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 (Note: this essay was translated by James W. Felt. James W Felt is Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. Independently of Fetz’s book he had published in Process Studies 14/4 (Winter 1985) an essay along some of the same lines: "Whitehead’s Misconception of ‘Substance’ in Aristotle.")

At the conclusion of Whitehead’s thought stands the insight into the unfathomableness of reality and the recognition of the necessarily provisional nature of philosophical speculation (PR xiv; ESP 114). The claim for dogmatic certitude is vigorously denied and his own philosophy declared to be inadequate (PR 343).² Whitehead thus takes criticism for granted; indeed he regards his philosophy as a success if it makes a new kind of criticism possible (ESP 114)³ He himself provides the criteria according to which his philosophy is to be evaluated. Thus, thought must not fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ but keep as close as possible to lived experience. Further, besides the criterion of adequacy, a philosophy ought to conform to the criterion of consistency (PR 3). An additional possibility for criticism appears in Whitehead’s appeal to other thinkers -- that is, through the alternatives that they thus bring into play. This seems to us specially relevant to Aristotle, since one finds here such a kinship of basic viewpoints that their differences particularly call for a critical examination.

1. The Equating of Entities with Microcosmic Events

"The question which was raised of old and is raised now and always, and is always the subject of doubt, viz. what being is, is just the question, what is substance?"⁴ This question, which confronted Aristotle from previous tradition and from his own thinking, poses itself anew to Whitehead. For his philosophy too is meant to be judged as an effort to give a new answer, from a changed situation, to this basic question about "substance," about what "actually" and "properly" is. So we get to the heart of the issue when for our part we make Whitehead’s ‘actual entities’ a "subject of doubt," and judge them by what seems to us to have been handed on for thought "of old and now and always."

The complex of problems, so rich in perspectives, provided by Whitehead’s ‘actual entities’ can be approached from many angles. We pose the question what may or must be most properly regarded as an ‘actual entity’ if one is to conceive it and attach the same importance to it as Whitehead does.

‘Actual entities’ are supposed to make up proper actuality, true being. They are thought of as subjects, the subjects of experience, however diverse. The fascination of Whitehead’s theory lies in the vision of a subjectivity that penetrates actuality. It is the same fascination that Leibniz and Hegel provoke. But in contrast to Leibniz, Whitehead’s entities have "windows" and are -- contrary to Hegel -- ineluctably a particular "this."

We are asking about the adequacy of Whiteheadian subjectivism, and more exactly, about the relationship between the concept and the status of a Whiteheadian [actual] entity. For to anticipate at once: the "subject of doubt" does not lie for us in Whitehead’s concept of an ‘actual entity’ so much as in his exclusive identification of ‘actual entities’ with [252] ultimate atomic event-units, even beyond the smallest units known to us in physics. As a matter of fact, most of the difficulties and objections that can be raised against Whitehead’s philosophy of organism have their root directly or indirectly in this narrowly conceived identification.

For one thing, the dubiousness of the ultimate event-units with which Whitehead identifies ‘actual entities’ consists in this, that they can in no way be regarded as given. That holds both for the events’ that make up the world around us and for those that are supposed to make up our very self. Rather, they are hypothetically postulated entities at the edge of the microworld. As such they owe their existence to a bare postulate, since Whitehead, by reason of his interpretation of the findings of natural science, thinks an infinite regress to ever smaller entities is unlikely (SMW 103, 110; PR 91f).⁵ If the existence of such ultimate event-units is not assured, neither is the structure that Whitehead attributes to them. In this respect the characterization of Whitehead’s system as "conceptual poetry"⁶ and the demand for a "de-mythologizing" (SPPI) of the ‘actual entity’ seem justified.

Whether ultimate event-units are to be acknowledged or not seems to us to be a question that neither philosophy nor natural science can decide with any certainty. Still more questionable is Whitehead’s supposition of ultimate event-units insofar as he takes these ultimate ‘events’ to be the only true ‘entities’ and builds his whole interpretation of reality on them. By reason of this prior decision Whitehead is forced to interpret all those beings of higher order that manifest themselves as unities, such as living beings and humans, to be a multiplicity of entities, that is, to be a ‘society,’ [253] or even more as a whole gradation of inter-compartmentalized ‘societies’ and ‘subordinate societies.’ The Whiteheadian concept of ‘society’ unquestionably serves well where, as in a material thing, multiplicity is dominant and no true unity holds sway. The concept even seems to us indispensable if in such cases we are also to display the organic’ character of the material thing. But it is misguided from the start when Whitehead, because of a hypothetical and procedural assumption, reduces to the concept of multiplicity that which manifests itself, both in immediate relationships and in self-consciousness, as a primordial unity. It appears to us, as it does to many other critics, (see WM; see also PS 2: 216-21; PS 3: 15-25; PS 5: 195-203) that Whitehead himself here commits the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ inasmuch as he puts a dubious multiplicity in the place of clear-cut unities.

That is by no means to say the last word about Whitehead’s philosophy. He explicitly distinguishes the metaphysical description that aims at giving the general character of any entity (a description that always remains tentative) from the tentative account appropriate to the development of a ‘cosmic epoch’ (PR 90f, 96-7). Even if one calls into question Whitehead’s hasty and exclusive identification of the actual entities of our epoch with the ultimate electromagnetic events, his radical and minutely carried out attempt at a novel conception of entity still retains all its interest. Criticism of Whitehead must not overlook that the higher unities making up the world do in fact comprise a multiplicity of subordinated unities, so that the problem of multiplicity in unity remains, even when one rejects Whitehead’s concept of a ‘society’ as too pluralistic. Finally, it should be pointed out that Whitehead himself is unable to stick with the postulated uniform character of an actual entity as resolutely and univocally as he alleges: God as an actual entity is more than just specifically different from the other actual entities.

The rigid adherence to microcosmic ultimate event-units as the sole actual entities seems to us to be not only inadequate with respect to the [254] higher forms of unity, but also to introduce an inconsistency in Whitehead’s thinking. That holds particularly with regard to the human person.

Whitehead’s model of an ‘actual entity’ is unquestionably the human self in its complete unity, including the body. In many passages there is indeed a human being, with its own experience of self, implicitly behind the concept of an ‘actual entity’ as Whitehead himself explains it, (PR 112)⁷ and we are of the opinion that impartial readers frequently apply this tacit concept to themselves as paradigms. From this perspective, the reduction of persons to a multiplicity of ‘actual entities,’ and their reconstruction as ‘societies,’ strikes one as an afterthought forced by a ‘cosmological’ or perhaps a ‘physicalistic’ tendency on the part of Whitehead. In place of the human being who immediately knows himself or herself as a subject and who provides the starting point for Whitehead’s analysis, there is suddenly substituted a multiplicity of entities whose existence is hypothetically assumed by reason of an altogether different starting point.

Whitehead himself emphasizes that an account has to be given of the unity of the person, including its body and its identity through time. He tries to achieve this in his own way, insofar as he conceives of the many ‘actual entities’ or ‘events’ constituting the person to be as mutually immanent as possible. One may doubt that this results in the achievement of the kind of unity that has to do with the human being. Even "orthodox" Whiteheadians have to admit that the human self is not experienced as a strand of distinct entities, but manifests itself as something enduring continuously (see PS 5: 200f). In a strand of really distinct actual entities, these would necessarily stand in a subject-object relationship to one another, so that the entity that perishes and is objectified is a different entity than that which is coming into being. But personal experience speaks a different language, insofar as it attributes to the selfsame "I" the [255] experiences of the past (see PS 2: 216-21). Likewise, the experience of identity with one’s own body scarcely seems adequately portrayed by the relationship of a dominant strand of events to its subordinate ‘societies.’ Here too it is true that I not only have my body in a subject-object-relationship, but much more, that as subject I am my body, a body that for me is something more and quite other than just a peculiarly intimate bit of the surrounding world (PR 81) with which I am not identified.

These Whiteheadian dilemmas simply cannot be avoided so long as one does not give up the rigid identification of ‘actual entities’ with hypothetically assumed ultimate event-units, and does not conceive entity more broadly. Instead of disintegrating the human person into a swarm of entities that are then reunited into the -- dubious -- unity of a bare ‘society,’ the simpler and more realistic solution ought to lie in conceiving the person, steadfastly and from the beginning, as one entity, even though a complex one, as befits Whitehead’s starting point. The same holds for the other beings that manifest a genuine and original unity.

In that case, of course, the concept of entity would have to be differentiated insofar as it would stand for unities of diverse grades of complexity. Whitehead’s ideal of a uniform, coherent theory would be better secured through an analogical use of the concept of entity than through the reduction to a single genus of entities, a move that Whitehead himself could not remain faithful to, as his concept of God shows.

What seems specially noteworthy in this connection is the meager use that the philosophy of organism makes of its own central concept of organism. For sensu stricto this denotes in the living being a unity that, as such, includes within itself a multiplicity of diverse "parts" or "organs." But in the concept of "organism," unlike in that of "society," unity and not multiplicity is dominant. In the end, the philosophy of organism has to conceive these genuine "organisms" as [256] ‘societies.’ It seems a paradox that a philosophy that purports to be organic is forced, precisely at its point of origin, to abandon the concept of organism as a real unity in order to hold on to its concept of smallest organic event-units.

2. Life-World and Natural Unities

And so we are faced with the fundamental question: what forces us, as it did Whitehead, to give up the unity of the apparent totalities of the life-world in favor of an invisible multiplicity of microcosmic ultimate event-units whose existence and nature remains ever questionable? Whitehead believes that in this way he can escape thinking in terms of substance, a concept he has rejected and that he thinks would predominate as long as one continues to think in terms of the things of, and the categories flowing from, ordinary experience, practically oriented as it is. In his perspective it is necessary to leave the plane of experience and go back to the ultimate microcosmic event-units, since it is only in the microcosm that the desired concept of an ‘actual entity’ as an organic unity of process can find a place. Hanging on to this concept would thus include recourse to such ultimate microcosmic event-units, so that in the end even the higher totalities could only be conceived as ‘societies’ of such ‘entities.’

Historically, Whitehead’s cosmology, in its intent and structure, has to be regarded as a rethinking of Leibniz’s doctrine of monads. But with his ‘societies’ Whitehead pushes forward more radically (and perhaps also more consistently) than Leibniz, who still conceives the higher beings to be one substance, even though composite and made up of a multiplicity of monads. Moreover Leibniz is willing to accept certain traditional unities, such as the human soul. In contrast to Whitehead, the gradation of Leibniz’s monads is open towards the bottom. But with his theory of monads Leibniz stands in the dualistic line of Descartes inasmuch as he contrasts the monadic, subsistent soul not with a single body but rather with a multiplicity of equally subsistent monads. [257] Whitehead wants to abolish the dualism of Descartes, and he succeeds insofar as one considers his concept of an ‘actual entity’ with its ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ pole. But does not the pluralism of his ‘societies,’ as with Leibniz’s "composite substances," continue the Cartesian split?

In any case the crucial question that presents itself is whether the Whiteheadian concept of an ‘actual entity’ -- or something like it -- can in fact be applied only to microcosmic ultimate event-units (insofar as they are real at all), but not to what confronts us as a genuine unity on the level of the "life world," namely the human being. Whitehead takes the one human being, in its here and now, as the model of an ‘actual entity.’ But what presents itself to his analysis as the model of an ‘actual entity’ ought to be ontologically interpretable as one entity.

Such an option would demand that we break with the presupposition that Whitehead seems implicitly to make, namely, that one is forced to think of substance in the sense he has rejected if one is to maintain the unities of the "life world." This holds true insofar as we are here on the level of "things" and think in terms of that concept. But these "things" are exactly not what presents itself to us in the "life world" as genuine totalities, as Whitehead himself describes it. The kind of substance-thinking that he has condemned is dominant only when one tends to think in terms of these "things" and does not explicitly pay attention to what manifests itself as a true entity. So what is first required is a distinction, right on the level of the "life world," between genuine entities and "things," rather than a reversion to microcosmic event-units.

Here Aristotle turns out to be a good witness for us. He anticipates a concept of entity that is akin to that of Whitehead, but without deserting the plane of the life world and its unities. For Aristotle living beings serve as models of "entity" and are each conceived as one "entity." He conceives these natural "entities" in contrast to the usual notion of a thing. [258] They are not "entity" by reason of a passively enduring material substrate, but by reason of a processively self-evolving patterning principle, the "form." The "form" as fully actualized pattern is conceived as the aim of the process. The "entity," just as Whitehead contends, is by no means something that lies ready-made before the process. As for White-head, its actuality consists in its activity, its energeia, which is aimed at the completion of itself, its entelecheia.

Thus in Aristotle we already find the principles that permit us to conceive in the manner of a Whiteheadian ‘actual entity’ a genuine natural being as such, without recourse to hypothetically assumed ultimate event-units. It is quite another question whether these principles were carried through by Aristotle in as radical a way as Whitehead demands -- whether indeed Aristotle could possibly have so carried them through, given his level of natural science. In the end it was not the concept of entity found in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but rather that derivative from the Categories, of the identification of entity with enduring substrate, that dominated later history of thought. This indicates that the concept of "thing" prevailed as an undercurrent and supplanted Aristotle’s genuine conception of entity.

3. Societies nd Organisms

It is in view of this development that Whitehead’s recourse to ultimate event-units when dealing with "things" takes on its whole significance. Where the unity of a thing is superficial and more or less external and chancy, where the impression of passivity dominates so that "things" seem only ready-at-hand, just there does Whitehead’s attempted recourse to more ultimate units amount to a real intensification of the actuality of nature. The analysis of "things" into ‘societies’ of more ultimate units can be considered as his thoroughgoing attempt to push on toward natural entities in Aristotle’s sense -- even where Aristotle on the basis of bare perception could, despite his principles, see only a more or less amorphous, passive "matter."

[259] Yet the fact remains worth pondering that there is the appearance of "dead" matter -- that despite the activity of the many process unities making up matter, the impression of passivity and formlessness dominates, at least for us and on the whole. This impression is of course relative: matter appears as "dead" in contrast to the variety of higher forms that manifest themselves in the living being. Nevertheless it is apparent that in living beings these forms reveal themselves, on a different level of integration, as unity and totality, as subjectivity and self-identity. Finally, for Whitehead there is no reason to suppose that below this higher unity of the lived world there should be a highly intense experiential activity. Indeed, he considers the average constitution of the entities that make up the "non-living" to be on a lower level than the constitution of those that make up the living being. Is that not a sign that the higher forms of life, as unities and thereby as entities, are more than those that we find outside of them?

What makes good sense with regard to "things," namely their conception as a ‘society’ of more fundamental Unities, is thus not called for with regard to the more highly developed forms of life if one does not want to run the risk of missing from the start what is distinctive of living things. For through this shift in the way of thinking about them, ‘things" actually become for the most part more "natural" because seen in terms of originary and self-acting units of process. On the other hand, the resolving of higher unities into ‘societies’ removes in principle that which -- for Whitehead too -- provided the very paradigm of unity and essence.

With Whitehead one can object to this that the higher forms of life and also the human being are composed of subordinate unities and to that extent exhibit a ‘social order.’ Indeed, "all life in the body is the life of the individual cells. There are thus millions upon millions of centers of life in each animal body" (PR 108). But in the same context Whitehead points out that, despite this multiplicity, it is a matter not only of unified behavior but also of consciousness of a unified experience, so that the explanation [260] called for by the "miracle of life" consists precisely in this unification. Whitehead tries to explain it through the special ‘social organization’ of the unities in question. But does not the "miracle" consist precisely in this, that out of the ordering of this multiplicity, an encompassing unity arises, so that the concept of ‘society’ from the very start falls too short to give an account of what is most decisive about process and its outcome? For Whitehead’s concepts of ‘society,’ of ‘social order,’ and of ‘social organization’ stand for too many and too diverse things, so that precisely the most decisive distinctions get lost. What Whitehead denotes as the ‘social order’ of the higher living beings can no longer be understood on the model of a society with its emphasis on multiplicity, but only on that of an organism focusing on unity. Here if anywhere the dominant order is strictly "organic," so that its subordinate unities cannot exist as beings in their own right but only as functionally incorporated "organs" of an intrinsically differentiated self. The concept of "organism" already contains the notion that the "organs" do not lie outside the organism, but that the organism is in itself its own organs.

This distinction between what is in the strict sense "organic" and what is "social" is also present in Whitehead when one attends to the different forms into which he analyzes ‘social order.’

For Whitehead, every kind of ‘society’ has its ground of unity in its ‘defining characteristic,’ that is, in a formal element common to all its ‘members’ and in virtue of which there is a generally dominant ‘social order.’ Whitehead even draws an express analogy to Aristotelian form (AI 203; PR 34). According to Whitehead, in the case of simpler beings the dominance of such a common form secures only the reproduction of the pattern of becoming in the succeeding ‘occasions,’ so that there results the formation of an ‘enduring object’ with its enduring character. Even if [2611 all the individual occasions prehend and instantiate the same form, they still remain at bottom a multiplicity, without constituting a higher unity. Here the Whiteheadian concept of ‘society’ applies, since it indicates the lack of a higher individuality. "Things," or ‘enduring objects,’ are multiplicities built up by an additive pattern and consisting in neighboring individual occasions that succeed one another by repeating the same structural pattern. For those societies, on the other hand, that make up the higher forms of life, and in particular for the human being, Whitehead thinks of this ‘defining characteristic’ or common form as a ground of unity that dominates the occasions. In these ‘structured societies’ the individual occasions and strands of occasions are supposed to be so coordinated in their culminating central focus as to make it possible for a knowing subject to experience itself as a unity (Cf. AI, 186).

In our view only the whole human being (or any higher form of living being), and not a ‘presiding occasion’ at the final focus of a strand of occasions (if indeed there be any such ‘occasion’), can be viewed as such a subject. The gradation of actuality is thus not to be interpreted as if all the more highly developed beings were merely made up of ‘societies’ of elementary occasions. Rather, above and beyond the more complicated structure of ‘social’ organization one must assume an organization in which its multiplicity is overshadowed by its newly achieved unity. Whitehead conceives of evolution as the emergence of beings of increasingly intensive experience. But the decisive stages of this evolution are just those in which, beyond a new and purely ‘social’ organization, there emerges the constitution of organisms that, on a higher level from that of the unities they have integrated, can again count as true unitary beings. At any rate, it is primarily such complex individual beings that force themselves upon us as subjects, as unities, and thereby as entities.

4. The Importance of Process Thought

According to the philosophy of organism, an entity is in every case to be conceived as some kind of complexity. But why could actuality not be conceived as a gradation of more and more complex beings that include less complex subordinate units without our ever being able finally to specify which are the "ultimate" units? Such a theory would have the advantage of not having to break with the evidence of the lived world because of an exaggerated reduction of entities into questionable monadic units of becoming. The higher living beings, especially the human beings, ought to be through and through conceived as single entities in such a way as to preserve Whitehead’s fundamental insights while at the same time ruling out the above-mentioned weaknesses of the traditional concept of substance. The comparison with Aristotle has taught us that, historically, such a conception lies right on the line of what Aristotle, in his writings on natural philosophy and metaphysics, originally conceived to be a natural entity.

Furthermore, such complex natural entities would be much more decisively conceived as process beings than would Aristotle’s. In particular, in the perspective opened up by modern physical science and incorporated by Whitehead into his own concept, there can be no more "matter" that, once actualized, thereafter simply gives endurance to an entity. Just as for Aristotle an entity is "its own" matter, so it must now be conceived as identical with its processes that first and foremost make up what we regard as matter or, in the case of living beings, as their body. Their process of constitution can thus in no way be conceived as a production or generatio that takes place once and that thereafter allows the entity so constituted simply to be there. Its "production" is much more an ongoing process; the entity consists only in the processes that continually constitute it. Thus Whitehead’s assertion about an ‘actual entity’ would hold true here as well: it is simply as directing its own process and as the result of its process -- as ‘subject’ and ‘superject.’

Its duration is thus quite different from the ‘undifferentiated [263] endurance’ of a formless substrate that Whitehead repudiates. Its duration consists rather in the continuity of a process of transformation that is subordinated to a unitary structural principle, an identical "form." For something to be really enduring, its continual regeneration of ‘physical’ subordinate units has to be thought of in terms of what Whitehead called the ‘mental pole’ in virtue of which the entity remains continuously ordered towards its subjective aim during the time of its existence. Its "existence," its "actuality," is then always also its "striving" towards this goal. It is Aristotle’s energeia directed to the entelecheia.

Even for such a complex entity as this, then, it still remains true that its very being bears the distinguishing marks of process and creativity. As for Whitehead, this creativity lies once more in the appropriation and transformation of the given of the past into a subject that is continuously coming to be. Thus Whitehead’s key concept of prehension can come into play as a concept of an activity that synthesizes all the main elements. Thereby, finally, the concept of concrescence -- or something very like it -- can also be used to describe such an entity.

The kind of reinterpretation and extension of Whiteheadian philosophy that has here been only roughly sketched can appeal to the latest scientific concepts. "The forms of a living being are not but rather come to be," says Ludwig von Bertalanffy (BW 120), and his "organismic" biology and later general system-theory for overcoming the opposition between mechanism and vitalism has given central insights of Whitehead a new formulation on the basis of science,⁸ Something similar holds for all the directions of research which Jean Piaget has brought to the [264] concept of genetic structuralism.⁹ The genetic epistemology founded by Piaget has proved through empirical research on the problem of knowledge the fruitfulness both of genetic analysis and of Whitehead’s principle of process.

Thus, what Whitehead speculatively sketched out as a metaphysician, always in the hope that his principles and categories could be transposed to the individual forms of scientific research, has at least in part proved a success in its naturalistic variants. His philosophy is thought at a turning point in time. Engaged with the classic way of posing philosophical problems and arising out of the collapse of scientific cosmology, his thought is at the same time fascinating through its proximity to the system-theory and genetic structuralism of progressive ways of thought. Whitehead’s importance lies in the prospects of a mediation between classical and contemporary philosophy, between philosophy and science.

References

ANW -- Victor Lowe. "The Concept of Experience in Whitehead’s Metaphysics." A. N. Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy. Ed. George L. Kline. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1963.

BW -- Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Das biologische Weltbilt I. Die Stellung des Lebens in Natur und Wissenschaft. Bern, 1948.

PS2 -- P. A. Bartocci. "Hartshorne on Personal Identity: A Personalistic Critique." Process Studies 2 (1972): 216-21.

PS3 -- F. G. Kirkpatrick. "Subjective Becoming: An Unwarranted Abstraction?" Process Studies 3 (1973): 15-25.

PS5 -- Rem B. Edwards. "The Human Self: An Actual Entity or a Society?" Process Studies.5 (1975): 195-203.

SPPI -- Barbara Parsons. "On Dc-Mythologizing Whitehead’s Actual Entity." Studies in Process Philosophy I. Ed. Robert C. Whittemore. The Hague: Martin Nijhoff, 1974.

WM -- Edward Pols. Whitehead ‘s Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality. Carbondale, IL: S. I. U. Press, 1967.

Notes

1Translator ‘s note’ This is a translation of the last chapter (3.3) of Fetz’s Whitehead: Prozessdenken und Substanzmetaphysik (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 1981). The previous two chapters (3.1 and 3.2) have previously appeared here as "Aristotelian and Whiteheadian Conceptions of Actuality: I and II." The author has reviewed and corrected the translation, for which the translator is grateful.

2(PR 343) Victor Lowe reports: "Whitehead did not hesitate to say to his students that if he had leisure for a second go at his metaphysical scheme, the result would be somewhat different." (ANW 131)

3Whitehead continues: "To be reasonably successful as a philosopher is to provide a new platform; perhaps not a completely new platform, but a slight alteration of some older platform from which it is worthwhile to make criticism." This characterization that Whitehead certainly meant to apply to his own philosophy seems to us specially apposite for describing Whitehead’s relation to his great predecessor, Leibniz, insofar as the typical problematic of a "monadic cosmology" arises for both, as the following discussion shows. Cf. PR 27.

4Aristotle, Met. I, 1, 1028b2; W. D. Ross translation. Translator’s note: It is notorious that Aristotle’s own word ousia, here rendered as "substance," has defied exact translation into other languages, and that the English word "substance" (after the Latin substantia) conveys all the wrong connotations. (See the discussion of this in Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics [Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978]). "Entity" may be the most plausible English equivalent, though Whitehead often uses it more broadly and thus prefers the phrase ‘actual entity’ when referring to his basic ontological unit. The author of the present essay frequently uses the German equivalent of "entity," "Wesenheit," to stand for what Whitehead meant by ‘actual entity’ (‘wirkliche Wesenheit’), as well as for what Aristotle meant by ousia. Thus the author’s Wesenheit seems, according to the context, best rendered as "(actual) entity." "substance." "being," or (basically), "ousia."

5The following report by V. Lowe is characteristic of the vagueness of Whitehead’s statements about this: "When I asked Whitehead whether the emission of a single quantum of energy by an atom should be considered an actual occasion, he replied, ‘Probably a whole shower of actual occasions.’" (ANW 131)

6E. Bubser, "Organismus-Philosophie und Spekulation," in Philosophic der Gegenwart I (Göttingen: 1972), p. 297.

7 See also A. H. Johnson, Whitehead’s Theory of Reality (New York: Dover, 1962), p. 18; W. A. Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 171.

8Bertalanffy summarizes the "theses of an organismic conception" as follows: "a holistic system-conception as opposed to an analytic-additive one; a dynamic conception as opposed to a static and mechanical one; a view of the organism as of a primary activity as opposed to the conception of its primary reactivity." On p. 184 he refers to the "organic mechanism" of Whitehead as a precursor. For the extension of Whiteheadian theses in connection with the general system-theory of Bertalanffy, see E. Laszlo, Systems, Structure and Experience (New York: 1969); The Systems View of the World: The Natural Philosophy of the New Developments in the Sciences (New York: 1972).

9See J. Piaget, Le structuralism (Paris: 1968); Epistémologie des sciences de l’homme (Paris: 1972). There is a reference to Whitehead as the founder of an organic view on p. 312 of the latter work. See also the interdisciplinary anthology by J. B. Cobb and D. R. Griffin (eds.), Mind in Natures Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1977). that puts together essays of celebrated structuralist biologists (B. Rensch, Th. Dozhansky. C. H. Waddington) and notable followers of Whitehead (Ch. Hartshorne, I. Leclerc).

(Note: This article is translated by James W. Felt. James W Felt S.J., is Professor of Philosophy at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053. Independently of Fetz’s book he had published in Process Studies 14/4 (Winter 1985) an essay along some of the same lines: Whitehead’s Misinterpretation of ‘Substance’ in Aristotle."}

Whitehead and the Tradition of Substance Metaphysics

Aristotle had raised the fundamental question about being [on],and in the seventh book of the Metaphysics he makes it the question about "entity" [ousia]² -- about "substance," as it will be called in the Latin tradition. Whitehead explains in the Preface of his chief work, Process and Reality, that he is concerned with "the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of actual entities"’ (PR xiii/xiv). Like Aristotle’s substances they constitute "the final real things of which the world is made up" (PR 18/27). Nevertheless Whitehead does not want to identify his [actual] entities with Aristotle’s "first substance." Rather, his concept of [actual] entity is meant to stand the traditional concept of substance on its head (PR xiii-xiv/vii-ix; 154-155/234). Whitehead’s whole metaphysics must be understood not only as a destruction of the previous concept of substance but also as a reconstruction of a more adequate concept of [actual] entity. The relationship of Whitehead’s metaphysics to the traditional philosophy of substance, and especially to Aristotle’s concept of entity, is thus the central point not only for any systematic exposition of Whitehead but also for his historical interpretation.³

Viewed historically that relationship is far less clear-cut than would appear from Whitehead’s own presentation and from his critique of substance. This is a result of the history [210] of substance metaphysics, with its multiplicity of historical approaches.⁴ The notion of a uniform, simple concept of substance must itself be viewed as the product of a critique of substance that began with Locke and was generalized in the nineteenth century. Such a notion moreover does no justice at all to the complexity and historical variability of the fundamental concept of substance. But the same charge must be leveled against Whitehead insofar as he carries on the same line of criticism. His criticism, however, is not only original in many ways; it turns out also to be ambivalent, as is especially apparent in the stance he takes toward Aristotle.

When Whitehead speaks of "substance," he has in mind the concept of substance that derives from Aristotle’s logic, that passed from the middle ages to modem times, that is dominant in Descartes, and, finally, that has been constantly criticized since Locke and Hume. It is the concept that defines substance as self-contained and as the enduring bearer of qualities. As Whitehead points out, this concept of substance mirrors the ordinary concept of a thing, according to which reality consists in "things" that are ‘simply located,’ are isolated from one another, and manifest an unchanged, enduring essence, their very "substance," that underlies their fixed or changeable determining conditions or "accidents."⁵ Whitehead shows how this concept of a thing, a concept that grew out of practical dealing with the actualities of the world, entrenched itself in the subject-predicate structure of language and from there made its way into Aristotle’s theory of the Categories. In the modem era, then, the originally logical schema of substance-quality was raised to the level of the fundamental structure of all reality -- with catastrophic [211] results that should allow us to recognize that in metaphysics this concept is "sheer error" (PR 79/122). This moves Whitehead to construct a radically transformed concept for his ‘actual entities.’ In it, enduring substances are reinterpreted as ‘events,’ and the previously dominant qualities are superseded by constitutive relations.

Doubtless Whitehead has hit upon a main strand of the substance tradition, and his rejection of this concept of substance is absolutely justified.⁶ At the same time, though, Whitehead points out that Aristotle himself, who in his Categories (a work of his youth) stands at the beginning of this development, does not allow his own metaphysics to be dominated by the explicitly logical thought structure of the Categories. Thus Whitehead can even go so far as to say, paradoxically, that "probably Aristotle was not an Aristotelian" (PR 51/81), insofar as the thought structure of the Categories is supposed to be the hallmark of the Aristotelian substance tradition. Thereby, however, Whitehead in principle leaves unanswered how this concept of an ‘actual entity’ is related to the genuinely Aristotelian concept of entity as found in the Metaphysics. For Whitehead is silent on this point.

Historically Whitehead is certainly right that the initial scheme of Aristotle’s Categories proved to be much more influential than the more profound but more complex descriptions in his Metaphysics which were in large part obscured by the former.⁷ This state of affairs has its repercussions in interpretations of Whitehead which usually [212] facilitate the historical comparison of the Aristotelian and the Whiteheadian concept of entity by subsuming it under the concept of substance found in the Categories.⁸ But such a procedure not only fails to take account of genuine aspects of the Aristotelian concept of entity, it scarcely gets beyond the comparison Whitehead already made.

If we are to create new possibilities for comparison we shall, in my opinion, have to draw upon just that part of Aristotle’s works in which Whitehead conjectures the presence of another way of thinking of substance, but without analyzing it. That idea gives the following interpretation its direction. We raise the question, to what degree can equivalents to Whitehead’s movement of thought be discovered in Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and metaphysics? We come to the perhaps surprising conclusion that Whitehead’s criticism of previous substance thinking and his own conception of an "actual entity" can in decisive points be regarded as a retrieval and a radicalization of the genuinely Aristotelian concept of entity.

Natural Entity: Neither Logical Subject nor Material Substrate

Whitehead’s critique of substance thinking is parallel to the genuinely Aristotelian approach to the problem insofar as Aristotle too rejects as inadequate a logical kind of consideration that orients itself only on the subject-predicate schema. For that would lead to the identification of entity with the underlying material substrate of the actualities of the world. True, the ultimate substrate seems most to be entity precisely because in any statement it always remains the subject to which all determinations are ascribed as predicates though it itself is never a predicate. But this way of looking at it is inadequate since, with the removal of all the predicated determinations, an utterly undetermined "primary matter" would remain as entity. Entity would become equivalent to matter.⁹ Whitehead’s suggestion that the concept of substance provided the basis for scientific materialism (PR 73/120) stands out as an historical confirmation of this train of thought.

But why, according to Aristotle, should matter not be entity? Because matter, the fundamental substrate of actuality, does not yet constitute something self-sufficient, a "that-there" bearing the mark of an individual. And so entity must be looked for in a principle that has the power to determine -- in "form," that is, rather than in "matter" (1029 a 27-30). What Whitehead conceives as the subjectivity of an ‘actual entity,’ its self-determination, has to do, in Aristotle’s doctrine, with his principle of "form." To inquire seriously about entity, one must begin with the recognition that it is "a principle and a cause," that is, the decisive reason why something is what it is, and as it is.¹⁰ The answer to this "Why?" is entity (i.e., ousia or "substance"). But this apparently simple question, "Why?" has to be broken into two parts to be asked meaningfully. The question, say, "Why is this a house?" has to be formulated explicitly, "Why are these things, namely bricks and stones, a house?" Here we are not inquiring into the purpose or the effective cause that produced the house, but rather into the kind of cause that makes material such as bricks and stone to be a house.

