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Alfred North Whitehead, the author of the monumental and tortuous Process and Reality, is our century’s foremost philosophical cosmologist. His speculative thinking is marked by a keen sense for aesthetic experience and art. In particular, he has a love for philosophy in art and for that rare phenomenon, the philosopher’s poet. For example, Whitehead finds Milton in Paradise Lost performing poetic service for Plato -- perhaps without cause, Whitehead is quick to point out, because Plato was more than capable of giving concrete and lively poetic expression to his own philosophic insights (PR 96).

This native love for aesthetic experience, for art, and for philosophy in art is wholly consonant with Whitehead’s fundamental philosophic vision of the universe. Given this passion and understanding, it is a shame that he missed a more recent philosopher’s poet, whose art is very closely related to the philosophical orientation of Whitehead himself -- Boris Pasternak in Dr. Zhivago, if not directly expressing Whiteheadian thought, is certainly the poet-novelist of a modern philosophical cosmology which shows striking parallels to Whitehead’s own. Without bending the truth too far, we may claim that Pasternak is Whitehead’s poet.

The philosophic dimension of Dr. Zhivago is all too often passed over or insufficiently considered. Dr. Zhivago is not a mere literary or aesthetic event, but the human document of an artist who himself was early a student of philosophy. Philosophic thought is absolutely central to the novel. Any attempt to appreciate Dr. Zhivago without grappling with the philosophy which permeates it would be like trying to comprehend Whitehead without reflecting on his imagery and metaphors. Both can be done, but not without distorting the respective visions. With varying degrees of emphasis, for both Pasternak and Whitehead art and philosophic thought are indissoluble.

Moreover, Dr. Zhivago stands as a significant philosophic event in its own right. The whole question of philosophical cosmology -- and of the particular brand adopted by Pasternak and Whitehead -- is radically reopened. Philosophical cosmology and the cosmological sensibility in general have recently been on the run, hounded from a central position in civilized thought. Yet, as shown by Whitehead and Pasternak, this philosophic perspective and sensibility spring forth again and again, irrespective of prevailing intellectual moods. Philosophical cosmology has a long, distinguished past, reaching back to pre-Socratic thinkers, and no doubt has a future. It is inextinguishable. It is endemic to a certain mode of thinking life, reflecting a certain relation of man to his world. Pasternak vividly retells us what this ongoing tradition is about, while offering his own original contributions. In short, he deserves our philosophic attention.

I. Pasternak and the Cosmological Vision

Whitehead wears his speculative cosmology on his sleeve. Pasternak cloaks his philosophy in his art, in his characters and their conversations, and in the imaginative world he creates. Nevertheless, the cosmological character of his vision is no less apparent. All of Dr. Zhivago’s major protagonists are infused with a cosmological sensibility. In a culminating meditation over the dead body of Yurii, Lara, aided by the explicit intervention of Pasternak, disclaims:

In an earlier effort to extricate herself from the nightmarish liaison with Komarovsky, Lara turns to the silent, flower-scented, broad expanse of a nature "dearer than her kin, better than a lover, wiser than a book." (DZ 63). She rediscovers the purpose of her life: to grasp the meaning of the earth’s wild enchantment, to call each thing by its right name, or to give birth, out of a love for life, to those who could. Nikolai, Yurii’s maternal uncle and the novel’s resident professional philosopher (Lara and Yurii considered too much philosophizing like a steady diet of horseradish), has his sister’s "aristocratic sense of equality with all living creatures and the same gift of taking in everything at a glance" (DZ 11). His speculations on the interconnections of life, religion, art, history, and Christ establish philosophic themes taken up again and again.

Yet it is left to Yurii Zhivago to move decisively beyond cosmological sensibility to more or less sustained cosmological reflection proper, to speculation on the relation of the natural universe to human life in all its facets. The same man who is repeatedly overcome by the sound of waterfalls, the smells of wild cherry and old linden trees, and the color patterns of butterflies undertakes a dual career in art and science, attempting to yoke the two in practice and in theory. Yurii is natively drawn to art and history, has interests in physics and the natural sciences, and chooses medicine as a profession because of its practicality and social usefulness (DZ 57). He has a specialist’s knowledge of the eye and writes a paper on the nervous elements of the retina, which he feels as somehow importantly relevant to imagery in art, to the logical structure of ideas, and to artistic creativity (DZ 69). He meditates on the relation of will and purposiveness to the mechanism of natural adaptation, of mimicry to protective coloring, and of the emergence of consciousness to natural selection. He thinks together Darwin and Schelling, the butterfly and modern painting, and envisions the vegetable kingdom as the key to human history and to human life itself (DZ 289, 377). In the dissecting room Yurii is stunned by the beauty of the human body, dead and dismembered, and is overcome by the riddle of life and death and of the fate of individuals. He dreams about writing a culminating book about life, for which his poems are but a preparation (DZ 57).

What are we to make of these catholic interests and tastes and of these bold connections of disparate realms of existence? According to Whitehead, they are endemic to the philosophic spirit. The felt importance of the universe, the world abroad, has many species, provoking a variety of interests irreducible to one another, no one species claiming an ultimate supreme value at the expense of the others. Yet none are alien to the human spirit. We are essentially constituted by our experience of a world of things felt as variously important and by the interests they provoke (MT 16).

Amidst these varied interests, the essence of philosophic rationality is connection, seeing patterned connections within and between things, yoking together analogous patterns in disparate realms, thereby discerning their underlying rational relation (MT 58ff., 203). The discovery of general patterns or interconnections uniting seemingly disjoined facts is the cosmological enterprise. Like Yurii, Whitehead thinks together the natural universe and human civilization, living creatures and art, logical and aesthetic experience.

Granted that Pasternak is a philosophic cosmologist, what does it all come to? What is at the bottom of this cosmological outlook? The clues have already been given, and they concern not so much the universe in general as man in particular. The core conviction, I believe, is that man is wholly in nature. We are integral members of a natural community which is the cosmos. This seemingly innocuous and ostensibly sensible conviction establishes the cosmological perspective from which all philosophical problems are to be raised and resolved.

Such a perspective carries philosophically fateful consequences. If man is in nature, nature must be so construed as to accommodate man. A status in nature must be found for the life, emotions, mentality, and creativity of man. Correlatively, if human activity is natural activity, then civilized life, ethical and intellectual activity, artistic creativity, aesthetic experience, and religious vision must have an essential relation to this newly construed nature, specifically to organic life.

The essential relation of organic life to all human activity is just what we find asserted in both Whitehead and Pasternak. It accounts for the originality of their visions and for their fundamental quarrel with other metaphysical positions.

According to Whitehead, the problem of life, specifically the status of life in nature, is the problem of modern science and philosophy (MT 202). Our conceptual and practical grasp of life has suffered at the hands of modern thinkers, whose conceptions are importantly traceable to Descartes’ deadly dualism of mere mind and mere matter with life -- all life -- banished to a metaphysical limbo (MT 204). This banishment of life from a central place in philosophic thought is precisely why philosophies starting with the Cartesian assumptions fail to gain a reasonably coherent and adequate view of the universe and ourselves.

According to Pasternak, life, the opportunity freely to live concrete, individual human lives, is the problem of modern sociopolitical existence. This is central to the tragic vision which is Dr. Zhivago. For Whitehead, notwithstanding practical problems, life faces the deadly abstractions of modern science and philosophy. For Pasternak, notwithstanding theoretical problems, life faces the practically fateful, no less deadly abstractions of political rhetoric and ill-informed ideology. The interrelation of the two problems is a fascinating and important topic which we must pass over. Nevertheless, "life and motion" threaten to be lost to our modern civilized existence. Whitehead and Pasternak intend to return them to their rightful places.

This central focus on life, human and nonhuman, rather than on mind or mere matter, seems to make the cosmological perspective philosophically inevitable. For notwithstanding Descartes and his modern followers, life is in nature -- how in nature is the fascinating philosophic problem. Life is Whitehead’s "nature alive." And, to repeat, if all modes of human activity are modes of life, then nature and human civilization must be brought together rationally. Life is the grand "go-between," the mediator, the concrete link between nature and culture. Culture and civilized life are only further creative elaborations of nature alive, with principles of civilization and human individuality adumbrated in organic life itself. Or so would claim both Whitehead and Pasternak.

We find ourselves in nature. We ourselves are concrete instances of life in the cosmos and thus are essential clues to its fundamental character and its natural achievements. We are natively equipped with an epistemic arsenal with which to comprehend reality. We need only to attend to ourselves understandingly. This is the inherent, persuasive logic of the philosophical cosmologist’s position, of the thinker who refuses to divorce nature, life, and man.

Given this philosophical persuasion, the fundamental character of life and how concrete instances of "nature alive" are essentially interconnected within the universe become cardinal speculative problems. With these problems in mind, we may approach Pasternak’s philosophy proper.

II. Life and Cosmos in Dr. Zhivago

Early in Dr. Zhivago Pasternak describes life in rural Russia and the bustle of passengers at a local train station -- good Tolstoyan themes (DZ 15). Abruptly he shifts into philosophical speculation. Taken separately, every motion in the world is calculated and purposeful. People are set in motion by the mechanism of their own personal cares. But taken together these motions are "spontaneously intoxicated with the general stream of life which united them all." The individual mechanisms of care only work because they are "regulated and governed by a higher sense of an ultimate freedom from care." This sense is derived from the nature of life itself.

The other name of this region is arguably life itself, which properly understood, comprehends the kingdom of God and history.

Whatever, we are told that all lives are essentially interrelated and flow into one another. And the sense of this interrelation harbors a freedom from care -- from a concern over mortality and death. The ongoing general stream of interconnected, individual lives itself is immortally alive. The immortal one is in the many, and the mortal many are in the one.

Pasternak delves further into this fundamental theme in Yurii s impromptu lecture at the sickbed of Anna Ivanova (DZ 59ff.). Anna is concerned about the immortality of her soul, the survival of her personal consciousness. But, says Yurii, consciousness is a light turned outwards, to help us move about in the world. Consciousness is a function of life in its commerce with the world, not an individual, independent substance. (Whitehead agrees.) And what, Yurii continues, do you know of your self? It is always knowledge of an external, active manifestation of yourself in others, in some work of your hands, in your family and friends. "You in others," that is your soul and will be your immortality.

The active manifestation of the self in others is the concrete, temporal mechanism interconnecting individual lives. The self essentially matters to the very qualitative liveliness of others. This is the only kind of individual immortality Pasternak will allow. Upon Anna s death, Yurii writes a poem in her memory. This is his active, immortalizing" response to her life in him.

This basic mechanism of "life in others," which means that life essentially involves both worldly activity and worldly "suffering" or undergoing, is behind the bewildering interconnections and mutual influences of Dr. Zhivago’s characters. The mutual penetration and real connection of lives, each in the other, is the backbone of the novel, undergirding its tragic vision. Lara and Yurii are a real source of life to one another; Komarovsky and Lara essentially influence one another, for worse and for better; Lara, Yurii, and their families cannot escape the savagery of the war, the revolutions, and their champions. Nor can postwar Russia fully escape the persuasive, fateful voice of Yurii’s poems. Dr. Zhivago is the story of individual, interconnected lives crucifying and resurrecting one another, again and again.

Life "crucified and resurrected" is no mere metaphor but, for Pasternak, a central character of life itself. After denying the traditional religious conception of personal immortality, Yurii tells Anna she should not be concerned. For "all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations and transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn" (DZ 60). You rose from the dead when you were born and never noticed it. St. John holds the key. There is no death, because life ever renews itself. It resurrects itself out of death, which is the past, the over and done with.

Here is adumbrated an important theme which runs throughout Dr. Zhivago: death is (ontologically) a friend of life. Life requires death for its own vital regeneration or resurrection. Concrete instances of life spontaneously arise out of the dead, the already become, which provokes life’s novel immediacy or activity. (Again, this is good Whitehead -- the parallel with the perpetual perishing of actual entities, and their subsequent role as objectively immortal, is too clear to require further elaboration.)

Interestingly, this particular conception of life in nature necessarily implies a notion of natural causation which breaks the hegemony of efficient causation, the complete determination of the consequent by the antecedent. For Pasternak, the present is not, or need not be, totally determined by the past. "By nature" there are authentic revolutions, personal and social. These are spontaneous events, breaking right into the middle of things "without cause," wiping away old habits, unjust and just alike (DZ 164). Such events are the backbone of history, which follows the pattern of the vegetable kingdom, spontaneously changing itself without our notice or without our willful interventions (DZ 377). True revolutions, historical change, the vegetable kingdom -- all are life aboriginally resurrecting itself out of death, the worldly past. This, in part, is the originality of life.

III. History, Art, Eros, and Ethics

Life resurrecting itself out of death, the worldly past, and "life in others" are the metaphysical bones of Pasternak’s cosmology. On the basis of these conceptions, all else must be interpreted, and his singular vision fleshed out. The fundamental theme which runs through his articulated cosmological vision is the central significance of lively individuals in worldly relations. All more specific reflections -- on history, art, religious leaders, women, politics, ethics, etc. -- are but elaborations of this theme.

For the speculative Nikolai, the ultimate importance of individual lives in their immediate, worldly settings was first emphatically recognized by life’s consummate genius, Christ. Christ transformed a blinding preoccupation with the old world abstractions of tribes, nations, and overweening sociopolitical projects into a lively concern with the mystery of the individual and of life itself. "The most important thing is that Christ speaks in parables taken from everyday life, that He explains the truth in terms of everyday reality" (DZ 39). The creative elaboration of everyday, concrete reality, an instance of life’s vital resurrection, culminates in "the irresistible power of unarmed truth," the inward music which subdues the beast in man and persuasively leads him to goodness by the power of its example.

The idea that underlies this, says Nikolai, is "that the communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful" (DZ 36). Christ natively grasped that life is a primary and ever-recurring ontological drama. It continually carries itself forward by actively renewing itself and its goodness in and through its interrelated, concrete vehicles, worldly individuals.

This idea also underlies Nikolai’s conception of history. History is "the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming it. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies (DZ 13). Human life actively meditates on the given, past world, thereby resurrecting itself. The dead is overcome understandingly or creatively, in science, art, or concrete practice. The past is taken up in an atemporal concept or a newly created form.

Further, this recurrent process is necessarily individual. There are only concrete instances of life, only individual, more or less creative transformations of the given. By the "immortal communion between mortals," "life in others" (ontologically the only way the historical project can be carried out), individual men participate in the creation of ongoing history, influenced and influencing. They do not "die in a ditch like a dog" (DZ 13). History is man’s true home in which he creatively springs beyond mere animal life. Yet man’s home is in the house of the cosmos, for human history is cosmic life’s own creative transformations. History is life endowed with human memory of the past and human aspirations for the future.

For Nikolai, Christ is at the font of truly human history precisely because he emphatically underscores its requisite principles: love of one’s neighbor, the supreme form of vital energy (the "immortal communion between mortals"), the idea of free personality (only individuals seek and are persuaded by the truth), and the idea of life as sacrifice, ultimately to life itself (DZ 13).

Christ’s genius for life likewise establishes him as the consummate artist, who decisively sets the course for modern art. This is a contribution of primary importance. For Pasternak, art is a crucial ingredient of man’s historical project, the overcoming of death and the resurrection of life.

Art, speculates Yurii, is not a category, but a vital principle, a force, a truth realized in its concrete instances. Art is not so much form as a hidden, secret part of content which is always essentially the same. It is "a statement about life so all-embracing that it can’t be split up into separate words" (DZ 235). Further, "Art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence" (DZ 378).

Art has its ultimate root in organic life. We are back at our fundamental theme of life, "one, immense, ever-changing, ever the same, concretely renewing itself. Art is a mode of life’s vital resurrection. However, an important new note has been sounded which increasingly will occupy us. Life, in art as elsewhere, engenders new forms of itself, out of itself, in its vital resurrection within concrete worldly settings.

Life implies and requires death. Life also implies and requires form. Life, death, and form must philosophically be brought together. This is just what we find in Yurii’s further meditations on art.

At Anna Ivanova’s funeral, Yurii notices in a glance peach-colored washing hanging in the monastery yard and how attractive his future wife, Tonia, is in black. In answer to the desolation of others, he is irresistibly drawn into poetic activity, to work out new forms and to create beauty. "More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the revelation of St. John" (DZ 78). Art echoes history, for both are constitutive modes of cosmic life.

The theme of life, death, and form is deepened in Yurii’s curious typhus dream. Passing through the crisis of his illness, Yurii dreams of writing a poem about Christ, specifically about the three days of turmoil, the raging earth assailing "the deathless incarnation of love" between His entombment and resurrection (DZ 174). Directly or indirectly, Tonia and Lara are present in the dream, nurturing him back to physical and artistic health. But the dream’s most striking feature is the presence of the enigmatic Evgraf, Yurii’s half brother, who is helping him write the poem. Yurii recognizes Evgraf as his death. Yurii asks, how could death be useful, a help in creative activity?

Evgraf is the son of Yurii’s suicide father, of the unregenerative legacy Yurii explicitly renounced, his "over and done with." Significantly, Evgraf himself is not creative, yet he recurrently pops up in the novel as Yurii’s benefactor, temporarily stemming the tide of the havoc wrought by the revolution and civil wars, putting things in order, providing Yurii an opportunity for pursuing his family life and creative talents. Evgraf effectively embodies a vestige of prerevolutionary order and resourcefulness. This is how "death" can finally be a true friend of life, and thus of art. The past world, including the artist’s personal past, must have a requisite order if life is humanly to renew itself. Death, the past, must have its definite concrete forms if important and original forms are to merge.

This fundamental insight was originally expressed through and by Christ. Art’s "timeless" history was deflected and deepened by Christ’s creative attention to the mystery of the individual and to the importance of everyday life. "Only the familiar transformed by genius is truly great" (DZ 237). Art requires the familiar and ultimately serves everyday life. The great object lesson is Pushkin, who opened the windows and let concrete reality, with its life and motion, storm into the lines of his poetry, "driving out the vaguer parts of speech" (DZ 237). This was more than aesthetic service. Pushkin reaffirmed the sanctity of everyday, "bourgeois" existence -- housewives, quiet lives, and big bowls of cabbage soup. With form and content indissoluble, the works of Pushkin (and later Chekov) become irresistible powers of unarmed truth, "like apples picked green, ripening of themselves, mellowing gradually and growing richer in meaning" (DZ 237). They concretely realize the unchanging aim of art: "homecoming, return to one’s family, to oneself, to true existence" (DZ 139).

Pushkin performs the same function as Christ. They have the same office and duty: to express the highest native talent, the talent for life, thereby resurrecting a truly human way of life. In some form or other, Christ’s passion must be authentically reenacted again and again. We repeatedly must be called back to everyday life and its requisite forms. There will always be a Pushkin, a Yurii, or a Hamlet, whom chance has allotted "the role of judge of his own time and servant of the future," the high destiny of "a life devoted and pre-ordained to a heroic task" (TS 129). In Pasternak’s cosmos, Christ and man are equals, each serving the same master, life itself.

This brings us to a final ingredient of Pasternak’s cosmic harmony, without which we cannot fully understand the interrelations of life, death, form, and art. This is eros, love. With love, Pasternak’s women emphatically enter the cosmic picture.

The theme of eros and women is explicitly sounded in the eccentric Sima’s conversations with Lara, with her original reformation of Nikolai’s speculative theses on religion and history. Mary replaces Christ as the inaugurator of modern, truly human history. The everyday girl gives birth to "universal life" by miraculous inspiration (DZ 342). "Universal life," God, becomes man, and henceforth individual lives and the creative elaboration of everyday reality become the life story of God (DZ 343).

Sima ponders why Mary Magdalene is mentioned on the eve of Easter, as a timely reminder of what life is before the ensuing death and resurrection of "universal life." This reminder is of concrete life, temporal, sensual, and passionate; crucified and seeking renewal; boldly speaking in bodily, everyday images. Magdalene embraces Christ in the waves of her hair, thirsting after his forgiving mercy. Sima exclaims, "What familiarity, what equality between God and life, God and the individual, God and a woman!" (DZ 345). Sima’s Christ is curiously silent. Who is resurrecting whom? Who is the consummate artist, creatively speaking the truth in terms taken from everyday life? The Magdalene of Yurii’s poems speaks in the same earthly erotic voice, with the same effect.

Sima’s speculations suggest that eros, as embodied in individuals, is the true artist, that eros is essential to the renewal of life, to art, and to the origination of form. For Pasternak, this is indeed so, as we see with Lara.

Lara is crucified by world events, by her womanly erotic impetuousness, and by her sensual embroilment with the "pagan" lawyer Komarovsky. Yet in her worldly involvements, she is a first daughter of the living cosmos, its natural work of art, and a living example of what Pasternak envisions human art should be. She is a creature of grace and vital harmony -- a dark, husky voice speaking a current of spontaneously flowing words, commanding by their truthfulness.

Lara is eros and form indissoluble.

What precisely did Lara mean to Yurii, to his personal and creative life? Practically everything. For Yurii, Lara was a deep electric current, charged with all the femininity in the world; a spring evening punctuated with the sound of children; vast Russia herself, his incomparable mother, splendid in all her extravagant contradictions, the blessing of his existence (DZ 325). Lara was existence itself.

Eros is the basal energy of life. Lara is Yurii’s gateway to the universe abroad and his means for understanding everything in the world.

On one side, erotic liveliness is essential to wisdom. Life, for Pasternak, can be intimately and finally known only by true lovers. In Translating Shakespeare, commenting on Romeo and Juliet, Pasternak explicitly asserts that love is an elemental cosmic force, simple and unconditional, wearing a disguise of meekness. It is not a state of mind but the foundation of the universe (TS 132). For Yurii and Sima, certain individuals, particularly women, are primary embodiments of this universal, sensuous eros, with an instinctive knowledge of life’s erotic ways. Final wisdom is understanding the nature of great love: what it requires, what nourishes it, what damns it. This in part is the philosophic significance of Lara’s and Yurii’s relation, of the two who are "by nature" compelled to love.

Thus we have the "immortal" Platonic dialogues of Yurii and Lara, the modern Socrates and Diotima. Lara, the incarnation of life’s universal eros, intuitively comprehends love’s need for an orderly, domestic world and for a childlike vision that can grasp life’s beauty. She understands that the havoc brought by the war, the overthrow of all old customs and order, the modern reign of untruth and bombastic rhetoric, and the fear of following one’s own conscience have destroyed all real love and family life, including her marriage with Pasha (DZ 335). To these reflections, which embody the genius of Nikolai’s Christ, Yurii, the "hero of his times," can add little.

Eros, as a fundamental cosmic force, is no less central to art and the creative engendering of form. Yurii’s poems are invariably inspired by Lara or other women, by their life in him and his nerve-wracking jealousy over their fateful, suffering involvement in the world. Nevertheless, his poetry is universal and cosmological in tone. The logic is straightforward. Women are particular embodiments of life’s universal eros and rekindle the same in Yurii. The fate of his women is importantly the fate of life itself, the final subject of his poems. The universal is in the particular, and it is Yurii’s office as a poet to bring the universal forth by transforming the particular (DZ 377).

Most significantly, awakened eros is itself responsible for the poet’s creative engendering of new forms. We get a first glance at this in Pasternak’s comments on Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet speak to each other in blank verse. The measure is never stressed nor obvious. There is no declamation. Form never asserts itself at the expense of infinitely discreet content. "This is poetry at its best, and like all such poetry it has the simplicity of prose" (TS 132).

The theme of eros and the artist’s creative engendering of form is further developed in Dr. Zhivago. At Varykino, during what proves to be their last moments together, Lara urges Yurii to return to his poems. Yurii writes "inspired" poetry and speaks of poetic creation. After several stages of necessary, preliminary preparation, language takes over the poet and the creative process.

This is precisely like the "language of love" that Pasternak finds in Romeo and Juliet. Furthermore, the erotic, impetuous, and powerful Lara is the home and receptacle of beauty and meaning. There is no paradox. Language is a mode of cosmic, organic, erotic life, which "creates its own forms in passing." Language is life expressing itself and being expressed, becoming "sensitive and capable of speech." Yurii is taken over by "the movement of universal thought and poetry in its present historical stage and the one to come" (DZ 364). He assumes his creative role in the historical project which is man’s true home. He feels a rare moment of vital peace and blesses his entrance into the incredible, pure realm of existence, which includes the stars, the fields, and Lara and her daughter Katenka in the bed beside him.

The origin of created form in erotic life is finally and most emphatically asserted in the culminating moment of Dr. Zhivago mentioned earlier. In Lara’s momentary resurrection over Yurii’s dead body, she takes leave of him in a spontaneous, original monologue, informed by her instinctive knowledge of life, love, and death. She addresses Yurii

This seems what Yurii always aimed at, but which cost him so much effort. Here are nature, individual human being, and art merged in a way that makes sense only in a cosmos governed by life, and only if this fundamental cosmic principle is erotic and engenders its own forms. Human creativity, feeling, and thinking are in nature, and nature is alive in man.

Such is Pasternak’s cosmological vision. Individuals are essentially involved with one another and with the universe abroad life renews itself out of death, with human love and creative activity the truest and fullest expression of cosmic reality. This vision is founded on Pasternak’s deep passion for the particular, the concrete, the truly lively. Only real, individual lives are ultimately important, and these lives always find themselves in particular worldly relations with one another.

Pasternak’s cosmology, in all its developments, supports this passion for the individual and for life. Without understanding his passion and the cosmological vision which philosophically justifies it, we cannot appreciate a final aspect of Dr. Zhivago. This is the novel’s ethical dimension, Pasternak’s emphatic indictment of Soviet Russia and our modern world.

Above all else, Pasternak is deeply repelled by social and political "blueprintism," the willful foisting of rigid, unyielding forms on humanly communal life, and by individuals denying their original, native personalities in favor of imitating someone or something else (DZ 147,418). He is repelled by all those who are unwilling to attend to life’s aboriginal ways and who give up on their individually unique lives in favor of grand poses, public or private. He is repelled by those who treat life as a substance to be molded (an attitude which only reveals their profound misunderstanding of life), and by all who delight in marching to deadly, "world-important" causes, the abstract issues of ironfisted, uncreative wills (DZ 208, 248, 282). Life cannot be treated with such impunity without disastrous consequences and without sinning against the very goodness of existence.

We might be inclined summarily to dismiss Pasternak on the grounds that an eccentric ethical passion has warped his vision and capacities, cosmological and artistic. This would be a mistake, philosophically if not practically. In his passion for life and the individual, Pasternak was pushed to wrestle with the most ancient of philosophic problems, in particular the problem of form. He speculated that forms are creatively engendered by the protean nature of life itself, in its active self-renewal within concrete worldly settings. This is more radical and "unPlatonic" than Whitehead’s speculative adventures. It assumes something Whitehead claims we cannot assume-that there are no uncreated, fixed forms, whether these be Platonic "realities" or Whiteheadian possibilities. Pasternak’s insight may prove the better road to evermore adequate philosophical cosmologies. Whatever, it has the widest possible ramifications, running the whole gamut of ultimate philosophical questions and concerns. Pasternak and his speculation deserve our further serious attention.

Notes

1 The key for references to the cited works of Pasternak is as follows:

DZ -- Doctor Zhivago. Translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari; Signet Books, The New American Library; New York; 1958.

TS -- Translating Shakespeare. Included in I Remember, translated by Manya Harari; Pantheon Books; New York; 1959.

Whitehead and Nietzsche, indefatigable process philosophers, march to decidedly different philosophic drums. Yet at a striking junction, they cross paths. Both find human life and the temporal world of becoming plagued by an ultimate evil that is deeply involved with the nature of time -- in particular, with the essential passage of time and the temporal dimension of the past. Time threatens to devour human significance and the humanly good life.

