relates this notion to the concept of idea: "‘Prehensions,"’ he says, "are a generalization from Descartes’s ‘cogitations,’ and from Locke’s ‘ideas"’ (PR 19/29).

This does not make them, for Whitehead, "mentalistic," for the crucial phrase here is "generalization." If we can understand, however, in just what sense we have ideas, then we can understand how it is that actual occasions prehend and are open to ingression. The special context in which Descartes finds his cogitations is our minds. But if we insist that cogitations are not necessarily related to minds like ours, we have some ideas of Whitehead’s notion. Locke, Whitehead thought, provided his own grounds for generalization, and it is really Lockean ideas which must have pride of place in our attempts to understand Whitehead.

One may suspect that, in the end, there is no role left for ideas in Whitehead’s conceptual scheme, but this I want to deny. The suspicion develops naturally enough from the fact that the concepts which Whitehead develops out of the concept of idea -- especially the concepts of "eternal object" and "prehension" -- do most of the work which Whitehead wants done. Furthermore, the word "idea" has complex connotations (especially mentalistic ones) which Whitehead wants to avoid. But I shall argue that it continues to be needed to designate the framework within which these more special concepts function, and this framework does important logical work. But the best way to settle such a matter is to follow Whitehead through some of his reflections on Locke and then through his accounts of "ideas" in Process and Reality.

5.

At the beginning of Process and Reality, Whitehead says, "the writer who most fully anticipated the main positions of the philosophy of organism is John Locke in his Essay, especially in its later books" (PR xi/v). A footnote suggests that by this he means to focus on Book 4, Chapter 6, Section 11 of that work (HU 585-87). Here we find out how a notion of simple and complex ideas introduced by Locke a little earlier bears on the whole question of the unity and intelligibility of the world.

Whitehead returns to the point in the middle of Process and Reality and insists that "the metaphysical superiority of Locke over Hume is exhibited by his wide use of the term ‘idea."’ He particularly likes the way in which Locke’s ideas were "determined to particular existents" (PR I 38/209).⁶ Bear in mind that what we are looking for, in Whitehead’s terms, is an account of just how it is that we can understand the relation between actual occasions and eternal objects. We must understand how actual occasions are related to one another through prehension, and how they are more open to the ingression of some eternal objects than to the ingression of others. In other words, we are looking for an account of the way in which the world holds together and of how it copes with freedom in an orderly way. The passage in Locke’s Essay referred to in Whitehead’s footnote has to do, amongst other things, with the way in which substances hold qualities together. This is another way, I think, of posing the question about just how actual occasions are open to ingressions or tend toward prehensions.

The passage in question, one ought to note, is quite startling in the face of some very common accounts of Locke. It deals with two difficult topics. One, which obviously attracted Whitehead strongly, concerns the unity of the universe. It is here that Locke denies what Whitehead called the "doctrine of simple location." Locke says, here, that no substance can be understood except in reference to all other substances. Knowledge requires an ultimate unity and, indeed, this is to be the basis of Locke’s argument for the existence of God in Chapter 10 of the Essay (HU 619-21).

The relevance of this issue -- or at least of the aspect of it which concerns the unity of the whole -- will appear, but the second topic is really the heart of the matter. For it is about the way in which we know substances, and, in the course of telling us about that, it offers clues about how it is that substances do their work. Locke’s account of substance has it that substances are whatever it is that perform the function of holding qualities together. The substance which is the sun holds together properties of being "Bright, Hot, Roundish" (HU 298). Sometimes Locke speaks of "mere Powers" such as the "Color and Taste of Opium as well as its soporific or anodyne Virtues." These powers depend on opium’s "primary qualities." Power and primary qualities together "make a great part of our complex Ideas of Substances" (HU 300).

Orthodoxy has it that Locke supposed that substances were hidden from us because they did not appear on the surface of experience and had to be inferred. But that is not really what Locke says. He does say that we know most about secondary qualities and that these qualities depend upon primary qualities. Then he adds "or, if not upon them, upon something more remote from our Comprehension, ‘tis impossible we should know." And he certainly does insist that we do not know "the Root they spring from" (HU 544-45). In the index he himself made for the Essay, substances are said to be "not very knowable."

Yet the passage cited by Whitehead (HU 585-87) suggests a different meaning. It explains why we have trouble knowing substances. True we can understand some things in terms of others -- secondary qualities through the powers of primary qualities, perhaps in the special sense that we understand color vision through the properties of light and the properties of our optical apparatus. But that only goes a little way. What Locke says in this later passage is that we know very little about substances because substances are to be understood, ultimately, only in terms of the whole universe. That is, we can see how the characteristics of things are held together only when we see the whole system and only when we see it as a system of a certain sort.

What sort of system is it? If we read back as far as Section 5 of Chapter 4 and Sections 7 and 8 of Chapter 6 (HU 564; 582-83), we discover precisely Whitehead’s problem: The system has to be one which expresses itself through individuals whose substance cannot be grasped by us. How, then, are we to understand these individuals? The answer is that we know them through what Locke calls their "simple and complex ideas."

In Locke’s view, in these passages, simple ideas are literally what is presented to the mind. Complex ideas we make up. The problem is that the complex ideas do not necessarily represent nature -- indeed they are not related to nature in the way that the simple ideas are -- and yet what we know of substances is necessarily what we can represent by complex ideas. For simple ideas tend to represent simple qualities. If, of course, we could see how all the simple ideas fitted together we would see the truth about substance. We make errors because we put things together wrongly.

A person who thinks there are dragons is right to believe that there are reptiles, flying things, and fires. He has put together some ideas in the right way. But he has then wrongly put together some of his compounds. But everything must have a place somewhere, and so there is some right way of putting things together. If there is, then there is what Locke calls an archetype of things which is really in nature. The fact that he tells us that the archetypes which we create are not in nature does not mean that he thinks that there are no archetypes in nature.

Indeed, the burden of the Book 10 argument about God is surely that knowledge is made possible by the fact that nature exhibits God’s archetypes. And the claim that Locke is a somewhat simple-minded empiricist is, in any case, finally destroyed by a passage from Chapter 19 of Book 4. "Reason is natural Revelation, whereby the eternal Father of Light, and Fountain of all Knowledge communicates to Mankind. . ." (HU 698; italics Locke’s).

It is because the archetypes from the mind of God form a coherent system and form the basis of the substance of things that knowledge after all is possible. Notice, however, that what I just wrote is meant quite literally: The archetype in question is the basis of the substance of things, i.e., it is the basis of any possible account of how the qualities of the world fit together.

The things themselves have their own independence which, if we consider them as particulars, seems to put them outside the scope of knowledge. But they do have a structure which makes some Platonic qualities more relevant to them than others. Locke insists in Book 4, Chapter 11, Sections 13 and 14 that we can only know particulars through their ideas (HU 637-38), i.e., through seeing that the best interpretation of the idea is that the thing exists. And this is because the idea, in the whole context of what Whitehead calls Locke’s philosophy of organism, gives it a position in a system which makes certain properties relevant to it and others irrelevant.

In the Essay, Locke is reluctant to tell us what ideas are. John Norris chided him for this omission and, in his replies to Norris and to Norris’s acknowledged master, Malebranche, Locke finally admits a measure of reality to ideas.⁷ In those replies, the suggestion about the existence of ideas is of a very special kind. Ideas are only real, Locke says, in the way that motion is real. They are not another kind of thing. They are what we interpret when we get knowledge. Though Norris, in Locke’s view, wrongly attributed to them a reality which was independent, he rightly estimated their importance. They are the source of both right and wrong interpretations of the world. What we should mean by the world is whatever counts as the correct interpretation. What it is for something to be material is for it to be properly interpretable as a material substance. If so, the problem cannot be about "inference" to something unknown.

It is this notion which Whitehead wants to generalize. I do not know that he ever read Locke’s reply to Norris but he says "Locke’s ‘particular ideas’ are merely the antecedent actual entities exercising their function of infusing with their own particularity the ‘passing on,’ which is the primary phase of the ‘real internal constitution’ of the actual entity in question" (PR 213/324). Whitehead’s generalization thus includes a restatement of the position I was ascribing to Locke, a restatement from the perspective of the object. But that this perspective should exist is entailed by the Lockean theory, too.

Thus generalized -- and so freed from the limitations imposed by the association of ideas with the conscious states of reflective beings -- ideas provide a way of escaping the dilemma. They can be eternal and unchanging, but can only exist in a world in which they are expressed through particulars which instantiate their properties. Those particulars in turn are necessarily perfectly particular. They are momentary and perish when the moment they have defined has finished. This, in turn is compatible with explanations for things only because what remains is the structure which determines a measure of relevance.

6.

To understand fully what Whitehead intended -- and how he developed these Lockean notions -- one must follow him through the nine passages of Process and Reality which contain important discussions of ideas -- and beyond into Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought. On first reading, one might even take Whitehead’s initial account to have disposed of the concept of idea in favor of the concept of prehension. Descartes and Locke are mentioned, but all that is said about them and about ideas is that the Whiteheadian doctrine of "prehension" is a generalization of their theses (PR 19/29). The same suggestion is repeated at the next mention, but at once a complication sets in. For we are told that ideas are associated with propositions, and also that, in addition to what we might ordinarily take to be propositions -- whatever it is, for instance, that is expressed in statements or sentences -- there are real propositions, and that these are "lure[s] for feeling."

What is being expressed in this section of Process and Reality is, evidently, the theory which I have already discussed, the theory that there is a structure to the world such that its particulars have more natural affiliation to some eternal objects than others. (In Whiteheadian terms, one might, insisting that particulars have a measure of real freedom, say that they are more inclined to some eternal objects than to others.) The same theory has it that particulars are also primary and this, too, is again emphasized in the discussion of fact and form in which Whitehead insists that Locke is right to hold that "there are not first the qualities and then the conjectural things, but conversely" (PR 53/83).

At the next mention of ideas, however, this thesis is expanded and becomes a major key to understanding Whitehead’s doctrine. Section IV of the chapter on "the extensive continuum" introduces the notion of the idea as the key to the dual existence of things in the world and in knowledge (PR 76/118). The example has to do with the sun as an Object of knowledge and as an Object in nature.

Whitehead returns to Descartes. In a famous but difficult text (part of the Replies to the First Objections), Descartes said that "the idea of the sun will be the sun itself existing in the mind, not indeed formally, as it exists in the sky but objectively, i.e., in the way in which objects are wont to exist in the mind."⁸

In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead had said that he had difficulty in squaring this sentence with the rest of Descartes’s doctrine. (SMW 73-74) and in Process and Reality he chides both Descartes and Locke for failing to hold firmly and consistently to the doctrine expressed in it. Whitehead understands this duality as a structure which enables us to identify a thing correctly. The sun can only be an object in nature insofar as it is a center of focus for an entire system which parcels out the properties of the universe so as to provide a unique sequence of actual occasions which we are able to grasp through our scientific theories. The idea in the mind must exhibit the same logical structure. Though the same structure organizes different actual occasions, the two systems mirror one another in such a way that we can be said to have knowledge. Descartes, of course, is not so inconsistent as Whitehead supposes since, for him, objective reality is the property which ideas have by virtue of which they are able to refer to things, while formal reality refers to the form which is shared between an idea and an actual thing.

It would appear that, for Descartes, an idea would have to have ideational reality as well -- would have to exist in at least the minimal way which was admitted by the later Locke (see Alquié’s footnote, OP 520). But this it would seem must be true for Whitehead as well. For it now turns out that prehensions account for only one dimension of ideas. There is also a kind of ideational form which permits that kind of mutual reflection through which knowledge becomes possible. Indeed, much later on in Process and Reality, Whitehead castigates Locke for having too thin a notion of idea. Ideas cannot be, he says, as Locke claimed they were, "mere qualifications of the substrate mind" (PR 147/223). That is indeed so -- and the later Locke who wrote in response to Norris and Malebranche would, as I have already suggested, have agreed. But if ideas were merely the immanent tendency of the system of particulars to favor some qualities over others, they would be mere qualifications of a substrate object. Whitehead’s doctrine in his chapter on the extensive continuum is, after all, that ideas must have this immanent tendency and be the structures which permit intelligent reflection, the structures which permit what exists at one place and time to be intelligible anywhere in the system. The presence of adequate structures for intelligibility is a general condition for all knowledge whatsoever and a particular condition for the possibility of science. Physics has to be the same everywhere, even if no two actual occasions can be identical.

The uniformity of physics is possible only if there are structures which permit one thing to be reflected in another. If we ask how any such reflection is possible, we shall discover that ideas have still another dimension. Ideas are also eternal objects. Whitehead explains that he does not call them forms or essences because he does not want to be mistaken for a Platonist or for one of the "critical realists" of his own time who tended to use the word "essence" in ways which he felt were undesirable. He does not himself use the word "idea" here, he suggests, because he is afraid that it will be understood in a subjective way (PR 44/70).

But quite a bit of confusion is, I think, caused by the fact that one may not notice that what he says in this passage -- in a chapter on "fact and form" -- is that eternal objects are, in any case, a dimension of whatever it is that has figured in his account of prehension and of the common substrate of things and knowledge. The word "idea" tends to get rather rough treatment, yet, if one looks closely. Whitehead has, in fact, spelled out what needs to be spelled out. He makes it very clear that the eternal object is not a distinct entity. "The actual subject which is merely conceiving the eternal object is not thereby in direct relationship to some other actual entity. . . . An eternal object is always a potentiality for actual entities (PR 44/70).

A few pages later, Whitehead describes the logical difficulties which would confront one who thought that eternal objects were really distinct entities which could exist in abstraction from their counterpart prehensions. There is not and cannot be, for instance, "One entity which is merely the class of all eternal objects." If there were, there would be yet other objects, he says "which presuppose that class but do not belong to it" (PR 46/73). He is referring here to an analogue of Russell’s paradox. For instance, if there were such a class there would be another class which would include it and all the other eternal objects. The totality would be an object, and so distinct from the rest. But then it could not be the totality.

What there is, he says, is a complex -- but a complex can only be understood as something expressed through a plurality. Idea is surely the proper name for this complex.

7.

Most revealing of all the references to the word "ideas," however, are the final paragraphs of the chapter on "the subjectivist principle." No doubt Whitehead was always uneasy about the word "idea." But in these paragraphs he insists that there is something which has a unity of its own and which shows itself as exhibiting the dimensions which he refers to as "eternal object," "prehension," and "the structural conditions for knowledge." There, Whitehead, explaining the principle of concrescence, whereby eternal objects ingress into actual occasions -- or whereby actual occasions prehend eternal objects -- says "this development is nothing other than the Hegelian development of an idea" (PR 167/254).

One must be careful, as I shall argue, about the reference to Hegel, but what Whitehead is talking about is basically the notion that one cannot understand actual occasions except in terms of the idea they instantiate, or understand the ideas except in terms of their expressions. This is not a vicious circle for two reasons. One is that ideas develop through their instantiations just as their instantiations are shaped by ideas, and so the unfolding of the idea is a process. Ideas are thus not simply eternal objects nor are they simply prehensions. Eternal objects and prehensions are aspects of ideas. The other escape from the vicious circle depends on the fact that ideas are not intelligible in isolation. We may think we have an idea of "redness." But nothing is red unless it occupies some space and has a place in some system. We cannot imagine anything’s being ‘just red" any more than we can imagine anything’s being ‘just good." Even abstract mathematical properties have their meanings within the context of some system which provides a distinct place for each of them -- which explains, perhaps, why Kant supposed that "7 + 5 = 12" is not really an analytic proposition.

Whitehead picks up the notion of idea I have been talking about again in Adventures of Ideas and in Modes of Thought. One of his basic themes is that, as he says, "human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language. Such ideas cannot be grasped singly, one by one in isolation" (AI 16). As usual, if one substitutes "prehension" for "apprehension" one gets a universal principle, and, indeed, later in Adventures of Ideas Whitehead suggests this generalization in his account of prehension (AI 176-77). and then he goes on to say:

In Modes of Thought, as I noticed, Whitehead relates these concerns to the nature of logic itself. The basic notion of the proposition with variables expresses an idea with roots in reality (MT 106-7).

Generalized to its extreme, this relation is the relation between any eternal object and any actual occasion and it is built into Whitehead’s world. But he notes that "logic presupposes metaphysics" (MT 107) -- not metaphysics logic.

Given all this, I think we should agree with Whitehead’s assessment that his notion of idea is the notion of something which is closely related to "the Hegelian development of an idea." Yet one must make some distinctions and not jump instantly to the notion that it is "the Hegelian Idea" that Whitehead is talking about.

The Whiteheadian idea is, I think, in one of its aspects (but only one) a particular species of the Hegelian concrete universal. If one asks for the idea of the Prussian state, the Poland China pig, or Barnard’s Star, one is asking, in Whiteheadian terms, for a certain kind of account of development. Each of these examples involves a point to which we ought to attend.

The Prussian state had its origins in 1226 when a Polish Duke, Conrad of Mazovia, invited the Teutonic Order to come and bring what he took to be civilized government to the local heathens. The idea developed as the organization of the state developed. The knights originally admitted none of the local nobility into their ranks and, as the state took shape, so did the sense of identity amongst the locals. The state did not really take on its full identity until after 1609 when it fell into the hands of the electors of Brandenburg. At each state, the idea influenced events and the events influenced the idea. As people began to think of themselves as Prussians, events began to take on a Prussian character.

One could try to bring order out of this oscillating development in Whiteheadian terms by noticing that the actual occasions, the events, had to take on one shape or another. Whatever happened there could not have been a shapeless or formless event. But this is just to say that there is a conceptual necessity for something to happen -- this is the foundation of the idea. It is equally a necessary truth, as we have seen, that the conceptual necessity cannot determine everything.

The Poland China pig developed neither in Poland nor in China but out of pigs introduced by the Shakers into the Miami Valley of Ohio where there was a need to find a quick-fattening animal to eat up the surplus corn. The modern neat black pig with white feet, white face, and white tail tip developed out of a spotted animal and only gradually did it become clearly identifiable -- the embodiment of an idea and an ideal which could be identified across the generations. No one had a clear idea of the Poland China pig when the process started in 1816 or indeed until after 1870, and no one can really say that either the idea or the events had precedence.

Ultimately, a state or a pig is, in Whiteheadian terms, a vast society of actual occasions. Ultimately, too, at one extreme are eternal ideas which resist further analysis, and actual occasions which are the simplest units any universe could exhibit. But the whole universe -- states, pigs and stars -- is an interlocking system in the sense that the events can be open to some and not other basic ingredients, and their openness is determined by the whole system. Pigs depend on stars being what they are, and states may rise or fall on grains of sand as anyone who has followed the history of silted ports knows full well.

When we come to stars, though, we may suppose that the story must be different. The minds of knights and nobles went into the shaping of the Prussian state, and the farmers who came after the Shakers shaped the Poland China pig. But no one shaped Barnard’s star.

Whitehead’s point, however, is that one cannot draw an ultimate line between stars and pigs. One cannot do so, for they are intelligible only as a system. If the pig depends upon the star which must stay in its place for the firmament to stay firm and must not emit too much radiation for reliable pig breeding, they both simply represent different points or moments of focus in the same system. Stars, pigs, and Prussian knights all prehend, though stars do not do so consciously. It is a mistake, Whitehead believed, to think that what characteristically attracts our attention in consciousness only exists in consciousness.

Stars take on the characteristics which make them graspable in ideas only as a result of a long process. But every such process requires some determinate form. Whitehead says "The spatio-temporal relationship, in terms of which the actual course of events is to be expressed, is nothing other than a selective limitation within the general systematic relationships among eternal objects" (SMW 161). Naturally, this relationship is reciprocal. "An eternal object, considered as an abstract entity, cannot be divorced from its reference to other eternal objects, and from its reference to actuality generally" (SMW 159).

The Hegelian Idea -- of which there is, in principle, only one -- is something rather stronger. Though the world and the Hegelian Idea are supposed, ultimately, to become identical, at least if one reads Hegel in the most traditional way, Hegel’s Idea has a greater reality than any yet actualized world, and it serves, finally, as the explanation of things. Nature and history alike are the unfolding of the Idea. The reciprocity so characteristic of Whitehead’s developing ideas is at least less clear in Hegel. If one has the perspective of the Absolute, would one be able to see the whole of reality as determined by the Idea? Not necessarily, of course, for, in Hegel’s view, too, there is a process of events which are sublated (or ablated) into its later phases, and the particulars of those developments. since they lack perfect rationality, are also not fully determined. But the Idea does have a kind of precedence for Hegel which it does not have for Whitehead. Whitehead would never have written the Logic of the Encyclopedia as a distinct enterprise to be completed before the Nature Philosophy and the Philosophy of Spirit.

Perhaps this point needs a little further explanation. Could Whitehead have written a book about the nature of the eternal objects conceived as logically quite independent of anything else? Whitehead’s eternal objects do not and cannot change. But, as he insisted in Science and the Modern World, "the metaphysical status of an eternal object is that of a possibility for an actuality" (SMW 159). They are incomprehensible without an actuality. They are only intelligible within a larger conceptual frame. Such a larger conceptual frame which exhibits the relations of eternal objects to actual occasions and vice versa is what I am calling an idea. An "idea," initially, as Locke thought, is what we take as the object of our interpretation when we confront our experiences. If we follow Whitehead, we can specify its conceptual ingredients -- eternal objects, prehensions and so forth. But an idea is not another thing in the world. The things in the world are what our interpretations of ideas lead us to believe in. They are ordinary objects -- stars, mountains, houses, trees, animals, and people.

Eternal objects really do not have a final conceptual priority. And this makes a difference. For the Whiteheadian picture is one in which rational structures of things and whatever is ontologically primary necessarily reflect one another. It is precisely this necessity which is the necessity of ideas to be expressed through actualities which can be understood as ordinary objects. The necessity for actual occasions to have structures permits us to resolve the problem about how one can have a philosophy which uses conceptually necessary systems of ideas to represent an open universe.

8.

But let us now, finally, come to the point. Does this account of things make metaphysics possible? It is useful to turn the problem around so as to see it more clearly in the context of the central strands of metaphysics. The Whiteheadian tension between eternal objects and actual occasions is a version of the traditional problem created by the duality of concept and thing. Any such duality, if it is not resolved, creates a rupture between thought and being. And indeed, what I have been calling Whitehead’s account of ideas is a generalization of the notion of thought, freeing it from its parochial associations with our particular fields of consciousness. But, freed or not, whatever view one takes of thought, one must be able to give an account of the relation of thought to being. This relation is, on the face of it, disastrously paradoxical, and one way to answer the basic question is to ask whether or not the account which I have been ascribing to Whitehead does enable us to deal with these paradoxes.

Logically, assuming that we have and ought to have both concepts and things or both thought and being, the initial possibilities are only five: (1) Thought and being overlap, but thought is more extensive than being; (2) Thought and being overlap, but being is more extensive than thought; (3) Thought outruns beings and being outruns thought (each in some distinct aspect); (4) Thought and being are wholly separate; and (5) Thought and being exactly coincide; Possibilities (4) and (5) cannot both be true. But, though (1) (2) and (3) each contradict (4) and (5), they do not contradict each other. Indeed, (3) reminds us it can both be true that some elements of thought Outrun being and that some elements of being Outrun thought. If these five options include all the possibilities, however, skepticism seems to be inevitable.

If being outruns thought there are things we cannot know, and we do not know how these things influence what we seem to be able to know. Indeed, on Whitehead’s account or on the account which Whitehead draws from Locke, everything must be organically related. If thought and being were wholly separate, one would get the same result. In neither of these cases can the line between thought and being be represented in thought. If thought outruns being then, again, unless there is something in thought which represents the distinction, we are lost so far as all knowledge goes, and, again, the line between the two presumably cannot be represented, for there is no determinate thought which counts as the thought of non-being. If, however, thought and being exactly coincide we know that something is wrong, for then it would seem that error would be impossible. Everything we could think of would be an actuality. And, if we know anything at all, it is that we make mistakes.

The way out, it would seem, is to hold that thought and being permeate one another. If one already supposes that this must be the case -- on the ground again that, if it is not, we cannot finally talk sense in and about the world, then the solution which Whitehead suggests becomes at least plausible. On such a view, thought must occur in the guise of ideas in and through the actual occasions, and the actual occasions must grasp or prehend the ideas. Thought and being are not perfectly identical, for actual occasions are particulars and ideas are not. But it is not that there is something in the actual occasions that thought cannot grasp. It is rather that the particularity of the actual occasions is represented as a place in a system of ideas. And it is not that the ideas are not expressible in actual occasions. It is only that nothing counts as their completed and full expression.

References

LPV -- Willard Van Orman Quine. From a Logical Point of View. New York: Harper. 1963.

Q -- Willard Van Orman Quine. Quiddities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

HU -- John Locke. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975.

OP -- Rene Descartes. Oeuvres Philosophiques. Ed. Ferdinand Alquié. Paris: Gamier, 1967.

Notes

1Three other editions of Process and Reality exist. One published by Cambridge appeared shortly after the original. Another, published by the Free Press in 1969, did not correct the many errors in the original. The fourth edition, which was edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne in 1978, did correct all the obvious errors. This edition was reproduced in paperback in 1979 and has become the commonly used text. But neither Whitehead’s manuscript nor the typescript from which Macmillan’s worked seems to have survived. Hence the corrections have, inevitably, an element of speculation about them. Fifty years of secondary literature refers to the original edition and the corrected edition includes its page numbers in the text. For convenience I have included page numbers to both the original and the corrected text in the 1979 paperback version.

2WiIliam Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic, Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1962, p.741. This particular section was written by William.

3Possible persons may have rights, and they can be treated unjustly when, for instance, we act so as to deprive the next generation of clean water. or of contacts with elephants or whales. But the injustice is caused by real, existent persons.

4 The reading often given to Dons Scotus is unfair because what he means to designate by haecceitas is the individuating difference. In addition to the forms as we usually conceive them, there must be a principle of individuation. It may be a kind of principle of emanation through which thc forms express themselves as distinct things. What is involved is a form which, when it informs things, results in their individuality.

5Whitehead ascribes this notion to Locke. He repeats the idea in a number of contexts, reminding his readers of it again on the last page, PR 351/533.

6 The passages to which Whitehead calls attention in his references to Locke’s "wide use" of the term "idea" seem to me to refute quite clearly the notion occasionally put forward that Locke thought ideas were mental images. Jonathan Bennet ascribes this view to himself and to Michael Ayers (Times Literary Supplement, March 20, 1992, p. 9). In fact Ayers (Locke, London: Routledge, 1991. Vol. I, p. 68. says this is only one side of the story and that "much of Locke’s language and thinking was found to reflect a duality in the notion of an idea recognized by Descartes" and that Lockean ideas also have a kind of "objective being." Ayers confines himself to the Essay, but this is what emerges most strongly in Locke’s Remarks upon some of Mr. Norris’s Books. (See below).

7John Locke, An Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of seeing all Things in God, in Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke, London: W. B. for A. and J. Churchill, 1706; and Remarks upon some of Mr. Norris’s Books, wherein he asserts P. Malebranche’s Opinion of seeing all Things in God, in A Collection of several Pieces of Mr. John Locke, London: J. Bettesworth for R. Franklin, 1720.

8I cite Alquié’s edition because it has useful notes on this passage (See OP 520).

A. N. Whitehead and Samuel Alexander were two of the few British philosophers who produced comprehensive metaphysical systems in the early part of this century (others being Bradley and McTaggart). They always spoke of each other with great respect. Alexander indeed used to say in his last years that he considered that Whitehead had superseded him. He went so far as to say in a letter to the present writer, "I read Whitehead naturally not only to understand him but to save my own soul. I think of myself only as having done what Burke said he did for [Dr. Samuel] Johnson in conversation – ‘rung the bell for him.’ But though Whitehead disregards Leibniz and proclaims his affinity to Spinoza, he is, as you say, much more of a Leibnizian. And I believe I am much more of a Spinozist. And so there is a side to me which has to be either lost by obstinacy or saved by surrender to Whitehead (or of course the other way about)." I do not think it is true to say that Whitehead disregarded Leibniz’. It was however a just comment to say that Whitehead was more of a Leibnizian and Alexander more of a Spinozist.

I see the attitude to each other’s philosophy as one of mutual appreciation rather than of influence. Each has occasional comments suggesting analogies; neither however directly discusses the work of the other. In fact neither was interested in going in for dialectical argument with his contemporaries. Moreover. Alexander’s main work was done before Whitehead’s philosophical (as distinct from his mathematical) books had come out. Space, Time and Deity was published in 1920, but the Gifford Lectures on which it was based were given in 1916. Whitehead’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge came out in 1919, and The Concept of Nature in 1921. Alexander’s preface to the 1927 edition of Space, Time and Deity shows that he was then aware of some of Whitehead’s views in these two books. However, he was mainly concerned to reassert his own positions in answer to criticisms by C. D. Broad and G. E. Stout.

I shall not therefore attempt to show influences, one way or both ways. Still less, in its limited space, can this be an exposition and detailed comparison of two highly elaborate and difficult systems. I shall be making comparisons where the differences seem to me to be of special interest, and I shall be noting where a view of Whitehead’s may suggest an alternative which would avoid crucial difficulties in Alexander’s view. I shall also be claiming that there are respects in which Alexander seems to me to have the better part. Where I give expositions, these will be of Alexander’s view rather than of Whitehead’s, since Whitehead will be getting extensive coverage in other parts of these volumes; moreover, Alexander is the lesser known.