So analyzed, the question. "Why?" yields the question why such and such a character advenes to something else that did not previously exhibit it. For the things that develop naturally, indeed, as distinguished from artifacts, it is not completely obvious just what it is that takes on such a character -- as when one asks why that is a human being. But even here the question clearly aims at asking why some material thing displays this determinate character. To ask about entity is at once [214] to ask about the cause that makes stuff to be something definite, and this cause is its formal determination. Whatever we concretely call "entity," therefore, must display an intrinsic formal determination as the first reason of its being (1041 b 28). We can even give this determination the name "entity" (ousia) since in its relation to matter it is the proper reason why something concrete can be called "entity" (1043 b 13; 1037 a 29).

But besides the stuff, is this formal determination a cause in its own right?¹¹ Just as the house can be taken apart into its bricks, so a natural thing can be reduced to its elements. But wherever something composed of elements is more than a mere heap, there must be something present besides the elements. This is already clear in the example of the house, which is not constituted by its bricks and their arrangement. For the latter is not itself something added to the elements as still another element that is their arrangement, but it is something different that determines how the elements are ordered to one another. That is most obvious if we pass from artifacts to the sort of thing that has grown and developed as a unity and as a whole. For when such a whole disintegrates into its elements, they no longer constitute that whole that had been formed out of them, no matter how they are arranged. Thus the separated parts of a living being have only the name in common with what they once were (1035 b 24). And so we must assume, in addition to the elements, a proper pervasive actuality that is not itself an element nor composed of elements. (Otherwise the problem would simply repeat itself.) But this Other, this proper contrast to the elements, is entity considered as formal determination; this is what many thinkers overlook, and speak only of "stuff’ (1043 b 12). Here it is quite clear that Aristotle differs, just as Whitehead does, from the idea that one can reduce entity to the mere function of a substrate, overlooking the formal principle of its own proper self-existence.

[215] For Aristotle, indeed, this stress on formal determination as the ground of entity leads also to his limitation of what can be called "entity" in the full sense of the word. Typically it is just those pragmatically constituted "things" that drop out of consideration -- "such as house or utensil," as Aristotle says (1043 b 20). Of the things that exist in nature, that thing cannot finally count as entity which does not exhibit a genuine unity: "earth and fire and air." These are only in potentiality to being entity, insofar as they could be the elements making up a genuine unity (1040 b 5).

In the concrete, then, what can be called "entity"? That which has a "nature" and exists by reason of nature (1043 b 22). For "nature," with its structuring power manifests itself in the actualities of the world as that which is not an element but a principle, and to that extent, entity (1041 b 29). The manifestation of a "nature," then, marks off where we are concretely dealing with entities and where we are not. So that is not entity in the full sense that does not yet manifest a "nature" and thereby a final form, such as the elements mentioned above. Neither is that an entity in the full sense that has lost its "natural" way of being and has been worked up into a "thing."

In this respect Aristotle and Whitehead are at one in rejecting "things" as entities. Moreover they also agree that our thinking about entity must be determined by just those wholes that manifest themselves as organic. Thanks to modern natural science these wholes can for Whitehead be much more closely investigated than they could for Aristotle with his rudimentary means of observation. Thus Whitehead can discern structured wholes that exist independently, or are integrated within a greater whole, where for Aristotle, in the case of "elements," there is nothing much more than mere material that only potentially counts as entity.

As a consequence of the new knowledge of nature Whitehead followed to a radical conclusion the road opened by Leibniz. He shifted "entity" to ultimate event-unities that constitute only a minimal [216] ‘event’ within what Aristotle, operating on the plane of the everyday world, accepts, and ontologically interprets, as one entity. What is at stake in this for Whitehead is the achieving of a new concept of entity that he believes can reside only in these ultimate events. Since Aristotle and Whitehead are at one in distancing themselves critically from entity understood as substrate, since they both have in mind the existence of a "self " as the decisive characteristic of entity, and since moreover they both turn in the direction of organic unities and not of "things," it becomes all the more urgent to ask just how the Whiteheadian concept of an ‘actual entity’ is related to the Aristotelian concept of "entity."

Natural Entity as Process Being

How Aristotle thinks of entity can best be judged by the way he links it to his concept of "nature" as dwelling in concrete things. It is nature, indeed, that allows something concrete to be "entity" in the full sense. Now it is decisive that this concept of "nature" includes precisely what Whitehead holds to be so essential, namely, "that aspect of self-production, of generation, of physis, of natura naturans" (PR 93/143). Aristotle states explicitly that of the many senses of the word, "nature," the first and most proper is that by which "nature" means that principle that allows an entity, over and above its adventitious processes, itself to grow)¹² "Nature" is entity in the sense of form, with the additional condition that it is now regarded as "in some sense the factor which initiates movement and rest"¹³ of just those processes that take place within the concrete being itself that "has" the nature. In a natural being processes can be evoked by the influence of other beings, and the being can itself have an effect on others in virtue of its efficacy. "Nature" differs from this kind of "efficacy" in that it is not a ground [217] of the becoming within another, but within that very being in which it dwells.¹⁴ "Nature," so understood, is "form" as the determining ground of its own becoming.

This distinction between the naturally determined stages of becoming within the being itself, and its processes which call forth an effect in another, already approaches the thinking of Whitehead who in fact eliminates causally efficacious "transitions" from the very concrescence itself that constitutes the "formal inner constitution" of an ‘actual entity.’ If Whitehead emphasizes the process character of an ‘actual entity,’ so too Aristotle’s concept of a "natural" entity comprises its process of becoming. For "nature," or more exactly, "physis," designates for Aristotle the very process of becoming that leads to a fully developed "nature."¹⁵ Thus the decisive question is posed: How does Aristotle conceive the relation between "natural" processes and "natural" entity?

It is indispensable to a "natural" process that it have a natural aim in which the process finds its conclusion. For nature, according to Aristotle, is a principle of activity that develops toward a goal. When nature is called a "principle of change and endurance," we can catch in this "endurance" a glimpse of the naturally given conclusion of a natural process. The process comes to rest because it has achieved its aim. Thus for the natural entities of Aristotle there is something analogous to the ‘subjective aim’ and to the final stage of ‘satisfaction’ of Whiteheadian ‘actual entities.’

The Aristotelian concept of a natural entity, then, includes both its own processive becoming and its own aim for that process. A natural being is one which, by reason of an intrinsic principle constantly maintained in process, has achieved a definite goal of its process. This goal of its process is the complete development of its proper nature. If "physis" also denotes "becoming," and this becoming is the "way to physis" or "nature" (193 b 12), it becomes clear that [218] "physis" is a process that received its name from what stands at the end of the process, that is, the fully developed "physis" or "nature." But that is the natural entity in its mature form; this mature form is the developed and thus "true" nature (193 b 18). "Hence, also, we say of things that are or come to be naturally, that even though they contain the source of their being, they do not have their nature until they have their form or shape."¹⁶

Thereby the decisive distinction is evident by which even for Aristotle a natural entity -- entity in the full sense of the word -- is regarded as a subject’ and ‘superject’ of its own process, to use Whitehead’s language. That which underlies the process of natural becoming proceeds from an initial form to a final form. ¹⁷ But what is its proper form, its full entity? "Not what it is growing out of but what it is growing into" -- the final form that develops in the process (193 b 18). The form is that for the sake of which (199 a 31), the (complete) being and the final goal are one and the same (198 a 25). It could hardly be said more explicitly that the complete entity is not found in the whence of its own process but in the whither -- in the resulting ‘superject’ of Whitehead.

But in the same passage Aristotle also emphasizes that the form, as formal principle, must be intrinsic to the processes that lead to it. Even when something does not yet have its full nature, that is already present from which it will naturally come to be. For the naturally becoming entity already "has" a nature, and that nature is, then, that according to which it comes to be.¹⁸ The aim, as the "for the sake of which" of the process, must be intrinsic to the process itself.

These assertions, linked mainly to Aristotle’s concept of nature, are confirmed and deepened where Aristotle in his metaphysics explicitly asks about the actuality 1219] of the actual. Aristotle thinks of it in terms of the two concepts, energeia and entelecheia. Energeia is the efficacy of the actual that carries within itself and educes the "work" -- ergon. But the "work" is the aim -- telos. The complete actuality is thus that which contains the aim as actualized within itself -- the entelecheia. When Aristotle deliberately expresses the commonality of energeia and entelecheia, and when he further asserts that energeia, as the efficacy of the actual, strives toward entelecheia as toward its fulfillment,¹⁹ it seems to us that the decisive point of convergence between these concepts and Whiteheadian thought has been hit upon.

But Whitehead is part of the historical development of these concepts, at least in his terminology. Surely it is more than a mere accident that Whitehead so conceives the "actuality" of his actual entities in such a way as to fit the Aristotelian sense of energeia and entelecheia, both of which are rendered by the Latin actus and its derivative forms.

The Polarity of Entities

Aristotle deals with the complexity of natural entities in terms of the concepts matter and form. Of itself matter yields no definite "entity" and no "this-something"; it is that which, "though it is not actually a this-something, yet it is potentially a this-something."²⁰ One can first speak of a particular thing only by reason of its form. The unity between matter and form, which always results in a single entity, is secured by this relationship between potentiality and actuality. For the stuff that immediately constitutes entity, the "proximate matter and the form, are one and the same: the matter as its potentiality, the form as its actuality (1045 b 18).

[220] What corresponds to this in Whitehead? As analogous to "proximate matter" we can take the objectified other ‘actual entities’ which -- or more exactly, whose prehensions -- the newly arising entity takes over.²¹ The "proximate matter" is then the many prehensions of the initial phase insofar as we abstract from their ‘subjective unity’ and their directedness toward the ‘subjective aim.’ It is true of them, as it is of Aristotelian matter, that they are potentially identical with the newly arising entity whose ground of possibility they constitute.

What is the aspect that corresponds to Aristotelian form? Whitehead denies to what is ‘objectified’ any ‘formal’ existence, by which he means, that which formally constitutes entity. That exists formally, however, which governs the process of its own concrescence, imparts to its components ‘subjective unity,’ and thereby directs them toward the ‘subjective aim.’ This subjectivity of an ‘actual entity’ has its concrete ground in the ‘mental pole’ in virtue of which it is able to devise and strive after its own self-identity. Thus the ‘mental pole’ can serve as the analogue of Aristotelian form, while the ‘physical pole’ takes on the role of the "matter" of the ‘actual entity.’ This exactly fits in with equating matter with the objectively given, inasmuch as the "physical pole" is the essence of ‘physical feelings’ in which the given is prehended. That leads us to ask how the similarity goes between the Aristotelian relation of matter and form and that of the ‘physical’ and the ‘mental pole.’

First of all, it is as true for Aristotle as it is for Whitehead that in dealing with natural actuality we always encounter both principles or ‘poles,’ which together constitute one natural entity, whose duality or bipolarity is part of its essence. Thus both of these principles will be thought of as strictly ordered to each other. They are co-principles which in their mutual relationship enable entity to become actual in such a way that this actuality -- again by reason of the two principles -- is itself processive. Just as determinable matter becomes entity in the full sense [221] only by reason of its intrinsic, determining form, so for Whitehead that which is physically pre-given enters into the self-identity of an ‘actual entity’ first through the reaction of the ‘mental pole.’

Aristotle and Whitehead also agree in ascribing to "form" or to the ‘mental pole,’ respectively, different properties than to "matter" or to the ‘physical pole’ (see PR 283-285/434-436). Continuity and divisibility are properties that, for Aristotle as well as for Whitehead, belong to an entity by reason of its "matter" or its ‘physical pole.’ There must correspond to them a principle of an altogether different sort, one that is not spatial and not divisible, in order for a genuine unity to arise.

Here it should be noted, however, that Whitehead’s ‘mental pole’ also includes in its concept what has traditionally been called spirit [Geist]. For Whitehead the polarity of ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ pole is primarily intended to supersede Cartesian dualism that posits spirit and matter as separate substances. For Aristotle it is an open question whether the human "spirit" ought to be identified with the human "form" -- that is, whether the human soul, considered as "form," can at the same time be a spiritual soul.²² With his ‘conceptual’ prehensions Whitehead unequivocally attributes to the ‘mental pole’ functions that encroach on the sphere of what according to Aristotle belongs to spirit. He can thus be regarded as standing in the line of that Aristotelian tradition that attempts to think of "form" -- yes, even "form" in its relation to "matter" that it informs -- simultaneously as "spirit." What Thomas Aquinas requires, namely that the human must be essentially conceived as soul and matter, so that the one spiritual soul is at the same time the form of the matter,²³ is now elevated by Whitehead to the fundamental structure of every single entity. Here Whitehead proves himself to be the thinker who radically carries forward the true beginnings of the Aristotelian tradition.

Whitehead’s thoroughgoing transfer to the whole of natural reality of a polar, spirit-matter conception such as was attempted by Thomas Aquinas for the human [222] is not so astonishing inasmuch as Whitehead takes the human self as the model case of an ‘actual entity.’ Relative to the human person Whitehead can be regarded as the Aristotelian who restores the original spirit-matter unity of the human person that had been sundered in Descartes’ dualism of spiritual substance and material substance. Whitehead, too, argues as Thomas did that human spiritual existence always manifests itself as embodied. (That Whitehead ends up dissolving the human person into a multiplicity of ‘societies’ of ‘actual entities’ is another question.) But Whitehead goes decisively beyond every previous form of the Aristotelian conception of unity when he posits, at least as a genuine potentiality in every ‘actual entity,’ what in the human person manifests itself as "spirit" in its full actuality. For all ‘actual entities’ exhibit the same principles of reality and these same fundamental polar structures, and the differences in the ‘mental pole’ are of a gradual rather than a fundamental sort. Thomas Aquinas, indeed, saw in the human soul as form the high point and conclusion of the hierarchically ordered formal principles in nature. But as "spirit" the human soul simultaneously belongs to another realm of being, the realm of immaterial forms, and as such is contrasted with other formal principles of nature, so that its ontological status is altogether different.²⁴

This generalization indicates the decisive point at which Whitehead’s transformed understanding of nature breaks with that of the ancients: the word that sums it up is "Evolution." Whitehead endeavors to think of nature as a coherent, self-developing whole in which there are no longer spirit and matter as mutually isolated realms. What happens in the human person as the culmination of nature’s development must be posited of the whole of nature. The entities of nature are therefore always to be conceived as spirit-matter and as developing toward consciousness. In this connection it is decisive how Whitehead takes up the Aristotelian distinction between potentiality and actuality and at the same time provides a new solution to the problem that goes clear back to Plato, that of an ideal realm. [223] And so the question arises: what place does Whitehead himself occupy in the European tradition that he characterized as a "series of footnotes to Plato" (PR 39/63)?

The Relation of the Possible to the Actual and the Problem of the Ideal

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, the problems of potentiality and actuality, of reality and ideality, meet in the problem of form. In this tradition "form" applies to the definiteness that belongs to a being and makes it what it is. But Aristotle also calls "form" the real principle in which the definiteness of an entity is grounded. Insofar as "form," thus understood as a real ground, brings a natural entity, or more exactly, its "matter," to its requisite definiteness, it must be regarded as the ground of the actuality of the entity. The form relates to the matter as actuality to potentiality. But for Aristotle that means that form itself must be conceived as actuality, as act.

In Whitehead these aspects show up rather differently. What for Aristotle does the work of "form" as real principle, is accomplished for Whitehead by the ‘mental pole,’ through which an entity in process achieves the actuality of its self-identity. This comes about because the ‘mental pole’ structures the entity in accord with its ‘subjective aim’ that settles the form of the entity as the determination properly belonging to it. But this form, as such, is not in itself actuality, act, but potentiality. Thus Whitehead appears to break here with the fundamental Aristotelian identification of form and act.

This impression is strengthened when we take a look at what corresponds in Whitehead to Aristotelian "matter." As the analogue of "proximate matter" we have to take the objectified other entities, or more exactly the ‘physical’ prehensions of them that are objectified in the newly arising entity. Whitehead [224] interprets such a transition as the reenaction of the old in the new. It is a matter of a causal act in the sense of efficient causality. From this it is clear that the ‘physical’ prehensions corresponding to "proximate matter" should by no means be conceived as something passive that requires the influence of form in order to become active. The prehensions are already in themselves activity, and what the ‘mental pole’ contributes to them is not an efficacy that of itself raises the activity to a higher level but the aligning of the given "forces" toward a ‘subjective aim.’

Finally, Whitehead’s explicit statement has to be treated as authoritative, namely, that for him ‘creativity’ takes the place of Aristotelian "primary matter" as the inclusive ground of unity of all realities in the world. But "creativity" implies pure activity and no longer a passive receptiveness for an actualizing form (PR 31-32/46-47). In any case ‘creativity,’ which takes the place of "primary matter" and which is supposed to be in itself just as indeterminate as the latter, constitutes the actuality of an actual entity’ -- its reality for itself and finally, as an ‘objectified’ entity, its reality for others.

But with this the Aristotelian equivalence of form with actuality and of matter with potentiality now seems to fail altogether, yes even to shift into its opposite. In the place of a potential matter we have an actual creativity as the ground of the unity of the world’s actuality, and the determination or form that belongs to the individual entities is interpreted as potentiality instead of as actuality. Is this a true "reversal" of the Aristotelian position, as has already been maintained?²⁶

To answer this question we must consider more exactly the concepts implied here. For one thing Whitehead’s distinction between different concepts of potentiality becomes important. Potentiality’ for Whitehead has two meanings.²⁷ In the first place Whitehead speaks of the ‘real potentiality’ of given ‘actual entities’ to enter into a new entity in one way or another. This potentiality [225] is conditioned; it depends on the conditions of what in fact is already "given." Yet it always continues to imply an indeterminateness with respect to the concrete determinateness that arises in the new ‘actual entity’ by the process of its concrescence in which it settles its self-identity in accord with its own subjectivity.

From this it is clear that the above equivalence of the process of objectification and of ‘creativity’ with actuality needs to be narrowed. Even though the objectifications, as early phases, make up the actuality of the newly arising entity, they must at the same time be regarded as potentialities insofar as the form of their ultimate incorporation into the new entity is not yet fully determined, and will experience its determination only in the process of concrescence. This interpenetration of actuality and potentiality is above all characteristic of the Whiteheadian boundary-concept of ‘creativity.’ In it, becoming is comprised purely as such, and as becoming it must count as activity and therefore as actuality. But insofar as in this boundary-concept becoming is thought of as lacking all determination (although in the concrete there exists only a determinate becoming), it is, in its relation to form, just as radically to be thought of as potency, as Aristotelian "primary matter."

Beyond these so-called "real" potentialities there are for Whitehead ‘general’ potentialities rooted in the ‘eternal objects’ and their interrelations. In them we are dealing with ‘pure’ possibilities that have not yet been subjected to the conditions of already completed realizations. Now insofar as Whitehead thinks of these ‘eternal objects’ as forms, we have in fact a case of a radical identification of form and potentiality. For as "forms of definiteness," ‘eternal objects’ are, by their very mode of existence, "Pure Potentials for the Specific Determination of Fact." And so the properly Platonic problem has now to be [226] taken up -- the question, that is, of how the relation of form and entity is to be conceived.

Whitehead’s originality stands out when his solution to the problem is thus compared with Plato’s and with Aristotle’s. For the question whether Whitehead is a Platonist or an Aristotelian does not, at first sight anyway, admit of an unambiguous answer. Whitehead can count as an Aristotelian insofar as he too does not take forms to be entities. His ‘ontological principle’ precludes that, for according to it, ‘actual entities’ must be regarded as the only real things; all forms therefore can exist only as forms of entities in which they are grounded. Whitehead explicitly calls this principle Aristotelian (PB. 40/64) together with its application to the problem of form, and in this judgment he is doubtless correct. On the other hand Whitehead’s "forms," or more exactly his ‘eternal objects,’ transcend the reality of the world in a way that reminds one more of Plato than of Aristotle. For Whitehead does not, like Aristotle, take his forms to be exhausted by the world’s actuality. The potentialities given with the ‘eternal objects’ are more varied and richer than what is actualized in the actualities of the world. In this additional function of potentialities in his revised account Whitehead takes account of a modem scientific revolution in virtue of which he reconceives the whole problem. This was above characterized by the word "Evolution." A comparison with Aristotle should in conclusion clarify their fundamental differences in understanding the world and nature.

Aristotelian Dynamics of Nature and Whiteheadian Evolutionary Thought

Aristotle always takes that which is identical in kind -- a human individual, say, as a kind of being -- to be actuality when he wants to explain the transition from potentiality to actuality in the single individual.²⁸ Even if temporally the individual, as such, represents a potentiality -- as does every living being in its seed -- nevertheless the full actuality of the species must simply be supposed to exist earlier: the seed is ordered to reconstituting a fully developed living being. For a natural being "becoming" means coming to be out of something and through something; matter calls for a cause if it is to produce a natural being. But this cause must be identical in kind with what is produced, and must have that distinguishing form as its actuality.

If for Aristotle the fundamental thesis of the absolute priority of actuality over potentiality holds with respect to time, it thereby holds also with respect to entity (1050 b 4). An actual being of a certain sort precedes its possible successors, and the actuality of the entity grounds its reproducibility and thereby its potentiality. Thus, too, Aristotle finally posits the form of the entity primarily as actual in order to ground its potentiality in a succeeding entity.

What is the significance for the problem of form of this dynamic, but non-evolutionary, Aristotelian view of natural actuality? It means that form, and in particular the various forms of entities, are always situated within what really exists in nature as actual. That is why Aristotle is not forced to suppose that his forms transcend the actuality of the world: they are the forms of actualities in the world that actually are. So Aristotle can reject the absolutizing of the "Ideas" that he is critical of in Plato. The ‘ontological principle’ that Whitehead called Aristotelian is employed by Aristotle himself in such a way that every form of being can always be found in previously existent entities.

Aristotle viewed the forms of natural beings as held in a continuity such that every higher form presupposes the actualization of its proximate lower form. For Whitehead, too, the forms are thought of as belonging to a continuously connected whole. But differently than for Aristotle, this connected whole extends beyond what is previously given in the formal determinations of actual beings. In the place of stable beings of a particular kind already fully in act, we have an [228] extended stream of individual events, and the stream in its universal conditions makes up a ‘cosmic epoch.’ This stream of events is characterized by creativity; it ceaselessly enriches itself, and in the course of time ever more complex and superior entities arise. Evolution therefore means the emergence of newer and higher entities. It is no accident that in the Preface to Science and the Modern World Whitehead expressly refers to Convy Lloyd Morgan and Samuel Alexander.

For Whitehead this means that the complex form that informs a new entity exists previously as possibility rather than as actuality, and that in an absolute sense. One must conceive the being of such an entity as first of all a pure possibility -- as a ‘complex eternal object.’ It will be actualized in time, but only when the requisite conditions for entity are realized in a given situation. Time is what first makes a ‘real’ potentiality out of what was always possible only as a ‘pure,’ general potentiality.

The emergence of new forms in time thus implies that at any particular moment of evolution the possibilities are more varied than those that have been actualized up to that time. For actuality -- which for its part always presupposes the possibility of itself -- further possibilities always lie open. Whitehead made of this possibility for actuality a separate category of existence -- the category of ‘propositions’ that mediate between ‘actual entities’ and ‘eternal objects.’ ²⁹ More perhaps than do ‘eternal objects,’ these ‘propositions’ show how far Whitehead has come with his new solution to the problem of form: he has provided a free space for the unfolding of creativity in world-process. But in Whitehead, ‘propositions’ are inconceivable without ‘eternal objects;’ these can be possibilities for actuality only because there is an inclusive realm of pure possibilities to begin with.

This manifest transcendence of the possible in the emergence of new forms of actuality is accompanied in Whitehead by [229] still another form of transcendence. The realm of possibilities transcends any particular actuality not only insofar as the latter is open to new possibilities, but also insofar as particular actuality is itself only one of the many possible forms of its own actualization. This holds just as well for the stream of becoming within a ‘cosmic epoch’ and its history: the history could have fallen out quite differently, and it cannot be wholly understood why just these forms of actualization came about (PR 47/74-75). The possibilities of the relations of ‘eternal objects’ to one another (their ‘relational’ essence, therefore) are far richer than the one possibility that we encounter in the concrete as actualized. Thus for Whitehead the ‘eternal objects,’ or pure "forms of definiteness," as such, precisely do not constitute actuality. It is, rather, described by a different operation than the simple determinations of form. It is a ‘decision’ by virtue of which one possibility among many becomes actuality and is "given" (PR 42f/67f). Against the background of forms as possibilities Whitehead achieves a new concept of facticity as that of the act of a ‘decision’ among possibilities.

Whitehead thus emphasizes the transcendence of forms in a way that prevents him from treating them only as forms of entities -- at least, entities of the world’s actuality.³⁰A strictly Aristotelian exposition of the ‘ontological principle,’ according to which all forms are situated in the world’s actuality, is thereby excluded. Will Whitehead then become a Platonist, giving forms an absolute status as "Ideas?" Once again that would not agree with the ‘ontological principle’ according to which everything must be grounded in an ‘actual entity.’ So the only remaining conclusion is that the ‘eternal objects’ have their ground in a supertemporal entity, in God, who ‘conceptually’ holds within God’s ‘primordial nature’ the totality of possibilities for creation.

In the broader historical perspective Whitehead thus stands in the neo-Platonic tradition which situated Platonic "Ideas" in God and [230] interpreted them as God’s ideas for creation. Yet also here a radical shift of meaning is immediately apparent. For while neo-Platonism and the Christian metaphysics of creation modeled on it regard God and the ideas as efficacious, Whitehead rather ascribes all efficacy to the becoming entities themselves. It is not God and God’s ideas that are creative; the properly creative act, the transition from possibility to actuality, belongs to the ‘actual entities’ themselves. That is just what constitutes their actuality. As the ‘principle of concretion’ God is the ground that makes this creation possible inasmuch as God already holds the possibilities within God’s self as a structure of meaning participating in God. But God is no longer the effective cause that gives these possibilities their actualization. The actualities of the world do that themselves, inasmuch as creativity is their decisive, fundamental character. This creativity is itself an ultimate that cannot be traced to a cause transcending itself with the exception of its formal determination which arises in the creature from God’s ‘primordial nature’ but which the creature again freely takes over.

Creation as Whitehead thinks of it is thereby a process of solidarity carried out in different ways by God and the world. If the Middle Ages allowed the creature to participate in creation as a "secondary cause," for Whitehead creatures become the immediate bearers of their own process of self-creation. They take from God only the possibilities of their own self-identity, and indeed as mere possibility, not as something that God calls into being. This is Whitehead’s way of expressing his conviction that with respect to all-encompassing creativity, evolution is itself the creative process that is supported by entities arising within it. Whitehead thus wants to secure for temporal creatures a new measure of autonomy, freedom, and self-sufficiency, and at the same time relieve God of the function wrongly imputed to God, of being an oppressive ruler of the world who governs with force and not with the attractive power of love.³¹

Notes

1Page numbers from the original text appear in brackets here. The translation has been reviewed and approved by the author. In order to remain close to the original, endnotes instead of parenthetical references have sometimes been used for documenting sources.

In the original title of the chapter, "Aristotle und Whiteheadscher Wesenheitsbegriff" lurks a problem of translation that haunts the whole chapter. The author consistently renders Whitehead’s ‘actual entity’ as ‘wirkliche Wesenheit.’ If, however, the word Wesenheit were here everywhere rendered as ‘entity,’ clarity would be sacrificed to consistency. For in the very first sentence of the text it is manifest that the focal point of the chapter is not entity in general, but that primary entity that Aristotle called ouisa and Whitehead called ‘actual entity.’ On balance, "actuality" has been chosen as the most feasible English rendering of "Wesenheit" in the title of the essay.

2Met VII, 1 1028 b 2. Translator’s note: All direct quotations from Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics are taken from the translations by Richard Hope.

3See especially I. Leclerc, "‘Whitehead’s Transformation of the Concept of Substance, The Philosophical Quarterly (St. Andrew’s) 3 (1953), 225-243; "Being and Becoming in Whitehead’s Philosophy." Kant-Studien 51 (1960), 427-437; "Form and Actuality," The Relevance of Whitehead (ed. Leclerc; London: 1961), 169-189; R. Rorty, "Matter and Event," The Concept of Matter (ed. F. McMullin; Notre Dame: 1963), 497-524; G. Bohme. "Whiteheads Abkehr von der Substanzmetaphysik," Whitehead. Einfuhrung in seine Kosmologie (ed. E. Wolf-Gazo; Freiburg/Munchen: 1980); also D. Bidney, ‘The Problem of Substance in Spinoza and Whitehead," The Philosophical Review 45 (1936), 574-592; A. W. Levi, "Substance, Process. Being. A Whiteheadian-Bergsonian View," Journal of Philosophy 55 (1958), 749-761.

4Despite numerous particular studies, no inclusive history of substance metaphysics has yet been written. With reference to our problem one should note especially W. Stegmaier (Substanz. Grundbegriff der Metaphysik (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1977], 19f) which deals with the development of the concept of substance in Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz. There too one can find all the pertinent literature grouped together In a systematic list.

51t is easy to recognize how that global notion of substance, characterized by Paulsen as Isolated, fixed bits of reality," also holds Whitehead’s thought fixed. See W. Stegmaler (1977), p. 20.

6For a discriminating assessment one could consult Cassirer’s classic work, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910). and H. Rombach, Substanz. System, Struktur: Die Ontologie des Funktionalismus und der philosophische Hintergrund der modernen Wissenschaft (2 vols.; Freiburg/Munchen: 1981).

71t should be pointed out that Leibniz once again proves to be a big exception, for with respect to the usual descriptions of substance as the ultimate subject and enduring substrate he explicitly invokes the Aristotelian definition of entity as the originative ground of its own activity. Proofs of this are in G. Martin, Leibniz. Logik und Metaphysik (Berlin: 1967), 144-147.

8G. Böhme says this explicitly in "Whiteheads Abkehr von der Substanzmetaphysik," p. 46.

9Met. VII, 3, 1029 a 1-27. See also A. Parmentier, La philosophie de Whitehead et le problème de Dieu (Paris: 1968), p. 190, who insists on this difference.

10Met. VII, 17 1041 a 6ff.

11For what follows, see Met. VII, 3 1041 b 11ff.; VIII, 3 1043 b 5 ff.

12Met V, 4.

13Phys. II. 1 192 b 21.

14Met. IX, 8 1049 b 5-10.

15Phys. II, 1 193 b 12; also Met. V, 4 1014 b 16.

16Met. V, 4 1015 a 3-5.

17Phys. II, 1 193 b 17.

18Met VII, 7 1032 a 22.

19Compare Met. 1047 a 30 and 1050 a 22, and the commentary on these passages by W D. Ross, Aristotle Metaphysics. Vol. II (Oxford: 1953). 245.

20Compare De An. II. 1 412 a 7 and Met. VIII, 1 1042 a 27.

21R. Rorty speaks similarly in "Matter and Event," p.512.

225ee De An. II, 2 413 b 25 and the difficulties about De An. III, 5.

23See Sum. Theol. 1,76, 1 and parallels, especially the "Tractatus de unitate intellectus contra Averroistas."

24See S.C.G. II, 68.

25On the whole issue, see PR 236-239/361-365.

26See I. Leclerc, "Form and Actuality," The Relevance of Whitehead, p. 178; R. Rorty, "Matter and Event," p. 508.

27See PR 45f/71f; 65/101-102; 22/32; SMW 198.

28See Met. IX, 8 1049 b 17 ff.

29The ‘propositions’ constitute the sixth ‘Category of Existence.’ See PR 22/32-33.

30PR 150/227-228; 222/340; 25/38.

31See PR V.

List of Abbreviations

Referring to works of Aristotle:

Cat. -- Categories

De An. -- De Anima (On the Soul)

De Gen. et Corr. -- De Generatione et Corruptione (On Generation and Corruption)

Met. -- Metaphysics

Nic.Eth. -- Nicomachean Ethics

Phys. -- Physics

Referring to works of Thomas Aquinas:

S.C .G. -- Summa contra Gentiles (Summa against Unbelievers)

S.T. -- Summa Theologiae (Summa of Theology)

The reconstruction of psychotherapy is a great challenge, especially in the face of postmodern impulses to deconstruct concepts and theories that have been taken for granted for many decades.¹ Of course, psychologists and therapists continually address this challenge, but human needs for healing continue, even while people raise foundational questions. With simultaneous pressures to reform thought patterns and practice healing, therapists may find process-relational approaches to postmodernism of particular value. This constructive postmodern path is not safe and easy, but it does respect sharp deconstructive moves in philosophy, while valuing the need to continue functioning in a world of pain.

At its best, postmodern thought raises questions with established patterns of thinking in the modern world, questioning the assumption that reason is more important to human well being than imagination and emotion, and the assumption that scientific theories are literal descriptions of reality rather than social constructions. At its best, postmodern thought stirs more than critique; it also stirs imagination regarding new ways of thinking and acting in the world. Both the critiques and reconstructions are important for psychotherapy.