But here the similarities end. At this crossroads, Whitehead and Nietzsche meet face to face, locked in a fundamental quarrel over the particular evil of time’s passage. For Whitehead, temporal process inevitably destroys worldly achievements. The temporal advance of the universe militates against any lasting permanence, against any realm of final, worldly being (PR 340/ 517). The destruction of a realm of permanence or being is precisely the evil of becoming and process, an evil which Whitehead refuses to accept as final. It must be overcome. Yet this evil is exactly what Nietzsche gladly embraces and calls for. Becoming must be rescued from the permanent obstacle of being, not a realm of being from the evergrinding jaws of becoming. The final problem of time is precisely that it does produce permanence, the stubborn past, which weigh too heavily on the worldly liveliness of human actors. This is the situation Nietzsche refuses to accept. A creative solution is required for overcoming the brute givenness of the past.

In this essay, I wish critically to examine these rival doctrines of the evil of time. This involves understanding Whitehead’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of time within the context of their basic philosophic visions and, in particular, in relation to their interpretations of the nature of value and the good. Further, I examine their creative solutions to the problem of time, which embody their understanding of the finally good life, the culmination of their philosophic efforts. This twin investigation prompts final questions and reflections. Is time, properly understood, really an evil? Have Whitehead and Nietzsche adequately grasped the nature of the finally good life?

1. The Evil of Time: Whitehead

For Whitehead, time is no "empty container," essentially independent of the becoming process and concrete actualities which he claims fundamentally characterize the universe. It is no empty vessel within which the substantive world evolves. Rather, time is produced by the atomic, episodic actualities which together constitute and engender the universe, as it advances into novelty (PR 21/ 31, 65f./ 101ff.). Whitehead’s doctrine of actual occasions, which centrally involves the essential relatedness of these final concreta, is the key to understanding his conception of time.

Briefly, actual occasions are integral drops of experience which, in an episode of subjective immediacy, experientially gather the antecedent world into a novel, concrete unity (MT 205ff.). This experiencing is the immediate actual occasion itself At the conclusion of its immediacy, it becomes an object for superseding actualities. An actual occasion is an experiential episode in which final and efficient causation are essentially interwoven (PR 21/32). It arises out of a particular stage of the world through its ‘objectification’ or nonconscious ‘prehension’ of the systematically arrayed actualities in its past (PR 5lff/ 81ff.) The particular character or definiteness of these experiential bonds is finally determined by what novel creature the occasion "desires" to become (its ‘subjective aim’), given the real opportunities provided by that world (PR 88/ 135). Novelty is achieved through subjective response, the subject’s private reactions (‘subjective forms’) to given entities. This response determines how the world is prehensively appropriated into a complex unity and how the immediate actuality ‘concrescence’ into a final concretum (AI 226). Crucial to this episodic activity is the immanent content and character given by the definitely characterized world of past actualities and the novel forms of definiteness aimed at. The occasion’s particular concrescence is determined by the mating of these two sources of character.

Time is engendered in and by these concrete situations. The present is constituted by episodic immediacy. The past is constituted by former episodes of subjective activity, in their essential relatedness. The future is the anticipation of novel creative uprisings, as related to the present and the past.

This doctrine of the essential relation of time to self-constituting actualities strictly determines what the nature of time must be. By necessity, Whitehead must hold an epochal theory of time (PR 68/ 105). There is no nature at an instant, for the real present is an episode of activity. Secondly, there can be no universal, uniform flow of an "autonomous" time or any continuity of temporal becoming. There are many particular presents (some whose durations "overlap" one another), many particular pasts, many particular futures. Further, as a dependent and relative reality, time is essentially filled by the realized character of the advancing world. The past is always the world of settled actualities. The immediate present is the experiential entertainment of these realized characters, plus entertainment of the potential forms of immediate concrescence and the more or less proximate future. The entertainment of potential forms of definiteness is the reality of the future, relative to any immediate actuality. Still further, the past exists only in the present, as inherited experience, and the present exists by virtue of the past, which is its very basis. This means that as the universe episodically advances, time necessarily has a cumulative character. The ever-growing, character-filled past is experientially gathered into the crookedly advancing, cutting edge of present immediacy (PR 237/ 363).

These epochal and cumulative characters of time importantly figure in Whitehead’s interpretation of concrete values and the humanly good life. Values are realized in the episodic, complex situations which are actual occasions. A concrete value is an actual occasion and, as such, has essential reference to the temporally deep world and to causation, final and efficient (AI 227). In its atomic epoch of self-constitution, the occasion freely determines just how the already realized values of the antecedent world are to be causally efficacious in its novel concretion of experience (PR 54ff./ 85ff., 119/ 182). Immediate, individual value is the actuality’s unique subjective liveliness engendered in this concrescence (PR 339/515; MT 152). Creative activity and character are the warp and woof of concrete values. Specifically, the particular complex form of final subjective response centrally depends on the settled characters of antecedent experiencers. Their former emotional or feeling characters are more or less conformally repeated in the immediate occasion, modified only by the relevant, novel potentials of character aimed at by the subject (PR 162/246). This crucial immanence of the antecedent, temporally deep world is the cumulative character of time.

This cumulative character underlies further fundamentally important cosmic adventures: the engendering of world order; the fashioning of worldly societies of epochal occasions; the advent of biological organisms, human beings, and world-historical cultures (PR 88ff./ 136ff.). These adventures into novel realizations of value depend on the introduction, the emphasis, and the repetition of forms of definiteness or character in superseding actualities (PR 98/150,230/352). The cooperative activities provide for the realization and survival of ever more complex characters. Finally, there emerges a relatively stable, complexly charactered, and significantly ordered world which serves the immediate subjective intensity of those actual occasions that can experientially incorporate the world’s diverse riches. Such occasions are those that reign in the complexly structured, organic society that is a human being. The humanly good life is the immediately intense, novel enjoyment of an agent-filled world, plus creative implication in furthering the world’s novelty of character and significant order (PR 339ff./ 515ff.). This is the creation of human civilization, vibrant and cosmically significant, which in turn serves the lively depths of immediate experience (AI 362).

All of these evolving ventures depend on the cumulative character of time, whereby settled actualities are objectively immanent and causally efficacious in their future descendents. Yet despite this cosmological service, Whitehead judges time to be an ultimate evil. Evil infects its very nature on two counts. The epochal character of temporal becoming is itself an evil. As noted, the final goodness of existence is realized by and essentially involves an actuality’s immediate emotional liveliness (PR 338/ 514, 340/ 516). But such immediate goodness never lasts. The concrete, unique present, the episodic immediacy of a novel actuality, perishes with final concretion. Immediate subjects epochally arise and fall. Epochal time has the essential character of ‘perpetual perishing’ (PR 340/ 517).

Moreover, time’s cumulative character is seriously undercut by the epochal processes that constitute it. Immediacy involves objectification of the past, which, due to the demand for concrete unity of experience, necessarily means experiential elimination of incompatible characters realized in past actualities (PR 26/39,231/353). In the inexorable march of the evolving cosmos, this eventually and inevitably results in the past fading below distinctness of immediate, vivid experience, the past’s only mode of effective existence.

In sum, thanks to the rigors of the creative advance, actualities lose their immediacy and the experiential incorporation of their individual achievement in superseding actuality (PR 340/ 517). Time as perpetually perishing means the ruthless destruction of world subjects, character, and order in the service of novel subjects, character, and order.

Whitehead claims that the higher reaches of rational, human life refuse to accept this as the final, culminating fact (PR 340/ 516). There is the insistent intimation of an order where both immediacy and character are retained, where novelty and achieved order are not antagonistic, where life is not merely a transient enjoyment, transiently useful (PR 340/516). A finer balance of immediate subjects and the evolving world is required, where being and becoming are adequately merged. Here, the twin ultimates, permanence and flux, are finally conjoined and stand in mutual requirement (PR 338/ 513). The solution requires a permanence in fluency and fluency in permanence, the wedding of both novel immediacy and permanence of character. The solution essentially requires a transformation of times character, from ‘perpetual perishing’ into vital everlastingness, both immediate subjects and the world they constitute, the goodness of life and the world, essentially saved (PR 347/ 527).

Such a solution and transformation are impossible in our world, where the evil of epochal time reigns supreme. An extra-mundane actuality, a saving God, is needed -- a nonepisodic actuality, ever in living immediacy, who experientially gathers the advancing universe into its own expanding concreteness.

This is Whitehead’s theistic solution to the evil of time, which we will later examine in more detail. We first turn to the conceptions of time and evil in Nietzsche’s atheistic Thus Spoke Zarathustra.¹

2. The Evil of Time

Nietzschean time is neither epochal nor cumulative. It is not essentially connected with or dependent upon causation, final or efficient. In short, it is not the production of cosmic becoming. Rather, time is more of an "empty container," an independent reality, providing the spacious room in which immediate becoming takes place. Becoming depends on time, not time on becoming. Nietzsche, understandably, still orbits in a Newtonian universe. Yet this has decisive significance for his doctrine of evil, and for his creative solution to evil.

Nietzsche’s time yawns from infinity to infinity. However, it has a certain inexorable, more or less uniform flow -- from the future, through the present, into the past. The universe is through and through a realm of becoming and thus essentially temporal in character, but it moves in the opposite direction. Becoming moves out of the past, into the present, towards the future. Although time provides room for becoming and opportunities for radically new beginnings, time and becoming, in their counter-movements, are potential antagonists. Given the nature of Nietzschean becoming, this antagonism inevitably breaks into the open. Time radically dogs the footsteps of becoming.

Nietzsche’s dominative concern is with the possibilities of human becoming. In the name of earthly life, he wages a frontal attack on any metaphysics of being and against being’s essential tool, reason. The ‘Being’ of reason stands opposed to earthly becoming and its dynamic agent, the protean will. In truth, at the bottom of all things is flux, impermanence, transience, and chance (TSZ 218). Being is the doctrine that "everything stands still," a fateful doctrine resting only on belief in philosophical and theological authorities, not on the nature of reality (TSZ 218f.). Lord Chance, the world’s oldest nobility, must be put back on the throne of metaphysics, with the consequent ascendency of innocence, accident, and wantonness (TSZ 186). Reality and concrete things are thus released from all servitude under purpose. There is no eternal will acting over and through things. There is no overarching rational design to the universe -- no eternal reason-spider and spider-web (TSZ 186). All things escape the clutches of cosmic lawfulness and necessity. The old gods, whether Spinoza’s Substance or Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, are banished. In sum, there is no finely ordered cosmos. Comedy triumphs over tragedy. The happy certainty of all things is that they prefer to dance on the feet of chance (TSZ 186).

The fundamental nature of becoming, and human life, is will to power. Life’s fundamental characteristic is the active, continual endeavor to overcome whatever stands in its way, including itself. Life is that which must overcome itself again and again; that which trust sacrifice itself for its own power and active exercise; that which must be struggle, becoming, goal, and conflict of goals, necessarily following crooked paths and creating beyond itself (TSZ 138). Life is a protean fountain of delight, in need of enmity, dying, and martyrdom, devoured only by a disgust which must be overcome in the pursuit and creation of its own immediate goodness (TSZ 120f.). It is not unfathomable, but merely changeable and untamed. It is not profound, faithful, eternal, or mysterious, but loved and praised only because of its activities, e.g., willing, desiring, and loving (TSZ 131f.).

With these themes of overcoming and creative sublimation, there emerges Nietzsche’s interpretation of man as creator, valuer, and conceiver. Man is the footsteps of life’s will to power (TSZ 138). Through man, life, as will to power, puts itself and its values on the river of becoming (TSZ 136). It creates "worlds." However, this is radically different from Whitehead’s understanding of man’s participation in world creation. With Nietzsche, man aboriginally and necessarily imposes his values (his ‘fors’ and ‘againsts’) and conceptions on reality. This is his way of overcoming. The world is "created" through conceiving and valuing -- the world as it appears to some world-historical people or individual. ‘Being’ is to bend and to accommodate itself to the subject’s will and to become subject to the mind as the mind’s own reflection and mirror (TSZ 136). Will to power, that fallen Hegelian, is to read and to honor itself in its own creation. Further, conceiving and valuing cannot be separated from each other or the basal willing, for the final necessary end is to conceive, i.e., to create, a human (or inhuman) world that man can revere (or creatively despise) (TSZ 136). The protean will, not reason, is behind our most basic world conceptions. All world views and world beliefs are expressions of will to power, the reflections of some ruling will at the moment of its ascendency (TSZ 137). Men either command such beliefs, are ruled by them or are both commanders-obeyers (TSZ 137).

This is decidedly not Whiteheadian. For Whitehead, values conceptions, and order are not radically created de novo and imposed on an amorphous whirlwind of becoming. The nonhuman world has values, order, and "conceptions" of its own, which we only creatively modify in the very act of being our human selves. We have both feet in an objective order of things. This is the fundamental message of the essential conjunction of final and efficient causation, the cumulative character of time, and the essential, reciprocal relation of subject and objectified world. We do not confront a radically alien world, for the "other," the real world as the foundation of experience, is ourselves. With Nietzsche, human actors threaten to become unhinged, internally isolated as they are from any objective basis in an orderly world, nonhuman or human (TSZ 234). This perhaps is the issue of the final independence of time from becoming, of the present as not essentially depending on the content of the past. Nevertheless, we are not cut loose from all moorings. Life as will to power remains an inescapable given. We necessarily have at least one foot in reality. And life harbors the possibility of discovering its true reality and goodness.

Nietzsche claims that modern man, through the machinations of will to power, has in fact become unhinged. He has lost his earth, the sense of his creative self, and his aboriginal innocence. Over the course of cultural evolution, due to an impotence at the heart of the will and to recurrent failures in ever-renewed struggles for ascendency, human will to power lost its good cheer and creatively turned against itself. In the very act of being itself, it developed a malevolent spirit (TSZ 162). It took revenge upon itself and the temporal realm of becoming in the only way it could -- through world creation and world valuation. Creative, potent wills to power were subdued by their impotent brethren through the malicious, if creative fashioning of tables of values (goods and evils) which denigrated the virtues of the earthly will and the value of temporal life in general (TSZ 119, 162). Life soured by impotence created superterrestrial gods, theologies, and metaphysics of being which place the value of existence "elsewhere" and ideologically rob man of his sense of power, creativity, and worth (TSZ 59, 110). In short, the spirit of gravity developed and conquered the human world -- that spirit which would have the earth and life heavy, hard to bear (TSZ 211), and which preaches a world of compulsion, need, consequence, purpose, divine or moral will, and good and evil (TSZ 215).

However, this cultural development did not merely result from historical contingencies and man’s all-too-human, quirky finitude. There is a radical impotence and certain necessity behind its genesis -- namely, will to power’s impotence before the march of time.

Life as will to power lives in the present and looks forward to the future, that empty, open horizon which it can creatively fashion through its own overcomings (TSZ 160). Yet time’s counter dynamics, its moving everything into the past, deeply affects the creative will. The will cannot create the past; it can only create the present and the future. It is impotent before the past, the brute given, the stubbornly there (TSZ 161). Moreover, immediate acts of willing inexorably move into the past to confront new acts with their impotence. Because of time, the will is necessarily a sufferer.

Evil is spawned in this relation of will to power to the essential passage of time. The realm of becoming, Whitehead notwithstanding, is itself innocent; intransigence and impermanence are facts to be celebrated or merely pitied (TSZ 216). It is the will that radically creates evil. It develops a spirit of revenge. Because it is powerless against the past, cannot will backwards and break time’s desire to move everything into the past, it becomes angry (TSZ 162). The impotent will takes revenge on those who do not feel a similar wrath and ill-temper, but who by necessity are also sufferers -- i.e., on creative, innocent, but necessarily finite wills to power. It does so by spiritualizing its revenge, by valuing all suffering as evil and a punishment. Spiritualized revenge is the final secret behind the conception of a static realm of being, that conception whose disguised intention is to damn the realm of becoming and willing itself. Time’s essential passage is valued cosmic justice and punishment, and the necessary need of willing as an eternal, unredeemable curse. Thus the malevolent will creatively produces the spirit of gravity and a great disgust at life, the world, and willing. It counsels a world-weariness and the cessation of willing (TSZ 162). Yet behind this final, nihilistic despair ultimately lies only the will’s antipathy to time and time’s ‘It was’.

This is the problem, according to Nietzsche, that the protean will, not reason, refuses to accept as final. And the solution must come from the finite will itself. Since all theisms are for Nietzsche spiritualized revenge, the will must learn how to affirm time and becoming as given an worldly reality. There can be no "other," saving realm. The will must learn to will backwards, to affirm time, and to redeem the past from malevolent valuation -- to claim that "I wanted or willed it thus," just the way it is (TSZ 163). This is the only way to redeem the will from disgust and revenge and to regain a primordial, creative innocence. However, the will can honestly will the past only if the past, exactly the way it is, is in the future, if it will come again, and if the will can creatively prepare the way for its return. In short, the very logic of Nietzsche’s philosophy of will to power, coupled with his conception of time and evil, leads him to his fundamental doctrine of the eternal recurrence of all things.

However, this logical outcome amounts to a transformation of the character of time and of his philosophy as a whole. The nature of time and becoming is subtly but radically changed. Time and becoming are bent into a circle. Things not only move inexorably into the past, but by this very process, they also move into the future. Things no longer are finally intransigent and impermanent but come again and again eternally. Chance, in any final, meaningful sense, vanishes. Acts of will to power are, in the last analysis, a fate and a necessity. An extreme existential crisis seems to demand extreme philosophic measures.

Whether heeding rational life or the creative will, both Whitehead and Nietzsche feel called upon to transform the worldly character of time and becoming in order to overcome the evil of time and to explain the finally good life. Further, Nietzsche, by the very logic of his thinking, is led into a philosophic concern for permanence and being whose issue has curious parallels to Whitehead’s thought. For both, a finally permanent, significant realm is required for the culmination of the good life. Yet the required transformations and final solutions strictly revolve upon the respective understandings of time and becoming. The solution of the eternal recurrence depends essentially on Nietzsche’s conception of the external, independent relation of time to becoming and willing, coupled with his notion of time as infinite and the becoming universe as finite (TSZ 178). The doctrine would be logically impossible in Whitehead’s scheme where time is cumulative, and becoming depends on the basic situation of novel actualities and the temporally deep world essentially conjoined. This basic divergence re the character of time importantly finds its way into their final visions of the goodness of human life.

3. The Divine Actuality and the Eternal Recubrence: Overcoming Evil and Transforming Time

In this final section, we examine more closely the Whiteheadian and Nietzschean solutions to the problem of ultimate evil: Whitehead’s God and his essential relation to the temporal world, and Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence. In particular, we wish to grasp the significance of these solutions for temporal human subjects. The solutions concretely reveal the final understanding of what is essential to the fulfillment and ultimate goodness of human life. Finally, we wish to question the adequacy of these solutions and ultimate visions.

Like any Whiteheadian actuality, the divine actuality prehensively objectifies the concrete entities of the world and gathers them into its own concrete, immediate experience. God’s experience of the world is essentially determined by efficient causation, by the conformal repetition of finite emotional experiences in subjective form (PR 345/523). The integration of this experience is essentially determined by God’s all-embracing, permanent subjective aim (his aim for his ongoing self), which is to realize all possible forms of definiteness and thus to achieve an absolute intensity of experience (PR 345/ 523). In short, relative to any stage of the advancing world and to any novel actuality, God is an instance of final and efficient causation, achieving his own novel experience of the world. However, this instance is not epochal. This is decisive. God’s immediate conformal experience of worldly actualities never fades and is forever woven anew into his final experiential harmony, which advances along with his experience of the advancing universe (PR 345/ 524). Considered in his full concreteness, God is temporal -- but not epochal. Epochal time vanishes in the divine actuality. This is the crucial step in overcoming the evil of time.

A grand, everlasting, ever-growing cosmos is experientially realized in and by God. Worldly actualities and the significant enduring societies they fashion objectively take their place as essential constituents within this final designing. Their individual characters, emotionally felt and woven together, form the vital harmony, which is God in his immediate concreteness (PR 345/524). The world of finite value achievement, which is absolutely essential to God, receives a final, everlasting harmonization impossible in the world (PR 348/529). God saves what he can. Objectification involves no elimination (PR 346/525). Further, a mutual immediacy among actualities -- actualities as felt by God’s liveliness -- is retained. Time is cumulative, without being epochal; it is transformed into everlastingness. This is the double solution to the evil of time -- no loss of immediacy, no loss of character, permanence and fluency standing in a final mutual requirement.

We now may appreciate the significance of this divinely wrought cosmos for a temporal human subject. The past of the subject, those reigning actualities of the human organism which together constitute the enduring self, have already been objectively incorporated into the everlasting, ever-growing harmony. God’s immediate feelings have realized the past self’s ultimate worth and significance as an enduring individual which essentially contributes to the divine experiential cosmos (PR 349/ 530). This sense of significance returns to the temporal experience of the immediate human subject, who is objectifying its world, which includes God (PR 350/ 532). The subject feels the never-fading importance of its immediate actions, that they essentially contribute to a finally harmonious realm of life which has a permanent significance built upon creative, finite achievements, including its own (PR 350/ 532). The subject feels a judge (his divinely transformed self) spontaneously arising from the very nature of things, embracing significant worldly achievements, damning aesthetic and moral evil, calling for finer worldly issues. Sorrow and pain are redeemed and become an element of triumph (PR 331/ 533). A final sense of vital peace is felt -- an ultimate trust in the everlasting efficacy of beauty, of finer worldly achievement and efforts (AI 367ff:). The "kingdom of heaven is with us today" -- a kingdom to which the enduring subject has made and is making an essential contribution (PR 350/ 532). This is the subject immediately enjoying and actively living the finally good life.

Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophetic spokesman, likewise feels his creative implication in a finally significant, permanent realm of life. This realm is the godless, closed circle of becoming, the great year in which all things are entwined together and which eternally recurs. Yet to grasp the full significance of the eternal recurrence, we must first recall Nietzsche’s basic intentions: namely, to accord an ultimate value to the realm of becoming and temporal life; to redeem and to unleash the creative potentials of earthly will to power; and to help create a humanly significant future.

Zarathustra’s art and aim is to be the creative poet of the world, to save the temporal world through reconceiving and revaluing life and the world, "to compose into one and bring together what is fragment, riddle, and dreadful chance" (TSZ 161, 216). In his own curious fashion, he abrogates crucial functions of Whitehead’s God, who also is poet and savior of the world (PR 346ff./ 525ff.). However, he is animated by a decidedly different vision. Zarathustra looks forward to the time when men themselves will be godlike, blissfully innocent in the creative sport of becoming existence, freely marching to their own individual wills, seeking a community based on individual differences, and enjoying the vicissitudes and machinations of human life, including the spirit of gravity, in good cheer (TSZ 215). These are Nietzsche’s infamous overmen. Zarathustra’s aim is to be a bridge and a bridge-builder to such a future.

However, the way to this future necessarily leads through the path of the past (TSZ 216). The doctrine of the eternal recurrence is the keystone of Zarathustra’s edifice. The doctrine presses the will into an ultimate crisis. It forces the will to accept without qualification the realm of becoming. The past and the present will come again and again. There is no final escape from worldly life (TSZ 179, 236). For a will dominated by the spirit of revenge and gravity, this is ultimate despair. Its suffering at the hands of the all-too-human past and present will eternally recur. The sole escape from overbearing despair is revaluation of the past and the correlative transformation of the spirit of revenge into a spirit of affirmation (TSZ 216, 236). This is the preparation necessary for a truly human life. The crisis is overcome by changing nothing and yet everything, by a peculiar, willful amor fati.

To transform the human spirit, Nietzsche crucially transforms time and becoming. To bend time and becoming into a circle is to engender a final, ironclad realm of permanence or being. It is in the nature of becoming and life to constitute this realm of being, which is none other than the great year of becoming itself. In his own fashion, Nietzsche resolves the problem of permanence and fluency and finds a permanence in fluency and a fluency in permanence. Yet this is a problematic resolution. This realm of life is neither a living actuality, with an ever-growing experience, nor is it a creative advance into novel becoming. From great year to great year, there is no novelty at all. Everything is repeated again and again, and all things are bound fast together in such a way that they draw one another around the circle (TSZ 179). Whether or not this be efficient causation and mechanistic determinism (TSZ 237), Lord Chance has been dealt a severe blow. Dancing feet merely perform old steps. This is a becoming finally void of free choice or novel, agent-initiated achievement.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche considers this realm of necessity or determined becoming a radical voluntarism. The instances of will to power, acting out their own necessity or destiny, creatively constitute the circle of becoming and actively keep the ball rolling. Spinoza’s conception of freedom is pressed into new metaphysical service. Further, the transformation effected by the conception of eternal recurrence discloses new experiential horizons.

Becoming is no longer creatively hurrying into an uncreated future. The future is already determined. Time is no longer hastening inexorably into the past. The immediate past is the distant future. The backs of the ruthless dynamisms of becoming and time are broken. Insistent, pressing concern with the past and the future fades. The immediate present emerges with a new, ultimate significance, tinged with a curious eternity (TSZ 234,238). Correlatively, immediate acts of creation, the self-constitutions of wills to power, are no longer radically contingent preparations for the new world. There is no new world. The determined future is merely called forth by the very fact of present existential exercise. Such exercises are the individual causes of the circle’s revolution (TSZ 237). Yet immediate creation, existence "again" beginning anew in every instant, gains a new and final significance.

This significance centrally determines the ultimate goodness and fulfillment of life. It is the final secret behind Nietzsche’s conception and affirmation of the eternal recurrence. Without reservation, Zarathustra affirms his necessary will, his particular, eternally recurring destiny as the prophet of the eternal recurrence and the bridge to the overman. Without qualification, he affirms the great year and his causal role within it, and this is his final salvation from the evil of revenge. Why? Because now life is finally deemed not radical production, poesis, but sheer ontological performance, praxis, novel or no. The final quality of life as sheer performance makes everything finally significant and acceptable. This final quality is immediate joy. All good things spring for joy into existence (TSZ 193). How could they want or will this only once? Joy wants eternity, to recur eternally (TSZ 244). Since episodes of joy are bound fast with everything else, the joyful creator wills the eternal recurrence of all things. Further, everything else gains its significance by its connection with such innocent, superabundant activity. It is joy that finally moves everything "beyond good and evil" and makes the permanent realm of becoming significant and intrinsically valuable, a true home for human creators.

From the perspective of joy, the world is transformed, i.e., reconceived and revalued, into a garden of delight (TSZ 234). In so far as Zarathustra promotes joy in earthly existence, he becomes an actor of final significance in this fluently permanent realm. He both actively realizes the ultimate good and effectively, if repetitively, lends his goodness to the universe. Conscious recognition of this culminates the goodness of human life and lends Zarathustra his final peace (TSZ 244ff.).

This is Nietzsche’s final, essentially religious vision, which parallels Whitehead’s vision of God and the world. Both find an ultimate significance in temporal life, becoming, and process. It is here that reality is constituted and that actualities realize their goodness, whether this be a joyful creare or intense, novel harmonies of world experience and creative implication in the advancing universe. Both find a required realm of vital permanence which secures everlastingly the individual significance and goodness of worldly actors and which adds an immediate, culminating dimension to human life. But how adequate are these visions?

Whitehead envisions a permanent, growing realm of life to which human actors make essential, lasting, creative contributions. However, though essentially connected to our temporal world, this final realm is a nonworldly actuality, God. It is "elsewhere." Nietzsche envisions a permanent realm of life within the boundaries of the temporal universe, but only by relinquishing freedom of choice, any novel temporal advance, and any creative, individual influence. Worldly or no, this does not seem a realm of life at all, not as we recognize it.

The divine actuality and the eternal recurrence are philosophically required to transform the basic character of time, to overcome its evil, and to win a humanly important realm of vital being. These seem extreme philosophic measures for securing such a welcomed end. Are such measures really required, or do they appear to be brilliant acts of conceptual juggling, an indication of inadequate philosophies? Is the required realm of being so far from our native grasp? Is time really an ultimate evil or an incitement to malevolent revenge?