II

There is a fine bust of Alexander by Epstein in the entrance hall of the Arts Building of the University of Manchester (where he was Professor of Philosophy from 1893-1924, continuing to live in Manchester until his death in 1938). At its unveiling in 1926 he remarked, "In the future when I am forgotten this bust will be described among the University’s possessions as the bust of a professor, not otherwise now remembered, except as an ingredient of the ferment which the earlier years of the twentieth century cast into speculation, but it will be added that it is an Epstein." The publication of these two volumes will be a testimony to the fact that the early part of the twentieth century in Britain contained a considerable ferment of speculation, and also the belief that Alexander’s part in it was an Ingredient still to be remembered.

Alexander’s background was the Oxford Idealism of which F. H. Bradley was the most distinguished figure. He developed his views in a struggle against Idealism, particularly against its theory of knowledge, and he ended with a naturalistic realism (not, as is sometimes said, materialism, since "matter" for Alexander has a restricted meaning). Whitehead’s background was that of Cambridge mathematics, and he developed his views in attacking the materialism which he thought was implicit in the Newtonian (and mechanistic) view of physical science. Both claimed that their metaphysics were extensions of physical science, and that their aim was to produce a "descriptive generalization." The term is Whitehead’s, but it could equally be applied to what Alexander saw as the method of metaphysics; indeed it might be applied more accurately to Alexander’s approach. Whitehead constructed what he explicitly called a "speculative" scheme, and then looked for applications in different branches of experience. It might be said, as it has been by Dr. Mays², that he was using the hypothetico-deductive model, where intellectual initiative is taken in constructing theories from which lower level hypotheses can be deduced, yielding predictions which can be tested empirically³. However, Whitehead does not strictly pursue a hypothetico-deductive method; there is little said, as far as I know, about prediction, nor indeed about verification. We have what are claimed to be applications of a speculative scheme which may or may not commend itself when taken as illustrated in particular spheres where something more like empirical description is possible. Thus while both Whitehead and Alexander produced systems of cosmological metaphysics which they held to be extended interpretations of the world of natural science, Whitehead is overtly speculative about this, whereas Alexander held that he was actually giving descriptive generalization, philosophy is the a priori part of an enlarged science. A priori here does not mean independent of experience, still less "analytic." It stands for the all-pervasive features of the world, as distinct from variable features which are studied in the empirical sciences. These all-pervasive features are called categories and they are discerned, not imposed by the mind. Nevertheless, Alexander’s list of categories closely follows the Kantian one, notably in its emphasis on Substance, Cause and Relation. "Substance" is the term for things as recurrent patterns in a world of motions of Space-Time (the basis of his metaphysical cosmology to which I shall be coming later); "Cause" is the term used for the channeling of motions of Space-Time continuing into other motions; Relation is the omnipresent fact of the "togetherness" of things, of which the most general form is called "compresence."

Knowledge for Alexander is a case of "compresence of a mind with an object. Since this is an instance of a general relation. Alexander does not feel called on to make epistemology a study prior to metaphysics. He can go straight into setting out how he sees the nature of the world. So too can Whitehead, who also holds that the relation of knower to known is a case of a more general relation, i.e.. that of conceptual prehension. Whitehead, as I have said, recognizes the speculative character of his metaphysical scheme. Alexander, on the other hand, sees the task as one of reporting what is discerned in the relation of compresence, doing so in a spirit of what he calls "strenuous naivit6," and also (adapting a phrase of Wordsworth’s) "natural piety." Such a theory of knowledge will obviously have difficulties over error and illusion, and I shall be returning to these.

III

First, however, I shall briefly set out the main features of Alexander’s metaphysical vision ("vision" is perhaps the right word, since he claims that this is a direct intellectual perception). The foundation is Space-Time, not Space and Time, but a four-dimensional continuum. He makes acknowledgement to Minkowski (1908) and also refers to memoirs by Lorentz and Einstein (STD 1:58). He alludes respectfully from time to time to the Theory of Relativity, but he does not appear to have gone deeply into this. Here there is a contrast with Whitehead, who was involved with Relativity Theory from its outset, and himself presented an alternative to certain parts of Einstein’s view based on a uniform space (see R).

Whitehead’s uniform space is, however, not physical space, but a general scheme of relatedness between events, underlying the more special relations from which physical space is derived. It need not be a flat space; indeed, Whitehead said it could be elliptical or hyperbolic so long as it was uniform. One might say that, whereas Einstein was talking of physical space, Whitehead’s uniform space is more like a metaphysical requirement, answering in some ways to the old notion of the Uniformity of Nature. This view of a uniform space has not, I believe, commended itself to Relativity theorists. Nevertheless, he was writing as a mathematician with close knowledge of mathematical theory in physics. He could therefore move freely in technical discussion (notably in The Principle of Relativity and in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge) and he could produce a relational view of Space and Time from which he was able to derive the axioms of Special Relativity.

The cardinal difference between Whitehead’s view and Alexander’s is that the former’s view is an explicitly relational one, in which Space and Time are derived from relations between events, and the fundamental ontology is one of events. Alexander, on the other hand, absolutizes Space-Time, and even speaks of it as a "stuff’ of which things are made. At the same time he also says that Space-Time can be called Motions -- not "motion" in the singular, but complexes of motions with kaleidoscopic changes within a continuum. So one might say that for Alexander motion is primitive, and Space and Time are defined through relations between motions. This view is, however, combined with that of Space. Time as a kind of ghost of the Absolute, a stuff differentiated by motions (not, it should be noted, a view of motions as taking place within Space). There might be a remote analogy here with General Relativity where matter is defined by warps in the geometry of Space-Time. These warpings, however, I take to be due to gravitational forces, and "warping" is not a notion used by Alexander, though he refers to Einstein on this in a postscript to his preface to STD. Alexander’s references to the General Theory of Relativity are respectful, but diffident.

For Alexander, the differentiation of Space-Time is due not to gravitational forces, or, as with Whitehead, to properties of events, but to Time itself. Time makes for a "principle of unrest" and also for what, to use a phrase of Whitehead’s, can be called "the advance into novelty." Time is necessary to motion as is also Space. There is an influential view, found for instance, in Russell’s Principles of Mathematics (1905) which has been called the "at-at" view. Here motion is defined as the occupancy of different places at different times, and Time appears as a dating system (what McTaggart called the B-series). For Alexander this loses the movingness of motion and the transitoriness of Time, both of which should be taken as primitive. "Motion," he writes, "understood as the primordial stuff, is what change becomes if you strip from change the notion of some quality which is replaced by some other quality. Rather the name is used to indicate that passage of nature of which Mr. Whitehead speaks, and to insist that the stuff of things is events and groups of events, not something fixed and resting but something which contains in itself a principle of unrest" (PLP 271-72).

Alexander speaks here of "the stuff of things" as "events," avowing an event ontology. The notion of "event" continually appears in his writings as though it were co-terminous with "motion." We miss a detailed account such as Whitehead gives of the notion of "event" -- how events are distinguished and how they extend over other events. Broadly, Alexander’s "event" is a region of Space-Time, seen also as a motion. It is therefore essentially changing, and in this it is unlike Whitehead’s events, which, we are told, succeed and extend over one another but do not change. It might therefore be said that Whitehead’s events are abstracted from the primitive "passage of nature," and he may have been dissatisfied with this when he substituted the notion of "organism" in his later work, where change and "becoming" could be integral in a way in which they were not in "events." But I am not sure how far Whitehead explicitly recognizes how different this was from his earlier event ontology.

Alexander indeed speaks of "events," but when he is giving a close account of what he sees to be the constituent units within Space-Time, he speaks of "point-instants." He says he took the term from Lorentz’ Ortzeit, for something both spatial and temporal. The nearest analogy in Whitehead would be the "event-particle." Whitehead can have a notion of a smallest unit with spatio-temporal spread because in the end he has a pluralistic metaphysics in which the final constituents are atomic (later to be called "actual entities"). This course is not open to Alexander, as his world is essentially continuous, a kaleidoscope of motions as continued into other motions. This means that, unlike Whitehead, Alexander would have had great difficulty in accommodating quantum theory. He notes its arrival (Preface to 1927 edition of STD, 1966 reprint, p. xxvi), but said that the metaphysical considerations which arise out of it were a matter for the future to be worked out by physicists and philosophical mathematicians. But "of course, if it turns out that Space and Time are not continuous, as Mr. Russell suggests they may not be, I should give up the game in regard to their claim to be the model continua as wholes; or even that of Space-Time, insuperable as I feel the difficulty of abandoning the real continuity of Motion." This was a statement of great candor by an old man looking back at his work.

We must return, however, to the view of Space-Time seen as motions individualized by point-instants. The point-instant is said to be a "limiting case of a motion," but why motions should have a limiting case, except in theory, is not apparent. Here as elsewhere Alexander might with profit have used Whitehead’s Method of Extensive Abstraction, where one Space-Time region can extend over another, and that in turn over another for as far as one chooses to go. Alexander refers to Whitehead’s Method of Extensive Abstraction, mainly in the form in which it was presented by Russell in Our Knowledge of the External World, but he does not use it.

Point-instants are positions in Space which are also moments in Time. As least motions they have extension and duration, and are not therefore unextended mathematical points. It could be said that points are loci of instants and instants give dates to points. Together they give centers from which "perspectives" can be traced. A perspective is the whole of Space-Time ordered with reference to a particular point-instant, the temporal aspect including its past history and anticipation of its future, while the spatial aspect gives its relation to what might be called the contemporary world in which other points occur in the same instant. A point-instant thus has an analogy with what Whitehead calls "co-gredience," as a relation to a "percipient event" (see especially CN 108ff.) The "percipient event" is a center of an observer as in Special Relativity, providing a frame of reference for a time system. This allows, as Alexander’s view does not, for different time systems with different centers of reference, and also for a view of simultaneity where events simultaneous in one time system need not be simultaneous in another. Alexander’s absolute Space-Time involves absolute simultaneity. Here he might be said to commit what Whitehead calls "the fallacy of simple location."

Whitehead’s "percipient," like the "observer" in Special Relativity, need not be a conscious perceiver. It can be a camera -- anything which provides for a "here-now" from which relations can extend in what Whitehead calls "durations." Alexander does not develop a relativistic view of Space and Time with point-instants as centers of reference. He seems rather to conceive of Space-Time advancing as a whole, channeled in "world lines" through point-instants. Without this channeling in Space-Time, motion could not be divisible into recognizable routes with repetitive patterning, and this is needed for Alexander’s categories of Substance and Cause. However it is hard to see this as just discerned in "natural piety" by a mind "compresent" with the world (though I am prepared to think that the "movingness" in motion and the transition in time on which this intellectual construction is based might be said to be immediately discerned).

A perspective is a line of Space-Time containing different dates. In this it differs from a section, which is a contemporaneous slice of Space-Time. Alexander takes the illustration of a tree sawn across. For the carpenter the concentric rings are simultaneous, and this is to see them in a section. For the botanist they are dated, carrying with them the history of the tree. He sees the rings as in a perspective, a route taken by this particular process in nature. Neither Whitehead’s events as "co-gredient" nor Alexander’s perspectives should be taken as implying a relativistic epistemology in which people’s opinions are said to be "relative" to their subjective points of view or even to their preferences. For Whitehead and Alexander, events are ordered from a locus in Space-Time, and this ordering is perfectly objective.

IV

The universe for Alexander is essentially in process, with Time as its ongoing aspect, and the ongoing process Consists in the formation of changing complexes of motions. These complexes become ordered in repeatable ways displaying what he calls "qualities." There is a hierarchy of kinds of organized patterns of motions, in which each level depends on the subvening level, but also displays qualities not shown at the subvening level nor predictable from it. The lowest level has the qualities such as inertia which are assigned to matter in physical structures. This is why Alexander’s system should be described as "naturalistic" rather than "materialistic"; his Space-Time is not matter, since "matter" is the quality of the lowest level of complexes of motions of Space-Time, where the products of motions are physical configurations, and also chemical syntheses. On this there sometimes supervenes a further level with the quality called "life"; and certain subtle syntheses which carry life are the foundation for a further level with a new quality. "mind." This is the highest level known to us, but not necessarily the highest possible level. The universe has a forward thrust, called its "nisus" (broadly to be identified with the Time aspect) in virtue of which further levels are to be expected. For us as complexes of living matter and carriers of the quality "mind," this as yet unrealized level is groped after in religious aspiration. It is called "Deity." Alexander’s Deity is not an eternal Being; it is an as yet unrealized quality towards which the process of the world is tending. "God" is however not only an as-yet non-existent quality of Deity. The name also designates the universe with its nisus towards this quality -- and towards whatever further quality might be "Deity" beyond this.

In speaking of "God," as referring in one sense to the world as a whole, Alexander showed (and welcomed) an affinity with Spinoza’s vision of Deus siva Natura. He said, indeed, that if it were written on his urn in the crematorium, "Erravit cum Spinoza," he would be well content. The cardinal difference is the role he assigns to Time. Whereas Spinoza’s one Substance had the attributes of Extension and Thought (and indeed infinite attributes unknown to us) Alexander has Space (Extension) and Time as the aspects of the Nature which is Space-Time ("Spinoza and Time," reprinted in PLP). The time-aspect makes the world a process, which to use a phrase of Whitehead’s, could be called an "advance into novelty"; this is of course quite foreign to Spinoza’s eternity of the world.

However, Time is not only the aspect of the world as ongoing. It is also for Alexander the inner aspect of everything in the world. He puts this by saying "Time is the Mind of Space" -- a daring remark which has indeed been quoted out of context by positivists who want to ridicule metaphysicians. Yet in context Alexander means something precise which takes up what he understands by Mind as we know it in ourselves. "Mind," we have said, is properly the name of a quality of certain syntheses of motions, a quality through which the omnipresent relation of one thing with another called "compresence" becomes consciousness of an object. This is knowledge in the form of what Alexander calls "contemplation." Besides this, there is another form of knowledge which he calls "enjoyment." This is a mind’s awareness of itself as knowing -- not introspection of itself as an object, which, if it were possible, would be a form of contemplation, but the inner experience of a process which is essentially temporal. Alexander generalizes from this to seeing the temporal aspect of anything as its own inner aspect, its living through whatever it may be undergoing. This, he says, is analogous to "mind"; it is not conscious enjoyment, which belongs to the quality known as mind proper. It is used by analogy to express the view of everything as having its inner side as a process which is gone through. On the other hand, "Space" stands for what is already achieved, already there as the contemporary world, and this is analogous to the extended body.

An analogy might be suggested here with Whitehead’s view of everything as having both a mental and a physical pole, and indeed Alexander himself drew this analogy (BV 291). There is, however, a considerable difference. For the later Whitehead, the physical pole is an actual entity’s "prehension" of other actual entities in its world, one is tempted to say, its response to stimuli from them, except that in Whitehead’s "prehensions," the initiative is on the part of the prehending actual entity, which takes account of, rather than reacts to, others in its world. This raises the difficult question of Whitehead’s view of prehensions and their role in causation, which is beyond the scope of this paper.⁴ The mental or conceptual pole for Whitehead is the prehension of an eternal object -- that is to say, some new possibility which is in some sense already presented in a schematic form. The notion of "eternal objects" has no analogue in Alexander; Alexander’s inner aspect is a matter of the actual temporal aspect of something as going on into a further phase. It is essentially an immanent nisus, not an apprehension of an eternal object beyond itself. Alexander’s use of the term "mind," as representing the inner temporal aspect in everything, is dissociated from the meaning of "mind," as a quality of conscious existents. "There are no degrees or kinds of consciousness lower than consciousness itself, as Leibniz thought, but different grades of reality each with an element which is not mind but corresponds to mind in its office" (STD 11:336; see also BV 291).

V

Alexander’s view of the process of nature was therefore one of the emergence of genuinely new qualities, not to be found in or predicted from the qualities of subvening levels. (He once remarked that he "took a low view of the amœba"). R. G. Collingwood stressed this difference from Whitehead in a letter which is reproduced in this volume and I shall only repeat two crucial sentences: "Your world seems to me a world in which evolution and history have a real place: Whitehead’s world is indeed all process, but I don’t see that this process is in the same way productive or creative of new things (e.g., Life, Mind) arising on the old as on a foundation. We seem rather to deny that these things really are new at all -- at least he seems to say so pretty explicitly in the little Nature and Life." Collingwood adds that "on that question I am impenitently an Alexandrine" and I agree with him. A doctrine of emergence which says that new qualities and capacities appear where certain patterns of order are achieved seems more plausible than saying that the new quality, e.g., mind, should be the heightening of mental propensities already present in a primitive state. Alexander’s view has, however, an implicit teleology in the "nisus" of Space-Time, and this may be a relic of the view of inevitable progress in which the temporal aspect of the world will not only produce what is new in the sense of "different," but also in the sense of "higher." Alexander could rejoin that we can see with "natural piety" that there has in fact been an ascent to higher levels.

Alexander’s view of an emergent process in which genuinely new qualities appear at different organized levels enables him to give a naturalistic view of mind without this being a reductionist view. Mind is in one respect identical with its neural and physiological base, but in another respect it is a new quality which functions in a unique way in conscious awareness. Moreover, there is the inner consciousness of this functioning, not, of course, of the neuro-physiological processes themselves, but of the process of being aware to which they have given rise. Hence Alexander maintained that he was not a behaviorist (see, for instance, Preface to 1927 edition of STD, 1966 reprint, pp. xxxv-vi); there is a conscious internal life of the mind not to be reduced to purely externally observable behavior. He himself had a considerable interest in neuro-physiology. He had studied this at first hand with Munsterberg in Freiburg i.B. Some of the points he makes concerning the basis of mind in the neurology of the brain, though no doubt dated insofar as they draw on empirical work, could still be read with profit by those today who maintain a contingent identity view. He holds to the neural foundation of mental processes and at the same time refuses to play down the crucial importance of consciousness. This is in accord with his view of emergence where the new quality of mind produces a new way of functioning. Emergence is more than "supervenience," which is in effect a form of phenomenalism.

VI

This is a direct realism, in which a mind, which is within nature and indeed an emergent quality of its body, reports and describes objects within nature with which it is compresent.⁵ The "sensa," which it perceives as secondary qualities such as "red," are not "mental," but qualities of objects; here Alexander is at one with Whitehead in repudiating a "bifurcation of nature," where secondary qualities belong only to our own perceiving. This realism produces obvious difficulties in accounting for error and illusion. Alexander tries to meet these by saying that a mind is aware of selected aspects of the objects with which it is compresent. This is clearly so in the case of perception, where parts are perceived and stand in for other parts not actually perceived. What of illusions, for instance, when a gray piece of paper is seen as green against a red background: in such cases, Alexander says that the mind is indeed compresent with a patch of green as an object, but incorrectly refers it to the place where it should be seeing a patch of gray. Compresence is not simultaneity; a mind-brain is compresent with the whole of Space-Time within its perspective, and whatever it contemplates has "fringes" extending in Space-Time beyond itself. So a mind may erroneously transfer an aspect of an object contemplated in one part of this perspective to another. "The object, with which the mind is brought into compresence by virtue of an act initiated by itself, is transferred from its place in the world into a place to which it does not belong. The illusion is a transposition of materials" (STD 11:214). This seems a strange view. That mind can "transfer," "transpose" (elsewhere he uses the term "dislocate") objects in the world, only which are not its own images, suggests endowing it with superhuman powers. However, rather than the mind moving objects about, Alexander is thinking of it as contemplating different appearances of objects in different parts of its perspective, and confusing their place and date. This suggests space-time travel rather than removal of "the furniture of the world" (to use a phrase of Berkeley’s) from one situation to another. Yet it is surely a very high price to pay for a view of perceptual illusion. Mind in knowledge may not alter its object; this is the crucial point of difference with Idealism. But we can use various means such as words, ideas, images, which are indeed expressed in some material medium, and so can be manipulated, as instruments of understanding and this is a source of error in seeking knowledge which when attained consists in describing a presented reality.

Alexander was therefore aware that we use constructions as instrumental means to knowledge. He was enough of a mathematician and an experimentalist for this. This is noted in a piece "Art and Science."⁶ Broadly, he sees a work of art as something fashioned out of materials, satisfying the aesthetic impulse which contemplates it disinterestedly. Science, on the other hand, satisfies the impulse of curiosity to understand. If the scientist uses constructions of his own, these will be aids -- either material ones as apparatus, or theoretical ones as mathematical or verbal signs. Science as a body of thought is a human invention, which uses these instruments. But they themselves are also part of the world. This is obviously so in the case of material apparatus; Alexander holds that indirectly it is also so of the mathematical "entities" used as signs. They are generalities abstracted from those features of the concrete world which are a priori in the sense I explained above.

Alexander’s interest in these questions may have led without his knowing it to his influencing the course of later philosophy. The young Wittgenstein was a researcher in aeronautical engineering in the University of Manchester between 1908 and 1911, and already developing an interest in the philosophy of logic. He sought out Alexander, the professor of philosophy; and in his later recollections he is reported as saying that Alexander advised him to go and see Frege, calling him "the greatest living philosopher." Wittgenstein visited Frege, and wrote in the Preface to the Tractatus that it was Frege and Russell to whom "I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts." Con Drury is reported to have said that Wittgenstein admired the title of Space, time and Deity, and said, "That is where the great problems of philosophy lie."⁷

To return to Alexander’s views on mathematics and the theoretical side of science. In the article "Art and Science," he quotes Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics of 1912 as supporting the generality of mathematics. He recognized that some flights of pure mathematics seem more like artistic creations. Yet "the validity of our quasi-artistic mathematical objects is not derived form the mind alone. . . . Ultimately the reason why mathematics is applicable to the world of things (so far as it can be applied, which is only approximately) is that its subject is abstracted from that world, and never really loses its connection therewith." Science is a "transcript" of the actual world; "unlike fine art it does not introduce into the contents of its subject-matter anything foreign to that subject-matter derived from the mind itself" (op. cit., pp. 18-19).

Whitehead’s free-ranging power of "conceptual prehension" grasps theoretical possibilities as "eternal objects," that is to say, as a kind of entity, distinct from the entities of the physical world into which they can "ingress," or be realized. The notion of ‘eternal objects" has, I think, grave difficulties of its own.⁸ Alexander’s view also has grave difficulties over abstraction and generalization, but I find it a merit that he does not try to meet them by introducing "eternal objects." Alexander’s universals are "habits of Space-Time," recurrent configurations in motions which can be recognized and possibly repeated.

VII

For Alexander, all objects are within the world of Space-Time, and knowledge occurs when some object reveals itself to a mind compresent with it. Truth is reality related to a mind correctly reporting what is disclosed. It is an instance of what Alexander calls a "tertiary quality." Tertiary qualities -- truth, goodness and beauty -- are values and not, like the emergent secondary qualities such as color, within the world apart from minds. They arise in a combination of mind and objects. Goodness occurs when a will seeks to satisfy the affections and desires which make for a harmonious social existence; this is how Alexander sees morality. Beauty is a quality found in certain objects contemplated with aesthetic appreciation apart from practical interest or questions of truth and falsehood. There is beauty in nature but only insofar as we see it with the artist’s eye -- some piece of nature which can be contemplated selectively, as if it were a composition. Alexander’s primary interest is in beauty as a quality of works of art, satisfying the particular passion we call aesthetic. This arises when the constructive impulse becomes disinterested and contemplative. The creative impulse to shape materials taken from the world into forms which can serve practical purposes becomes an impulse to shape significant forms which give aesthetic pleasure apart from any practical concern. Alexander was sympathetic to the term "significant form," which was being used by philosophically minded artists such as Clive Bell. However, he insisted, in particular against Croce, that what was significant was a form or composition embodied in a material medium, and that the artist works by manipulating and often struggling with this material medium. In this sense, the words of a poem embodied in sounds or in written characters are a material medium as much as pigments or marble. Alexander insisted that neither the impulse to artistic creation nor the aesthetic satisfaction in what is created is primarily a matter of expressing emotion, still less of expressing the personality of the artist. Feelings and personality may indeed be drawn on, but the final product is depersonalized, and its contemplation gives disinterested pleasure.

Alexander was intensely interested in the arts, and often wrote about them with examples, including examples drawn from pieces of prose and poetry. Some of these papers and lectures are published in his last book, Beauty and Other Forms of Value (1933), and in the posthumous collection, Philosophical and Literary Pieces. Whitehead also had a strong aesthetic interest, and indeed it could be said that in his metaphysics he sees "processes of becoming" as directed towards aesthetic harmony. "Beauty," he says, "is the mutual adaptation of the several factors in an occasion of experience" (AI 252).⁹ Such mutual adaptation need not be a simple harmony achieved by eliminating what is disharmonious. In the higher forms of experience there is more massive harmony, where feelings of new intensities are held together in "contrasts." In giving central importance to this, Whitehead’s metaphysics of experience could be said to be stressing a particular kind of aesthetic achievement. But he did not, like Alexander, work out a philosophical theory of aesthetics.

We can perhaps say that in this, as in other respects, Alexander, to a greater extent than Whitehead, is a philosopher’s philosopher. I-Ic discussed central questions as they had come to be formulated in the history of philosophy and particularly in the legacy of Kant. Yet he has also been called one of the great solitaries of modern philosophy, not only as having produced a highly individual philosophy which cannot be classified under the label of any of the known schools, but also because of his manner of life; he was unmarried and singlemindedly dedicated to philosophy. Whitehead was not worldly, but he might be said to have been a man of the world to a greater extent than Alexander ever was. He had a wider range of contacts, perhaps a wider range of interests, which could be brought into his philosophy, and also a wider clientele who looked on him as a sage. Moreover, he came into professional philosophy in later life, whereas Alexander had spent his whole life in it. This does not mean that Alexander was narrow in his interests. Like Whitehead, he had a strong concern to relate his philosophy to contemporary science. In comparing them in this respect it might be said that the outcome of Whitehead’s later philosophy is a psycho-physiological view of the nature of actual entities, while it was Alexander who had the closer acquaintance with neuro-physiology. On the other hand, Alexander had a metaphysics of perspectives in Space-Time which needed to draw on concepts of General and Special Relativity, while it was Whitehead who had the closer acquaintance with these. Behind Whitehead’s philosophy there was a mathematical physicist trying to turn his interest in formal structures into a metaphysics of organism interpreted in psycho-physiological terms. Behind Alexander’s philosophy there was a neuro-physiologist trying to turn his interest in the mind-brain into a metaphysics of Space-Time point-instants. There is no way, as I see it, of combining the two philosophies. In any case, a metaphysical system is a single individual achievement. But each of them may be read with the greater appreciation if we also read the other.

Principal Works by S. Alexander

Moral Order and Progress. London, 1899. (Written from an Idealist position later abandoned).

Space, Time, and Deity, London, 1920. Reprinted with Introduction by Dorothy Emmet in 1966.

Beauty and the Other Forms of Value, London, 1933.

Philosophical and Literary Pieces (Ed. J. Laird, London, 1939).

(This posthumous volume contains a memoir and a list of Alexander’s published works. A collection of letters is deposited in the library of the University of Manchester.)

"The Basis of Realism." Proceedings of the British Academy (1914). Reprinted in Realism and the Basis of Phenomenology (Ed. R. M. Chisholm, Glencoe, IL, 1960).

"Sense Perception: a reply to Mr. Stout." Mind, n.s. Volume 32 -- 1932, 1-11.

Some Works on Alexander

Broad, C. D. Review articles on S.T.D. in Mind, n.s. Volume 30(1921), 25-39 and 129-150.

Broad, C. D. The Mind and its Place in Nature (London, 1925) discusses Alexander’s view of emergence, 648.

Devaux, P. Le systéme d’Alexandre (Paris, 1929).

Emmet, Dorothy. "Time is the Mind of Space." Philosophy XXV, 233.

Weinstein, M. A. "Unity and Variety in the Philosophy of Samuel Alexander" (Indiana, 1984).

Cv. of s. Alexander

Born Jan. 6th 1859 in Sydney, Australia.

1877 Scholar of Balliol College, Oxford. Studied Philosophy and Mathematics.

1882 Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. (The first Jew to be elected a fellow of an Oxford College).

1890-91 Studied experimental psychology with Munsterburg in Freiburg im B.

1893-1924 Professor of Philosophy in the University of Manchester.

1938 Death.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Science and the Modern World, chapter ix, where he says that "the presupposition of the philosophy of organism must be traced back to Leibniz" (in having ultimate entities as monads). the difference being that whereas Leibniz’ monads were windowless," W’s actual entities are internally related by prehensions.

2. In The Philosophy of Whitehead, chapter I (London, 1959).

3. For an exposition of this method see R. B. Braithwaite. Scientific Explanation (Cambridge, 1953).

4. I have tried to discuss this in detail in "Whitehead’s View of Causal Efficacy" in Whitehead und der Prozess begriff (Alber, 1984).

5. The main outlines of this epistemology are given in the British Academy Lecture for 1914, "The Basis of Realism," reprinted in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology edited by R. M. Chisholm (Free Press, Illinois, 1960).

6. Journal of Philosophical Studies I i (1927).

7. I owe this information to Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life, p. 75 (London, 1989). He gives as source R. Goodstein’s account in Ambrose and Lazerowitz. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophy and Language (London, 1972), pp. 271-72.

8. For some of these difficulties see Everett W. Hall, "Of what use are Whitehead’s Eternal Objects?" Journal of Philosophy 27(1930).