The purpose of this essay is, thus, to engage in critique and reconstruction. The critique focuses on codependence theory, a theoretical resource for psychotherapy which is itself a reaction against many modern assumptions about human beings. The reconstruction is an act of imagination that points to, but does not fully delineate, an alternative approach to psychotherapy. The critique carries on the postmodern impulse to question, even to question emerging views that have considerable heuristic value. The reconstruction stirs imagination regarding alternatives. Although the reconstruction in this essay is only a sketch, I hope it will contribute to an ongoing conversation and a larger work of mutual reconstruction.

I. Questioning Codependence Theory

When I first encountered codependence theory, I was impressed with the heuristic value, especially the idea that some people (particularly women) are inclined to relate with others in codependent ways. Codependence is a style of relating in which one’s identity and sense of worth are defined by others and one has difficulty in distinguishing between one’s own needs and feelings and those of others (sometimes called boundary confusion). Codependent persons often take care of others, or serve them as fully as possible, in order to foster the others’ continuing dependence and, thus, to enhance their own sense of being needed.

Examples abound in literature, as well as the counseling room. Consider Paula Spencer in Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors, Paula remained with an abusive husband for seventeen years in what she described as "one beating [. . .] that went on forever." She described her life as a cycle: "Getting hit, waiting to get hit, recovering; forgetting. Starting all over again" (206). She also blamed herself again and again, despite her own better judgment. She said:

Such a situation represents codependence at its worst; the destructiveness -- psychological and physical -- takes over the lives of a whole family and then spreads to others.

Because codependence is commonly found among people who are closely related to alcoholics, early developments in the diagnosis and treatment were shaped by reflections on alcoholism. Twelve-step programs were developed for codependents, and popular books were written and bought widely through chain bookstores. Now the language of codependence has become a household word in many communities, more extensive theoretical work has been done, and psychotherapists are using the diagnosis of codependence widely with clients. What better time than now to step back and ask the question of whether codependence theory has heuristic value, or whether it falls too easily into reductionism in the service of diagnosis and psychotherapy.

I will approach this question with the assumption that readers have at least some acquaintance with discussions on codependence through psychological journals, popular literature, or the practice of psychotherapy. Some critical reflections have already been made on the codependence movement,² but the particular aim here is to raise questions from the perspective of process-relational thought -- an organic philosophy and theology of nature -- and from the concerns of feminist analysis -- a critical appraisal of gendered reality. Both process-relational thought and feminist analysis are based on philosophical assumptions that all of life is interrelated; thus, they offer fresh ways to reflect on phenomena labeled as codependence and critical tools for postmodern analysis and reconstruction.

A. Why Question a Good Theory?

I cannot question codependence theory without a personal prologue to keep me honest. I see more than a few codependent traits in myself, and viewed from the outside, I probably appear to some people as a classic case. For this reason, any critical analysis that I do needs to be subjected to suspicion that my own psychological motivations may be denial, repression, or some equally powerful defense mechanism. Not only am I personally culpable, but I also live within institutions (family, higher education, and the church) that are particularly susceptible to codependent relationships. Again, this may arouse suspicion of the potential biases in the following critical analysis.

Despite these risks of distortion, the questioning of codependence theory seems worthwhile for several reasons. First, it is so widely used in popular interchange and in sophisticated psychotherapy that it merits critical analysis. The fact that church communities and pastoral counselors have been among the leaders who have appreciated the heuristic value of the theory and the healing value of the diagnosis and treatment suggests that theological analysis would be valuable to any critical reflection. Further, the theories of codependence have not thus far been developed with much careful discussion of the relationship to altruism or with extensive comparisons between healthy interdependence and unhealthy codependence. Whether it is the theory itself that is flawed or its psychotherapeutic implementation, the treatment of codependence can lead persons to reject relationships altogether. It can also lead people to fear interdependence in any form, and to interact with other persons and institutions in passive aggressive ways, seeking to withdraw from personal and institutional involvement while indirectly undermining corporate life.

B. Codependence and Theological Questions

This oversimplified analysis already begs some theological questions, first in relation to women, and then, in relation to the nature of God and the universe. Since women are more often diagnosed as codependent than men, stereotypical or reductionist tendencies may be inherent in the diagnosis; these are potentially destructive for women. For example, what happens if the qualities of sensitivity to others and self-giving are defined entirely in the negative; especially, how do these negative valuations affect women whose socialization has often nurtured these very qualities? Certainly the dangers and damage of such socialization are obvious, and the evidence is convincing that these qualities often contribute to women’s self-abuse and abuse by others. On the other hand, what are the potential dangers of defining highly relational women and common relational characteristics of women in largely negative terms? Is the danger akin to the diagnoses of hysteria among women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Is the danger that women will not be taken seriously in their fullness but be reduced to a simplistic psychological definition?

In addition to the potential dangers to women’s existence, what assumptions does codependence theory carry about the nature of God and the universe? The theory implicitly challenges any theology that views God or Jesus chiefly in terms of sacrifice -- theologies in which the redemptive work of God is described primarily as God’s sacrificing Jesus or as Jesus’ sacrificing himself.³ The theory explicitly challenges any theology that fosters codependence as a value, especially a theology that fosters martyrdom or forms of self-giving that contribute to self-destruction, self-abnegation, or dependence on others for a sense of value. These are significant concerns emerging from codependence theory, but they are often stated without extensive theological or social analysis, thus leaving many open questions regarding the nuances of diverse theological perspectives and the varied experiences of peoples in diverse racial-ethnic communities, socio-economic classes, and regions of the world.

Codependence theory implicitly suggests an individualistic worldview as well, especially if the only options for communal worldviews are described in codependent terms. The consequences of such a non-communal worldview can be philosophical and psychological: a retreat into individualistic or atomistic views of the universe, a high valuing of individual human existence over social existence, a subtle rejection of people who hold more communal understandings of the world, an encouragement of people to seek their own identity by rejecting the influence of others, and a negation of the human ability to experience or act on healthy impulses to give of self and to care for others.

Perhaps, these are all reasons to question a good theory, but they are not necessarily reasons to reject the theory. The purpose of the remainder of this essay is to probe these questions and to seek alternative views of relationships and alternative approaches or resources for psychotherapy.

II. Codependence Theory: Life-Giving or Death-Dealing for Women?

On first blush, codependence theory seems to promise life to women, indeed to any individual or institution that gets caught in the codependent syndrome, described by Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel as "a constellation of behaviors that emerge in relation to the addictive system and dysfunctional family patterns" (73). Codependent and addictive behavior, while bearing some common features, are actually syndromes that are mutually reinforcing. The qualities of codependence include taking care of others, giving of oneself to the point of exhaustion or depression, suffering and complaining while denying help, living in close relation with addicts and/or other codependents, and discerning and responding to the cues of others ("external referencing and impression management") (74-76).

Of particular interest for the focus of this essay is the way theology and the psychotherapeutic profession play into the dynamics of codependence. According to Schaef and Fassel, "the society’s concept of the ‘good Christian martyr’ is the perfect co-dependent" (74). This means that the culture often values the behavior of the codependent positively, while giving a negative valuation to alcohol and drug addiction; in fact, they add, "helping professionals have themselves become the practice of the disease of co-dependence" (75). In other words, the official codependents in our society are often psychotherapists, priests, rabbis, and other practitioners of healing.

Religious communities often perpetuate the hand-in-glove relationship of codependent and addictive persons by encouraging the helping relationship as a religious ideal -- the relationship of one helper or helping institution with others in need. Again, Schaef and Fassel speak to this dilemma, saying, "to the extent that religious systems are caught in the same processes as the addict, they themselves support our remaining in the addictive system" (67). They describe the processes of an addictive system as denial, confusion, self-centeredness, dishonesty, perfectionism, seeking after sufficiency in a scarcity model of the world, seeking to control, frozen feelings, and ethical and spiritual deterioration (62-67).⁴

Though the theory-building on codependence began with the study of individuals in addictive family systems, the study has in recent years taken account of codependence as a phenomenon in institutions and organizations. Schaef and Fassel identify four forms of addiction in organizations: organizations in which a key person is an addict, organizations in which persons take their addictive or codependent disease into the organization and replicate the dysfunctional system, organizations which themselves become the addictive substance, and organizations that are themselves addicts (77-176).

This shift to a social psychological analysis of community life marks a broadening of codependence theory; it also accounts for an interaction between individual and social pathology. On the other hand, it perpetuates a tendency to interpret communal life through categories of individual psychology and through diagnostic categories of psychopathology. Can such diagnosis of addictive systems provide adequate understanding of any social community? Are the origins of cultural, ethnic, and gender patterns reducible to the dynamics of the individual psyche, or can they be better explained in terms of a complex interplay of individual, social, economic, and historical forces? These questions cannot be fully addressed in a single essay; the questions can be approached, however, by evaluating the adequacy of codependence theory through gender analysis.

A. Women and Codependence

Thus far, the discussion of women has been by implication, but reflect for a moment on a few realities: the majority of persons in the United States diagnosed with depression are women;⁵ the majority involved in religious communities and helping organizations are women; and women are more often associated with the ideals of self-giving than men. We should not, then, be surprised if psychotherapists frequently use the language of codependence in helping women name their hurts and illness; nor should we be surprised that many books recommended to codependent and addictive clients in the healing process are focused largely on women.⁶

A distinction should be made between the more popular and the more empirically based codependence theory; yet, in both, women have been the subject of research and theory more than men. The basic reason for this is a laudable effort to redress a neglect of women in earlier theories. Anne Wilson Schaef for example, has been a popularizer, and many women and men have met codependence theory and found psychotherapeutic guidance via her works. Schaef was aware of gendered realities before she began using the language of codependence. She began with an insight that existing theories of psychotherapy were not very responsive to women, and in 1981, she saw this problem in her own twelve-year old practice of psychotherapy:

In approaching this problem, Schaef describes the limits of both intrapsychic and interpersonal approaches to therapy and puts forth the idea in Women Reality that an analysis of the "‘White Male System" is necessary if psychotherapists are to understand the dilemmas of women in society (1-4). The problem infuses the general society, the counseling room, and the most influential theories of psychotherapy

Schaef refers particularly to Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson, whom she describes as "very astute observers," but not very good interpreters of women "because they could only interpret from their own, White Male System bias" (Women’s 33; cf. Homey 54).⁷ She gives one example in Freud’s assertion that women envy men -- an astute observation in itself, but one distorted by Freud’s idea that women’s envy centers on the male penis. She says:

Schaef proceeds to explain some of the ways in which the White Male System defines all aspects of women’s reality as inferior and does not even leave room for women to express their rage without the label of "inappropriate" (Women’s 85-88).⁹

Further complicating this picture for women and ethnic minority persons, Christian theology has been used to reinforce the patterns: "Without a doubt, the church has perpetuated the concept that the suffering servant is the holiest person of all. Women and minorities have been encouraged to be suffering servants, thereby achieving absolution" (Women’s 167).

Attending to Schaef’s view opens the issues, but it is also a distortion, for she is a popularizer. By her own testimony, she is writing as a synthesizer looking at the big picture, and she is concerned that her work not be used as a "weapon against women"; she worries that therapists will use her work to tell women "what they should be feeling, thinking, and working on" (Women’s Foreword). Selecting Schaef’s work is intentional, however, because the sales of her books represent some of the best evidence of the heuristic value of codependence theory

Schaef is not the only psychotherapist who has attended to women and codependence. In fact, much of the research on codependence has focused on women as primary subjects. This is apparent in the numerous studies of wives of alcoholics as well as in reviews of the literature on codependence (Farris 113-32).¹⁰ What is also evident in this research is that definitive conclusions are not possible in regard to the health of women married to addicts because different personality dynamics and different degrees of personality disturbance are found (Farris 115-26).¹¹ The evidence does not support an easy conclusion that women married to addicts have more personality disturbances than others in the population. This leads back to the question of whether the theory of codependence and the popular conclusions regarding the relation between codependence and women are overly simple: is the theory heuristic or reductionistic?

B. Women and Theological Traditions

The encouragement of codependence in women is deep within the traditions of Christianity, so this psychological diagnosis is not surprising in cultures influenced by Christianity. Since the problem can also be found in other religious traditions, this analysis of Christian tradition is done in hopes that future analyses will be made within other traditions as well. A twofold problem exists for women in Christian theology -- namely; the assumption that women are inferior to men and the ethical norm for women to be subject to men. These theological assertions are drawn from many corners of the biblical and church traditions, but one theologian who has had major influence on Christian theology exemplifies the problem in his explicit treatment of the subject -- Thomas Aquinas.

In speaking of the creation of humans in the image of God, Aquinas makes a case that men are created in the image of God in a way distinct from women. He presents a two part case, beginning first with the argument that the intellectual nature of the image of God is "found both in man and in woman," appealing to Augustine’s argument that this expression is necessary "lest it should be thought that both sexes were united in one individual" (472). Here we see an instance of protecting the distinction between male and female. To this Aquinas adds a second argument:

In this second argument, Aquinas moves beyond the distinction between male and female and expresses the primacy of male over female, a primacy rooted in God’s creation and witnessed in the Bible.

The fundamental theological problem for women in Christian tradition is this argument for the inferiority of women to men. A second problem is the ethical argument for women to be subject to men. Again, Aquinas makes this argument, appealing to Genesis and embellishing the argument with assertions that women are inferior to men. The primary role of women in relation to men is in the work of generation; thus Aquinas argues:

Building on this basic theme, Aquinas makes an explicit case for the subjection of women to men, not the kind of subjection emerging from sin in which the subject is used for the benefit of the superior, but the kind of subjection that existed even before the entry of sin into the world in which people are subjects for their own benefit. Of this second kind of subjection, Aquinas says:

We see here a picture of women as inferior, less able to reason, and more needy than men.

The question before us now is whether the theories of codependence promise to free women from such characterizations -- from their sense of inferiority and from their traditional assignment to subjection and helping roles. On the other hand, will these theories subject women to even more characterization? The particular danger is a diagnosis that names the helping roles (into which women have often been well socialized) as illness or codependence? These questions fuel the remainder of this essay, particularly the search for a larger theory

III. Beyond Codependence: Toward a Larger View of Life

The central question is whether codependence theory gives life or death to people who are subject to this diagnosis. Of course, the answer largely lies in how the theory is used, but the focus here is on the theory itself. Focusing first on women, who have been most often diagnosed as codependent, the theory implicitly denies the inferiority of women or anyone else; the theory also denies women’s obligation to be subject to others. Subjection is necessary neither for one’s own good nor for others’. On the other hand, the theory also carries an implicit denial of the traditional virtue of giving that is associated with women, even a denial of generosity as a positive impulse. Does such a theory promise fuller life or death?

Answers exist within codependence theory itself for the question I am raising here. For example, Anne Wilson Schaef makes the distinction between relationships and pseudo-relationships; the former support life and the latter destroy it. Schaef herself raises questions with codependence theory, recognizing that the label "co-" can be an avoidance: "Most people would rather be a ‘co-’ than an addict" (Escape 6). She recognizes that the labels of co-dependence and co-sex addicts are easier to accept than other addictive labels; therefore, claiming these diagnoses may be a way to avoid seeing one’s own addiction. Shaef shows how these codependent roles are addictive in themselves, drawing people into pseudo-relationships and, thus, into an escape from real intimacy (Escape 6, 106-11). Taking Schaef’s view, codependence itself is death-dealing to relationships in much the same way that addictions are.

In developing this theme, Schaef describes her own move beyond the "caretaker, controller issues" and the idea "that co-dependence is a relationship disease"; she concludes instead "that co-dependence underlies every addiction" (Escape 106). In making this move, she describes various addictions that flow from the co-dependence, namely, "ingestive addictions, process addictions, certain neuroses, certain psychoses, character disorders, and non-liberated men and women" (Escape 107). Though she asserts that codependence and the underlying addictive process are not exactly the same, she admits to being unsure about what the difference is. The implication of this thinking is that codependence is nor only a disease, but it is foundational to many other diseases, thus intensifying and expanding the seriousness of codependence as a clinical category.

When viewed from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, this idea could be seen as an expansion of the traditionally understood defense mechanisms of projection, rationalization, reaction-formation, dissociation, regression, repression, identification, introjection, and compensation. These defense mechanisms (or some of them) are seen in codependence theory as the central causal problem rather than the symptom of a deeper problem. From Sigmund Freud’s perspective, the opposite is the case; defense mechanisms are seen as means for dealing with anxiety which is aroused by deeper sexual and aggressive drives. These deeper drives are the real causal forces in human personality, according to Freud.

What does a process-relational view contribute to this discussion? It would certainly affirm the Freudian and post-Freudian assumption that the underlying causal force in human life is energy, or deep drives. A process-relational view is distinct from psychoanalytic theory however; the underlying force is not seen as sexual energy or the will to power, but rather, as the will to life. Building on this basic notion, we can describe the powerful energies within human life as energies directed toward preserving and enhancing life. If this is the case, then defense mechanisms might be seen as efforts of that internal energy to protect what life a person is able to experience and to create opportunities for new life to grow.¹³

In such a view, defense mechanisms function not merely to protect persons from anxiety (external or internalized threat), but also to open persons to new life. From the perspective of process-relational thought, defense mechanisms might be seen as cries for help, or doorways that potentially open possibilities for people to respond more fully to the influence of God’s initial aim and to the more life-giving influences of their past.¹⁴ The concept of concrescence is critical because every moment offers the real possibility for fuller life to emerge.

Appealing to the same form of argument, the will to relationship could be seen as a will to life-giving relationship. This is sometimes distorted into death-dealing relationship. If postmodern thought pushes toward a relational view of the universe, then postmodern thinking poses a worldview (or a variety of worldviews) in which relationships are not optional; they are part of reality. For Schaef to distinguish between relationships and pseudo-relationships may be an appropriate plea for distinguishing healthy from destructive relationships, but one cannot assume that any relationship is not real. Relationships are real, and they are pervasive.

Defense mechanisms might be understood, then, as the meager efforts that people make within present relationships to protect what life-giving elements do exist. Perhaps, people are simply protecting the positive value that they experience in these relationships, hoping to open the way for more just and loving relationships in the future. In such a view, defense mechanisms are not idealized as ends in themselves, but they are valued for what they reveal of human yearning and what they can potentially contribute to human thriving. Problems arise, of course, when defense mechanisms are perpetuated long past their usefulness, living on as part of an unfinished and unintegrated past. But what would happen therapeutically if people were encouraged to discover (or rediscover) their impulses to protect life and then draw upon those impulses as a force for healing?

Lest this be judged as hopelessly optimistic, consider how limiting is the cause-and-effect thinking of codependence theory in which one pattern of behavior (addiction) explains another (codependence). Even psychoanalytic theory, with all its fascinating complexity, is grounded in cause-and-effect explanations of human behavior. One unique contribution of process-relational thought to the postmodern movement more generally is the recovery of mystery, denying none of these dynamics of cause and effect, but affirming the reality of novelty God’s initial aim is contributed to every becoming occasion, and every occasion receives the entire inheritance of the past, which itself may enter into the subjective aim of a becoming occasion in a novel way (not always the predictable ways that are explained by cause-and-effect theories). The possibilities of novel response are limitless, certainly moving beyond simple causal explanations. Further, the possibilities for healing expand far beyond existing diagnostic categories, even the most complex and adequate of those categories.

With these ideas in mind, one can see the actions of codependence as actions toward life, actions toward living fully and living in full relationships. Rather than focus on codependence as a diagnostic category, the focus can be shifted to codependence as an effort toward life. This is not to deny the destructive potential of codependent behavior, but to shift the figure and ground, placing the dynamic effort toward life in the foreground and looking to that dynamic as a positive force upon which to build.

We are talking here of reversal thinking. For example, the codependent spouse of an alcoholic may be seeking to find and enhance the glimmers of life that exist within his or her limited marriage relationship. That person’s positive search for life, however limited, might be more promising ground for healing than the distortions themselves. Analyzing relationships in this way, psychotherapists can encourage people to build on positive impulses rather than to focus on destructive self-labeling or hasty withdrawal from questionable relationships.

Although ending relationships is sometimes best, it is also a limited choice, due to communal, family, vocational and psychological complexities; it can even be a misleading choice, as when people disregard the persisting influences of relationships, even after distancing is accomplished. This does not mean that people should be encouraged to remain in relationships at all costs or continue in the same destructive patterns. Instead, they need to be encouraged to recognize in those patterns a yearning for life that can provide the energy for more promising, life-giving choices. Those choices might well include a distancing from certain relationships or a radical shift in the mode of relating, but the impulse to change will be built on the seeds of life that are already present rather than on self-condemnation.

Other examples can be given for this kind of reversal thinking. The overachiever may be one whose opportunities have been limited or who has been discouraged from full participation in life; the effort to achieve may be the person’s effort to live to the fullness of her or his abilities. Similarly, a person who is highly dependent on relationships may be someone who has been limited in relationships in the past and discouraged from fullness of relational being. The person’s effort to seek and build upon relationships may be promising ground not only for diagnosing pathology but, more importantly, for discerning the desire and capacity for life-giving relationships.

When applied to communities of people, as to women, the move of codependence may be seen as an effort toward countering years, even centuries, of demeaning socialization. The tendency for codependence to become stronger in women is surely no accident, given the repeated messages of inferiority and experiences of subjection that women have encountered. The very exercise of codependent behavior among women may be an effort to claim life; from this, more adequate efforts can later grow. When women acknowledge and celebrate their efforts to claim life, they will be empowered to move beyond self-destructive cycles and toward fuller life.

IV Beyond Codependence: Toward a Larger View of Relationships

The discussion thus far points to the conclusion that codependence has had enormous heuristic value in naming the experience of many people, especially many women. The value, however, has been in giving voice to a phenomenon on the surface of experience, but not In unearthing the depths of that experience. The reflections on life instincts in the previous section point to the possibility of a larger view of life, and now we will seek a larger view of relationships. Here is where process-relational thinking may be particularly valuable; philosophers and theologians describe a relational universe in which the dynamic of codependence is only a minuscule part of human relatedness with the world. If codependence theory is overstretched, the practice of codependent diagnosis and counseling may indeed be reductionistic. If codependent interactions are not recognized as singular strands in a larger relational web, the fullness of psychological explanation, and the fullness of life, may be thwarted.

As I write this, I think of persons diagnosed as codependent who withdraw from existing relationships and reflect on all their former giving as codependent and sick. Closing themselves off from their former acts of giving, they also close themselves off from larger needs in the world, thus enclosing themselves in a narrow world where they see only themselves. Is the thrust of such a move to support life or to deny it?

Perhaps such withdrawal is a necessary first step, but what is lost if diagnosis and therapy stop at this point? Perhaps codependent behavior itself is an effort that people make to move into a larger world where they can participate in the support of life. If this is the case, withdrawal from codependent behavior may be best effected if persons are encouraged to give themselves more fully to the cherishing of life -- theirs and others as well. When, as is the more customary practice, codependent persons are encouraged to cherish themselves and to withdraw from the caring of others, the pattern of dichotomizing self and others, individuality and relationship, codependence and independence is perpetuated.

What are the alternatives, and in what views of God and the world might such alternatives be grounded? Gordon Jackson answers this question with a vision of pastoral care and counseling drawn from process-relational metaphysics. He describes pastoral ministry and the healing process as creating something of beauty. In this view, people are invited actively into the creative process of life -- to appreciate, enjoy, and contribute to beauty in the world. Jackson’s view has much in common with the one presented here, which is built upon honoring the Spirit of Life, self-giving, and interdependence.

A. God as Spirit of Life

Perhaps the present alternatives of codependence and independence owe more than we realize to the dominant views of God as the Supreme Helper of the world or as the Wholly Other. Perhaps the dichotomizing of codependence and independence owe much to the dichotomizing of God’s acts into intimate care-taking and almighty judgment.¹⁵ Even the difficulty of reconciling a fully good God with a fully powerful God is an indication of the dualistic categories.

This entire complex of questions is one in which process theologians have often traveled, posing the idea that God is fully good, but not all-powerful. Hence in the process view, God is the Source and Sustainer of Life, who participates fully in every moment of life, luring every being to more fullness. At the same time, God’s power is persuasive rather than coercive; God’s power is the greatest power and the unsurpassable power, but not the only power in the universe. Thus, God interacts with the world but does not control the world. God’s life is interdependent with the life of the world. God feels the pain and joy of the world and God contributes an initial aim to every emerging occasion, but God does not and cannot determine the outcome.

In this process-relational, panentheistic view of God, God is understood to be in every being and beyond every being. God is neither defined by the reality of the world, nor independent of that reality God indwells every moment of experience, but these moments always transcend God (having received into themselves other forces of the universe, including evil forces), and God always transcends the experiences, always being more than is concretely actualized in the world.

This view offers a vision for human relationships that moves beyond the dichotomous choice between independence and codependence. Insofar as human beings are created in the image of God, people are themselves born into such a network of relationships in which each person and each community is unique, transcending every other person and community in that uniqueness. At the same time, people are born related to one another, to God, to the whole universe; thus, our actions affect the life of the world and the life of God. We cannot exist in isolation from God and the universe.

B. Self-Giving: A Human Value

Where does this discussion lead in regard to the value of self-giving, a value that falls all too easily into the distortions of codependence? Perhaps one clue lies in the work of God -- a work of self-giving without end -- a work, however, in which God’s self-giving is not an end in itself but always a movement toward God’s future of shalom.

Drawing from Jewish and Christian traditions, biblical texts describe God’s work as directed toward life -- toward justice and the wholeness of creation. That raises questions for Christian theology about why Jesus died, and what model of human life is offered to us by Jesus’ journey to the cross. This question was raised in the pastoral counseling movement long ago by Helen Flanders Dunbar, who drew connections between the Christian belief in a suffering God and Christian value patterns of self-depreciation and masochism. As paraphrased by Jeanne Moessner and Maxine Glaz, "The way of the cross may lead to the mental hospital" (40-41).

Theologically, this view of God’s suffering might be refrained in a process-relational view, emphasizing God’s feeling with and for the world. God’s suffering is not masochistic, but is instead the natural consequence of being related with every moment in the life of the world. Similarly, Jesus’ death was the natural consequence of radical living and loving -- the consequence of Jesus’ identifying with the outcast, proclaiming God’s justice and righteousness, and giving his life fully to living. By such an argument, Jesus is seen as self-giving, but not self-destroying. He simply met and accepted the consequences of radical living. In this view, incarnation is a theological contribution to codependence theory -- a rejection of self-giving that is aimed at self-destruction or filling an inner void and an affirmation of self-giving that is aimed at supporting life.¹⁶ This view suggests that the value of self-giving would be measured not so much by how much the giver suffers, but by the degree to which the giving contributes (or is intended to contribute) to justice and love and fullness of life.

This leads me to reject Anne Wilson Schaef’s ethical conclusions. As Bonnie Miller-McLemore says: "Schaef advocates an individualistic, situational ethic that is insufficient for the problems of late-second-wave [feminist] women and at odds with Christian ethics." Miller-McLemore further critiques Schaef on her assumption that "as each woman realizes her own individual good, she will have a congenial social balance of needs met and desires gratified" (72)¹⁷ What is needed instead, according to Miller-McLemore, is an ethic of reciprocity in which self-concern and concern for others are held together (77-79).

Because the term reciprocity evokes connotations of equal trade, I choose to speak instead of an ethic of mutuality -- an ethic in which both giving and receiving are valued, both self-concern and other-concern, both care-giving and justice-making. An ethic of mutuality calls not only for action between two persons or two social groups, but also, collective action toward the larger world.

Psychotherapy that supports an ethic of mutuality assigns value to self-giving whenever that giving sustains life in oneself and others. Such counseling contributes to peoples’ ability to empathize with others and to be attuned with oneself. Such counseling inspires persons to give of themselves for the sake of life, and it equips people to make difficult decisions in order to support justice and well being for all life, the life of self interpersonal relationships, social structures and the entire eco-system. It does not demand independence from relationships, but rather living in relationships in the most life-giving ways possible.

C. Beyond Codependence to Interdependence

In conclusion, the heuristic value of codependence theory for psychotherapy is clear. The theory elaborates on a common problem in human relationships in which life is narrowed and destroyed, and relationships are limited or used to destroy the Spirit of Life. The critique developed here also carries force, however, and reductionistic aspects of codependence theory become increasingly clear. Most important, codependence theory limits the discussion of relationships to certain sick patterns in human interactions. This focus neglects the limits of cause-and-effect descriptions of human behavior, as well as the depths of psychic pain which are only partially revealed in codependent patterns. It also neglects the profound will of human beings to live fully -- an instinct that motivates much human interaction and sometimes pushes toward healing even in the midst of sick patterns of relationship.

Further, codependence theory fails to recognize the distinction between codependence, in which one person or social group is defined by the other, and interdependence, in which persons and communities live in mutual relation with one another and with God. Interdependent relationships, if they are to sustain life rather than destroy it, require an ethic of mutuality -- an ethic that calls each human being to be responsive to the Spirit of Life in oneself and others, and calls all beings together into solidarity on behalf of the planet.

V. A Picture of Process-Relational Psychotherapy

A postmodern effort to imagine the future of psychotherapy is inevitably vague, due in part to the nature of postmoderism, which is clearly a movement beyond modernity, but not a fully or concretely formed system. Postmodern thought is most obviously and actively a critique of modernity and a smaller current within the postmodern movement is the constructive postmodern impulse to seek alternative worldviews and patterns of action -- an impulse marked by the active participation of many process-relational thinkers.

This essay is grounded in an assumption that the critical and constructive impulses of postmodernism cannot be glibly dichotomized. Critical work opens space for new constructions, and new constructions require the same critical eye as the old.¹⁸ In fact, the reconstructions may simply replicate modernist assumptions regarding the superior value of reason, and they may remain trapped in modern dichotomous thinking about sickness and health, dependence and independence, and women and men.

Having pronounced these warnings, the greater danger seems to lie in the failure to ground the ideas of this essay in proposals for practice, committing another modernist fallacy of divorcing ideas from their concrete manifestations. The work of practical philosophy or practical theology is one that begins and ends in practice. Certainly, the hope for real transformation in psycho-therapy pushes me to close this essay by circling back to psychotherapeutic practice. For now, the practical proposals are in the form of imaginings, awaiting further action and conversation with others. The proposals, thus, are listed as invitations for experimentation and reflection.

I. Process-relational psychotherapy would seek to enhance the will to lift and the will to lift-giving relationship, both for individuals and communities. In such therapy, people would be encouraged to identify what in their actions or the actions of their community already represents their quest for fuller life. They would be encouraged to reflect on their most positive actions, but also on those actions that are destructive, seeking to discern the impulses toward life within those very acts. Further, people would be encouraged to name those experiences that best nourish their lives and relationships and, then, to seek ways to build such experiences more fully into their daily comings and goings. The nourishing experiences may he political activity, gardening, spending time with friends and family participating in active sports, exploring the natural world, exercising, or listening to music.

Although the focus of such therapy would often be on individuals and families, the work of psychotherapy would also be focused more directly on the life of larger social bodies. Psychotherapy would concern itself with the wellbeing of communities and, therefore, would encourage and support actions that nourish communal life and relationships -- communal rituals, common meals, and communal play. The forms of process-relational psychotherapy would be many, but one of the primary disciplines of healing would be to identify and engage in actions that support the wellbeing of communities and individuals, and to do so within the context of the larger environment.

2. Process-relational psychotherapy would seek to enhance the relationships that people have with the Spirit of Life, which many will call God and others will name in other ways or not name at all. The practice of prayer, contemplation and meditation would, then, be quite appropriate to psychotherapy. Such a recommendation seems more obvious for those who are pastoral or religious counselors than for those who are "secular" therapists. Certainly pastoral and religious counselors would have a unique contribution to make here, but some practices of meditation are not bound within a particular religious tradition, and some are shared by many traditions. The proposal is that psychotherapists seek ways to engage people in prayer, contemplation or meditation, and to do so in ways that are appropriate to the therapists and clients within their particular contexts. Some of this may take place in therapy sessions, particularly if religious frameworks and language are shared by therapists and clients. Some therapists may simply encourage clients to participate in their own religious communities.

3. Process-relational psychotherapy would encourage people to be involved in self-giving, focusing particularly on forms of giving that they judge to be most valuable to themselves and others, and forms of giving that are the least tainted by their past experience with self-abnegation. The possibilities of self-giving are limitless: giving through social protest (often protesting the very oppressions that have most affected them and their people); giving through helping others (individually and collectively); giving through service to the earth (caring for the air and land, recycling, participating in the political process to protect the eco-system); giving through developing one’s distinctive strengths and the quality of one’s own life, both for oneself and for others.

4. Process-relational pschotherapy would encourage people to enjoy life and enjoy relationships, seeking ways to enhance their ordinary lives and relationships so that they bring more enjoyment to all involved. This would include analyzing ordinary life to discern what is already present to be enjoyed, what is absent, and what might be transformed or initiated as a movement into enjoyment. The aim would be to enhance the quality of life and the quality of relationships, recognizing that relationships do exist, that they are often filled with brokenness and pain, and that the healing of relationships can contribute to the healing of individuals and the healing of the world.