These questions challenge Whitehead and Nietzsche on phenomenological grounds, on the basic evidence of their philosophies. Phenomenological enterprises essentially depend on human interests. We only find or discover what we look for. Whitehead finds time epochal, cumulative, and perpetually perishing. But his gaze seems dominatively informed by "microorganic" and cosmological interests, by concern with the creative advance of the universe and its atomic building blocks, actual occasions. Nietzsche finds time as essential passage, as rushing everything into the past despite the efforts of creative becoming. However, Newton or no, Nietzsche is mainly concerned with the worldly vicissitudes of the spirit of revenge and its possible overcoming and is thus essentially animated by historical interests. Whitehead discovers the crooked time of the evolving cosmos, and Nietzsche, the more or less linear march of human history.

But has something important been relatively neglected, a crucial dimension of our lives which logically must be central to both philosophers? This is the time of biological organisms, animal and human, and of the earthly realm of organic life. From this interesting perspective, does time appear microscopically epochal, perpetually perishing, or linearly flowing into a stubborn, or utterly irretrievable, past? Rather, the time of organisms and the organic realm seems marked by recurrence and cycles, by epochs which complexly overlap one another. There are the yearly and daily rhythms, the cycles of lives, the rhythms fostered by metabolism, sexuality, and needs of vital psychic and spiritual integrity. We experience at first hand and take for granted deep recurrences of types of things. The crucial, dynamic features of organic and human life are never irretrievably lost. They begin again and again -- for individuals, while they last, and for the realm as a whole. The organic and humanly organic realms have permanent characteristics which play themselves out endlessly, cyclically, "everlastingly."

Interestingly, Whitehead and Nietzsche do give central recognition to features of organic time in their transformations of time and their final visions. Whitehead’s divine, enduring actuality is recurrently revising his ongoing experience of the world in response to the demand for personal, vital, concrete integrity. We recognize our own individual struggles to attain ongoing integrity.² But, unlike ourselves, God forgets nothing. He experientially keeps everything alive. Central organic concerns are muddied by cosmically historical concerns. No individual act of achievement must be allowed to pass into night. There must be a certain individual, everlastingly effective immortality for all.

Nietzsche’s ultimate vision is directly inspired by the nature of organic time. Zarathustra’s animals sing to him the refreshing songs of the cycles of the great seasons, the comic version of the eternal recurrence (TSZ 234). Nietzsche’s imagined overman quits the history of the spirit of revenge for the more cheerful play of a protean natural organism. Life dances over history, which is its playground. Yet Nietzsche will not allow a final end to history. Organic time is stripped from its native context, to be stretched and frozen into a great year. Is this only to cure will to power of its revenge, or is it also, again, to ensure a certain vital, individual immortality?

But what if we should find that individual immortality, in whatever fashion, is not what we finally require? The compelling need to distort organic time or to resort to philosophic extremity may vanish. We could then reask our questions. Is organic time, exactly the way it appears, an ultimate evil; does it provoke malevolence? Everything we hold dear, life’s rich possibilities, cyclically recur. Perhaps concrete things, and living individuals, must pass into the night so that life may begin again, with renewed possibilities. Further, is the worldly realm of organic life not that realm of vital being we require for the final goodness of human life?

From our human, everyday perspective, which no doubt is our concrete perspective (all others being more or less stretched or "abstract"), the richly diversified realm of life appears permanent, with abiding character. It is a vital realm of becoming being which transcends us and yet includes us. Its ongoing goodness both is actively achieved by ourselves, among organic others, and importantly depends on our creative efforts. Organic liveliness is our most intimate participation in being and the goodness of being. Its welfare is our final responsibility.

From this perspective, the evolving cosmos appears as the necessary supporting stage of organic life. History and changing cultural configurations appear as the essential, recurrent performances of intelligent organisms fighting for a vital individual and collective integrity under the spur of organic necessities, physical, psychic, and spiritual. In brief, history and cultures are expressions of life, not realms radically apart from human biological existence. The cosmos, history, and cultures provoke genuine, intrinsic interest. Yet this interest flows out of, and back into, those lively actors whose being and well-being so essentially depend on these dimensions of worldly reality.

Our ultimate joy and final peace may be the ontologically significant performance of life’s excellence, with others and within the world, and creatively laying the foundation for further organic exercises. This may be the finally good life, in which everlasting individual immortality, objective or otherwise, has no place. If this is so, it is a challenge for a novel process philosophy which, whether theistic or atheistic, is even more a philosophy of organism than Whitehead’s or Nietzsche’s.

Notes:

1 The exposition of Nietzsche’s thoughts is based upon Thus Spoke Zarathustra ("TSZ," translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969) because of the central attention given to the spirit of revenge and the eternal recurrence, as well as to life as will to power and valuation. Moreover, since the nature of Nietzsche’s thinking is essentially colored by thought experiment, often leading him to results which contradict or subtly differ from earlier or later formulations, it seems wise and convenient to stay within the confines of Zarathustra.

2 This seems more adequate and convincing than Whitehead’s theory of a biological organism’s being a society of epochal subjects, where ongoing integrity, physical or personal, is the task of many actualities, not of an enduring, self-constituting subject. See my "Whitehead and Jonas: On Biological Organisms and Real Individuals," Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics (a Festschrift for Hans Jonas), Stuart F. Spicker, editor; Philosophy and Medicine, Volume 7 (Dordrect and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978).

Although Whitehead’s theory of propositions has received treatment in many general studies of Whitehead’s philosophy, it has received little attention as a topic by itself. Our contribution is a general comparative study of the central differences among Whitehead’s and Aristotle’s theories about propositions. Specifically, we intend to show that the crucial point of difference, demanded by Whitehead’s metaphysics, is the fact that for Aristotle a proposition contains reference to what is believed to be an actual state of affairs -- either positive or negative -- as a predicable within the proposition, and that Whitehead’s theory does not have such an element. We will see that because of this built-in aspect of the Aristotelian proposition, its defining value is its truth value. The combination of these two elements in Aristotle’s theory generate the logical problem of "negative facts," i.e., affirming actuality of negations, e.g., affirming the fact denoted by the proposition, "The round square does not exist." We will proceed first with an examination of Aristotle’s position and its problems and then turn to Whitehead’s theory, contrasting it with Aristotle’s.¹

A. Aristotle’s View of Propositions

In De Interpretatione chapters 4-6, Aristotle identifies propositions as such with (a) statements of affirmation or denial, and, therefore, with (b) the fact of existence or nonexistence of the corresponding content denoted by the proposition. The corollary of (b) is that truth value is inextricably bound up with the nature of propositions. Thus, in the case of true propositions a true affirmation corresponds to a positive state of affairs, e.g., "This thing is white," and a true denial corresponds to a negative state of affairs, e.g., "This thing is not white." In each case there is an actual fact -- positive or negative -- which must correspond to the assertion; this is significant since the correspondence is a constituent of the proposition qua proposition. If there is no state of affairs to which an affirmation or denial can correspond, the proposition is false and its opposite is true. The important point is that it is constitutive of the very nature of propositions that they either correspond or do not correspond to the asserted state of affairs. This aspect of propositions has the consequence of making truth value a conceptual constituent of any given proposition; put another way, propositional meaningfulness is dependent upon truth value. These aspects of Aristotle’s theory are illustrated in this passage: "We call those propositions single which indicate a single fact, or the conjunction of the parts of which results in unity: those propositions, on the other band, are separate and many in number, which indicate many facts, or whose parts have no conjunction" (17a 15-17). A look at some more passages from Aristotle will help exemplify these central points.

In Chapter 4 Aristotle explains that a word in insolation may have meaning but it is not a proposition. What is interesting about the passage is that in it he equates proposition with affirmation and denial: "The word ‘human’ has meaning, but does not constitute a proposition, either positive or negative. It is only when other words are added that the whole will form an affirmation or denial" (16b 28-30). Further on he equates propositions with their truth value:

To make an affirmation is to affirm the presence of an accident in a subject, and to make a denial is to deny this relation. The nature of a proposition is then to be the linguistic counterpart of the various ways in which predicates (accidents) can, or cannot be, found in subjects (substances). Conceiving of propositions in this manner necessarily entails that truth value be a conceptual constituent of propositions.

This theory of Aristotle’s puts him in the precarious position that Bertrand Russell found himself in centuries later, namely, being theoretically committed to the existence of "unreal objects" or "pseudo-objects." By identifying propositions with linguistic entities, and with their truth value, Aristotle must admit that a rightly denied proposition corresponds with an actual negative state of affairs. Such a proposition must assume the existence of a certain fact in order to deny its existence. Russell recognized that such was the case in propositions like "The round square does not exist."

One could show the same sort of logical inconsistency with Aristotle’s example of affirming or denying that son3ething will be white: " . . . if it is white, the proposition stating that it is white was true; if it is not white, the proposition to the opposite effect was true" (18b). Aristotle’s use of the future tense does not affect our point. For in any tense, if the latter assertion is true, then there still is the problem of having to assume that the privation of the property of whiteness is itself an existing fact which corresponds to a true denial. One is forced to assume such a fact while simultaneously denying that it has existential status.

B. Whitehead’s Theory of Propositions

The logical consequences of Aristotle’s metaphysics are that every proposition must be either true or false with respect to affirming or denying accidents of substances. His metaphysics demands this correspondence theory of truth which entails that the truth value of propositions be intrinsic to the nature of a proposition. Whitehead’s process metaphysics, however, entails a theory of propositions which distinguishes what Aristotle identifies in such a way as to make propositions a real factor in the "process" view of the world while avoiding the logical inconsistency of negative facts.

Whitehead rejects the notion that the Aristotelian subject-predicate form of propositions expresses an ultimate truth, namely, that Substance in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject" (2a 11; cf. PR 137/ 208). The Aristotelian subject-predicate form of statement in Whitehead’s opinion cannot properly allow for the creativity present in the self-realization of the subject, nor the transcendent creativity of the subject as superject.

Whitehead’s metaphysics of internal relations, embodied in the principle of relativity, needs a correspondingly appropriate theory of propositions.² Whitehead provides such a theory which can account for the creative advance of the world, but which is naturally contrary to the sort of theory based on the subject-predicate form of statement.

In part II, chapter 9 of Process and Reality. Whitehead begins

Because of the fusion of eternal objects with actual entities within the potential setting of the proposition, certain qualifications are put on the meanings of "eternal object" and "actual entity." The predicate of a proposition loses much of its generality which it otherwise has in the strict sense of being an eternal object. Whitehead explains, "In the proposition, the eternal object, in respect to its possibilities as a determinant of nexus, is restricted to these logical subjects" (PR 257/ 393). Likewise, the actual entities involved in a proposition lose some of their characteristics qua actual entity.

Thus from the synthesis in the proposition there results an elimination of the objective efficacy for that particular physical feeling from whence the actual entity is abstracted. Its objectification functions only insofar as it indicates the abstract definiteness that the logical subject has within the proposition. This qualified sense of objectification is necessary so that the logical subjects may correspond with the potential nature of the predicate.

One other important part of Whitehead’s theory is the "locus" of a proposition.

This aspect of Whitehead’s theory, as we shall point out, is demanded by his metaphysics, and, more specifically, it is a consequence of the fact that for Whitehead truth value is not a part of a proposition as such.

One of the first steps to understanding the difference between Aristotle and Whitehead on the role of truth value, can be made with regard to Whitehead’s distinction between a judgment and a proposition. Contrary to the belief of the majority of logicians, a proposition is not identical with a judgment; moreover, a proposition, according to Whitehead, is not even a linguistic entity. Whitehead argues that the truth value of a proposition is not to be found in the judgment one makes about it; rather, a judgment is actually a subjective feeling of a proposition. Thus, truth and falsity are only ascribed to propositions, and correctness, incorrectness, or suspension are ascribed to judgments (PR 191/291). The correctness or incorrectness of a judgment is self-referential; there is a coherence within the judging subject if that subject correctly judges the truth or falsity of a proposition. A judgment is a feeling in the process of the judging subject, and it is correct or in correct respecting that subject. . . . This judgment [about a proposition] affirms, correctly or incorrectly, a real fact in the constitution of the judging subject" PR 191/ 291).

Whitehead summarizes the distinction between ajudgment and a proposition in the following:

Whitehead then shows the distinction even more strongly in the lines which follow this quotation, allowing, in effect, that the same proposition could possibly make up the content of contradictory judgments.

Two conditions must be fulfilled in order for the situation described in the last quotation to take place. First, the judging subjects must have in their actual world the actual entities presupposed by the proposition. Secondly, the judging subjects must have the requisite knowledge of the world defined by the first condition (PR 193/294). If these conditions are not fulfilled, then the proposition is nonexistent for the first case, and the judgment is impossible for the second.

The truth or falsity of a proposition has importance in the determination of a correct or incorrect standpoint of the judging subject, but this importance is not relevant for the proposition qua proposition; as Whitehead explains: since each actual world is relative to standpoint, it is only some actual entities which will have the standpoints so as to include, in their actual world, the actual entities which constitute the logical subjects of the proposition" (PR 193/ 293f.). Since a proposition is not a verbal statement (nor some other linguistic entity), nor a judgment, propositional truth value is entertained in the feeling of propositions that may issue in linguistic entities or judgments, but as distinct from the proposition as such. Truth or falsity is established by means of the anchor that the logical subject has in given fact, but truth value is not intrinsic to the proposition in itself. Truth or falsity must be established somewhere along the line, but the primary reason for showing the distinction between judgments, linguistic entities, and propositions is that the truth value of what is being proposed (in the proposition) is not a part of that delimited content. The content’s truth value does not contribute to the intelligible aspect of that content. Whitehead states the following concerning the truth value which must eventually be established: "Truth and falsehood always require some element of sheer given-ness. Eternal objects cannot demonstrate what they are except in some given fact. The logical subjects of a proposition supply the element of givenness requisite for truth and falsehood" (PR 258f./ 395). Concerning truth or falsity of a proposition as such, Whitehead has this to say: "But its own truth, or its own falsity is no business of a proposition. That question concerns only a subject entertaining a propositional feeling with that proposition for its datum" (PR 258/ 394f.). For Whitehead, the critical problem with the Aristotelian propositional expression is that it identifies a proposition with its judgment, which, because of Aristotle’s substance/accident metaphysics, necessarily includes taking a stand on the proposition’s truth value. Another important way of understanding a proposition’s independence from truth value can be found in Whitehead’s description of a propositional feeling at the end of part III.

This synthesis of eternal object and actual entity can be "picked out," "held up" for valuation precisely because its truth value is not in the nature of the synthesis. For Whitehead it may be that the state of affairs picked out by a proposition is mistakenly accepted. Thus the state of affairs might not be true, but the propositions eventual truth value makes no difference to the state of affairs which is picked out. The existence or nonexistence of the state of affairs picked out by a proposition does, however, make a difference in terms of the proposition’s truth value. To say that a proposition is true or false does make a difference not to what is picked out, but to the proposition inasmuch as what was once a proposition is now something extrapropositional, i.e., insofar as it is no longer an entity between an eternal object and an actual occasion. Truth value pertains to a proposition not as such but qua extrapropositional.

C. The Significance of Propositions

Distinguishing a proposition from its judgment or its linguistic expressions enables Whitehead to show the real significance of a proposition. That significance is to be a lure for novelty. Propositions must be distinguished from these other related entities because propositions are metaphysically part of the creative advance of the world. The world’s creativity is fundamentally incompatible with a theory of propositions which reflects an Aristotelian metaphysics according to Whitehead. As a result of logicians identifying propositions with judgments, Whitehead tells us that "false propositions have fared badly, thrown into the dustheap, neglected. 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 to interest" (PR 259/ 395f.).

Even propositions which are false can still be interesting, a lure for feeling.

In the same vein, Whitehead states that a proposition "is a datum for feeling, awaiting a subject feeling it" (PR 259/ 395). Donald Sherburne gives an interesting example of Whitehead’s meaning in the following:

Many people in a given town may be aware of the existence of an empty lot in the center of town, but only one enterprising businessman may positively prehend the proposition indicated by the words restaurant on that corner. At the moment he first prehends the proposition, it is false. But this is not the important fact about the proposition. As a lure for feeling the proposition may lead the businessman to buy the lot and build the restaurant. (KPR 240)

Not only are propositions part of the concrescing process of the prehending subject, but they have what Martin Greenman calls an "eternally objective structure." The principle of relativity demands that all entities which are not contemporaneous be internally related; thus, propositions whose function it is to pick out the real possibility of novelty presuppose a metaphysical character of the universe which Whitehead describes as "a hierarchical patience involving systematic gradations of character" (PR 192/ 293). Greenman explains that a proposition is that proposition precisely because it takes its place in its eternally objective structure, or, what Whitehead would describe as its place in a hierarchy of wider and wider societies (FR 192/ 293).⁴

This metaphysical character of the universe is another way of justifying the claim that a verbal statement is never the full expression of a proposition. In any proposition it is always "a matter of convention as to which of the proximate societies are reckoned as logical subjects and which as background" (PR 192/293). Whitehead often refers to the proposition "Socrates is mortal" as an example of the shading off of logical subjects into the hierarchical patience of the universe. The proposition could be written as "It is Socratic and mortal," where each of the possible logical subjects would presuppose actual worlds which would exemplify certain systematic schemes in which the predicates would be realizable (PR 264f./ 403f.).⁵ This is another way of explaining the "locus" of a proposition mentioned in part B. If propositions were identical with judgments and their linguistic expressions and had truth value as a conceptual constituent, Whitehead’s notion of the "locus" of a proposition would not be possible.

Since Whitehead divorces the nature of a proposition from its corresponding judgment, he can avoid the problems that a theory like Aristotle’s encounters altogether;⁶ he need not posit negations as actual states of affairs in order to deny their existence. One does not actually discover or observe a rightly denied proposition, nor the falsity of a mistakenly held proposition; rather, one comes to know what one did or did not expect, and having this knowledge is different in positive ways from what one would know if the opposite were the case. This point would seem to be especially applicable to Whitehead’s theory of propositions since false propositions are not condemned to the dust-heap as logicians would have it. The judging subject in Sherburne’s example may be incorrect in affirming the proposition "There is a restaurant on that corner," but he would observe the proposition’s falsity in positive ways such as observing the boundaries of the empty lot, or an open area surrounded by other businesses on the block, etc. Ironically, for Whitehead, observing the falsity of the proposition in these positive ways would comprise the data for the propositional feeling itself. This would not seem to be a problem for Whitehead; quite to the contrary, it is a good illustration of how the data for the same proposition can on a logical level be the reason for the falsification of the proposition, yet on the level of prehensions be data in the proposition as a lure for the feelings of the judging subject.⁷

References:

BNT -- Grisez, Germain. Beyond the New Theism: A Philosophy of Religion. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.

KPR -- Sherburne, Donald W. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966.

Notes

1 I found that the theory of propositions by Germain Grisez outlined in BNT 40-52 was similar in many respects to Whitehead’s. In his analysis Grisez shows the main points of difference between his theory and the sort of theory that Whitehead criticizes. For these reasons, I found Grisez’s treatment helpful in making the contrasts between Whitehead and Aristotle. Some citations to Grisez are made below in the notes.

2 The correspondence needed is not merely a paralleling, but rather one of reciprocity since propositions have primarily a metaphysical status in Whitehead s view.

3To describe a proposition as "interesting" or as a "lure" is not simply to give it methodological value as in the case of an hypothesis. A proposition is interesting according to Whitehead because it in some way influences the concrescence of an actual entity whether or not it is a true proposition. See Nathan Rotenstreich, On Whitehead’s Theory of Propositions," Review of Metaphysics,5 (1952), 389-404 for the criticism of Whitehead’s notion of "interesting."

4 See Martin Greenman, "A Whiteheadian Analysis of Propositions and Facts," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 13 (1952.53), 477-86. at 484: ". . . any given fact, by virtue of its internal relations to all other facts, reflects in itself the eternally objective structure of the concrete world which includes it. It is that fact by virtue of its relation to all other facts within that concrete world. The real possibility of a novel fact is then defined by the relation of a given concrete world to the whole realm of possibility."

5 See BNT 48-50 for a similar recognition of the background of logical subjects and predicates.

6 There would not seem to be a problem for modal logic in Whitehead’s theory of propositions since a proposition as such is in principle exclusive of’ the question of existence, although the picked out content exists insofar as it is "picked out." Thus, for example, one could know what it would be like for a proposition to be necessarily true or false without actually knowing its truth value. See BNT 45f.

7 Cf. note 3.

-- Peirce, quoted by Hartshorne

I have been preoccupied for a long time with the question, "How is our conscious experience related to our bodies?" The answer I am looking for involves more than knowing what experiences are correlated with what physiological events. It involves understanding how they are correlated. Recently I learned of Whitehead’s concept of psychological physiology. Here is an interesting way of envisioning the correlation -- a way that is radically different from that of ordinary physiological psychology and yet compatible with scientific knowledge. The main difference between these two approaches is reflected in the order of the terms that name them. Whereas physiological psychology assumes that experiences are the outcome of physiological events (physiology comes first), psychological physiology assumes that physiological events are the outcome of experiences (psychology comes first).¹

There are two other notions in Whitehead’s cosmology that are relevant to this topic. First, subjective experience is not limited to animals. The elementary particles that make up the world and possibly other things such as molecules and cells are sentient individuals too. Second, in its essence, experience is not continuous through time. Although it may seem like a flow, it is made up of a sequence of discrete actual occasions -- acts of experiencing. Each occasion of private, subjective experience becomes a public, objective event -- the superject of the experience.

In this new framework my question takes a different form: What are the properties of conscious superjects? More specifically, what kind of physiological event does an occasion of human conscious experience become? If the answer is to be in line with Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, it will have to take account of the idea that conscious occasions are a subclass of presiding occasions -- actual occasions that dominate a physical system so that it functions as an individual rather than as an aggregate.² But my ideas about what the features of presiding superjects should be are not exactly the same as Whitehead’s. This is because I have been influenced by modern holistic approaches, by Hartshorne’s version of process cosmology, and by research in the life sciences. Therefore, I will precede the discussion of conscious superjects with a more general discussion of presiding superjects.

The first section of this paper presents a general cosmological theory that applies not only to human conscious superjects but to presiding superjects of any kind of individual. I try to bring together the notions of hierarchical nesting, forms of relatedness, physical fields, and interstitial spaces in models of the general features of presiding superjects. The models depict three types of features -- spatial, temporal, and dynamic. The resulting picture is different from the one Whitehead presents in PR, but I believe it is the kind of picture he was approaching in his later work.

In the second section I formulate an empirically testable theory of the physiological correlates of conscious experience. This theory unites the spatial, temporal, and dynamic features of presiding superjects in the hypothesis that a conscious occasion becomes a configuration of waves in the electrical field of the brain.

A Cosmological Theory of Presiding Superjects

Spatial Features

What might be the size, shape, and bodily location of conscious superjects? It seems that Whitehead envisioned them as being tiny in size and located in the interstitial space of the brain. "The final percipient route of occasions is perhaps some thread of happenings wandering in ‘empty’ space amid the interstices of the brain" (PR 339/516).

How did Whitehead come to this extraordinary notion? According to one interpretation of his theory, actual occasions become minute objects which are packed one next to the other in space (empty space being filled by "occasions of empty space"). This depicts a world made up of momentary building blocks -- sort of a three-dimensional mosaic of actual occasions.

Apparently this "mosaic model" of the world grew out of Whitehead’s earlier work in physics. There, following contemporary physical theories, he thought of the world as a plenum of infinitesimal event-particles. Later he reasoned that these event-particles should have subjective features as well as objective features -- viz., actual occasions. It seems that, at least in the early stages of his theory, actual occasions still had the spatial features of event-particles. Since a moment of human experience is an actual occasion, each moment must become something tiny like an event-particle.

It is not clear how closely Whitehead held on to this image in his later thinking. But, as I understand his theory of extension in PR, the following rules hold for the spatial relations among actual occasions, and I find no evidence of later modifications of these rules. (A) There are no regions of space that are not occupied by actual occasions. (B) Contemporary occasions do not overlap. (C) One occasion cannot completely surround another occasion.³

These rules do not entail a mosaic model, but in any case, I think the mosaic model is unnecessarily restrictive -- presiding superjects should range in size and shape just as individuals do. To begin with, the mosaic model is discordant with the theory of societies that Whitehead outlines in PR. The theory of societies, like modern general systems theory, pictures a world made up of societies within societies (systems within systems). That is, societies do not just line up side by side like mosaics -- they form "nested hierarchies" that go from subatomic particles through cells to animal bodies, or through stars to galaxies.

The discordance between the mosaic model and the theory of societies is especially clear in the case of an animal body. We presume that some of the subsocieties of the body, such as cells and atoms, attain moments of individuality just as the whole animal does. This means that there are times when these subsocieties have their own presiding occasions. According to the mosaic model presiding occasions of bodies, cells, and atoms are all about the same size and are packed one next to the other in space. How can this be when the societies that these occasions preside over differ so greatly in size, and the smaller societies are nested inside the larger ones?

Another thing to consider is that our experience is a holistic phenomenon that involves the integrated functioning of the whole body. Also, we ordinarily feel embodied. I think that a spatial model should reflect these facts -- the superject of an experience should permeate the body like a "public spirit" that fills the spaces among the cells. In fact, the concept of an interstitial space is especially relevant to this holistic line of thought. In his Gifford lectures of 1922, the great comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan spoke of the emergent unity of an individual as a "form of relatedness" among its parts.⁴ It seems reasonable to think of the interstitial space between the parts of a society as being the locus of the occasion (the form of relatedness) that unites these parts. But to unite the whole society the occasion should fill the whole interstitium, not just one part of it.

I think these are good reasons to develop a new model which has the following features. First, presiding occasions fill the whole interstitial space of the society over which they preside. Second, this space is coextensive with the society itself. Third, presiding occasions of subordinate societies are nested within presiding occasions of superordinate societies. It turns out that it is possible to transform the mosaic model into a "hierarchical model" with the above features without violating the rules of no empty space, no overlap, and no surrounding. I will describe this model and show how it corresponds to the actual anatomical structure of organisms.

Consider the following model of an animal body. Picture a jar full of marbles (the marbles representing the body cells). Imagine pouring a liquid into the jar to fill the interstitial space between the marbles. Imagine further that the liquid solidifies, so that the containing jar itself can be removed, and we are left with a kind of sponge structure packed with marbles. Note that the sponge -- the interstitial stuff -- does not completely surround any marble because each marble touches several adjacent ones. Note also that there are no overlapping regions and no empty spaces.

Now, the sponge-marble structure can be applied to successively lower levels of the animal body. Just imagine each of the marbles (cells) to be, itself, a miniature sponge packed with miniature "secondary" marbles (molecules) which are themselves sponges, and so on. In this kind of nested hierarchical structure no region is ever completely surrounded by any larger region -- topologically everything is side by side just as in the mosaic model. As a matter of fact, the very tiniest region deep inside the structure is actually outside the structure in the same way that any object in the hole of a donut is outside the donut.

How closely does this model correspond to the structure of an animal body? Like the marbles, body cells generally connect with each other at several points along their surface so that the space between them has the topological properties of the above sponge structure. This interstitial space is literally the extracellular fluid compartment which functions as an internal environment for the body cells -- the milieu intérieur of Claude Bernard.⁵

At the cellular level there is something like an interstitial space between the structural proteins that make up the cell walls around and within the cell. Moreover, the adjacent proteins are connected by molecular bonds so that the space does not surround them. The lower we go the more uncertain we are of the actual structure. But, it seems that the data are compatible with the conjecture that there are similar connections and spaces at lower and lower levels.

Thus, it seems possible to transform the mosaic model to one in which presiding occasions permeate the society over which they preside by occupying its interstitial space. This hierarchical model has the advantage of being congruent with the theory of societies and with the notion of holistic emergence. At the same time it seems to be in accordance with Whitehead’s theory of spatial extension.

There is, however, one important feature of the mosaic model that is lost in the hierarchical model. This is the simple notion of an actual occasion as a perspective on the world. This notion is captured in the image of a time-cone which terminates in a punctate region. I believe that this notion can be incorporated into the hierarchical model by an additional elaboration. Imagine that every actual occasion, no matter how large, has a kind of center of gravity -- a "center of experience." Imagine a focus of intensity at this center and then a gradual fading off towards the periphery. This focal point can be conceived of as the origin of the perspective -- the tip of the time-cone.