9. This book contains Whitehead’s most explicit remarks on the pre-eminent importance of Beauty.

A. Introduction

In this article I would like to accomplish three things. First, I will examine both the features of virtue ethics relevant to an understanding of Hartshorne and several of the features of Hartshorne’s thought relevant to an understanding of virtue ethics. In this effort I hope to show that Hartshorne’s thought is an improvement with respect to some of the weaker features of virtue ethics as it has been defended by some recent philosophers, in particular regarding the allegation made by virtue ethnicians that deontology and utilitarianism are defective because they depend on abstract rules. As is well known, Hartshorne is a critic of universals when these are seen as abstractions devoid of any real connection to concrete events in process.

Second, I will examine one Hartshornian virtue in particular. moderation, a virtue which is as central to his thought as it was to that of the Greeks. This examination will include a treatment of moderation both in his metaphysics and in his applied ethics. My hope is that a strong connection can be made between these two sorts of moderation. In fact, I claim that Hartshorne’s most important contribution to contemporary ethics is his ability to show the relevance of metaphysical moderation to (moderation in) ethics.

Third, I will treat in detail the Hartshornian stance regarding abortion, a stance with which I agree, both to illustrate the aforementioned connection between moderation in metaphysics and moderation in ethics as well as to combat the charge that virtue ethics, because it focuses more on the character of agents than on their acts, is incapable of treating the really difficult issues in applied ethics.

B. The Virtues

The last two decades have witnessed a rebirth of interest in the virtues, an interest which, at a minimum, acts as a supplement to the familiar alternatives of deontology and utilitarianism, and, at a maximum, acts as a substitute for deontology and utilitarianism.¹ 1 will not be defending the maximal thesis in this article, as some in the virtue ethics "movement" have done (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre and Philippa Foot²). James Wallace is instructive here. Whereas he started out with the extreme view that we could dispose with the idea of moral rules or laws, he eventually realized that this is a vain hope. Hartshorne, as well, speaks forcefully in favor of duties (or rights) as limits which no virtuous person can violate.³ Further, it should be noted that a defender of the maximal view would also seem to be committed to the stance that in society there should not be many conflicting communities, each fostering different virtues, and this because in the maximal view there is no clear rule for adjudicating disputes among the values found in different communities. Here again Hartshorne adopts the minimal view in that his liberalism -- whether classical or contemporary⁴ -- commits him to the likelihood that there will in fact be conflicting communities fostering different virtues. Each segment in our society is not only likely to have its own interests but also its own virtues. Hence it is at least understandable why contemporary ethics is somewhat legalistic. By way of contrast, Aristotle dealt with a small face-to-face community where the potential phronimoi were well known in that they usually came from the well-respected families.

The fact that MacIntyre’s defense of virtue ethics is extreme, however, should not prevent us from admitting that he points out some severe defects in Kantian ethics, defects which, I think, Hartshorne can handle better than MacIntyre. For example, MacIntyre argues that: (1) The categorical imperative is detached from contingent events in Kant such that, as part of a strictly transcendental or formal ethics, it can be given almost any content. In Hartshorne’s terms, there is a defect in Kantian ethics because the categorical imperative is a detached universal, detached, that is, from concrete instances of becoming. And (2), this remoteness associated with Kant’s metaphysics of morals helped to prop up an emergent anthropology of self-interest in that concrete individuals had no alternative, on Kantian grounds, but to see themselves as sovereign. This defect is noticed both by MacIntyre and Hartshorne, although Hartshorne does not use his critique of self-interest as leverage with which to critique liberalism, as does MacIntyre. Bernard Williams puts the point as follows:

There are other difficulties with MacIntyre’s approach (in addition to the fact that he is premature in wishing to do away altogether with moral rules) from a Hartshornian point of view. For example, because of his theory of time as asymmetrical, Hartshorne believes we always face a future which is at least partially indeterminate, hence it is even more difficult than MacIntyre admits to determine the narrative order to our lives. Narrative order seems to presuppose some knowledge in the present regarding how future contingencies will be actualized. In this regard Hartshorne’s attachment to the virtue tradition is closer to that of G. H. Von Wright, who was insistent that the path to virtue is never laid out in advance, and to that of Lester Hunt, who claims that thought and emotions are fused in virtues rather than thought controlling emotion as an alien, recalcitrant subject matter.⁶ In the terms of Hartshorne’s process philosophy, and of his Peirceian pragmatism⁷, a person’s principles are seen in his actions just as in Hartshorne’s metaphysics universals are embedded in the world of becoming, as Aristotle and Plato (correctly read, according to Hartshorne) have also indicated. This is not to say that passion never conflicts with principle, but rather that such conflict need not he exaggerated to the point where we are encouraged to engage in (Kantian) dualistic orgies. Hartshorne, like Jonathan Bennett, is willing to hold that just as good moral principles can check bad desires, so also sympathy can check bad principles.⁸ Sympathy is not brute and non-moral (or immoral), as Kant thought, but an important component of the moral life which should be in reflective equilibrium with our moral principles.

Hartshorne would disagree with the claim that the virtuousness of a trait is derivative from some relationship it displays to what is antecedently specified as right action. But it should be noted that within an ethics of virtue it is possible to have a teleological dimension (pace Von Wright, Foot, and Hare) as well as a non-teleological dimension (as in G. E. M. Anscombe, Wallace, Peter Geach, MacIntyre, and even Aristotle, who has a prominent place for deontos in his ethics⁹). One of the defects in deontological ethics as usually conceived is that it ultimately requires an unchanging, eternal deity to deliver the command to obey the moral ought, a fact pointed out by Anscombe to contemporary Kantians who have forgotten that Kant himself would have readily granted this point. Hartshorne, however, has spent a lifetime criticizing the unchanging, eternal deity believed in by classical theists like Kant and Anscombe. By believing in such a deity one can move too easily, it seems, to either the metaphysical abstractness of deontology or to something close to religious fundamentalism in a virtue ethics heavily dominated by divine command theory (as in Anscombe and Geach).

When one realizes how different Hartshorne’s ethics is from that found in deontology as usually conceived, and when one notices his numerous and repeated criticisms of utilitarianism,¹⁰ one is then in a position to see how he culls insights from both of these in the effort to develop his own virtue ethics centered around the law of moderation. These cullings at times make it hard to distinguish Hartshorne from utilitarians like Von Wright who have a far richer conception of the good than, say, Hare, or from Kantians who have been heavily influenced by Kant’s Lectures on Ethics and other of his writings more conducive to virtue ethics than the Grundlegung. But regarding the metaphysics of morals there is absolutely no mistaking Hartshorne for a deontologist or a utilitarian. Deontological and utilitarian theories can be seen as different versions of an ethics of duty wherein one is supposed to have a disposition to choose for the sake of what is antecedently established as right. According to Gregory Trianosky, this is true in an attenuated sense even for a Kantian like Rawls who, although not particularly interested in metaphysics, and who at least initially seems to place all of his attention on developing a decision-making procedure, nonetheless commits himself to doing what is right as such. Specifying this "as such" from a metaphysical point of view is difficult to do if one wants to avoid the sort of eternalism criticized by Hartshorne.

It must be admitted that there are certain potential vices to virtue ethics even in its minimalist mode, i.e., even when it does not try to crowd out the legitimate insights of deontologists and utilitarians (e.g., from the deontological side, that there are limits -- deontoi -- regarding what any virtuous person can be permitted to do, and, from the utilitarian side, that there are calculations which are relevant regarding many moral decisions the virtuous person must make). For example, one of the possible vices of virtue ethics is what Robert Louden calls a "somewhat misty antiquarian air" (APQ 21) to much that goes on in virtue ethics (say in MacIntyre, Geach, and Anscombe), which is not found in Hartshorne, even if he is personally something of a latter-day Victorian figure. As we will see later in this article, his Peirceian and Whiteheadian principles make it possible for him to look forward to the resolution of contemporary ethical problems, say that regarding abortion. Another potential vice is conceptual reductionism. Whereas virtue ethicians often criticize deontologists and utilitarians for starting with a priori concepts (in the pejorative sense of a priori) of the good state of affairs, the same sort of criticism could be made of virtue ethics if virtue ethicians begin with a root conception of, a procrustean bed provided by, the morally good person. But Hartshorne’s conceptual reductionism, if there is such, consists not in an unquestioning acceptance of the good person, but in a commitment to a metaphysical principle of moderation which provides the basis for his belief in asymmetrical temporal relations.

One of the standard criticisms of virtue ethics is that it is weak when dealing with issues in applied ethics, in contrast to deontology or utilitarianism, and this because virtue theorists focus on good or bad agents rather than right or wrong acts. As Louden puts the point:

But this criticism does not really apply to Hartshorne in that in his virtue ethics he is not so much concerned with agents as with the principles that (albeit at a high level of abstraction) guide one in determining which actions are logically possible and which, when chosen by some agent or other, are consistent with what must be the case in metaphysics. That is, Hartshorne’s virtue ethics offers an alternative from "above" to most contemporary ethics in that he sees an essential role for metaphysics in ethics, even in applied ethics, whereas most virtue ethicians offer an alternative to contemporary ethics from "below," from a perspective which emphasizes the sorts of community and habit that are conducive to the development of an ethos. Virtue theorists in general tend to emphasize "being" as opposed to "doing," a distinction which is usually seen as equivalent to the distinction between agent and act. But the particular feature of the being of the agent with which Hartshorne is concerned is his or her ability to relate moderate metaphysical principles to moderate ethical ones, an activity which reaches fruition in a sort of doing, as we will see. We cannot entirely assess the ethical value of a person’s action or of a person’s character without also assessing the abstract claims to which the person is committed, explicitly or implicitly.

Because virtue ethicists tend to trace their lineage back to Aristotle, when they discuss the connection between ethics and metaphysics they also tend to do so in Aristotelian terms, specifically in terms of a natural teleology that tries to determine which functional properties are essential for a full human life. As is well known, Aristotle agrees that some natural processes have final as well as material and efficient causes, but the events in a person’s life are not goal-directed merely because they achieve some result that might have been their goal: rain may spoil the crops on the threshing floor, but that was not necessarily the goal of the rain. Future results can be relevant in explaining why certain previous events may have happened without actually having been the causes (in the sense of sufficient conditions) of those events. This point is crucial in the effort to show the continuity between Aristotle and Hartshorne regarding the metaphysical basis for virtue ethics. If Aristotle were alive today the last thing he would be is an Aristotelian if what it means to bean Aristotelian is to defend what I will call a symmetrical theory of internal relations.

T. H. Irwin has carefully explicated the metaphysical basis for Aristotle’s ethics wherein, it must be admitted, the desire for the final good is part of the human pattern of activity (EAF). But Aristotle equivocates between a psychological description of what everyone desires and ethical advice regarding what everyone should, but only some do, desire. Those who do develop a conception of the final good, of the good to be achieved in a life as a whole, often avoid mistakes in practical reasoning and choice, but not even they are immune from disaster striking or from unforeseen future contingencies forcing them to radically alter their plans. Clear, explicit plans for the future are only marginally more successful than the rough, implicit ones developed by most people. We are easily misled here by the following sort of reasoning: "If x can do A, B, and C, and nothing else can do C, but other things can do A and B, we might describe x’s peculiar function either as ‘doing A, B, and C’ or as ‘doing C"’ (EAE 49). That is, only human beings, it is claimed, can attempt to plan for the future and only they can try to develop a theory regarding their telos, abilities which lull some individuals into thinking that they can in fact perform these tasks unerringly. A more accurate view would be that all human beings characteristically guide their actions by practical reason; the point is not that we should aim at a maximum possible distance from other creatures regarding our ability to imagine how future contingencies will eventually be actualized.

C. Moderation in Metaphysics

Thus far I have made several general remarks about virtue ethics, in particular, and about the relationship between virtue ethics and metaphysics, in general. At this point I would like to draw attention to Hartshorne’s resolution of one serious problem in metaphysics itself, the problem of temporal relations. His resolution consists, I allege, in a moderate view between two extremes. That is, the law of moderation is operative not only in Hartshorne’s ethics but also in his metaphysics. In fact, it is helpful as a heuristic device to use Hartshorne’s moderation in metaphysics to deal in a moderate way with problems in applied ethics. My hope is that the patient reader will be rewarded by Hartshorne’s insightful treatment of philosophical issues surrounding abortion, a treatment which rests four square on his attempt to defend a moderate view of temporal relations. The two extreme views of temporal relations which he criticizes are both symmetrical views whereby human identity can be attributed to a being whether it is viewed in its transition from past to present or if it is viewed in its transition from present to future. These extreme views are, respectively, (1) the Leibnizian one, where all events in a person’s life are internally related to all the others, and (2) the view of Hume and Russell that, strictly speaking, there is no personal identity because each event in "a person’s life" is externally related to the others.

Let us consider the defects in the Leibnizian view first. "If I was already ‘myself’ in childhood, still that self did not have and never can have my adult knowledge" (WM 18-19). That is, in its memories the adult has its childhood, but no child can have its adulthood. There is a partial but not a complete identity between a child and any adult. Leibniz’s unqualified identity fails to take into consideration these implications of temporal becoming for human identity. Do young persons really identify themselves with the elderly persons they may eventually become? Hardly.

If one supposes that a person is simply one reality from before birth until death (or after), then one is in effect denying that with each change in life we have a partly new concrete reality; one would be implying that there is a strictly identical reality with merely new qualities. But, contra the Leibnizian view, to say that Mary is "the same person" day after day and year after year is primarily to say that she does not become a geranium or anything other than a human person, and that she does not become Jane. This leaves open the possibility that Mary on Friday and Mary on Monday are somewhat different realities, both quantitatively (one is older than the other) and qualitatively (Mary on Monday has actually had experiences over the weekend which Mary on Friday could only imagine) (OOTM 104-5). The "identity" between the two Marys is real, but it is an abstract reality rather than any concretely lived experience. That is, genetic identity is a nonstrict identity, as opposed to Leibniz’s (and the opponent to abortion’s) theory of strict identity.

A nonstrict identity is composed of two or more successive concrete actualities with partly identical and partly differing qualities. It makes sense to claim that a person in a later state includes that person in an earlier state, but not vice versa. For example, only I remember my past in the inward way in which I remember it, though even I remember it vaguely and partially (OOTM 104-5). The point is that I-now cannot be adequately described without mentioning my past, but (in distinction to the opponents to abortion) I-then could have been (could only have been!) adequately described without mentioning I-now.

The fact that one’s past self is in some significant sense "another" self should not be underestimated, especially when the issue of abortion is considered (CSPM 8). To claim that a "substance" is an identical entity through time containing successive accidental properties is really a misleading way of describing an individual enduring through change. Successive states are not so much "in" the identical entity as it is in them (CSPM 20). At a given moment every human being is definite, and definite in their history up until that point, but until they die their future is at least partly indefinite, even with respect to the immediate future, and perhaps largely indefinite with respect to the distant future. If it makes sense to say, as it obviously does, that this human being could have had a somewhat different career up until the present, then this individual is a partly indefinite entity. That is, a human being is not, in spite of the Leibnizian view, the same as his career. The latter is an abstraction in comparison with the concreteness of lived experience (CSPM 23).

There is a certain bias in the history of philosophy from which it has painfully tried to free itself; the favoring of one pole of conceptual contrasts at the expense of the other pole. Being has traditionally been preferred to becoming, identity at the expense of diversity, etc. (CSPM 44).¹¹ The Leibnizian view of human identity I am here criticizing clearly exhibits this bias. The hope of defenders of this view has been that by attacking the idea of a partially changing identity one could make secure the true reality or true being of an individual. An unintended consequence of this view is that it leads to determinism. If the future is just as internally related to the present as is the past (i.e., if the present is just as much affected by the future as by the past), then what are normally called future contingencies merely refer to our ignorance of what is already in the cards (CSPM 174). It is no accident that the strict identity view is often based on the theory that God knows with absolute assurance the outcome to future contingencies, a theory which traditionally, and understandably, has run up against the objection that such absolutely certain knowledge would eliminate the possibility of future contingencies. On the theory of strict identity, all change consists in attaching predicates to a strictly identical subject (or substance) which endures throughout the succession of predicates. This seems to imply that substances are eternal in that, being changeless, they are incapable of creation or destruction unless, of course, they are created or destroyed by divine miracle, an implication actually welcomed by Leibniz and implied by some who are opposed to abortion in the miracle of God breathing a soul into a fertilized egg (CSPM 180).

The ordinary use of personal pronouns and nouns is perfectly compatible with the process, nonstrict view of identity I am defending. I am I and not any other person (CSPM 183). The series of experiences of which I have intimate memory contains no members of your series. It is not true that only defenders of strict identity can explain the persistence of character traits, whereas event pluralists who defend nonstrict identity can only give grudging recognition to these traits. Identity is not so much in dispute as its analysis or symmetrical-asymmetrical structure. Obviously I am in some sense numerically the same person I used to be, but it is equally obvious that in some sense I am a different person, even numerically different in that I have more past experiences as constituents of who I am. It is my present, however, which contrasts itself with my past, not the other way around. The old reality enjoyed or suffered no contrast with what came later; at best it vaguely anticipated what came later. "Life is cumulative, and hence asymmetrical in its relatedness" (CSPM 184). The Leibnizian view stumbles in viewing self-identity as merely numerical oneness, with at most a plurality of qualities, a single noun with many adjectives (LP 120).

Genetic identity is a special strand of the causal order of the world, and it rests on the same principle of inheritance from the past as does causality in general. Even the unconscious memories of our earliest moments form part of our individual natures. Once born, or perhaps even as a developed fetus (to be explained later), the particular events which prolong one’s existence are additions to a personal sequence (CSPM 185). By way of contrast, Leibnizian strict identity implies (but this implication is seldom noticed) that nothing a person does or that happens to that person could have been otherwise (CAP 160). I am alleging that in order to avoid the untoward implications of the Leibnizian view one needs to posit the concrete determinate actuality in the present (which in some way preserves its past) as that which "has" properties (CAP 168).

The reasonableness of the theory of nonstrict, temporally asymmetrical identity can be seen when it is contrasted to a second extreme, but equally symmetrical, view. Hume, Russell, and some Buddhists have overstated the non-strictness of genetic identity by claiming that all temporal relations are external, hence strict identity theorists can rightly fear this view (OOTM 105). But before showing what is defective in the theory of purely external relations, I would like to indicate its grain of truth. The theory of purely internal relations starts with a correct intuition regarding the need to explain the persistence of character traits, but it grossly overemphasizes the personal continuity needed to preserve these traits. Likewise, the theory of purely external relations (in Buddhism, especially) starts with the legitimate insight that the qualification of personal identity allows for at least partial identity with others. The "no soul, no substance" doctrine of the Buddhists enables us to understand the Pauline claim that we are members one of another. That is, self-love and love of others are on much the same footing and neither makes much sense without the other, (OOTM 107-8) especially when it is realized that my previous self is to some degree an other self from the one I am now.

From this insight, however, defenders of external relations like Russell show no more hesitation than Leibnizians regarding the acceptance of symmetrical relations. If events in nature are mutually independent, then nature is analogous to a chaos of mutually independent propositions (CSPM 83). The defender of asymmetry (who views a present person as internally related to his past but as externally related to his future) finds it comical to see Russell attacking rationalists like Bradley and Hegel because they had little or no use for anything but internal relations. And it is equally comical to see partisans of purely internal relations like Bradley or Blanshard trying to refute Hume, James, or Russell (CSPM 96).

One defect in the theory of purely external relations is that we do in fact usually talk as though events depend on what happens before but not on what happens afterwards; we do talk as though asymmetry is the case. This in itself does not refute a Hume or a Russell, but it should lead defenders of purely external relations to wonder if believing in events as dependent both ways (i.e., present dependent on past and present dependent on future) is necessarily worse than believing in events as independent both ways (CSPM 147, 213). There is also the familiar difficulty of preserving moral responsibility for one’s past actions if one is not internally related in some way to those actions.

Consider the following clever and, I think, devastating example from Hartshorne:

More complications set in when it is realized that a symmetrical theory of purely internal relations leads, as Hegel and Bradley realized, to monism, whereas a symmetrical theory of purely external relations leads, as Russell realized, to a radical pluralism. Russell’s mistake was in assuming that one had to be either an absolute monist or an absolute pluralist and that one could not benefit from the strengths of internal and external relations (CSPM 216). Defense of purely internal relations leads to the erroneous conclusion that we can only expect what laws governing the internal relations will allow, and the view which emphasized purely external relations should lead to the conclusion that at each moment anything could conceivably happen next (LP 174). Speaking of Perry, James, and Russell, the following astute observation is made by Hartshorne:

D. Implications Regarding Abortion

By now the implications of a theory of human identity based on a theory of asymmetrical temporal relations have been stated at least implicitly. The purpose of this section is to make these implications explicit, an effort which is facilitated by noting the defects in the two theories of symmetrical relations. I will make these implications explicit by noting the texts where Hartshorne himself explicitly refers to abortion or to fetal development.

Most who use the contemporary slogan "respect for life" seem unaware of the vast gulf in quality between experiences open to a fetus compared to experiences possible for a walking, talking child, not to mention the mother of the fetus. The question should be, respect for life on what level? A single human egg cell is alive, but it has no experiences like those of an adult, or a child, or even of an animal with a central nervous system. ¹² Augustine did well by comparing the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy (before the development of the central nervous system, which, as we now know, makes sentiency possible) to a plant. No egg cell, fertilized or not, can simply turn itself into a truly human individual (with sentience as a necessary condition for the truly human). Only years of attention can do that. Just as we need a mean between extremes regarding temporal relations -- avoiding both mystical monism, where all things are interdependent, and the antimetaphysical pluralism of the early Wittgenstein and of Russell, where all things are mutually independent -- we also need a mean between injudicious extremes regarding respect for life (WM 4-5).

If to be a person in the fullest sense is to be conscious, rational, and have a moral sense, then a fetus is, at best, a probability of a person, hence those who equate abortion with murder are engaging in demagoguery. A probability of something is not that something, especially when the probability can only be realized with considerable effort and sacrifice on the part of others (WM 59-60). I am potentially the president of the United States, but I do not insist that "Hail to the Chief" be played when I enter the room. I will probably be a grandfather some day, yet at thirty-nine and with more than a few gray hairs appearing, I nonetheless think it is premature to call me "Grandpa" and to remind me to take my Geritol.

It changes the whole quality of life to learn that there are murderers about, but the embryo is not bothered by, nor is it even conscious of, the fact that there are abortionists about. "The human value of the embryo is essentially potential and future, not actual and present" (WM 125). The functioning which it does actually exhibit is nothing especially exalted when compared to other beings, even a great many nonhuman beings. Of course even the potentiality of a fetus has some value, but this value (even plants have some value) is nothing absolute and should be weighed against the values of those -- especially the mother -- actually functioning at a much higher level (i.e., at the level of sentiency, at the very least, if not at the level of rationality). Indeed, as some "pro-lifers" notice, the aborted fetus could have turned out to be a genius, but this is not the same as actually being a genius. The aborted fetus could also have turned out to be a murderer. It is unclear, to say the least, how one can make the status of a pre-sentient cluster of cells more or less exalted by considering what it might eventually be (WM 126).¹³

The fetus is obviously alive, as is grass, and it is obviously human in the sense that it has human parents and has a human genetic structure. But if what I have said regarding asymmetrical relations and human identity is correct, the primary moral question becomes: When does an individual human life become as valuable as the life of an animal? And the secondary question becomes: When does an individual human life become more valuable than that of a "mere" animal? My response to the first question is: around the fourteenth week of pregnancy, when a central nervous system, and hence sentiency, develops. A response to the second question is much more difficult to make (OOTM 99-101). Not even an infant reasons in any sense equal to or beyond the capacity of dogs, apes, or porpoises, (WM 33) although even the infant is enormously superior to a fertilized egg in many morally relevant respects: levels of sentiency, consciousness, fear, etc. (OOTM 55). From the fact of infant inferiority, however, we should not be driven in a Michael Tooley-like direction¹⁴ toward the moral permissibility of infanticide, but rather toward the protection of the lives of animals. They are actually sentient and it is, as Kai Nielson notes,¹⁵ a fundamental moral axiom to claim that no being that can suffer ought to be forced to suffer unnecessarily.¹⁶

The point I am trying to make here is not only that a fetus is not B moral agent, but also that it must go through a certain period of development to reach the threshold of moral patiency, i.e., sentiency. Only after sentience is acquired can we even begin to compare fetuses to other beings who are not moral agents but who are moral patients: the comatose, nonhuman animals, etc. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how we could consistently generalize the claim that nonsentient beings have rights. For example, if such (vegetative) beings have rights, then human beings would likely starve in that they would have little, if anything, to eat. The equal value of the possible and the actual "is not an axiom that anybody lives by or could live by" (OOTM 101). Even on strictly anthropocentric grounds it is not an axiom with any pragmatic value.

Although not in itself an argument against the opponent to abortion, nor an argument in favor of infanticide, the following consideration by Hartshorne indicates the counter intuitiveness of the theory of strict identity:

Equally problematic is the adjective "innocent" used of fetuses, a term which has at least two senses. It may very well be the case that we ought not to kill the innocent not because they are guiltless but because they are not harming us at this time; that is, there are such things as "innocent threats." Thus, if a fetus poses no harm to the pregnant woman it is innocent in this sense of the term. However, the usual sense of the term contrasts with "guilty" or "culpable." Only if those who saw abortion as morally permissible had ever claimed that fetuses were wicked and ought to be punished could the innocence of the fetus, in this second sense of the term, be a moral consideration (OOTM 102). In this second sense of the term, the "innocence" of the fetus is like that of the animals: an incapacity to distinguish right from wrong but a capacity to experience pain. Here fetal innocence deserves consideration once it has achieved this capacity but not before (OOTM 102-3).

A classic case of human beings becoming entangled in their own language is exhibited when opponents to abortion ask: How would you have liked it if your mother had aborted you? An adequate response would presuppose a responsible use of pronouns. I would neither have liked nor disliked the abortion because before the development of sentiency there would have been no "I" at all, and for some time after the development of sentiency there would have been fetal "innocence" but only a tenuous selfhood at work (OOTM 103).¹⁷ Once again, an understanding of the theory of asymmetrical relations is what enables us to see that:

During the first weeks of pregnancy an embryo is but a colony of cells, "itself" as a whole not an individual at all. Those who are offended by the claim that horses or chimps or whales (OFD; also see OOTM 13, WM 49) deserve more respect than the fetus in the early stages of pregnancy usually resort to a type of question-begging which Peter Singer calls "speciesism": the human fetus in the early stages of pregnancy deserves moral respect just because it is human. To avoid begging the question as to why the embryo deserves moral respect, the opponent to abortion usually resorts to something like what I have called the theory of strict identity based on a symmetrical theory of temporal relations. And if, as I have tried to show, this latter theory (and other symmetrical theories) has more defects than its asymmetrical alternative, then opposition to abortion is, at the very least, questionable.

No doubt defenders of strict identity will conflate the asymmetrical view with the theory of purely external relations by claiming that both theories make human identity too fragile. My response to this claim is, in a strange way, a sympathetic one. In the theory of purely external relations there is no real human identity through time, and in the asymmetrical view human identity is indeed fragile. But it is not "too" fragile. The asymmetrical view leaves human beings "as fragile as they are and not a whit more" (CAP 87).¹⁸

E. Conclusion

The critique of deontological and utilitarian abstractions (as evidenced in the categorical imperative or in the exhortation to maximize happiness) offered by virtue ethicists is enhanced by Hartshorne’s own critique of metaphysical abstractions. According to this latter critique, the ideal of "moderation" is not a detached, static, pure form with a life of its own, which is then imitated by human beings in the world. Rather, moderation enters into the real world only as a constitutive element in real becoming. Once one thinks carefully about the practical implications of the two symmetrical views of temporal relations, one sees that they are both intellectually defective and pragmatically costly (as in the predestinarianism found in a theory of pure internal relations and as in the expansive exoneration promoted by disowning oneself from one’s past in a theory of pure external relations).

Hartshorne usually returns to the traditional term "universals" so as to avoid the extreme "Platonism" (not necessarily held by Plato) of Whitehead’s "eternal objects."’⁹ Although the most abstract metaphysical categories (like "becoming") are time independent, and hence eternal, the other universals, according to Hartshorne, are emergent and contingent, as in "different from Shakespeare," or as in the precise shade of blue in a certain iris, or as in "moderation regarding the issue of abortion." That is, ethical judgments regarding what is moderate in the abortion issue are fallible even when they are alleged to have metaphysical support. But until more support is forthcoming for the theory of pure internal relations it is the opponents to abortion who appear to be quite immoderate.

References

APQ 21 -- Robert Louden. "On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics." American Philosophical Quarterly 21(1984): 227-36.

CAP -- Charles Hartshorne. Creativity in American Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1970.

EAE -- T. H. Irwin. "The Metaphysical and Psychological Basis of Aristotle’s Ethics." Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics. Ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.

LP -- Charles Hartshorne. The Logic of Perfection. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962. OFD -- Charles Hartshorne. "Foundations for a Humane Ethics." On the Fifth Day. Ed. Richard Knowles Morris. Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Press, 1978.

OOTM -- Charles Hartshorne. Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

PCH -- Daniel Dombrowski. "Hartshorne and Plato." The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne. Library of Living Philosophers Series, Vol. XX. Ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991.

WM -- Charles Hartshorne. Wisdom as Moderation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Notes

1. In this section of the article I rely heavily on Gregory Pence. "Recent Work on Virtues," American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984), pp. 281-97; and Gregory Trianosky, "What Is Virtue Ethics All About?,’ American Philosophical Quarter/v 27 (1990), pp. 335-44.

2. Sec Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981) and other works by MacIntyre; and Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978).