All of the proposals imagined here are exploratory but underlying them is the hope that psychotherapy can empower people to critique and transform their world. Process-relational psychotherapy might be understood as the mutual practice of healing. People are encouraged to work together in healing their world, themselves, and the communities in which they live. The hope is to create and nurture communities of well being that will foster well being among their members and in the larger world.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this essay was published as: "Codependence Theory: Heuristic or Reductionistic?" The first version was presented in a conference on Process Thought and Psychotherapy, sponsored by the Center for Process Studies, School of Theology at Claremont, October 1992.

2. James Farris reviews the literature on codependence and critiques the approach of twelve step programs in healing, particularly in regard to the elements of twelve step programs that reinforce dualistic spirituality, based on an assumed chasm between the divine and human.

3. This issue is raised with more explicit detail in feminist and womanist writing; a connection is demonstrated between the accent on God’s sacrifice and the ethic of self-sacrifice as a human value. Further, these theorists observe that the value of self-sacrifice is often applied more vigorously to women than to men. Two important sources for these discussions are: Isabel Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God and Joanne Carlson Brown & Rebecca Parker, "For God So Loved the World."

4. Other characteristics are described elsewhere, such as crisis orientation, depression, stress, abnormal thinking processes, forgetfulness, dependency, negativism, defensiveness, projection, tunnel vision, and fear" (68). See also Schaef, When Society Becomes an Addict, 86-93.

5. Christie Cozad Neuger has described the epidemic of depression among women, as well as the major explanatory and prescriptive theories.

6. See for example Beattie, Baer, DeRosis, Dowling, Kimball.

7. In this critique, Schaef stands with women psychologists and psychoanalysts since Karen Homey, who have noted that Freud and most early post-Freudians were men, whose understanding of men’s psychology was greater than their understanding of women’s. Consider Freud’s Outline of Psychoanalysis and Civilization and its Discontents.

8. Karen Homey describes with more complexity than Schaef the inadequacy of a theory of female psychology based in biological difference and disregarding the force of masculine-dominated culture.

9. This is the theme of the entire book, but Schaef deals explicitly with rage on these pages.

10. See also Whalen, MacDonald, James and Goldman.

11. Farris notes that research on enablers and co-alcoholics (prior to the coining of "codependence" in the early 1970s), as well as research on codependents, leads to mixed conclusions regarding personality disturbance among these people (115-26). He concludes that research is inconclusive on the emotional health of codependents: "With regard to the rate of personality disturbance among wives of alcoholics as compared to wives of nonalcoholics, research findings are mixed. Regarding the issue of the presence of personality disturbance among wives of alcoholics sufficient to warrant generalization that wives of alcoholics are disturbed, research findings are open to both interpretations and the charge that they reflect cultural stereotypes" (124).

12. This argument is quite different from that of contemporary feminist scholars who make a case that the Genesis 1:27 passage regarding the creation of "them" in the image of God is an instance of inclusiveness in a biblical text, referring to the image of God in both men and women and, thus, the possibility that God can also be imaged as both male and female. See, for example Trible.

13. These ideas bear close resemblance to Greider’s description of "the instinct to survive and live well." ("All" 2). See also Greider’s Reckoning with Aggression. Theology, Violence and Vitality.

14. This idea is developed more extensively in the essays of David Roy and Robert Brizee.

15. Bonnie Miller-McLemore is also concerned about the classical Western views of God as ultimately separate, self-sufficient, omnipotent and beyond influence. She connects this theological issue with her psychological concern regarding the dichotomy between autonomy or self-concern and concern for others. She finds theological resources in Catherine Keller’s view of God who "activates connection" (77-80; cf. 63-85). See also Keller.

16. A similar accent can also be found in other theological perspectives, even in Jürgen Moltmann who strongly emphasizes service and the human call to assume suffering in solidarity with others who suffer. He says, "the person who wants to fill an inner emptiness through service to others will only spread this emptiness further [. . .] Only those who have become free within from self-seeking, from preoccupation with self, and from anxiety about life, can share suffering and take it upon themselves -- and free others" (30).

17. Miller-McLemore argues further that Schaef assumes the inherent goodness of human nature, but limits her assumption to women. In so doing, she ignores "the depth and complexity of human nature and its capacity for both greatness and corruption, goodness and evil" (72-73).

18. Jantzen ("Knowledge") emphasizes the point that postmodern deconstruction is intentionally vague. For Derrida, deconstruction is more of a creative inquiry than a fixed method to be grasped. It is a mode of inquiry that gives attention to subtext, convention, and margin; it is not antithetical to reconstruction, but wary of reconstruction that is done prior to major social reordering. See also Jantzen (Power).

Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, vol. I. New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1947.

Baer, Jean. How to Be an Assertive (Not Aggressive) Woman in Life, in Love, and on the Job. New York: New American Library, 1976.

Beattie, Melody. Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself New York: Harper, 1987.

Brown, Joanne Carlson & Rebecca Parker. "For God So Loved the World." Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse: A Feminist Critique. Eds. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn. New York: Pilgrim, 1990. 1-30.

DeRosis, Helen A. and Victoria Y. Pellegrino. The Book of Hope: How Women Can Overcome Depression. New York: MacMillan, 1976.

Dowling, Colette. The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. New York: Pocket Books, 1981.

Doyle, Roddy. The Woman Who Walked through Doors. London: Random House, 1996.

Dunbar, Helen Flanders. "Mental Hygiene and Religious Teaching." Mental Hygiene 19 (July 1935): 353-72.

Farris, James. Dances of Life and Dances of Death: The Addictive Process, Dualistic Spirituality and Codependence, Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont School of Theology, 1991.

Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1949. Civilization and its Discontents. London: Liveright, 1930.

Glaz, Maxine, and Jeanne Stevenson Moessner, eds. Women in Travail and Transition. A New Pastoral Care. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991.

Greider, Kathleen J. "‘All the Rage. . .’ (As in "Race, Rage, and Reconciliation"): On Aggression, Rage, and STCs 92-93 Curricular Theme." October 2, 1992.

-- Reckoning with Aggression: Theology, Violence and Vitality. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1997.

Heyward, Isabel Carter. The Redemption of God. Lanham: UP of America, 1982.

Homey, Karen. Feminine Psychology. Ed., Harold Kelman. New York: Norton, 1967.

Jackson, Gordon. A Theology for Ministry: Creating Something of Beauty. St. Louis: Chalice, 1998.

James, J. E. and Michael Goldman. "Behavioral Trends of Wives of Alcoholics." Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 32 (1971): 562-86.

Jantzen, Grace M. "Is Knowledge Gendered?" Philosophy of Religion Research Seminar, King’s College London. 28 Oct. 1993.

-- Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Keller, Catherine. From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self Boston: Beacon, 1986.

Kimball, Bonnie-Jean. The Alcoholic Woman’s Mad, Mad World of Denial and Mind Games. Center City, MN: Hazelden Educational Materials, 1978.

MacDonald, David. "Mental Disorders in Wives of Alcoholics." Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 17 (1956): 282-87.

Miller-McLemore, Bonnie. "Women Who Work and Love: Caught Between Cultures." Glaz and Stevenson Moessner 63-85.

Moessner Stevenson, Jeanne & Maxine Glaz. "The Psychology of Women and Pastoral Care." Glaz and Stevenson Moessner 39-42.

Moltmann, Jürgen. Hope for the Church. Nashville: Abingdon, 1979. Mullino Moore, Mary Elizabeth. "Codependence Theory: Heuristic or Reductionistic?" Journal of Ministry in Addiction and Recovery 2 (1995): 59-77.

Neuger, Christie Cozad. "Women’s Depression: Lives at Risk." Women in Travail and Transition: A New Pastoral Care. Eds. Maxine Glaz and Jeanne Stevenson Moessner. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991. 146-161.

Schaef Anne Wilson and Diane Fassel. The Addictive Organization. San Francisco: Harper, 1988.

Schaef Anne Wilson. Escape from Intimacy: The Pseudo-Relationship Addictions. San Francisco: Harper, 1989.

Schaef, Anne Wilson. When Society Becomes an Addict. San Francisco: Harper, 1987. 86-93.

Schaef, Anne Wilson. Women’s Reality: An Emerging Female System in the White Male Society. Minneapolis: Winston, 1981.

Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978.

Whalen, Terry. "Wives of Alcoholics." Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 14 (1953): 632-41.

An organic philosophy calls forth an organic approach to teaching. Teaching organically certainly would require more than one educational methodology, simply to draw from the fullness of human inventiveness. The focus here, however, will be on one particular form of organic teaching that is unusually full in itself -- narrative teaching.

Teaching narratively calls forth images of storytelling, simulation gaming, dramatization and ritual reenactments. But teaching narratively is more than a set of techniques that can be thrown into an eclectic bag of tricks. Narrative is a significant mode of human communication, a bearer of culture, and a potentially profound and far-reaching educational methodology.

In Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis portrays the simple character of Zorba -- a man who is simply complex, a man of rich experience whose life is so full of stories that his crude philosophy is full of wisdom. In his wisdom, Zorba constantly shames his well-read, intellectual companion who works as his boss and narrates his story.

Zorba’s life is a bundle of narratives, and he himself communicates primarily through narrative. His story-telling is so organic and involving that he does not even need words to tell a story. In one scene Zorba tells his boss of his days in Russia. He tells of meeting a Russian man in the tavern where he spent every evening after working the copper mines by day. Together Zorba and the Russian drank vodka and began to talk. Zorba’s Russian vocabulary was limited to five or six words, but he and his new-found friend wanted to share their stories. Zorba explains how they managed:

Zorba narrates his friend’s story of the Russian revolution, and then he proceeds with his own:

Such is narrative! It can cross cultures, speak through the whole body, and bind people together in a depth of understanding. The response of the Russian to Zorba’s story was a hug; the response of Zorba’s boss later that night was a feeling of shame that his own life was not so rich:

In fact, the two eternal antagonists of soul and flesh are reconciled in story. Story, whether told in words or in dance, is embodied communication. A good story is richly textured: the characters are full and embodied; their lives are interwoven, and their ideas and actions are interwoven. Of course, stories are told for various reasons, and some are designed primarily to convey certain ideas or morals. What is recognized here, however, is that stories are more aesthetically rewarding if they are more richly textured.

These qualities of story naturally attract an organic philosopher, who naturally cares about the relation between soul and flesh, between one person and another, between one culture and another, and between ideas and actions. When one begins theorizing about education from an organic, web-like view of the world, one begins with assumptions that the world is thoroughly interconnected, and one naturally seeks modes of communication which are themselves organic and web-like. When one begins theorizing about education from an organic view of time, one begins with assumptions that the present is intimately related with the past and future, and one naturally seeks modes of communication in which the dynamic process of life can be viewed through time. Narrative communication is a natural, and it invites a closer look.

Narrative Methodology in Modern Education

In surveying the horizon for contemporary educational reflections on narrative methodology, one is first struck by the relative absence of such reflections. In surveys of teaching and learning theories, the absence is striking.

Narrative methods are mentioned with some more frequency in surveys of teaching strategies. One example would be Aimee Dorr Leifer’s essay entitled "Teaching with Television and Film," (TTF) published in N. L. Gage’s The Psychology of Teaching Methods, a widely read Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education.¹ Even in this essay, however, Leifer reviews what has been learned from various psychological studies of television and film narratives, and the limited range of the studies limits the vision of narrative teaching that she puts forth. Particular attention is given to the kinds of content that is communicated through such narratives (cognitive, social and emotional, information processing skills, implicit messages, and modes of learning), and to the processes and potential of learning from television and film. Though Leifer casts her net broadly, she focuses particularly on television and film, and she functions within the constraints of the psychological research, which itself deals largely with cause and effect questions and with carefully selected variables, one or two at a time. Her review is suggestive of broader possibilities for narrative, but those broader possibilities are not the intent of her essay, nor of the volume and others like it. In fact, another widely used volume on teaching methods, written by Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil and now in its third edition, does not even mention narrative as a methodology (Mod T).

One notable exception to this vast generalization is Mildred McClosky’s Teaching Strategies and Classroom Realities (TS). In this edited volume, McClosky has included a vast number of case studies written by teachers of their experiences using drama, simulation techniques, filmmaking, literature related to social values and ethnic issues, and so forth. Again, this volume points to extensive possibilities in narrative teaching, but its purpose is to deal with particular strategies rather than a methodology.

Two possible conclusions might be drawn from the scarcity of attention to narrative as an educational methodology. One is that most teaching and learning theories are based on the research and theory of modern psychology, which has not been focused primarily on complex forms of communication and reception. Another conclusion is that technique and strategy are often separated from methodology, which is a more comprehensive term. Methodology refers to wisdom about method and to interweaving the theory and practice of method. The ease of separating technique from methodology has made it easy to deal with narrative as a helpful technique or strategy, without considering the large possibilities in a narrative methodology. Narrative strategies have been clearly demonstrated as effective, but the reflection on narrative methodology has not been done -- at least not elaborately done.

Glimpses of Narrative Methodology in Modern Educational Theory

Having made a case for the dearth of narrative methodology in modern education, one must recognize the ways in which such a methodology does appear. In fact, a few persistent themes appear in the broad literature of educational theory, philosophy and theology. Some general attention will be given to these various areas of inquiry in order to identify some important themes.

First, imagination is being revalued as an important ingredient in education. Beginning with the idea of imagination itself, we note that Elliot Eisner, writing in general education, and Maria Harris, writing in religious education, are calling particular attention to the role of imagination in the educative process. Eisner has offered a persistent critique of the over-dependence of education on science, modem technology, and narrowly defined learning processes and content. He has spoken to the importance of artistry in teaching, and the importance of educational Imagination throughout the entire system of schooling (see especially EI 183-186, 354-380). Of artistry in teaching, he says:

Similar themes are struck by Maria Harris, who sees imagination at the very heart of religious education (TRI).

A second theme is that narratives are a very important source of imagination. This theme has been developed by persons like Bruno Bettelheim, who has demonstrated the healing value of fantasies for young people with emotional and other disorders (UE, TL). The theme has also been emphasized by Northrup Frye, who explicitly describes the value of fairy tales in inspiring imagination. Such tales restore the primitive perspective of myth which relates the human and natural worlds (Ed Im). William Bausch is one of many religious educators who specifically identifies the role of story in linking theology and imagination (SIF; see also SS, OG. GS). In the area of story and imagination, religious educators have perhaps been more attentive than general educators because of the consciousness that religious traditions are carried largely by story.

Yet another theme in the educational literature is that narrative is a source of human consciousness and social critique. On the subject of human consciousness, Jerome Bruner calls attention to the distinctive role of narrative. The two natural modes of human thought, according to Bruner, are paradigmatic thought (logico-scientific thinking that rests on description, explanation and verification) and narrative thought that weaves together action and consciousness (NPM)3 Consciousness is the thinking, feeling and willing of the human person. To focus entirely on paradigmatic modes of thought is to pull away from attending to consciousness, and therefore, to the human act of sense-making. Unfortunately, according to Bruner, the tendency in psychology has been to ignore the narrative mode of thought. He says:

We are left then, with very little understanding of consciousness in the learning process and very little attention to it in the educational process.

We should not wonder, then, that the accent on narrative and consciousness is being most clearly sounded in educational theory today by Maxine Greene, who is herself both a literary scholar and an educator. She draws extensively on literature, both in teaching and in writing, and she has been particularly active in advocating the importance of education that fosters human consciousness. Meaningful learning, for Greene, involves "‘going beyond’ what has been" (CC 302). This can involve imagination and subjectivity, but is not limited to these modes of thought. Consciousness basically involves an awareness of the world and one’s own experience of the world, and also an effort to make sense of the world (CC 299-317). Greene draws a relation between the dawn of consciousness and social critique. In the process of arousing consciousness and stirring imagination, narratives raise persons’ awareness of the social situation and of new social possibilities. This theme recurs in Maxine Greene’s writing, as she points to the inherent link between the individual’s consciousness and the social reality, a link that is fostered by narrative teaching.

The fourth theme in the literature comes from philosophy and theology rather than from education. This is the idea that story is a form of indirect communication that conveys truths which cannot be communicated directly. The idea of indirect communication was especially developed by Søren Kierkegaard, who was a philosopher, theologian and literary figure. He, in fact, communicated through story in his own work, interpreting at length the story of Abraham and Isaac, and creating parabolic stories to convey his insights into the human condition. He also sought to develop a theory of humor, always searching for the comic dimension in the human contradiction.

In his Stages on Life’s Way (SLW), Kierkegaard speaks of irony as the means by which persons make the transition between aesthetic and ethical awareness, and humor as the means for making the transition between ethical and religious awareness. Through irony persons realize that they cannot settle the tension between possibility and necessity, but must live with the tension. Humor offers a means for responding to contradiction and suffering with it. An example of Kierkegaard’s humor of contradiction is the story of the shipmates who frenetically try to make their ship orderly, all the while their ship is sinking. For Kierkegaard, humor is an important avenue for human growth, precisely because it is able to communicate something of the human condition that cannot be communicated adequately in other ways.

For similar reasons, storytelling is an essential method in philosophical discourse. Kierkegaard often employs story to carry some of his major philosophical themes, such as the contrast between experiential and theoretical knowledge. He tells the story of a conversation between a troubled man and a parson who was trying to give the man some consolation about everything working together for the good. The parson quoted from a book to prove his point, citing that, after all, God is love. The troubled man finally confessed that he was the author of that book. (CD 206-207).

Another prominent theme in Kierkegaard’ s work is the human failure to be self-aware. In Sickness Unto Death, he tells the story of a peasant who sought to put on a new self and new clothes. He became inebriated and lay down in the road to sleep. When he saw an approaching wagon, he told the driver to drive over his legs because they were not his anyway; he didn’t recognize them with his new shoes (FTSD 187). With such stories Kierkegaard is able to convey truth that is elusive in direct communication.

Kierkegaard’s approach to truth through story has been influential in a very direct way on Fred Craddock, who has developed a theory of indirect communication within the context of the Christian church. He sees indirect communication as the way to preach and teach the Gospel to those who have already heard (00).

Within Christian theology the attention to story as truth-communicator is also emerging with great power among Asian theologians. Minjung theologians in Korea communicate largely through stories of the minjung, or the people. They tell biblical stories of Jesus responding to the common people, and contemporary stories of the people in Korea, especially those who are oppressed or suffering. Another Asian theologian, C. S. Song, usually begins his writings with story, followed by interpretation (TLM, TU). He does not use the stories to illustrate the commentary, but the commentary elaborates and interprets the stories.

One last theme in narrative methodology emerges from the theological literature. This is the idea that stories have the power to form and transform the world. Different kinds of stories function in different ways, but stories do function to form or transform persons in their world views and lifestyles. Dominic Crossan particularly has developed this point of view; he describes myth as the form of story that functions primarily to form world, and parable as the form of story that upsets and transforms world (DI). Recognizing the different social functions of different kinds of stories offers a route into a more nuanced educational theory of the narrative method.

What has been offered above in terms of dominant themes in modern educational theory is not intended to be comprehensive and complete, but to point to some very important work that is evidenced in the educational, philosophical and theological literature. The work is being done without much collaboration and cross-fertilization, and no comprehensive educational methodology of narrative has been developed. What is available are some very fruitful insights that could be formative elements in such a methodology.

Assumptions About Learning:

Inside these glimpses of narrative methodology are some assumptions about learning that we can bring to attention for the sake of theory development. These assumptions are implicit and explicit in the works reviewed above.

One foundational assumption is that human beings are imaginative creatures -- capable of imagination and in need of it. Imagination is important to mental health, human growth, cross-cultural understanding, and social critique. Imagination opens the way for persons to gain perspective on their own lives, to perceive the world of another person or culture, and to envision alternate possibilities for life on the earth.

A second assumption about learning is that persons learn through stories. Story is a stimulus to imagination, as well as to greater self- and social-awareness. Story stirs imagination, and it also points to realities that are not easily communicated in conceptual forms.

A third assumption about learning is that social learning takes place through stories, so that cultural beliefs and values and patterns of action are actually formed and transformed through storytelling. Story is, therefore, an important factor in social stability and change.

Organic Perspectives on Narrative Methodology

The organic philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead offers potential for valuing and re-forming narrative methodology. Unlike Søren Kierkegaard or C. S. Song, Whitehead himself did not employ a narrative methodology. He did, however, emphasize the educative value of reflecting on ideas within an historical matrix, and his philosophy has fostered accents on interconnectedness and historical process that are highly compatible with narrative methodology. Here we will probe some major accents in Whitehead’s cosmology that may reinforce and illuminate narrative teaching.

Even the use of the word cosmology is illuminating. Whitehead describes his work in Process and Reality as an essay in cosmology (PR xiv/ x), and cosmology is itself a theory, or story, of the universe. Whitehead’s use of the term cosmology undoubtedly leans more toward the connotation of theory than of story, but his attempt to put forth a wholistic picture is undeniable. He wanted to move beyond a philosophy that was simply a "criticism of detached questions" and work toward constructive thought (PR xiv/x). He believed that "the true method of philosophical construction is to frame a scheme of ideas, the best that one can, and unflinchingly to explore the interpretation of experience in terms of that scheme" (PR xiv/x). Further, he believed that all constructive thought is guided by such a scheme, whether or not that scheme is acknowledged; the role of philosophy is "to make such schemes explicit, and thereby capable of criticism and improvement (PR xiv/x)³ Insofar as a scheme of ideas, or a theory of the universe, can be understood as a story, Whitehead was himself engaged in a story of the universe. We will attempt here, at least, to make explicit his scheme of ideas in relation to narrativity. We will review some themes in organic philosophy that are particularly relevant to narrative methodology.

One compelling theme in Whitehead’ s philosophy is the idea that aesthetics is important to all human activity. This is the theme Whitehead chooses to close Science in the Modern World. He turns in the last chapter of that book to education, regretting the ways in which modern education is compartmentalized and focused on analysis and abstraction. He expresses his regret that professional training is one-sided, and his hope that education might stimulate aesthetic growth (SMW 199). He says,

In response to the need for vivid values and concrete perceptions, Whitehead finds possibilities in art. He believes that aesthetic education is needed to "draw out habits of aesthetic apprehension" (SMW 199). Art in the more specialized sense is a special kind of aesthetic education, but art in the general sense is a habit of apprehending an organism in fullness, or "the habit of enjoying vivid values" (SMW 200). Art, then, is necessary to human life. It provides "fertilization of the soul" by arranging the environment "to provide for the soul vivid but transient values" (SMW 202). Though the values are transient, they contribute to the permanent richness of the soul, which flourishes in the experience of newness (SMW 202). The art represents the interaction between nature and human creativity, thus heightening a sense of humanity, contributing to intense feeling and serving the curative function of revealing truth about the nature of things (AI 270-272).

This accent on aesthetics was not new for Whitehead in his later years. In 1917 he presented an address as part of a prize distribution at the Borough Polytechnic Institute in Southwark. In his address, "A Polytechnic in Wartime," he spoke to the aesthetic dimension of education. He encouraged aesthetics not just in conventional forms, but also in carving and modeling, dance, music, literature, decorative arts, bookbinding, dress making and so forth. He said, "This list, incomplete as it is, tells us two great truths -- you cannot separate art and recreation, and you cannot separate art and business (OT 65).⁴ In other words, aesthetics is apart of everything.

If this is true, what do we need to do in education? Certainly we need to be more like Zorba, absorbing and giving through all of our senses. Certainly we need fullness of experience. We need arts and crafts in public schools, not as fluff but as fundamentals. And we need arts and crafts in religious communities, not to fill time but to contribute to full spiritual growth.

A second theme in Whitehead’s thought is that the world is a world of concreteness. This theme runs contrary to world views based in abstractions. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead argues strongly against the value of pure abstraction because it leads to thinking that is detached from concrete reality and it leads to narrow specialization. He articulates the ways in which this focus on abstraction and specialization often dominate professional education and the work that professionals do. He speaks eloquently to the dangers in this kind of specialization.

Whitehead makes his educational critique very specific. He points to the inadequacies in educational methods that focus on intellectual analysis and acquiring "formularized information"; he believes that educators who use these methods, "neglect to strengthen habits of concrete appreciation of the individual facts in their full interplay of emergent values" (SMW 198). Whitehead hopes instead for a more balanced development, one that leads to wisdom. Such a balanced development does include analysis and abstractions, but it also includes much opportunity for students to do things and to experience concrete apprehensions. Whitehead says, "In the Garden of Eden Adam saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system children named the animals before they saw them" (SMW 198).

As one ponders narrative methodology, one can see ways in which narrative itself may introduce concreteness and value. Even in fairy tales, the presence of talking stones and larger-than-life animals call attention to the powers and interactions of the concrete world. Such stories can enhance persons’ apprehension of the world as it is. This may sound absurd since most people do not hear stones talk, but in an organic world view, everything is understood to be living to some degree. Talking stones, therefore, reflect the world more adequately than inert, silent ones. This idea is not developed at all by Whitehead, but his metaphysic seems to call forth a blending of concreteness and value, which is possible in story.

Whitehead himself makes indirect associations between narratives and concreteness when he writes on education. For example, he believes that history is important to our perception of movements in civilization, and even technology needs to be seen within an historical matrix (SMW 198). The story of history requires a large picture of the flow of epochs as well as some concrete particularities (AE 72-75).⁵

Literature is itself a concrete reflection of a particular civilization. Whitehead’s proposal regarding classical literature is very compatible with narrative methodology:

Stories, then, can be seen as reflections of concrete reality, or they can be seen as concrete realities in themselves, parts of a particular civilization. In either case, they are important to the development of human beings.

What does this mean for education? It means that stories themselves are concrete, and the characters of story become part of our concrete reality. One person’s story inspires others to tell their’s. As we hear more and more stories, we also become more conscious of the concrete details in our own stories. The experience of reading a book and seeing one’s own life more vividly through the book is common. The experience of laughing or crying in a movie is an experience of laughing or crying about ourselves. We can see more concretely and more vividly in a story-filled world.

A third Whiteheadian theme provides considerable support for a narrative methodology, namely the idea that a society is bound by a stream of meaning that gives it order. Whitehead’s educational theory is grounded in his philosophy of organism, or an organic understanding of how every part fits with the whole. Whitehead identifies the way in which some parts adhere with particular closeness, forming a nexus or group of actual occasions bound together. When the binding is ordered over time, the nexus is called a society. When a society of societies are bound together by a common element, the result is a corpuscular society, or personal order. A human person is an example of such a personal order, and one could extend this image to include larger and more complex corpuscular societies, such as ethnic groups, geographical communities, or subcultures. Nathaniel Lawrence sees this interconnected social fabric of Whitehead’ s philosophy of organism as forming the base for his beliefs about education (NES). The educable self is a reflection of these natural social relationships.

Whitehead actually defines nexus and society in terms of mutual immanence, in which two or more occasions are interwoven (AI 201-202). In the case of the society, the relationship is genetic because actual occasions contribute to the shaping of future occasions, thus providing a continuity and order (AI 203-206). For Whitehead these relationships are seen as expressions of value: "The Universe achieves its values by reason of its coordination into societies of societies, and in societies of societies of societies" (AI 206). The question that naturally arises is: What can education do to enhance the relationships and the process of order and value?

From where does this strand of personal order, or stream of meaning, come, and how does one assess the value of the order? We can assume that all orderings are not equally good, so how can these judgments be made? The ordering comes from the creative advance itself as one actual occasion is prehended and received into a succeeding occasion. When the process of transmission becomes conscious, the possibilities for exercising judgments are enhanced, and this is when narratives can be important.

Narratives can raise our consciousness of how societies are ordered, and they can stir our imagination regarding how societies could be ordered. One function of narratives is to call attention to how societies are ordered and what values shape the order. From this point, judgments can be made regarding the adequacy of the values that are embodied in the order. Naturally, narratives then can introduce new values by introducing new ways of ordering and coordinating the societies. By using this technical Whiteheadian language, the basic idea may seem more complex than it is: in fact, what is being said here was discussed earlier in relation to Dominic Crossan’s idea that stories can either form world (myth) or transform world (parable). The Whiteheadian notion would simply add to Crossan’s basic idea that the formation and transformation of world would be not only a transformation of human perception, but an actual ordering and reordering of the concrete entities of the world. Stories can affect the world directly, as well as through human perception.

Narratives actually function in the world as symbols. When symbols are linked with meanings, persons experience feelings, thoughts and recollections. Symbols, then, become very important for giving access to meanings that are not easily elicited otherwise, such as religious emotions (PR 180-183/274-279). Even a word like forest can be a symbol that gives easy access to recollections of forests, when experiencing an actual forest may not be possible (PR 182-183/277-279). Certainly narratives are themselves evocative symbols that shape and challenge and reshape the world.

Narratives give access to meanings that might be inaccessible otherwise, or very difficult to experience directly. Few of us will have an opportunity to travel with Zorba, but most of us have traveled with Zorba, or with Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, or with some other literary figure. These characters and their stories contribute to the stream of meaning that gives order to our world and that poses the possibility of a new, more adequate world.

A fourth theme that conjoins with narrative methodology is the value placed on interest and novelty in contributing to the richness of life. One of Whitehead’s famous epithets is: "But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds interest" (PR 259/395-396). Certainly one of the values of narrative communication is that it is interesting and that its claims to speaking the truth are more metaphorical and approximate than absolute. For this reason, narratives can add considerably to interest. Furthermore, narratives can also add novelty by introducing fresh descriptions of the world, new perspectives or new visions.

On the subject of novelty, Whitehead has been very clear. He believes that novelty is necessary for rhythm and for life. The process of concrescence itself involves uniting the given past with the novelty of the present (PR l79-180/272-273).⁶ Uniting novelty with what has always been can potentially contribute to the creative advance of the world. In Science and the Modern World Whitehead says, "There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, . . . the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both" (SMW 201).

What is the challenge for us as educators? It means that education should never be dull. We need to learn to discern the novel and the interesting in our midst and to pass it on. And we need to help others discern the novel and interesting as well. Merging the past heritage with the novelty of the present can contribute to emerging wisdom. This is the rhythm of education.

A fifth Whiteheadian theme is relevant to narrative methodology: that is, the complexity and interrelatedness of events in reality. Given that complexity and interrelatedness, narrative becomes a very apt mode of communication. Stories can embrace considerable complexity and weave characters and events together in a way that communicates relationships more fully than most categorical and conceptual language can do. In fact, much conceptual language has promoted a disconnected view of the universe in which every entity is seen in isolation from every other entity. This way of thinking is actually dangerous, according to Whitehead, because it carries people away from the world of values and promotes the privatization of experience and, hence, of morals (SMW 195-196). According to Whitehead, ‘The two evils are: one, the ignoration of the true relation of each organism to its environment; and the other, the habit of ignoring the intrinsic worth of the environment which must be allowed its weight in any consideration of final ends" (SMW 196). These habits of disconnected thinking only feed the problems of specialized training of professionals discussed earlier.

For Whitehead, the nature of interconnectedness is not an obliteration of differences and individuality into vague unity. In fact, every detail is important in relation to the whole. The quality of great Art is that "(t)be very details of its compositions live supremely in their own right" (AI 282). At the same time, great Art serves the harmony of the whole, contributing to the whole and receiving from the aesthetic quality of the whole (AI 282). In relation to narratives, one could say that each character and event is a detail that can reveal some important aspect of reality and touch deep feelings in the hearer or reader. At the same time, each character and event receives and contributes to the whole, and the story is more than the sum of its parts. Certainly, narrative methodology guided by this idea would include narratives vivid in detail but integrated and whole.

If reality is organically connected, then narrative can reveal those connections. Narratives have an unusual capacity to link past, present and future so that the connections across time are revealed. If we agree with Whitehead that "the very essence of real actuality" is process (AI 274), then we need forms of communication that reveal the flow of time. History becomes a flowing river, not a dark cave that seems disconnected from everything else, a cave that you enter and fear that you will never leave. We need forms of communication that reveal the spirit of change and the spirit of conservation, both of which are "inherent in the very nature of things" (SMW 201). Elsewhere I have developed the idea that education is a process fostering both continuity and change (ECC). Certainly, narrative education can be particularly fruitful in this regard because of the potential in narratives to re-present the processive flow of reality across time and to heighten awareness of both continuity and change.

A sixth relevant theme in Whitehead is the importance of recognizing that reality transcends our conscious perception of it. Given the largeness of reality and the relative nature of human perception, education needs to point beyond what is empirically measurable and to invoke a sense of awe and wonder. Narratives are important to that process because they do not claim to portray reality in a straightforward way, and also, by stirring imagination, they serve as reminders of the beyond.

If reality reaches beyond what we can see and touch, then story does not have purely descriptive functions. Though narratives are often used to describe reality and to correspond as closely as possible with the reality that is being described, narratives can also serve to point to a new perspective or vision of reality, or they can point beyond the known to the unknown. In any of these cases, the narrative is not corresponding to reality so much as pointing beyond what is immediately evident. In so doing, art performs a valuable psychological function. It points to the larger world beyond consciousness. It releases the soul from static values and offers vivid, though transient, values (SMW 202). The result is vivid experience.