There are other advantages to this elaboration. The idea that conscious superjects have a central focus matches my normal impression that although I pervade my whole body my mental processes are largely centered in my head. It is possible that different feelings of personal location are associated with different foci of conscious superjects. Also, the foci of successive superjects can be identified with Whitehead’s "thread of happenings" that wander from one part of the brain to another according to where the "greatest intensities of feeling" are to be found. This idea fits what we know about localization of function in the brain -- different mental functions involve different regions.⁶

Temporal Features

What might be the duration of a conscious superject? (I use the term "duration" here in the ordinary sense of a stretch of time rather than in Whitehead’s technical sense of a cross section of the universe.) This question presupposes Whitehead’s theory of epochal time, which has many difficult problems. I will have to bypass some of them here in order to focus on those that are most relevant to this study.

The theory of epochal time states that the genesis of an actual occasion does not take place in physical (clock) time; it creates a quantum of physical time: in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but that act itself is not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become" (PR 69/107).

I take this to imply that a superject occupies a particular region of space and time which has a definite magnitude and a definite relation to other regions. Therefore, one can say that during a given period of clock time a particular region of space was occupied by a particular superject. But Whitehead does not explicitly distinguish this finite period of objective presence from the endless period of objective existence which follows the concrescence of an occasion. "An actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding over its own immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its function of objective immortality" (PR 45/ 71).

It will be helpful to distinguish a "period of superjective presence." This is the period of clock time during which the superject occupies its particular spatial region. I will assume, on the basis of Whitehead’s principle of process, that the period of superjective presence corresponds to the subjective duration of the occasion (its specious present or presented duration) in some sense or another.

What I want to discuss in this section is the idea that the duration of a superject is correlated with its size (i.e., its hierarchical level in a structured society). Imagine a progression of superjective durations that corresponds to the progression of superjective sizes as one ascends a hierarchy such as the one that makes up an animal body. In this image, there is not just spatial nesting but spatiotemporal nesting in a structured society.

As far as I know, Whitehead does not directly address the question of whether there is a progression of durations. But some of his metaphors suggest that his thought was moving in this direction. In PR he identifies subatomic occasions with events which are only millionths of a second in duration. "Thus, there is every reason to believe that rhythmic periods cannot be dissociated from the protonic and electronic entities" (PR 79/ 122). Also, he seems to have considered the possibility that different types of occasions differ in duration. "The factor of temporal endurance selected for any one actuality will depend upon its initial ‘subjective aim’" (PR 128/ 195). But he says nothing about durations of higher grade occasions in PR, and there is no evidence that he thought of them as being much longer than subatomic occasions at this time. However, in later works he begins to speculate about the actual durations of higher grade occasions and suggests that human conscious occasions have a duration of some tenths of a second.

Perhaps Whitehead was beginning to envision a vast progression of durations correlated with the progressing complexity of occasions. It seems reasonable to suppose that higher grade occasions have longer durations. First, a longer duration seems more suitable for a richer experience -- one that appreciates more of the past, involves more phases of integration, and sees further into the future. Second, empirical data show that, generally, the larger an event, the longer its duration.⁷ Given that higher grade occasions are larger than lower grade occasions, it follows that their durations should be longer.

Once the notion of varying durations is adopted, great new possibilities for speculation are opened. One can consider the possibility of macrocosmic occasions that last minutes, hours, or eons. Also, the idea of a progression of durations brings a certain aesthetic harmony to the theory of societies by unifying the variables of size, duration, and complexity across the levels of hierarchies.

On the other hand, the notion of a progression of durations raises some difficult problems. Perhaps this is why Whitehead did not speculate much here. But, I believe that these problems arise with any theory of durations that allows for any variation at all. The problems are just more obvious when the durations are long and the variations are large. For example, it is difficult to work out a plausible scheme of prehensive relations when durations differ greatly. Imagine the prehensive relations across levels of a structured society in which presiding occasions have durations a million times longer than do subordinate occasions. Other problems arise that involve relative motion, or more generally, relative change. In the cosmological scheme of PR actual occasions do not move. Change is "the difference between actual occasions comprised in some determinate event" (PR 73/ 114). This creates problems when durations vary. How do long-lived, motionless actual occasions keep their place in a society that is in motion? For instance, a person can move a considerable distance in a tenth of a second -- where is the motionless conscious superject that came into being here, when the body is now there? Can we think of the spatiotemporal region between here and there as a static quantum? I will return to these problems later.

Dynamic Features

How might conscious occasions interact with other occasions of the body? The empirical data tell us that neurons are the functional units that carry sensory information from the body into the brain and carry effector information from the brain to the body. If conscious occasions are to play a role in the activities of the body, they must interact with neural occasions. Now, neural impulses are very brief compared to actions of the whole body. A neural occasion could not be much longer than a thousandth of a second without extending over more than a single neural impulse. How can we conceive of the prehensions between conscious occasions and neural occasions?

Given the kind of spatiotemporal progression that I have described, one might envision the interaction between presiding and subordinate occasions as follows. Imagine a presiding occasion to be like an ambient environment for subordinate occasions -- something like our atmosphere is to us or the extracellular fluid is to body cells. There are many different types of changes in an ambient environment -- some very fast like electromagnetic waves, some very slow like the accumulation of pollutants in the air, and some with rapid onsets and offsets but long durations like a rainfall. Let the slow or long-lasting ambient effects represent the acts of presiding occasions. So a presiding occasion is analogous to a context which sets the conditions for life within it. The action of a presiding occasion constitutes a change in the context which produces a change in the individuals within it.

On the other hand, individuals can change the context which defines them. For instance, our short-lived acts can have cumulative effects upon our atmosphere -- each breath we take changes its composition a little. We can actually see our effect on an atmosphere in a small enclosed space -- imagine a room filled with cigarette smoke. Also, it is well-known that body cells alter their extracellular environment by exchanging chemicals, generating heat, and so on.⁸

The analogy uses ordinary physical interactions to illustrate the interplay between a slowly acting, overarching individual and the myriad of quickly acting individuals which make up its body. This raises the question of how to conceive of physical interactions involving living occasions, such as conscious occasions. To be consistent with scientific thought, conscious superjects must have physical properties if they are to have physical effects upon the body.

Whitehead’s speculations about living occasions do not directly address this issue. He was concerned mainly with the problem of reconciling novelty and endurance. He felt that physical structures were too inflexible to allow for the originality that characterizes life. This is why he speculated that conscious occasions occupy the interstices of the brain: "life is a characteristic of ‘empty space’ and not of space ‘occupied’ by any corpuscular society [i.e., material body]" (PR 105 / 161). He suggested that living nexus are characterized by conceptual rather than by physical properties.

But not all physical things are rigid enduring objects like corpuscular societies. Societies of waves (modulations of physical fields) do not have a static structure, and so they seem quite compatible with conceptual novelty in this regard. It is interesting that Whitehead associates physical fields as well as living nexus with empty space (PR 92/ 141). In any case it seems reasonable to identify presiding superjects of physical societies with the physical forces or fields among the subsocieties. What I want to suggest here is that conceptual as well as physical prehensions are manifested physically in conscious superjects. This notion expresses what most neuroscientists believe -- that there is a one-to-one correspondence between mental events and brain events.

There is one more dynamic feature which needs to be discussed. I have not yet accounted for the agency which characterizes individuals. An adequate theory of the interaction between presiding occasions and subordinate occasions should account for our feelings of personal causal efficacy over our bodies.

Critics like Paul Weiss have argued that the inertness of the actual world in Whitehead’s scheme is incompatible with real individual action upon the world.⁹ There are now two problems associated with the inertness of superjects -- the problem of action and the problem of relative motion which I mentioned in the preceding section. Is it essential to Whitehead’s cosmology that superjects be dead facts? Let us see what happens if we "activate" the superject. In other words, consider the idea that motion, and more generally any kind of activity, is just another species of eternal object that ingresses into actuality along with others such as shape and color. This activity should occur during the period of superjective presence which I distinguished before. Thus, an actual occasion has a sort of power during this period that it does not have during its genesis or during its subsequent objective immortality. In Weiss’s terminology one might say that an occasion insists on itself" during this period so that it cannot readily be eliminated from feeling by negative prehensions. But to say that it insists on itself does not mean that it is simultaneously an experiencing subject -- the insistency of the superject can be thought of as a Sort of after-effect of the subjective aim.¹⁰

This modification of the theory of actual occasions fits Whitehead’s observation that in the present cosmic epoch "direct objectification is practically negligible except for contiguous occasions" (PR 308/ 469). The period of superjective presence is precisely this period of contiguity -- the time that the superject is available for direct prehension. After this time the superject is prehended only indirectly through intervening occasions. This is evident in ordinary life in the sense that present events have a kind of insistency that past events lack. I can more or less disregard things that happened in the past, but I cannot readily disregard a present stimulus like a loud sound or a shove from behind.

Another advantage of the idea that superjects are mobile is that some of the problems of relative motion are avoided. For instance occasions can maintain their relative positions in a moving society. (But some additional assumptions would also be needed to account adequately for relative motion.)

Now we must look at the new problems that this modification raises. The theory of epochal time implies that quanta of physical time come into being "in solido." That is, in some sense, each chunk of time comes into being all at once. This might be understandable if the chunks are conceived to be static entities. But how can we conceive of a dynamic superject in these terms -- how can a trajectory of change come into being in solido, all at once, the end along with the beginning? Suppose this is a relatively long duration -- will short-lived occasions concrescing at the beginning of the duration prehend the same features as those concrescing at the end of the duration? I do not know how to answer these questions.

It may be helpful to summarize the alternative solutions to the problems of time and dynamics that came up here. First of all, one can avoid the problems of relative motion by reverting to the idea that all actual occasions have the same brief duration. However, this does not solve the problem of action, it is incongruent with the theory of societies, and it gives me a very implausible account of my experience. If one opts for varying durations instead, one must account for the coordination of motion within and between societies. I cannot imagine any way to do this other than to assume that superjects do move. This has the added benefit of solving the problem of action, but it implies that a trajectory comes into being all at once -- a very questionable idea. Since none of the alternatives is satisfactory one might consider abandoning the theory of epochal time altogether. But then one will have to confront the problems of freedom and causality which the theory uniquely solves.

In summary, it seems to me that the trade-offs involved in the following choices are worthwhile -- epochal time over continuous time, varying durations over a uniform duration, active superjects over inert superjects. Although the remaining problems of the theory of epochal time are awesome, I see no reason to believe that they are insoluble. For instance, perhaps we do not have to think of one notion of time as more fundamental than another -- perhaps we can find ways of conceiving of epochal time and continuous time as basically complementary. This could greatly increase the adequacy of the theory.

A Neurophyslological Theory of Conscious Superjects

Features of Brain Waves

From the standpoint of physiological psychology one wants a theory of conscious superjects that can be tested by experiments. This means that general notions like those of the cosmological theory have to be tied to observable things or to hypothetical constructs which are measurable. Is there any conceivable physiological correlate of experience that has the spatial, temporal, and dynamic features that I have described? I do not know of any that exactly fits these features, but the electrical field of the brain (i.e., the field of "brain waves") comes very close. Also, it has several other attractive features. For instance, it has a unity that matches the unity of experience, and it is complex enough to code the contents of experience in a one-to-one manner. In fact, Wolfgang Kohler and other researchers in the holistic tradition have formulated theories that link conscious experience to brain waves." Let us see what a brain wave model of conscious superjects might look like.

According to biophysical theory the brain waves that are picked up by ordinary electroencephalographic (EEC) recording techniques are superimposed electrical potentials produced by large populations of neurons. Each synaptic event and each neural impulse cause a change in the distributions of electrically charged atoms in the adjacent interstitial fluid. This is reflected in local electrical potentials. When groups of neurons fire synchronously, the local potentials summate to form more widespread potentials. Thus, the electrical field is made up of complex patterns of waves upon waves.

The present theory of conscious superjects proposes that there is another independent variable that determines the pattern of brain waves. This variable is the self-creative action of conscious occasions. The superject of this self-creative action is a particular configuration of brain waves superimposed on the waves produced by neural activity. Now, let us see how well the spatial, temporal, and dynamic features of the brain’s electrical field match those of all presiding superjects.

Electrical potentials are generated throughout the brain. But there are also varying focal regions of activity. For example, the intensities and patterns of the brain waves in different areas of the cortex change according to the kind of mental activity that is going on. However, brain waves are not confined to the brain because the interstitial fluid functions as a conducting medium and it is continuous throughout the body. Cell membranes act as barriers to current flow into the cells, so the electrical field is confined to the interstitial space. The waves travel through this space at roughly the speed of light. They fall off sharply in amplitude with distance from their source in the brain (according to the inverse square law and the impedance of the medium).

One important complication here is that other body organs such as the heart also generate electrical potentials that spread through the body and summate with the potentials from the brain. Therefore, we should think of brain waves as making up just one component of a complex field of electrical activity -- presumably contributing certain characteristic frequencies to the field.

The predominant EEG frequencies are in the range of 3 to 20 cycles per second. It is interesting that these frequencies correspond so closely to the duration that Whitehead suggested for conscious occasions. However, there are many other brain wave frequencies that are not picked up in ordinary EEC recordings. These range from local "action" potentials in the millisecond range to "DC" potentials with durations of minutes or hours. Can we think of the longer potentials as representing single conscious occasions? Not easily. According to the theory of epochal time an occasion does not prehend contemporary occasions. An empirical implication of this is that a conscious occasion cannot be longer than the minimum conscious reaction time to a sensory stimulus. This reaction time varies with different states of consciousness, but it is typically less than a quarter of a second.¹²

A critical property that the brain’s electrical field should have is causal efficacy upon neurons. Recent research suggests that this is in fact, the case. An animal’s brain waves can be directly manipulated by placing it in an electromagnetic field and modulating the electromagnetic waves within the range of the brain’s natural rhythms. This procedure can alter both neural activity and overt behavior in the animals. Also there is evidence of molecular mechanisms in the cell membranes that can amplify small changes in the field to produce large changes in neural activity.¹³ On the other hand, earlier tests of Kohler’s theory found that interference with electrical gradients over the cortex had no effect on behavioral measures (see note 11 for reference to these studies). This and other negative findings will have to be accounted for before we can conclude that the electrical field does have the causal power that the present model requires.

Consider now some shortcomings of the brain wave model. First the uninterrupted flow of brain waves seems discordant with the notion that each superject is a distinct event. This problem is similar to that of reconciling the apparent flow of experience with the idea that it is made up of distinct acts. However, it is important to note that the brain wave model is pretty much compatible with other notions of time, including the ordinary notion of continuous time as well as the notion that time is made up of uniform infinitesimal epochs. As I noted before, each alternative has its own problems, and so this shortcoming of the brain wave model originates in the more general problem of time.

Second, it seems that the model does not correspond to Whitehead’s idea of what makes up electrical waves. He envisioned each electron to be a society of electronic occasions. So a single brain wave would involve many societies of electronic occasions. In contrast, the present model identifies a single conscious occasion with a whole pattern of waves. It might be possible to combine the two notions by thinking of conscious occasions as presiding occasions of the electronic society of the brain, but this involves additional confusion that would need to be cleared up.

Third, the model has the general limitations that beset any abstract concept. It treats parts as though they were wholes -- aspects of things as though they were complete and self-sufficient entities. In the present case, it is important that we do not lose sight of the fact that, in reality, there is no such thing as an electrical field that is separable from current sources, a medium, chemical gradients, heat, gravity, and so on ad infinitum. Also, the spatial boundedness of the field is a kind of fiction. The electrical field of the brain is continuous with the electromagnetic field outside the body. The brain itself is not simply located inside the body.

I do not want to try to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the model at this point. Instead, let us look at some of its scientific implications.

Scientific Implications

What are the implications of the brain wave model for scientific theories and research? To begin with the model diverges from current theories of physical causality. According to process cosmology experience is the coming-into-being of objective reality. In the brain wave model conscious experience is the coming-into-being of a configuration of brain waves. To put it plainly, the model implies that the electrical field of the brain is affected by experience itself. But it takes energy to generate electrical potentials, and, according to biophysics, this energy can come only from cellular metabolism.

Some scientists accept the notion that experience affects body functions but try to formulate the problem in a way that does not involve conflicts with thermodynamic laws. For instance, general systems theorists have proposed that what is involved in such effects is modulation of the overall distribution of energy in a system and not the introduction of new energy into the system. There are many examples of emergent, overarching constraints that govern the interactions among the parts of a physical system and thus alter the distribution of energy within the system. But to account for the causal power of experience in terms of general emergent principles is not yet to explain how a free act of self-creation affects the distribution of energy in the brain. So, I think that there is no getting around that fact that if the present model were correct, it would call for some revisions in current ideas about the determinants of physical fields.

Consider now the experimental implications of the brain wave model. The model states that it is not just cellular activity that determines brain wave patterns -- the way a conscious occasion comes into being also affects the pattern. This implies that in the absence of conscious occasions, say when a person is unconscious, the correlation between neural impulse patterns and brain wave patterns should be higher than when the person is conscious.

A further prediction comes from the notion of mental originality. In accordance with the principle of process, the model implies that a novel idea will be reflected in a novel pattern of brain waves. Novel ideas (conceptual prehensions) are independent of physical data such as neural activity. Therefore, the brain wave pattern reflecting a novel idea should deviate from concurrent neural impulse patterns. The straightforward experimental implication is that the correlation between brain wave patterns and neural impulse patterns should be lower when a person is engaged in creative thought than when engaged in routine activity like adding numbers.¹⁴

Is it possible to test these hypotheses with current neurophysiological techniques? An ideal experiment would require monitoring the activity of all brain cells and all brain waves simultaneously. We are nowhere near being able to do this; however, current technology does let us sample the concurrent activity of small groups of neurons and their ambient electrical field. This is done routinely in experiments with animals and occasionally with human patients undergoing neurological treatment. Although no single experiment of this type would be conclusive, a series of experiments which all pointed in the same direction could be. As a matter of fact, E. R. John and his colleagues have been carrying out experiments of this type to test a model of consciousness that links consciousness to the activity of a particular type of neuron.¹⁵ It appears that John’s model predicts different results than the present model does, and one can think of several feasible experimental designs that would test between the two models. But what is most important here is the fact that researchers are actually testing models like the present one and getting relevant results.

Finally, I believe that these kinds of experiments can also test the validity of the present cosmological theory and of process cosmology in general. In other words, these very general speculative schemes are not entirely immune to empirical data. For instance, suppose that experiment after experiment showed that brain wave patterns deviate most from patterns of neural activity when people are making what look like free choices. Suppose further that no one is able to come up with a good explanation of this phenomenon in terms of biophysical principles. I think that most scientists would consider at least some of the notions of the cosmological theory as being more plausible in the face of such positive results. On the other hand, suppose experiments showed that every brain wave is associated with a neural substrate, and no deviation can be found under any condition. In contrast to the positive results, it seems relatively easy to explain such negative results away, and I cannot think of any other plausible negative results that would strongly disconfirm the cosmological theory. Nevertheless, the more weak disconfirmations that I found the more my confidence in the theory would be eroded. Although I cannot say what the exact logical entailments between the cosmological and the neurophysiological theory are, it seems to me that tests of the neurophysiological theory can have relevance for the cosmological theory.¹⁶

Philosophical implications

Finally, I would like to mention some implications of the neurophysiological and cosmological theories for a most general problem of philosophy -- the problem of the one and the many. It seems that this problem involves a whole set of problems that cross many disciplines. I want to talk about two of these problems -- the problem of emergent individuality and the problem of relations and relata -- because I believe that this study suggests some productive ways of thinking about them.

The problem of emergent individuality can be put simply: How is it that nature can put together an assortment of things in such a way that it gives rise to an individual who then goes about looking after his interests? This is not just a philosophical problem. It is a problem that holistic approaches to biology such as general systems theory have been most interested in, and it is the problem that prompted C. Lloyd Morgan to speculate about forms of relatedness. The empirical theory that I presented here suggests an experimental approach to this problem. According to the theory, the form of relatedness that characterizes unified, purposive functioning in human beings and lower animals should be manifested in their brain waves -- perhaps in some kind of harmony that appears in the brain wave pattern. Thus, we have an observable variable to study, and we can use the techniques of neuroscience to try to find the essential features of the form of relatedness that underlies emergent individuality. Further, experimental research can potentially reveal the principles of brain organization that make the essential harmony possible in animals, and this might illuminate the general principles underlying all instances of emergent individuality.

The problem of relations and relata is much harder to put into words. It seems like a many-sided problem. I think this study is relevant to its cosmological side -- how do relations and relata make up the world? How are they involved in continua and pluralities, fields and particles, individuals and aggregates? In what sense are these terms complementary -- involved in each other’s meaning?

Again, this study does not answer these questions, but it suggests a promising approach. The kinds of models that I used here can illuminate the roles of relations and relata in the world. The models convert very general ideas into simple images that can be visualized and understood intuitively. For instance, one can take the two complementary phases of the sponge-marble model to represent the complementary roles of relations and relata in the make-up of complex things (see text and note 6). This helps one envision how the holistic properties of a society are a function of the relations among its sub-societies. The interstitium represents the arena for these relations -- physical relations make up the physical fields of the interstitium while physical relata make up the particulate (material) properties of the subsocieties that give rise to the interstitium and its fields. Also the model helps one see how relations and relata make up the hierarchical structure of societies. Each descent to a lower level of a structured society shows relata to be composed of relations among sub-relata. This descent can end only with perfectly simple relata. Alternatively, there may be no elementary relata -- the descent may be endless.

When I began this study I had a vague impression that there is a commonality among the notions of relatedness, emergence, individuality, interstitium, and field. I had a feeling that if I understood this commonality I could make better sense of the relation between conscious experience and the body. It seemed that process cosmology might hold the key, sol tried to put these notions together according to process categories. Although there is still much confusion, I feel that this endeavor has shed light on how mind and body might be related. It has also shown how process cosmology can influence research in neurobehavioral science.

Notes

1I overlook several distinctions in the ways physiological psychologists conceive of the mind-brain relation because they are not essential to the point I want to make here. What is relevant here is the common presupposition of scientists that matter (or whatever it is that makes up the physical world) is ontologically prior to experience in the sense that matter can exist without experience but experience cannot exist without matter. In other words experience is the outcome of physiological events because it is a function of the organization of atoms rather than being inherent in the atom itself. Also I want to note that this view is not essential for scientific research. I discuss the advantages of the alternative view of process cosmology elsewhere (George Wolf, "The place of the brain in an ocean of feelings," to be published in a festschrift for Charles Hartshorne edited by John B. Cobb, Jr.).

2 Several of the technical terms used in this study do not come from Whitehead’s vocabulary. The terms "individual" and "aggregate" are used by Hartshorne to distinguish societies which are unified by presiding occasions from those which are not. A given society may be an individual at one moment and an aggregate at another moment.

Also, what I call "conscious occasions are what Whitehead calls "final percipient occasions of human experience. I use the term "conscious occasions" for convenience to refer to ordinary human experience, An approximate operational definition is "any moment in the life of a person that he or she can subsequently remember." This definition does not capture everything one usually would call "conscious experience" hut it is adequate for the present purposes.

Finally, this paper is concerned mainly with objective correlates of experience -- what Whitehead called a coordinate analysis of actual occasions. I often use the term superject" (where Whitehead would use the more general designation occasion or "entity") to emphasize that it is the objective features of the occasion that are being discussed. The term ‘conscious superject" can be taken to refer to the physiological correlate of a moment of ordinary human experience, although this does not exhaust its technical meaning.

3 There is some controversy about how to interpret the rule that occasions cannot overlap (the problem of "regional inclusion"). For a discussion of this problem see John B. Cobb. Jr., and Donald W. Sherburne, PS 3:27-40 (1973), and earlier papers referred to there. Also, there are several other studies which are relevant to this topic and bring up important problems that I do not deal with here. William Gallagher, PS 4:263-74 (1974), comments on the above discussion, as does Lewis S. Ford, PS 3:104-18 (1973), in a review of a relevant book by Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (New York; Humanities Press, 1972). Also see F. Bradford Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1980).

The notion that one occasion cannot surround another is not explicitly stated in PR, but it is implied in an explanatory paragraph appended to part 4, chapter 2. There Whitehead states, "The inside of a region, its volume, has a complete boundedness denied to the extensive potentiality external to it" (PB 301/ 546). This implies that an actual occasion cannot have the shape of an encasement such as an egg shell, or better, an egg white because the region surrounded by the encasement is external to the region occupied by the encasement itself (as the yolk region is external to the white region), but it has a complete boundedness. If this form is not possible, then complete surrounding is not possible. I do not know how important this notion is in relation to the general scheme of extension that Whitehead had in mind. In any case this restriction does not conflict with the alternative model which I will propose. On the other hand, I found no statements in PR that rule out other complex topological forms for actual occasions, especially perforated forms such as a donut or a lattice, and this is critical to my model.

4 C. Lloyd Morgan, Emergent Evolution (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927). Apparently Whitehead was influenced by this work. He mentions it in the preface to, SMW.

5 The analogy is imperfect because motile cells such as white blood cells are not connected to other cells and so, according to this model, would be completely surrounded by interstitial stuff. Furthermore, the extracellular fluid compartment is made up of various types of societies -- water molecules, solutes, and cells. The topological relation between a pervasive presiding occasion and these extracellular societies has yet to be worked out. It may be possible to work out a scheme of spatial relations that entirely avoids complete surrounding, but exploring this would take a lengthy analysis. Since the importance of this principle for Whitehead’s theory of extension is not clear to me, I will not pursue this problem further here.

Also, there is no reason to assume that the presiding occasion is the only occasion that pervades the whole interstitium. One can conceive of a variety of types of interstitial occasions (such as varying forms of "entirely living occasions") that might pervade the whole interstitium sort of adjacent to or intertwined with the presiding occasion. Both Sherburne and Gallagher (see references in note 3) feel that a single strand of occasions is not sufficient to account for human experience. They suggest that one should think in terms of a nexus of occasions to account for the variety of preconscious and unconscious elements that color experience. The present model is compatible with this idea.

6 There are some additional properties and possible elaborations of the model that are worth mentioning. Note first that the model has two (primary) phases -- a sponge phase and a marbles phase. The two phases are topologically identical and interlocked. To envision this imagine that the marbles are slightly flattened where they touch one another so that the region of contact is spread out rather than being a mere point. Next imagine shaking the marbles out of the sponge, making a cast of the holes, and then peeling off the sponge. The cast of the marbles space has the form of a three dimensional lattice such as a jungle gym -- each marble corresponds to a node where the bars meet. The space between the bars has the same lattice form as the jungle gym. This corresponds to the sponge. Thus, the sponge-marble structure can serve as a sort of geometrical model of the complementarity of continuous and discontinuous aspects of reality -- specifically the complementarity of physical fields (sponge phase) and material objects (marbles phase).

Consider next the relation between adjacent levels of interstitial stuff. In the model that I described in the text, the interstitial stuff around the marbles of the sub-adjacent level is taken to be distinct from (externally connected to) the interstitial stuff inside the marbles. This represents, for example, the difference between the extracellular fluid around body cells and the cytoplasm inside them. But there is also a sense in which the space around body cells is continuous with the space inside them. Electron micrographs show that cell walls fold into the cell to form tortuous invaginated channels into its depths. The space inside these channels is continuous with the space around the cell in the same way that the space inside the alimentary tract is continuous with the space around the body. It is possible to think of this continuity as reaching all the way into the atom -- through the spaces between the proteins that form the cell walls and so on. One would need another version of the sponge-marble model to represent this. In this version the primary interstitial stuff -- or better some feature of the stuff -- sort of worms its way down into successively smaller interstitial spaces. The result is that the hierarchy of sponges and marbles is made tip of a single uniform stuff.

It might be that an adequate model of the spatial features of structured societies would have to combine the features of both versions and maybe more. In any case, I find that models like these can be helpful for thinking about the actual structure of the world. The constraints and the implications of certain relationships become very clear, and the models lend themselves to seemingly endless embellishments that suggest empirical hypotheses.