3. See James Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). For Hartshorne on rights and duties see. e.g., OFD, and "The Rights of the Subhuman World," Environmental Ethics I (1979), pp. 49-60.

4. On the tension in Hartshorne’s thought between classical and contemporary liberalism, see Randall Morris, Process Philosophy and Political Ideology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).

5. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1981), p. 19.

6. See G. H. Von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (NY: Humanities Press, 1963), and Lester Hunt, "Character and Thought," American Philosophical Quarterly 15(1978), Pp. 177-86.

7. See Theodore Vitali, ‘The Peirceian Influence on Hartshorne’s Subjectivism," Process Studies 7 (1977), pp. 238-49.

8. Jonathan Bennett, "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn," Philosophy 49 (1974), pp. 123-34.

9. Regarding R. M. Hare, see Moral Thinking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); also see G. E. M. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," Philosophy 33 (1958), pp. 01-19; Peter Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

10. Regarding Hartshorne’s criticisms of utilitarianism see Thomas Nairn, "Hartshorne and Utilitarianism," Process Studies 17 (1988), pp. 170-80.

11. Also see LP 17, where the prejudice in favor of being as opposed to becoming is related to the theory of strict identity. If all events in a person’s life are real together (say in the mind of God), then the totality of events simply is, with being and not becoming as the inclusive conception.

12. See my Hartshorne and the Metaphysics of Animal Rights (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

13. Also see an excellent article by Randolph Feezell, "Potentiality, Death, and Abortion," Southern Journal of Philosophy 25 (1987), 39-48. Although the present article is primarily directed against strict identity theory (which is connected with what Feezell calls the conservative view of abortion), it also has implications for Feezell’s moderate view, which criticizes the casual attitude some (he calls them liberals) may have toward the fetus, which is a "soon-to-be-actual" person (47). At times Feezell is careful to refer to the fetus as a future (i.e., a possible) person, and then attempts to attribute rights to the fetus on that basis. But this attempt, I suggest, is only successful when Feezell almost imperceptibly slips into the strict identity (i.e., conservative) view. Consider his claim that "the death of the fetus is a severe misfortune for the person whose possibilities have been negated" (46 -- my emphasis; note that here Feezell does not say "future person"). He also says that "at conception a unique chromosomal combination occurs, and that is the basis for speaking of some identifiable potentiality which will be born and will develop into that person whose history we must now morally consider" (44-45 -- my emphasis). My criticisms are as follows: if the fetus is a potential (i.e., a future) person, as Feezell sometimes admits, why should we grant it rights now? To say that it should have rights now because it definitely will be born and definitely will develop into an infant is to subtly slip into the strict identity theory based on symmetrical temporal relations. That is, if Feezell had said that the fetus may eventually be born and that it will perhaps develop into a person a more accurate (from the point of view of asymmetry) description of the fetus’s mode of existence would be given, such that there would be less of a tendency to treat the fetus as a bearer of rights. Feezell is correct that fully actual persons are the subjects of misfortune (45), but I am not convinced that potential persons, because they exist in space and have a history, are also (albeit in a "weaker sense") subjects of misfortune. The question is: what sort of actuality does the historical being in question have? Rocks also occupy space and have a historical route of occasions making up their careers. Feezell is also correct in pointing out the asymmetry we are willing to adopt regarding prenatal nonexistence and posthumous nonexistence (43). We are not unhappy about the former, but it makes perfect sense to be bothered about the latter. I do not think that death simply as such is an evil, but it does make sense to grieve over a premature or ugly or violent death of a sentient being. But these types of death bother us because an actual person who was capable of receiving violence or who actually had hopes for the future (hopes which existed in the present) was cut down. In the end, however, Feezell’s moderate view (which leans toward the "conservative view") is not too much different in practical effect from my or Hartshorne’s moderate view (which leans toward the "liberal view") in that I am only delivering a carte blanche for abortion in the early stages of pregnancy and pointing out that the fetus in the later stages of pregnancy has a moral status analogous to that of an animal, a status which I think deserves considerable attention on our part.

14. Michael Tooley, "Abortion and Infanticide," Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (Fall, 1972), 37-65. Tooley is correct in searching for a morally relevant threshold for moral patiency, but it is by no means clear why he so casually rejects (or how he could reject!) sentiency as such a criterion. Is he really willing to claim that a being which can experience suffering does not have the right not to have suffering inflicted on it unnecessarily?

15. Kai Nielson, "Persons, Morals and the Animal Kingdom," Man and World II (1978), 233.

16. See my The Philosophy of Vegetarianism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).

17. Also see my "Starnes on Augustine’s Theory of Infancy," Augustinian Studies 11 (1980), 125-133.

18. For a summary of some of the scientific research which supports the view that the fetus is not a prepackaged human being (e.g., even something so relatively simple as a fingerprint arises at least in part due to chance events not present in a fertilized egg) see Charles Gardner, "Is an Embryo a Person?," The Nation (Nov. 13, 1989). 1 would also like to thank T. E. McGarrity for comments on a previous version of this article.

19. Regarding Hartshorne’s and Whitehead’s relationship to Plato once again see my "Hartshorne and Plato" (PCH). Also, regarding Hartshorne and abortion, see two other pieces by Hartshorne: "Scientific and Religious Aspects of Bioethics," in Theology and Bioethics, ed. by E. E. Shelp (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985) and ‘Concerning Abortion: An Attempt at a Rational View," The Christian Century (Jan. 21, 1981). Finally, see H. Tristram Engelhardt, "Natural Theology and Bioethics," in The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991). where the author emphasizes the role of the divine perspective in Hartshorne’s approach to abortion. This author can also be used to point out that Hartshorne is not always consistent in his approach to sentient beings.

Substance metaphysics, or the view that the world is composed of individual entities which have properties and are related to each other in various ways, has been under steady attack from various quarters for around 300 years.¹ It is a great tribute to its staying power that it has not disappeared completely. Indeed, it has, in many ways, proven itself an extremely adaptable species of metaphysics.² Its adaptability is so remarkable that the process philosopher Ivor Leclerc has attempted to adapt it to process metaphysics. Since one of the most famous exponents of process thought has called the western notion of substance a chief cause of moral evil and selfishness in the western world (WVR 6), it is astonishing that another famous process philosopher should have tried a reconciliation between process thought, with its emphasis on relations and actions, and Aristotelian substantialism, with its emphasis on things and states of being.³

Leclerc’s desire to reach such a reconciliation springs from his love for the history of philosophy, and for the now neglected branch of philosophy once known as the philosophy of nature⁴ (PN 19-34). Leclerc thinks it vital for any sound metaphysics that it ground itself on a proper understanding of the nature of physical existence. But according to Leclerc, such a grounding is all the more difficult in modem times, since the very concepts we use to understand nature have become largely subconscious (PN4-8). Since the time of Kant (PN 11-12), explicit and conscious philosophical study of the natural world has been abandoned, and consequently the problems raised in the struggle of modern philosophers (Descartes, Leibniz, and the Atomists) with the traditional Aristotelianism of their day (which found its greatest exponent in the forbidding figure of the Jesuit Francis Suarez), have never been answered.

According to Leclerc, coming up with an answer requires a reinterpretation of the notion of substance that would allow us to regard composite material substances as true substances which are yet composed of smaller substances, down to the ultimate smallest substances, or "minima" (PN 122-24). This, in turn, requires a reinterpretation of the Aristotelian notions of potency, act, and form, in the light of both modem thought (esp. Leibniz), and contemporary process thought. Thus Leclerc says both substance and relation are equally fundamental, since for him substances themselves can consist of the relations which hold between smaller substances.

This paper will attempt an assessment of Leclerc’s radical position, using as a foil the thought of the baroque scholastic, Francis Suarez.⁵ The latter was picked to fulfill such a function both because he represents the most complete summation of the older Aristotelian theory of substance Leclerc attempts to appropriate and reinterpret, and because he was the most important scholastic figure for the age that Leclerc sees as both the turning point in the history of the philosophy of nature, and as the golden age of such a philosophy, namely, the modern age (PN 194-95).

As will become clear in the course of this paper, I am very skeptical concerning the success of Leclerc’s adaptation of Aristotelian and Scholastic thought. By the time he gets through with such an adaptation, not only has the meaning of terms been pushed to the outer limits of analogy to teeter on the brink of equivocation, but it appears that the very law of non-contradiction itself has been violated. Before attempting to show all this, however, we must first explain Leclerc’s own view, and before attempting to do that, we must first explain a certain central problem in the traditional metaphysics of substance which Leclerc’s view was posited to solve. Only by understanding this problem can we appreciate the subtlety and appeal of Leclerc’s view, however untenable we will ultimately judge it to be.

I: The Problem of the Unity of Material Substances

According to what I shall call "substance metaphysics" the world is made up of distinct beings, each of which has an existence in itself, rather than in another; these beings are called "substances". Everyday examples of such would be a tree, a cat, a human. These beings are characterized by attributes which exist in them, and these attributes are called "accidents" because they "befall" substances. Everyday examples of such would be a cat’s color, a tree’s size, or a person’s idea of justice. Both substances and accidents have essences on the traditional view. The essence of a thing is what it most fundamentally is (e.g. a person, a cat, or a color), and what allows us to put it in a class distinct from other classes (as a dog is in a class with other dogs, that is distinct from the class of cats). A substantial essence will be an essence which gives substantial being of a certain sort, as the soul may be held to give one substantial being as a human. An accidental essence will be an essence which gives only accidental being, as a person’s skin color, for example, or the size of his nose.

In addition to existing in themselves, substances are held by substance metaphysicians to be singular or one in a way that precludes a certain sort of multiplicity. Since substances are the ultimate furniture of the world, so to speak, or what most truly and ultimately exists, they cannot be collections of things. Rather, substances are the fundamental things which are collected. Thus a soldier is a substance, but the army he is a member of is not; it is a collection of substances, each of which, like the soldier, is a person.⁶ Collections are, in traditional language, called "accidental unities", or aggregates, while individual substances are called "per se" unities, because they are held to be single, complete beings, not heaps of other beings.⁷

Problems with this traditional view of substance arise when we consider that what we ordinarily take to be substances are in themselves collections, at least in some sense. Thus the soldier we just mentioned is not simple -- he is a composite being, as is apparent even to common sense, since he consists of a number of extended parts: his limbs, organs, tissues, etc. And the knowledge gained from modern science shows that he is further constituted by a wide array of distinct chemicals, atoms, and sub-atomic particles.

Faced with the problem of how to account for the substantial unity of such common sense substances in light of the multiplicity of their extended parts, most philosophers have taken one of the two following positions:

1) They have affirmed the soldier is one substance, and have denied that the parts that compose him are substances. This is the view of Suarez, which I will carefully explain below. Suffice to say here that on this view the parts of the soldier are but a disposition of the matter that is a partial constituent of him. Matter in itself is a pure potency for being (MD 13,5,11), which gets extended, or spread out, we might say, by the accident of quantity, preparing it to receive various forms which actualize its potency or capacity (MD 15, 1, 18-19). In the case of the soldier, the matter is spread out and structured to form a human body, which is quickened and made to be the body of a human by the human soul which informs it. None of the parts of this body, then, are distinct substances; they are accidents of the matter of the human which dispose it for the human form, and which are given their substantial being by the human form or soul (MD 15, 10, 30). They have no other substantial being than that of the human taken as a whole, and if they are severed from the body, and no are no longer actualized by the human soul, they are transformed into new substances which have new, non-human, forms⁸ (MD 15, 10, 38).

This view names the substantial form "act" and "actuality", since it actualizes the capacity of matter, when properly disposed, for being human, while the matter itself is called a "potency". Matter is thus determinable stuff, and form the intrinsic determiner or actuality of matter, as the shape of a bronze statue is the intrinsic determiner of the bronze, actualizing its capacity to be a statue of such and such a sort.⁹

2) The second view philosophers have traditionally taken in light of this problem, denies that the human soldier, if by the term "human soldier" we mean to refer to the composite of soul and body, is a single substance, and holds instead that the tiniest parts composing him are. Philosophers who hold this view seem to do so on the ground that it is absurd to think that quantity is, as such, an attribute or accident of a purely potential matter. Instead quantity or extension is the plurality of a number of things existing simultaneously. No single thing can be extended; rather, extension holds only of groups, just as only a group taken together can number five.

The most famous advocate of this point of view is Leibniz, who argued that the only real substances are simple, unextended points, endowed with force. These he named "monads"¹⁰ (M 2-3). These monads group themselves together to form the objects of our everyday experience, none of which are single substances, and all of which are aggregates of substances (i.e., of monads)¹¹ (M 70). Thus our soldier is an aggregate, consisting of a self- conscious monad, or mind, which is the soldier’s real self,¹² and a body, which is itself a collection of an infinite number of monads, ruled, as it were, by the soldier’s mind (M 62).

Leclerc’s originality consists in the fact that he considers both of the above positions to be partially right, and partially wrong. Both are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. Thus position (1) is right in affirming that the soldier is a substance (PN 122-23), wrong in denying the parts of his body are (PN 128), while position (2) is right in affirming that the parts of the soldier’s body are substances, wrong in denying the soldier as a whole is a substance. In other words Leclerc holds both that a) the soldier is a single, complete substance, and b) the soldier’s parts are complete substances; propositions that Suarez would say are incompatible. How Leclerc tries to reconcile the apparent incompatibility of these two propositions, and why he ultimately fails to do so, are the topics we must now turn to.

Part II: The Dynamic View of Ivor Leclerc

Leclerc develops and articulates his own view of substance in the context of a complex dialectical examination of a number of historical theories. Chief among these are Aristotle’s, Leibniz’s and Whitehead’s. Leclerc gives a very thorough analysis of seventeenth-century thought about composite substances, and contrasts this thought with the Aristotelian theory that preceded it. He then uses Leibniz to oppose most of the tenets of other (less Aristotelian) seventeenth-century thinkers, retaining only one feature of their doctrine. Finally, he modifies Leibniz’s theory of substance by making use of the Aristotelian notions of potency and act. He filters these notions, however, through the sieve of process metaphysics.

In presenting Leclerc’s view we shall briefly summarize the results of his analysis of seventeenth-century thought. We shall then show how Leclerc, by using the philosophy of that century’s own great rebel, Leibniz, criticized most seventeenth-century thought. Finally we shall show how Leclerc attempts to make up for insufficiencies in Leibniz’s view by appealing to an Aristotelianism that is reinterpreted in the light of process thought.

Leclerc sees seventeenth-century thought as of great importance for present concerns, because it was the last century that had a clearly articulated philosophy of nature. As such it still, for better or worse, is the basis of the almost sub-conscious thoughts the modern individual has about the nature of physical reality. Though Leclerc carefully locates his thought in the context of the natural philosophy of the seventeenth century, he modifies it considerably, as we have said, by drawing especially on the insights of Aristotle, the schoolmen, and Leibniz.

Leclerc’s critique of seventeenth-century thought actually arises from a dialectical interchange between that thought and the Aristotelian philosophy of nature that preceded it. This makes perfect sense, because that century’s physical philosophy articulated and formed itself in conscious opposition to Aristotelian physics. It might be helpful in understanding Leclerc’s own views therefore, to list the theses of the Aristotelian view that came under attack in that century, followed by the modern objections to them.

1) Aristotle. Matter is not a complete substance in itself, but a pure capacity, a stuff out of which things are made. It needs to be completed by a substantial form to actually exist (PN 21).

1’) Seventeenth-Century Thought. Matter is a complete substance in itself, needing nothing else to actualize it. Form exists only as a separate substance (i.e., as the human soul) (PN 23).

2) Aristotle. The source of action and of motion is intrinsic to substances. Their very natures demand they act in certain characteristic ways (PN 20).

2’) Seventeenth-Century Thought. The source of action and of motion is entirely outside substances, which are completely passive and inert (PN 24).

3) Aristotle. There are many kinds of change: in quality, quantity and place (PN 23-24).

3’) Seventeenth-Century Thought. There is only one kind of change, change of place (PN 24).

4) Aristotle. The middle-sized objects of our experience, such as dogs, cats, trees, people, etc. are true substances. The components that make them up do not actually exist in them, but are taken up by the higher substantial form of the whole (PN 132).

4’) Seventeenth-Century Thought. Middle-sized objects are not true substances; they are aggregates of true substances, or atoms, which are the tiniest material bodies possible.(PN 37).

5) Aristotle. Extension is an accident of bodies, never their very essence. Qualities are real, and far more important than quantities (PN 144).

5’) Seventeenth-Century Thought. Extension is of the very essence of bodies. Qualities are only phenomenal (PN 58).

Of course, Leclerc is well aware that not all of these seventeenth-century divergencies from Aristotelian physics would be accepted by every seventeenth-century thinker, but he takes them as typical of the time, and further holds that all of them have been very powerful influences on scientific thought since that century.

With the help of Leibniz, Leclerc opposes virtually every one of the fundamental tenets of seventeenth-century thought, with the exception only of the one that says composite substances are composed of simple substances (4’); but even this he greatly modifies, as we shall see, since he also regards composites as true substances, though of a different ontological nature than their components.

Leclerc’s criticism of seventeenth-century thought takes its rise from two tenets of Leibniz; these are that extension is phenomenal only, pertaining to a multitude in relation, and not to any single entity, and that the source of the activity of any physical being is from within. These two Leibnizian tenets allow Leclerc further to deny the seventeenth century’s claim that matter is a complete substance, and that the only sort of change is local. In order to argue against the seventeenth century’s view that compound bodies are not real substances, Leclerc is forced to go beyond Leibniz, however.

Let us first see where Leclerc follows Leibniz, before going into their differences. Leibniz had argued, against most seventeenth-century thinkers, that extension could not be a real attribute of anything, and that all real substances are unextended (M 3). Leibniz’s reason for holding this is because extension 15 a multiplicity of parts, and each part is, itself, something really distinct from the other parts, able to exist on its own from those other parts. And the fact that parts may be strongly joined as, say, two pieces of steel welded together, does not make them any more one than they were before being joined. They are, in reality, no more truly one than individual sheep in a flock are, or a pair of Siamese twins.¹³ Since every substance is one, and every extended object is many, no substance is extended.

Leibniz had also argued against most seventeenth-century thinkers, that whatever is purely inert, and without any capacity to act, is nothing, so that the source of the action of all things is intrinsic to them. His ultimate metaphysical reason for this is that if this were not the case, no source of action could be found: "If nothing is active by its own nature, there will be nothing active at all, for what reason for activity can there be, if not in the nature of the thing?" (L2: 876)

Leclerc fully agrees with these two assertions of Leibniz, and he further agrees with Leibniz’s arguments for them (PN 84-90). His disagreements with Leibniz, however, start with Leibniz’s conception of the nature of the activity of monads. Leibniz held that no individual substance really acted on any other, and, consequently, that the only action of substances was intrinsic to them, consisting in thinking and willing.

According to Leclerc (and he seems right on this), Leibniz inherited the Neoplatonic views that relations are not real, and that thinking is but the entertaining of pictures of things in the mind. For Leibniz the first of these actually follows from the second. His monads, being unextended and thus not in space, were conceived by him as being minds whose only activity was to mirror in their thought all other monads (M 7-14). Of course, the degree of clarity with which they did so varied, and it was this that distinguished or individuated them. But at the root of all their activity was the same thing -- thought. Thus each monad was a little world reflecting all others, but in itself it was not really related to the others, nor did it act on them.

This latter point is crucial for Leclerc. He thinks, rightly, that the reason the monads are not really related to each other is precisely that they cannot act on each other; and they cannot act on each other because their only activity is the contemplation of the mental images they have of each other (NPE 268-69). Leclerc suggests, however, that such a doctrine is neither warranted nor desirable. It is not warranted because even if one does accept Leibniz’s view that the ultimates are unextended (as Leclerc does) one need not accept that their only activity is thought -- for Leibniz simply assumes this, he never demonstrates it (NPE 267-69). Leclerc seems too hard on Leibniz at this point, for Leibniz attempted to demonstrate that the only activity of monads is mental from his view that transient action is impossible (M 7). His arguments for this, however, seem very weak, as C. D. Broad has powerfully argued (LI 48). At any rate, they have not convinced many philosophers other than Leibniz. Assuming, therefore, Leibniz to be mistaken in thinking transient action is impossible, we can agree with Leclerc that it is an unwarranted assumption that all monads do is think.

But not only is Leibniz’s doctrine that the monads cannot act on each other unwarranted, according to Leclerc; it is also undesirable. If we assume it we cannot explain the nature of things which have structures intelligible only as wholes, such as living beings (PN 117-18). The parts of such beings must be related, and intimately so, according to some overall pattern or structure which will be their substantial form, to use Aristotelian terminology. In making his own contribution to the philosophy of nature, Leclerc seeks to build on Leibniz’s notion that ultimates are I) minima and 2) active, by modifying Leibniz’s view so that it can account for the substantial nature of such organic wholes as plants, men, cats, and even molecules.

To establish a metaphysics which will allow him to do this, Leclerc first seeks to demolish the Neoplatonic notion that all relations are set up by the mind, with its unfortunate consequence that the minima or monads are not related to each other in a way that would allow for the formation of organic wholes which are not mere heaps, but have some character as wholes (PN 146-47). Leclerc’s way of doing this is simple in its basic idea, though its details are complex. He supposes that the minima do act on each other, and not only act but react, in such a way that their composite acting is greater than each or than the acting of each. To see what he means, consider the following example. Consider two substances, A and B. A acts, in some unspecified but real way, on B, affecting B in its being. The act of A on B is already more than just A or B; it is rooted in them, so to speak, but is not a real accident or feature of either individually, for it is a "going out from A and a landing in B." At the same time, according to Leclerc, that A acts on B, B will act on A, for to be really acted on or affected by another thing is in some way to also act on and affect it; there is thus no such thing as absolute potency (NPE 295).

The action produced by the interactings of A and B will be other than A or B, more than they are, and also more than the acting of either A on B, or B on A, taken individually. To explain the action one will have to refer to both, but to both only in relation to each other. This notion of the real interactings of minima on each other is the basis of Leclerc’s doctrine of the nature of the physical existent, and of his view that complex substances literally consist in the actions produced by the interaction of the minima that comprise them (PN 148-50). The emphasis is thus not on the entity of the minima themselves, but on their acting on other minima, according to some pattern or form. The precise nature of this acting we shall presently turn to, but it should be clear at this point that Leclerc’s opinion that a composite substance literally consists of the acting of the minima that compose it, is a very novel view of substance, to say the least, and one which, intuitively, seems fraught with difficulties, since the traditional view of substance is that it is that which acts, not activity or action itself

Having briefly stated the fundamental insight which grounds Leclerc ‘s theory, I wish to examine it in detail. In order to do so, it would be helpful to compare and contrast it with the theory it is most similar to, namely the hylomorphic theory, represented in this paper by Suarez. We can, in this way, see Leclerc’s view as an attempt to mediate between the seventeenth-century thought of Leibniz on the one hand, and the thought of the schoolmen on the other, coming up with a third view that he thinks combines the strength of what is best in both seventeenth-century thought and in scholasticism, while avoiding their weaknesses.

Leclerc appropriates from hylomorphism the act/potency doctrine in order to explain how a compound substance can yet have substantial unity. That the unity of compound material substances is the key problem involved in the account of such substances, Leclerc sees quite clearly.

Leclerc’s solution to how one can have compounds that are yet single, complete substances, and not heaps or aggregates of substances, like a pile of rocks, is grounded on the old Aristotelian notions of potency and act. Leclerc radically reinterprets these in a relational way, making the unity of a substance to consist, not in a simple actualizing principle (substantial form as act), but in the relational acting of the various substances involved in the constitution of the compound. To see clearly Leclerc’s originality in this regard it will be helpful to remind the reader of the older scholastic view of Suarez, and then to present Leclerc’s solution, noting both its similarities and differences from the older view.

In this matter, Suarez holds that in order for a composite to be "per se" and substantially one, it must be made up of incomplete entities, related to each other as matter, or determinable stuff, to form, or determining act¹⁴ (MD 4,3, 8). "Act" here must not be equated with "action"; rather, "act" refers to the intrinsic quality, as it were, that determines the potency of matter to be such and such, in the way that the shape of a piece of clay determines its potentiality to be a certain shape. For Suarez it cannot be the case that both of the entities comprising a composite substance be form, or act, as form is complete and actual in itself, and can only be further completed accidentally, that is, can only be further completed by various accidental attributes existing in it, which do not change it essentially, but only alter it, as a change of the color of a substance, for example, does not make a new substance, but only alters an existing one. Hence the determinable element in a composite substance is the pure potency of matter which is ordered to form as that which substantially completes it.

It cannot be overstressed that for Suarez there cannot be more than one substantial form to a composite, because form is act, and act is being, so from two forms two beings, not one, arise (MD 13, 3, 11). Of course, if the forms are accidental there can be many of them in the same substance, provided that they are not essentially contrary (as large and small, for example). But that is because the very nature of accidental forms is to exist in another, and from many accidental forms there arises only an accidental unity (MD 4, 3, 13). Substance, and the substantial form which constitutes substance, have a kind of being, being "in se" which is inimical to existing in another -- hence there is only one substantial form to a composite substance (MD 15, 10). In this way Suarez holds that the composite cannot be constituted by more than one actual principle -- it can only be constituted by a potential principle, matter, and an actual principle, form. Any other actual principle, added to the substantial form, can only be an accidental one (MD 13,3,11).

Three points should be noted concerning this view: (1) The components of a substance cannot be related as substance to substance, and more particularly the potential principle cannot be a substance. It is true that for some scholastics (including Suarez) the human soul, which is the human form and actualizing principle, can be a partial substance having an essential existence of its own (A 1, 12). But the matter, or potential principle, if it is to be given complete essential being through form, and is to share in the form’s existence, cannot naturally exist in and of itself as a substance, else there would be two substances, not one, in the composite¹⁵ (EE 2, 3). (2) Form is act, taken not as activity, like thinking or running or speaking, but as actualizing principle of being, as that which forms or makes to be such and such (MD 12, 3, 3). (3) Form is a certain partial entity which confers on matter its essential being, making it to be what it actually is, such as a tree, a pig, or a flower (MD 15,5, 1). It is, as the principle of unity, a part of the substance, but a part which binds the whole into one; in actualizing it gives essential being, and in giving essential being, it of course gives true substantial unity.¹⁶ But it could not give unity were it not itself a simple unity. Thus, although the scholastics held that every substance other than God is a composite in some sense, they held that the principle of the being and unity of those substances, the substantial form, is itself a simple act.

Let us turn now from the scholastic theory of Suarez to Leclerc’s theory. What does he accept and what does he reject of the older view? He accepts the notion that the substantial unity of the composite substance can only be explained in terms of the notions of potency and act (PN 126-27). He further accepts that act or actuality is, in some way, the source of the being and therefore of the unity of substances (PN 126-27). He rejects, however, the idea that the component parts of a substance cannot in themselves, and independently of their relation to the composite substance, be true substances (PN 128). In this he accepts the seventeenth-century notion that composite substances are composed of minimal or atomic substances. Further, he rejects the notion that form is an entitative act; rather it is the form or character of a relational activity (PN 137). For Leclerc actuality is thus not what the scholastics would call "first act", or the act that makes a thing to be a certain sort of thing (that by which a flower is a flower, for example); rather it is a process, a change, and an activity. It is a relation between substances, not the intrinsic ground of an independently existing substance. Finally, it is not the same as form, for form, according to Leclerc, is that which determines that activity as having a certain, definite, structure.

We need to examine each of these key points of Leclerc’s theory individually, beginning with the notion that the unity of a composite substance can only be accounted for by recourse to the principles of potency and act. This point is relatively obvious and simple according to Leclerc. For if the constituent substances are not potential with respect to the larger composite substance, if they remain "in every respect fully actual, then a compound substance with them as constituents is impossible" (NPE 305). Therefore in relation to the whole compound unity, the constituent substances must be potential. So far there is agreement between Leclerc and Suarez. Leclerc is not finished yet, however, and it is his next point which is the key to all his divergences from Suarez. For Leclerc does not accept the notion that the constituents of the compound substances must be merely substantial principles having no complete existence of their own; rather he accepts the seventeenth-century notion that compound substances are made up of substances which in themselves remain actual substances, and he even insists that this is necessary in order that they be able to act in such a way as to constitute a compound substance (NPE 305).

This being the case, however, how can they come together to form a single compound substance? Why should they not be regarded as simply a number of substances which are indeed really related in virtue of their mutual acting on each other, but independent with regard to substantial being?

The answer is that Leclerc thinks that relations, if they are founded on real interactions between substances, have enough being to constitute a new substantial unity, and hence a new substance. This in turn is based on Leclerc’s dynamism, on his acceptance of the view that insofar as a thing is active, it is; and insofar as it is, it is one (NPE 300). It is thus that the relational activity of the constituents of the compound substance binds and unifies them into a single substantial being and unity. Leclerc insists over and over again that his theory is different from those of all others before him because it recognizes the reality of relations founded on mutual interacting, and that the action produced by such an interacting transcends the constituents, and indeed emerges as a new substance.

Leclerc, then, conceives the actuality which binds the composite substance together in a totally different way from the way in which the actuality of the substantial form makes material substances to be one in the Suarecian theory. For, as Leclerc notes, the schoolmen conceived actuality to be the substance in "a final, achieved, and thus static state" (NPE 308). For them actuality was primarily the actuality of being a certain sort of thing; it was not process or change. Thus pure act, or God, though completely actual, was for them also unchanging. ¹⁷

Leclerc’s theory, in contrast to the scholastic, static, view of actuality, sees actuality as "the substance in relation… and there can be no relation actualized apart form the acting, the relating. So the substance, and hence the relation actualized must necessarily be the substance en-energia, in act" (NPE 308). For all his borrowing from Aristotle, and for all his disagreements with Whitehead, Leclerc remains a process thinker.