Furthermore, art is artificial and finite, representing the juncture of appearances in reality and human creativity. When these come together in art, the result is a heightened sense both of the conscious appearance of reality and of human creativity. One cannot talk about simple cause and effect relationships in art, nor one-to-one correspondence between art and nature. Whitehead says, (T)he work of art is a message from the Unseen. It unlooses depths of feeling from behind the frontier where precision of consciousness fails" (AI 271). The narrative that is art, then, has this ominous power to reveal conscious reality and also to point beyond it. In so doing, it stirs awe and wonder in the presence of the universe.

One last theme in Whitehead is the possibility of relating to historical communities and cosmic community. Beginning with the more obvious part of that theme, Whitehead is clear that literature has a role in expressing the mentality of a culture. For this reason, literature is a very important avenue for understanding a culture. For Whitehead, the study of literature becomes a way of discerning a particular culture and the broad flow of human affairs (AE 66-71, 74). This is why the study of literature is given value in his educational philosophy, mid why he also takes interest in how that study is done. For example, the scale and pace of the storytelling needs to be tailored to the purpose of storytelling and to the story itself (AE 70-71). Thus, a range of hermeneutical tools is needed in accordance with the nature of the story and the purpose of one’s reading and interpreting the story. Certainly, a narrative educational methodology would need to employ a range of hermeneutical approaches.

Furthermore, the study of history, according to Whitehead, is the study of the sweep of civilizations, a study that helps one to understand the intricacies of a particular civilization and its relation to others. He himself proceeds in this kind of historical framing of intellectual and social questions, such as the influences of Greek thought or the practice of slavery. A narrative educational methodology would also need to include such a historical consciousness.

But Whitehead is not just interested in relating to historical communities; he is also interested in cosmic community. In fact, according to Robert Brumbaugh process philosophy is a reminder that we are part of a cosmic community, and the effort to put forth a cosmology is an effort to put forth a vision of such a community. In fact, the search to express cosmic vision is the origin and inspiration of religions (WPP 122-124). An important function of narrative is to put forth cosmic vision and invite people to participate in cosmic community. For Whitehead, the venture of imagination can help people anticipate the future, and the anticipation of unrealized possibilities can arouse the realization of these possibilities (AI 278-279). Narrative can function to expand the range of our imagination and our courage to act in new directions toward new possibilities.

Narrative Methodology Re-Formed by Organic Philosophy

The question now is what kind of narrative methodology is needed in order to teach organically. Certainly a narrative approach to teaching would be very important from the perspective of organic philosophy, largely because story communicates in ways compatible with how people learn. Story communicates in wholes, rather than in isolated bits. In story, one can discern the flow of time and the interactions among characters and events. If stories are to function in this way, they must be full stories, developed with vivid characters and events woven into a whole. Stories that have one point, or moral lesson, have very limited value in narrative education. The richer the story, the more it can contribute to the narrative approach.

If story functions as a symbol that actually reflects the interrelated world and fosters our relationships with the world, then we need to select stories that reflect many dimensions of the world. We need stories of animals, plants, fantasies, divinities, humans, historical and contemporary cultures, and so forth. We need a wealth of stories in order to reflect the fullness of reality.

But description is not the only function of story; we also need stories that point to mystery. We need stories that are chosen because of the largeness of their vision, rather than because of the accuracy of their parts.

We also need stories that represent different perspectives, different forms of consciousness. We need stories from Native American perspective, women’s perspective, South African perspective and Wall Street perspective. We need this variety in order to help people cross over into other forms of consciousness, and to see the world from others’ perspectives. This is important to the self-development that we call education.

Narrative methodology is more than story-telling. A narrative methodology re-formed by organic philosophy would integrate metaphysical and conceptual thinking with narrative and metaphorical thinking. In fact, metaphysics would actually be drawn from narratives as a source, and new narratives would be formed in response to new concepts in metaphysics. Further, each would critique the other. The dialogical relationship would be important if mutual enrichment and correction is expected.

Finally, if we are to take seriously an organic approach to narrative teaching, we will tell stories from different eras of history and different parts of the world, but we will also tell stories that are happening in our midst. We will see ourselves as living in the middle of story, so we will seek to tell, interpret and participate more fully in that living story. We will ask people to tell their stories, to draw stories from their own imaginations, and to make decisions about how they want to script the next chapter of their stories.

Teachers who use a narrative methodology are people who hear stories, gather stories and tell stories. They are alert to what is happening around them; they see and hear and give birth to stories. They bear the heritage of generations and appreciate the stories forming in their midst.

References

CC -- Maxine Greene. "Curriculum and Consciousness." Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists. Ed. William Pinar. Berkeley: McCutchan, 1975.

CD -- Søren Kierkegaard. Christian Discourses. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.

DI -- John Dominic Crossan. The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story. Niles, IL: Argus Communications, 1975.

ECC -- Mary Elizabeth Moore. Education for Continuity and Change. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983.

EdIm -- Northrup Frye. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1964.

EI -- Elliot W. Eisner. The Educational Imagination On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. New York: MacMillan, 1985.

FTSD -- Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

GS -- Ralph Milton. The Gift of Story. Toronto: Wood Lake Press, 1982.

ModT -- Bruce Joyce and Marsha Weil. Models of Teaching. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986.

NES -- Nathaniel Lawrence. "Nature and the Educable Self in Whitehead." Education Theory 15/3 (July 1965): 205-216.

NPM -- Jerome Bruner. "Narrative and Paradigmatic Modes of Thought." Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing. Ed. Elliot Eisner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

OG -- Fred B. Craddock. Overhearing the Gospel. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1978.

SIF- -- William I. Bausch. Storytelling: Imagination and Faith. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications. 1984.

SLW -- Søren Kierkegaard. Stages on Life’s Way. New York: Schocken Books, 1967.

SS -- William R. White. Speaking in Stories. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1982.

TL -- Bruno Bettelheim. Truants from Life: The Rehabilitation of Emotionally Disturbed Children. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 1960.

TLM -- C. S. Song. The Tears of Lady Meng. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 1981.

TRI -- Maria Harris. Teaching and Religious Imagination. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986.

TS -- Teaching Strategies and Classroom Realities. Ed. Mildred G. McClosky. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

TTF -- Aimee Dorr Leifer. "Teaching With Television and Film." The Psychology of Teaching Models. Ed. N. L. Gage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

TU -- C. S. Song. Tell Us Our Names: Story Theology from an Asian Perspective. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984.

UE -- Bruno Bettelheim. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred F. Knopf, 1976.

WPP -- Robert S. Brumbaugh. Whitehead, Process Philosophy and Education. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982.

ZG -- Nikos Kazantzakis. Zorba the Greek. Trans. Carl Wildman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.

Notes

1 TTF was the Seventy-fifth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, and it has been one of the most broadly used of the yearbooks.

2Learning and Teaching the Ways of Knowing, in which NPM is found, is the Eighty-fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. The inclusion of this article by Bruner in the Yearbook could signal a growing interest in narrative methodologies of education.

3 Whitehead continued to reflect on existing cosmologies and persist in the effort to put forth a more adequate cosmology. A major section of his last published work was entitled "Cosmological." See AI, 103-172.

4 Robert Brumbaugh highlights Whitehead’s emphases on aesthetics. See especially Brumbaugh’s "Whitehead’s Educational Theory: Two Supplementary Notes to the Aims of Education" (Education Theory [1964]: 210-215).

5The attempt to reflect on thought and movements in an historical flow is common to all of Whitehead’s writing.

6Whitehead discusses this idea in terms of the supplemental phase of presentational immediacy which follows and is united with the responsive phase of causal efficacy.

What does a psychologist-theologian have to offer to this celebration of Charles Hartshorne besides comic relief? The words of Lewis Ford come to mind. More than a decade ago, he and I discussed the challenges of doing a process-relational philosophy of education. He said that what was needed was "middle principles" -- that is, principles between metaphysics and educational practice. I knew immediately that Lewis Ford was correct in his assessment, and I have spent the intervening years living into his proposal. Within the philosophy of education especially, much of the process-relational work has been focused on the few tantalizing middle principles offered by Alfred North Whitehead, and some sparse work (with the notable exception of Robert Brumbaugh) has been done relating process-relational metaphysics to educational practice. The work thus far is more centered on the metaphysical principles themselves or the dynamics of practice than on the middle ground where the conversation takes place.

The middle ground is where I want to focus in this brief essay. I will argue that Charles Hartshorne has lived primarily in the first and third worlds of concrete actualities and generalized abstractions. In those worlds he dazzles me and countless others with his sensitivity to the smallest subatomic actualities and with his daring brilliance as a logician of generalized abstractions. I suggest, however, that in choosing to live in these first and third worlds, he has spent far less time in the second world of middle principles. This middle world is where I will focus, seeking questions and insights that emerge as the perspectives of that middle world interact with the observed actualities of the first world and the metaphysical principles of the third world.

Three aspects of Hartshorne’s philosophical method are particularly important in begging middle world questions. One is his distinction between empirical and a priori knowing, both of which are formulated without explicitness about the possible influence of middle principles, such as selective perception or the conceptual bias that emerges from the social location of the philosopher and the historical influences on the philosophical community. A second aspect of Hartshorne’s method is the way he defines and employs phenomenology and pragmatism in his method. Within the first and third worlds, Hartshorne’s method is genuinely phenomenological and pragmatic. Within the middle world, some questions remained unanswered. A third aspect of Hartshorne’s method is his choice of linguistic and logical-mathematical ways of knowing. He has plumbed the riches of these ways of knowing far beyond my own comprehension. The middle world question is: What kind of riches remain unexplored by remaining in this third world of analysis, and what might be discovered by further exploration of middle world modes of analysis, such as the analysis of ordinary language and human relationships?

In a profound sense, my raising these questions is a logical extension of Hartshorne’s own work, because his own metaphysical analysis has propelled him to move beyond dualism and to find middle grounds, or more expansive explanations that hold together polarities. Also, I come to his work as a lover of nature and a student of human relationships, as one who has learned more from the natural world and people than from books (though I have read more than a few). Hartshorne, by his own self-description, has found his "intellectual stimuli" more in books than in people (PCH 25, 16). This is not meant to be a trite comment, but to point to different ways of knowing that stir different questions and different modes of inquiry. As a student of human relationships, I live largely in a middle world, where Hartshorne’s first and second world analyses are inordinately interesting and useful. Now I ask how the analyses of that middle world might be interesting and useful to Hartshorne.

Empirical and a Priori Knowing

Focusing first on Hartshorne’s distinction between empirical and a priori knowing, I am struck that Hartshorne has critiqued Husserl’s seeming naivety regarding the possibility of suspending belief in phenomenological inquiry (PCH 22). Hartshorne assumes that some belief cannot be suspended; people bring theoretical prejudgments to observation. Further, those theoretical judgments have themselves been influenced by experience in the world. He recognizes, for example, that the world has influenced his own thinking. He says, "The same world, and many of the same influences, worked on me as had worked on Whitehead and Peirce. None of us would have been possible a century earlier (PCH 21, cf. 31).

For Hartshorne, however, a priori knowing is different from Husserl’s "belief" or from theoretical judgments shaped by experiences in the world. A priori truths, for him, are those that are constructed by logic -- that contradict "no conceivable observation" or "could not conflict with conceivable experiences (CSPM 19-20). In this way, a priori truths are defined into a separate class of thinking, almost untouchable by observation. Since Hartshorne defines metaphysics as "the study which evaluates a priori statements about existence," metaphysics itself is focused on these necessary truths. One wonders what the relation is between this third world of metaphysics and the first world of observation, and how great are the real possibilities for critical reflection on metaphysics from the ground of empirical observation. Perhaps what is needed is middle principles that mediate between the data of observation and the a priori truths formulated by metaphysics.

On closer examination, Hartshorne himself is taking a middle road between Popper’s denial of empirical verification and the denial by other philosophers of non-empirical, non-contingent a priori truths. He does this by adopting Popper’s distinction between empirical truth (which is contingent) and a priori truth (which is non-contingent or necessary) (CSPM 19).¹ Might a further distinction be made in the middle -- a form of truth that we might call empirical generalizations -- generalizations that are based on empirical truths and serve as data for forming and critiquing a priori truths?

This seems urgent now as greater evidence is coming from the social sciences regarding the immense diversity in the human family and the way one’s worldview and experience of the world is shaped by one’s social location. For example, the work of linguist Benjamin Whorf suggests that the language of a culture shapes the way in which people of that culture experience the world. Of particular interest would be the distinction between the Hopi people and peoples of SAE (Standard Average European) languages. An empirical generalization that emerges from Whorf’s work is that Hopi people tend to view the world as a flow of reality because discreteness is not part of their language. The Hopi will speak of "earlier" and "later," rather than use objectified numbers for time, for example. On the other hand, peoples of SAE languages tend to view the world in terms of discrete entities, including numbers for temporal phenomena (such as 10 days), concepts of waves in the ocean, and so forth (LTR 134-59).

What does this have to do with Hartshorne? Hartshorne wrestles with the difficulty of resolving the contradiction between "distinct unit-experiences" and "the apparently continuous flow of experiences in waking life," especially if one focuses on purely empirical inquiry (PCH 636-37). He himself uses logical analysis to demonstrate the existence of distinct unit-experiences and the implausibility of thinking in terms of substances that move spatially but not temporally. This truth might be analyzed differently if one were functioning within the Hopi language and worldview in which discreteness is not even named, but in which everything is understood in relation to something else, such as "the tenth day," instead of "ten days" (LTR 140).² Empirical generalizations such as this description of Hopi language and worldview could contribute to the evaluation of truths in what I have called the first and third worlds. And it could sharpen suspicion of both a priori and phenomenological truths by raising our awareness of the social construction of all knowledge.

Phenomenology and Pragmatism

In general Hartshorne’s metaphysical logic is more explicitly and fully developed than his phenomenological investigation and analysis. Others have developed this point, however, and I will not expand on it here (PCH 291-312, cf. 636). The point that I will make is that Hartshorne’s phenomenology and pragmatism both function primarily in what I have called the first and third worlds. One example of his phenomenology is an experience in his youth that led him to a new metaphysical understanding:

An experience such as this one is helpful to see how Hartshorne merits his own claim that his method is phenomenological (PCH 23; see also M 324). He did, in fact, experience a French landscape (a concrete actuality) and respond with a metaphysical judgment (a metaphysical generalization). He exemplifies in this moment the way in which he was living in the first world of concrete actuality and the third world of metaphysical generalization, and how these were influencing one another.

Likewise, Hartshorne has claimed a particular form of pragmatism in his method. He describes an instance of such pragmatism:

I suggest that this is genuine and helpful pragmatism, but it is quite different from the pragmatism of John Dewey or William James, or the neo-pragmatism of Cornel West.

Hartshorne’s pragmatism belongs more to the third world of metaphysical logic without a full interchange with the first world of concrete actuality. Perhaps another kind of pragmatism is also needed, and that is a pragmatism of the middle world, in which extensive attention is given to historical events, global conditions, and emerging crises in the world. Metaphysical constructs would be formed in dialogue with those events, conditions, and crises, and ideas would be judged by the contribution they make to life in the world. For example, the mechanistic and substantive views of reality that Hartshorne critiques so well through metaphysical logic may be critiqued even more radically in terms of how they have fostered the abuse of the natural world for human benefit.

Modes of Analysis

My last question has to do with modes of analysis. The question is: What might be gained if Hartshorne expanded his modes of analysis beyond the linguistic and logical-mathematical? This question will get the barest mention here, but recent study of human intelligence by Howard Gardner indicates that at least seven intelligences exist in human beings, of which linguistic and logical-mathematical are only two (FM). Gardner names the other intelligences as spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Hartshorne’s interest in, and attention to, aesthetics suggests a compatibility with the insights that would emerge from the exercise of these various capacities, but what new insights might emerge if all of these ways of knowing were integrated as sources and modes of analysis in metaphysical reflection?

This question throws us into the middle world again, where folk tales, works of art, ordinary language, cultural rituals, and patterns of relationship become integral to philosophical method. One particular experience would still have import, but the patterns of experience discerned and expressed in the middle world would also be taken as data, and the modes of analysis in the sciences of experience would be taken as appropriate, even vital, to philosophy.

What I have offered here is a call for middle principles; but more than that, I hope that the formation and reformation of middle principles will inspire a continuing reformation of metaphysics. My thanks to Charles Hartshorne for being an intellect who could stir such a dialogue within me and offer such a challenge for the future.

References

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

FM -- Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

LTR -- Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Whorf. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1956.

M -- Charles Hartshorne. "Categories, Transcendentals, and Creative Experiencing." The Monist 66/3 (July 1983).

PCH -- The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne. Ed. Lewis E. Hahn. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991.

WM -- Charles Hartshorne. Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Notes

1From this distinction, he proceeds to offer examples of a priori truths: "Something exists," "experience occurs,"" creative synthesis occurs," concrete actualities exist "which are both externally and internally related," and divine or infallible experience occurs which has "fallible experiences among its objects" (CSPM 172; cf. WM).

2Hartshorne does allow for considering this kind of empirical generalization, but he relies more on what Nancy Frankenberry calls "the method of a priori falsification. in connection with nonempirical statements." See Frankenberry, "Hartshorne’s Method in Metaphysics" (PCH 297).

According to Robert Brumbaugh, Whitehead’s mature philosophy has important implications for education. With his criticism of current commonsense ideas of space and time and the influence of seventeenth-century physics on twentieth-century metaphysics, Whitehead pointed the way toward a new realistic theory of education. "It is an obvious but important theme in his writings," says Brumbaugh, "that if education -- or anything else -- is to be realistic, it must rest on a correct notion of reality" (WPP 1). In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead offered a brief sketch of his project for revising American educational theory and practice, but he never completed the projected work and left its applications to later scholars.

In his book on Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education, Robert Brumbaugh takes up the Whiteheadian challenge and in so doing sees himself working "in the tradition of Platonic metaphysics that includes the new emphasis on the concrete introduced by process thought" (WPP 2). Like Whitehead, he criticizes the unthinking acceptance of the seventeenth-century notion of space as a perfect insulator and physical things as located in a Cartesian pure space. The educational ramifications of such a view can be seen in the physical layout of the typical school classroom: desks in neat rows, sometimes even nailed to the floor, teacher at the front, everything in its proper insulated space. Classroom behavior mirrors this physical layout: no unauthorized talking is allowed, lesson plans are prepared a week in advance, competition for grades and extrinsic rewards is encouraged, wandering about the halls during class time is severely discouraged. As a fitting final touch, discipline is often enforced by the "punishment" of being required to remain in school after hours. All of this reminds me of Dewey’s lament at being unable to find the right desks for his Laboratory School and the remark he quotes from one dealer: "I am afraid we have not what you want. You want something at which the children may work; these are all for listening" (SS 21).

Brumbaugh agrees with Whitehead that it is a mistake to treat students as stupid particles in an insulating vacuum. He advocates instead a process view of reality in which each entity in space has a center of identity which holds together or "prehends" its aspects or perspectives that spread out into the places of other persons and things. Things extend out from centers of identity and overlap and influence each other in various ways, depending on "(1) the intensity of each property a thing has, (2) the relevant distance between centers in a field, and (3) the resistance or conductivity of the field in question" (WPP 28). Such an alternative view of students in classroom space would call for more, not less interaction, cooperation in tasks rather than competition, a dynamic give and take instead of a unilateral telling and listening. This is what Whitehead has in mind when he calls for ideas to be utilized, thrown into fresh combinations, put to the test, and when he urges teachers to give their students something to do or to make, so that their ideas can gain "that reality that comes from seeing the limits of their application" (AE 54). In this view, classroom space becomes the place for a creative interplay of forces, where ideas, as well as teachers and students, come alive.

Brumbaugh also calls for the reexamination of our commonsense notions of time. He lists four distinct analyses of time in Western philosophy: "(I) time as a space-like extended dimension, or as an actual series; (2) time as recurrent periodic motion; (3) time as progressive maturity or age; and (4) time as a distention of the soul, awareness of the sequences of states and events that make up our subjective experience" (WPP 65). According to a process view of reality, existence in time is dynamic, directed, irreversible, and takes place in successive "phases of concrescence." All actualization follows a fixed order of phases or sequences: an initial encounter, a phase of readjustment, and a final stabilization. "If all learning is to be an integral part of a student’s existence and growth," says Brumbaugh, "it must follow the three-stage pattern in which growth and concrescence take place" (WPP 4).¹

The message for educators is that learning should take place in interweaving cycles of stages, beginning with the stage of romance or excitement at the realization of new possibilities. With this initial motivation, the student will seek the precise tools necessary to sort out and understand these possibilities, leading on to the next stage of generalization where general principles are used to range over a wide variety of details and still further exciting possibilities are uncovered. Whitehead refers to the case of a small child learning to speak, a formidable task which gets accomplished, by and large, because we follow the natural order of stages or phases of growth and concrescence, moving from romance through precision on to generalization.

Brumbaugh explains how these stages can get out of proper order, leaving the student stuck at one stage from which nothing else follows. He cites educators who seek excitement without precision (contemporary freeschoolers come to mind), precision but no satisfaction (the call to go back to the basics), satisfaction but no precision (most college survey courses in Western civilization). For the proper sequence of teaching and learning, he turns to role models from the history of Philosophy. Socrates patiently, yet persistently questions Meno and gets him to recognize his ignorance and join in the inquiry. There is a noticeable improvement in Meno’s motivation for learning. Aquinas discusses "whether a man can be taught by an angel," and Brumbaugh relates this to the question of how to design a new symbolism for the direct presentation of ideas and whether the new media necessarily enhance precision in learning. Whitehead’s lecture on "Immortality" is seen as an example of the kind of cosmic view that comes from the generalization provided by a realistic system of education.

These are but a few samples of Brumbaugh’s ventures in "applied metaphysics," starting with basic metaphysical principles and following through their practical applications to education. Two of the metaphysical principles that he deals with in this way are taken from the Greeks: the principle of limitation and the principle of plenitude. According to the principle of limitation, "to be is to be something; and to be something is to have defining properties that constitute an identity, and locate an individual within a kind or type" (WPP 10). This is the principle that is at work in traditional views of the value of a liberal education with its emphasis on the appreciation of form and logical order. Recent defenses of the Greek ideal of liberal education are couched in terms of "forms of knowledge" or publicly distinguishable ways of understanding and organizing experience that are structured around distinctive sets of concepts, statements, and tests against experience (LE 113-118). E. D. Hirsch, Jr. proceeds along the same lines with his emphasis on the function of schemata in achieving literacy (CL) .²

But Brumbaugh argues for an equally valid metaphysical principle, the principle of plenitude which stresses that "concrete individuals are more than mere type-outlines in space and time, infinitely more, and that this greater complexity gives them an added dimension of aesthetic interest" (WPP 10). Useful as it may be to abstract types of things from the welter of everyday experience, we must not commit what Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" whereby these abstractions are treated as if they were the actual realities under consideration. This is not only to be avoided with the subjects chosen for study, which should not be presented as isolated bits of information forever fixed in time; it is even more the case with our students, who are not to be identified as personality types or classified according to I.Q. without keeping in mind that they are living, changing individuals who encounter the subject-matter in highly idiosyncratic ways. We must take care to treat students as worthy of our respect and special concern, and we should not neglect to teach them to see themselves and others concretely as well.

Seeing things concretely is described by Brumbaugh as the "marvelous seeing by a bracketing that cuts out any impulse to classify or manipulate [and] offers new interest and reveals new vividness and beauty in unexpected places" (WPP 87). It is the ability to appreciate things in their own right, not as type-specimens, commodities, or tools. Such aesthetic sensitivity, he suggests, can be learned, although it cannot be taught in the ordinary sense of teaching. In what he admits is "more tentative and exploratory than any other part of my discussion of metaphysics and education" (WPP 86), Brumbaugh attempts to convey some of the elements in this new vision of the aesthetically interesting.

We can elicit concrete seeing by looking at things framed, as in a display case or pragmatic insulator. We can come to recognize abstract pattern hidden beneath everyday construction. We can gain a sense of rhythmic sequences exhibiting periodicity and contrast. Brumbaugh gives illustrative examples from modem art and contemporary music. Most imaginatively of all, he claims that "the basic categories of art appreciation, importance, interest, contrast, and novelty, are also the basic categories of mutual human appreciation" (WPP 95). As persons with contrasting qualities, we are aesthetically interesting. We need to teach our students about types and logical specimens, but their education is by no means complete unless they can also attain a certain facility for concrete appreciation of things in their own right.

One means to this end is through a shared, creative present time with our students. This cannot be fully duplicated by listening to a tape, watching TV, or working at a computer terminal. For Brumbaugh, teacher and student should interact as individual human beings in a shared enterprise that may well include eccentricities and failures. There are limits to efficiency in teaching that seem part and parcel of any human encounter. As Brumbaugh expresses it, "no film or written text records the kind of jeopardy that present creative communication faces. And if periodic failures occur, so more frequently do successes" (WPP 115). From this encounter should come the romantic excitement that supplies motivation for learning precision in order to achieve generalization and satisfaction. Throughout the process of teaching and learning, we should acknowledge completed steps by our students, give them a feeling of accomplishment for having grasped the point, solved the problem, parsed the sentence correctly, rendered the accents properly, and so on. This sense of completion should spur the student on to further effort.

The final stage of satisfaction, in life as well as in learning, stems from the fact that we bring value into the world, that each of us has a unique contribution to make to the overall scheme of things. Brumbaugh observes that "it is by an appreciation of value as future, selection of it as present, and conservation of it as past, that we as individuals achieve our cosmic importance" (WPP 128). Concrete seeing culminates in the awareness of ourselves and others as cosmically important. Whitehead said that the essence of education was that it be religious. Brumbaugh sees process cosmology supplying a final vision of ourselves and the world "which reaches beyond science and the practical, and which should be the final satisfaction that concludes our education" (WPP 123). We are free, creative agents who can decide what the world will become and what humanity will become in it. Our individual experience and life style has an aesthetic quality and we can see ourselves concretely as spatially and temporally at home in the cosmos. This is the source of our importance and our immortality.

This is as far as Brumbaugh can take me in his quest for a realistic theory of education. I must confess to being caught up in a whorl of exciting possibilities; nonetheless, I feel I must raise two points of further clarification before moving on to the final satisfaction that Brumbaugh so eloquently describes. My first question has to do with metaphysical hypotheses like those of Whitehead and Brumbaugh -- how are they to be judged for adequacy and accuracy? Whitehead himself urged us to discard a metaphysics based on an outmoded seventeenth-century physics. How are we to know that process philosophy provides us with a correct view of reality? Brumbaugh admits that as of 1978 he could name only a few American theorists working with Whitehead’s ideas in education, physics, or the philosophy of science. We clearly need to follow his lead in crossing disciplinary boundaries, challenging uncritically accepted paradigms in science and education, getting others to join us in the complex task of trying to determine how things really are. We must be careful not to take our Whitehead in any less of a critical fashion than he took his own predecessors.

My second question follows from the first and reflects my own efforts at concrete seeing: how do we apply metaphysical principles to education? Plato developed a cosmology that translated into a political theory, an epistemology, an ethics, and a theory of education. Dewey did the same, although proceeding from very different principles. For Whitehead, the connection is not as clear; we have to largely surmise what his social or political theory would look like. This raises the danger of trying to generate an ought from an is, that is, of moving from a cosmology (a view of the way things really are) directly to an educational theory (a view of what should be taught, how it should be taught, and why). I suggest that more work needs to be done to develop a process view of the goals of society. the nature of the individual, what knowledge is of most worth, whether virtue can be taught, and what is the meaning of life.

On a more practical level, there is the problem of actually putting philosophical ideas to work in the classroom. Dewey and Russell had mixed results in running schools based on their educational ideas. Whitehead took another tack and concentrated on university administration, local and national education committees, and lecturing teachers on how to teach mathematics (see DRW). He would likely have welcomed the recent formation of an association for process philosophy of education, so long as its membership included teachers, scientists, artists, school administrators, as well as philosophy professors. He would certainly have endorsed many of the challenging ideas set forth by Brumbaugh. For Whitehead, William James epitomized the imaginative scholar of his day with his blend of scholarly discipline and intellectual adventure. For me, Bob Brumbaugh fills this role today and we are all m his debt for showing us the exciting possibilities of a process philosophy of education. Let us join him in the task of moving from romance to greater precision in developing a view of education based on a correct notion of reality.³

References

AE -- Alfred North Whitehead. The Aims of Education. New York: Free Press, 1967.

CL -- F. D. Hirsch, Jr. Cultural Literacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

DRW -- Brian Hendley. Dewey, Russell, Whitehead: Philosophers as Educators Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.

LE – Paul Hirst. "Liberal Education and the Nature of Knowledge." Philosophical Analysis and Education. Ed. R. D. Archambault. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.

SS – John Dewey. The School and Society. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.

WPP -- Robert S. Brumbaugh. Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982.

Notes

¹ For more on Brumbaugh’s views of time, see his Unreality and Time (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984).

2A similar yearning to return to a fixed form and order in the content of education can be found in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). Brumbaugh provides a compelling alternative view of education to that expressed by Hirsch and Bloom.

3As a step in this direction, see Plato, Time and Education: Essays in Honor of Robert S. Brumbaugh (Ed. Brian P. Hendley; Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987).

(Presented as the Annual Lecture for the Center for Process Studies. Claremont, California, February 1991.)

I ended my book, Philosophers as Educators, with a call for philosophers to join in a conversation. This was to be an edifying discourse of the sort proposed by Richard Rorty, in which we joined with other researchers and educators in an attempt to make sense of the multidimensional aspects of human experience. Rorty uses the term "edification" to stand for "this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking" (PMR 360). The conversation is an ongoing one, since there is no final vocabulary, no single certain way to capture the meaning of human life. It is not a matter of discovering necessary truths or grasping unchanging essences, but of being prepared to listen and learn from others, as well as to respond and reconstruct our own views, as we investigate together what it means to be a human being and how this might be brought about through education.

Richard Bernstein calls this approach pluralistic: not a "flabby" pluralism, where we simply accept a variety of perspectives, vocabularies, paradigms, and language games, each on an equal footing; nor a "fortress-like" pluralism, where disparate groups work out of isolated frameworks and there is no communication between them; but rather an "engaged pluralism" where we acknowledge our fallibility and try to be responsive to the claims of others. The important thing is that we give up "the quest for certainty, the craving for absolutes, the conviction that there is or can be one final language, the idea of a totality in which all differences are finally reconciled" and direct our efforts to keeping alive the spirit of truth, never ceasing to question "what seems obvious and definitive..." (ReM62: 271). I have described this as a case of thinking things through about education, getting clear about what we hope to accomplish and how we might best go about it. I see such an engaged pluralism as a natural offshoot of Dewey’s claim that ideas do matter, and that theories of education should meet the test of practice. It also supports his contention that "philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men" (MW10:46).

In the book, I went on to claim that philosophers can bring some valuable resources of their own to such an interdisciplinary conversation about education. Many philosophers are themselves classroom teachers whose personal experiences may serve to concretize their more theoretical speculations about teaching and learning. They are often specially trained to critically analyze arguments, to seek clarification of terms and root out presuppositions, to provide a general perspective that covers a variety of details, and to convey a continuity of valuable ideas derived from a distinguished line of predecessors in the history of philosophy. In return, philosophers have much to gain from such an enterprise: an exposure to alternative points of view, new theories, and research findings, a newfound sense of practical problems in need of more immediate solution, and a realization of the importance of being able to talk sense to the non-specialist -- all of which I felt could only serve to improve their philosophizing. I proposed that philosophers of education abandon their sterile attempts to locate necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct use of educational concepts and the relatively passive role of critically analyzing other people’s theories, and resume their more traditional role of formulating general theories about education and becoming active participants in an ongoing conversation about how to bring them into effect.

Since I issued that call, Rorty has continued to develop his notion of an edifying conversation in ways that I find stimulating, yet troublesome. He has expanded on his challenge to philosophers to overcome the tradition that has run from Plato to Kant, with its paradigm of objectivity and rationality, and to replace it with the view that justified true beliefs may represent no more than conformity to the norms of the day. He wants us to recognize that "the latest vocabulary, borrowed from the latest scientific achievement, may not express privileged representations of essences, but be just another of the potential infinity of vocabularies in which the world can be described" (PMR 367). In his more recent writings, he even attempts to combine an ironic sense of the radical contingency of our language, desires, and beliefs, with a strong commitment to liberal political values, such as the need to fight against pain and suffering and the importance of achieving solidarity as members of a community. While admitting that irony seems to be inherently a private matter and of little public use, he nonetheless contends that we should develop a kind of "liberal irony" of the sort adopted by the pragmatists, particularly Dewey. Having rejected traditional Philosophy, with a capital "P," he urges us to embrace pragmatism, with a small "p," as the "post-philosophical philosophy."

I think that this is a bold move, but one that does not ultimately succeed. To begin with, Rorty is highly selective in what he takes from Dewey and the pragmatists. He supports their critique of the correspondence theory of truth, but shows little interest in their insistence that ideas should apply to practice. Particularly disheartening to a Deweyan is his aloofness from educational issues. Neither the notion of "irony" nor that of "solidarity" lends itself readily to educational discussions. The rare occasions when Rorty does turn his attention to education give me cause for alarm. In one instance, he speaks far too casually about the prerequisites for developing a sense of solidarity through free discussion and the role that intellectuals can play in this. In another, he defends E. D. Hirsch’s ideas on cultural literacy by mistakenly locating them within the framework of a Deweyan understanding of democracy. My criticisms of both these points will serve to take us back to some key notions of Dewey on democracy and education and will enable me to sketch out some possible extensions of Rorty’s view to education.