I consulted with several mathematicians about the properties of the structures which I have described here. They advised me that the relevant topics in geometry are lattices, crystallography and fractals. Many of the interesting properties of the sponge-marble structures depend on their elasticity, and so topology is most relevant here while geometric problems like sphere packing are not.

7 To see this unambiguously one must look over the whole range of events from microcosmic to macrocosmic, and one must choose the same type of event at every level. One type of event that occurs ubiquitously is a periodic departure from and return to an origin -- i.e., cycles, pulses, orbits, and so on. Now, the period of an electron is well under a millionth of a second, the human pulse is roughly one per second, and a single rotation of a galaxy takes well over a million years. However, with smaller intervals and different types of events one may encounter significant exceptions to this rule.

Also, it seems more reasonable to think of these periodic events as aggregate events which are the outcome of coordinated activities of constituent occasions than to think of them as acts of single individuals (although Whitehead does identify subatomic pulses with single actual occasions). One might conjecture that such periodic functions of aggregates set the boundary conditions for durations of actual occasions at any given level of a hierarchy.

8 It is instructive to spell out the interactions given in the analogy in terms of prehensions. Consider, for example, the prehensive relations between conscious occasions and neural occasions. To simplify this analysis assume that conscious occasions have a uniform duration of 100 milliseconds and neural occasions have a uniform duration of 1 millisecond. Assume further that during a given period of clock time, say a 300 millisecond period, there occur uninterrupted trains of conscious and neural occasions so that there is a passage of a train of 3 generations of conscious occasions and a multitude of trains of 300 generations of neural occasions. One way to envision the prehensive relations between the conscious and neural occasions during this period is as follows. Each conscious occasion prehends the 100 immediately preceding generations of neural occasions as a single nexus. This set of 100 generations of neural occasions forms a distinct nexus because they all directly prehended the same conscious superject, and this constitutes the defining characteristic of the nexus. To put this another way, a conscious superject which comes into being at T100 (milliseconds) functions as an overarching influence upon the concrescences of all neural occasions between T100 and T200. In turn, this nexus of neural occasions provides the main physical data for the conscious occasion that comes into being at T200 and is "present" until T300.

9 Paul Weiss, First Considerations (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977). See especially Weiss’s reply to Robert Neville’s criticisms -- pp. 223ff.

10 It is not entirely clear how to think about the temporal relation between the genesis of an occasion and its period of superjective presence. Although the genesis does not take place in physical time, it has to be related to physical time in some sense. Thus, it is possible to conceive of the genesis as taking place before the period of superjective presence, at the instant of inception of the period, or concurrently with the period (i.e., the genesis is orthogonal to the arrow of physical time). An adequate discussion of these possibilities would be beyond the scope of this paper, but I want to note that each alternative has serious problems.

11 For a discussion of brain wave theories of consciousness see W. Ritter, "Cognition and the brain," in H. Begleiter, ed., Evoked Brain Potentials and Behavior (New York: Plenum Press, 1978), pp. 197-227. This chapter also gives references to other papers on this topic.

12 However, there maybe nonconscious, overarching occasions that correspond to the long DC potentials. In note 5 I mentioned the possibility of pervasive interstitial occasions other than the presiding occasion. Such occasions might be very long-lasting and serve to contribute enduring components such as moods and expectancies to our conscious experience. These occasions would contribute to conscious experience only when they were positively prehended by the presiding conscious occasion. One way to get suggestive evidence of such long-lasting occasions is to look for delayed emotional or physiological reactions to stimuli -- reactions which come long after the initial conscious reaction.

13 Much of the work that is most relevant to this discussion has been done by W. R. Adey, and he has written several reviews on the subject. Although the work is done in the context of a more general problem -- the effect of environmental electromagnetic fields upon cellular functions -- Adey is also concerned with the question of how brain waves might play a role in normal brain function. See W. R. Adey, "Neurophysiologic effects of radio frequency and microwave radiation," Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 55 (1981), 1079-93.

14 Technical details are not too relevant here, but I want to mention briefly that it is unlikely that one would find gross dissociations between the electrical activities in the field and in the neurons because an autonomous change in the field should cause a corresponding change in the neurons. It is more likely that one would find changes in the phase relations between slow waves and intracellular potentials. In other words a conscious voluntary action should be associated with a tendency for the potentials in the field to lead the potentials in the neurons. Furthermore, there is no reason to expect the shifts to be of equal magnitude in all regions of the brain. It is also relevant here that one would have to take into account not only neurons but also, glial cells since these contribute potentials to the electrical field of the brain.

15 For a review of this work see E. R. John, "A model of consciousness," in G. E. Schwartz and D. Shapiro, eds., Consciousness and Self-Regulation (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), pp. 1-50.

16 But I believe that the relevance of cosmological theories for scientific research does not depend on how readily they can be tested by experiments. Whitehead illuminates the complementarity between speculative and scientific thought in a most general context of evolution and reason in FR. In another paper I give several examples of how process cosmology can benefit science by enhancing the scope of empirical inquiry (see reference in note 1).

Most of what the Basinger brothers say seems to me both sound and sensible. They are quite right, for example, in pointing out that I enthusiastically reject what David Griffin calls "I-omnipotence." According to Griffin, if God has I-omnipotence, then he "can unilaterally effect any state of affairs, if that state of affairs is intrinsically possible." Perhaps another way to put this is to say that God has I-omnipotence if and only if every state of affairs possible in the broadly logical sense is such that it is within God’s power to cause it to be actual. But then, surely, God does not have I-omnipotence. For while the state of affairs consisting in Eve’s freely taking the apple is possible, it is not within God’s power to cause it to obtain; if he causes it to obtain, then he causes Eve to take the apple, in which case she does not take it freely. Eve’s freely taking the apple is a possible state of affairs, but it is not possible that God cause it to be actual. Hence it is not within God’s power to cause it to be actual, and God is therefore not I-omnipotent. So if, as the Basingers say, I am a classical theist, then, as they also say, a classical theist need not (ought not, I would add) accept I-omnipotence.

Still, I do have a couple of caveats. In the first place (contrary to what they say) I do not argue that "it is possible that all creatures (creaturely essences) are such that they would go wrong with respect to at least one action in any world in which they were free with respect to morally significant actions." I have no doubt that you and I could have been significantly free but morally impeccable; there is a possible world in which we are free to do wrong but always do what is right. Indeed, for any significantly free creature there is a possible world in which that creature is significantly free but always does what is right. That this is so, furthermore, is a necessary truth; so I do not think it is possible that there be free creatures some of whom go wrong with respect to at least one action in every world in which they are significantly free. What I do think is this: there are many possible worlds God could not have actualized; and it is possible (I know of no reason to think it is true) that among these worlds are all the worlds in which there are free creatures who always do only what is right. There are plenty of possible worlds where free creatures do no wrong, but it could be that God might not have actualized any of those possible worlds (NN 168-84).

Secondly, I do not believe that "the possible world containing Hitler’s actions -- i.e., the actual world -- contains the greatest net amount of good over evil of any possible world containing free moral agents which God was free to actualize." In the first place, there is not just one possible world in which Hitler exists and perpetrates his abominations; there are any number of such worlds. More importantly, I do not believe the actual world "contains the greatest net amount of good over evil of any possible world containing free agents" God could have actualized; I see no reason to think there is any such world. Perhaps for every world God could have actualized, there is another, containing an even better balance of good over evil (1:9).

Third and most significant: I fear the Basingers perpetuate a confusion Griffin perpetrates about defenses. The Basingers quote Griffin as follows:

They then make the following comment:

Both these comments, I believe, conceal confusion. The Free Will Defense is not a theodicy, and it is not an attempt to explain the existence of evil; it is a defense. In particular, it is a defense against the charge of inconsistency or contradiction. Numberless hordes of atheologians have claimed that a proposition most theists believe -- God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good -- is logically inconsistent with another proposition they believe, namely, that there is evil (or that there is some specific kind of evil such as e.g., nonmoral evil). The Free Will Defense is an effort to show that these two propositions are jointly consistent by finding a proposition that is consistent with the first and such that its conjunction with the first entails the second. It therefore appeals to the following truth of modal logic:

In the particular case at hand, p is God is omnipotent, omniscient, and wholly good and q is there is evil. Now what sorts of conditions must r meet, if the argument is to be successful? Clearly it need be neither true, nor probable, nor plausible, nor believed by most theists, nor anything else of that sort. All it needs to be is consistent with p and such that in conjunction with p it entails q; and if there is such a proposition r, then p and q are consistent. The fact that a particular proffered r is implausible, or not congenial to "modern man," or a poor explanation of q, or whatever, is utterly beside the point.

Since this point has proven unduly unappreciated, let me belabor it a bit. Suppose you have a bright but impetuous student who has been reading epistemology and become enamored of various "High Accessibility principles. In particular, he embraces this claim: if a person is rationally justified at a time t in believing a proposition p, then he knows, at t, that he is rationally justified in believing p. You remonstrate with him as follows: first, you observe that

is consistent with

Next, you point out that P and R together entail

"If so," you conclude (perhaps a bit pedantically) "P and Q are consistent, so that your principle isn’t true." Now suppose your student responds as follows: "Look," he says, "by 1879 Clifford had been lecturing and writing about epistemology for years. In fact in 1879 he published his Lectures and Essays, containing that famous piece ‘The Ethics of Belief’. How could he have done that, if he had never thought about epistemology and hadn’t so much as acquired the concept of rational justifiability? Your R is utterly implausible. No informed person could believe it." This response, obviously enough, is entirely beside the point. R doesn’t have to be plausible to do its job; all it has to be is consistent with P and such that in conjunction with P it entails Q.

But the same holds in the case of the Free Will Defense. Griffin apparently thinks hypotheses about Satan and his cohorts implausible. Plausibility, of course, is in the ear of the hearer, and no doubt many people do find such hypotheses implausible. Their plausibility or lack thereof, however, has nothing whatever to do with their role in the Free Will Defense. That defense is aimed at establishing just one thing: that the relevant P and Q are jointly consistent. Any proposition, plausible or not, that is consistent with P and together with P entails Q will do the trick. Some people seem to think that if you employ an implausible H, then somehow you are committed to it: they seem to think that your claim -- that P an are jointly consistent -- is no more plausible than the R you use to establish it. But of course that is a confusion; it confuses an argument that P and Q are consistent with the very different enterprise of explaining Q, given the truth of P.

Now of course someone might set out on this different enterprise; he might try to explain the existence of evil, or of nonmoral evil, from the theistic perspective; he might try to explain why it is that God permits the various sorts of evil we do in fact find. Here questions of plausibility are indeed relevant; a good explanation will not be unduly implausible. Whether you find a hypothesis implausible, of course, depends on what else you believe. One who does not believe in God, for example, may find the existence of free, nonhuman, immaterial persons such as Satan quite implausible; one who already believes in the existence of at least one such free, nonhuman, immaterial person -- i.e., God -- may find it much less implausible. But at any rate plausibility is relevant to this enterprise.

Now of course it may turn out that the theist cannot think of a plausible explanation for the evil we find. He may believe in God, believe that God is both good and powerful, and believe that God has a reason for permitting evil -- a reason for each specific evil; but he may have nothing but the most general idea as to why God permits these evils. And this can constitute a problem for him. Perplexed and disturbed about a horrifying evil in his own life or the life of some one close to him, the believer may find it hard to trust God, may come to question God’s goodness or his concern, may even come to rebel against God. His perplexity about God’s reasons for permitting evil can thus precipitate a spiritual crisis. But as an intellectual or theoretical problem it does not come to much. If God is good and powerful as the theist believes, then he will indeed have a good reason for permitting evil; but why suppose the theist must be in a position to figure out what it is? And now suppose the best the atheologian can do by way of an antitheistic argument from evil is to point out that theists do not have an explanation for evil: then theism has nothing to fear from him.

One final matter. The Basingers believe "that most influential classical theists -- e.g., Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin -- have affirmed I-omnipotence"; they go on to say that "unfortunately, Plantinga, himself, has not explicitly acknowledged the fact that his analysis of the relation between divine sovereignty and human freedom is basically an attack upon, not a defense of, the view of omnipotence that most classical theists seem to hold." But I very much doubt that there is any one view of omnipotence clearly accepted by most classical theists. A being x has I-omnipotence, you recall, if for every possible state of affairs 5, it is within x’s power to cause S to be actual. And some classical theists -- Leibniz, for example -- seem fairly clearly to affirm that God is I-omnipotent. Many others, however, do not, or do not clearly. Take the four the Basingers mention: Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. Augustine’s views on these matters are not clear, but in De Libero Arbitrio he offers one of the first versions of the Free Will Defense and in some passages seems to suggest that it is not within the power of God to cause it to be the case that someone freely performs an action. Aquinas discusses the matter of omnipotence in some detail and at any rate pays lip service to the claim that God has I-omnipotence. In Summa Theologiae I, Q.25, a.4, however, Thomas discusses the question whether it is possible for God to restore a fallen woman to virginity. Consider Miss X, who is now no longer a virgin: is it now within God’s power to bring it about that she is a virgin? The question is not: is it now within God’s power to bring it about that Miss X is both now a virgin and formerly a fallen woman; that state of affairs is impossible in the broadly logical sense. The question, instead is just this: can God now bring it about that Miss X is a virgin -- i.e., that she is not now and never has been a fallen woman? That state of affairs -- Miss X’s being now a virgin -- is indeed possible, but Aquinas concludes that it is not within God’s power to cause it to be actual. So Aquinas seems to affirm I-omnipotence, but also to deny it.

Calvin sometimes speaks of omnipotence, but I know of no passage in which he discusses the question whether omnipotence consists in being able to actualize just any possible state of affairs. Furthermore, I know of no passage in which he says something from which we could reasonably infer that he thinks of omnipotence in that way; so far as I know, he doesn’t raise that issue. As for Luther, I do not know his thought on this matter. Some of the medievals, however, apparently thought that every state of affairs, whether possible or not, is such that it is within God s power to cause it to be actual. Descartes, shared this view; he clearly teaches that God’s power is absolutely unlimited, so that it is within his power to cause to be actual any state of affairs whatever (DGHN 92-146). My guess is that Luther is closer to Descartes, here, than to Aquinas or Leibniz. In any event, it should be clear that there is not any one conception of God’s omnipotence common to classical theists.

References

DGHN -- Alvin Plantinga. Does God Have a Nature? Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980.

NN -- Alvin Plantinga The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.

1. Alvin Plantinga. "The Probabilistic Argument from Evil," Philosophical Studies (1979).

I

Process philosophers in the tradition of Charles Hartshorne propose an account of God as changing from moment to moment, and therefore as internally complex, internally affected by events in the world, and essentially dependent on other nondivine realities. This account is fundamentally incompatible with the account of God characteristic of classical theology. For the God of classical theology is timeless, unchanging, simple, unaffected by events in the world, and absolutely independent of other, nondivine realities.

One important source of this incompatibility is Hartshorne’s characterization of reality as consisting concretely in units of experience, specifically his contention that experience is essentially temporal in structure and order. Then if there is a concrete, divine reality, that reality must be an experience which stands temporally between other experiences. If there is an enduring divine reality, that is, a divine reality which persists for an extended period or forever, it must, like other enduring realities, be a series of concretely distinct units of experience in which later experiences feel and thus inherit the content of earlier experiences. If there is a God who exists concretely, who endures over the course of human and cosmic history, and who is affected by and affects what occurs in that history, then that God would consist of an ordered series of unit-experiences, each exemplifying the necessary abstract features essential to a divine experience, each experiencing both the divine and the nondivine experiences which had preceded it, and each in turn being felt by the divine and nondivine experiences which succeed it. If, therefore, experience is essentially temporal in structure and order, a timeless unchanging being of the sort proposed by classical theology could not experience, could not know or love, and indeed could not exist concretely.

An important part of the assessment of process theology must therefore be an examination of the concept of temporal experience. To that assessment this essay will contribute modestly by arguing (1) that an account of experience must be compatible with the fact that there is no one thing which is what experience is or is the essence of experience, (2) that no philosophically adequate account of what experience is can be established merely by appeal to direct, personal, intuitive experience of one’s own experience, (3) that generalization from features found in human experience is not sufficient to justify the claim that temporality is essential to experience, but (4) that dialectical argument rather than intuition or generalization is necessary to support the claim that experience is essentially temporal.

II

The process account of reality in general, and of God specifically, appeals to experience in its support. But ‘experience’, as Aristotle remarked of ‘being’, is said in many senses. To speak of one’s years of professional experience, of an experience of humiliation, of an experience of pain, and of an experience of heat is to use ‘experience’ in different senses. Indeed, in a given language there may be no single term with just the variety of senses characteristic of the English word ‘experience’. Talk of experience is thus in some measure a function of the socially and individually imposed conventions relevant to the particular context in which ‘experience’ is being used. These conventions vary, and what might he appropriately called experience under one set of conventions might not be appropriately called experience under a different set. For example, proving the Pythagorean theorem is an experience many of us have had; one can learn the truth of the theorem from proving it; and yet (with a shift in relevant conventions) one has not learned the truth of the theorem from experience, as one might from experience to distrust an acquaintance.

If, as I have suggested, there are different sets of conventions governing the use of the term ‘experience’, and if those conventions are such that what might properly be called experience under one set might not properly be called experience under another, then a rather obvious question arises with regard to the process account of experience. What sense, if any, could there be in speaking, as process philosophers do, of the essence of experience? For, after all, at the heart of the process philosopher’s constructive metaphysics and theology is the claim that having temporal antecedents is essential to experience. But if there is a single essence common to all instances of experience, how could there be different and conflicting conventions determining what is, and what is not, legitimately called experience? Or, if there are different and conflicting conventions, how could there be a single essence common to all cases of experience? One might be tempted to argue (1) that process philosophy and theology rest on the assumption that there is an essence common to all instances of experience, (2) that an examination of the legitimate uses of the term ‘experience’ reveals that there is no such common essence, and therefore (3) that process philosophy and theology are mistaken at the outset.

The argument should be resisted for the time being, even if it should happen to be sound in the end. For there are a number of ways in which the force of the argument can be at least temporarily neutralized. I intend to examine some, but not all, of those ways.

One rather obvious move would be for the process philosopher or theologian to concede that there are different uses of ‘experience’, but to argue that that fact does not entail the nominalistic conclusion that there is no essence of experience. I think that this counterargument is correct -- so far as it goes. It is conceivable, e.g., that, instead of one essence common to everything properly called experience, there might be different essences corresponding to some or all of the different uses of the term.

That opens several paths to the process philosopher. One might claim that the process account of reality and God is constructed from an analysis of one of’ the common uses of the term ‘experience’, without pretending that the other uses offer an apt basis for metaphysical generalization. Or one might claim that, even though there are different uses of the term ‘experience’, there is still something common to all or many of those uses and that process philosophy and theology are constructed around and from an account of an essence common to many different kinds of experience. In this latter case, it might be that some one of the present uses of ‘experience’ already signifies this essence and that the process account is an analysis of one particularly important and central current use of the term. Or it might be that there is no present use of the term which clearly reflects this essence common to all or many kinds of experience and that the task of the process thinker is to construct a new use for the term ‘experience’, where the analysis of this essence will provide criteria constituting a new set of conventions governing a use of the term different from any present use, but intimately related to all or many present uses.

This sketch of possibilities is not intended to be exhaustive. There are perhaps many others. But I shall mention only one more -- one which is important not because of its attractiveness in the abstract, but because it seems to be tempting in practice. Rather than clearly choosing some one path, one may shift from one to another, sometimes acting as though one is explicating the meaning which ‘experience’ has had all along, sometimes acting as though one is exploiting one of the several meanings ‘experience’ has had all along, and sometimes acting as though one is constructing a novel sense for ‘experience’ -- a sense different from (though not unrelated to) any sense the term has had prior to the construction of the process account of experience. Such shifts make it difficult sometimes to determine just what claim is being advanced and, therefore, just which criteria of evaluation are relevant.

The observation that ‘experience’ has many senses does not, however, imply that process philosophy and theology can be rejected a priori because of an illegitimate attempt to speak of the essence of experience. But neither does the prima facie availability of avenues of escape imply that one who sets out on one of those paths will come ultimately to anything but dead ends, impassable swamps, fatal falls from darkened cliffs, or the wandering circles of the lost explorer. The paths need to be cautiously mapped to see where they lead before one abandons oneself to them. In that sense, the process philosopher or theologian who chooses to make some concept of experience central to an account of reality and of God may reasonably be expected to establish the credentials of the concept.

III

Philosophers, however, like other explorers, are commonly tempted by the lure of a direct route which offers rapid and rich reward, instead of the tedium of caution. The Northwest Passage of many philosophers is the promise of privileged access. In the case at hand, some process thinkers seek a direct route to the essence of experience by exploiting the unique promise of a view from the inside. The prospect of discerning an essence of experience in the bewildering mass of disparate things termed experience seems dismayingly remote by contrast with the direct access to the essence of experience which an intuitive and immediate grasp of one’s experience would seem to offer.

It is a prospect which may appear to cut across problems of the sort we were just considering. If I am presented with claims that the variety of uses of ‘experience’ does not and could not reveal any normative essence of experience, I can counter that I have a prelinguistic intuition of the essence of my own experience -- an intuition against which the adequacy or confusion of language can be authoritatively measured. If I have accepted the variety of usage and am looking to find or create a use to support metaphysical generalization, I can rely on the uniquely intimate and immediate revelation of my own experience -- intuitively grasped from within -- to authorize an insider’s judgment about what reality is like at its heart. In any case, I can step away from the complex and obscure maze of language and external phenomena to find simplicity, clarity, immediacy, and profundity in an inner intuition of my own experience as subject. Instead of argument open to mistake there would be direct grasp without intervening source of error. Instead of inferring, one could just look and see.

In some cases this appeal to inner intuition might take the form of the claim that each of us has a "non-sensuous experience of the self" which is "both prior to our interpretation of our sense-knowledge and more important as source for the more fundamental questions of the meaning of our human experience as human selves" (BRO 75). It is not claimed as the special privilege of certain human beings or of certain philosophers. It is a, even the, distinctive feature of being a self, and it grounds one’s experience of any reality external to the self (cf. RG 74). One’s experience of other is grounded in one’s experience of self (cf. P 446, 450).

In other cases this appeal alleges, not that there is any experience of the present self which grounds all experience of the nonself, but that the most immediate objects of present human experience are the immediately preceding instances of human experience (cf., e.g., MMCL 444). Thus, while no experience can be an experience of itself (cf. CSPM 7, 91, 106, 109, 167, 224), each human experience directly grasps other human experiences immediately preceding it at only a moment’s distance. One’s experience of things like trees and fire hydrants is thus mediated by one’s experience of experiences (cf. MMCL 446). Thus one has better access to the nature of experience than to the nature of anything else (cf. MMCL 455, 461, 462). For, in the concrete, one directly experiences only experiences.

This contention is not defeated merely by a critic’s facile claim not to be conscious of any such nonsensuous perception of one’s own "self," or of anything describable as experience mediating one’s experiences of trees, dogs, and fire hydrants. For the thinker who appeals to such awareness may distinguish between awareness and conscious awareness, and then contend that his claim depends only on a necessary awareness which one must have even if one’s awareness is not conscious. In that case the critic’s lack of conscious awareness would not conflict with the claim being advanced. To make this move plausible the thinker might draw an analogy with visual experience. Just as there is a real difference between noticing something already within one’s vision and bringing something new within one’s visual experience, so there is a real difference between becoming conscious of something already within one’s field of experience and introducing something new within the range of one’s experience.

Even if the analogy were sound, i.e., even if there were such awareness of the self, the real effect of distinguishing unconscious and conscious awareness is not to preserve the authority of the experience of the self to which the process thinker is appealing, but instead to underscore the philosophical weakness of the appeal to such privileged and direct experience. Insofar as the experience of this self is unconscious, its immediacy and directness offer no exploitable advantage: one can hardly claim to be conscious of the essence of experience as exhibited immediately and directly in an experience of which one is not consciously aware. Insofar as the experience of this self has been made conscious, it fails to provide the process thinker with the desired immediate and authoritative access to the essence of experience. For the consciousness of that experience of the self is mediated by the dialectical examination or analysis which brings it to consciousness. The authority of that experience is mediated by the dialectical defense of this (mediated) immediacy and its (consequent and derivative) authority.

Schubert Ogden, for example, says that the principle from which process philosophy and theology begin "requires that we take as the experiential basis of all our most fundamental concepts the primal phenomenon of our own existence as experiencing subjects or selves" (HG 57). A reader might take the phrase "the primal phenomenon" to mean or imply some fundamental consciousness of the self, as though the first and most apparent thing of all is "our own existence as experiencing subjects or selves." But Ogden seems to appreciate that this "primal phenomenon" does not leap easily and inevitably to conscious view. His claim is more modest: "no careful analysis of our experience can fail to confirm the difference between our inner non-sensuous perception of our selves and the world as parts of an encompassing whole and the outer perceptions through our senses whereby we discriminate the behavior of all the different beings of which we are originally aware" (RG 105; cf. BRO 65,66). My point is merely that the analysis required to confirm Ogden’s claim -- even if the analysis cannot fail to do so -- itself mediates access to the allegedly primal phenomenon, and thus leaves Ogden with a "phenomenon" which is not epistemically "primal," and access to which is neither epistemically immediate nor privileged nor error-free in principle. The "primal phenomenon," even if it were as described, is only as authoritative as the analysis which renders it epistemically accessible. The account of it is as error-prone as the products of philosophical analysis generally -- which is to say to a nonnegligible degree.

The claim of privileged access is not saved by arguing that each of us intuitively grasps this self without analysis or argument, that each of us singly grasps the essence of experience in this intuition, and that the analysis or argument is required only (1) to call it to the attention of those who have not noticed it, or (2) to defend the claim of such an intuition against those who deny it for no or bad reasons, or (3) to develop its implications and describe its content. The claim is not saved in this way, for the claim to have such an intuition is not the alleged intuition itself, and only that claim is what in fact and in principle enters the realm of philosophical theory and argument.

Moreover, that claim cannot escape characterizing the alleged intuition except at the price of emptiness.¹ If there is indeed such an intuition, then whatever role it might play in other contexts, it is philosophically mute. As itself voiceless and inarticulate, it may be the subject of, but cannot itself participate in, that enterprise of dialectic and articulation which philosophy is. Only one’s account of it can represent it in the inherently public and discursive enterprise of philosophy. And in principle that account cannot itself maintain the immediacy and the infallibility which it might seek to attribute to the intuition which it seeks to articulate and defend.

Consider the comparable case of a mathematician intuitively (and excitedly – "Eureka!") in possession of what he believes to be a solution to a nagging mathematical problem. The solution remains mathematically deficient in an important sense until the mathematician has spelled it out, i.e., has set it out in an explicit, discursive form which stands on its own merits, independent of the particular subjective experience whose objective content the mathematician has sought to display in the explicit formulae. While the mathematician’s intuitive conviction might in some informal contexts be sufficient to justify a claim to have found a solution to the problem in question, it would clearly not be sufficient (nor even relevant) justification in the formal mathematical presentation of the solution itself. That the mathematician had the intuition is not something which functions as a premise in the formal mathematical argument, nor does the occurrence of the intuition provide any guarantee that the argument or proof constructed is successful in satisfying the (quite public) criteria by which the success of such arguments or proofs is measured.

In general, while appeal to or reliance upon one’s own intuition (in some technically unspecified sense of the term) may satisfy the informal demands of many ordinary, nontechnical contexts, such intuitive conviction -- however important heuristically to the individual inquirer -- may be of no logical relevance to the job of satisfying the technical demands constitutive of some formal arena of discourse. In the case at hand, an intuitive grasp of the nature of experience would be no substitute for, no guarantee of, and no part within an account of experience which satisfied the (quite public) criteria by which the adequacy of philosophical accounts is determined. And this is true not only insofar as one’s account is offered to others, but also insofar as one constructs and weighs one’s own account. Just as not even the mathematician described above could be professionally satisfied by his own intuitive solution but for himself wants the explicit formal statement of the solution, so too the philosopher’s own philosophical satisfaction is contingent on the articulation of a dialectically sound account.