The view that actuality is activity rather than primal act of being leads Leclerc to his final disagreement with the scholastic, and hence Suarecian theory: his notion that form is distinct from actuality. Form for Leclerc is neither act taken as the static first act of the scholastics, nor even act taken as activity, the scholastic second act, but rather the specific character and structure of an activity -- for example, the character of the activity which gives rise to the peculiar geometrical shapes characteristic of different molecules (PN 142-49). It is important to note, however, that form is not to be simply identified with these shapes, for shape, being a characteristic of extension, is phenomenal for Leclerc, not real; it is the result of a relation (or better, of a relating) which is formed or determined in such a way that it gives rise to a specific and a unique shape (PN 142-49).

Part III: The Suarecian Criticism of Leclerc

Having given a detailed examination of Leclerc’s view, we now attempt a criticism of it from the standpoint of the more traditional substance theory of Francis Suarez. The question that Suarez would ask of Leclerc is, of course, whether or not in making the component parts of complex substances themselves substances, Leclerc can use their activity to unify them into one substance. And there is no doubt but that Suarez would answer negatively. His reasons for so answering would be based on three aspects of Leclerc’s view that he would find untenable: (1) the notion that action itself could constitute the substantial form of a complex substance, (2) the notion that there are emergent beings arising from a whole which are not formally in the parts, (3) the notion that minima remain, in themselves, actual substances even while constituting a complex substance. We take up each of these in turn.

(1) Leclerc’s view that formed action can constitute the substantial form of a composite substance is founded on his process view of substance. According to Leclerc, process thinking regards the very existence of substances themselves as a kind of activity, the activity of continually coming to be. For Whitehead, and process thinkers generally, existence is dynamic, and there is no aspect of things which is free from change.

It might be noted here that the notion that existence is a kind of acting, that it is existing, bears some resemblance to the Thomistic notion of the act of existing (esse). Nevertheless, both the Thomistic tradition, and scholasticism in general, distinguished act taken as the completed result of an action, as its perfection, and act taken as the action, or the becoming, by which a completed act comes to be. For Suarez action in the sense of a change is not even an accident of substance, for its whole being is relative to that which it effects.

In refusing to make action a full accident, Suarez asserted the affinity of action with potency; action is the act of potency so far as it is in potency. It is not pure potency, but so long as it is action or movement, neither is it act. It is the in-between of potency to its act, and what is true act, the result of potency, is not in the process of becoming or change; it is the rest at the end of change. It is the product, the effect of change. The painter’s process of coloring a house red is a continual motion of potency to act and it has neither the status of a pure potency nor a complete being; yet absolutely speaking it remains more on the side of potency than act. On the other hand, the redness of the house that is the result of the painter’s action is not in any way a change or a process. It is completed act, it is the act of the redness of the house. ¹⁸

If Suarez could not accord an act taken as an action of change even the status of a real accident, but located it in the sphere of potential and relative being, then he surely would not have held that formed action could constitute the substantial being of anything. Yet, whether or not he would be right in this would require a full examination of the differences separating scholastic from process thought on this matter. I will content myself, therefore, by simply noting that if one is to maintain a metaphysical pluralism, one must hold there is a distinction between immanent action and transient action. Immanent action is the action of a living thing whereby it affects its own being in some way. Examples would be digestion in plants, sensation in animals, or thought in humans. Transient action is the action whereby any agent, living or non-living, affects the being of another thing in some way. Examples would be the heating action of fire, or cooling action of water.

Now surely the form of a thing, which constitutes it as what it is, must be an immanent action if it is to be an action. But the action that constitutes Leclerc’s complex substance is not immanent; for it is the unified action of the minima of the complex substance on each other. Should it be objected that it is transient action only with regard to the minima, but immanent action with regard to the complex, we respond that that begs the question, for it presupposes that something could be constituted in its essential being by the transient actions of other beings, which is exactly what needs proof.

(2) The second criticism concerns Leclerc’s insistence that in acting on each other substances produce qualities that are not contained in them separately. Leclerc asserts the notion of emergent properties resulting from action in several places, and he is quite clear that these emergent properties are not mere mixtures of the properties that go to make them up; they are new creations, qualitatively different from their constituents.

Suarez would urge, against the notion that there are emergent properties of a compound which are not simply the mixture of the properties of its constituents, that all the real properties of a composite must be found within its constituents; the essential being of the composite can in no way transcend its constituents as united (MD 36, 3, 7). This is because the distinction between the composite and its constituents can only be one of the inclusive to the included. That is, the whole is compared to each of its constituent parts singly as that which includes that constituent part, plus other parts. But this means that the whole cannot be anything over and above the parts joined together. If it were, the composite substance would be an entity really outside of and distinct from its parts, which is absurd.

From this argument Suarez concludes that whatever real properties there are in the composite must have come from and indeed be in the parts. No new accident or substance could arise from the union of the parts, save those that can be accounted for simply in terms of the union of those parts (MD36, 3, 10). Thus matter as actualized by form is given a determinate "to be" by form, and form is given a subject to act on. But this is accounted for by the parts in union. Form without matter is not complete, nor is matter without form. But there can be no emergent property which is not already seen to be within the matter or the form. If it is objected that the composite is a new entity distinct from form and matter, Suarez answers that it is not an entity distinct from form and matter as joined, and thus that whatever is formal in it, is in the substantial form taken as separate from the union -- there can be no new form over and above the substantial form that arises from the union of form with matter.

What is crucial to note in Suarez’s argument is that he is not saying that there are no attributes characteristic of the composite which are not characteristic of the parts. For example, the power of vision is of the composite animal and not of either the animal’s soul or its body. This is because vision requires a sense organ (arising from the body) and certain non-material sensible powers (arising from the soul). But one can see then that the power of vision arises from the joining of soul and body, in the same way the power to grind wheat arises from the joining of the hardness of a rock with the motive force of a hand. There is no mysterious transcending of the being of the parts in any of this; the properties which arise in the composites are seen to be the result of a simple joining of part to part.

For Leclerc this is not the case; according to him the very substantial form of the composite is not the substantial form of the parts -- it is some new substantial form which transcends them. For Suarez this would be to get something from nothing -- if you start with two substantial forms and join them together, you have two substantial forms joined together, not two, plus a third one arising from their union.

It could be objected that Suarez is here contradicting his expressed opinion that the forms of compounds, and especially of living beings, are essentially distinct from the forms of the elements that comprise them, since compounds have "nobler" qualities than elements, and this requires a nobler form (MD 15, 10, 48). The point, however, is that for Suarez this means the forms of compounds cannot be mixtures of the forms of the elements; they are entirely new forms, which do away with the forms of the elements, and retain those forms only as material dispositions. Thus when a compound is generated from a mixture of elements, the elements, in their mixture, so act on the matter in them, that it becomes disposed for the reception of a new and higher form. On the arrival of this new form, the forms of the elements perish, and only those dispositions they introduced into matter which are necessary for the existence of the new form remain (MD 15, 10, 50). Thus it is for Suarez that the constituent parts of compounds are not the substantial forms of the elements, but matter and the new, more perfect form of the compound.

(3) Now we come to what would be Suarez’s third and final objection to Leclerc, and in it we come to the very heart of the whole question of substantial unity for Suarez. It is an objection that will lead us so deep into his thought that we will find we are carried back to the metaphysically primordial distinction between "is" and "is not’, between "sameness" and "otherness", between "yes" and "no". For the father of metaphysics, Parmenides, being could never be other than what it is -- and since being is always what it is, it cannot change, nor can it be multiplied. The Parmenidian insistence that being is what it is, and is distinct from what it is not, is retained in all the great Greek thinkers. And for the schoolmen the Parmenidian notion is the first principle of metaphysics -- "being is being and it is distinct from non-being".

Suarez, however, like Aristotle, could deny neither multiplicity nor change. He held both that all created things are characterized by attributes distinct from each other, and that all created things change -- in this way they become other than themselves; but, and this is an all important "but", they never become other than themselves qua themselves, but only qua certain accidental features which inhere in them (MD 15, 10, 45). The Aristotelian reply to Parmenides, which does not question Parmenides’ basic principle, is the doctrine of accidents. This doctrine states that everything, so long as it remains what it is, cannot change what it is -- it may, however, change accidentally by becoming the subject of new accidental features, which features do not really change what it is, but add to it.

Suarez applies this doctrine rigorously: everything, including accidents themselves, can only change accidentally according to him (MD 15, 10, 45). Thus a shade of the color red, if intensified, is a different shade, and it is not changed, rather it ceases to be and is replaced with a new, specifically distinct color. Red, in virtue of what it is, viz, a certain color, cannot change; it can only change accidentally by becoming the proximate subject for new features which do not alter its essence (what it is). Thus its shape might change, and that would be accidental to it, since it would not alter what it is. Of course an accident can be the immediate subject of another accident, but not the ultimate subject, since all accidents must be grounded in substance.

This leads us to the problem at hand. Suarez insists that if accidental forms can only change accidentally, so much more so substance can only change accidentally (MD 15, 10, 45). A substance already constituted in act through the actualization of matter by a given substantial form, cannot acquire a new substantial form and remain what it is; it can only change accidentally by gaining some added feature that does not alter what it is. Hence Suarez would say that Leclerc’s talk about "new substantial forms supervening on already constituted substances" transgresses the law of non-contradiction. For even accidents cannot change in virtue of what they are; they can only change accidentally. And things change accidentally by acquiring new accidental forms, for a substantial form cannot inhere in any already existing substance; were it to do so, it would be an accident²¹ (MD 13,3,11). Much more so then, will a substance be able to change only accidentally; i.e., while it remains in being it will only be able to acquire new accidental forms, not new substantial forms.

Along the same lines, but in a slightly different vein, Suarez would insist that a substance can only exist in itself -- it cannot exist in another. To talk of one substance existing in another is to fall into a contradiction. But since a complete substance is a being in act, it can only change accidentally; thus whatever new comes to it will come to it accidentally (MD 13, 3, 16). And since substance cannot be made up of accidents, but only of substantial principles, the very constituents of substances cannot exist in some already completed substance, else they would be accidents (MD 13, 3,16). Thus, though matter is a subject for form, it cannot be the case that form in actuating matter exists in matter as an accident. That is why matter, though a subject, cannot be a complete substance. But Suarez would argue that since the simple substances that comprise Leclerc’s complex substances are complete substances in themselves, the substantial form arising from their complex interactions must exist in them as an accident; for a complete substance can be the subject only of accidents, like every other real essence. Hence the form that informs Leclerc’s minima can only be an accidental form, not a substantial one. But in that case it can only give accidental being.

Conclusion

From the point of view of the traditional substance metaphysics of Francis Suarez, Leclerc’s account of the nature of composite material substances fails. It fails because 1) it makes an accident, namely activity, the principle of substantial unity of the composite, 2) it posits emergent wholes which are more than the sums of their parts, and 3) it allows substances to acquire new substantial forms, a contradiction, since all forms accruing to an already existing substance must be accidental. It seems to me at least that the last of these reasons for why Leclerc’s view fails is the most convincing. Whether Leclerc is right in holding that actions can be substantial principles, or that wholes can be more than the sums of their parts, has not been demonstrated in this paper. All that has been demonstrated is that on Suarez’s more traditional view of substance, Leclerc cannot hold such are the case, and certain non-demonstrative arguments have been given in favor of the traditional view. But Leclerc himself regards substance as that which exists in itself,²² so that it does not seem that any entity which exists in another complete substance or substances could itself be either a substance or a substantial principle, since whatever exists in another complete substance or substances must, by the very definition of substance, be accidental.

Moreover, Leclerc’s own argument that certain intimate actions binding minimal substances together are themselves substantial principles, is very weak, and seems to rest on the assertion that such relations must be substantial because 1) there are composite material substances, and 2) such composites are composed of other, smaller substances. Leclerc thus points out a clear need for action to perform the task of substantially uniting other, smaller substances, but he never really shows, even on his own principles, that it can.

Though Leclerc has not succeeded, however, in giving a plausible account of composite substances, it is still possible that he is correct in holding that composite material objects are tightly organized societies of minimal substances, and it seems to the present writer at least that such a view as this would be very hard for traditional substances metaphysics to disprove. This, however, must be the subject of another paper.

References

A -- Francis Suarez. De Anima. Opera Omnia edition, ed. C Berton Tom. Paris: Vives, 1861. (Arabic numerals refer, respectively, to book and chapter.)

EE -- Thomas Aquinas. De Ente et Essentia, Trans. Armand Maurer. Toronto, Ontario: The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949. (Arabic numerals refer, respectively, to chapters and paragraphs.)

IRP -- John Wild. Introduction to a Realist Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row, 1948.

LI -- CD. Broad. Leibniz; An Introduction. Cambridge, England: The Cambridge University Press, 1973.

L -- G.W. Leibniz. Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and Letters. 2 vol. Trans. and ed. L.E. Loemker. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1956. (Arabic numerals refer, respectively, to volume and page number.)

MD -- Francis Suarez. Disputationes Metaphysicae. Opera omnia edition, ed. C. Berton Tom. Paris: Vives, 1861. (Arabic numerals refer, respectively, to disputation, section and paragraph. Where there are only two numbers no particular paragraph in the section is being referred to).

M -- G.W. Leibniz. Monadology, in Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics, Correspondence with Arnauld, Monadology. Trans. O. R. Montgomery. La Salle, IL:

Open Court, 1902, revised by A. P. Chandler, 1927. (Arabic numerals in the text refer to paragraphs. Arabic numerals preceded by "Montgomery" refer to page numbers in Montgomery’s text.)

NP -- John of St. Thomas. Naturalis Philosophiae. Ed. P. Beato Reiser. Turin, Italy: Marietti, 1820. (Arabic numerals refer, respectively, to chapter and article.)

NPE -- Ivor Leclerc. The Nature of the Physical Existent. New York, NY: The Humanities Press, 1972.

PN -- Ivor Leclerc. The Philosophy of Nature. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986.

POS -- John Kekes. "Physicalism, the Identity Theory, and the Doctrine of Emergence." The Philosophy of Science 33 (December, 1966): 360-75.

PS 19 -- Reto Luzius Fetz. "Aristotelian and Whiteheadian conceptions of Actuality." Process Studies 19/1 (Spring 1990).

ST -- Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Westminster MD: Christian Classics, 1987. (Arabic numerals refer, respectively, to part, question, and article.)

WM -- Ivor Leclerc. Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975.

WVR -- Charles Hartshorne and Creighton Peden. Whitehead’s View of Reality. New York, NY: The Pilgrim Press, 1981.

Notes

1. 1 suppose the first sustained attack on it was made by Hume, but since Hume it has been questioned by thinkers as diverse as A. J. Ayer and Alfred North Whitehead.

2. The revival of interest in the metaphysics of substance has occurred in recent years by philosophers in the analytic camp who are known as "essentialists". Among them should be counted Baruch Brody, David Wiggins, Saul Kripke, and Jorge I. E. Gracia (though the latter has roots in scholasticism as well, and is far more versed in the history of the notion of substance than any of the other figures here listed).

3. It should be noted, however, that others besides Leclerc have held that Whitehead and Aristotle can be reconciled if we look, not to the notion of substance developed in the Categories, but to that developed in the Physics and the Metaphysics. This is the position taken by Reto Luzius Fetz, in "Aristotelian and Whiteheadian Conceptions of Actuality (PS 19). According to Fetz, Aristotle rejects the notion that an entity is a "thing". Suarez is in this respect the exact opposite of Fetz. For Suarez, not only is every substance a "thing" (res), but form and matter, as the components of substance are "things" as well; they are incomplete substances which could exist independently of each other.

4. Leclerc notes here that the philosophical investigation of nature has been so neglected that "today even the very phrase ‘the philosophy of nature’ is apt to have a rather antiquated, even perhaps obsolete, ring" (p. 19).

5. Since Suarez was the major Scholastic of the early modern period, and since one of Leclerc’s heroes, Leibniz, did repeatedly indicate the great influence of Suarez’s metaphysics on his own thought, it is odd that Suarez is not so much as mentioned in Leclerc’s writings. Perhaps Leclerc regards Suarez’s thought as not differing in its fundamentals from that of Aquinas. This is in the main true, but, as I have pointed out elsewhere, Suarez shifts the emphasis in his metaphysics of material substances from the phenomenon of substantial change to the problem of substantial unity, which is precisely the problem that so vexed both Leibniz and Leclerc (For an account of Suarez’s metaphysics of material substances, see my article "The Importance of the Concept of Substantial Unity in Suarez’s Hylomorphism", in the special Suarez volume of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.) There is really no work that I know of that fully examines the ground of the differences between St. Thomas and Suarez. Though they agree on much, their differences are very important; the major ones are as follows:

This last difference seems to ground almost all the rest (save for the differences concerning knowledge of singulars, and the principle of individuation), and it itself seems to be based on two principles: 1) that any two things that are really distinct can exist apart (Cf. MD 7, 2, 9) and 2) that every real thing is in some way actual, so that there can be limited acts which are not limited by potencies distinct from them (Cf. MD 31, 13, 18). "Consequently, since existence is nothing else than an essence constituted in act, just as an actual essence is formally limited by itself, or by its intrinsic principles, so, too, created existence has limitation from its very essence, not as it is a potency in which it is received, but because, in reality, it is nothing else than the very actual essence itself" (On the Essence of Finite Being as Such. On the Existence of that Essence and their Distinction: Metaphysical Disputation 31. Trans. and with an intro, by Norman J. Wells. [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press], p. 223).

6. On this see especially Leibniz. the Correspondence with Arnauld, letter dated April 30. 1687. para. 15. (Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics/Correspondence with Arnauld, and Monadology).

7. For a nice summary of the traditional doctrine of the distinction between accidental unities and per se or essential unities, see Francis Suarez, MD 4, 3.

8. The scholastics were wont to say that "inferior" forms remain in "superior’ composite substances "virtually", by which they seemed to mean that the properties of inferior forms remain in the superior forms they are taken up in, but that the inferior forms themselves perish. Thus Aquinas says "the forms of the elements remain in the mixed body, not actually but virtually. For the proper qualities of the elements remain, though modified, and in them is the power of the elementary forms" (ST., 1,76,4,ad 4).

If I understand him correctly, Lewis S. Ford is very close to this Thomistic view when he conceives of parts of substances as "sub-occasions" rather than "actual occasions" which, however, have their own "persistent properties" (PS 3:109).

9. Suarez also calls matter the first quantity of a thing, since quantity flows from matter, and form its first or substantial quality, since quality flows from form, and since form makes a thing to be of such and such a substantial sort (MD 42, intro., 3).

10. "There must be simple substances because there are composites; for a composite is nothing else than a collection or aggregatum of simple substances. Now, where there are no constituent parts there is possible neither extension, nor form, nor divisibility. These monads are the true atoms of nature, and, in fact, the elements of things" (Montgomery, p.251).

11. "It is evident, then, that every living body has a dominating entelechy, which in animals is the soul. The parts, however, of the living body are full of other living beings, plants and animals, which, in turn, have each one its entelechy or dominating soul" (Montgomery, p. 267).

12. Leibniz wavers on this point, but eventually clearly states that only monads are substances in the true sense (see, for example, the letter to Des Bosse, found in Loemker, Gotfried Wilhelm Leibniz; Philosophical Papers and Letters 2, 1001).

13. Correspondence with Arnauld, letter dated April 30, 1687, para. 14, (Montgomery 190).

14. For Suarez an "ens per se unum" is found either 1) in simple entities which are complete in their nature, or 2) in composite entities which are likewise complete in their nature but are comprised of entities which are not complete in their own nature. These entities are always ordered to each other as something determinable to that which determines it, i.e., as matter to form taken in the broadest sense of potency to act.

15. Though Suarez holds, in opposition to St. Thomas, that matter has a partial existence of its own, and can be conserved by God apart from form, it is still not naturally able to exist without form according to Suarez (MD 13,5,9-11).

16. "Any real whole is simply all the parts in an implicit and unspecified form. All the parts are the whole made explicit and distinct. The idea that the whole is a new entity distinct from the parts arises from a tendency to ignore a certain kind of part that enters into the essential composition of any natural entity -- its form or structure. The parts which impress us most obviously are the integral, quantitative parts of a thing. These are called integral because each of them is a whole which can exist apart from the rest.

"If a physical thing were made up exclusively of parts of this kind it would not be essentially one, but only one by accident, like a heap of rocks piled up together. After we have analyzed a thing in this purely quantitative way we often get a dim sense of the underlying unity which binds these quantitative parts into one entity of a certain kind. We realize that there is something more there than a mere agglomeration of quantitative parts. But this something more is not the whole. It is another, more basic kind of part, the substantial form, or structure, which determines the matter from which the thing has evolved and spreads out the quantitative parts in a unitary pattern. Matter and form are the essential physical parts of any natural entity". (IRP 295)

17. "From what precedes, it is shown that God is altogether immutable. First, because it was shown above that there is some first being, whom we call God; and that this first being must be pure act, without the admixture of any potentiality, for the reason that, absolutely, potentiality is posterior to act. Now everything which is in any way changed, is in some way in potentiality. Hence it is evident that it is impossible for God to be in any way changeable". (ST. 1, 9, 1)

18. John of St. Thomas says that motion is a kind of "imperfect act", and that a thing in motion is "partially in act, partially in potency." It is in act relative to the starting point which is moved; for when something is moved it begins to be actualized in a certain way. It is partially in potency, however, for the act of motion is an imperfect act which continually tends to the perfect act which is its terminus or completion (NP 14,1).

19. Some philosophers have criticized the notion of emergent properties by arguing that, in order for a truly new property to emerge, it would have to be logically impossible to predict its existence, prior to its emergence. But they regard such a claim as highly dubious (POS 360-75). The strength of this criticism of emergentism is based upon the naturalistic assumption that all emergent properties must somehow come from a structuring of material substances that existed prior to the emergence. If we grant the deterministic hypothesis that all bodies follow certain physical laws, then it has to be asserted that it would be at least logically possible to predict the emergence of emergent properties from the law-guided interaction of smaller bodies.

Such a criticism, therefore, seems to be very telling against Leclerc, since he holds that emergent properties and substances arise from the complex interaction and structuring of smaller substances. Suarez, on the other hand, does not hold this to be true. For him form is not a structure, but an entity and an act. Therefore any emergent properties and substances would not arise form a complex ordering of smaller substances. They could only arise from the action of a substance that had a degree of being and act as great, or greater, than the substances to emerge. Thus the whole evolutionary notion that higher forms can come from a structuring of lower forms, is implicitly denied by Suarecian metaphysics.

20. English Dominican Province translation, p.2118.

21. That is why, for Suarez, there are modes which are substantial. For the mode of subsistence, which makes a nature capable of substantially existing to actually substantially exist, cannot be an accident, since it helps constitute the substance as a substance. Thus as a completer of the substantial being of a thing, it is not an accident, which is to say, it does not exist in an already constituted being.

22. At least I assume he does, though it is true that he does not talk that much about substance as that which exists in itself, preferring to focus on it as that which is one, and which is a center of action. But certainly in appropriating Aristotle and Leibniz, Leclerc could not have failed to be aware of substance as that which exists in itself, nor, I think, could he deny that any substance, whether minimal or composite, is distinguished from properties by having such a mode of being.

It is a commonplace of modern science that facts are one thing and values quite another, that we can rely on objective scientific knowledge, while subjective metaphysical thinking (the logical positivists would say) is dubious and to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, it is an assumption of our world view that progress consists in the advance of science and technology, replacing lore and craft.

And yet people are increasingly bewildered when the great resources of our research institutions bring forth products which maim -- napalm -- and threaten civilization itself -- nuclear weapons. People are ambivalent when modern medicine and medical institutions cause diseases and distress in measures which seem to undermine their undoubted benefits, as occurs in antibiotic resistance, tranquilizer dependence and the inhumanities of high-technology obstetrics. People feel consternation when microelectronics, biotechnology and the new techniques of fertilization and transplant surgery threaten to control our lives and scramble our ethics and our sense of human dignity and life, quite as much as they improve our lives from conception to a (hopefully) caring demise.

I owe it to the fact that my teachers told me to read Science and the Modern World at an early age that I have found these conundrums less confusing than I might otherwise have done. In my opinion it is one of a small number of books (others listed in bibliography) that can provide a real basis for achieving the sort of society that our imprint was created to serve: an association in which the free development of each is a condition of the free development of all.

The reason that Science and the Modern World is such a wonderful and penetrating book is that Whitehead looks at the deepest level of our modern world view -- at the metaphysical foundations of modern science. He argues with great audacity that the system of abstractions which was created by the scientific revolution to serve us has got out of control. It was created for a certain set of purposes, has been overgeneralized and should now be replaced.

He tells us in a powerful passage just how odd a world the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities which was developed during the scientific revolution gives us:

Born in the seventeenth century, this is still the reigning view.

It was ‘a scheme of scientific thought framed by mathematicians, for the use of mathematicians’ (81). The result was a conception of the world which we ‘could neither live with nor live without’ (74). The consequence, according to Whitehead, is that modern philosophy has been ruined.

But Whitehead is not only in the business of criticizing this world view. He believes that its weaknesses provide hope. ‘The field is now open for the introduction of some new doctrine of organism which may take the place of the materialism with which, since the seventeenth century, science has saddled philosophy’ (55). He points out that in between the material on the one hand and the mental on the other ‘there lie the concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous reality, interaction, order of nature, which collectively form the Achilles’ heel of the whole system’ (84).

Anyone who has followed recent critiques of modern science should find in Whitehead a sure guide to the deepest issues involved. His analysis of modern materialism and his advocacy of organic mechanism’ should be comforting to those who have criticized science as domination, science as sexist, science as reductive, science as opposed to ecological and environmental values. His views are also a real advance on the many misguided scientist-philosophers who argue that recent developments in fundamental particle physics provide a new basis for holistic thinking. The point is to stop extrapolating from scientific research. Instead, with Whitehead, we need to redefine the world view we want science and other forms of research to serve.

It is time we noticed the hypocrisy in the scientific world view. On the one hand, its advocates represent themselves as humble, disinterested seekers after objective truth -- separators of facts from values. On the other hand, they serve the political, military and economic powers that be and operate as consultants to them as well as accepting invitations to generalize from scientific research to political and social philosophies -- blinkered mandarins, speaking as if they were wise.

Whenever I reread this book, its effect on me is emboldening. The absurdities of mind-body dualism lose their hold. The misplaced concreteness of mind language and body language and the impossibility of interaction between domains whose very definitions preclude causal relations, become clear in the teeth of all the theories and institutions based on a dualistic ontology, e.g., psychiatry versus neurology versus psychoanalysis versus a holistic view of humanity. In their place one puts the ontological priority of the concept of a person and the properly derivative nature of the mental and the physical.

Similarly -- and for the same reason -- Whitehead helps me to reintegrate purposes, values, goals and meanings with the other elements of explanation. In the great rent in reality which the scientific revolution codified, concepts were made separate which urgently require reintegration. The deepest divisions of our world have their philosophical roots just here -- in dualistic thinking. Many of the dualisms overlap, but the duality remains crippling.

In formal philosophical terms, the language of final causes or purposes in Aristotelian explanation, was sequestered from formal, material and efficient causes. Thus the form or plan found its way in to modern science as formal relations, plans, formulae. The material cause found its way into the theory of matter, that out of which things are made or come to be. Efficient cause remains with us in the theory of agency, energy, motion. But the purposes, goals, uses and meanings got left outside the concept of scientific explanation -- in the mind, in the church, in the domain of ethics, relative and subjective, while science was said to be objective, positivistically true.

Whitehead makes a beginning at putting the world back together by advocating the replacement of the brute concept of matter with that of organism and replacing the other parameters of space/time with the concept of event. Both are designed to be irreducibly purposeful and meaningful. The result of this drastic act of metaphysical reconstruction is intended to be the reintegration of reality into one world in which values are intrinsic, not extrinsic, to scientific explanations. On this model, of course, the separate category of ‘science’ would be reintegrated into the social totality. Research would thereby be precluded from the sequestration that now occurs in our ivory or industrial or military towers, the distinctions between which are themselves disappearing very rapidly due to the separation of the values embedded in research and patronage from the minds of the researchers -- all of which, in turn, are increasingly distanced from public accountability.

I want to conclude this foreword with three caveats. First, Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is about a great deal more than I have mentioned. I have made no effort to allude to his concept of ingression, his theory of eternal objects or many other topics in Whiteheadian scholarship. Some readers will want to go further into these matters. Others, like myself, will decide to learn from his critique of the world view of modern science without wishing to become Whiteheadian organismic philosophers. A person may make a brilliant diagnosis, but it often falls to others to effect a successful cure. Even so, it is a great achievement to insist that the biological concept of organism provides a better basis for metaphysics than the physical concept of matter. This makes at least possible a project that was not conceivable if the concept of matter bequeathed to us by the scientific revolution remained our basic building block of reality. With the value-laden concept of organism as our starting point, there is a hope of having a single set of principles which encompass all forms of experience, physiology and psychology, including morals, politics and aesthetics.

My second caveat is about the text. I share the following views of the eminent Whitehead scholar, Dorothy Emmett:

She goes on to say that in this book the ‘technical passages are less overlaid with idiosyncratic terminology and a labored attempt at producing a system’ than other works of his. Cold comfort, perhaps, but this is the place to begin.