RORTY’S VIEW

Rorty argues that the philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant has treated truth in terms of correspondence to reality, and the human mind as a kind of mirror which reflects back to us how things really and truly are. On this view, meaning can be derived from objective, ahistorical, nonhuman standards, and our knowledge of nature can reach high levels of certainty. This tradition should be overcome, says Rorty. because it "simply isn’t working anymore. It isn’t doing its job" (PAP 15). Rather than providing us with a conceptual map of reality, such traditional approaches constitute a flight from meaning. They are subject to Nietzsche’s charge that "the traditional Western metaphysico-epistemological way of firming up our habits" can be regarded as "an attempt to avoid facing up to contingency, to escape from time and chance" (PAP 14-5). From Plato onwards, philosophers have sought to escape from the anxiety of personal freedom by searching for certainty and objectivity in a supra-human realm, whether it be that of unchanging Platonic Forms, or in the inexorable unfolding of some grand historical design, or in an eternal life with an omniscient, loving, supreme Being. Rorty urges philosophers to set aside the spirit of "seriousness which characterizes this search for the meaning of life in terms of a teleology or sense of direction which can only be found in a realm that transcends our day-to-day existence.

Rorty wants philosophers to abandon this fruitless quest for ultimate explanations and final truths, and to start afresh by recognizing the irony of the human situation and the contingency of our starting-points. We have no objective foundation nor fixed goal, and we must accept "our inheritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of guidance" (CP 166). This means that our society, political traditions, and intellectual heritage are all shaped rather than found and are only one among many that men have made. There is no underlying core to human beings, no ultimate basis for our most cherished beliefs, not even any final goal on which all our yearnings and searchings will eventually converge. Language should be used as a tool for coping with things, rather than as a kind of code which, if we could but read it, would tell us how things really and truly are. Progress for the individual and the community will not come from dramatic new discoveries or conclusive arguments. It "is a matter of using new words as well as arguing from premises phrased in old words...." Pragmatists like Dewey can help by showing us ways to redescribe and thereby reconstruct our sense of self and community.

What Rorty favors in pragmatism is its nominalism and its historicism. The pragmatist is an anti-essentialist who recognizes that we have no God-given essence which forms the basis for all our values and desires. Each generation must struggle to create itself anew through words and deeds, and the chief instrument for personal and social progress is the development of new, enriched ways of speaking. Rorty chides those who have forgotten Nietzsche’s admonition that truth is nothing but "a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people" (VPN 46-7). The pragmatist refuses to settle for any definitive way of describing ourselves and our fellow human beings because the world is still in the making. We have devised no final vocabulary which corresponds to the nature of things. Instead, we should engage in "edifying" discourse which seeks to help others "break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide ‘grounding’ for the intuitions and customs of the present" (PMR 12). The cultural role of such edifying philosophy is "to help us avoid the self-deception which comes from believing that we know ourselves by knowing a set of objective facts" (PMR 373).

For Rorty, such edifying discourse helps us describe and thereby recreate our world. Our words do not capture some objective reality "out there" just beyond reach; they create the reality or the meaning which we give to things. Rorty asserts that "most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary, rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary..." (CIS 7). He goes on to say that "interesting philosophy" of the sort done by the pragmatists is really "a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things." The chief instrument for cultural change is "a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well" and intellectual and moral progress can be charted as "a history of increasingly useful metaphors rather than of increasing understanding of how things really are" (CIS 9). For Rorty, our conversations are to be mutual explorations in what it means to be human.

A good example of the type of philosophizing that Rorty rejects can be found in the tortured path of conceptual analysis followed by Peters and Hirst in their quest for necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct use of the term "education." After considering various criteria for what it means to be an "educated person" and encountering formidable counter-examples at every turn, they abandon the search altogether and ask us to concentrate instead on the common usage of the term "education" among professional educators like themselves. This turns out to be the nineteenth-century ideal of an "all-round educated person" which conveniently encapsulates all that Peters and Hirst think such a person should be today. They have not discovered how things "really" are, but have merely created their own concept. They have not found an objective foundation for the notion of an "educated person," but a contingently formulated conception from the past that they want to reinstate into our contemporary discussions about education. The end result seems hardly worth the trouble it took them to get there.

Rorty would have philosophers stop playing these particular language-games and "treat everything [his italics] -- our language, our conscience, our community -- as a product of time and chance" (CIS 22). He would have us see the process of self-knowledge as one of confronting one’s contingency and inventing a new language (CIS 27). All this is to be carried on in the spirit of irony whereby we also face up to the realization that all of our most cherished beliefs and desires are themselves mere products of time and chance. Rorty defines an "ironist" as someone who fulfills three conditions: "(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses...; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3)...she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself" (CIS 73). This is not to say that ironists are mere relativists or "flabby pluralists," unable to take a stand on anything because one opinion is just as good as the other. Rorty holds fast to the view that "To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man from a barbarian" (CIS 46). We are thus called upon to combine a steadfast commitment to a liberal view of social welfare, with an ongoing sense of the contingency of our own commitment (CIS 61). Rorty would have us become "liberal ironists," people who are sufficiently nominalist and historicist to appreciate their own fallibility and the radical contingency of their fundamental beliefs and desires, and yet who "include among these ungroundable desires their own hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease" (CIS xv).

How are we to achieve this unlikely combination of ironic detachment and social commitment? The added dimension of a liberal political outlook stems from a sense of human solidarity which comes from the realization that we are all members of a community of shared vulnerabilities. Rorty calls us "the liberal Rawlsian searchers for consensus" and "the community of the liberal intellectuals of the secular modern West" (CIS 12). This is not an ultimate community whose solidarity is an expression of an ahistorical human nature or derived from some nonhuman objective reality, but the kind of democratic community endorsed by thinkers like Dewey. Here we seek to develop a wider area of shared concerns, to draw upon a greater diversity of personal capacities, and to promote a freer interaction between social groups. We aim to rediscover and reconstruct a society based on "belief in the ability of human experience to generate the aims and methods by which further experience will grow in ordered richness" (PCM 227). As Rorty has put it more recently, "whatever good the ideas of ‘objectivity’ and transcendence’ have done for our culture can be attained equally well by the idea of a community which strives after both intersubjective agreement and novelty -- a democratic, progressive, pluralist community of the sort of which Dewey dreamt" (ORT 13).

For Dewey, the aim of education is growth in and of experience, and the aim of growth is more growth. We continue to grow through the use of critical intelligence directed at common problems. We have no final end, only ends-in-view, which, when attained, provide us with starting-points to seek further growth. To do this requires education. For Dewey, faith in democracy is faith in experience and education. We need to be able to communicate with one another, to initiate the young into certain habits of doing, thinking, and feeling. We need to provide the freedom for thinking to take place and to encourage the thinking that will help preserve that freedom. Attending to the consequences of our ideas helps us test their worth. This best takes place in a democratic community. Democracy is not just a form of government; it is a mode of associated living. According to Dewey, it is the sole way of living which "believes wholeheartedly in the process of experience as end and as means.... Since it is one that can have no end till experience itself comes to an end, the task of democracy is forever that of creation of a freer and more humane experience in which all share and to which all contribute" (PCM 228).

Rorty’s liberal community has a similar goal. It is meant to embody "the ideas of Socratic conversation, Christian fellowship, and Enlightenment science" (ORT 15). Its foundation rests on nothing more (or less) than our shared sense of common vulnerability to pain and humiliation. This leads to a common commitment to eliminate cruelty. Key to this struggle is the search for new ways of describing ourselves and our situation. Rorty specifically addresses intellectuals who use words and read books in an effort to re-describe themselves and what it means to be human. He calls upon us to try to expand our sense of "us" as far as we can, to seek to understand marginalized" people, to see traditional differences as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation, to create a more expansive sense of who "we" are. Rorty’s liberal ironist sees persons and cultures as "incarnated vocabularies" and tries to resolve her doubts about her own character or her own culture by enlarging her acquaintance of other people and cultures. "The easiest way of doing this," he continues, "is to read books, and so ironists spend more of their time placing books than in placing real live people" (CIS 80). Not to be lost in this attempt at continual redescription of ourselves is an abiding sense of irony that our starting-point in language is largely the result of historical factors and our feelings of solidarity have no basis beyond that of our own subjective experience.

Dewey would not deny the contingency of our situation, nor does he look outside of human experience for the answer to its problems. Experience is means and end. There is nothing more, nor less. Sidney Hook captures this sense of the vulnerability of the human condition when he defines pragmatism as "the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control it may not be [a] lost [cause] if we can summon the courage and intelligence to support our faith in freedom..." (CAP 193). The Deweyan response to the lack of an objective foundation for our values, beliefs, and desires is to have faith in the creative use of human intelligence as a means of coping with the problems of life, and to seek to develop the democratic community as the best way of enriching and enlarging human experience. Although it might be claimed that Dewey was simply giving democracy a religious dimension and seeing it as some kind of final spiritual community, the point I want to emphasize is that for Dewey democracy is a moral ideal for this life, an ideal that we are still far from attaining.

Consider the implications of Dewey’s statement that "The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion" (PIP 143). How much progress have we made in democratizing the family? How do we deal with battered spouses or negligent parents? What are the rights of individuals within the family unit? How do we respond when schools seek greater control over even the most petty details of their students’ daily lives? Do we seek to make our students active participants in the learning process? How free are our teachers to act as true professionals? Do they share in developing plans for education? Do school administrators treat the schools as cooperative communities? Do workers have any more direct control over their day-to-day labors than children and students? Is there a strict division between "bosses" and "laborers" that parallels that between "husband" and "wife" or "teacher" and "student"? What of Church officials who brush aside attempts at reform by claiming that the Church, after all, is not a democracy?

Dewey’s point is that we cannot create a truly democratic community without extending the ideas of freedom and choice and the pooling of intelligence to all modes of human association. He did not feel that democracy had been fully achieved in the United States. His own lifelong struggles for educational and political change should give the lie to those who would minimize the practical problems to be faced in implementing the democratic ideal. Creating a democratic community is indeed a daunting task, for the very idea of democracy is one that has to be continuously employed afresh. We can hand on to the young what we have accomplished and show them the direction we think they should follow. But this heritage is just a set of working hypotheses which must be once again put to the test and modified accordingly. As Dewey put it, "Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife" (MW 10: 139).

Bernstein sees Dewey’s liberal, political outlook as completely consistent with his view that philosophy’s main task is "to become practical, where this means addressing itself to the basic issues and conflicts that confront us, and making practical judgments about what is to be done" (PA 225). Many of these practical judgments are required in education, which Dewey liked to call "the laboratory in which philosophic distinctions become concrete and are tested" (MW9: 339). Dewey actively sought out ways in which the habits of doing, thinking, and feeling required for a free and open community of inquirers could be fostered in the schools. Bernstein adds that he did so because he felt that the philosopher has the responsibility "of not only projecting and rationally defending ideals for the achievement of a more desirable future, but also must clarify the means by which they are to be embodied. ... From this perspective we can best understand Dewey’s lifelong involvement in the theory and practice of education in a democratic society" (DD 52).

Unfortunately, the same concern for educational practices cannot be found in Rorty. He makes few references to the means that might be employed to bring about the solidarity he advocates. Although he speaks of our duty to use persuasion rather than force in bringing about change in a liberal community, he says very little about how this might be done. He even sarcastically calls his own position that of "postmodernist bourgeois liberalism." For all of his declared sympathy towards Dewey’s approach, Rorty’s neo-pragmatism can be said to contain "neither the creative ambition nor the engaged activism of Dewey’s historical theory of inquiry and reflective intelligence which is in part, a theory of social reform and amelioration" (PAP 271). His message to liberal ironists is to carry on with the project of continual redescription "to make the best selves for ourselves that we can" (CIS 80); and he insists that this be done through words, not deeds, using persuasion, not force. Such persuasion, in turn, requires a certain political context that provides for free discussion. And free discussion is, for Rorty, "simply [my italics] the sort which goes on when the press, the judiciary, the elections, and the universities are free, social mobility is frequent and rapid, literacy is universal, higher education is common, and peace and wealth have made possible the leisure necessary to listen to lots of different people and think about what they have to say" (CIS 84).

I find this is carrying irony a bit too far. For someone who claims close affinities to Dewey and the pragmatists, this surely will not do. How "simply" are these liberal ideals to be brought about? What should our political agenda be, given limited resources and divided loyalties? What specifically should we do in education to promote free discussion? Rorty is distressingly silent. It is as if, in the end, his sense of irony wins out over his liberal sentiments, and he does not want to get involved. This comes out clearly in one of his latest statements about the therapeutic" function of philosophy as applied to social issues: "helping people get out from under outdated philosophical ideas, helping break the crust of convention." Although he admits that "the principal instrument for breaking the crust of convention.., is the suggestion of new, concrete alternatives." he does not carry this to the Deweyan conclusion of putting one’s own hypotheses to the pragmatic test. Instead we are left with the comment that "the best that us [sic] philosophers can do is to develop a suitable rhetoric for the presentation of these new suggestions -- making them a bit more palatable" (ET40:41).

This emphasis on talking about change rather than actively trying to implement it runs directly counter to Dewey’s insistence that the philosophy of education is "ultimately the most significant phase of philosophy." For it is in education that we can get the union of knowledge and values that actually work in conduct. Here we get to test our theories and to intellectualize our practice. The last thing the philosopher should be is an aloof onlooker or a rhetorical cheerleader, for "without the knowledge of actual conditions and of relations of cause and effect, any values that we set up as ends are bare ideals in the sense in which ideal’ means utopian, without means for its realization" (JDE 18). To refuse to consider the practical ramifications of philosophical ideas contradicts the distinctive position of the very pragmatism that Rorty avows. From Peirce’s claim that we can make our ideas clear by considering their conceivable practical effects, to James’s notion of truth’s cash value in experiential terms, to Dewey’s own view of the practical character of reality, the message seems to be that philosophy has more to offer than a therapeutic stance toward social issues and a rhetorical presentation of new suggestions.

Rorty feels that philosophy should not be thought of as a foundation for education or politics; on the contrary, he insists that grounding social and political action on philosophical theories of human nature has done more harm than good. Nor should we look to philosophy for help in determining our educational practices. At best philosophers can express our hopes; they have no claim on the ‘truth" nor can they tell us how things really are. His whole emphasis on irony and contingency is meant to protect us against what he calls "the dangers of over-philosophication," the temptation to think of philosophy as providing anything more than a kind of therapeutic stance. Thus, he concludes: "The sense of human languages and practices as the results of experimental self-creation rather than of an attempt to approximate to a fixed and ahistorical ideal.., makes it less plausible than ever to imagine that a particular theoretical discipline will rescue or redeem us. But we do not need such hopes of redemption, or such fantasies of power, to continue our work" (PAPA59: 753). But surely the expression of such hopes is of little worth unless it relates to actual conditions and our attempted re-descriptions can be put to the test of experience.

Philosophy plays a relatively minor role in Rorty’s scheme of things. Human solidarity is to be achieved "not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created...by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people" (CIS xvi). The way to such heightened sensitivity is not by means of philosophical analysis and argumentation at all. It is best achieved through literature: plays, poems, and novels, "the disciplines which specialize in thick description of the private and idiosyncratic..." (CIS 94). But is such increased awareness of our vulnerability to pain and humiliation sufficient? How are we to deal with the pain? What practical means can be followed to eliminate cruelty? What should the community do about the suffering once we all become more aware of it? Can we avoid all pain and humiliation? What, specifically, can be done in our schools? Works of literature may starkly present us with the problem, but by themselves they do little to point us toward the solution. I feel that Rorty is toying with the pragmatists here by not taking seriously their insistence on the importance of considering the practical effects of our ideas.

Rorty does take a stand on a current educational issue when he supports efforts to promote literacy in a democracy so that the electorate can understand the issues of the day and become better citizens. In rejecting Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as yet another example of "that old-time [Platonic] Philosophy" which presupposes an objective foundation for an elitist social agenda, Rorty quite properly endorses Dewey’s view of the need to develop literacy in all our citizens. Like Plato, Bloom denies that reality can be found in the cave of our common experience, and seeks to locate it in a realm of ahistorical, absolute truth. Only a select few are capable by natural ability and proper training to leave their cave and reach this higher realm of knowledge and reality. Nothing is to be gained from visiting other caves; and efforts to educate the masses about such truths are met with derision and outright hostility. Rorty opposes this Platonic model of the search for certainty and objectivity and invokes Dewey’s view of the benefit of enlarging our moral imagination through exposure to other cultures. He then goes on to praise E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy as a more useful critique of current educational practices because it works in "the framework of a Deweyan understanding of democracy" in which students are to be made better citizens by preparing them to "recognize more allusions, and thereby be able to take part in more conversations, read more, have more sense of what those in power are up to, cast better-informed votes. Rorty concludes that "Dewey would have cheered Hirsch on" (NR 31).

In my own review of Hirsch, I expressed strong doubts that Dewey would have cheered him on, given that he misrepresents Dewey’s position as "content-neutral" and that his proposals for cultural literacy are as elitist and culture-bound as those of Bloom. Hirsch replied to my criticisms by admitting that in his later writings Dewey may indeed have considered the importance of teaching the content as well as the skills of literacy and was therefore not as Rousseauian as Hirsch had made him out to be. On this point of the correct interpretation of Dewey, he was willing to bow to my greater expertise. Nonetheless, he continued to insist that his own view of education was not "elitist" because "It is not elitist to want to help poor people make more money. It is not elitist to help excluded people to be included." He further granted that "Although I stress shared knowledge, and try to give an index to a first approximation of its contents, I do not propose in my book any best way of imparting that knowledge. I do not think there is one best way" (120: 64). (My review of Hirsch appears in 120: 53-60.)

Leaving aside the dubious assertion that it is more democratic to help people make money and the intriguing admission by the apostle of literacy himself that he may have misread some critical texts, I am still puzzled by Rorty’s endorsement of Hirsch. I do not see that having self-appointed experts draw up a list of what every culturally literate American needs to know catches the spirit of liberal irony in the least. Rorty’s answer is somewhat glib: "The reason I like Hirsch’s book better than Bloom’s is that it mostly stays away from philosophy and instead asks what concrete institutional factors are responsible for the prevailing cultural illiteracy. I agree with Hirsch that our schools are not producing an electorate able to understand many political issues. But I am not sure that, as a philosopher, I have anything to say that is relevant to that situation" (ET 40: 41). Once again we see him at a crucial point beg off from any consideration of the practical implications of his views.

I had hoped that Rorty would have dismissed the claim that there are systems of shared information and associations that should form the core of every child’s curriculum as yet another instance of Nietzsche’s "mobile army of metaphors" which after long use become "firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people." He could have repeated his warning that we not treat them as some kind of a final vocabulary which corresponds to things as they really are. Hirsch’s misguided attempts to alphabetically list items that are thought to form the essential core of cultural literacy blissfully ignores Rorty’s plea for the recognition of the contingency of our own language games and the need to extend our sensitivities to the marginalized. A Deweyan response to the crisis of literacy would not seek to impose a canonical list of cultural information on students but would urge educators to "listen to our young as well as lecture to them, to become aware of their concerns, experiences, and vocabulary; not in the sense of making them the arbiters of cultural literacy, but in the true community spirit as a joint effort to communicate and grow" (120: 58). What we need are not cultural dictionaries and lists, as if we are trying to crack a code, but listening and responding because we are trying to cope.

This could be seen as a Rortyan response as well. He stresses the need to create new ways of speaking which will heighten our sense of human solidarity by increasing our sensitivity to the pain of others and enlarging our sense of "us." He has also observed that "This process of coming to see other human beings as ‘One of us’ rather than as ‘them’ is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel" (CIS xvi). I see neither the means nor the end of this task of redescription as fitting in with the arguments of either Bloom or Hirsch, based as they are on the notion of a fixed and definable content for education. Nor do I see it as compatible with current calls for the study of the so-called Great Books, or for greater "accountability" in teaching through standardized tests. Rorty can be a valuable ally in battles with self-styled experts who claim to know what is best for all our children. I am thus all the more frustrated by his disclaimer that as a philosopher he has nothing relevant to say about education.

CONCLUSION

So where do I stand with regard to Rorty? He is still a stimulating conversationalist, and I agree with many of his criticisms of Philosophy with a capital "P" with its search for certainty and objectivity. It is that tradition that underlies the fruitless quest of Hirst and Peters for necessary and sufficient conditions, as well as the Platonically inspired educational theories of Bloom and Hirsch which assume that we can delineate ‘higher" levels of knowledge and culture that must be transmitted to the young. I also find Rorty’s notion of irony a refreshing antidote to some of the moral fervor that accompanies so many proposals that we go back to the basics. His many references to Dewey warm my philosophical heart, but I am not fully convinced of the aptness of his stance of liberal irony, since I do not see that he has found a sufficient basis for human solidarity in our common aversion to pain and cruelty. The whole approach strikes me as too academic, a new kind of language game for intellectuals rather than a practical attempt to make social and educational reforms. Rorty might well have been describing himself when he said that "what intellectuals contribute to moral and political change is not methodology but brilliant new re-descriptions of what is going on . . . (TCPS2l: 43).

I accept Rorty’s defense of the value of literature as a means of sensitizing us to the predicaments of life, but would expand upon it by reiterating my original call for a truly interdisciplinary conversation, one that includes humanists and scientists, theoreticians and practitioners, students and educators. Rorty himself admits that "there are no constraints on inquiry save our conversational ones -- no wholesale constraints from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers" (CP 165). This seems to me to be the whole point behind Dewey’s ideal of a democratic community and is perhaps what Rorty had in mind when he called for free discussion. Why should we arbitrarily rule anyone out? We clearly need all the help we can get.

What bothers me most about Rorty’s liberal irony is its tendency to absolve the philosopher from intellectually coming to grips with the real problems of human beings in the world. More to the point, for educators in these troubled times, is David Griffin’s trenchant observation that those who seek to improve the human condition dare not ignore the transcultural proclivity to evil deep within the human heart and the strong element of competition in finite existence. If we are to re-describe ourselves through education, we must begin by being realistic about the way human beings behave. The aloof intellectual as portrayed by Rorty seems to be a luxury the world can ill afford. What is even more disappointing is how this attitude of liberal irony seems to downplay what is at stake in education. I can think of no more timely rebuttal to Rorty than the concluding remarks of an address delivered by Dewey more than sixty years ago at the dedication of the new campus of U.C.L.A..

references

CAP -- Sidney Hook. "Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life." Contemporary American Philosophy, second series. Ed. John E. Smith. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970.

CIS -- Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

CP -- Richard Rorty. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

DD -- Richard J. Bernstein. "Dewey, Democracy: The Task Ahead." In PAP.

ET40 -- Richard Rorty. "The Dangers of Over-Philosophication -- Reply to Arcilla and Nicholson." Educational Theory 40 (Winter 1990): 41-44.

I20 -- E. D. Hirsch, Jr. "A Response to Harvey Graff and Brian Hendley." Interchange 20 (Spring 1989): 61-64.

JDE -- John Dewey. "The Relation of Science and Philosophy as the Basis of Education." John Dewey on Education. Ed. Reginald D. Archambault. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.

LW5 -- John Dewey. "Philosophy and Education." Later Works 5. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: S.I.U. Press, 1984 (1929-1930).

MW9 -- John Dewey. "Democracy and Education." Middle Works 9. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: S.I.U. Press, 1985 (1916).

MW10 -- John Dewey. "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy." Middle Works 10. Ed. Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale. IL: S.I.U. Press, 1980 (1916-1917).

NR -- Richard Rorty. "That Old-Time Philosophy." The New Republic (April 4, 1988): 28-33.

ORT -- Richard Rorty. Objectivity Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

PA -- Richard J. Bernstein. Praxis and Action. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971.

PAPA59 -- Richard Rorty. "From Logic to Play." Proceedings and Addresses of the APA 59/5 (June 1986): 747-53.

PAP -- Post-Analytic Philosophy. Ed. John Rajchman and Cornell West. New York: Columbia, 1985. For Richard Rorty, "Solidarity or Objectivity?"; for Cornell West, "The Politics of American Neo-Pragmatism."

PCM -- John Dewey. "Creative Democracy -- The Task Before Us." The Philosopher of the Common Man. Ed. S. Ratner. New York: Greenwood Press, 1964 (1939).

PIP -- John Dewey. The Public and Its Problems. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985 (1927).

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

ReM62 -- Richard J. Bernstein. "Metaphysics, Critique, and Utopia." Review of Metaphysics 62 (December 1988): 255-73.

TCPS21 -- Richard Rorty. "Comments on Sleeper and Edel." Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21 (Winter 1985): 40-48.

VPN -- Friedrich Nietzsche. "On Truth and Lie in Extra-Moral Sense." The Viking Portable Nietzsche. Trans./Ed. Walter Kaufman. New York: The Viking Press, 1954.

Alfred North Whitehead enjoyed two major teaching careers. The first was in mathematics at Cambridge University and London University, from about 1886 to 1924. The second was in philosophy at Harvard University from 1925 to 1937. In between the construction, so to speak, of these two reputations, Whitehead published a small collection of essays (originally delivered in address form to educational and scientific societies) in which he advances some general ideas about teaching and curriculum design. Although his exhaustive Principia Mathematica (with Bertrand Russell, 1910-1913) and his revolutionary Process and Reality (1929) stand as twin monuments to his mind’s adventures, it is likely that the sensible Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929) can claim a wider readership over the past sixty years than the other two volumes combined.

Two of the major ideas in those essays are discussed here: the rhythms and the aims of education. We learn that in the teaching/learning process, thinking is a rhythmic occasion, not a skill; and that in a living world, none of our educational goals can claim any position of ideal completeness.

During these dreary days when suggestions for teaching and curriculum stem from the shallow roots of positivism, Whitehead’s writings are at once philosophically profound and pedagogically fresh. Just reading his educational theory, full of its process language (novelty, impulse, movement, action, relevance, application, immediacy, experience)would inspire creative change in any teacher’s practice.

The Rhythms of Education

A common interest in rhythms might have been one of the places where Dewey and Whitehead found some mutual understanding. (We recall Dewey’s dismayed appraisal of Process and Reality: "A tough nut to crack!" [AP 285]). Whitehead’s idea was that the student learns in a rhythm of three cycles. We begin to formally educate a child at the age of six, and twelve years later frequently find we have failed, not because school material is intrinsically difficult (the task of learning a new language is much more so, yet the child masters it in thee years); we find failure because we have ignored the fact that the developing personality has a natural sway, to and fro, which Whitehead says results in a "craving" to be continually refreshed by the experience of starting anew. When a student approaches a new subject he or she has, at first, a general apprehension of its vague possibilities. We recall Whitehead’s "mental furniture" which he says the student brings to the subject. Secondly the student proceeds to mastery of the relevant details; finally he or she puts together the whole subject in the light of relevant knowledge. The movement of the student’s developing mentality is but one example of the "way of rhythm that pervades all life" (FR 21):

Teaching which ignores the rhythm of life is relinquishing a pedagogical tool which can make the difference between the student’s suffering through an imposed routine and transfiguring that routine into an experience of fruition. A rhythm is a "conveyance of difference within a framework of repetition" (AE 17). It is for the teacher to convey the difference within the framework; he or she does this by making conscious allowances for the student to experience all three stages. The stages are interdependent, though their sequence is not interchangeable.

The first stage is called "Romance." In this stage the student is allowed to enjoy a sense of adventure as he or she explores what a subject might have to offer. Here the student browses independently in the new material, finding for himself or herself where the points of relevance are. In a sense, the stage of Romance is the stage of research without strict criteria. The student researches the subject simply for the purpose of getting a general knowledge of the groundwork of fact and theory, keeping a sense of wonder and interest in the newness. The Romance stage really depends, as does its counterpart Generalization, on chance flashes of insight. The student makes contact with points of information if they arouse interest.

But this interest will not sustain him or her indefinitely in the "adventure." Before long the student’s natural craving for development will lead to the desire to know more about the subject. Romance recedes into the background and the student proceeds to the second stage called Precision. The stage is dominated by two considerations: the student needs to know what the relevant details of the subject are (what is the symbol for Radium, when did the Greeks win Battle of Marathon) and the teacher has a need to transfer to the student the cumulated (and relevant) knowledge of the subject. There is, wisdom tells us, no need to reinvent the wheel in every generation. So in the second stage of Whitehead’s rhythms, the "facts" are conveyed, with more or less inclination to dogmatism according to teacher style. Unfortunately this stage is the one which predominates in modern secondary education today. It is extremely difficult for a teacher to take the entire class down the path to Precision without dulling interest. Initiative and training are both essential, but too much of the latter kills the former quickly.

Yet, if done correctly, the freedom of the first stage and the discipline of the second stage should complement, not antagonize, each other. The teacher should, in the best possible pedagogical world, make the transition from Romance to Precision pass almost without notice. The challenge is to have the student commit to memory theorems or grammar rules or history facts or piano scales using his or her interest, not eradicating it. This formidable task is accomplished by the "resonance of the teacher’s personality" (AE 39). As the student’s interest begins to wane before the spectacle of so much new detail, the enthusiasm of the teacher for the subject should carry the stimulation along. The detailed knowledge of the Precision stage is kept from being "inert" because the student tests it against the knowledge learned in the Romance stage and against the background knowledge he or she brought to the subject originally. Perhaps the major failure in secondary school (where the Precision stage is most in evidence) is that of overlooking the fact that knowledge is being thrown into fresh combinations in the minds of students.

The last stage is a return, in a sense, to the adventurous cycle of Romance. Here the student allows the details to retreat from his or her total attention and emerges in the stage of Freedom or Generalization to apply the new knowledge actively. The student’s mind responds to the richness of illustration and general truth of the Precision stage and in response to a "natural" progression it seeks fruition of the effort in the Freedom stage. The teacher has begun by evoking initiative and ends by encouraging it. Always, as in all of Whitehead’s philosophy, there is a feeling of movement. No entity, student or item of fact, can claim completeness, it is always moving into a relationship which defines it somewhat differently. The teacher watches and guides the movement’s speed:

The mention of "irrelevant stuff" brings us to another facet of a successful education, and that is scale. It serves little purpose to examine the Sistine Chapel ceiling with a microscope or to read a play of Shakespeare with minute analysis of phrases (which practice prompted Whitehead to call for teachers of English to be "prosecuted for soul murder"). We must keep in mind the scale of the subject. The teacher decides which picture the students need to understand, then they move together into action on it according the pace of the student’s individual and the class’s collective rhythm.

For Whitehead the stages of rhythm can also be said to relate to the student’s chronological age. It is in this part of his educational theory that some theoretical anachronisms become apparent. He says the years 8 to 13 are usually the stage of Romance, "the years dominated by wonder" (AE 32). The years 14 to 18 are the years of Precision; and the university years are those of Satisfaction or Generalization. The assessment is informed less by theories of adolescent development, which Whitehead predates by 40 years, and more by influences from his personal life. First, Whitehead is himself the product of a nineteenth-century English social class which educated its younger members for intellectual satisfaction and leadership. Whitehead’s own creative urge, never completely satisfied as we know, was allowed virtual freedom in his mathematics studies at Cambridge University from 1886 to 1914, and as dean of the science faculty of the Imperial College of Science and Technology from 1914 to 1924. He sees the responsibility of the university as one of fostering "a zest for life" (AE 93) connecting to knowledge. From Whitehead’s personal and professional experience, the university was the logical place for the imagination of the student to engage the principles mastered in secondary school. Whitehead would later modify this position somewhat and would endorse what he calls "technical education" or vocational education, as well as compulsory general education at the secondary level.

Whitehead knew that within his large scheme of three cycles the individual student would be learning at a pace that would be influenced by the type of study required and the student’s interest in it. "[T]he development of mentality exhibits itself as a rhythm involving an interweaving of cycles, the whole process being dominated by a greater cycle of the same general character as its minor eddies" (AE 27). That is, even within the Precision stage of secondary school, the student may be at Romance in mathematics, Precision in French and Generalization in literature. Under ideal learning conditions we would predict that the student reaches a Generalization stage first, in the subject he or she enjoys most. The student will remain in the Precision stage of another subject if he or she cannot "experience" it enough to lift it beyond the rules it embodies.

"Concrescence" (or the becoming of an experience) through stages is a principle of life, according to process philosophy, but in the case of the student, the teacher’s function as guide has a moral importance. Brumbaugh elaborates:

It would not be hyperbolic to say that most secondary school students today accommodate themselves to a compulsory education as though it were an external accident: they attend school but would prefer to spend their time doing something they can "relate to."