There is a further objection to the appeal to one’s own privileged and direct access to the essence of experience as encountered immediately and from within. This further objection is independent of any of the preceding argument and, in my judgment, by itself entirely suffices to defeat the ambitious attempt to find a direct route to the essence of experience as such. Suppose one did have an immediate experience of the experiencing self as such or of immediately preceding momentary units of experience as such. Suppose that the content of these experiences were revealed in such a way as to be philosophically available and fertile. It would still be true, I think, that the content of such an experience, and even a fully adequate and somehow (impossibly) guaranteed inventory of that content, would not alone provide any nonarbitrary basis, intuitive or articulate, for distinguishing what is essential to the experience simply as an experience, and what is essential to it as a specifically human experience -- nor even for determining whether there is anything peculiarly one’s own in the experience, as distinguished from what is essential to human experience as human or as experience.

The point is especially important because a key move in the process thinker’s characterization of God is to argue that since experience as we know it is always and necessarily temporally ordered and structured, so must it be with divine experience as well. I do not argue now that the conclusion is false. But I do argue that even if we each had privileged and direct access to, and guaranteed inventory of, our own individual human experience, only a complex dialectical examination could, if anything could, reasonably and nonarbitrarily determine which features of our own experience -- individual and human -- are essential to experience as such, which are essential to human experience but not to experience as such, and perhaps which are essential to one’s own experience but not to human experience as such. Specifically, only a rather sophisticated philosophical argument could offer a reasonable basis for taking temporal order and structure to be essential to experience as such and therefore to divine experience as well as to our own.

I conclude, therefore, that any temptation to avoid the frustrations of philosophical discourse and argument by appealing to a direct intuition of the essence of experience within oneself should be vigorously and clearsightedly resisted. For in spite of its prima facie attraction, and even if there is such a "primal" experience, that experience would not be accessible in any philosophically helpful way, could not be exploited without reliance upon the very analyses and arguments whose lack of immediacy and authority the appeal is seeking to escape, could not (even for oneself) sustain translation into the discursive and dialectical combat zone of philosophy, and could not by itself alone provide a nonarbitrary basis for determining what in it is essential to experience merely as such. There is, I think, no philosophically viable substitute for the tedious, painstaking, and unending analysis and argument which, properly, most people avoid in favor of the rich directness of normal human life.

IV

The process account of God, of course, does not depend in principle on the legitimacy of a claim of privileged access to the essence of experience. Some process thinkers, Charles Hartshorne preeminent among them, seem to recognize that the view of experience on which process theology rests owes its philosophical credentials to the coherence and intelligibility of its account of experience and to the dialectical defense of its adequacy, rather than to some claim of privileged access -- real or imagined. Since Hartshorne’s account and defense of the process concept of experience is more sophisticated and detailed than any other yet proposed (with the possible exception of Whitehead), and yet assumes a form typical of a major current of process thought, I will examine several aspects of Hartshorne’s dialectical concept of experience.

Although at times Hartshorne has spoken as though his account of experience rested on some intuition of its essence as exhibited in his own experience,² his predominant view and his philosophical practice advance a concept of experience that is generated by dialectical argument rather than by appeal to direct introspection or intuition: "The philosopher, as Whitehead says, is the ‘critic of abstractions.’ He starts, not with the purely concrete, for which abstractions are to be found, but with such more or less suitable abstractions as are already available, and seeks to improve them, having in mind experiences of the concrete. In so far, philosophy is like science" (CSPM 57). Indeed, Hartshorne’s settled view seems to reject even the possibility of a direct intuition of the self (so CSPM 106,109,112,220; but cp. MMCL 461). And when, in proposing that we have direct experience only of what is past, he holds that one’s own immediately preceding experiences are directly experienced, he indicates that this normally involves no consciousness of what is experienced (cf. CSPM 79, 90f., 106, 195, 300). In fact, it seems consistent with his view to claim that they might never be consciously experienced.

Not so clear is whether Hartshorne takes his dialectic to explicate some current use of the term ‘experience’, or whether he takes himself to be constructing a new sense -- a sense that will capture for the first time the true essence of experience (cf. CSPM 33,60, 81, 90,92, 105, 154,155,231,282,288; also, e.g., MVG 19). What is clear and sufficient for now is Hartshorne’s belief that there is an essence of experience (cf., e.g., CSPM 79, 81, 90, 115, 155), that this essence is somehow common to all instances of experience (cf. CSPM 80, 81, 91, 92, 105, 115, 154, 155,156,167, 168, 216ff., 224, 231, 263, 271, 277), and that he knows and is able to say with reasonable adequacy in just what this essence consists.

The resulting account of experience is intended to provide "a legitimate broadest possible meaning of psychical terms which is applicable to all individuals whatever, from atoms to deity" (CSPM 154), and, therefore, to all the various things now legitimately termed experiences. This seems to indicate that Hartshorne is proposing a generic concept broad enough to be oblivious to differences between species of experience. Whether merely the explication of some current concept, or instead the construction of an utterly new one, the result is a concept which Hartshorne believes to stand in real continuity with current uses of ‘experience’ and other "psychical terms." The result would also seem to be a concept which captures the minimal conditions necessarily satisfied by anything to which it is applicable, and which therefore supports a univocal use of ‘experience as applied to any individual, "from atom to deity" (cf. CSPM 3, 33, 75, 90, 91).

The method employed to generate this generic concept consists, on one level, in close scrutiny of ordinary cases (cf. CSPM 231), seeking to find what is common to them. Hartshorne speaks of freeing concepts "of limitations which do not seem inherent" (CSPM 90) in their meaning, or of divesting experience of its "contingent specificities" (CSPM 91). Typically this takes the form of comparing different kinds of experience in the attempt to find conditions common and fundamental to each kind. The search takes a standard form: "What, then, is the concept . . . which expresses what the two forms have in common? If there is none, then our metaphysical search is balked at an essential point. A unitary principle for both might be that . . . or it might be that . . ." (CSPM 91).

In practice Hartshorne commonly looks to one of the cases under examination to supply a paradigm or model to which the other cases may be assimilated. He attempts to discover which of the cases under comparison might be taken to exhibit more clearly the essence of experience, and then moves to state it in a form sufficiently neutral to apply to the other cases as well.

The aspect of primary concern here -- the temporal ordering and structure of experience -- results from just such a choice of memory as a particularly illuminating paradigm of experience.

The choice is clearly a reasoned one. The several reasons are marshaled systematically in support of the conclusion that "memory is the clearer case, and should be studied first" (CSPM 75).

The result of the study should be a description of the relevant feature (s) of memory. But the description should be sufficiently generalized to be equally applicable to perception as well. In that way memory and perception "can be assimilated to one, and . . . memory is in some respects a better name for this single function than perception" (MMCL 441). From generalizing and assimilation of cases there is progressively generated a description by which all and only cases of experience can be characterized. He concludes:

The process of developing this account is clearly rational and constructive in character. It rests on an appeal to "good reasons." It involves imaginative insight into generalizable features of particular kinds of experience. It requires a skillful and knowledgeable appreciation of the systematic consequences -- positive and negative -- of proposed generalizations. And it requires a willingness to use old (and sometimes new) words in perhaps strange but (the user hopes) powerfully illuminating ways that may disturb or add to, but still remain in fundamental continuity with, the conventions dear to common sense (cf. CSPM 81).³

Clearly this kind of imaginative generalization is far from some mysteriously privileged report of some introspectively examined essence of experience. It is a quite public exercise in the manipulation and construction of concepts -- a manipulation of fundamentally the same sort and serving substantially the same purposes as scientific generalization.

Viewed in this way, Hartshorne’s concept of experience seems to be the product of a purely straightforward attempt at theory construction. The theory may or may not be coherent and adequate. But it is an effort to sort out the central features of experiences of various sorts, to generalize their descriptions, and to develop in that way a generic notion of experience intended to be applicable to all the various kinds of experience.

V

A prime feature of the resultant notion of experience is temporal ordering and structure. From the selection of memory as a paradigm of experience, and from the generalization of the paradigmatic intuition of the past, temporal ordering and structure are built into the very conceptual bone and muscle of the theory of experience which Hartshorne constructs and proposes.

When one puts the theory to the task of developing an account of divine experience, it therefore follows quite directly that temporal ordering and structure will be judged to be as essential to the divine experience as to any other. Thus, in the terms in which I have so far presented the theory, the attribution of temporality to God has the great advantage of appearing to be a perfectly reasonable next step in the positive task of constructing and working out the implications of a theory of experience. But, at the same time, the application of the theory to God imposes the need to face a serious question which I have so far passed over.

If, as Hartshorne does, one uses one’s prior understanding of various types of human experience as the source of generalized descriptions which together constitute the final concept of experience, how does one decide whether the generalizations have been radical enough to support application to all -- including nonhuman -- experiences or were sufficient only to cover human experiences? How is one to decide whether all of the merely human limitations have been eliminated from the concept so that there remain only those features characteristic of all experience?

The ultimate weakness of the earlier appeal to some immediate and privileged intuition of the essence of experience was precisely its inability to provide such a determination. Does a reasoned and discursive construct succumb to the same line of objection? Or can process thought find some way to defend itself against the charge that it has retained human factors that are not essential to experience as such? I raise the question here in terms of Hartshorne’s account of experience and God, and I will pursue it by examining his reasons for retaining temporal ordering and structure as essential to all experience, including divine experience. But the question is one that must be faced by any process philosophy or theology which sets out to use an analysis of human experience as a basis for characterizing God.

Hartshorne has faced the question rather carefully, both in general and specifically in terms of the issue of temporality. His general response, I believe, consists in his view of falsification as the crucial element in the method and argument of metaphysics. Hartshorne contends that a "basic procedure in all thinking is to exhaust possible solutions to a problem and arrive at the best or truest by elimination of those that are unsatisfactory" (CSPM 84). This procedure is not, in Hartshorne’s view, just one of several possible methods. The approach to the true solution by exhaustively eliminating alternative solutions is essential.

In the case of metaphysics, at least, Hartshorne’s reliance and insistence on falsification appears to be a consequence of his view that the truth of metaphysical statements is a function of their meaning: "Metaphysical statements are not opposed to anything except wrong ways of talking. Metaphysical error is exclusively a matter of confusion, inconsistency, or lack of definite meaning, rather than of factual mistakes" (CSPM 69). Given this view of metaphysics, one might properly conclude that the truth of one’s own metaphysical statement is definitively established only if the falsity of opposing statements can be shown. And the falsification of metaphysical statements must take the form, not of exhibiting "factual mistakes," but of demonstrating "confusion, inconsistency, or lack of definite meaning," i.e., in showing that they are "wrong ways of talking."

If Hartshorne takes this account of metaphysics and its method seriously, then the whole process of constructing a general concept of experience as such is, on its positive side, a process of framing a hypothesis and not at all a process of establishing a thesis. The defense of the thesis that experience is as the hypothesis has been framed consists in the destruction of opposing hypotheses. And their destruction must consist in showing their inconsistency or lack of definite meaning.

How does Hartshorne’s defense of his theory of experience implement this method of falsification? The facet of that theory that is of special interest here is the claim that temporality is essential to experience as such and therefore to divine as well as to human experience. Hartshorne’s explicit defense of this thesis seems to take two forms.

The first is to argue that we know experience only as a response to what is temporally prior to it, and therefore that to try to exclude such a temporal dimension from divine (or any other) experience is to destroy that analogy to our own experience which is the only source from which ‘divine experience’ could derive any meaning.⁴ This line of defense seeks to show "lack of definite meaning" (CSPM 69) in the opposing statement, just as the method of falsification requires. But it does so only by appealing to experience as we know it.

If experience as we know it were to function as the definitive norm by which the essence of experience is to be determined and as the definitive measure of all meaningful talk of experience, then the consequence must be that no experience can be, or can meaningfully be said to be, any different from experience as we know it. Such an appeal appears to suffer from two defects important to Hartshorne’s enterprise. It cannot, without begging the question, alone support a distinction between what is essential and what is contingent in our own experience. And it cannot support a distinction between what is essential to human experience and what is essential to experience as such.

The theological consequence of taking experience as we know it to be the sole norm, positively requiring that everything characteristic of experience as we know it be considered essential to experience as such, and negatively excluding anything different from experience as we know it as meaningless, is to require God to have every characteristic of experience as we know it, and to refuse as meaningless any divine characteristic different from experience as we know it. Even from Hartshorne’s position that is both to require too much and to allow too little. Indeed, especially for the psychicalist like Hartshorne, such a norm would render impossible the very kind of generalization which moves from things as we know them to inferences about both subhuman and superhuman realities.

As Hartshorne himself repeatedly reminds us, an adequate concept of experience as such must be freed of the contingent limitations inherent in human experience (cf., e.g., CSPM 90,91,154). The issue is whether temporality is inherent in experience as such, or only in certain kinds of experience (cf. CSPM 154). Even if experience as we know it had always been temporal, that fact does not of itself bear immediate witness to its own necessity or contingency for human experience, much less for experience as such. The needs of his own philosophizing lead Hartshorne himself on occasion to reject the persistent message of experience as we know it. In taking occurrence in discrete units to be essential to experience as such, for example, he admits:

I conclude that Hartshorne’s defense of the temporality thesis by appeal to experience as we know it is at best suggestive and "inconclusive," at worst mistaken, and by itself insufficient to show that experience as such must be temporally ordered and structured.

Hartshorne’s second line of defense exhibits more adequately the character of his method of justification through falsification. In general, it consists in attacking the claim that divine experience is nontemporal by arguing that the claim is self-contradictory in meaning or has implications which are mutually inconsistent. Specifically, a number of fatal paradoxes are urged. The central allegation of paradox seems to me to run roughly as follows: a nontemporal divine experience would include in itself all events in time (cf. CSPM 105); but to experience all temporal events simultaneously would dissolve any real distinction between past and future (cf. CSPM 66); so there could be no temporal transition, no change, no contingency, and no freedom (cf. CSPM 137); and since nothing could become, there could be no real permanent and unchanging reality either, "for then the contrast between the terms, and therewith their meaning, must vanish" (CSPM 166).

My present purpose is not to evaluate or to refute this line of argument. The argument is clearly one which purports to establish radical and fatal paradox in the claim that divine experience is or even might be nontemporal. Some argument of this type must be successful if Hartshorne is to live up to the demands of his own conception of metaphysics and its method of falsification. If this argument were successful, it would indeed establish -- as direct introspection of one’s own experience or any merely positive, constructive analogy with human experience could not establish -- that temporality is essential to both divine and human experience.

But the argument also depends on a number of premises rather remote from intuitions of one’s own experience or from any generalized description of one’s own or of human experience. It depends on a certain theory of how an experience is related to its objects; on the view that if two temporal events are nontemporally experienced, they must be simultaneous; on the contention that the possibility of alternatives and of freedom is inseparable from temporal transition; and on a peculiar theory of meaning as requiring contrast.

All of these positions may well be correct. But even so, it would also be true that none of these positions could be known or shown by us to be true, even as interpretations of experience, by any direct appeal to experience unmediated by very complex philosophical analysis and dialectic. Their truth cannot be established (or disestablished) by any privileged direct intuition of one’s own experiencing, or by any direct, nondialectical inventory of the contents of one’s own experience.

VI

Process philosophy, and specifically the process account of God, are sometimes defended by various kinds of appeal to experience and to the essence of experience. I have argued here that in general it is not terribly clear just what an appeal to experience might be, nor whether talk of the essence of experience is legitimate or meaningful. I have tried to show that, even if one can successfully carry the burden of showing some legitimate sense in which one might speak of the essence of experience, one cannot know or say (in any philosophically relevant way) what that essence is merely through some privileged intuitive grasp of it. I have contended further that one cannot know what the essence of experience is, or whether temporality is a part of it, merely through generalization of features found in human experience. And I have sought to show, using Hartshorne as a concrete example, how a dialectical defense provides the ultimate support for one’s claims about experience and its essential temporality and how that dialectic rests on claims quite remote from any direct or straightforward reading of experience, whether private or public.

Process philosophy and its account of God may rest on a theory of experience. But that theory is highly dialectical, as must be any theory that hopes for adequacy. To claim therefore that the process account rests on experience in some sense in which other metaphysical and theological accounts do not is at the very least thoroughly misleading, and at the very worst quite false. Assessment of process thought, and in particular of its attribution of temporality to God, must proceed to an evaluation of the dialectic which is its final support.

References

BRO -- David Tracy. Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology. New York: The Seabury Press, 1975.

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. London: SCM Press, 1970.

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

MMCL -- Charles Hartshorne. "Mind as Memory and Creative Love," in Jordan M. Scher, ed. Theories of the Mind. New York: The Free Press, 1962.

P -- Charles Hartshorne. "Panpsychism," in Vergilius Ferm, ed. A History of Philosophical Systems. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1950.

RG -- Schubert M. Ogden. The Reality of God and Other Essays. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977.

Notes

1 Even Hartshorne, who takes memory to be a grasp of past experiences, distinguishes between memory and verbal judgments based on memory. Cf., e.g., CSPM 79f., esp. 80: "The mere process of verbalization, being a human and hence fallible operation, introduces possibilities of error that involve more than memory."

2 Cf., e.g., P446, where Hartshorne speaks of "the human self" as "the only distinctly intuited singular" and argues that all other singulars "are conceivable only as more or less remotely resembling" it. Cf. also MMCL 461. For a detailed examination of some other aspects of Hartshorne’s concept of experience, see my "The Epistemic Availability of Hartshorne’s ‘Experience’: A Critical Analysis," International Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1981) 29-49.

3 Hartshornes willingness to introduce new uses for ordinary words is often quite apparent. He says, e.g., "if memory is defined as ‘experience of the past,’ then all perception . . . is a form of memory, by this definition of the word" (MMCL 442). Even if one accepts the claim that memory is an experience of the past, this is rather like saying that if we define dog as a four-legged mammal, then all horses are dogs. I am not inclined to oppose such moves in principle. The issue seems rather to be whether the advantages of such moves outweigh their potential for creating confusion and for misleading not only readers but authors as well.

4 Cf, e.g., CSPM 12 on experience as creative: "We know creativity only as a responding to prior stimuli, and if we refuse to allow an analogy between such ordinary creative action and the divine ‘creating’ of the cosmos, we are using a word whose meaning we cannot provide." Cf. CSPM 124, 239.

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, it becomes both possible and appropriate to identify pathfinding figures and schools of thought which have contributed significantly to the spirit and style of the times. Since the recognition of change or process is a prominent feature of the intellectual pursuits of the century, one would expect the name of Alfred North Whitehead to be prominent in a list of figures for whom process is reality. This roster may also include such names as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Ervin Laszlo, and Ilya Prigogine. Except for Prigogine, whose recent achievements have won him international awards and considerable publicity, these individuals are perhaps not as readily recognizable as Whitehead to philosophers and theologians. Yet they may well be as influential as he in framing a world view based on a clear and general understanding of process.

Bertalanffy and Laszlo are unfamiliar because they represent a relatively new school of philosophy which takes its insights from the theoretical perspectives of contemporary science and technology rather than from the mainstream of professional philosophy. "Systems philosophy" or the "systems approach" is very much a philosophy from below. It arose in consequence of the discoveries of dynamic interaction and wholeness in the life sciences and cybernetic technologies. Bertalanffy¹ himself was a theoretical biologist who employed holistic concepts in the study of organisms in a time when the prevailing biological paradigm was exclusively analytical and reductionistic. He identified a number of organizational essentials of life forms. These, he discovered, could also provide a framework for understanding complex processes in any domain of experience, including human societies. He called his paradigm "General System Theory."

This approach was boosted by parallel developments in the technological sciences of cybernetics and information theory. Brilliant minds of the order of Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, John Von Newman, W. Ross Ashby, and Stafford Beer, among many others, provided the conceptual structures for the multidisciplinary methodology of the systems approach.² Incredible advances in computers, in league with sophisticated instruments of systems analysis, play an ever increasing role in shaping the life style and the world view of contemporary society along the lines suggested by systems theory.

Ervin Laszlo is a philosopher of science whose cast of thought is toward a position which both recognizes the discoveries of science and accounts for the fundamental structures of the world. Under the influence and tutorship of Whitehead³ and Bertalanffy, Laszlo has developed a unitary vision of systems which falls within the general conceptual framework of western philosophy.⁴ Despite his acknowledged position as the founder of systems philosophy, no school has developed around his efforts. This is primarily due to the fact that the systems approach continues to be deeply rooted in science and technology, from which it draws much of its nurture. It is also due to the eclectic attitude of systems practitioners. The concept of system is a crossroads; many ideas converge there to be applied in whatever ways are most fitting. Laszlo himself left professional philosophy and has worked for the past decade applying his approach to global issues as a Senior Fellow of the United Nations Project of the Future at UNITAR.⁵

A comparison of the essential concepts of Whitehead’s philosophy of process and Laszlo’s philosophy of systems can prove constructive. Each position has its unique terminology permitting the thorough and precise articulation of fundamental concepts. The identification of similarities would encourage further efforts to augment one position with insights taken from the other. The identification of differences might assist to eliminate ambiguities or inconsistencies and encourage creative resolutions. While modern science has made deep impressions on both philosophers, systems thought is more directly indebted to its idiom. If significant correspondence can be found, yet another avenue of relevance may be opened for the application of Whitehead’s ideas to contemporary issues.

Futhermore, Whitehead and Laszlo both intend to offer a conceptual scheme that will apply universally and help make the cosmos intelligible as a whole to human thought. Strong correlations between these major world models should increase significantly our confidence in the explanatory power of process cosmologies. As Whitehead observed, in times of profound cultural crisis the creative formulation of persuasive philosophic visions of great generality is a very practical pursuit (AI 16). It is my contention that, as we approach the year 2000, the "Bimillennium," this enterprise becomes ever more urgent. My intention here is to encourage further conversation in the development of such a consensus cosmology.

Sections of this essay will be devoted successively to methodological issues, the nature and influence of environment, and the application of systems cybernetics to Whitehead’s account of actual occasions and the functions of God.

The Furnishings of Reality

Whitehead intends to avoid the pitfalls of previous metaphysical schemes in his singular pursuit of an account of the elemental entities which characterize reality as we experience it. His task, therefore, is one of analyzing, as clearly and completely as possible, the irreducible unit of process, the actual occasion. Laszlo launches his program of inquiry on a similar keynote: "What is real? Or what are the principal furnishings of reality? receives a simple unequivocal answer: natural-cognitive systems. If any set of events in the microhierarchy constitutes a non-summative, self-sustaining and self-evolving dynamic structure, it is ‘real’" (ISP 173).

The essential types of systems are inorganic, living; and living-thinking systems. These may be individuals or they may be societies such as ecosystems or human institutions. A system is a whole whose parts functionally integrate and give rise to a unity. All species of wholes qualify as systems despite their considerable differences because they fall under this minimal definition of the real.

In their pursuit of the question, "What kind of things are there?", Whitehead and Laszlo arrive at a common supposition, namely that the res verae are respectively actual occasions or actual systems. A full accounting of the structures of the world is simultaneously a full accounting of the fundamental entities of its constitution. It follows that to search for an explanation of things anywhere else but in these fundamental entities is to quest in vain. This, of course, is the ontological principle applied variously to actual occasions and to natural systems.

With this agreement the similarity ends. Whitehead requires that the ontological principle apply to a ubiquitous kind of entity which is incapable of division into more fundamental components. The actual occasion is not compound; it is rather the ultimate simple. It would make no sense to speak of a complex actual occasion as composed of lesser occasions. Laszlo, however, applies the category of system to entities of widely varying composition. Indeed, a system may be constituted by other systems and these of yet smaller systems, and so on.

The approach employed by both thinkers is hypothetical-deductive. As Hall explains it, this method follows certain procedures.: "The categorical notions are axiomatically organized, allowing for relevant deductive procedures which define the limits of applicability and the mutual coherence of the categorical notions within the scheme itself" (CE 12). It should be noted that the categorical notions are a product of imagination informed by and tested against experience. Whitehead is forever conscious of the insidious tendency of thought to slip into abstractions while examining concrete realities. His writings exhibit a continuous awareness of when he is describing a living thing and when he is describing a concept, principle, or category. However, one receives the impression that systems theorists, including Laszlo, are more at ease in their manipulation of the conceptual apparatus of a general theory of systems. The conceptual elements of the theory are examined in their own right before being applied, grid-like, over the multitudinous systems inhabiting the world at large. One reason for the highly abstract conceptual mapping of systems concepts is found in the procedural recommendations of the hypothetical-deductive method, with its emphasis upon the axiomatic approach.

A second reason is the overt attempt to overcome insulated bubbles of concentrated attention found in the numerous specialized disciplines of contemporary science (GST 36). The reversal of the fragmentation process of knowledge can be achieved only in an integrating idiom applicable to all of the more particular kinds of phenomena investigated by the sciences. Since these phenomena have in common the fact that they are systems, a classification of the features to be found unexceptionally in all natural systems would provide a unifying perspective and language, a new queen of the sciences, reintegrating this babble of specialized discourse. This ideological program of unification is a source of motivation for the highly abstract conceptual schemes found in the writings of many systems theorists.

The categories of systems philosophy, however, are derived from the discoveries of these same sciences in alliance with a phenomenological analysis of our experience of things in the world. All natural or artifactual systems exhibit certain fundamental features of structure, behavior, and interaction shared in common by virtue of the fact that they are systems. These characteristics, which include the nonsummative nature of a system, adaptive self-stabilization, adaptive self-organization, and hierarchical ordering, are called in-variances (ISP 11). A complete description of a system must include an account of its particular and concrete embodiment of each categorical invariance. The conceptual approach of systems theory is not a specific description of some ideal or metaphysical "general" system. Rather, it is a general survey of those features displayed by any and all systems to be found in our experience.

The systems approach endures the tension between its allegiance to the empirical spirit of modern science and its ideological dedication to resolve the predicament of conceptual segmentation in the sciences. Laszlo himself hovers between monism and pluralism. He criticizes methodological pluralism for its operating presupposition that the parts of the universe "are isolable enough to permit independent exploration in conventional disciplines" (ISP 175). Yet, he wants also to avoid a monism that fails utterly to take seriously the many phenomenally distinctive entities of experience. He settles, therefore, on an "integrated pluralism," "an ontology that proclaims both the diversity and unity of the world" (ISP 175). The world is populated with vast numbers of specific systems acting in accord with unique structures and diverse purposes. Each specific system, however, is netted within a larger whole or environmental context in which it plays a constitutive role. This component system is itself composed of subsystems which, when taken together with their respective interrelationships, constitute its unity.

With qualifications, Whitehead’s organic philosophy tolerates being characterized as an integrated pluralism. Actual occasions gather into weak clusters called nexus, or they may be found displaying stronger relationships and referred to as societies. The macroscopic aspect of the world is built on such clusters and clusters of clusters. This emphasis is balanced by an equal emphasis on the dynamic internal event of an actual occasion coming to be a unique individual unifying the world through a synthesis of its feelings.

There is no corresponding primary, concrescing occasion to be found in Laszlo’s version of a systems philosophy based on an integrating pluralism. I suspect that, despite wide-ranging similarities in both methods, a fundamental distinction is to be found between the perspectives of Laszlo and Whitehead at this point. It is that, while Laszlo centers upon patterns of structure and relationship which are reiterated throughout the hierarchy of entities of the world, Whitehead focuses on a primordial type of entity, the actual occasion, whose basic processes are found only in its kind and not reiterated in larger arrangements such as nexus and societies. Certainly such arrangements display systemic properties, but the explanation of the world lies not in such properties but rather in the life-span of the essential components which give rise to the properties.