My third warning is that the framework of the book is limited. Science and the Modern World is a great work in the critical history of ideas. As Whitehead says, there are periods when philosophers can play an important role as critics of abstractions. He shows us what the scientific philosophers’ philosophical reasons were for commenting on the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But he never asks what social, economic, political and ideological forces were at work in the creation of the modern scientific world view, any more than he looks at the role of those forces in the eighteenth century celebration of it, the romantic reaction against it, or the nineteenth and twentieth century codification of positive science. What he sees and says is, I think, true and profound, but it is a partial truth, deeply ahistorical. For example, he evokes Tennyson:

This example forms part of a trenchant critique of materialism, but Whitehead nowhere characterizes the industrial revolution which evoked romanticism -- early and late.

In my view we need to connect the scientific revolution with the protestant and capitalist revolutions as facets of a single change in world view. Whitehead is right about the abstractions but addresses them (as befits a mathematical logician) abstractly. He does not ask what other values are served by sequestering values. They remain efficacious but are not amenable to public contestation. This is the ideological function of positivism’s separation of fact and value. His analysis calls for reintegration of the history of science with social, economic and political history just as his philosophical proposals call for integration with current reasons for making science, technology and medicine more accessible and accountable. There is, therefore, a last dichotomy to overcome: from Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World to science in the modern world.

Whitehead’s creativity often has been interpreted as existing only pluralistically, that is, existing only as numerically many in the plurality of actual entities by virtue of which it is actualized. Apart from its existence in the plurality, it has been thought to have absolutely no ontological status whatsoever. The object of this essay is to question the philosophical and textual motivations for such a pluralistic interpretation, and then to philosophically articulate and defend an alternative interpretation that is explicitly monistic. An explicitly monistic interpretation is one that holds that there is a sense in which creativity exists apart from its plurality of instances.

The argument of this essay is not that Whitehead himself clearly affirmed a monistic view of creativity as his final considered position. I believe that a careful examination of the texts will bear out that, although Whitehead’s thinking about creativity clearly underwent significant shifts, in the end his position is neither explicitly monistic nor explicitly pluralistic. Possibly, Whitehead himself intended that creativity itself be thought of as neither monistic nor pluralistic. Nonetheless, this essay will attempt to show that a monistic interpretation is consistent with the texts. Furthermore, it will argue that a monistic interpretation is philosophically preferable to a pluralistic interpretation. That is to say, it will argue that a monistic interpretation results from completing an analysis that Whitehead himself never fully pursued.

The claim that there are important internal unresolved questions within Whitehead’s metaphysical system should not be too startling. The massiveness of the system relative to the short amount of time spent on developing it should lead us to suspect that there would be gaps and loose ends.

The situation with respect to creativity makes it even more open-ended in that Whitehead never presented anything like a chapter-length or intensive sustained treatment of it. Perhaps the most famous discussion of creativity in the texts comes in the description of the "Category of the Ultimate" in Part One, Chapter Two of Process and Reality. Lewis S. Ford, in his genetic analysis of Whitehead’s writings, suggests that this passage was one of the last from Process and Reality to have been written (EWM 240). Furthermore, as we will see below, there are clear indications that Whitehead’s thinking about creativity underwent significant changes from the time of Science and the Modern World through to Adventures of Ideas. A case can therefore be made that Whitehead’s creativity remains a somewhat open field for scholarly interpretation.

I. A Review of the Case for a Pluralistic Interpretation

Creativity in Whitehead is analogous to prime matter in Aristotle in that it is the counterpart of form. As the "ultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality," it is "without a character of its own" and "cannot be characterized because all characters are more special than itself" (PR 20/30). Creativity is the "ultimate behind all forms" (PR 20/30).

There is, however, a crucial difference between creativity and prime matter in that whereas prime matter is passive with respect to receiving the actuality of the forms, creativity is pure activity. Creativity is "divested of the notion of passive receptivity, either of ‘form’ or of external relation" (PR 31/46). For Whitehead, it is not the material, but the formal principle that is passive or potential; the "eternal objects are the pure potentials of the universe" (PR 149/226).

Perhaps the strongest textual evidence for a pluralistic interpretation comes from passages that are not explicitly about creativity at all, but rather from passages where Whitehead clearly affirms his commitment to ontological pluralism. If creativity were in some way universally ontologically one over and above the plurality of actual entities, then Whitehead’s system would seem to be very close to ontological monism. The plurality would seem to be reduced to superfluous adornments of the one ultimate creativity. But Whitehead is unequivocal in his rejection of ontological monism; "the philosophy of organism is pluralistic in contrast with Spinoza’s monism" (PR 73-74/114). The plurality of actual entities are "the final real things of which the world is made up" and there is "no going beyond actual entities to find anything more real" (PR 18/27-28).

Whitehead’s ontological pluralism is also clearly affirmed through his "ontological principle" This principle affirms that "whatever things that there are in any sense of existence’ are derived by abstraction from actual occasions" (i.e., actual entities) (PR 73/113). Thus, "actual occasions form the ground from which all other types of existence are derivative and abstracted" (PR 75/116).

While these statements about actual entities are not explicitly about creativity, they have suggested to many interpreters a way to understand Whitehead’s description of creativity as an "ultimate." Creativity is held to have no existence whatsoever apart from the plurality of actual entities, but within the plurality, it is seen to exist as their most basic feature or essential character. It is the most general thing that all actual entities have in common, and it is what makes them what they are, i.e., instances of creative activity.

II. Two Representative Pluralists: Christian and Leclerc

One of the main proponents of this interpretation is William A. Christian. He interprets creativity as merely a generalized concept for referring to the fact that each individual actual entity is for Whitehead in some way self-created or internally free. Whitehead likens actual entities to "drops of experience" (PR 18/28), and what he means to say is that each actual entity is essentially its own center of subjective feeling. Whitehead also believes that the internal subjective reactions of actual entities are free or self-caused. This self-caused subjective feeling is the actual entity’s essential identity. "An actual entity feels as it does feel in order to be the actual entity that it is. In this way an actual entity satisfies Spinoza’s notion of substance: It is causa sui" (PR 222/339; see also 150/228).

Christian takes Whitehead to mean that actual entities are analogous to divine and human acts of free will in being radical sources of "original and originative activity" (IWM 113). The essential identity of each and every actual entity is its self-caused subjective feeling. This self-caused subjective feeling is creativity. Thus, creativity exists in each separate actual entity as individual self-creativity, where each instance of self-creativity is ontologically diverse from every other.

But, Christian points out, the concept of creativity can also serve as a general or universal notion to refer to this common feature or character of the plurality of actual entities. Creativity in this sense is merely "the name for a general fact" (IWM 403), namely that the world consists of self-creative actual entities. Christian’s interpretation of creativity as a general name squares well with an extreme nominalist’s interpretation of Whitehead’s designation of creativity as the "universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact" (PR 21/31).

A second notable representative of a pluralistic interpretation is Ivor Leclerc. For Leclerc, creativity in itself is "a generic activity conceived in abstraction from the individual instantiations of that activity" (WM 84). Leclerc is also explicit in addressing the sense in which he regards creativity to be "ultimate." He insists that creativity "is not merely a common feature of the individual actual entities" (WM 86), since it accounts for their very existence, which is something more than what a mere feature can do. "Each actual entity is (i.e., exists as) an ‘act of becoming"’ (WM 82) and creativity is its "basic activity of self-creation" (WM 84).

Leclerc is particularly concerned that the ultimacy of creativity not be over-stressed. He fears that if we concentrate on the ultimacy too much, "there is a strong tendency to conceive it as itself ‘actual,’ as somehow ‘more real’ than the individual embodiments" (WM 83), which if it were taken that far would, of course, amount to ontological monism.

III. A Pluralistic Interpretation and the Problem of On-Goingness

It is clear that if a monistic interpretation of creativity is to have any success, it must not turn Whitehead’s system into an ontological monism. But before trying to support a monistic interpretation with textual evidence, I should point out that the pluralistic interpretation suffers from what is clearly a very serious philosophical weakness. Perhaps the easiest way to see this problem is to reconsider the difference between creativity and prime matter. While both principles serve as the counterpart of form, prime matter is passive, whereas creativity is pure activity. We must now consider how this difference is further reflected through their different analyses of on-going change.

Aristotle invokes prime matter as an underlying something that remains the same through change. It upholds the change in the sense that it does not go away. Change is thereby analyzed as prime matter undertaking a change in forms.

Since creativity is pure activity, its role in change is not to underlie it, but to drive it. But what happens when creativity is interpreted as existing only pluralistically? The genetic analysis of actual entities holds that actual entities come into existence, pass through a series of phases, and then perish. If creativity exists only pluralistically within the plurality of actual entities as the principle of their individual identity, then, when each individual actual entity perishes, so too does its creativity perish with it. But, then, where is there any more creativity to drive the next set of actual entities? Under a pluralistic interpretation, creativity has absolutely no status apart from actual entities. How, then, is creativity in turn supposed to give rise to those actual entities? Thus, in order for creativity to drive the universe, there must be some sense in which it precedes the plurality.

This same problem has been raised by W. Norris Clarke. Accepting the pluralistic interpretation of creativity as a "generalized description" of the "individual bursts of self-creativity which . . . are the only ground or referent for the term ‘creativity,’" Clarke asks why this creativity "should bubble up unfailingly and inexhaustibly all over the universe through endless time" (L 1:17). He sees no reason "why this creativity continues to spring forth endlessly and inexhaustibly, all over the universe, from no actually existing source" (L 1:17). Clarke sees that the root of the problem comes from basing creativity exclusively within the plurality, and he seems to assume that a pluralistic interpretation is the only kind available. "Creativity seems to be an ultimate primordial many, with no unifying source" (L 1:16).¹

IV. Garland’s Interpretation

From the fact that a pluralistic interpretation of creativity fails to explain how the universe is on-going, does it follow that a monistic interpretation can succeed? To get a better handle on this question, let us discuss an important article by William J. Garland, "The Ultimacy of Creativity." Garland stresses creativity’s role in explaining on-goingness without explicitly addressing the question of whether creativity is to be interpreted pluralistically or monistically. A careful examination of Garland will show, however, that he invokes an interpretation of creativity that is implicitly monistic. We will at that point see the importance of trying to advance an interpretation of creativity that is explicitly monistic.

Garland sees universal temporal on-goingness as standing in need of "ultimate explanation" (EWP 221). He argues against Christian that it is not enough to try to explain the connectiveness implied by universal temporal on-goingness in terms of individual actual entities being self-creative. For Garland, not only are actual entities self-creative, but earlier actual entities are "other creative" of later ones. To explain how, Garland takes creativity to be an active receptacle of the actual entities of the past. Creativity "receives" the completed actual entities of the past and "passes them on as data" to the becoming of new actual entities of the present (EWP 228).

Garland reasons that because creativity is ultimate, the process by which actual entities are other-creative is unitary throughout the universe. That is to say, there is only one successive universal creative advance, not several unconnected ones. "All actual entities are related to their predecessors . . . because there is but one creative process from which they all arise and to which they all make their final contribution" (EWP231).

Thus, under Garland’s interpretation, creativity has, so to speak, a universal job to do. It literally "gives past actualities to present ones" (EWP 231) and thereby "drives the universe forward" (EWP 230). How can it do these things unless it has its own agency? Furthermore, how can it have this agency if it is identified exclusively with the individual self-creativity of the plurality? "Over and against all entities . . . there stands a dynamic creative activity" which "can never be reduced to any set of these entities" (EWP 232). Clearly, for Garland creativity can be understood in some sense as a universal agency in some measure separate from the plurality. Garland does not ask, however, how such an interpretation of creativity is consistent with Whitehead’s unequivocal rejection of ontological monism.

Two other interpreters besides Garland who also emphasize creativity’s explanatory role with respect to on-goingness should be mentioned here briefly. Jorge Luis Nobo sees individual instances of creativity as manifestations of "the one ultimate creativity of the universe," and this one creativity is "eternally real" (WMES 174) as "an inexhaustible metaphysical energy at the base of all existence" (WMES 175). Nobo maintains that "without the eternal creativity no creature could ever become" (WMES 174).

The second interpreter is Jan Van der Veken, who proposes that "creativity first and foremost be conceived as substantial or universal activity -- in a real and proper sense, and not merely in a formal sense" (WMC 184). His disclaimer that he is not speaking of a "formal sense" would seem to be a reference to the fact that creativity is analogous to Aristotle’s material principle; so it is not enough to see creativity merely in terms of its being a generic feature or character the way Christian and Leclerc seem to. Creativity is rather "some legitimate form of agency or active principle" whose function is to be general or "all-encompassing" (WMC 182).

In general, then, it seems that a monistic creativity would be able to explain on-goingness so long as it meet the following conditions. It must extend as a continuous unity from the past to the present. It must lead into the future. It must be inexhaustible and imperishable. It must not underlie the change, but drive it. So it must be ever active. Finally, it must in some sense be identical with, though separate from, the plurality of self-creative actual entities by which it is instantiated.

V. The Textual Basis for a Monistic Approach

Finding a basis within the texts for an approach to creativity that is generally monistic is not difficult. In Science and the Modern World, where Whitehead has not yet come up with the concept of creativity as a technical notion, he speaks of a substrate activity" which he sees as analogous to Spinoza’s one substance; it is "one underlying activity of realization individualizing itself in an interlocked plurality of modes" (SMW 70). "There is nothing with which to compare it: it is Spinoza’s one infinite substance" (SMW 177). This one substrate activity admits of "modal differentiation" into a plurality of individual "events." "Each event is an individual matter of fact issuing from an individualization of the substrate activity" (SMW 70).

In Religion in the Making, Whitehead introduces the technical concept of creativity, but he clearly has revised his position to where creativity is not to be taken as itself an "actual entity," since "its character lacks determinateness" (RM 90). By Process and Reality, Whitehead has backed away from giving any indication that he thinks of creativity as "substantial." Creativity is "an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents"; but Whitehead carefully points out his difference from monistic philosophies such as Spinoza’s or absolute idealism in that he does not allow his ultimate a "final ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents" (PR 7/10). Nevertheless, Whitehead can still say in the context of this same discussion of creativity as an ultimate that his philosophy is "closely allied to Spinoza’s scheme of thought" (PR 7/10). Even though creativity is no longer substantial, it may still be one. The plurality of individual actual entities are at various places said to "condition" (PR 43/68-69); 237/362), or to "qualify" (PR 88/135), or to "characterize" (PR 108/165) the creativity which "transcends" them.

A further set of texts that lay a basis for an interpretation of creativity as monistic are ones where creativity is invoked to explain on-goingness. Creativity is designated as a technical notion for "passing on," which is itself said to be "more fundamental than that of a private individual fact" (PR 213/324). Thus, it is "inherent in the constitution of the immediate present actuality that a future will supersede it" (PR 215/327). Creativity in itself is described to be a universal agent; the ‘"creative advance’ is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates" (PR 21/32).

By Adventures of Ideas, the appeal to creativity to explain on-goingness is even more pronounced, possibly because Whitehead himself was beginning to sense the need for it. Each actual occasion is said to emerge from an "initial situation" which "includes a factor of activity which is the reason for the origin of that occasion" (AI 179). The "factor of activity" is creativity, and because of it, the situation out of which an actual occasion emerges is "active with its inherent activity" (AI 179). Thus, creativity "drives the world" (AI 179); it is the "throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact" (AI 177).

After looking over these various passages, it seems evident that Whitehead was never really too sure about how creativity was supposed to relate to the plurality. He started out in Science and the Modern World with a strong notion of an "underlying substantial activity," but in Religion in the Making he drops the idea that creativity can be an actual thing with a determinate character. In Process and Reality he apparently saw that he also would have to drop the idea of creativity as "substantial" if he was to hang onto ontological pluralism and not reduce the plurality to accidental accompaniments. But then, in Adventures of Ideas, he saw clearly that he needed to emphasize the explanatory role of creativity with respect to on-goingness. What he never seems to have done adequately, however, is to explain how a creativity that is conceived strongly enough to explain on-goingness is at the same time found actualized only through the plurality of actual entities.

VI. Creativity and the Many: Dynamic Differentiation

An analysis of the concept of a monistic creative activity can reveal a close relationship between a monistic creativity and a plurality of individual creative events. Such a relationship Whitehead himself seems never to have explored, and perhaps never to have noticed. A monistic creativity would be unlike a monistic substance in that it would imply the existence of process. Creativity would be something that by its very nature proceeds onward, giving rise to a process of spatial and temporal differentiations through a sequence of stages or episodes. These stages or episodes would be the multiple manifestations of the monistic creative activity. Without them, a monistic creativity just would not be creativity.

Whitehead’s criticism of Spinoza seems not to be that he sought unity through a monistic approach, but that once he invoked the monistic intuition as indicating substance, he was unable neatly to accommodate the plurality. Spinoza’s initial move to one substance satisfies a theoretical demand for "coherence." But in addition to the demand that our theories be theoretically coherent, they must also be "adequate" to experience (PR 3/5). Spinoza’s problem, as Whitehead sees it, is that when he introduces the plurality of individualized modes, he gains adequacy with respect to the undeniable plurality of our experience only to lose coherence. If, as Spinoza holds, reality or nature is essentially one substance, then the introduction of the plurality of modes is an arbitrary or incoherent "gap in the system" (PR 7/10). Thus, the most that Spinoza can say about the ontological status of the modes is that they are "accidents" of the one real substance.

I propose that once the monistic intuition is taken as indicating, not substance, but creative activity, the problem of any arbitrary disconnection between the one and the many immediately disappears. A monistic creativity necessarily would give rise to plurality of stages or episodes, and it could not exist as creative activity apart from the many stages by which it proceeds onward through space and time. These individual steps are all stages or episodes of the one. They derive from the monistic creativity, and are the actual manifestations of its dynamic quality. A monistic creativity is ontologically one as the same reality existing dynamically, and its plurality is the differentiated stages or episodes that fall out along the way as marking creativity’s dynamic driving progression.

Thus, the notion that creativity is a creative activity of process elucidates how the one creativity and the many stages or episodes belong to each other. The monistic creativity and the plurality of stages or episodes are inextricably connected in that the monistic creativity is a creative activity of process and as such requires pluralistic differentiation. The plurality are the creatures or the offshoots of the one, while the one is the active creativity of the offshoots.

VII. A Monistic Creativity and Whitehead’s Critique of yhe Subject-Predicate Form of Discourse

The relationship between a monistic creativity and a plurality of individual creative events can be further explored by reflecting upon Whitehead’s criticism of Spinoza for accepting the subject-predicate form of thought as metaphysically adequate. Although Whitehead sees himself in regard to creativity as "close" to Spinoza, he differs from him "by the abandonment of the subject-predicate forms of thought, so far as concerns the presupposition that this form is a direct embodiment of the most ultimate characterization of fact. The result is that the substance-quality’ concept is avoided; and that morphical description is replaced by description of dynamic process" (PR 7/10).

Elsewhere in the text, Whitehead gives indication that he thinks ontological monism, of which Spinoza’s philosophy is an example, results from an adherence to the subject-predicate form of thought; "every respectable philosophy of the subject-predicate type is monistic" (PR 137/208-9). Consider, then, that if creativity is analogous to Spinoza’s one, yet differs from it insofar as Whitehead rejects the metaphysical adequacy of the subject-predicate form of expression, would it not seem that creativity could be adequately represented by a single ultimate verb -- that is, by a verb standing on its own without the need of a subject-noun expressing an agent? Such a verb -- we might call it ". . . creates . . ." or ". . . activates . . ." -- could be taken to represent a single universal activity that runs throughout the entire universe.

To see the monistic creativity in terms of Whitehead’s rejection of the subject-predicate form of thought allows us to explore the point that the plurality of creativity’s stages or episodes do not inhere in creativity as do accidents in a substance. Since Spinoza’s modes are marked out by accidental predicates, they are not necessary to the one, and they have no significant status as individuals unto themselves. But stages or episodes of the monistic activity could be determinate individuals represented as marked out by adverbial modifiers of the one verbal activity. The monistic creativity in itself is neither determinate nor actual. To be made determinate, it needs to take on particular forms; it needs to be adverbially modified by the eternal objects.²

The eternal objects as adverbial modifiers represent the how of the monistic creativity’s pluralistic differentiation; they represent how creativity is actual in the form of a plurality. The monistic creativity is not an underlying passive substance in which adjectival-accidents happen to inhere. Instead, creativity acts to assume adverbial modifiers in its route to complete itself as actual. The eternal objects are not accidental to a substance; they are essential to the individual acts they determinately constitute. Creativity completes itself as actual by becoming a plurality of determinately formed individual acts.

VII. Subjective Aim and the Self-Creativity of the Many

Does the plurality of stages or episodes which would derive from a monistic creativity constitute a plurality of ontologically separate individuals? Why would not a plurality of stages or episodes just be diverse aspects of a single all-encompassing actual entity? Such an all-encompassing individual could be analyzable into separate stages or episodes in the same way Whitehead takes a single actual entity to be analyzable into a plurality of diverse prehensions. Prehensions are not the full-fledged individuals that actual entities are, since a prehension "cannot be abstracted from the actual entity entertaining it" (PR 221/338). Why should a monistic creativity give rise to a plurality of atomic selves?

This question is related to the problem of how a monistic interpretation of creativity would handle Whitehead’s claims that each actual entity is in some measure self-creative or causa sui. The point is whether or not a stage or episode of a monistic creativity is a real individual. If it is a real individual, then there ought to be a way to analyze out the point at which it breaks off from the one.

To address this question, we must be clear that what it means to be an individual for Whitehead is to be a center of subjective feeling or experience. So the question we are looking at here is how the monistic creativity could give rise to a plurality of separate centers of individual subjectivity. Why do the plurality of stages or episodes constitute many separate such centers, instead of just being aspects or facets of a single all-encompassing center? Furthermore, can the concept of being a separate center of subjective experience be used to understand Whitehead’s concepts of self-creativity and causa sui?

Since Whitehead understands individuality in terms of subjectivity, a key concept in Whitehead’s analysis of individuality is teleology. Subjective experience is the experience of purpose. Thus, to be an individual, for Whitehead, is to be a separate center of purposive experience. Each individual is structured in terms of its own teleological aim at its own satisfaction or completeness. It is a unique center of experience because it aims at its own subjective fulfillment. Thus, the stages or episodes of a monistic creativity would have to be organized into a plurality of separate individuals by means of a plurality of separate subjective aims.

Our task then, is to see whether the concept of subjective aim can be used to explain Whitehead’s special understanding of self-creativity and causa sui. We will look first at passages where Whitehead discusses actual entities as causa sui, and then at passages where he discusses self-creativity. Sometimes when he speaks of an actual entity as causa sui, he is referring to an actual entity’s "modification of subjective aim" (PR 47/74) through its "decisions"; "the admission into, or rejection from, reality of conceptual feeling is the originative decision of the actual occasion. In this sense, an actual occasion is causa sui"(PR 86/131). "To be causa sui means that the process of concrescence is its own reason for the decision in respect to the qualitative clothing of feelings" (PR 88/135). These passages mean that an actual entity is causa sui because it makes decisions on how the subjective aim or the "lure for feeling is admitted to efficiency" (PR 88/135). Decision is thus the basic activity by which an actual entity is causa sui, and it is the unique way in which the actual entity feels and reacts to its subjective aim; it is, indeed, the very experience of subjective aim.

The concept of causa sui shows up again when Whitehead discusses actual entities in terms of their internal processes of final causality. Whereas efficient causality pertains to the actual entity insofar as it must conform to the actual world of its immediate past, final causality belongs to the actual entity by virtue of its own "internal process whereby the actual entity becomes itself" (PR 150/228). This "becoming of the immediate self" is the "immediate actual process" (PR 150/228). With respect to the initial phase of the actual entity, with its conformation to the past, an actual entity is "the product of the efficient past," but with respect to the later phases it is "causa sui" (PR 150/228). Causa sui thus refers to a process of final causality by which an actual entity is an individual experience.

These passages which connect causa sui first with decision and then with final causality make essentially the same point as some other passages which directly connect self-creativity with subjective aim. "The concrescence is dominated by a subjective aim" and this "subjective aim is this subject itself determining its own self-creation as one creature" (PR 69/108). "In its self-creation the actual entity is guided by its ideal of itself," where the "enjoyment of this ideal is the ‘subjective aim’ by reason of which the actual entity is a determinate process" (PR 85/130). "The immediacy of the concrescent subject is constituted by its living aim at its own self-constitution" (PR 244/373).

The reason, then, why the stages or episodes of the monistic creativity constitute a plurality of separate centers of subjective experience, instead of just being aspects of a single all-encompassing subjective experience, is that they are organized into separate such centers by a plurality of subjective aims. Self-creativity turns out to mean the creativity of a self, an individual, in the sense of being a novel atomic unity with its own final causality. The self-creativity of the individual actual entity is the monistic creativity of the universe as felt subjectively by the actual entity through its subjective aim.

It is possible to ask at this point the further question of why there should be a plurality of subjective aims. The answer is to be given in terms of the unique kind of activity that springs from God, for God is the source of all subjective aims. At each moment that the monistic creativity differentiates itself into a plurality of stages or episodes -- a plurality of mere facets or aspects not yet differentiated into full-fledged individuals -- God is there to issue to these stages or episodes a plurality of subjective aims by means of which they are variously gathered into separate individual or self-creative experiences. God’s role of supplying the world with a plurality of teleological visions is a process of giving rise to a plurality of separate teleological experiences. Such a role for God makes God out to be a creator, not in the sense of ex nihilo, but in the sense of causing the plurality to exist as separate individuals. God has the unique power, as well as the goodness, to share or to spread teleology.

IX. The Permanence of Creativity

By now it should be clear that the interpretation of creativity being advanced here takes creativity to be a permanent structure of the universe, similar to the way Aristotle regarded matter to be a permanent structure. As something permanent, creativity endures the change from the past to the present. In this sense, permanence may suggest something stationary, or unchanging, and these notions may further suggest something passive. But such is not the case with creativity; creativity is permanent activity. The activity comes to it from within as self-activating activity, causing temporal change. Thus, as something permanent, creativity itself does not suffer or undergo change, but as self-activating activity, it gives rise to change. Creativity in this sense may be considered to be "pre-temporal."

Whitehead’s category of the ultimate relates creativity to the succession of novel concrescences which "it originates" (PR 21/32). Each new actual entity arises as a novel concrescence of the many actual entities of its immediate past. Although these past actual entities have perished in the sense that they have lost their subjective immediacy of experience, the qualitative character of that experience is to some degree saved in that it is re-experienced by the novel concrescences that come after them. According to the monistic interpretation being advanced here, what is also saved is the creativity of those past actual entities. When the subjective immediacy of the past actual entities went out of them, the creativity continued on into the present.

The sense in which creativity is being interpreted as monistic is to be located precisely in its continuation from one set of self-creative individuals to the next. To say that the creativity lives on after the past actual entities have perished is to attribute to creativity a status apart from its existence as the creativity of the past. It is the same creativity that is preserved from the entire past to the entire future. To say that it is ontologically one means that there is no significant sense in which it is preserved as many. Although it exists as many at each moment in the plurality of self-creative individuals by which it is differentiated, those individuals are continually perishing and being replaced by new ones. Creativity can never be preserved as the same many as it was once in the past, since those individuals never continue.

Nor would it make sense to suppose that creativity was preserved as many in the sense of there being many separate strands of creativity weaving in and out of each other, for then those enduring strands would be the most basic plurality of Whitehead’s ontology, and not the actual entities that would be variously composed of them. Creativity in itself cannot be many because it is without determination, and is found determinate only in its separate units. In its units, it is made determinate by the eternal objects and the subjective aims, but in itself it is indeterminate, and so, if there is any sense at all in which it is, then it can only be one. There would be just no way in which separate units of undetermined creativity could be distinguished from each other.

On the other hand, the sense in which creativity is held to be one must not be over-stressed. Since creativity in itself is indeterminate, it cannot be one actual thing. The only unity being attributed to creativity is that required for us to be able to refer to it in its explanatory role as it.

The interpretation being offered here seems to differ from Nancy Frankenberry’s in that it attempts to analyze out a sense in which creativity has a status apart from the pluralities of either the past or the present. Frankenberry interprets Whitehead to explain the emergence of the present by means of a continuation of the creative energy of the past into the present, and in this way her position and the one being argued here are very similar. But her understanding of this transformation of energy seems to be that the creativity of the past is active in the present. It is thus possible for her to speak of "transitional creativity" -- that is, the creativity involved in the transition from one set of actual entities to the next -- as "the power of the past" (PS 13:140). The past, for her, remains active, even after it has perished.

The interpretation presented here, on the other hand, is not that the past is presently active, but that creativity is. A major point of Frankenberry’s discussion of the creativity of the past seems to be to emphasize that the present is very close to the immediate past and heavily shaped by it, so much so that the present and the immediate past form an "indisoluable unity" of the sort that can be broken only by an "extremely abstracted intellectual analysis" (PS 13:141). This cautionary note about abstract analysis being heeded, the question seems to remain as to how the past can have a role in shaping the present, if the past is truly perished. It seems that it may play a role only through the agency of something that by its very nature extends into the present. The analysis seems to lead to a monistic creativity which both persists through change and gives rise to it.