In the misguided notion that "important gains can be made in insight or depth" by rearranging the curriculum, a school might change to a curriculum which is all one stage. If that stage is Romance, then we would see classes of little or no structure. But since education is really a training in aesthetics (discussed below) then it depends on limitations at some point (Whitehead says stage two) for its natural evolution. So the student in the pure Romance curriculum becomes frustrated when he or she needs, and cannot find, direction. The breadth of the view in Romance may be exciting at first, but the view does not show the footpath of the mountains in the distance.

In recent years the "back to basics" movement has seen curricula which are in essence a one-stage example of Precision. Although the curriculum looks efficient compared to the all-Romance variety, the motivation to learn is entirely extrinsic, with all that that implies for the ethics of education and for the practical consideration of retaining knowledge.

Then there are arrangements of patterns which could include two of three stages, for example, a curriculum which is Precision and Generalization (high on structure but low on student interest throughout). We often see this type in language courses. Or we might see a curriculum which is just Romance and Generalization (high on interest at first, but no motivation to learn the necessary detail). This variety is seen in college survey courses. If it were successful, then a student could take a survey course in, say, American literature, and then attempt to write the Great American Novel. The sequence is not quite adequate to the task.

Rhythms are a concept which Whitehead does not confine to the field of education. In The Function of Reason (1929), thirteen years after he had first considered the theory in "The Aims of Education," the rhythm motif returns:

The "antecedent stages" of cycles are another concern of Whitehead’s when he speaks of the curriculum. He says that he has two objections to the way curriculum is ordinarily planned. First, he does not consider it necessary to teach the easier subject before the more difficult. We mentioned that the child learns a language, the most difficult learning, before any other "subject" learning. In his own field of mathematics, Whitehead points out that the elements of algebra, the most difficult branch of mathematics, usually come before the differential calculus, a much simpler topic.

Secondly, Whitehead thinks that the principle of "necessary precedence" which means that the student must study one subject before another, is too strictly observed. For example, the study of Homer is postponed until secondary school, after the student has learned to read competently, when in fact it was intended for illiterate audiences and shared with them orally for centuries. For Whitehead:

The phenomenon of growth is directly related to action. "The stimulation of creative impulse requires, especially in the case of the child, the quick transition to practice" (AE, p. 48). We recall that Whitehead was educated at home; the teachers who guided him were a vicar "with more personality than intellect" and two household servants. In form if not content, Whitehead was the product of the type of education he advocates. He experienced an extended period of Romance, in which he read and learned at his own pace and without fear of violating a schoolmaster’s agenda. Then he moved to the Sherborne School where, as though he had trained for it, he became a prototype of an all-around public school student: dormitory master, cricket captain, mathematics whiz, editor of the school newspaper. When he claims that the secondary school is the place for the stage of Precision and that the university is where the student can break new scholastic ground, his own education could be the model for the plan.

Finally we must recognize that the function of rhythm in education has the same function as it does in music and that is its contribution, overall, to a creation of harmony.

What is wanted is a "harmony of patterns" achieved by the teacher’s guiding of the various elements of cycles within cycles. The harmony is the fundamental abstract structure, which, although below the consciousness of the student, has an irresistible appeal:

The student will experience knowledge when he or she can perceive the harmony that is hidden there beneath the surface. If the material taught is unfamiliar, then the contact with harmony is difficult. Think of the feeling of dissonance we get when we look for the first time at an abstract painting: we don’t know what it is we are supposed to be seeing. The harmony escapes us. The artist responds patiently, "It is not supposed to represent anything; you should try to experience it." A formidable assignment!

In education the assignment is, of course, more formidable still. The teacher takes new material and allows the student the freedom to pass through the stages of rhythm. But unlike the artist, the teacher’s responsibility does not end with providing the means for the participation of another person in the abstract structure which is harmony. The teacher must also be concerned with the end of the passage. These aims are the subject of the following section.

The Aims of Education

Whitehead suggests that teachers should facilitate what he calls the student’s "concrete vision" by allowing the student to utilize knowledge: "By utilizing an idea I mean relating it to that stream compounded of sense perceptions, feelings, hopes, desires and of mental activities adjusting thought to thought, which forms our life" (AE 3). The concrete vision is perhaps most important in the stage of Romance when the teacher needs to secure the student’s attention. We have seen that the stage of Romance is the sine qua non of learning. If we start with Precision, we lose interest; if we start with Generalization, we provide no incentive for further pursuit. Finally, we have seen that we cannot omit a stage without serious impediment to the learning process.

But having considered these suggestions we come to a question: why do we consider at such length the issue of the efficacy of teaching and learning? Why is it important that it be done well? What are, in fact, the aims of education? Whitehead’s "aims" are as multitudinous as the relative clauses in one of his sentences. It remains to be seen if they form a unified whole.

One of Whitehead’s aims is to produce a person of culture, i.e., one who has "receptiveness to beauty and humane thought." Throughout his writings we see these two themes emerge repeatedly: feeling (appreciating, being receptive or sensitive to beauty) and expression (activity, movement, utilizing, relating, marrying thought to action). On the face of it, it would seem as though Whitehead is simply endorsing an expanded place for the visual arts in the curriculum. And in fact, he does, saying that art is to the curriculum as sunshine is to the physical world. But when Whitehead speaks of art he refers less to the domain as we usually consider it and more to the general sense of which art is just a subcategory. Art is for him an aesthetic appreciation of value beyond the merely artistic. And contemplation of works of art which have endured is just the beginning of appreciation:

Whitehead sees an aim of education as aiding the student in developing the habit of appreciating not just one value but an interplay of emergent values. Enjoyment of the color of a painting is only one of the values emerging; the composition of the colors is of a higher grade of appreciation.

After the concept of "process," beauty is the single most important aspect of reality for Whitehead. Together the notions of process and aesthetics are two major pillars of his cosmology. In the final chapter of Science and the Modern World, one of the last times Whitehead would address in print the issue of education, he weaves them into an effective passage, notable for its passionate treatment of an ethereal subject:

Yet the fact that art has the function of liberating our souls is not the total justification of its presence in our lives. Its larger justification is its relation to the formative element, i.e., the non temporal factor, which is the "actual entity" Whitehead calls God. All creativity for Whitehead (and in fact the teleology of the universe itself) is directed to the production of beauty. And beauty gets its definition, its limits, by its relation to God; creative action is conditioned by God’s immanence (RM 100).

Creative action, we reiterate, is not limited to works of art in the usual sense Any subject or endeavor may be regarded as beautiful if its definition is broad enough. "Wide purpose is in its own nature beautiful by reason of its contribution to the massiveness of experience" (AI 266). Even one’s personal life and communal life have an aesthetic value for Whitehead. "Habits of thought and sociological habits survive because in some broad sense they promote aesthetic enjoyment" (ESP 129). Evil does not survive, because it is inherently unstable and inconsistent. Beauty survives precisely because it is ordered, consistent and harmonious.

Now how do these metaphysical concepts translate into educational theory? If one of the aims of education is to produce a person of culture who is receptive to beauty and humane thought, do we draw up lists of great books, require study of paintings of the masters, impose a selection of music for students to listen to? If it were that easy, we would have far more success in this enterprise than we do. The fact is that, like so much other important knowledge, e.g., the grab-bag of virtues, aesthetic appreciation can be learned but not taught. Aesthetic appreciation necessitates the involvement of the student. "No one, no genius other than our own, can make our own life live" (AE 57). The most teachers can do is make aesthetic value present; whether or not it is apparent to the study relies on other factors.

How do we recognize the value of a specific study? Whitehead tells us that the goodness is revealed in a subject’s patterns. "Thus the infusion of pattern into natural occurrences, and the stability of such patterns is the necessary condition for the realization of the Good" (ESP 109). Stability is the operative word here, keeping in mind that evil, though it will also have a pattern, is inherently unstable and eventually is overcome with the pattern of the good.

The study of patterning is as problematical for a thoughtful critic of education as it is in art. In modern art the criteria of beauty in nonrepresentational pieces are still open to question. In a different field, Dunkel tells us, questions will always be open:

The problem of judging the adequacy of patterning in a highly complex endeavor such as education is obviously even more difficult. The totality of the teaching of, and learning by, an individual is a "unique configuration" in the case of every single student. We comfort ourselves with the knowledge that judging the adequacy of a pattern will be an elusive goal always, and that pursuit of the definition of the criteria of good education is itself worthwhile.

We are not surprised to see that for Whitehead the major instance of a pattern of true beauty is the study of mathematics. To a lesser extent (only because their criteria are more obscure) he also endorses art, music and literature. But as a lifelong student of mathematicism he reserves for it the highest praise:

The presence of these statements (twenty-five years before computer science appeared in high school curricula) aside, we must note that we cannot restrict our education to mathematics. Whitehead himself studied nothing but mathematics at Cambridge for four years, but it is not a career he recommends. What he recommends is keeping open the possibility of novel patterns at all times; Whitehead elsewhere calls these "ideas thrown into fresh combination" (AE 1). The caution is against replacing the old set of abstractions, brought to the learning situation by the student, with a new set of abstractions chosen on the basis of a pattern apparent only to the person in charge, i.e., the teacher. We must provide for the activity of the student’s mind such that he or she freely perceives a new abstract pattern, in art or literature or mathematics. We must provide the opportunity for the student to relate it to that stream of consciousness that is life.

In more specific terms, Whitehead saw the dilemma facing the schools in the early twentieth century as a choice between producing amateurs or experts, generalists or specialists. Each student brings knowledge to the classroom, knowledge based on a unique totality of experiences, interests and training. Consequently, "One train of thought will not suit all children" (AE 9). The individual is naturally a specialist: "One man sees a whole subject where another can only see detached examples . . . wherever you exclude specialism, you destroy life" (AE 10).

But humans are naturally social beings as well. We need to communicate with others. This communication relies on a body of language and custom that allows mutual intelligibility with other members of the group. This body, called culture, necessarily enters into the habitual life of the student, in part via the general curriculum of language, literature, history, natural science and mathematics. Only after learning these cultural tools should the student proceed to a specialty dominated by finer theory and more subtle ideas. Whitehead recognized that for many students formal education concludes with secondary school. For that reason the justification for any subject’s inclusion in the curriculum must be its relation to the student’s life at the time, not that it is a preparation for later study. If a generalized curriculum and specialized curriculum cannot both be included because of time constraints, then at all times the specialized study must be sacrificed to the general study.

The strong recommendation for general education is not so antithetical to Whitehead’s insistence that the individual be allowed to diversify from conformity as it may first appear. It is impossible to construct the public school curriculum in such a way that every person can pursue his or her specialty. Nor would it be in society’s best interest to do so. But when we separate out the subjects into compartmentalized areas so that they are manageable from an administrative point of view, the result is an "unrhythmic collection of scraps" (AE 21). The vitality of the curriculum is killed by this disconnection of subjects. "The least that can be said (of most curricula) is that it is a rapid table of contents which a deity might run over in his mind while he was thinking of creating a world and had not yet determined how to put it together" (AE 7). If we integrate the studies so that their relations to each other are presented as true as in fact they are, then the student is more likely to be able individually to diversify from the stream of conformity, as he or she makes the connection between the integrated curriculum and life.

Another aim of education is to impart a sense of the power of ideas and a sense of the beauty of their structure. The "amateur" student can get a sense of the beauty of ideas in the Romance stage. However, a sense of their power only comes with the remaining two stages, Precision and Generalization. The current notion that if we restrict teaching to the Precision mode we can impart even a sense of beauty is most dubitable. And the mistaken belief that a transfer of information from teacher to student will in itself convey a sense of the power of ideas recalls Whitehead’s widely quoted indictment of education:

Employing an unusual choice of word, Whitehead says that another aim of education is the acquisition of "style" which he classified as the most austere of all mental qualities. By style, he means the aesthetic sense, ". . . based on direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste" (AE 12). He says that style, in any subject, has fundamentally the same quality, i.e., attainment and restraint. "The love of a subject in itself and for itself where it is not the sleepy pleasure of pacing a mental quarterdeck, is the love of style as manifested in that study" (AE 12). The choice of attaining style as one aim of education is entirely consistent with Whitehead’s notion that inert ideas are the most corrupt part of a curriculum: style embraces a morality intolerant of superfluous knowledge. In fact, we could say that an inert idea is the aesthetic opposite of style. With style we see an economy of material such that what is available is used as experience.

The final aim of education is from the last statement in Whitehead’s essay by the same name. There he says that the essence of an education is that it be religious. By this be means that education should inculcate two factors which are generic to religion: duty and reverence.

The dutiful aspect of education is related to the individual, to specialized study and to style itself. Duty is something the individual is expected to do out of legal or moral obligation. Clearly, for Whitehead one does have a moral obligation to develop the individual potential one possesses. "Where attainable knowledge could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice" (AE 14). Duty is almost solely the product of a specialized education because only the expert is aware of the power of an idea, its worthiness and the responsibility to apply it. Insofar as Whitehead defines religion as what one person does with individual solitariness, and insofar as specialized study is a solitary pursuit for the most part, we can say that the aspect of education that is dutiful refers to the education of the expert. It is an education that inculcates a dutiful regard for his or her potential and a social obligation to change "the issue."

The reverence that qualified a true education is not for established knowledge. Whitehead reminded us that knowledge keeps about as long as fish. The reverence he anticipates is for the present because it "holds within itself the complete sum of existence backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time which is eternity" (AE 14). This is entirely consistent with his recommendation that the subject of education should be life in all its manifestations. The sum of existence is the education at the moment the student perceives it. It is all that has come before (in learner and in subject content) and it holds within it all of which it is capable in the future. The present, for Whitehead, is "holy ground" (AE 3) and since general education involves an intimate appreciation of the present, we can say that if "duty" is the purview of the specialized student, then "reverence" is the purview of the student of a general education.

But just as we strive to produce amateurs who are experts and experts who are still amateurs, we also strive to produce this combination of reverence and duty for education in every student. To the extent that these two goals are mutually inclusive, we see a unified theory of education in Whitehead.

Whitehead’s own education was a classical one, with an emphasis on Latin and Greek authors that was typical for his era and social class. He would write an essay in defense of the classics that was so persuasive it was used successfully by the Harvard faculty working to keep Latin as an undergraduate requirement. But many years later Whitehead would say that the study of Latin and Greek should have no important place in a modem curriculum. His evaluation of its benefits was not appropriate any longer.

Are there any Whiteheadian aims of education (that it produce a person of culture, "many" thought to action, and teach a sense of style, a sense of duty and a sense of reverence) that seem predicated by his own schooling?

When he was younger, Whitehead’ s early education was in the hands of his father and, informally, in the hands of a few trusted household employees. For several years he was allowed to wander among English ruins, gardens and beaches and form his own questions. Later, perhaps speaking autobiographically, he would say that the years 8 to 13 are filled with wonder. For him these years were surely rich with opportunity for concrete apprehension. His Romance stage had a quality and duration which can be called enviable for its time and place. Later he went to the Sherborne School (his Precision stage) and learned mathematics assiduously but with a joy of discovery that transfigured routine.

We can assume that at Sherborne he experienced firsthand the aspects of education he advocates. When the boys thought about the Greeks and Romans in terms of politics, they compared them to the system they knew. When they learned "foreign" languages they acted on the knowledge by reading the Scriptures. They connected to the study of political history by walking through an historic countryside. And when they learned new mathematical theorems they applied them. The teachers at Sherborne apparently had a gift for encouraging potential. This was where Whitehead saw style at work: he economized on Latin and got satisfaction in mathematics as far as was possible in that environment. If style is economy of effort with constant attention to the end you want to attain, we can see that the early education of this mathematician had great style indeed. He intended to go to Cambridge, renowned for its mathematics department, and did not waver from his goal. "With style the effect of your activity is calculable and foresight is the last gift of gods to men" (AE 13).

Finally we consider Whitehead’s suggestion that an education’s essence is that it be religious. The influence of the Church over Whitehead’s early life was pervasive. Being the son of the popular vicar in a small country parish could not have been easy for a frail boy who left any friends he might have had to spend the winters in London. But in an interesting example of the philosophy he advocates -- that the process is more real than the material fact -- Whitehead himself remained more affected by the process, not the content of his early life and education. As an adult he was no longer a member of the Church, yet duty and reverence were transferred, so to speak, to a theory of education. The student has an obligation to learn; not to do so is equated with vice. The student has a reverence for the present, for life in all its manifestations; not to have it is actually corrupt.

Whitehead’ s religiously-guided education might have been unsuited for modern times, yet it is fair to say that his profound philosophical development had its beginning in some very early insights, for example, the concept of the consequent nature of God and the evidence of God’s presence in the pattern of beauty in mathematics. Implicitly, Whitehead compares the potential of education for every individual with the important aspects of his own early life: an exquisite feeling for beauty and a dutiful sense to act on knowledge.

References

AAE -- John Dewey. Art As Experience. New York: Minton, Batch, 1934.

AP -- John Dewey. "The Adventures of Persuasion." The New Republic 74(1933).

PANW -- The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. Library of Living Philosophers. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941.

WOE -- Harold B. Dunkel. Whitehead on Education. Ohio State University Press, 1965.

WPP -- Robert S. Brumbaugh. Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982.

(I am grateful to Professors Thomas Flynn, George Lucas, Jr., and Richard Patterson for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.)

Since the publication of Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, it has become commonplace in Anglo-American philosophy to cast a disparaging eye on induction. Much of the contemporary interpretations of science based on paradigm shifts and the incommensurability of rival theories are founded on the presumed invalidity of the inductive movement. Induction has been accused of many shortcomings, but the common denominator of the various criticisms leveled against it, from Popper to Kuhn to Feyerabend, is that belief in induction is responsible for a naive empiricism which views science as based on uninterpreted observation and direct verification of theories by the "facts."

Whitehead was not unaware of the difficulties involved in such a simplistic approach to induction. In Science in the Modern World, he notes that "It is in respect to the process of verification for the particular case that all the trouble [with induction] arises" (SMW 35). Whitehead then adds somewhat enigmatically that "The theory of Induction is the despair of philosophy -- and yet all our activities are based on it." However paradoxical this statement may seem at first glance, it nevertheless indicates the fundamental direction taken by Whitehead in elaborating his own approach to the problem of induction. On the one hand, Whitehead is fully cognizant of the difficulties inherent to the so-called Baconian method of induction. In particular, he repudiates both a naive verificationism and the corresponding belief in pure or uninterpreted observation of independent facts. On the other hand, although he shares with contemporary epistemologists the view that all observation is "theory-laden," he does not thereby conclude that induction should simply be discarded to the junk heap of worn out ideas. Whitehead’s philosophical project can, in part, be construed as an attempt to rehabilitate induction as an essential feature of experience.

Unlike most contemporary philosophers, who restrict their examination of induction to the modern sense of the term, in which it is construed as a method of inference which permits some prediction of future events on the basis of past events, Whitehead also recognizes the importance of the ancient meaning of induction. For the Greeks, particularly Socrates and Aristotle, induction (epogoge) is the process of seeing a general principle exemplified in particular cases known by experience. This type of induction might be called abstractive induction, since it involves the drawing out of the universal from the particular instance. Whitehead explicitly recognizes the importance of abstractive induction in his description of the method of speculative philosophy. In this paper I will attempt to give a sketch of Whitehead’s reappropriation of the ancient Greek procedure of epogoge. Whitehead is relatively well known for his rethinking of induction in the modem sense of the term, which is a foreknowledge of future events in the light of past experience. It is at this juncture that he enters the contemporary debate concerning the so-called "problem of induction," which is primarily an ongoing discussion on the validity or invalidity of Hume’s critique of causal connection. This paper will not directly address this latter sense of induction, on which several excellent studies have been written.

In a surprising move for a mathematician turned philosopher, Whitehead explicitly eschews the deductive method as the key procedure to be followed in elaborating metaphysical truth. To follow the deductive method properly one must begin with axiomatic principles and then proceed in a rigorous manner in unfolding the consequences and applications of those principles. In metaphysics, however, the central issue is not to posit principles axiomatically and then proceed more geometrico, but rather to pursue those first principles themselves. Postulation of the first principles is thus the goal of philosophy and not its starting point. "Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious," writes Whitehead; "they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities" (PR 8/12). The central preoccupation of the philosopher should therefore be the discovery and accurate description of those ultimate generalities which explain all actual entities Whereas the special sciences seek to uncover the explanatory principles which govern one particular genus of entities, metaphysical inquiry seeks to uncover truly universal principles which apply to all actual entities insofar as they are actual entities. And since "apart from things that are actual, there is nothing -- nothing either in fact or in efficacy" (PR 40/64), then the subject matter of metaphysics is necessarily universal in scope. "The metaphysical first principles can never fail of exemplification. We never catch the actual world taking a holiday from their sway" (PR 4/7).

To the above characterization of metaphysics, Aristotle would most certainly nod in approval. If metaphysics is indeed the elaboration of the first principles upon which all experience depends, then it is essential to get clear on both what those principles are and how one might proceed in securing a knowledge of their basic structure. Whitehead and Aristotle are generally in agreement as to the method by which the first principles come to be known, although the articulation of the principles themselves will be substantially different in the two cases.

For Aristotle, induction is generative of both the first principles of demonstration and the middle term of the syllogism. It can be characterized as a movement whereby the mind passes from a consideration of individuals to the intuitive grasp (nous) of a universal property. In the famous concluding chapter (Book II, chap. 19) of the Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle describes how the mind ascends to the first principles on which all science is grounded, he points out that the immediate point of departure of the inductive movement is not mere sense perception, but "experience": "So from perception there comes memory, as we call it, and from memory (when it occurs often in connection with the same thing), experience; for memories that are many in number form a single experience. And from experience, or from the whole universal that has come to rest in the soul . . . there comes a principle of skill or of understanding . . ." (100 a 3-9). This passage makes it clear that experience is constituted by a combination of sense perception and memory, and that it has for its object the discernment of similarities held in common by a series of individuals. Moreover, if one recalls that memory, for Aristotle, is that faculty whereby past events are retained in images, then it should not be surprising that the action of the imagination should be required for the elaboration of universals through induction. Universals and first principles can come "to rest in the soul," only after the data of sense experience has been properly ordered by the imagination and memory into a unified whole which is manifested to the intellect in a mental image.

The Aristotelian universal should not be thought of as an abstract essence which has only a contingent relationship to the particulars which are subsumed under it. On the contrary, "the reference to the individuals which form a certain class and present, in this respect, a certain identical structure, is not contingent . . . but is constitutive of the universal qua universal" (KUP 307). In other words, the universal can only be truly known when the mind actively refers back to those individual substances in which the universal is realized in concrete existence. It is for this reason that some commentators of Aristotle posit a descent from universal to particular as an integral part of the overall inductive process. On this view, the universal principles, which are arrived at by means of abstraction from particulars, retain an intrinsic link with the particulars subsumed under it. The universal principle is explanatory of particulars which alone can be said to exist in the full sense of the term, for according to Aristotle "no universal exists apart from the individuals" (Meta. 1040 ^b27). To syllogize on the level of the abstract intelligible with no further reference to concrete individuals would constitute a variety of "misplaced concreteness," hardly consonant with Aristotle’s firm realism.

Aristotle himself gives some indication that induction involves both ascent from particular to universal as well as descent from universal to particular, when he notes in Post. An. 81 ^b6 that one cannot have episteme of particulars -- "for neither can one get to them from universals (sc. universal propositions) without epogoge, nor can one get them through epogoge without sense perception." He also notes in Pr. An. 67 a 22 (against the Platonic theory of recollection) that "it never happens that we know the particular previously, but we get the knowledge of the instances along with epogoge, recognizing them as it were."² An explicit reference to induction as a movement of both ascent and descent can be found in the Aristotelian logic of John of St. Thomas (1589-1644). The passage in question is worth quoting, because it presents a good framework from which to approach imaginative generalization, which constitutes Whitehead’s own version of "abstractive induction."

At the outset of Process and Reality, Whitehead gives a description of the process which leads to the discovery of first principles which is analogous to the Aristotelian treatment of the matter. Significantly, he calls this procedure "imaginative generalization."’ The expression "inductive generalization" is avoided ,⁴ probably in order to avoid any possible confusion of this approach to metaphysics with Bacon’s inductive approach, which Whitehead explicitly rejects.⁵ At any rate, although the term "induction" is not used, it is clearly induction as epogoge that Whitehead has in mind when speaking of "philosophic generalization" "The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it takes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation" (PR 5/7).

Induction is here defined as a movement of ascent and descent, from particulars to a universal principle and back again, which is accomplished by means of a structured use of the imagination. In a manner analogous to Aristotle’s grounding of induction in "experience," Whitehead is quite emphatic in stating that direct observation is incapable of serving as the springboard for arriving at the larger generalities. A belief in sheer observation, unaided by imagination, is precisely the core of the Baconian method of induction, which, as Whitehead notes ironically, "if consistently pursued, would have left science where it found it" (PR 5/7). In contrast to this "rigid method of empiricism," imagination will exercise an essential role in the search for the ultimate first principles.

Whitehead recognizes that the "appeal to the facts is a difficult operation" (PR 11/16) and cannot be accomplished by a simple appeal to direct observation. What is often called "direct observation" is in point of fact a highly sophisticated mental function in which the causal impact of objects on the observer is interpreted selectively by observers according to their purposes. The aim of imaginative generalization is not to purify observation of interpretation, for if such were the case we would be left with little more than the bland experience of the stone: "If we desire a record of uninterpreted experience, we must ask a stone to record its autobiography" (PR 15/22). The aim, therefore is not to excise subjective intensity from the experience of perception, but rather to strip our experience of the world of that abstract selectiveness which is the natural accompaniment of perceptual immediacy. The illusion that there are uninterpreted "self-sustained facts, floating in nonentity" (PR 11/17) is the direct outcome of Bacon’s attempt to describe detailed matters of fact in separation from a metaphysical interpretation of the experienced world as a unified whole.

The role of imaginative generalization consists therefore in relating the particular occasions immediately experienced with the larger totality from which the particular occasion originates and which it embodies. The practical concerns of ordinary life require that observation be selective, so that the unity experienced in the mode of causal efficacy is obscured by the need to separate experience into clearly delimited areas of concentrated activity. Philosophy arises as an attempt to recover, on the plane of conceptual analysis, "the totality obscured by the selection" (PR 15/22). In the opening pages of Process and Reality Whitehead describes the way in which the imagination functions as a means to an inductive generalization. In the first place, he notes that imagination is essential in order to free experience from the habit of focusing on the same selected observations, which have become solidified and thus transformed into "matters of fact." The problem here is to overcome the "benumbing repression of common sense" (PR 9/13) so that events which have become commonplace can come to be experienced with new meaning, when viewed in the light of an imagined contrast. "Such thought," notes Whitehead, "supplies the differences which the direct observation lacks. It can even play with inconsistency; and can thus throw light on the consistent, and persistent, elements in experience by comparison with what in imagination is inconsistent with them" (PR 5/7). Imagination operates in this regard as a "propositional feeling" which uncovers new elements in the field of observation through a comparison of some possibility with what is actually given.

The above function of imagination, which enables the observer to discern features of actual entities by means of contrast, should most likely be seen as a necessary condition of the imaginative generalization, rather than the generalization itself. Its role is analogous to Aristotelian "experience," which is the necessary jumping off point of epogoge, but is not itself an instance of epogoge. Moreover, a supplementary condition is required for the success of an imaginative generalization, insofar as the generalization should always take its point of departure from within some particular branch of human learning. This is important, since the intention is not simply to imagine any arbitrary combination or contrast of observed features, but rather to start with some limited generalization arrived at by careful reflection in one of the branches of intellectual research. Whitehead construes the various possible areas of research very broadly, listing physics, physiology, psychology, aesthetics, ethical beliefs, sociology, or in "languages conceived as storehouses of human experience" (PR 5/7).

Once the above two conditions have been fulfilled, the actual act of imaginative generalization is ready to be accomplished. The generalization begins by an act of extrapolation, in which an insight obtained in one of the above fields of interest is extended, through an imaginative leap, beyond the "restricted locus from which it originated" (PR 5/8). Whitehead describes just such a leap in Science in the Modern World (219-223). in conjunction with his description of how he arrived at the philosophical realization that all actual entities exist as an interlocked community (principle of relativity). In that case, the generalization began with the accepted scientific view regarding the electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time, and rose beyond the limits of that physical theory to posit the ontological framework which the theory itself presupposes. Whitehead points out that the science of physics presupposes the principle of universal relativity, but that such a principle cannot itself be arrived at within physics, since it is a postulation about intrinsic reality and from the limited perspective of physics "there is no intrinsic reality" (SMW 223).

Thus, the imaginative generalization begins with some salient feature of reality viewed within the perspective of some particular intellectual discipline and then posits a principle which is exemplified within that discipline, but whose scope is not limited to the discipline in question. Whitehead notes in this regard that "the field of a special science is confined to one genus of facts, in the sense that no statements are made respecting facts which lie outside that genus" (PR 9/14). The aim of the imaginative generalization consists in seeing how each genus of facts is, in reality, a limited expression of some universal principle which is equally exemplified in some very different genus of facts. Imaginative generalization tends therefore to unify, from the metaphysical standpoint, the various genera of facts which, if viewed from the standpoint of each particular science, seem utterly irrelevant and disconnected. Whitehead describes this act of "philosophic generalization" in terms reminiscent of Aristotle’s own account of "first philosophy," when he notes that such a generalization is "the utilization of specific notions, applying to a restricted group of facts, for the divination of the generic notions which apply to all facts" (PR 5/8).

I mentioned above that imaginative generalization "begins with an act of extrapolation." In effect, in order to arrive at some general principle which applies to all sectors of reality, more is needed than just an extrapolation beyond the limits of some particular science to a metaphysical principle which that particular science presupposes and which metaphysics alone can adequately explain. In order to justifiably assert the universality of the principle in question, it must be seen to apply to a nexus of occasions apart from its original point of origination. This involves a descent from the general principle to renewed observation of facts within an entirely different science. From those particular facts one again rises to the general principle of which those facts represent just one particular order of exemplification among many possible orders of exemplification.

Science in the Modern World can be read as an exercise of the process of imaginative generalization, as it has just been described. The principle of universal interconnectedness (relativity) is arrived at from within modem field theory and is then seen to be operative in various other fields of human experience: psychology, physiology, poetry, etc. It is essential here to comprehend that the principle of relativity (which states that all actual entities are internally related) is not simply applied to physiology or psychology, etc., but rather, in each instance the principle is arrived at in an original way from within the particular facts of the particular field of learning in question. In other words, positing the principle of relativity as a universal principle covering all experience, is the result of a series of distinct, limited generalizations, in which the principle is extracted each time from a particular group of facts. Whitehead applies the term "imaginative generalization" both to the limited generalizations that I have just described, as well as to the entire process in which repeated generalizations lead to the universal generalization that the scope of the principle is indeed universal.

In elaborating a notion of imaginative generalization founded on repeated generalizations from distinct starting points in the various sciences or arts, Whitehead is conscious of the danger of misplaced concreteness which can arise from an unjustified extrapolation from one disciple to another. Mechanism, for instance, began as a limited theory about the structure of matter, and was subsequently extrapolated throughout the range of human experience. Since the fundamental principle of the mechanistic philosophy -- all bodies are externally related within instantaneous configurations of matter -- is not universal in scope, its cultural dominance throughout several centuries created two types of intellectual difficulties. On the one hand, certain zones of experience are viewed as impermeable to mechanistic explanation (poetry or religious inspiration, for example) and are thus simply excluded from relevance. On the other hand, areas of research such as biology and psychology are subjected to a mechanistic interpretation which tends to deprive them of their specificity as sciences.

A key consequence of thus mistaking a partial abstraction for an ultimate explanation is that various dualisms are thereby created: subject-object, primary-secondary qualities, extended substance-mental substance, etc. When a partial abstraction is assumed to be an adequate explanation of concrete reality, a divided, disjointed view of reality seems to be the inevitable outcome. On the other hand, a sign that a truly ultimate principle of explanation has been reached would consist in showing how this principle is capable of unifying the diverse aspects of experience. Whitehead presents organic mechanism as a constructive theory in which an ultimate principle of explanation can unify the various orders of nature, precisely because the principle operates throughout the whole of nature, from the smallest constituent parts (electrons, etc.) to the highest organisms.

Imaginative generalization operates as the fundamental method of the organic philosophy. The process of repeated ascent and descent is required in order to arrive at a truly organic conception of nature, in which the principle of universal connectedness is seen to arise from within each of the particular orders of experience, rather than be imposed from above by philosophical fiat. The movement of descent, from the universal principle down to concrete reality, is of special importance in avoiding the pitfall of speculative "inadequacy," in which "failure to include some obvious elements of experience in the scope of the system is met by boldly denying the facts" (PR 6/9). The inductive descent exercises a role not unlike Popper’s falsification. A principle arrived at by abstraction from one order of facts, is confronted with facts from another order of experience, as a test of speculative applicability: "The success of the imaginative experiment is always to be tested by the applicability of its results beyond the restricted locus from which it originated" (PR 5/8). However, unlike Popper’s falsification, which is most interesting when the theory in question is refuted by confrontation with the facts, Whitehead’s version of testability is most interesting when the attempted application actually works.