Despite the numerous resonations between systems and process philosophies, this distinction is crucial. Each posits a prototypical reality and proceeds to build an ontology upon an elaboration of that type of being. The ontological fundament for Laszlo is the system; for Whitehead it is the actual occasion. A natural system corresponds closely to a Whiteheadian society. It is important to recall that a complex society of occasions has no agency of its own. Rather it depends upon its high-order presiding occasions for its directive capacity. A system, however, may well exhibit emergent properties of self-directedness which are the consequence of the strong coordination of its diverse parts generating organic integrity. In systems thought the whole itself possesses agency; the many move as one.

A further distinction arises when attention turns to a discussion of the fundamental "stuff" out of which the entities of the world are ultimately formed. For Whitehead, the "universal of universals" (PR 21/31) is creativity. His view of creativity is qualified so as not to violate the ontological principle. Having no form of its own, creativity is intuited from the flux and restlessness of things as exemplified by the "creative advance into novelty" (PR 349/529) which describes any actual occasion. Laszlo’s equivalent of creativity is his cosmic matrix or primordial continuum defining space and time and providing the absolute potential from which systems emerge, take their places, and build hierarchical relationships through evolutionary development (ISP 292). Since it undergoes modification by accumulating characteristics and generating systems entities, the matrix resembles Aristotle’s prote hyle. It is not itself a system, but a homogeneous field of relational potential. It is therefore exempt from the universal in-variances specified for every concrete entity it generates. Whether or not Laszlo wishes to attribute causal priority to the matrix is unclear. He devotes little attention to developing the concept and obviously does not wish to assign it a central position in his philosophy. As it now stands, however, the matrix idea appears to be an insufficiently examined incoherence within the categorical scheme of systems philosophy.

The Individual and its Environment

Central to both process thought and systems philosophy is the idea of environment. An account of a concrete entity must include extensive reference to its context as the major factor of its being what it is. The two positions share a common criticism of the analytical approach to knowledge. Modern science has often sought to explain a whole by examining its parts serially and independently. The analytical removal of beings from their prevailing circumstances simply destroys the complex mutual causal relationships that inhere between the components of a dynamic system (ISP 6). Any particular entity has an environment by virtue of its participation in a larger whole and its character is a function of its fit in that context. The structures of environment are important to Whitehead and Laszlo. Questions of freedom, value, the nature of experience, and causality arise in any discussion of the impact of environment upon individual entities. We now turn to a consideration of each of these issues.

All creatures are enmeshed in a context of ever-widening character and influence. Actual occasions are related as nexus and societies. Systems, likewise, are located within larger wholes or supersystems. Since there exist societies of societies and systems of systems, the general structure of environment takes the form of a hierarchy. Neither Whitehead nor Laszlo intend hierarchy to be understood as a stratified arrangement of power or authority. It consists rather of ever more inclusive spheres of influence and shared properties. This is clear in Whitehead’s description of the natural social order: "In reference to any given society, the world of actual entities is to he conceived as forming a background in layers of social order, the defining characteristics become wider and more general as we widen the background" (PR 98/ 150). Specifically, the current cosmic epoch exhibits a set of levels moving inward from pure extension through regions of geometrical and electronic occasions, giving rise to atoms and their inorganic and organic combinations. Finally, it culminates in the bodily hierarchy of living individuals and the collection of individuals into societies of various order and complexity (PR9O/ 138). In addition, a society embedded in the hierarchy is both inclusive and included. "A structured society as a whole provides a favourable environment for the subordinate societies which it harbours within itself. Also the whole society must be set in a wider environment permissive of its continuance" (PR 99/151).

Laszlo, too, describes the arrangement of the world as a set of Chinese boxes of systems within systems. Any specific system may be located with reference both to the parts which, when taken together, constitute the system itself, and to the system in its role as a part of some larger system. This is Koestler’s "holon": a Janus-faced entity with two identities -- one as a supersystem in relation to its included parts, the other as a subsystem in relation to its inclusive whole (GM 4Sf.). Systemic, contextual invariances are the more general features which prevail as the radius of inclusion widens. This sweeping vista of cosmic systems within systems is the common perspective of Whitehead and Laszlo.

Given this account of environment, how is it possible to speak of an enmeshed entity as possessing freedom, that is, the power to be self-causing, self-defining, and unique? With respect to societies and systems, the answer proposed by both positions is that freedom is primarily a function of organization and complexity. High-order entities exhibit a hierarchical internal structure. Their subsystems are rich in the sheer immensity of their numbers, the variety of types, and the complexity of interconnectedness between them. Laszlo, echoing a basic tenet of Teilhard de Chardin, observes that the level of spontaneity, flexibility of strategy, and aggressiveness exhibited by a living system in response to its environment is proportional to its organization. The greater the complexity, the greater the context-independence or freedom manifested by a natural system.

A similar account is advanced by Whitehead. Actual occasions range hierarchically from those dominated by the physical pole to those dominated by the mental pole. Such hierarchies are often found in structured societies, that is, living organisms. Corpuscular societies populated with low-grade occasions show little originality. However, the structured collective of such societies arranged in ascending order of intensity provides the support, both in terms of massive order and variety of data, for high-grade living occasions. The mental pole of complex presiding occasions permits great individual initiative to be expressed with unrivalled intensity, originality, and depth, all because their dominant strands are nestled in a structured subservient hierarchy of societies. Freedom or context-independence arises in consequence of this complex integration of societies at many levels (PR 105f./ 160f.).

All actual occasions, wherever they fall along the vast spectrum from physical to mental dominance, are composed of feelings. Mere matter, dead material, does not exist. Laszlo has no similar theory of entities which are experiential in their essence. Hence, he must deduce life or feeling as he finds it in correlation with systemic complexity. We have it from the sheer immediacy of the evidence, our undeniable personal experience, that some very complex, highly organized natural systems are psychophysical. These systems possess inner experiences which correlate with external observations. "Such systems," suggests Laszlo, are not "dual" but "biperspectival":

Given the continuous nature of the natural hierarchy, any effort to demarcate between living natural systems (those above a specific level of complexity) and nonliving systems (those below that level) is a totally arbitrary procedure. A natural system of whatever minimal complexity possesses a rudimentary subjectivity by virtue of that complexity. Thus, Laszlo, like Whitehead, believes that dead matter does not exist.

Having said this, however, we must also recognize that the two positions are at odds about just exactly where subjectivity is to be found. Whitehead clearly locates it within the actual occasion. Societies exhibit subjectivity because their component occasions possess it. Laszlo sees subjectivity as a function of emergence. Emergence is the appearance of new, often unforeseen properties generated by the co-activation of entities at one level of complexity to form a larger, unified whole at the next higher level. The properties of the whole are not merely the sum of its parts. The network of mutual influences between parts has its properties as well. Subjectivity is a feature of wholes per se and is not necessarily to be found initially in their primordial components (ISP 174).

The issue of freedom and that of the existence of inner states arise at least partially out of a prior understanding of causality. Modern science has simply dismissed the notion of final causality in its efforts to apply unilaterally the concept of efficient causality to explain all natural phenomena. Whitehead and Laszlo do not wish to deny the importance of efficient causality, but neither do they wish to dismiss teleological explanation. The problem then becomes one of relating the two under a larger paradigm. In the theory of actual occasions efficient causality appears in the impact of the physical data supplied by the actual world in the initial phases of concrescence. Final causality is what occurs within the various phases of the occasions internal movement towards satisfaction, primarily in its efforts to arrange the many of its various feelings into a complex unity under the guidance of a subjective aim (PR 47/ 75). Corpuscular societies consisting of low -- level occasions, such as rocks and billiard balls, display little originality, thereby providing ideal instances of efficient causality for mechanistic science. Very complex structured societies which harbor presiding, high-grade mental occasions may move with great originality toward the fulfillment of uniquely defined, clearly entertained goals. Such societies are intractable to explanation by an appeal to efficient causality alone (PR 47/ 75).

For Laszlo, causality, like experience, is a function of complexity. Inner, structured organization determines the degree of a system’s autonomy, its context-independence. Systems of very low complexity are subjected blindly to the external forces of their circumstance. In systems parlance such entities are closed systems. Very complex open systems, however, are capable of recording and reordering the impress of experience, thereby generating alternate programs of action in response to, and often in spite of, environmental stimuli.⁶ Such imaginatively envisioned goals or purposes may then provide the impetus even to alter the prevailing context to favor their realization (ISP 266).

What, then, is the general telos towards which the basic entities, natural systems or actual occasions, strive? Laszlo, here betraying his indebtedness to evolutionary thought, maintains that the most valued state of a natural system is to be adapted to its environment. "I shall consider normative values to be correlates of certain states of a system within the system’s environmental continuum, defined by degrees of adaptation of the system to the environment" (ISP 263). Adaptation entails survival. The very purpose of adaptation is to secure the persistence of the natural system over time; the system survives. He further suggests that high-order or living systems experience satisfaction in the harmonious match of their internal or psychic states with the actual facts of their environment. In the case of lower organisms, satisfaction is achieved by the successful removal of environmental irritation or by the reduction of a biological urge such as hunger. In cognitive systems, however, satisfaction may be enjoyed not only viscerally, but also in a rational, aesthetic, or religious mode (ISP 267). Still the subjective experience of satisfaction is the result of the interaction of the system with its environment and signals the successful adjustment to environmental circumstances.

Whitehead’s answer to the question of valued goals seems to be in variance with satisfaction through adaptation. The universal value for the world is found in God’s aim for it, and God’s purpose "in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities." And again, "The primordial appetitions which jointly constitute God’s purpose are seeking intensity, not preservation" (PR 105/160). Such intensity is in consequence of the concrescing of an actual occasion toward satisfaction, which is the arrangement of its many feelings into a complex and novel unity. The satisfaction of the actual occasion is that of the artist. It is the "adjustment of aesthetic emphasis in obedience to an ideal of harmony" (PR 102/ 155). At the macroscopic level societies of occasions are preserved in their dominant patterns through adaptation to their environment.⁷ This adjustment is pursued ultimately not for its own sake, but for the sake of providing a stable actual world in which the constituent occasions may be nurtured toward the achievement of greater intensities of self-realization. This environing world is ordered only insofar as it provides the "givenness which is compatible with the dominant ideal" of the society. Disorder is present when the inclusion of certain components of the actual world interferes with the full attainment of the ideal and hence reduces the intensity enjoyed in the final satisfaction. Since ideals vary, one society’s order may be another’s chaos.

By applying this account of the relativity of order to structured societies possessing high-grade mental occasions, an agreement with Laszlo’s notion of adaptation is possible. Here order appears as a state of affairs in which the supportive structured society is adapted to prevailing circumstances such that the dominant ideal of its personal strand of mental occasions is least frustrated by the actual world of its environment. The degree of satisfaction then corresponds to the level of adaptation. Maximal adaptation would signify maximum order as verified in the successful achievement of the dominant ideal.

Systems Cybernetics, Actual Occasions, and God

Systems theory and process thought share a fundamental interest in the nature of dynamic interactions. The patterned flows which we clearly experience in the world are best explained under the working principle that order arises and is sustained because of continuous mutual influence between entities. Systems cybernetics, including information theory, provides fruitful concepts for clarifying the nature of complex and dynamic organizations. These concepts can likewise be applied usefully to process thought. But before this application can proceed, it is first necessary to deal briefly with several elementary notions of information theory.

Communication takes place when influences, transmitted as signals or messages, alter the behavior or structure of a receiving system. Messages have to do essentially with information. We normally understand information in terms of the intuitive appropriation of communicated content which conveys existential or rational meaning. This semantic form of information is highly anthropocentric and limited mostly to verbal and symbolic discourse (CW 234). The technical definition of information is far more significant for our discussion. Selective information, as opposed to the semantic form, is a measure of communication processes regardless of their content. It has nothing to do with the implicit meaning of a message, but deals only with the effectiveness of the process itself. Significantly, the word "form" appears in "information." This is accurate, for information, carried in "bits," is the quantitative tabulation of the amount of formal patterning or complexity exhibited by a processing system.

Information is always related to a set of possibilities. If, by a process of determination, some elements in the set of possibilities are realized or selected out and the remainder eliminated, then the uncertainty of the situation has been at least partially removed.⁸ Before the process of selection begins, our observer has no knowledge about which elements will be favored. His uncertainty is his ignorance. As the process proceeds, however, and the range of choice becomes more and more restricted, he gains in his powers of predicting the final outcome. Selective information is the measure of his knowledge. With the completion of the process, a definitive and unique decision has been made and all uncertainty is removed. The information content is thus said to be maximal. If the original possibilities are perceived as being totally random and chaotic, that is, equiprobable, the observer possesses the least possible information or the greatest possible uncertainty. In such cases of complete disarray, the set is in a maximum state of entropy (IC 121f.).

As indicated above, information has much to do with the presence of formal patterning, of arrangement, order, and complexity. Information expresses the power of organization of a system as contained in the richness and texture of its consolidated parts. It is related to activities as well as states. An agent who acts to design, plan, select, systematize, and arrange, acts to generate or increase information or to decrease disorder, ignorance, indistinctness, randomness, homogeneity, and entropy of a state of affairs (ITB 4).

Information is clearly related to the integrity or wholeness of a being. A system consists of parts which are coupled by their complex interactions. The behavior of any particular component is related to a set of possible states which it might assume. If the other elements of the system work together to restrict the component’s ability to realize equally all available states, then organization is present. The part is subordinated in some extent to the prevailing demands of the whole. Restrictions range from "zero" to "total" coupling. Zero coupling is the complete autonomy of the part to assume any possible state available to it. The presence of such radical freedom means that the part ceases to play any role in the configuration of the whole. Zero coupling entails maximal entropy since the motion of the parts is essentially chaotic. Autonomy is absent in a state of total coupling where there exists a very strong interaction between parts. Total coupling is the expression of maximum information. The background set of possibilities for a specified component has been reduced to one. All uncertainty vanishes in the explicit definition of the association (COS 34f.).

When the absolute variety of an ensemble of alternatives is limited, constraint is present. For a die, this ensemble is six, in accordance with the number of faces on the cube. If, upon repeated casts, the die discloses a bias in the uneven frequency of occurrence of a numbered face, constraint is suspected. Constraint indicates that some influence is at work limiting the set of alternatives that might be reasonably expected in a system to some smaller number (IC 128).

Our experiences of the world suggest that constraint exists everywhere. In fact, learning about the world would be impossible without the operation of constraints which we perceive as the order and consistency to our environment (IC 130). Science is concerned with elaborating universal constraints operating in natural phenomena which it calls laws. Human society represents the attempt to create institutionalized systems of constraint on individual conduct which promote common well-being. We may understand that all systems properties or invariances are restrictions upon pure possibility giving rise to specific configurations of mutually constraining elements.

With this primer of elementary information processes, we are in a better position to examine certain aspects of Whitehead’s thought in the light of systems theory. These aspects include especially the concrescence of actual occasions and the idea of God.

An actual occasion is a discrete information processing system. Indeed, if we may understand prehensions as signals, and the ingression of prehensions as the initial phase in a selective process of self-actualization, then an actual occasion consists purely of information. As it moves through the process of becoming a specific and complete something in the world, the actual occasion exhibits the character of a decision system. The initial data entertained in this act of unification through decision is composed of a multiplicity of impressions conveyed by the past state of the world. To become actual a selection process must occur concerning which signals to entertain and which to eliminate as well as how the signals, once admitted, will be arranged to achieve maximum satisfaction. The ensemble of possibilities provided by the actual world and by God, contains the variety out of which an occasion arranges itself as a specific entity. Decisions are rendered in the selection process and information is thus generated. Since "the satisfied actual occasion embodies a determinate attitude of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ " all uncertainty has been eliminated (PR 212/ 323). When complete, the occasion contains information, the stuff of order.

Whitehead stresses that the process of concrescence generates the order of the world as the entropy-laden and disjunctive many attain unity in the determinate form of the completed occasion. Because their prehensions are limited to a narrow range of signals, low-grade occasions are radically constrained in their potential for integrating the rich givenness of the world. The data these slight occasions transmit contain negligible originality but guarantee maximum order detectable as highly redundant pattern. High-grade occasions do not suffer from this internal austerity. They select liberally from the vast range of possibilities. Yet, because of this openness, they often suffer from the ingression of mutually obstructive feelings. The presence of these feelings thwarts full integration and yields entropy in the final state.

One could reasonably expect the entropic effects of repeated failures to be cumulative, despite the heroic efforts of actual occasions to generate novelty and completeness. Increasing "noise" would lead eventually to a general decline in the order of the world, and its replacement with increasing randomness and atomicity, that is, movement in the direction of zero constraint. Whiteheadian metaphysics contains an entity, God, which functions both to sustain and replenish this organization and to supply a field of potential that will serve to build the novelty and variety of the world.

Desperately little is to be found in the literature of systems thought which addresses the idea of God. There is no mystery in this fact. Laszlo and others hold a "Semite" model for God (PR 95/146), in which God is understood as absolutely transcendent of the world and, thanks to omnipotence, the determiner of its destiny. Laszlo readily admits that a notion of God can be developed using systems categories (ISP 295), but he insists that, by proceeding "from the nonperceivable continuum toward increasingly discrete particulars," the universe orders itself causa sui (ISP 294). The Laplacean spirit prevails; no transcendent agency need be gratuitously introduced to complete the account.⁹

There is actually little disagreement between Laszlo and Whitehead on this point. God is a constituent entity of the world, an actual entity, as must he the case if the ontological principle is to hold. One may emphasize God’s unique primordial character or the presiding role God plays in the cosmic process, but these in no way give the privileged status of independence from the remainder of the world. God and the world are mutually implicated in the everlasting process which makes absolute transcendence for either impossible (PR 242f./ 368f.).

Whitehead sees the "religious problem" as "the question whether the process of the temporal world passes into the formation of other actualities bound together in an order in which novelty does not mean loss" (PR 340/517). In the function as an actual entity generating order, God is the metaphysical answer to the religious question. God strives to guide the world of actual occasions between chaos and rigid, innocuous repetition, between pure randomness and pure redundancy, between zero and total constraint. God is therefore the supreme steersman, the kubernetes, and hence available in principle for analysis by systems cybernetics.

In Science and the Modern World Whitehead offers an argument for the inclusion of God as an element in his system (SMW 173f.). His argument is consistent with the cybernetic and information concepts discussed earlier. The world displays an obvious constraint on possibility. The number and variety of possible things are vastly greater than the number and variety of actual things. Why, then, this particular order of nature and no other? Why not "an indiscriminate model pluralism apart from logical and other limitations?" (SMW 177). Systems cybernetics operates with an identical mode of inquiry when it examines particular systems or populations of systems in relationship: "Cybernetics looks at the totality in all its possible richness, and then asks why the actualities should be restricted to some part of the total possibilities" (IC 131). These observations suggest that some "unique categorical determination" (SMW 178) or agent of selection is at work imposing the limits we detect. Where restriction or constraint exists, two or more systems are involved in communication processes. Definite patterns of structure and behavior emerge from the mutual influence thereby restricting the larger range of activity to a narrower ensemble compatible with the established interactions. God and world are just this sort of coupled system, with God limiting the absolute field of pure possibility to that region or order compatible with the actual world.

If God functioned only as an agent of constraint upon the range of possible states which the world could be envisioned to take, the God-world coupled system would be essentially closed. Vast as the actual world is, and insistent as actual occasions are upon realizing novelty, the potential variety contained in the actual situation is finite. A finite ensemble of signals is capable of generating a maximum state of information and no more. Indeed, as transformations occur, variety is driven down, thereby diminishing the available information required to maintain and build order. Entropy inexorably grows toward the maximum in any finite and closed system.

However, Whitehead provides God with a second role in addition to that of the agent of limitation. God is the ground of possibility and the generator of variety. If the world were truly a closed system, potentiality would be limited to the sum of all possibilities contained within it. Any actual occasion would be required to take its prehensions from the giveness of the situation and nowhere else. Whitehead maintains that, in addition to the "real potentiality" of the given world, there is a "general potentiality" provided by the multiplicity of eternal objects as envisioned in the primordial nature of God’s character (PR 65/ 102). The realm of eternal objects does not suffer from limitation, save for that imposed upon it by God as God orders the infinite potential to reflect a graded relevance suitable for employment in the actual situation. Eternal objects are provided for concrescing occasions, enabling them to achieve truly novel realization and replenishing the variety of real potentiality. God functions to keep the cosmic system open by transporting variety into the world, where it is realized as information in the complex determination of actual occasions.

As "the founder of order and the goal toward novelty," (PR 88/ 135) God steers the world somewhere between chaos and rigorous structure, between fire and ice. God supplies the optimal amount of arrangement which maintains the formal pattern and yet permits the free play of novelty. It has been noted in the cybernetic analysis of music that this orchestrated balance between pattern and spontaneity offers "the highest degree of aesthetic value attainable" (CO 203). This, with appropriate qualification, is Whitehead’s claim exactly.

God and world form a coupled system rich with feedback. God in God’s wisdom rescues the world from rigidity or chaos by reinforcing and preserving favorable trends in the flux while dampening those which would prove damaging to God’s overall aim. The world, in turn, supplies God with physical prehensions qualifying God’s process of concrescence and consolidating God’s involvement in its destiny. God and world co-create each other by engaging in a perpetual dance of synergy. Through this dynamic state of "interexistence" (ILM 60) each fulfills the other and is fulfilled in return.

Conclusion

Our excursion into the philosophical visions of Whitehead and Laszlo has disclosed significant parallels in their thought. These include similarity of methodological approach, emphasis upon environment, and postulation of a free milieu intérieur for all entities. We have also realized at least partial success in the exercise of applying systems-cybernetic invariances to process entities. Actual occasions do resemble discrete information processing systems, and God does function to constrain and originate variety for the world in God’s capacity as one element in a system with transaction.

We have also come across differences, two of which appear to be serious. The first is in the identification of the most real constituents of the world, an account of which would lead us to an interpretive metaphysics of great power and generality. For Laszlo the significant entity is the system, while for Whitehead it is the actual occasion. Actual occasions cannot be easily understood as systems. Systems resemble societies. They are therefore less than fundamental from the perspective of Whiteheadian metaphysics. The second real difference follows from the first. Agency, be it mechanistic, organic, or mental, is an emergent property of wholes, or so the systems approach maintains. Process metaphysics asserts that agency is found only in the complex internal workings of an actual occasion. Mentality is not the novel capacity of a complex living society which is absent in its constituent occasions. Rather it is to be found in a high quality version of the same processes of feeling and decision exhibited in some degree by all occasions.

Despite these substantial issues, the common task of the systems approach and process metaphysics is that of "describing the present order of the world in terms of principles which are the special exemplification of the most general" (MN 124). Both schools tend to converge on what seems to be a consensus paradigm of dynamic organization. This vision is alone sufficient to encourage further discussion.

References

CE -- David C. Hall. The Civilization of Experience. New York: Fordham University Press, 1973.

CO -- Monroe C. Beardsley. "Order and Disorder in Art," in Paul G. Kuntz, ed., The Concept of Order. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968.

COS -- J. Rothstein. Communication, Organization, and Science. Indian Hills, Cob.: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958.

CW -- Abbe Mowshowitz. The Conquest of the Will: Information Processing and Human Affairs. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1976.

GM -- Arthur Koestler. The Ghost in the Machine. Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967.

GST -- Ludwig von Bertalanffy. General System Theory. New York: George Braziller, 1978.

IC -- W. Ross Ashby. An Introduction to Cybernetics. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1961.

ILM -- Ervin Laszlo. The Inner Limits of Mankind. New York: Pergamon Press, 1978.

ISP -- Ervin Laszlo. An Introduction to Systems Philosophy. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1972.

ITB -- H. Quastler. Information Theory in Biology. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1953.

KWPR -- Donald W. Sherburne. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1956.

MN -- David Ray Griffin. "Whitehead’s Philosophy and Some General Notions of Physics and Biology," in John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin, eds., Mind in Nature. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1977.

NS -- Nature and System, 2/1 (March, 1980).

Notes

1 Bertalanffy’s basic works include: General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1978) and Robots, Men, and Minds (New York: George Braziller, 1967).

2 For an excellent survey of the history and basic concepts of systems thought, see Joël de Rosnay, The Macroscope: A New World Scientific System (New York: Harper and Row, 1979) or Bertalanffy, "General System Theory -- A Critical Review," in Systems Behaviour, edited by John Beishon and Geoff Peters (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

3 Early in his career Laszlo was impressed with Whitehead’s thought. His first book, Essential Society: An Ontological Reconstruction (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1963), was considerably influenced by process metaphysics. However, as his thought developed, Laszlo experienced increasing difficulty in accepting the "Platonic Correlates" of Whitehead’s system. Most of his references to Whitehead found in Introduction to Systems Philosophy are critical.

4 Laszlo’s writings are extensive, including over thirty books and a hundred articles. His more representative works include: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1972) and the readable layman’s version, The Systems View of the World (New York: George Braziller, 1972).

5 Laszlo defends his praxis approach against his critics in a review essay, "Some Reflections on Systems Theory’s Critics" (NS 49f.). Here he documents his application of systems theory to world order by listing his contributions in that area, including: A Strategy for the Future (New York: George Braziller, 1974), a Report to the Club of Rome called Goals for Mankind (New York: New American Library, 1977), and its short summary, The Inner Limits of Mankind (New York, Pergamon Press, 1978). His most ambitious task is to complete a seventeen volume collection on world economics in collaboration with ninety-eight research institutes and teams worldwide. This project is the UNITAR-CEESTEM Library on the New International Economic Order to be published by Pergamon Press.

6An open system is in permanent relation with its environment. It responds in complex ways to environmental input by altering that input before expressing itself uniquely in response. An open system and its environment together constitute a coupled system of mutual address. A closed system has no such responsive capabilities. It is unable to replenish lost energy or recover lost complexity due to entropic degradation. Most often, a closed system reacts passively to environmental forces.

7 Concrescing actual occasions, of course, do not adapt since they cannot respond objectively to the world. Societies, however, are enduring objects in which the process of transition is significant. Consequently, they can be said to adapt over time through self-modification (PR 150/ 228).

8 The amount of information available in a set of equipotential elements is the numerical equivalent of the yes-no decisions required to identify one element uniquely by successive acts of division. For example, a set of 8 objects is divided into 2 subsets of 4 objects each, and one subset is discarded. The procedure is repeated with the remaining subset, giving a further subset containing 2 objects. Again, one of these is discarded, resulting in a final selection of 1 unique object. The entire process of specifying 1 object from an initial group of 8 has required 3 yes-no decisions, generating 3 bits of information. Information is indicative of the powers of discrimination. Only 15 bits of information are needed to determine a unique answer to a question that has more than 30,000 possible answers.

9 Laszlo is frankly concerned with what he considers to be Whitehead’s penchant for excessive speculation. In regard to Whitehead’s introduction of God and eternal objects to explain human freedom he says: "If explanatory principles are available which could account for the sensation of freedom without at the same time taking us beyond the bounds of the actual world, we should explore them, and, if they prove to be consistent with the facts, adopt them in preference" (ISP 246).

Throughout the last fifty years various philosophers and physicists have attempted to assess the extent of agreement between the conception of physical reality within the framework of process philosophy and the character of the physical world described by quantum theory.¹ Recently this line of inquiry has been given new life by the discovery of Bell’s theorem. This theorem and its experimental disconfirmation appear to imply that we must radically revise our ideas about the spatiotemporal description of the elementary physical entities represented by the equations of quantum mechanics.² Since this is an issue on which Whitehead focused a great deal of his criticism of classical physics, it is not surprising that Bell’s theorem has occasioned considerable interest among process philosophers.³

Although it is perhaps not widely recognized, a similar concern with a critique of the classical concepts used in the spatiotemporal description of physical reality is the cornerstone on which Niels Bohr erected his framework of "complementarity" designed to resolve the paradoxes of quantum theory. Juan earlier paper I considered some of the common features of Bohr’s interpretation of quantum theory and Whitehead’s process philosophy (1:32-47). Here I propose to revise that analysis somewhat by presenting an overview of the conceptual path which led Bohr to complementarity and showing it to be analogous to the twin tools which Whitehead used to clear a conceptual space in which to build his process framework.⁴ In particular I intend to show how the experimental tests of Bell’s theorem confirm the outlook of both Bohr and Whitehead, thus strengthening the potential alliance between these two frameworks.