X. Comparison With Ford

Before closing this discussion, a final comparison should be drawn with Lewis S. Ford’s novel approach of identifying the source of present creativity with future becoming. Ford believes that Whitehead’s system taken as given is simply unable to explain the emergence of present creativity. He believes that on-goingness can be explained only by modifying Whitehead. He argues that creativity cannot come from the actual entities of the past, because they have perished. Neither can it come from the actual entities of the present, since their emergence is the very thing that is to be explained. This argument, of course, is essentially the same as the one that was used above in criticizing the interpretation of creativity as existing only pluralistically. So, Ford asks, why not say present creativity comes from the future?

Ford draws a distinction between "the order of being," which is settled and determinate, and "the order of becoming," which is forward-moving and open-ended. When Ford identifies creativity with the future, he is speaking in terms of the order of becoming; he means by the future "not what will be, but what might be" (NEM 179). In the order of being, the past is earlier and the future is later. But in the order of becoming, these positions are reversed; the future is earlier and the past is later. When analyzing the order of becoming, we find a succession of phases of determination. The "latest" or most recent phase is also the "most determinate," which "verges on the past," while the "earliest" one is "least determinate," and "verges on the future" (NEM 188). Ford proposes that if the future is creativity, then there is creativity "earlier than" or before the present. Present determination is possible because the undetermined future laid out before the present gives it an openness within which to operate. This undetermined region before the present can be taken to mean that the "novel possibility" realized in the present is "received from the future" (NEM 193). Ford sees future creativity as flowing out to the present as the present becomes determinate. Creativity, on his view, is "bequeathed to the present by a retreating future" (NEM 195).

Ford’s interpretation of future creativity is markedly similar to the monistic interpretation presented here in the way it explains the plurality of present actualities as arising from a single source; "the present activity of finite occasions constitute many pluralized modes of the creativity flowing from the one future source" (NEM 187). Undetermined monistic creativity flowing from the future to the present becomes determinate and plural.

The major difference between Ford’s approach and mine seems to be that I take the singular source of present creativity to be permanent instead of future. In placing the monistic creativity in the future, Ford seems to be thinking that the activity of a monistic creativity must be simply contained within some temporal location. Since the past is ruled out on the grounds that it has perished, and the present is ruled out on the grounds that creativity must be somehow prior to the present to explain how it emerges, the future is the only temporal location left.

The interpretation offered here, in contrast, is that a monistic creativity that is permanent is not simply contained within any temporal location; rather, it is a unique sort of activity that results in temporal location. One might be tempted to prefer Ford’s approach on the grounds that it better honors Whitehead’s commitment to "take time seriously"; but a permanent monistic creativity hardly fails on this score, since it necessitates by its very nature that there will be time.

As we have mentioned, Ford thinks that the emergence of present creativity can be explained by Whitehead’s system only if the system is modified. The argument of this essay has been that Whitehead’s system is so rich that it contains internal resources of which Whitehead himself seems unaware. Thus as original and highly imaginative as Ford’s modification of Whitehead is, one wonders whether Ford does not give up on Whitehead too quickly. What the system seems to need is not modification, but more analysis and elucidation along the same lines that have been offered here.³

References

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

EWP -- William J. Garland. "The Ultimacy of Creativity." Explorations in Whitehead ‘s Philosophy, Ed. Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983.

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

L 1 -- Norris W. Clarke. "Christian Theism and Whiteheadian Process Philosophy: Are They Compatible?" Logos: Philosophical Issues in Christian Perspective, 1 (1980), 9-44.

NEM -- Lewis S. Ford, "Creativity in a Future Key" New Essays in Metaphysics, Ed. Robert C. Neville. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

PS 13 -- Nancy Frankenberry. "The Power of the Past." Process Studies, 13/2 (Summer 1983): 132-42.

WM -- Ivor Leclerc. Whiteheads Metaphysics. London: George Allen and Unwin ltd., 1958.

WMC -- Jan Van der Veken "Creativity as Universal Activity." Whitehead ‘s Metaphysics of Creativity, Ed. Friedrich Rapp and Reiner Wiehl. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.

WMES -- Jorge Luis Nobo. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Notes

1A question of creativity’s ability to explain on-goingness has also been raised by John B. Cobb, Jr. in A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965). pp. 203-14. Cobb’s discussion is particularly helpful in the way he sees this question as emerging from a comparison of creativity with prime matter. However, like Clarke, he too seems to assume that creativity is be interpreted only pluralistically. Thus, his question does not necessarily have force against an interpretation of creativity as monistic.

2The suggestion that individuals of creativity can be understood in terms of adverbial modifications has been made also by William A. Christian in An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press. 1959), p. 230. Of course, Christian’s construal of this suggestion would be different from the one proposed here in that his interpretation of creativity is pluralistic.

3Sections 1-8 of this article are based largely upon my doctoral dissertation, "A Monistic Interpretation of Whitehead’s Creativity," completed in 1986 at the University of Notre Dame under the direction of Sheilah O’Flynn Brennan. Sections 9-10 grew out of discussions between myself and Lewis S. Ford. I am grateful to both Brennan and Ford for their helpfulness.

Mordecai M Kaplan (1881-1983), one of the major figures in contemporary Jewish thought and founder of the Reconstructionist movement in Judaism, exerted a profound impact on Jewish theology in the twentieth century.’ Kaplan’s major contribution to Jewish theology is his theory of transnaturalism. The purpose of this theory is to develop a philosophical theology that avoids what Kaplan considers to be the pitfalls of both supernaturalism and reductive naturalism. In this aim, Kaplan’s philosophical theology is similar to that of Alfred North Whitehead’s -- namely, to steer a middle course between unreflective supernaturalism and reductive naturalism.

Kaplan agreed with Whitehead that the combination of the ideas of Aristotle’s "unmoved mover" and God as eminently real, in Christian theology, led to the disastrous concept of "an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys" (PR 342). For Kaplan, "the fact is that God does not have to mean to us an absolute being who has planned and decreed every twinge of pain, every act of cruelty, every human sin. It is sufficient that God should mean to us the sum of the animating, organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos. This is what we understand by God as the creative life of the universe" (MG 76). Both Kaplan and Whitehead, therefore, develop conceptions of a non-absolute God within the framework of a religious naturalism.

Our task is threefold. First, we shall explain and evaluate what both White-head and Kaplan share -- namely, the idea of a revisionary or reconstructed concept of God -- a non-absolute God. Second, we shall distinguish and evaluate the contrast between Kaplan’s naturalistic pragmatism and Whitehead’s "naturalistic idealism" (CNT 136). And third, we intend to evaluate the pragmatic value, in terms of the task of ministry, of Kaplan’s idea of God and that of process theology based on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.

I

As I have indicated, Kaplan’s transnaturalism is a form of religious naturalism; that is, a reinterpretation or reconstruction of the idea of God in naturalistic terms. Such reconstructed God-ideas are often attacked from both sides of the spectrum. Many atheists on the one hand, and fundamentalists on the other hand, deny the legitimacy of reinterpreted God-ideas.

For them, "religious naturalism" is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. They maintain that the word God must denote a transcendent Being who created the universe. Any other usage, it is claimed, violates "the ethics of words."² The larger issue raised by Kaplan’s transnaturalism and Whiteheadian process theology is the coherence of the idea of a non-absolute God, within the framework of religious naturalism, as a theological and philosophical concept.

First, let us note how Kaplan’s transnaturalism differs from strict naturalism.

Naturalism may be defined as "the disposition to believe that any phenomenon can be explained by appeal to general laws confirmable either by observation or by inference from observation" (CRN 21). This does not mean that everything that happens in the universe is at present explainable. Rather, naturalism represents a methodological recommendation concerning the theory of knowledge. What it suggests is that the only instruments of knowledge we possess are reason and critically analyzed experience. Claims to knowledge based on a special faculty, such as mystical intuition, must therefore be recognized as assertions of faith which cannot be verified and can only be evaluated in terms of their consequences for human conduct. The reliance on reason and critically analyzed experience is thus the method of naturalism, its logic of inquiry. Naturalism as a theory of reality, however, can be problematic because of the ambiguity of the term "nature." For most naturalists, nevertheless, it is safe to say that "nature" signifies the totality of reality -- its substance, functioning and principles of operation, since what distinguishes naturalism from other metaphysical standpoints is its claim that there is nothing beyond nature.

Let us now examine Kaplan’s transnaturalism and determine its divergence from strict naturalism. To begin with, let us look at Kaplan’s definition of "transnaturalism":

We can see from his definition of transnaturalism that Kaplan finds strict naturalism inadequate because it is incapable of "dealing with" the phenomena of mind, personality, purpose, ideals, values, and meanings. On the other hand, underlying Kaplan’s entire philosophical theology is a polemic against supernaturalism, according to which God is not subject to any empirical law of nature and can therefore suspend the natural order at any point in time. Thus Kaplan rejects the historicity of the miracles described in the Bible and the logic of supernaturalism inherent in the Jewish tradition. Kaplan holds that the modern approach to reality has rendered the dichotomy of natural and supernatural irrelevant. The tendency nowadays, Kaplan asserts, "is to enlarge the concept of the natural so that it might include that plus aspect of reality which the traditional outlook did indeed sense but not altogether apprehend" (JC 315). Hence, transnaturalism is precisely that "enlargement" of the natural to include the plus aspect of mind, purpose, values, etc. Through this enlargement of the natural, denoted by the term transnaturalism, Kaplan is seeking an explanation for the phenomena of mind, purpose and values, which he holds cannot be accounted for by strict naturalism.

But what kind of explanation is Kaplan seeking? What Kaplan is looking for is cosmic support for human values. Kaplan stresses the category of wisdom, which he defines as "the sense of values" (REN 21). And he maintains that human wisdom is a reflection of Divine wisdom: "the wisdom by which man is expected to control and direct his life reflects the wisdom by which God’s laws govern all nature" (REN 30). Kaplan sees the wisdom of God’s laws manifested in the polarity of independence and interdependence in nature: "the universal law of polarity whereby everything in the universe, from the minutest electron to the vastest star, is both self-active and inter-active, independent and interdependent" (REN 34, 35). This model constitutes, for Kaplan, the goal of our moral and ethical strivings -- the synthesis of independence and interdependence. As Kaplan explains:

Human moral responsibility is thus grounded, for Kaplan, in the Divine cosmic process of organicity, organicity being the key element in the overall process of creativity.

We can now understand exactly what Kaplan means by "transnatural." Among the dictionary definitions of the prefix "trans" is: "through and through; so as to change completely" (WNCD 402). Kaplan maintains that God is the creative process which transforms the chaos of the universe into an organic whole: "Nature is infinite chaos, with all its evils forever being vanquished by creativity, which is God as infinite goodness" (REN 51).

This is a clear departure by Kaplan from strict naturalism. For Kaplan, nature is not the totality of being but infinite chaos forever being vanquished by God, identified as infinite goodness and creativity. It is imperative to note that, for Kaplan, God is not a being or entity. Kaplan writes:

In the foregoing passage, Kaplan negates supernaturalism, the view that God is an identifiable being who stands outside the universe. And he also negates strict naturalism when he identifies the transcendent aspect of God with the element of creativity, which is not accounted for by the laws of nature. Strict naturalism, we noted, is the disposition to believe that any phenomenon can in principle be explained by appeal to general laws of nature.

We are now in a position to note what Kaplan and Whitehead have in common. Kaplan’s idea of creativity, which cannot be accounted for by the so-called laws of nature, echoes Whitehead’s metaphysical concept of creativity, the nisus toward the endless production of new syntheses. For both thinkers creativity transcends the laws of nature (for Whitehead, since the present laws of nature are relative only to our present cosmic epoch, whereas creativity is a universal metaphysical principle).

Both thinkers, we have seen, are mercilessly critical of unreflective supernaturalism.

Both thinkers adamantly reject the concept of Divine omnipotence, in part due to their acute sensitivity to the problem of evil. Whitehead, for example, writes: "The limitation of God is his goodness.... It is not true that God is in all respects infinite. If He were, He would be evil as well as good" (RM 147). And Kaplan states: "If God, conceived as function, denotes whatever is of ultimate value to mankind, He cannot be represented as a personal Being infinite in power and in goodness, which is a contradiction in terms.... The power of God is inexhaustible but not infinite" (REN 51).

Both stress the idea of value. Whitehead claims that value refers to "the intrinsic reality of an event" (SMW 131). He holds that deity is "that factor in the universe whereby there is importance, value, and ideal beyond the actual" (MT 102). And Kaplan, we have seen, maintains that "God" denotes "whatever is of ultimate value to mankind" (REN 51).

Thus, both Whitehead and Kaplan hold revisionary concepts of God, or reconstructed God ideas. What these redefinitions have in common is that God is limited by His goodness and is not to be conceived of as the Creator of the entire universe, the good as well as the evil. To use Whitehead’s clever terminology, both he and Kaplan refuse to pay God "metaphysical compliments," which would render the Deity as "the supreme author of the play," causing us "to discern in Him the origin of all evil as well as of all good" (SMW 179).

The theological postures of Kaplan and Whitehead have the virtue of undercutting the problem of evil, for the problem only arises in acute form if God is conceived of as omnipotent -- a view which both Whitehead and Kaplan repudiate.

But both theologies face metaphysical and religious problems. Metaphysically, the problem is stated cogently by Richard Swinburne: "To start with, theism postulates a God with capacities which are as great as they logically can be. He is infinitely powerful, omnipotent. That there is an omnipotent God is a simpler hypothesis than the hypothesis that there is a God who has such and such limited power.... A finite limitation cries out for an explanation of why there is just that particular limit, in a way that limitlessness does not" (EG 94). Religiously, the issue is posed by Robert C. Neville in these words: "I think nothing short of the ground or principle of the whole of things is supreme enough to be worshipped" (CG 14).

How would Whitehead and Kaplan defend their theologies against these challenges? To hypothesize how they would answer these objections requires us to distinguish between their respective approaches -- namely, Whitehead’s naturalistic idealism and Kaplan’s naturalistic pragmatism.

II

The first point to notice, in distinguishing Whitehead’s theology from Kaplan’s, is that Whitehead, unlike Kaplan, does not identify creativity with God. Whitehead does not identify creativity with God because, for Whitehead, God has to have a character as an identifiable actual entity. "Actual entities -- also termed actual occasions -- are the final real things of which the world is made up.... They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space" (PR 18). Thus, for Whitehead, creativity is too amorphous and protean to be identified as divine. In contrast, Kaplan, to avoid reification of God, resists identifying God as a being or entity of any sort and allows the term "God" to represent creativity or the creative process insofar as it ‘makes for" human salvation or self-fulfillment.

Kaplan would have agreed wholeheartedly with M. Scott Peck, who contends that it is fallacious to think of God as a discrete entity that is metaphysically locatable.³ Kaplan calls this the error of reification or hypostasis -- of treating a process like a thing. Emphatically, Kaplan asserts:

Specifically, Kaplan maintains that God is the "transnatural" cosmic process "that makes for man’s life abundant or salvation" (FM 183).

Kaplan’s view is quite similar to that of Henry Nelson Wieman, who used the word "God" to denote "that something upon which human life is most dependent for its security, welfare and increasing abundance" (RESM 9). Wieman variously referred to God with such terms as Growth, Creative Synthesis, Creativity, Creative Event and Creative Interchange, for much the same reasons as Kaplan.

Noting the differences in the approaches of Whitehead and Kaplan, let us see how they each would reply to the upholders of Divine omnipotence.

Whitehead would answer the metaphysical question by holding that both God and World are ultimate, as in his famous antithesis "It is as true to say that God creates the world, as that the world creates God" (PR 348). For Whitehead, God and world require each other. He would criticize Swinburne for viewing God as eminent reality, maintaining that nothing, not even God, has aseity as a totally independent being.

Kaplan, unlike Whitehead, tended to be a neo-Kantian rather than reverting to pre-Kantian habits of thought. Just as Whitehead held to a dualism of God and World, so Kaplan held to a dualism of God (creativity) and world (chaos), but in Kaplan’s case this was because of what he deemed to be the limits of the human mind. Kaplan maintained: "The human mind, as Kant has shown, cannot really solve the problem of absolute beginnings, and identifying creativity with transformation marks the limit of its capacity (MOG 61).

Unlike Whitehead, Kaplan was thus reluctant to engage in metaphysics because of his Kantian inhibitions. Although he was sometimes drawn to make what seem to be metaphysical statements in response to questions about his theology, Kaplan’s overall methodology in theology was pragmatic or functional. Thus, Kaplan stated,

In the foregoing passage, Kaplan is advocating a pragmatic, functional approach to the idea of God, antithetical to metaphysics. God functions for Kaplan as the power that makes for human salvation or self-fulfillment. As for what God is, apart from nature and humanity, Kaplan would claim ignorance. His retort to Swinburne would be, "I just don’t understand what you mean." In this Kaplan is not only a good Kantian but also a faithful Maimonidean in stressing the unknowability of what God is, metaphysically.

As far as religious availability is concerned, Whitehead held that the idea of an omnipotent God who put all sorts of imperfections in the world was a morally outrageous notion (see DANW 370). A Deity whose limitation is his goodness was far more worshipful for Whitehead. Kaplan’s response to this question was, in the spirit of John Dewey, a call to religious inquiry. Kaplan asserted vigorously, "It is difficult to understand why religion should not be accorded the same right of revising and correcting itself as is accorded to science and philosophy" (FAMJ 192).

Kaplan’s point here is an important one. Many people assume that only an omnipotent God is worthy of worship. But since the Holocaust, this assumption has been called into question. It is now time for religious experimentation and inquiry. Theology must become more empirical. Instead of starting with a preconceived notion of what God must be, perhaps a more fruitful course would be to attend, first, to spiritual qualities of experience that actually exist, and then infer from these textures of experience what the nature of God might be. As Nancy Frankenberry has stated, "We do not know the true’ God" (RRE 30).

III

The major task in the ministry, to which both Whitehead’s and Kaplan’s process theologies are germane, is consoling those who have suffered tragedies, especially bereavement, and helping those who have suffered human injustice and oppression.

When a parishioner, after losing a loved one, asks, "Why me?" how might the clergyman respond?

Kaplan’s advice to the clergyman would be "to shift the problem of evil from the field of thought to that of action. Instead of asking ourselves, ‘How can life be considered good when there is so much evil in it?’ let us ask ourselves, What must I do to make the world better?’" (FAMJ 236)

I would imagine that a Whiteheadian’s advice might be more along the lines of what David Griffin has asserted in God, Power and Evil. Griffin rejects views of those, like Kaplan, who argue that the problem of evil is an existential, only practical problem. He contends, rather, that if human theoretical beliefs are central to the human experience of evil, then the effort to overcome human evil cannot omit the theoretical dimension of the problem" (OPE 16).

Whereas common sense would support the Kaplanian approach, cognitive therapy would buttress the Whiteheadian orientation. According to cognitive therapy, the way we think determines the way we feel. Thus, it would be crucial to get the bereaved person to talk about how he or she thinks about God and the problem of evil.

Both Kaplan and Whitehead would agree that the traditional theistic hypothesis -- namely, the idea that a benevolent and omnipotent Deity is in control of the universe -- generates unrealistic expectations in terms of human evils. As John B. Cobb has suggested, we should not be surprised when bad things happen. This is the way things often do happen. But when we see good things happen, we ought to be open to asking the question: "Must there not be something at work other than narrow and brutal self-interest and absolutization of one’s own group? Can we not call that God?" (PETM 175)

If Whitehead and Kaplan have demonstrated anything, it is that the question, "What shall we call God?" must be open and subject to revision and inquiry. The meaning of the word "God" must itself be in process, consequent on new human insights into and discoveries about the vast, complex and mysterious universe in which we live.

References

CG -- Robert C. Neville. Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology. New York: Seabury Press, 1980.

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

CRN -- Jack J. Cohen. The Case for Religious Naturalism. New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1958.

DANW -- Lucien Price. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1954.

EG -- Richard Swinburne. The Existence of God. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

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

GPE -- David Ray Griffin. God, Power and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1991.

J -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. "What Is Our Human Destiny?" Judaism 2/3 (July 1953). JC -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. Judaism as a Civilization. New York: Schocken, 1967.

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

MOG -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion. New York: The Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation, 1947.

PETM -- John B. Cobb, Jr. "The Problem of Evil and the Task of Ministry." Encountering Evil. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981.

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

RESM -- Henry Nelson Wieman. Religious Experience and Scient4fic Method. New York: Macmillan, 1926.

RRE -- Nancy Frankenberry. Religion and Radical Empiricism. New York: State University of New York Press, 1987.

TCE -- Mordecai M. Kaplan. "The Meaning of God for the Contemporary Jew." Tradition and Contemporary Experience. Ed. Alfred Jospe. New York: Schocken, 1970.

WNCD -- Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary.

Notes

1Kaplan’s magnum opus is Judaism as a Civilization (1934). His most important theological work is The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (1936). Other volumes include The Future of the American Jew. (1949), Judaism Without Supernaturalism (1958). The Religion of Ethical Nationhood (1970). and many other works. The Reconstructionist movement in Judaism represented for Kaplan an effort to reconstruct the theology and ideology of Judaism to fit the modern age. The movement is now in process, attempting to come to terms with post-modernism as well as modernism.

2The phrase "the ethics of words" is utilized by Sidney Hook in his essay "The Atheism of Paul Tillich" in Religious Experience and truth, edited by Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1961), p. 59, and also by Corliss Lamont in The Philosophy of Humanism (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1967), p. 143, to discredit redefinitions of God.

3See M. Scott Peck. The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 262, for a popular exposition of what Kaplan meant to designate by the term "reification."

Alfred North Whitehead posits that the "actual occasions are the final actual entities in our cosmic epoch" (PR 18/27). Given Whitehead’s words "final" and "actual", his statement can be interpreted to mean that occasions are res verae, really real, more real than people. Whitehead also writes that "the real actual things that endure are all societies. They are not the actual occasions" (AI 262). Given the words "real" and "actual", this later statement seems to identify societies as res vera, since they are the things that endure. We are concerned with Whitehead’s usage of the word "actual" and whether or not it is synonymous with res vera.

Although Whitehead’s Category of the Ultimate is meant to lessen the distance, so to speak, between actual occasions and societies of actual occasions, the application of Whitehead’s metaphysics to persons seems troublesome; the ancient metaphysical problem of appearance and reality seems to lurk in the background, for the philosopher who wishes to identify res vera in the system soon finds herself perplexed, asking if the subjects of experience are actual occasions, societies of occasions, or sentient beings, such as persons and animals.¹

I. Historical Context

There is a debate about the status of actual occasions. John Cobb, Jr. and Charles Hartshorne, for instance, hold that the only actual entities are microcosmic actual occasions. Their position has been termed the "orthodox" interpretation. In contrast, F. Bradford Wallack and Justus Buchler hold that almost anything can be an actual entity, at any scale of space and time (ENP 8).

The early part of this paper strengthens the arguments for identification of actual occasions with the microphysical quantum events using insights from the philosophy of time, as well as from physics. But we argue with Edward Pols that there is one other radically different kind of actual entity, persons (PS 8:103).

Although Joseph Bracken’s notion of "collective agency" is an interesting recent attempt at a compromise between the orthodox interpretation and positions like that of Edward Pols and this paper, collective agency fails to give sufficient unity and actuality to persons. Similarly, Pols’ notion of "fields" only exacerbates the problem of unification rather than solving it, as fields are most anomalous concepts, much more puzzling than persons (PS 18: 156-57).

II. Actual Occasions as Quantum Events

Actual occasions must be small enough to be the parts of elementary particles in physics, and this assertion conforms with Whitehead’s acceptance of insights from physics. Not only does Whitehead call our cosmic epoch the "electromagnetic society", he also writes:

The most likely candidate for actual occasions are the quantum events because these are the constituents of electrons, protons, and all other elementary particles. We believe that quantum events are the electronic and protonic actual occasions to which Whitehead refers. P. A. M. Dirac’s conception of a space-time "ocean" of quantum events is easily interpreted as a plenum of Whiteheadian actual occasions.

Besides the "similar size" of actual occasions and quantum events, there is yet another point to consider, one which makes the quantum event perhaps the sole candidate for the actual occasion, Only quantum events have the characteristics that one expects of actual occasions with respect to space-time. Indivisibility is a characteristic which applies to both quantum events and to actual occasions. Both "come to be at once", rather than as a succession of earlier and later parts. Whitehead writes: "Every act of becoming must have an immediate successor" (PR 69/107). The problem with the mathematical continuum is that there is no immediate successor to any temporal instant in the continuum; hence, the need for occasions of finite duration, the coming to be of which is at once, indivisible.²

Naming the coming to be at once of actual occasions "concrescence", Whitehead describes the phenomenon as a springing into existence (PR 35-6/52-54). Once a finite quantum of space-time has been actualized by the concrescence of a new occasion, the quantum may be divided into smaller parts in accordance with the mathematics of the continuum. Whitehead rejects the view that coming to be occurs by infinitesimal instants because it is impossible to select a next infinitesimal instant later than any given instant; we believe that Whitehead sees this as the ground of Zeno’s paradoxes. Springing into existence allows for the actualization of a finite quantum, avoiding the problem of there being no next instant after a given instant. Through his description of concrescence, Whitehead denies actual occasions internal temporal becoming.

Whitehead, moreover, strongly suggests that quantum events are actual occasions, as well as that events come to be at once by his statement that ". . . in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but that the act itself is not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become" (PR 69/107). We interpret his statement to mean that temporal extension is the result of concrescence, not that concrescence is temporally extended. What comes into existence is continuous after it has come to be; thus, another Whiteheadian saying: "There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming" (PR 35/53).

Yet if actual occasions are in fact quantum events, then there seems to be a problem with appearance and reality. If the statement that the "actual occasions are the final actual entities" identifies that which is res vera as the quantum events, then people are reduced to appearance, to being less real than quantum events.³ We acknowledge that such a position seems reductive, as well as inconsistent with at least the spirit of much of Whiteheads later philosophy.

We recognize tension between the technical language introduced in Process and Reality, where the "occasions are the final actual entities", and Whitehead’s assertion in Adventures of Ideas that "the real actual things that endure are all societies. They are not actual occasions" (AI 262). The "real actual things" in Adventures of Ideas do not seem to be actual entities in the sense of Process and Reality. Both statements, however, present problems for applying Whitehead’s metaphysics to persons.

Perhaps the tension can be reduced by examining the word "final" in the phrase "the final actual entities" found in Process and Reality. If the word "final" is taken in the sense of "original," then the problem of res vera is lessened, since there are grounds in physics and astrophysics for arguing that quantum events were the original actual entities within our cosmic epoch; pure quanta of space-time are posited in many contemporary versions of the Big Bang cosmology to be the original state of the present observable universe, beginning at Plank Time at about 10^-43 sec after the beginning.⁴ Actual occasions remain arche in at least two senses: occasions are both the fundamental constituents of things, and they are the original state of the cosmos. If, however, the word "final" is taken in the sense of "most developed" or "last," then the problem is heightened, since it does not follow that actual occasions are the only actual entities.⁵ Persons, we maintain, are actual entities, res vera.

Not only might there be a problem of appearance and reality if the occasions are taken to be the final actual entities in the sense of most developed or last, but there is also another problem, one which concerns time. We maintain that the actual occasions coming to be at once are finite, without an internal past, present, or future. What exists after concrescence can be divided into parts and arranged, but only after concrescence. The result of denying internal temporal becoming to an actual occasion is a "time" within the occasion that is "static."⁶

By speaking of "time" within the occasion, we are speaking figuratively, as we shall soon argue that there is no time within the occasion and that time comes into existence only at satisfaction. The phases of concrescence are not within physical time, and it is impossible for us to conceive of any kind of time until actuality is achieved; hence, we maintain that concrescence is productive of time.

III. Time

A) In an effort to explain Whitehead’s use of the phrase "physical time" in his statement: "This genetic passage from phase to phase is not in physical time", some process philosophers argue for two kinds of time (PR 283/433). We reject this idea, as a distinction between two kinds of time seems to us unjustifiable; we do, however, admit that Whitehead’s phrases "genetic passage" and "physical time" raise a question: Did Whitehead consider another kind of time? But, unlike Lewis Ford’s interpretation, we deny that concrescence takes place in genetic time. We maintain that concrescence provides the basic stitching of the fabric of space-time and that it is only in the relations between quanta that time exists.

We reject the idea that concrescence is a temporal process, as Zeno’s paradoxes cannot be satisfactorily met if it is granted that concrescence is temporal. To our understanding, concrescence is actual and temporal only upon satisfaction, for unless this is so, Zeno’s paradoxes of motion and change will reemerge to challenge Whitehead’s metaphysics. If concrescence is interpreted as a temporal process, Zeno’s problem becomes one for concrescence because there is no next instant after a given instant.

The problem posed by the mathematical continuum for the philosophy of time is created by a fundamental feature of all series which are ordered, but not well ordered. Though "cuts" are possible which allow one to obtain a single element of the series, it is impossible to cut the series a second time and obtain an element next to the first element. If time is isomorphic with the real number series of the mathematical continuum, then there is no next instant after the present instant. Any instant later than the present instant is such that there are infinitely many instants between it and the present instant. Two cuts cannot be close enough together to remove the infinity of intervening elements without the two cuts being the same cut.

Whitehead’s epochal theory of time circumvents this problem in a manner that is quite convincing: "there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming" (PR 35/53). In other words, creative advance is epochal rather than continuous, and we interpret Whitehead to mean that the "times" and "places" within the standpoint of the single occasion at satisfaction came to be at once with the occasion, that time and space do not exist until the occasion completes concrescence, and, therefore, actual occasions are the very fabric of space-time.