The point that I wish to emphasize is that what I have described as the inductive descent plays a much more important role in Whitehead’s philosophy than the mere search for confirmation or falsification of some theory by the facts. The aim of the descent is primarily to establish a positive correspondence of the universal principle with the particulars covered by the principle, a correspondence which should nevertheless not be equated with the search for confirming instances. Popper is unable to see any positive sense in which a theory can be said to correspond to the facts, because he tends to view such a correspondence in terms of a search for certitude or confirmation. In order to avoid what he perceives as a misguided emphasis on certitude, Popper exalts the virtue of successive conjectures and refutations.’ Whitehead, on the contrary, seeks a constantly renewed confrontation of general principles with observation of concrete reality, not primarily to confirm, but in order to illuminate experience:⁷ "The partially successful philosophic generalization will, if derived from physics, find applications in fields of experience beyond physics. It will enlighten observation in those remote fields, so that general principles can be discerned as in process of illustration, which in the absence of the imaginative generalization are obscured by their persistent exemplification" (PR 5/8).

The primary role of the inductive descent, "the renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation" (PR 5/7), is not to confirm, but rather to propel the process of speculative discovery forward to novel and unforeseen dimensions of experience. With each new application of universal principles to novel facts, it is not just the facts, but the principles themselves which are illuminated and reinterpreted, consonant with the greater breadth of experience which has thus been obtained. It is for this reason that Whitehead is careful to insist on the tentative nature of the ultimate generalities, which are always susceptible of reinterpretation in the light of the evolving facts of experience.

In conclusion, I would like to make it clear that the aspect of universality, which is characteristic of the ultimate generalities of speculative metaphysics, is not regarded by Whitehead as a fixed point known with definite certitude, at some stage in the process of discovery. The movement of imaginative generalization, which I have described above as the discovery of a general metaphysical principle and its repeated application and rediscovery within the diverse branches of human learning, is not intended to fulfill a condition of "complete enumeration of particulars" which would ground the affirmation that the principle is indeed of universal scope. In other words, the repeated descent from a principle to its exemplifications in experience, is not meant to be a method to determine if the acquisition of the universal principle by inductive means is valid.

On this score, Whitehead departs from the traditional Aristotelian discussion of induction, with its emphasis on the problem of complete enumeration of particulars as a justification of the inference from particular to universal. Imaginative generalization is a method of discovery which seeks to recapture the unity of experience by successive insights into the overall interconnectedness of actual entities. If some synoptic or universal vision is thereby attained, it will necessarily be a provisional grasp of unity, based on the structure of experience interpreted within some particular epoch in the ongoing adventures of actual entities. The question of how an inference of a fixed universal proposition from enumerated particulars can be justified no longer needs to be raised, since the relation of particular to universal is no longer construed in quite the same way. Particulars are capable of generating propositions of universal import, precisely because the particulars are themselves universal, in the sense that each actual entity is constituted by a synthesis of all the other actual entities in the universe. The principle of universal relativity turns out, in the last analysis, to be the ontological foundation for the process of imaginative generalization.

This last point would, in my opinion, merit careful examination, because it represents a possible solution to an inherent difficulty in the Aristotelian approach to universals and particulars. Commentators of Aristotle have often noted an unresolved tension at the center of his philosophical system, inasmuch as the Aristotelian ontology is centered on the primacy of individual substances, while his epistemology is centered on the intelligibility of the universal. The impression of a fundamental dualism is thereby created. The theory of abstraction is elaborated precisely in order to bridge the gap between an ontological world of subsisting individuals and the epistemological world of universals. Induction is proposed as the means by which the universal is drawn out from concrete particulars.

From the standpoint of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, where the particular, actual entity is universal, the epistemological problem of how to bridge the gap between the two orders (the order of existence and the order of knowledge) is thereby resolved. Whitehead’s approach is, in my opinion, unique among modem philosophical systems because he attempts to resolve a long-standing epistemological difficulty by an appeal to ontology. His solution to the problem of universal and particular is thus inverse to the nominalist approach of most moderns.

A critical appraisal of Whitehead’s ontological "reduction" of the universal/particular dichotomy would need to address the following questions:

(1) Since the principle of internal relatedness has been posited as the ontological foundation of the intellectual process of imaginative generalization, and it has also been affirmed that this principle is itself arrived at via imaginative generalization, do we thus find ourselves trapped in a sort of vicious circle? In other words, does Whitehead’s novel solution lead to a new version of the "riddle of induction"? To my mind, this difficulty might best be approached in the light of Whitehead’s analysis of causality. Is his analysis sufficiently rich to allow for different levels and specific types of causality, such that causes of a different kind can be understood to cause one another reciprocally, causae ad invincem sunt causae (to use a Scholastic dictum drawn from Aristotle), thus avoiding true circularity?

(2) As was mentioned above,⁸ Whitehead views the universal/particular distinction as inherently misleading, because "the ‘particular’ is thus conceived as being just its individual self with no necessary relevance to any other particular." Whitehead traces this metaphysical error back to Aristotle, to whom he attributes a metaphysic of "solitary substances," inherently opposed to the "democracy of fellow creatures" affirmed by the philosophy of organism. However, in defense of Aristotle, it might be asked whether Whitehead has in fact conflated two distinct senses of "universal" which for the sake of clarity ought to be kept apart?

On the other hand, "universal" can be used as a synonym for "common property," and is intended to signify some form or structure shared in common by a multiplicity of entities. Here, "universal" is indeed opposed to "particular," for although entities possess certain properties in common, each thing also includes certain incommunicable, individuating properties, which sets it apart from all other beings and makes it a unique particular. On the other hand, we can speak of something being "universal" because it is in some way related to a very large number or even the totality of other beings. Hence we speak of someone being "universally known," "the sun’s universal influence upon all bodies on earth," or even of the intellect, which Aristotle says "has the virtue of becoming all things" (De Anima, 430 ^a15). In this second sense, being "universal" is not opposed to being a concrete, particular thing, since it is the particular itself which is related to others in manner sufficiently great to be qualified as universal. In this way, nothing precludes an Aristotelian primary substance from possessing certain incommunicable, exclusive properties which render it fully individual, while being at the same time in vibrant communication and interrelation (through the exercise of causality, knowledge, affection) with other substances.⁹ An adequate explanation of any substance would necessarily have to include reference to the other entities to which it is thus related.

(3) Finally, if the metaphysical principle of universal relativity is adopted as a kind of first principle of knowledge, which illuminates and guides our investigation of actual entities, the objection might be raised that such a principle actually accomplishes the contrary of what is intended, and would in fact exclude any proper knowledge of existing things. For if each singular entity mirrors the entire universe within itself and is thus constituted as a synthesis of all the manifold beings that compose the universe, should we not therefore conclude that the ontological structure of any given actual entity is hopelessly beyond our ken? For who can pretend to describe (even inadequately) any specific actual entity if all the other actual entities in the entire universe (past, present and future) must necessarily enter into its description? This objection is in no way a novel one. Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, and Locke all advance the doctrine of internal relations as evidence for the skeptical claim that human knowledge is severely limited and radically incapable of penetrating the fabric of nature.¹⁰

References

AL -- John of St. Thomas. Ars Logica. Vol. 1 of Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus. Ed. B. Reiser. Turin: 1930. [A section of AL has been translated as Outlines in Formal Logic, trans. Francis C. Wade (Milwaukee: 1955). When this translation is used in a citation its page number will be given after the page number of the Reiser edition.]

CWA -- The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: 1984.

KUP -- Walter Leszl. "Knowledge of the Universal and Knowledge of the Particular in Aristotle." Review of Metaphysics 26 (December 1972): 278-313.

Notes

1When speaking of "abstractive induction" I mean to include the passage from sensible singulars to the grasp of either single universals or axioms. Aristotle himself uses the term "epogoge" to cover these two possibilities. It should also be noted that I do not intend to directly address the much debated question concerning the respective roles of epogoge and nous in the knowledge of first principles. In this paper I take induction to signify the passage from individuals to the universal, and nous the terminus of the inductive movement wherein the universal is finally grasped.

2Translated by D. W. Hamlyn, "Aristotelian Epogoge," Phronesis 21 (1976): 169-70. Hamlyn notes that "epogoge is involved in the application of general principles to cases, not just in the argument for the general principles themselves" (170). He adds that "the application of principles to cases is an essential part of the Socratic arguments that Aristotle calls ‘inductive’" (170, note 5).

3 Whitehead also uses the related terms: "imaginative rationalization," "imaginative construction," "descriptive generalization," and "philosophic generalization."

4Whitehead also tends to avoid such terms as "abtractive induction" or "inductive generalization" because of his unhappiness with the particular-universal distinction itself: "These terms, ‘universals’ and ‘particulars,’ both in the suggestiveness of the two words and in their current philosophical use, are somewhat misleading. The ontological principle, and the wider doctrine of universal relativity, on which the present metaphysical discussion is founded, blur the sharp distinction between what is universal and what is particular. The notion of a universal is of that which can enter into the description of many particulars; whereas the notion of a particular is that it is described by universals, and does not itself enter into the description of any other particular. According to the doctrine of relativity . . . both these notions involve a misconception. An actual entity cannot be described, even inadequately’ by universals; because other actual entities do enter into the description of one actual entity. Thus every so-called ‘universal’ is particular in the sense of being just what it is, diverse from everything else; and every so-called ‘particular is universal in the sense of entering into the constitutions of other actual entities" (PR 48/76). Whitehead adds several pages later that the metaphysical misconception of the particular-universal distinction is historically rooted ,n the Aristotelian ontology of substance, in which the ‘particular’ is "conceived as being just its individual self with no necessary relevance to any other particular" (PR 50/79).

5A reading of Bacon’s New Organon reveals a more nuanced and less empiricist approach to induction than Whitehead (and other twentieth-century philosophers) usually give him credit, One text in particular refers to the ascent and descent characteristic of imaginative generalizations: ". . . from the new light of axioms, which have been educed from those particulars by a certain method and rule, shall in their turn point out the way again to new particulars, greater things shall be looked for. For our road does not lie on a level, but ascends and descends; first ascending to axioms, then descending to works" (Book I. aphorism 103).

6Popper writes, for instance, that "the rejection of our theories by reality -- is, in my view, the only information we can obtain from reality: all else is our own making" (Karl R. Popper, Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics [Totawa, New Jersey: 1982] 3). For an analysis of Popper’s approach to induction, confirmation, and truth, see my "Popper en question -- Quelques critiques sur la croissance du savoir," Revue Thomiste 83 (1985): 38-68; 431-56.

7 In a similar way, Aristotle notes in the Posterior Analytics (91^b 34) that "someone who gives an induction [does not] demonstrate, but he nevertheless makes something clear" (i.e., some truth is made manifest to the knower). In the same vein, John of St. Thomas writes that induction does not aim to furnish a proof or to impose assent upon the mind, but rather to introduce the intellect to universal things: "[non est] ordinata ad probandum seu convincendum intellectum, sed ad introducendum in universalia" (AL 200).

8See the passage from PR 50/79 quoted above in note 4.

9On this score, Whitehead’s transformation of the universal/particular distinction could he profitably confronted with Thomas Aquinas’ reformulation of the Aristotelian philosophy. St. Thomas makes a more explicit attempt than the Stagarite to develop the view that substance is self-communicative through action. It is because Thomas takes the act of being as the deepest metaphysical principle, an act which he holds to be diffusive of its very nature (De Potentia, q. 2, art. I), that he is able to articulate and harmonize the dual exigencies of individuality and presence (through real relation) to other subjects. It would he especially interesting to contrast Thomas’ doctrine of "intentional being" (esse intentionale) with Whitehead’s theory of "objective immortality," since both aim to explain, through an ontological analysis, how one entity can be really present in another entity.

10On this point see Pascal, Pensées, § 355 (ed. Brunschvicg) and Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, Book 2, chap. 2-5. The case of Locke is particularly intriguing, inasmuch as Whitehead writes in the Preface to PR that "the writer who most filly anticipated the main positions of the philosophy of organism is John Locke in his Essay, especially in its later books" (PR xi/v), If one refers to the section of the Essay (Bk. IV, ch. VI, § II) cited by Whitehead in his footnote, one does indeed come across a passage that closely echoes Whitehead’s metaphysical insight that all entities are internally related. The sticking point occurs, however, when one considers the use that Locke makes of the insight that all entities are thus interrelated, Locke’s intent in this chapter is to point out the essential limitations imposed on our knowledge of corporeal substances. His point is that we only know the real essence of some substance when we know the operations of that substance and the diverse causes that concur in the accomplishment of such operations. He concludes that it is impossible for us to attain a knowledge of those causes, since in order to do so we would have to penetrate the entire nexus of causes operative in the universe. The result is that we know hopelessly little about the things of nature and that we are better off applying our limited minds to those areas of knowledge (mathematics, religion. jurisprudence. ethics) in which our intellect stands as the measure of what is, instead of letting our thou g his stray "into the vast Ocean of Being." Such is Locke’s conclusion, a conclusion which one might conceivably interpret as an objection to the very possibility of a philosophy of organism along the lines laid out by Whitehead.

Within the past decade, there have been several attempts to categorize ethical systems arising from process metaphysics in their relation to ethical theory in general. Although many concur in categorizing any ethical system based on process metaphysics as teleological or consequentialist, recent writings have gone beyond this, attempting to demonstrate the affinity between process ethics and utilitarianism. Whereas Richard Davis, for example, merely alludes to the "resemblance" which process ethics (in this case, Whitehead’s ethics) bears to utilitarianism (WMP 85), John Moskop attempts a detailed analysis of such a resemblance in a comparison between Hartshorne and John Stuart Mill (MH passim).

Moskop claims that there are five points of agreement between the two philosophers: both maintain that ethics is "(1) teleological, (2) having its telos in experience, (3) requiring qualitative distinctions among experiences, (4) based on an aesthetic criterion of good experience, and (5) altruistic" (MH 19). He concludes that for Hartshorne, as for Mill, the basic principle of morality is that of utility. He adds that Hartshorne’s understanding of justice, like that of utilitarianism, is derived from the principle of utility (MH 31). Finally, Moskop notes that there seems to be "the same subordination of justice to utility considerations in the divine will as is demanded of human wills" (MH 31).

Moskop thus makes at least three important claims in his brief essay: I) that the five theses adequately and unambiguously represent the framework of Hartshorne’s moral philosophy, 2) that Hartshorne’s metaphysics justifies not only a broad understanding of altruism but rather a dependence upon an understanding of the principle of utility quite similar to that of utilitarianism, and 3) that in both Hartshorne’s moral philosophy and his metaphysics the claims of justice are necessarily subordinate to those of utility. Each of these claims seems at best inaccurate, leaving his general argument unconvincing.

Moskop’s argument is unconvincing not primarily because of the five theses upon which it is based, but rather because in his interpretation of these similarities he seems to have insufficiently analyzed (1) Hartshorne’s understanding of the concrete ethical subject and (2) his notion of God. Although both concepts have significant implications for Hartshorne’s ethical enterprise, this study will suggest that if one takes Hartshorne’s understanding of the relation between ethics and theism seriously, one arrives at a notion of ethics rather different from that envisioned by Moskop.

I. The Principle of Utility.

Moskop maintains that both Mill and Hartshorne "acknowledge the utilitarian principle that morality consists in the production of the best experience for the greatest number" (MH 24). The difference between the two, Moskop contends, is that each adopts a different manner in justifying the utilitarian principle. While Mill depends upon an appeal to psychological claims of fact, Hartshorne "grounds his utilitarianism on basic metaphysical doctrines" (MH 29f). The metaphysical doctrines to which Moskop alludes are precisely those which I believe he does not take seriously enough -- the understanding of the concrete subject and the notion of God.

Moskop reached his conclusions by concentrating on two of Hartshorne’s more important articles dealing with ethics, "The Aesthetic Matrix of Value," which forms the last chapter of Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method (CS), and "Beyond Enlightened Self-Interest: A Metaphysics of Ethics" (BES). Ethical questions, however, permeate most of the writings produced throughout the philosopher’s career, and a broader reading of the Hartshorne corpus suggests other conclusions. In fact, on several occasions Hartshorne himself is explicit in stating that his form of ethics is not utilitarian. He makes clear in several of his writings that he considers the principle of utility to be an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.¹ Hartshorne claims that "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is not itself an actual happiness to anyone, and so is not a value in a clearly intelligible sense" (MRM 465). He further maintains:

Rather than using his understanding of God to undergird a system of utilitarianism, Hartshorne rather describes it as an alternative to utilitarianism. He asks: "What . . . is to arbitrate between self and others? There seem to be two possibilities only: the good of the greatest number, self included, or some superindividual unity. Now the good of the greatest number is an abstraction. Is it really one good? Can there be value in a sum of values unless there is a valuation which summates them, which embraces them together in a single good?" (BH 321)

Hartshorne is explicit in emphasizing that the greatest happiness cannot be localized simply in the human group. There are at least three reasons for his position. In the first place, a group, as a collection of interrelated selves, "does not literally have interests that can be satisfied" (RSP 64). One is in danger of again falling victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. To claim some sort of ultimate value for group-interest is necessarily to abstract from the concrete.

Secondly, according to Hartshorne, "[n]o human associates can be fully sensitive to all that passes in any one human person; and no human laws or institutions can be perfectly adjusted to any individual, to say nothing of all individuals" (RH 32). The reason for this assertion lies in human fragmentariness. According to Hartshorne, such fragmentariness affords all human beings, and even human groups, inadequate partial perspectives. He maintains that such perspectives "do not add up to definite truths" (MM 467). Furthermore, he fears that a group, motivated from such fragmentary and inadequate perspectives, can easily "simplify and impoverish in order to reduce multiplicity to unity" (BH 55). He adds: The state, or public opinion, is always more coercive than sensitive or understanding" (BH 55). Thus, not only is group-interest an abstraction from the interests of concrete individuals, but such interest also has the tendency to accomplish the opposite of what it claims to do. Rather than adequately furthering the good of the many through sensitivity and understanding, members of the group may seek coercive ways to further group aggrandizement (LP 298). Hartshorne concludes, "the consequence is that the individual is bound to claim rights against society as well as through it. He cannot admit that its will is ipso facto right" (BH 32).

Finally, any human group, and indeed the human species, will one day vanish. If it is the human group in which value resides, this value itself will perish when the species perishes. Hartshorne consequently raises the following question regarding the aim of life: "Be the aim Nirvana, the Classless Society, the Welfare State, Self-Realization, the query is never silenced, what good is it, from the cosmic and everlasting perspective, that one or other or all of these aims be attained for a time on this ball of rock?" (LP 132)

Hartshorne does acknowledge, however, the dilemma to which his questions lead. On the one hand, the greatest good for the greatest number ought itself to be a value; on the other hand, it seems not to be. He attempts a solution:

Such a "sum of all value" can be felt concretely only by God, and therefore it is God’s prehending the various human goods that provides the unity to a multiplicity of concrete individual enjoyments.

For Hartshorne, then, one can articulate the solution to this dilemma only in theistic terms:

If the above analysis is correct, Moskop is inaccurate in stating that "God assumes, for Hartshorne, a role in some ways similar to that of Hume’s impartial spectator" (MH 29). Charles Reynolds, in his article, "Somatic Ethics: Joy and Adventure in the Embodied Moral Life," is more accurate in claiming that an ethics based on process metaphysics "avoids the beguiling trap of utilitarianism for an ideal participant perspective" (SE 127, my emphasis).

It is not accidental that the notion of God which forms the foundation of Hartshorne’s ethics is that of the divine receiver of value. In a sermon which Hartshorne delivered in 1956, he summarized his "divine recipient" perspective:

It is in contributing to the one life of God that the multitude of human experiences and values in fact becomes that sort of good which is "individual, unitary, personal" (RH 32). Being so profoundly personal, this is a good which the human person is able to embrace completely. Hartshorne claims that "only through a relation to the Everlasting Itself, it seems evident, can the query concerning the aim of life have an answer which avoids giving rise to a still more ultimate query" (LP 132).

The moral life is therefore not a valuing of others simply for one’s own satisfaction or happiness; nor is it valuing others simply for their own happiness. The only ultimate motivation is the happiness or the glory of God (DR 130-132; MVG 235; LP 323). It is God, and God alone, who maintains an adequate perspective of the individual sentient unity entities which comprise the universe. ²

Hartshorne claims, however, that even the maintenance of this perspective is not most important for the discussion under question. He insists, rather, that it is more proper to say that "to be is to feel one’s value as appreciated by God" (LP 296, my emphasis). Hartshorne explains this appreciation in terms of God’s enjoyment of humans (and of all creation), and consequently in terms of the human person’s enjoyment in being enjoyed by God:

I will return to this notion of enjoyment later in this study. At present it is important to see that this move is key to Hartshorne’s avoidance of utilitarianism. To be ethical for Hartshorne is to contribute positively to the God who not only is able to know of one’s dealings but also is able to appreciate them:

Not only does God appreciate all creatures in some abstract sense, but this care or concern is directed to all concrete individuals. Hartshorne therefore concludes: "God is the only one who really sees and cares for human life correctly" (GMNR 11). This understanding of God saves one from recourse to either fragmentary individual interest or fragmentary group interest. It is not a justification of utilitarianism but rather an alternative to it.

If there is any concrete meaning to "the good of the many," therefore, it can only be understood as God’s prehending the many particular goods of creation. A process ethics cannot be used as a mere calculus for balancing the interests of one group or individual against those of others. Hartshorne demands that "there can be no greater good without particular goods" (MVG 162) since the "greater good" without these personal goods is but an abstraction. It is by means of these personal concrete goods that God is served. Thus, the aim of ethics is not the balancing of interests but rather the creating of a more harmonious world as a gift for God. It is this, and not the principle of utility, which Hartshorne’s ethics attempts to justify.

II. God and Justice.

Moskop’s second claim is that Hartshorne’s ethics subordinates justice claims to the principle of utility. He states that "claims for equal treatment for individuals may be held to depend on a doctrine of social inheritance underlying claims for the maximization of the total welfare" (MH 31).

It appears that there is a certain element of truth in this analysis insofar as Hartshorne does not seem concerned about how the sum of creaturely enjoyments which becomes the unitary enjoyment of God is itself distributed among creatures. Hartshorne does not discuss distributive justice in its narrow sense in any of his writings. There is, however, a broader sense in which one may speak of justice, and that is giving to each his or her due. In this sense, justice is opposed to partiality. That certain persons suffer (or rather that all persons suffer to different degrees and at different times) is not in itself an injustice. Rather injustice would stem from the partiality of an individual or of a group (or of God) which accepts that certain less favored groups or individuals may suffer so that more enjoyment can accrue to the more highly favored groups or individuals. Hartshorne does take into account this latter broad sense of justice as impartiality throughout his writings.

In Hartshorne’s use of this broad sense of justice there does not seem to be a subordination of justice to utility. In one of his earliest ethical writings, Hartshorne lists three concepts which, when taken together, form the foundation of any ethical theory: reasonableness, pleasure or enjoyment, and justice or duty. He goes on to emphasize:

There is no conscious attempt to derive any of the three conceptions from the others. This conviction is not lost in the philosopher’s later writings.

One may ask, however, what Hartshorne means by justice. Beyond the broad sense of impartiality described above, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term. The usual sorts of descriptions, those having a basis in the concepts of merit, equality, or need, all do not seem to be totally adequate descriptions of Hartshorne’s use of the term justice.³ He simply maintains that a just person is one

The just person is one who is unselfish, who is able to see and appreciate his or her own place in the universe, and who is able to go out to others in love. For Hartshorne, in practice love and justice coincide.

This unity between love and justice again forces one to look at the theistic foundation of Hartshorne’s ethical system. For Hartshorne, God is the coincidence of perfect love and perfect justice. This notion of God as perfectly just, a necessary move in Hartshorne’s system, raises a further question. In his discussion of God and justice, Moskop asserts:

This description, if accurate, would strike at the very heart of Hartshorne’s ethical enterprise. If it proves true, God would then be partial and therefore unjust. An unjust God, however, by Hartshorne’s standards, would be unloving and therefore would not be God at all. Furthermore, the motivation for humans to be ethical would be destroyed.

It is unlikely, however, that Moskop is able to demonstrate the adequacy of his claim. Hartshorne explicitly states: "God ‘cannot’ wish the weal of one while disregarding (as, to a greater or lesser extent we always do) the woe of others; for no woe is merely indifferent to God" (LP 142). He adds that those who think in the way suggested by Moskop "are thinking anthropomorphically about God, who must always relate Himself to absolutely all creatures" (LP 142).

As we have already discussed, within Hartshorne’s theory, God is the one who most adequately appreciates all individuals and who most adequately takes into account the needs of all. It is God’s receptivity which grounds this understanding of justice. He concludes:

Consequently, Hartshorne is able to say that one finds in God not some sort of

Hartshorne does speak of conflicts, such as those between justice conceived as fairness and the principle of utility, but he does so in a way different form that which Moskop describes. Within Hartshorne’s system, there is a theory of genuine chance which accounts for conflict. His understanding of all reality as creative synthesis demands a multiplicity of truly free entities. Since these multiple unit-entities are continually creating their specific character and aims, Hartshorne concludes, such entities can only escape conflict by means of luck (MM 461).

God is related to this conflict, but Hartshorne describes this relation under the rubric of tragedy. By invoking this notion of tragedy, applicable both to creatures and to God, Hartshorne attempts to distance himself from a notion of God "willing that some individuals be forced to suffer for the good of others" (MH 31), which would be an unjust God. He emphatically denies that "tragedy is part of a divine plan which wisely decides how much and when each creature ought to suffer" (LP 314). Rather, he suggests that:

Tragedy occurs because of the incompatibility of a multitude of free creatures each freely pursuing its "creaturely answer." Hartshorne reminds his readers that "all freedom is dangerous" (MM 460). Tragedy thus finds its roots in metaphysics

Consequently, tragedy is not imposed upon creation as part of the will of God but rather inevitably arises from the multiplicity of free creatures as conflicts between noncompossible goods (See CS 312).

God enters into tragedy because of God’s love. Hartshorne explains why this is so:

Because of God’s receptivity and love, disharmony in the world becomes suffering in God. God therefore is not unaffected by a world in which there exist discord, hatred, evil and suffering. Hartshorne is clear: "Indifference to suffering rather than suffering as a result of loving sympathy with sufferers should be rejected as unworthy to be predicated of God" (WP, 197).

God’s justice is demonstrated through God’s entering into tragedy and through God’s suffering with creatures. Hartshorne provides the following summary of his point of view:

Hartshorne himself refutes the claim of Moskop. In the broad meaning of justice, God is just. God does not manipulate the details of the universe so that the greater number might flourish at the cost of the few. God is not indifferent to any suffering but in fact shares in all of it.

III. Moskop’s Theses.

One may now return to the five theses mentioned earlier: that Hartshorne’s ethics is teleological, having its telos in experience, requiring distinctions among experiences, which distinctions are based upon aesthetic and altruistic criteria. In evaluating these theses, it may be wise to remember the following words of Hartshorne:

Without this basic explicit reference to theism, one cannot understand Hartshorne’s ethics. To the extent, therefore, that one endeavors to speak of Hartshorne’s ethics without such explicit reference to God, the understanding of his basic concepts remains at best inchoate.

The difficulty with Moskop’s theses then as adequate representatives of Hartshorne’s position arises from the fact that they fail to take the question of God seriously. Each of the five theses must be recast in theistic terms. Unless this component is recognized, the theses remain inadequate representations of Hartshorne’s thought.

The first three theses, for example, can be misleading if they refer only to what Hartshorne calls ‘naturalism" in ethics.⁴ These theses become meaningful only in relation to Hartshorne’s conception of God. The "ultimate good" to which they refer is not to some sort of "qualitative hedonism" as Moskop claims (MH 20), but rather to God. Hartshorne explains this by recourse to the term "contributionism."⁵ Hartshorne does speak of "happiness," but true happiness comes only from having a truly rational aim. He emphasizes that "a rational self, no matter how momentary, cannot be satisfied with less than a rational aim, and no aim short of some universal long-run good is fully rational" (CS 198, my emphasis). One is compelled to move to the question of God.

The remaining theses, dealing with the aesthetic and altruistic components of experience, are likewise dependent upon Hartshorne’s concept of God. When viewed from this theistic perspective, these theses can be seen as two sides of the same coin:

This emphasis on the primacy of God for Hartshorne’s ethics does not eliminate all the questions which Moskop raises, but it does serve to place them into a different context.

IV. A Theistic Teleology.

If the above exercise proves anything, it is that Hartshorne’s ethical system is necessarily and unabashedly theistic. The philosopher maintains: "ethics either formulates God as the ideal, or it leaves its basic concepts in an implicit, confused form" (BH 261). Most basically, Hartshorne’s ethics demands a teleology, but one properly understands this teleology only through recourse to Hartshorne’s use of the term contributionism. The person is a contributor to the divine life and also enjoys the beauty of the experience which he or she contributes to God. Moskop is correct in his analysis insofar as it is indeed beauty which the person gives to God.

It is only in this context of contributionism that Hartshorne speaks of the quality of human experience and individual satisfaction or happiness. Ultimate value cannot be reduced to "finite human enjoyments and loves" (MVG 63). Without God, one faces "helplessness in the theory of value" (MVG 63). Hartshorne goes on to claim, with Peirce, that the one thing true of any entity is that it "is a potential contributor to the summum bonum. and how it can do so is its meaning."⁶

Thus, even aesthetic satisfaction arises from the contribution one makes to God. Hartshorne states:

There is a relationship between ethics and happiness, but it is not the usually perceived relationship as found in utilitarianism. Lynne Belaief’s description of this relationship in Whitehead’s thought aptly applies to Hartshorne as well:

Acting so as to contribute beauty to others, and especially to God, is enjoyed; but the ethical motivation for one’s decision is the contribution it makes, not the enjoyment. Hartshorne summarizes these sentiments in the following way:

V. Conclusion.

Ethical concerns permeate the metaphysics of Charles Hartshorne, and writers will continue attempting to place the philosopher in relation to one or another ethical school. Yet, there will always be a danger inherent in these attempts. To the extent that one fails to take seriously Hartshorne’s particular understanding of experience as creative synthesis or his demand that one constantly confront the question of God, one cannot do justice to his ethical system.

References

All citations listed without an author are by Charles Hartshorne.

BES -- "Beyond Enlightened Self-Interest: A Metaphysics of Ethics" Ethics 84:3 (April 1974): 201-216.

BH -- Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1975.

CS -- Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. La Salle, IL: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1970.

DR -- The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

EAP -- "Ethics and the Assumption of Purely Private Pleasures." The International Journal of Ethics 40:4 (July 1930): 496-515.

GMNR -- "God and Man Not Rivals." Journal of Liberal Religion 6:2 (Autumn 1944): 9-13.

LE -- "Life and the Everlasting." Unpublished sermon delivered at United Liberal Church, October 28, 1956.

LP -- The Logic of Perfection. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., 1962.

MH -- John C. Moskop. "Mill and Hartshorne." Process Studies 10:1-2 (Spring-Summer 1980): 18-33.

MM – "Mind as Memory and Creative Love." Theories of the Mind. Ed. Jordan M. Scher. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962.

MRM -- "Mysticism and Rationalistic Metaphysics." The Monist 54:4 (October 1976): 463-469.

MVG -- Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964.

PSG -- Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese. Philosophers Speak of God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

RSP -- Reality as Social Process. Studies in Metaphysics and Religion. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1953.

SE -- Charles H. Reynolds. "Somatic Ethics: Joy and Adventure in the Embodied Moral Life." John Cobb’s Theology in Process. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Thomas J. J. Altizer. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977: 116-132.

WMP -- Richard S. Davis. "Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy." Process Studies 3:2 (Summer 1973): 75-90.

WP: Whitehead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.

WPT -- Lynne Belaief. "Whitehead and Private-Interest Theories." Ethics 76:4 (July 1966): 277-286.

Notes

1This term was coined by A. N. Whitehead to explain a certain confusion which mistakes the abstract for the concrete. See SMW 51.

2This is Hartshorne’s description of divine omniscience. See, for example. LP 141,296: DR 120-124.

3Although none are totally adequate, the third option comes closest to Hartshorne’s usage. See "Individual Differences and the ideal of Equality." New South 18:2 (February 1963): 3-8.

4 Hartshorne suggests that this term should be taken in its literal sense meaning "intensely interested in nature." When taken in this sense, there is no contradiction between enjoyment and disinterested love. See Hartshorne, "Man in Nature," Experience, Existence and the Good: Essays in Honor of Paul Wiess, ed. Irwin Lid, (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. 1961): 89-90. Hartshorne demands that this naturalistic pole of his ethics must lead one to theism and not replace it. See BH viii-ix.

5Hartshorne asserts: "All experience is vanity of vanities, unless it contributes to an abiding whole of life that not only transcends us but transcends humanity altogether" (LP 322-323).

6Hartshorne does not express which citation of Peirce he had in mind, but it might be 1.362 in which Peirce describes God as manifested by the completely evolved universe in the infinitely distant future. See CSPM 26.