The idealist is not bothered by Zeno, for in idealism time is ultimately unreal; time depends for its being on the eternal. But we understand and judge Whitehead to be a realist, and so he must have an analysis of creative advance which gets around the problems that arise when time and space are allowed to be isomorphic with the mathematical continuum, the problem with which is that its series are dense rather than discrete. In a dense series, distinct elements can be obtained by cuts, dividing the series unambiguously into subclasses of all members earlier than the instant obtained by the cut, in contrast to all members later than the instant obtained by the cut, or all members to the left of the point, in contrast to all members to the right of the point.

B) A distinction has been drawn between genetic and physical time to argue that concrescence is a temporal process, but there is difficulty distinguishing two kinds of time without denying to each kind a condition necessary to time itself. To illustrate, consider Lewis Ford’s description of genetic time:

Ford describes genetic time using the words "earlier" and "later". Ford elsewhere argues that genetic time is A-series time involving past, present, future, and becoming.

But consider that John McTaggart, who bequeathed to us the distinction between A-series, past, present, future, and B-series, earlier and later, argues effectively that each of these characteristics or determinations of time require the other. Simply, past, present, and future presuppose earlier and later; the A-series presupposes the B-series. McTaggart argues that the two are inseparable characteristics of time, and hence are not two different or distinct times.

We agree with McTaggart; consider that if an event A is unambiguously earlier than event B, then this can only be if B is in A’s future, and A is in B’s past. Only by denying temporality to the B-series is it possible to avoid the crossover from earlier than and later than to past, present, and future. Similarly, if event A is in the past of event B, then A is earlier than B, and B is later than A, and hence the B-series characteristics follow from the A-series characteristics, as the A-series characteristics follow from the B-series characteristics.

Thus we hold that genetic time, what Ford calls the time of concrescence, cannot be distinguished from physical time, the time of persons, the time of the world larger than single quantum events. If concrescence is in fact temporal as some philosophers maintain, its temporality must involve both the A-series and the B-series characteristics; genetic time cannot be A-series time without entailing events ordered or orderable in terms of B-series time. The B-series side of time taken alone will land us in Zeno’s paradoxes because the B-series leads to isomorphism with the mathematical continuum and so to infinite divisibility.

Since time cannot have A characteristics without also having B characteristics, physical time cannot be time if it is merely static or B-series time severed from the A-series. Chapter X of Part II of Process and Reality seems quite clear that it is completion of concrescence and transition to newer occasions that is responsible for the coming to be of time (PR 210/320).⁸ Within physical time there is a past which is already objectively immortal, a present which is the standpoint of the new occasion, and a future which is not yet; hence, we maintain, on Whitehead’s account, physical time is dynamic. Physical time is not merely B-series time, but necessarily has A-series characteristics.

C) We interpret Whitehead’s statement that "there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming" to connect concrescence with his Category of the Ultimate, Creativity (PR 35/53). We also hold that concrescence is a nontemporal process, even though the phrase "nontemporal process" is admittedly a most paradoxical concept. Temporality characterizes the actual, but not that which is too indeterminate to be actual.

The concept of indeterminacy is ambiguous; there are at least two different senses of the word "indeterminacy". One sense denotes relative or ordinary indeterminacy, and the other sense denotes radical or absolute indeterminacy. Ordinary indeterminacy is compatible with time, for this indeterminacy can only be a characteristic of some enduring object which is otherwise fully actual. For example, a person may be undecided as to where and when to eat lunch. As the morning passes, this indeterminacy may give way by stages to the determination to eat at a specific time, at a specific place. In this case, the reduction of indeterminacy to determinacy occurs with the passage of time and on the part of an entity who is fully determinate and actual; the person is fully actual throughout the entire process. The indeterminacy in this case is relative indeterminacy, not absolute indeterminacy.

But as we understand Whitehead, the passage from the indeterminacy of the initial phases of concrescence, through the intermediate phases to the final phase, satisfaction, is a process which concretizes or actualizes the occasion itself, and the occasion is not actual until the process is complete.⁹ If so, the indeterminacy of the earlier phases of concrescence is a radical or absolute indeterminacy inconsistent with the passage of time, for there is nothing as yet actual for which time could pass; thus, concrescence is a process in a metaphorical or figurative sense, and this is why Whitehead associates concrescence with creativity, calling creativity the Category of the Ultimate, meaning that though it is used to explain all else, it is not explicable.

Is inexplicability too high a price to pay for granting time’s reality and combating Zeno’s paradoxes? Whitehead seems willing to pay this price, which is that concrescence is not a temporal process. Instead, time is the result of concrescence followed by transition from occasion to occasion. Yet another price is the need to solve such problems as the nature of a person by some other means than the analysis of actual occasions, as actual occasions alone are insufficient to explain persons.

IV. Persons

Each person may be described as a society of more than fifty trillion cells, and each living cell is a society which from any vantage point rivals the observable universe in its complexity. To get an idea of the mystery and wonder which is a person, note that the number of elementary particles within a human body is 1027, whereas the number of stars in the observable universe is less, 1023; thus, there are 10,000 times more elementary particles in a human body than stars in the heavens. This is quite impressive, suggesting that people are marvelously amazing.

In light of the present interpretation of actual occasions and concrescence, actual occasions alone cannot be used to explain persons. For unlike concrescence, the temporality of persons lies outside single actual occasions. Temporality exists in the relations among occasions; without temporality, no larger scale events or enduring objects are possible, and in a realistic and relational theory of time and space, the concrescence of microphysical occasions is productive of space-time by providing the relata for the relations which are the fabric of space-time. In addition, unlike occasions, persons have within themselves earlier and later, past, present, and future; a quantum event has no basis for temporality internal to itself.

Persons have an internal sense of the direction of time with and because of awareness, but at the scale of a quantum event there is no arrow internal to an event that indicates the direction of time. Whiteheadian actual occasions must rely on the world external to themselves for a vicarious experience of time. A clock is needed in physics to determine which subquantal event is earlier relative to another. And the "laws" which are applicable at scales smaller than the quantum event are thought by many physicists to be reversible or bi-directional, so again instruments must be used when determining earlier and later events at the quantum scale.

Furthermore, there are scale differences between persons and quantum events. Consider that physics believes a quantum event is one ten-trillionth of a second in duration. Conversely, the moment that a human experiences as the present lasts much longer. According to William James, it lasts somewhere between one twentieth of a second and a second and a half (PP 642). In sum, the number of quantum events in one second is equal to the number of seconds in one hundred thousand years.

Not only is there a remarkable difference in time between an actual occasion and a person, there is a disparity regarding space. Quantum Electrodynamics estimates the "size" of a quantum event to be approximately one ten-trillionth of a centimeter cubed. Compare the quantum event’s "size" with one cubic meter, which is approximately the space that a human occupies. Recognizing the tremendous differences between persons and quantum events in time and space, a philosopher begins wondering and worrying.

Admittedly, Whitehead’s theory of concrescence is an idealized abstraction from human experience, but as Whitehead admits, an abstraction leaves out most of the features of the original from which it is abstracted; hence, it does not follow that because the original has a given feature the abstraction will also have that feature (AI 187). For example, human experience has internal temporality, but it does not follow that concrescence has internal temporality; to assume that an abstraction has all the features of the original model is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

We are reluctant to take the notion that concrescence is a mere idealized abstraction from human experience too seriously in the analysis of persons, for there are characteristics of a person that must not be ignored and cannot be understood in terms of single occasions. Not only do serious problems arise concerning time and space, but serious problems also arise when trying to explain the nature of being and acting human.

According to Whitehead, only that which is subjectively real can act in the sense of self-creation, and only that which is self-creative is fully actual. White-head writes: "An actuality is self-realizing, and whatever is self-realizing is an actuality" (PR 222/340). Initially, the assertion seems applicable to persons, but in the chapter on Process, part II of Process and Reality, Whitehead posits that it is the single actual occasion that concrescences, connecting concrescence with self-realization. He states that " ‘Actuality’ means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete" (PR 211/321). We are concerned with the word "entry" in Whitehead’s statement, for persons do not only enter into the concrete, we endure in the concrete.

We interpret Whitehead’s above statements to mean that the present actual occasion is subjectively real, actual, and that all other occasions are objectively immortal. But if only the present actual occasion is that which is actual, how can a person act?¹⁰ It seems obvious that the whole person acts, not an individual occasion, especially since an occasion is one ten trillionth of a second in duration.

It is a venerable and reliable principle of metaphysics that if an entity is capable of acting, of being an efficient cause, then that entity is an actual entity. If it is the person who acts rather than a part of the person, an occasion, then he or she is an actual entity, according to traditional metaphysics; however, this is inconsistent with a literal reading of Whitehead on the nature of actual occasions, for he identifies that which is subjectively real as the individual occasion, and thereby seems to commit himself, however unwittingly, to the position that people are not res vera. So we ask: are persons creatures of appearance in Whitehead’s system? Or does Whitehead’s system defy interpretation using the concepts and the language of traditional metaphysics?

In Whitehead’s metaphysics the locus of creation is confined to the standpoint of one present occasion in the sense that something new becomes with the present occasion. One way to reconcile the difficulty is to allow that persons act through influencing the self-creation of actual occasions, to allow that a person is grounded in an astronomically large number of occasions as objectified in comparison to the single occasion on the cutting edge of the creative advance through which a person lives, endures, acts.

V. Persons and Action

If the locus of action is the single occasion, then the sense that a person has of acting is illusory. Moreover, if the locus of action is the single occasion, a person’s action is reduced to an epiphenomenon because most of what a person is, past occasions, is incapable of acting; to limit action to a single occasion is essentially to deny acting to persons. If we acknowledge that persons are capable of acting, then we must also acknowledge persons are actual; action is a sufficient condition for actuality. Simply, if we are willing to grant that an entity is capable of action, then we must grant that the entity is actual.

The problem of persons cannot be solved without some basic changes in understanding Whitehead’s metaphysics. Whitehead’s theory of actual occasions puts too much emphasis on the actuality of the one immediately present actual occasion (PR 211/321). Whitehead calls the causal past the actual world, but his notion of objective immortality belies some of the consequences of actuality. For instance, past occasions are supposedly no longer alive, and so these are no longer subjects of action, subjects of experience.

We hold that the test for actuality is the ability to act, to exert power and influence on the coming to be of individual quantum events and larger societies of occasions. Persons have this power; at least, such is presupposed by human languages of action and intentionality. That persons have the power to act is a fact, a fact perhaps often overlooked because Whitehead calls a person a society.

The word "society" is a bit misleading; society suggests the multiple, that is, a multiplicity of occasions, as opposed to the idea of an organic unity. Persons are multiplicities, but persons are unities as well. The danger posed by calling a person a society is that a person might be understood to be a cluster of occasions, one occasion subjectively real, while all others are objectively immortal. The concept of societies is further misleading in that it is an abstraction which leaves out many of the details of the reality of persons. Consequently, the word "society," we believe, ought to be understood in the sense that Whitehead uses the phrase "organism" in Science and The Modern World, which is as a whole not reducible to the sum of its parts, an organic unity (SMW Ch. V).

We hold that most ordinary things are organic unities for Whitehead, including occasions, elementary particles, molecules, simple organisms and complex organisms. Of course, other ordinary things like tables, cans, and, generally speaking, artificial things are less than organic unities. A person ought to be described then as containing within herself many societies, though societies in the sense of organic unities; a person is an organic unity, but a unity which contains many organic unities, such as elementary particles, atoms, molecules, cells, organs.

Actual occasions ought to be understood as organic unities. At the foundational level actual occasions are the fabric of space-time, the necessary condition for all else. We believe that were it not for the foundation of actual occasions constituting space-time there could be no elementary particles, no molecules, no simple or complex organisms, no persons. Stated differently, the occasions of space-time are the original entities of this cosmic epoch.

But in Process and Reality, Whitehead recognizes two fundamentally different types of actual occasions, those constituting space-time empty of matter, and those constituting experient occasions in the histories of particular particles, corresponding to basic pulses or beats in the theories of quantum physics (PR 177/269). Whitehead, like many quantum physicists, draws a distinction between those quantum events that lead to successors constituting particles, and those quantum events that are independent of particles, those of empty space.

We hold that those occasions responding to basic pulses or to the lure of a particular past particle form the elementary particles, which in turn form the atoms, which in turn form the molecules, which in turn form the more complex molecules of primitive organisms, which in turn form the one-celled organisms, which in turn form the multi-celled organisms, which, finally, in turn form the more complex organisms, persons. A person, then, contains within herself different times and different places of all the organic unities within herself. Just as the rainbow is not within any particular droplet of water, a person is not within any particular actual occasion, nor any particular constituent society. Whitehead’s thesis that there is no nature in an instant of time can be applied directly to persons: there is no person in any one occasion nor any one constituent society (SMW Ch. II).

In light of the above, the problem concerning the differences in size between persons and occasions appears to us to be a pseudo-problem. For all entities, elementary particles, atoms, molecules, and so on, are organic unities, each integrating into itself organic unities smaller in size with the differences in size being unproblematical between each level, above or below.¹¹

Though the problem of size seems no longer troublesome, there remains a problem: Whitehead’s seeming unwillingness to allow subjective reality to entities other than actual occasions. Common sense requires that persons be acknowledged as initiators of actions, subjects of experience. If persons are subjectively real, then persons must somehow influence occasions, but there is no need to suppose that the influence is direct from person to an occasion. We must keep in mind the many layers of organic unities between a person and actual occasions. The entities directly below the level of a person, the immediate constituents of a person, are the organs such as the brain and heart, and other large scale body parts, such as the arms and hands. The person acts and experiences with these, and they have their nature in the life of a person. We maintain that a person’s influence is direct and immediate over the constituents of the next level down, and each of these in turn over those below. Whitehead stressed the importance of the fact that we see with the eyes, and he would have noted that the eyes experience with their immediate constituents, rods and cones. None of this would be possible unless actuality is granted to societies of occasions, and not just to occasions.

VI. Conclusion

We have argued that the quantum event is Whitehead’s actual occasion and that concrescence is productive of space-time, which is the fundamental level of the present cosmic epoch, the necessary condition for all that is. We, however, have also argued that there is another kind of actual occasion, though at the same scale as quantum events, responding to the elemental and fundamental beats, musical lures, basic rhythms constitutive of cosmic order; in time, we believe that new sciences, such as chronobiology, will shed light on this process.

We have argued that persons are res vera and that single occasions alone cannot explain persons, but societies of subjectively real organic unities can to a great extent explain the complexity of persons. A person is composed of many subjectively real organic unities all working with each other at various levels of scale. We hold that occasions, organic unities up to persons and other sentient beings, are res vera. We are no longer concerned with Whitehead’s usage of the word "actual" as we were at the beginning of the present paper.

Initially, Whitehead might seem to identify actual occasions as res vera to the exclusion of persons; however, careful thought, along with the addition of other Whiteheadian ideas, such as organic unities, casts doubt on the suspicion that for Whitehead only actual occasions are res vera.

To an extent, Whitehead’s metaphysics defies interpretation based on the concepts and the language of traditional metaphysics. Whitehead’s philosophy requires a broader conception of time, for example, one which will allow for the reality of the past in the present, a concept that the traditional metaphysician would likely judge as intuitively false, leading to the additional judgment that much of human experience is appearance rather than reality, a position which we reject, having come to a greater understanding of Whitehead’s metaphysics.

What we have attempted in this paper is intended as provisional and suggestive, certainly not final, as philosophy is never final. The questions are always more important than any particular answers.

References

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

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

PP--William James. The Principles of Psychology. Volume I. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. (First published in 1890.)

PS 8--Edward Pols. "Human Agents as Actual Beings." Process Studies 8/2 (Summer 1979): 103-13.

PS 18--Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. "Energy-Events and Fields." Process Studies 18/3 (Fall 1989): 153-65.

Notes

1This has been argued at length in papers in Process Studies. The article by Joseph A. Bracken, S. J. (PS 18: 153), "Energy-Events and Fields", is the most recent. Bracken attempts to solve the problem through the idea of "collective agency", stopping short of allowing that the person is as real as her constituent occasions. The article by J. P. Moreland, "An Enduring Self: The Achilles’ Heel of Process Philosophy" (PS 17: 193), focuses more on the problem of personal identity, but it is concerned with the general part-whole and unity problem that this present paper is attempting to sharpen. Much further back in time is Rem Edwards’ attempt to use Whitehead’s theology to resolve the problem of reality of persons, by suggesting that "souls" continuously concresce in the same manner that God continuously concresces. Bracken’s attempt to use the concept of "field" is suggestive, but in the end unsuccessful because fields pose even greater conceptual problems than events.

2Murray Code, Order & Organism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), especially pages 73-75, is a helpful discussion of the relevance of Zeno’s paradoxes to Whitehead’s theory of actual occasions.

3Adventures of Ideas, Part IV, especially the chapter "Truth and Beauty", can be interpreted as supporting the position that humans are creatures of appearance.

4See, for example, Joseph Silk, The Big Bang (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1980).

5Eric Chaisson, The Life Era (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), argues for a transition in kind from era to era in the unfolding of the present cosmic epoch in the kinds of entities that are "final" in the sense of "last".

6Though the original work was done by J. E. M. McTaggart, the best available source for a discussion of static versus dynamic time and of the corresponding B series and A series distinctions, is Richard M. Gale, The Philosophy of Time (London: Macmillan, 1968).

7Lewis S. Ford, "When Did Whitehead Conceive God to Be Personal?", Anglican Theological Review, 72/3 (July, 1990), 280-91.

8We grant that Whitehead’s language in this passage, "The two kinds of fluency", is puzzling with respect to the philosophy of time. We are arguing that time as such requires both of these kinds of fluency, that neither is in itself a temporal process.

9The material in Chapter X in Science and the Modern World is relevant to the issue of the kinds of indeterminacy, in that indeterminacy is connected with two different kinds of abstraction.

10Edward Pols’ discussion of the nature of agency (PS 8: 103-13), is most helpful. We are in agreement with Pols that a person has power over his constituent parts. Speech acts and neuronal and other physiological activities are interesting metaphysically because the act seems to exercise power over the neuronal activity (PS 8: 103).

11 Lewis S. Ford’s essay, "Inclusive Occasions", proposes a way for constructing larger occasions out of quantum sized sub-microscopic actual occasions. We differ with Ford’s theory of inclusive occasions in that we allow societies to have the unity of organic wholes, organisms, in Whitehead’s sense, and as such to be capable of action, to be subjectively real. Ford’s theory of inclusive occasions places occasions within occasions; we, however, believe that there are two types of occasions, occasions which constitute space-time and occasions which are the basic constituents of particles and, indirectly through particles, of all of the more complex entities. (See "Inclusive Occasions" in Process in Context: Essays in Post-Whiteheadian Perspectives, ed. Ernest Wolf-Gazo, [Bern: Peter Lang, 1980], 107-36.)

When I was a student at the Hebrew University, Mordecai Kaplan lived in Jerusalem. Always interested in young people, it was his custom to host occasional evenings in his living room with university students. The discussions would meander over a variety of contemporary Jewish issues but in some way always return to some central theme of Kaplan’s thought.

One especially memorable evening was on the first night of Hanukkah. The elderly professor, well into his nineties by this point, began with the candle lighting ceremony after which it is customary to sing the traditional hymn "Rock of Ages." He spoke with a very slight European accent and sported a goatee which created an air of old world authenticity, at least to a California-born Jew like myself who had been educated primarily in Reform institutions.

After the candles had been lit and we had recited the appropriate blessings he turned to us -- we were about 25 students in all -- and asked, "Who knows Maoz Tzur -- Rock of Ages’?" Wanting to impress, or at least not disappoint, the famous rabbi who seemed to personify traditional Judaism, we all raised our hands. He then scolded us, "I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people today, wasting your time with such gibberish. How many of you actually believe the words of that song? It is so out-dated. How can you sing it if you don’t believe it?"

Kaplan was not known for his tact. There was, for example, a poor young man in Kaplan’s homiletics class at The Jewish Theological Seminary who spent several hours with the learned professor in his office preparing a sermon that was to be delivered in class in a few days. Kaplan became one of the most influential of American Jewish philosophers in part because he was willing to teach homiletics, which many of his colleagues on the faculty considered beneath them. But he did not concern himself with the method of delivery in these classes. Rather he focused on content. He asked his students the same question that he had asked us so many years later: do you believe what you are saying? If not, how can you deliver a sermon on that topic with integrity?

At any rate, the young man in question indeed delivered the sermon in class that he had prepared with Kaplan in his office. Kaplan then proceeded relentlessly to dissect the sermon word by word. By the end of Kaplan’s analysis, the poor young man was devastated. He turned to Kaplan and said, "But Professor, this is the very sermon that we prepared in your office just two days ago. Every ‘t’ is crossed and every ‘i’ is dotted in the same place today as it was then." Kaplan turned to the young man indignantly and retorted, "But, my good man, I have changed in two days."

Returning now to my evening with Kaplan, with the slight sting of embarrassment from knowing too much of the wrong Hanukkah ritual still in our hearts, we all sat down sheepishly. The room was crowded. We waited to hear the professor’s words of wisdom. He began as usual with a question. "Who here knows some philosophy?" Now you might expect that by this point we would be a bit chastened by the professor’s scolding from just a few minutes earlier, at least sufficiently so to be more reticent about raising our hands or answering a question that he asked. Indeed, perhaps because they didn’t think that they knew much about philosophy or perhaps because they learned more quickly than some of the rest of us, the vast majority of students were smart enough by this point not to try to impress the old man. A few of us, however, still thinking that we would impress the great philosopher, responded in the affirmative by raising our hands.

By now of course you can predict the response. "I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people today, wasting your time with such gibberish. I studied philosophy at Columbia University, and it was all a lot of nonsense. All of it, except the pragmatists like Dewey."

I recount these anecdotes not only to give you a sense of the personality of the man who is in some important respects synonymous with American Jewry and who is responsible for conceiving of some of its major institutions, from the once liberal orthodoxy of the Young Israel movement, to the Reconstructionist movement in Judaism, to the very structure of the American synagogue, which he called a synagogue center, to my own institution, The University of Judaism. I recount them also because they speak to the central themes of Dr. Kaufman’s very fine analysis of the relation between Kaplan’s pragmatism and process theology.

First, Kaufman is quite right, as Kaplan’s own testimony suggests, to view Kaplan as a pragmatist. Indeed, the very concept of a "reconstructed God" and a "reconstructed Judaism" may well be taken from Dewey’s 1920 volume Reconstruction in Philosophy. Kaplan’s disdain for academic philosophy probably also derives from its lack of concern for practical consequences. Certainly he was concerned with the consequences of religious faith and played out this concern in his functionalist analysis of divinity as well as in his conception of the ethical ramifications of such faith.

Second, Kaufman is also most certainly correct that Kaplan’s religious pragmatism has much in common with Whitehead’s process theology. Indeed, one of Kaplan’s closest associates during the period in the twenties and early thirties when his theological ideas were taking shape was Max Kadush in. In fact, it was Kadushin more than Kaplan who, in volumes such as The Rabbinic Mind and Organic Thinking: A Study in Rabbinic Thought, set out to understand traditional Judaism in terms of the organic approach that is so characteristic of Whitehead’s metaphysics.

But Kadushin broke with Kaplan over the very sort of naturalism that Kaufman so astutely sees as that which Kaplan’s religious pragmatism and Whitehead’s process theology have in common. At least this is the common wisdom.

Just as Kaplan had too much integrity to sing "Maoz Tzur -- Rock of Ages" when he could not believe the words he was singing or to encourage a young rabbi to preach that which he could no longer believe, Kaplan could not countenance a theology that was inconsistent with other facts we know to be true about the cosmos. If our most basic beliefs about the stuff of which nature is made preclude the existence of some other, radically different metaphysical stuff from which a transcendent deity might be made, then we must admit, as an inescapable consequence, that no such transcendent being exists. Yet, if there remains a positive function to belief in such a deity, it must be the case, again inescapably, that this deity is to be accounted for within the confines of the natural order.

And Kaufman has gotten it right once again that it is over this very issue that Kaplan and Whitehead part ways. For Whitehead is prepared to attribute to the God-head the sort of stuff of which "actual entities" are made, and to say of this God stuff that it is distinct from other natural stuff, though not so different as to remove God from the natural order. Unlike Kaplan who identifies God with the creative forces within the universe itself, Whitehead represents God as the "principle of concretion" by means of which actual process takes shape. God is not the process of creation, nor does he or she create actual entities; rather he or she provides the initial impetus for self-creation. Each actual entity, including God, is a particular outcome of ‘creativity,’ which is the process through which the stuff of creation is concretized. God, like everything else, is a process. And process is the stuff of creation. Only God is a particular kind of process, one that plays a unique role in the creation of other processes.

About all of this Kaufman is dead right. Nevertheless, Kaufman does not touch upon a deeper rift between Whitehead and Kaplan, a rift that can explain why, at least to the bereaved, Whitehead’s may be a more worshipful God than Kaplan’s. It may also offer a deeper explanation as to why Kaplan’s loyal friend Kadushin could not follow him into Reconstructionism.

Dr. Kaufman is, of course, aware that Kaplan was deeply influenced by the great founder of Cultural Zionism, Asher Ginzberg, who published under the pen name of Ahad Haam (one of the people). Ginzberg argued that the religious life of the Jewish people was a product of the medieval dispersion of the Jews from their ancestral homeland, and that a renaissance of the Jews in the land of Israel could make possible the revival of a national secular culture that would revolve around Hebrew language.

It was from Ginzberg’s conception of a national Hebrew culture that Kaplan derived his notion of Judaism as a civilization. And it was in response to Ginzberg’s secularism that Kaplan set out to defend Jewish religion. Ginzberg saw the Jewish people moving into a new phase of its existence in the modem period. Having survived their mythical and metaphysical phases, the Jews were moving into a scientific phase. Ginzberg learned this stage theory of cultural development from the French philosopher August Comte, the father of positivism. And it was also from Comte and the cultural milieu that popularized his philosophy of science, that Ginzberg learned his own views on the character of the scientific culture into which the Jewish people was emerging.

It was this naive positivism that Kaplan accepted, rather than, for example, the much more sophisticated views of his philosophical mentor John Dewey, as the basis of his argument for religious naturalism. For, it was Kaplan’s aim to demonstrate that Jewish religion had a function even within the scientific culture into which the Jewish people was said by Ginzberg to have emerged. Thus, Kaufman quite rightly cites Kaplan’s disciple Jack Cohen in defining naturalism as "the disposition to believe that any phenomenon can be explained by appeal to general laws confirmable either by observation or by inference from observation."

However, by the time he delivered his Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1927 and 1928, upon which Process and Reality was based, Whitehead was already aware of insurmountable difficulties with many empiricist assumptions about the nature of the reality that we are supposed to observe in order to confirm those general laws of which Cohen wrote. He was also aware that efforts by logical positivists like his own student, Bertrand Russell, and members of the Vienna Circle such as Rudolph Carnap, were doomed to failure.

Kaplan’s theology embraced a popular view of the nature of science that would prove ultimately to be indefensible. Whitehead’s theology, on the other hand, stood at the forefront of the attack on the very naive positivism that Kaplan learned from Comte through Ginzberg. Kaplan, in short, was a positivist and a modernist, while Whitehead was one of the earliest post-positivists and post-modernists.

This is the rift that separates Kaplan from Whitehead. And it is this that explains why Kadushin could not follow Kaplan into Reconstnictionism, a theological doctrine even more dominated by naive positivism than the positive-historical school of The Jewish Theological Seminary where they both taught. For like Whitehead and Dewey, Kadushin understood that the concept of organic thinking offered an approach to logic and the foundations of knowledge that was an alternative to the perversions of the sort of blind faith in natural science that had come to dominate the intellectual cultures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; an alternative that did not attempt to devalue science or replace it with a nonrational mysticism, but which did attempt to place scientific thought into a broader cultural context in which other forms of cultural expression such as religious and legal reasoning could play important and non-subservient roles.

It may also be this rift that explains why Whitehead’s God offers greater solace to the mourner. For all of Kaplan’s concern with salvation, he has learned too much optimism from the positivists to account for the many profound failings in human nature and in the rest of nature as well. Life, it often turns out, is not the way it’s supposed to be. If there is such a strong saving force in the natural universe, if in other words God is so good, the mourner wants to know why life is so bad. Of course, the mourner wants to know no less from traditional theology. But that is precisely the point. Kaplan seems to have replaced an absolute truth rooted in metaphysics or even myth with another one rooted in science. But an absolute truth it is nonetheless.

Whitehead, on the other hand, stands at the forefront of a movement that was destined to debunk absolutes in both philosophy and science, in order to grasp the nature of reality with more subtle and flexible intellectual tools. Out of this movement, a vision of the cosmos is emerging that is at once more purposeful, more respectful of the mysteries of nature, and more cognizant of the limitations of the human mind in attempting to comprehend it. This added subtlety lends itself to a sort of humility that is absent in the positivist doctrine and that may be more appealing to the bereaved. On this view, our only response to the mourner may be to say, "I don’t fully understand why life turns out so awfully sometimes, but I am here, and through my presence perhaps you can feel God’s presence as well."

I came away from my evenings with Kaplan in awe of his intellectual acumen, his encyclopedic knowledge, and most of all of his integrity. But I also came away troubled, troubled by his arrogance. It was as if he had the truth in his pocket, and the rabbis who preceded him somehow didn’t get it. I could never bring myself to believe that in all of Jewish history, so many rabbis who had been so smart about so many other things, could be so stupid theologically. I guess Kadushin could not bring himself to believe that either. I like to think that when Whitehead turned from mathematics to metaphysics, he felt some of these same sorts of doubts from within his own cultural context.