1. Conceptual Frameworks and the Philosophy of Science

Quite independently of recent developments in quantum physics, philosophy of science recently has undergone a prodigious upheaval which has ended the regime of the so-called "orthodox" or "received view" -- inspired by positivism -- that once utterly dominated the field. Whatever might be the final outcome of this revolution -- and this issue still seems very much unresolved -- it now appears quite clear that the erstwhile antimetaphysical bias of philosophy of science is being replaced by a new sensitivity to the role of the conceptual framework within which any scientific description of reality is offered for acceptance.

What I am calling "conceptual frameworks" might be called by different names and of course vary considerably from one philosopher to the next. However, what most challenges to the received view seem to share in common is the recognition that what makes possible the advance of the scientific understanding of nature is not captured by a model that bases scientific theories on a foundation of allegedly certain, unproblematic, directly known observation statements. Instead, it appears that science devises continuous modifications of its descriptive concepts and their interrelations in ways which lead to an ever-widening base of possible observations as interpreted within the conceptual scheme.⁵ This process embodies a rationality or rationalities which may take into account a host of factors other than experimental observations. A conceptual framework provides the concepts in terms of which theoretical representations are understood as describing reality. But in doing so, it also essentially embodies fundamental ontological presuppositions about physical reality and stipulates ideal standards of what is to count as an acceptable description of phenomena given within the framework.⁶

My point in mentioning this changed outlook is to draw attention to the fact that philosophy of science appears to be moving towards the conclusion that progress in understanding nature involves an ongoing critique of the conceptual framework within which science describes the physical world. The time once was that philosophers had an important role in precipitating such a critique -- or perhaps more accurately: those who performed it were both scientists and philosophers. However, partly due to the increasingly technical nature of science and partly due to the positivistic antimetaphysical attitude which has prevailed in philosophy of science, in this century such a critique has been left almost exclusively in the hands of scientific specialists. The most notable exception is Alfred North Whitehead.

As a philosopher who was very much sensitive to how the conceptual scheme of science had to be changed, Whitehead was able to put his finger on two of the weakest points in the classical framework. Indeed, as the pressure for change coming from quantum theory has intensified in the years since Whitehead wrote, these two points have exhibited an ever greater degree of conceptual tension. The first is the assumption that the reality described by classical physics consists of entities having the properties of existing at a determinate location in space at each instant in time. Since such entities are regarded as "substances" and thus can be known only through their properties, as far as the framework of classical physics is concerned, these entities are defined by a spatiotemporal mode of description. What a thing is, is, in essence, where that thing is in space and time. Where a thing is not, it can have no property and so no causal effect. This line of reasoning led to a view of the universe in which the interrelatedness of things was ultimately a mystery. Whitehead called it the fallacy of simple location.

In 1964 J. S. Bell showed that if we assume, in accord with the classical framework, that quantum mechanical descriptions are descriptions of the properties of simply located elementary particles, than the mathematics of quantum theory allows us to derive an inequality -- now known as "Bell’s theorem" -- which essentially places a limit on the number of pairs of particles with certain specified properties one should be able to detect experimentally. However, the evidence now strongly confirms that in actual observation this limit is exceeded. Thus if we assume that the quantum formalism is correct, as seems to be dictated by overwhelming experimental corroboration, then the assumption that quantum mechanics describes simply located particles must be regarded as false. Thus today it would seem that this experimental disconfirmation of Bell’s theorem has confirmed Whitehead’s attempt to restructure our thinking with respect to the doctrine of local causes.

Whitehead’s second criticism concerned the tendency of classical physics to regard its theoretical representation of an object interacting with human sense organs to cause experience as a description of the real entities of the world. The experiences which confirm such theoretical representations are understood as the causal effects of these allegedly real objects which populate the physical universe. Whitehead called this line of argument the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. As in the case of the fallacy of simple location, the failure to confirm Bell’s theorem would not have surprised Whitehead, for deriving that theorem assumes that the mathematical abstraction of a simply located particle is a direct representation of the real object of a quantum mechanical description. In other words, Bell’s derivation depends on committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Of course Whitehead launched his critique primarily in response to relativity. The quantum theory which influenced him was the "old quantum theory" of Planck and Bohr’s atomic model, not the new quantum theory of 1925-27 proposed by Heisenberg and Schrödinger. It is this latter theory which uncompromisingly defies the classical mode of description and brings forward the demand -- crystallized in the indeterminacy relations of Heisenberg -- for a renewed critique of the classical descriptive concepts.

The person who first met this demand directly was the patron spirit of the whole quantum revolution and the mentor of Heisenberg: Neils Bohr. Unfortunately, because Bohr was a physicist, not a philosopher, his attempt to formulate a new framework which would rationally generalize the framework of classical physics focused quite naturally on specific quantum problems and assiduously skirted overtly metaphysical issues. Nevertheless, Bohr made it quite clear that he was not merely providing an interpretation of quantum mechanics, although that was of course his professional objective and virtually the only aspect of his work considered today. Instead, he was attempting to provide a new "viewpoint" which would replace the classical world-view. And, like Whitehead, he also made it quite clear that this new framework was to be developed by analyzing the classical descriptive concepts and their incompatibility with quantum demands. He called this new framework "complementarity."

2. The Framework of Complementarity

Bohr’s failure to present complementarity in a systematic way as a framework for describing all of nature has hindered appreciating the significance of his revision of the conceptual scheme of classical physics. Since complementarity is generally read as a way of "explaining" either the indeterminacy relations or wave-particle dualism, it is not widely understood that Bohr arrived at his position essentially through an analysis of classical physics. Furthermore, Bohr’s reluctance to comment on the metaphysical implications of his framework and the fact that it was proposed during the heyday of positivism have conspired to produce an amazing number of misunderstandings concerning complementarity.

Most commonly it is believed that Bohr argued against realism in behalf of the instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theory, holding that wave and particle representation of quantum systems were merely theoretical devices useful for predicting the outcome of particular measurement operations in different experimental situations. Sometimes we find it leads to correct predictions to use the particle "inference ticket" and sometimes the wave. But since scientific theory -- on the instrumentalist account -- does not intend to describe how the world really is, there is no inconsistency in using representations which, if interpreted realistically, would attribute incompatible properties to the entities described by quantum theory. Particles and waves are thus "complementary" conceptual tools for getting at correct predictions of phenomenal observations.

This facile distortion of Bohr’s intention can easily be dispelled by the careful reading of his early papers on the subject (ATDN). Indeed, Bohr argues that the complementarity of particle and wave "pictures" is a consequence of the fact that observation must be theoretically represented as an interaction in which one of the interacting physical systems is understood to be the real object which quantum theory attempts to describe. When Bohr unveiled his philosophical discovery, the term "complementarity" was first used to characterize a relationship between two "modes of description":

In order to understand what these two modes of description entail and why they can no longer be applied as they were in the classical framework, it is necessary to retrace briefly Bohr’s conceptual critique of the classical framework.

Bohr’s revolution starts with his acceptance of the "quantum postulate." This postulate states that as an empirical fact it is necessary to describe atomic systems as existing only in certain discrete or "stationary" states defined by reference to Planck’s quantum of action. In changing from one state to another, quantum systems "jump" discontinuously from one discrete state to another. Since mechanical states are defined in terms of the parameters of space, time, momentum, and energy, and since on the classical view these parameters are defined as continuous, in that framework, in general, change of state is represented as taking place continuously. But in the framework intended to resolve the quantum paradoxes, elementary entities must be understood as changing their state discontinuously. As Bohr understood his task, a "rational generalization" of the classical framework must make possible harmonizing the quantum postulate with those aspects of the classical framework that must be retained to allow an unambiguous description of the experimental results necessary to secure the objectivity of that description.

Let us consider how the classical framework made the descriptive goals of classical mechanics attainable. If we focus on describing an isolated body moving through space, we can regard the task of mechanics as successfully completed if we can develop a formalism which, given certain initial conditions, will allow us to determine the spatial locus of the body at each instant in time. Bohr calls a description of this sort a description which employs the mode of "space-time co-ordination." Insofar as Bohr’s framework of complementarity seeks to alter our understanding of the mode of description of space-time co-ordination, like Whitehead, Bohr is committed to a critique of the classical doctrine of simple location. The acceptance of a particular mechanics, i.e., a particular set of laws governing such motion (e.g., Newton’s mechanics), is a function of the degree to which the deductive consequences of its formalism accord with observations of the body it is intended to describe. Insofar as these bodies are planets or other large objects which can be observed by direct visual means space-time co-ordination can be attained by observation involving no particular conceptual difficulties ("the idealization of observation" in Bohr’s words). Thus although in a strict sense even just looking at the moon does involve an interaction between the moon and the light which will reach the eye, the way in which such an interaction changes the state of the moon is so minute as to be utterly negligible. Hence, as an idealization so close to reality that this discrepancy could never be detected, looking at the moon may be regarded as an observation which determines the moon’s position as it is in complete isolation from the observer and the light which reaches his/her eye.

However, when we consider objects that cannot be so simply observed visually, we will be forced to determine their position through various instruments: the "measuring" or "observing system." Still, the classical framework is easily able to handle this task for it can invoke the fundamental principles of conservation of momentum and energy. Using this aspect of the classical formalism (in Bohr’s words, "the claim of causality"), we consider the observed object and the observing system as two physical systems in interaction. The measuring apparatus is so constructed that we can determine its mechanical state in a way such that the interaction involved changes its state no more than looking at the moon -- for example, reading a pointer on a meter. If we arrange to have the observed system interact with the measuring and observing systems prior to the observational interaction, and we can unproblematically determine the state of the observing system after the interaction, we can use the conservation principles to determine just how the state of the observed system was changed in the observation in order to define its state (the "idealization of definition") at the instant the interaction is complete. Bohr calls this aspect of the description the mode which employs the "claims of causality" because the interaction is essentially the way in which the state of one system causally affects the state of the other.

However, in order to employ the conservation principles to define the state of the system as isolated once the interaction is completed, we need to assume that the observed system is in some mechanical state throughout the interaction and that this state is changing continuously up to the instant the interaction ceases. Only by making this assumption can we legitimize the conclusion that the state of the observed system at the last instant of the interaction is negligibly different from the state of that system the moment it is isolated from the observing system.

But this is precisely the presupposition which the quantum postulate forces us to discard. Since according to the quantum representation states do not necessarily change continuously throughout an interaction -- indeed it is impossible even to define separate states for the two systems while interacting -- it follows that the two systems cannot be understood as continuously changing their states. As a direct consequence of the quantum formalism we cannot define a state function for the state of the observed system in the course of its interaction with another system; thus the formalism does not permit us to determine a specific classical state for the observed system once it is isolated from the observing interaction. We can, however, consider the interacting systems as a single whole system and formulate a state function representing the two systems together as a single object of description. From this function we can derive a probability for finding the observed system in some particular state after the observation has ceased. This fact gives to the processes of interaction as represented in quantum theory a feature of wholeness or "individuality" as Bohr called it. Any attempt to represent the state of the two systems separately involves an "abstraction" from the concrete physical situation which the quantum formalism is designed to represent. Such an attempt would be precisely what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness; thus like Whitehead Bohr also criticizes this tendency in so interpreting the physical description of nature.

From this line of argument it follows that to observe an isolated physical system is quite literally a contradiction in terms once the quantum postulate is accepted. Within the classical framework, however, the claim that mechanistic physics presented an "objective" description of physical reality was justified by the belief that it determined the properties of substances as they exist quite independently of our observation of them. These properties (spatiotemporal positions) were regarded as the mechanical causes of the observables (spatiotemporal measurements) which empirically confirmed the theory that was expressed in terms of mathematical parameters (spatiotemporal variables in equations) operationally coordinated with the observables. Thus theoretically representing the state of a physical system as isolated from any mechanical interaction was equivalent to determining the properties possessed by a substance as it exists independently of the observation. If we remain within this classical framework, then, since quantum theory cannot so represent the classical state of an isolated system, it follows that either it is an incomplete theory or its description is not objective.

Of course, if we want to defend the claim that quantum theory provides an objective description of its objects, then we must alter the framework to provide a new notion of what such objects are. Bohr’s reasoning followed exactly this path, but though he attempted to formulate a new framework, he avoided stipulating what the ontology of such objects would involve.

First he considered that in order to describe the outcome of a measurement we need to retain an objective means of describing the state of the measuring apparatus. For this task classical mechanics had already provided a totally acceptable method, the method of space-time coordination. This method maybe retained -- indeed Bohr would have said it must be -- because in dealing with the measuring apparatus, we must ultimately deal with physical systems with dimensions such that observing them involves an interaction so small that it can be neglected. This is in fact true by definition; it is what we mean by a "measuring system." Thus the mode of space-time coordination must be retained for describing experimental outcomes.

Secondly, Bohr noted that in order to be able to use the observing interactions as measurements of anything we must consider such observations as involving causal interactions. Only in this way is it possible for the conservation principles to permit determining the state of the observed system by means of its interaction with the observing system. Thus the claims of causality must also be retained. But, because of the quantum postulate, both modes of description cannot be considered as describing the same object. Thus we must conclude that what it is that we are describing using one mode is quite distinct from what it is that we are describing using the other mode. However, the two modes must combine to allow a "complete" description in that the description furnished by one mode is the starting point for the application of the other mode and vice versa. The two modes are thus said to be "complementary." Since Bohr arrives at the complementarity of these modes of description by a critique of the belief that a mathematical representation of a particle at a simple location in space is a description of a real object, and since assuming this belief is necessary for deriving Bell’s theorem, it follows that the disconfirmation of Bell’s theorem amounts to an indirect confirmation of complementarity.

The price to be paid for recognizing that the two modes of description do not apply to the same object of description is that we must relinquish the classical realistic belief that what we are describing in mechanics are the properties possessed by a substance. As mentioned, Bohr assiduously avoided any such overtly metaphysical claim, thereby leaving himself open to being hailed as an ally of the instrumentalists. However, throughout his whole life’s work it is clear that he regarded the task of physics as the description of physical reality, not simply the invention of mathematical schemes allowing correct predictions of experimental results. Whether or not the elementary entities described by quantum physics are particles or waves, it is quite clear that whatever they are Bohr regarded them as real things in the physical world -- as entities which causally interact with our measuring apparatus to produce the experimental observations that confirm the theory. They are not merely inference tickets allowing correct predictions but having no correlation to the way the world "really is."

What is it, then, that the two modes do describe, and what is the relationship of these "objects of description" to the "real entities" which quantum theory symbolizes by its state functions and which interact with the measuring apparatus to produce the phenomena we observe? First consider the observing interaction from a complementaristic viewpoint. In order to use this interaction as an observation not only must we know the state of the observing system before and after the experiment -- recall that its state must be determined unproblematically in the classical fashion -- but also we must know the state of the observed system prior to the observation; at least the theory must provide a function representing that state which can enter into the theoretical description of the interaction that employs the conservation principles. But this means that we must have a theoretical representation of the state of the isolated system, and that is, of course, what observation in the classical scheme was intended to establish by means of the mode of space-time coordination. But now once the quantum postulate is accepted, observation cannot be regarded as determining the state of the isolated physical system. Thus when we theoretically construct a function which represents the state of the system prior to the interaction, i.e., as isolated, the "object" so described must be understood as a conceptual abstraction or idealization, not a "picture" (Bohr’s word) of the entity existing in isolation from the observation as it is in-itself.

Idealization or abstraction though it may be, it is not for that reason one with less importance in quantum physics than it was in the classical framework, for it is the essential requirement for using the other mode of description -- that of describing causally interacting systems through the conservation principles -- in order to describe the measurement interaction as an observation of the state of the observed system. Complementarily, that other mode, the mode employing the claims of causality, is essential to determining the state of the system at some prior time so that we can provide a spatiotemporal description of the isolated system immediately before a particular measurement interaction begins. Thus the two modes mutually support each other, but the object of’ the mode of space-time coordination -- the state of the system as isolated from the interaction -- is itself a theoretical abstraction. Just as Whitehead reminded us in the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, Bohr also insists that we must not mistake it for the actual reality which causes our experiences.

What then is the object which the causal mode describes? It cannot be the real entity as it exists apart from observation either, for the causal mode describes an interaction, and in quantum interactions the state of the observed system cannot be separated from the observing system. Thus the only "object" which is described when the causal mode is invoked to describe an interaction is the whole phenomenon of the interaction itself. We do not in this mode describe two distinct things at all; we describe one thing: an interaction. It would seem, then, that this object of description in the causal mode is no more a substance possessing properties than was the object of the mode of’ space-time coordination. What we are describing in this mode is a change that has an indivisibility or individuality that cannot, on pain of ambiguity, be further subdivided; it is a whole process of change. Again Whitehead’s view seems to accord well with complementarity.

It appears that in neither mode of description does complementarity hold that quantum theory allows a description of a real entity existing apart from observation. Certainly this conclusion is correct if we assume that "describing reality" means, as the classical framework stipulates, determining the properties of a substance, in particular the properties coordinated with the mechanical state parameters. But what if reality is not in fact composed of such entities? Can we formulate an alternative framework in which reality is not so conceived and in which it is understood in a way that does allow us to regard the quantum theoretical representation as in fact describing a real entity? It is at this point that Bell’s theorem provides a helpful clue.

3. The Ontological Significance of Bell’s Theorem

Bell’s theorem is essentially the latest chapter in a story that begins with the confrontation between Bohr and Einstein concerning the completeness of the quantum mechanical description of reality. Although the participants in the debate tended to see the question as whether or not the indeterminacy relations could be violated, in fact the point of issue was not one in physics but in metaphysics. Remaining true to the classical conception of reality, Einstein held that the parameters defining the classical mechanical state are essentially theoretical representations of properties possessed by the entities themselves. Since it is well known the indeterminacy principle prevents determining simultaneously the properties that define the classical mechanical state, if Einstein’s conception of reality is retained, there are properties of real entities which quantum theory cannot determine. Thus the theory is said to be "incomplete." Einstein attempted to make good this argument by designing a series of thought experiments -- the last of which was the celebrated "Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment" -- which would permit determining more than the indeterminacy relations allowed, thus proving the incompleteness of quantum theory. However, his argumentation premised the classical conception of reality; thus for Bohr, who rejected this notion of reality, Einstein’s reasoning quite naturally appeared unsound. The controversy, then, turned on opposing conceptions of physical reality.

Bell’s theorem enters into this story by proposing a possible experimental test of which conception of reality accords with observation. To derive Bell’s theorem one must accept the classical realist’s assumption that the observables recorded in an experiment are the causal effects of properties possessed by the quantum mechanical entity. In order to make the argument go through, one must further assume that if we can demonstrate by observation a correlation between the properties of two systems which once interacted in the past, then the properties in question must have been possessed by the systems when they interacted, even though the observations which determine these properties are made long after the interaction between the systems has ceased. This assumption, in turn, is justified by tacit appeal to the classical belief that the two systems once separated are simply located where they are observed and that therefore no causal relationship between them can exist. A theory which accords with these presuppositions of the classical framework is called a "local realistic theory." With these assumptions Bell derives an inequality concerning the numbers of pairs of particles that will be observed having a particular pair of properties. The quantum formalism predicts that in certain cases this inequality will be violated, and experimental evidence now appears to support its prediction against those of the local realistic theories. This experimental disconfirmation of Bell’s inequality implies that one or more of the classical presuppositions from which it is derived must be false.

It is pointless to repeat a detailed qualitative description of these experiments -- for which the reader is referred to the literature cited above -- but in order to see how complementarity would explain why Bell’s inequality is not confirmed, we need consider only the following facts. In any experimental setup it is impossible in principle to design apparatus which would determine two observables which the indeterminacy principle prohibits determining with arbitrary accuracy. However, we can consider two entities which interact in a way such that the observable detected when entity A is observed hears some strict correlation with the same observable which entity B exhibits when it is observed. Thus from the knowledge of an observable determined from a measurement interaction on entity A, because we know that there is a strict correlation of this observable with that of entity B, we should be able to predict the value of the same observable if entity B is observed.

Indeed such a correlation is found in the case of the spin measured along some coordinate axis of each of a pair of protons which have been allowed to interact in a well-known configuration called the singlet state. At a crucial step in the reasoning, Bell’s derivation then argues that since there is a well-confirmed correlation between the spins of the two protons, it follows that what is observed in the measurement of the spin of proton A is the effect of a property possessed by that proton when it was in interaction with proton B well before the spin was determined by observation. The observation cannot record an effect which arises merely ip the measurement interaction, for that measurement can take place long after the two protons have separated. If the spin of proton A only comes into being when observed, how could that which causes the observation of a particular spin bear a strict correlation with the spin property of proton B since it would not have come into existence until long after the interaction with proton B had ceased? Furthermore, we can observe the two protons with separate spin detectors at the same time even though they are separated by a distance so great that a causal interaction between proton A and proton B at the instant of measurement would have to propagate through space faster than light.

From the viewpoint of complementarity, the negative outcome of experiments testing Bell’s inequality is a victory that could have been expected because the arguments from which the inequality is derived commit the very same fallacies that Whitehead named in his critique of the classical framework. Consider first the description of proton A. We can describe its state after the interaction with proton B has ceased as that of a particle moving through space in a spatial region far from proton B. In the interval between the interaction with proton B (which is allegedly when the relationship to the spin of proton B is determined) and the observation that determines the spin of proton A, we can consider proton A to be an isolated physical system. Indeed, in order to describe the measurement as a measurement of the spin of proton A it is essential that we do so. This state of the isolated proton can be represented as a particle moving through space from the point where the two protons interacted to the point where the spin measurement is made. But, as we have seen, complementarity insists that this representation "describes" an abstraction which is required for our theoretical representation of the measurement interaction but cannot be regarded as a description of the properties of a substantial object existing independently of observation. Consequently when classical realism does in effect argue that the spin of the proton is a property of the proton prior to observation, it assumes that a theoretical representation of what happens in the observing interaction is a description of the real entities that interact to produce the experimental phenomena. In this way classical realism commits the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: it regards the theoretical representation as a description of the properties of an objective reality.

At the same time in arguing that the two protons are entities existing where the spin detectors interact with them, and that they are so separated that a signal cannot pass from one proton to the other unless it moves faster than light, classical realism commits the fallacy of simple location. Thus it assumes that because the observation is theoretically represented as resulting from the interaction of the measuring apparatus with a particle that is simply located at the same point in space as the apparatus, the entity observed in this interaction is in fact a substance possessing the property of existing at that point in space; i.e., that it is simply located.

From within the framework of complementarity the "reality" producing the phenomena we call "observations" is represented by the wave function which defines the state of the system within the quantum formalism. This representation of the state of the system isolated from interaction may in principle be spread across an arbitrarily large area of space. The initial conditions which define this wave function are given by the state of the combined system of two protons while interacting in the singlet state. After the interaction we can consider each proton as a separate entity, but in doing so we are dealing with an abstraction that enables us to describe the interaction with the spin detector that forms the observation. This representation cannot, however, be regarded as a picture of the underlying reality. If we do so regard it, the experimental disconfirmation of Bell’s inequality forces us to conclude that some superluminary transmission of a causal relation connects the one simply located proton with the other. But no such strange conception of causal connection need be assumed, for there is no reason -- except dogmatic adherence to the classical framework -- to regard the quantum system as in any sense simply located. The property of location belongs to the causal mode of description; i.e., we attribute position in space to objects which we observe. Bohr called these objects phenomenal objects. Considered as an object of description, the phenomenal object "possesses simply location. However, this fact does not legitimize the conclusion that the object itself apart from the interaction has the property of simple location any more than a molecule considered in isolation has temperature.

When we do talk about the trajectories of particles or waves moving through free space, we do so in the context of an abstraction which is the goal of the mode of space-time coordination and is necessary for describing interactions through the causal mode. But we cannot regard this abstraction as a "picture" of the real entity without committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. The conclusions of Whitehead’s critique thus find confirmation in complementarity’s analysis of the disconfirmation of Hell’s inequality. But what of the reality which interacts with observing systems to produce the phenomena that quantum theory describes; what does the new framework tell us about this reality? Can it even support any realistic claims?

4. Conclusion -- The Nature of Quantum Mechanical Reality

The fundamental problem in providing an account of the nature of quantum mechanical reality requires devising a framework justifying the claim that quantum theory provides a complete description of reality and at the same time avoiding the paradoxes that arise when the quantum theory is viewed from within the framework of classical realism. How can we revise the notion of "physical reality" so that we can be scientific realists and accept the completeness of the quantum description of its objects?

Realism presents a descriptive ideal for science: we are to consider a scientific description "complete" or "adequate" only when it permits determining all of the properties possessed by the real entities which cause the experiences that confirm that particular theoretical representation. If we believe that we know what those properties are, we may ask of a theoretical description quite simply, does it allow determination of such properties or not? If it does not and yet science retains such a theory as acceptable, it would seem that science abandons realism. This was in fact Einstein’s conclusion about those who accepted the completeness of quantum theory.

As long as the received view dominated philosophy of science, it was believed that since our only foundation for accepting a theory is the experimental confirmation of that theory’s deductive consequences, the task of a theory was merely to permit deductions of statements describing experimentally observed phenomena, not to account for the character of reality. Hence, imposing the demands of a realistic metaphysics on scientific explanation seemed totally unjustified. However, we have now come to recognize the crucial role of the framework within which a theory is offered in stipulating the sorts of entities described by the theory. Thus the question of realism again becomes one internal to a philosophical account of scientific explanation, rather than an external metaphysical appendage which may be removed without any deleterious consequences to scientific explanation. The point of mentioning this new outlook is that the concept of reality cannot be regarded as given independently of scientific theory.⁷ This is what Einstein failed to appreciate with respect to quantum physics: scientific theory "informs" metaphysical frameworks. We may, of course, reject quantum physics and cling to the notion of reality implicit in the classical framework. But we have greater justification for regarding quantum theory as well established, and this fact indicates we must begin serious consideration of exactly what revisions in the framework and its concept of reality are required to regard this theoretical representation in a realistic way. The fact that a successful theory does not coincide with one concept of reality hardly entails that if we retain the theory, we have abandoned realism. What is required is a revised notion of reality.

With respect to this conclusion, Whitehead’s process philosophy and complementarity are in full agreement. Both recognize that simple location can no longer be considered a defining property of the ontologically real entity described by quantum physics. Since this property essentially defines "matter" as classically conceived, it is clear that realism and quantum mechanics can both be retained only once the ontology of classical materialism is fully relinquished. But the extent of this agreement between Whitehead’s outlook and complementarity goes beyond their common criticism of the classical framework. In stipulating that what is described by the state equations of quantum mechanics is not the properties of a substance but a process of interaction which cannot be unarbitrarily subdivided into separate physical systems in determinate states, the framework of complementarity essentially puts the notion of process at the heart of its characterization of the ontological status of the objects of experimental observation, or in other words, of experience.

No doubt, what these conclusions give us is not a framework itself, but an indication of some characteristics of a framework yet to be developed. The expectation that we can produce a unified, consistent framework within which the quantum description of reality can be realistically understood refers to an ideal goal rather than anything that is likely to be an historical fact. Looking backwards at the regime of classical mechanics, we often speak as though that stage of physics were dominated by a single consistent world-view. But this characterization is at least in part mythical, for, throughout the centuries from Newton to Einstein and Bohr, the framework of classical physics was always in a state of modification and in fact was never a single framework so much as a family of resembling variants with historical and conceptual linkages. Thus to expect that process philosophy can provide a single, unified, consistent framework within which the quantum description of reality can be interpreted realistically in a totally non-paradoxical manner is ill-founded and ahistorical. However, it is entirely defensible to argue that process metaphysics has injected into the career of philosophy crucial ontological conceptions, both critical and constructive, which may well serve as seeds from which a fuller understanding of the nature of the physical world, in both science and philosophy, may grow.

References

ATDN -- Niels Bohr. Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. New York: Macmillan, 1934.

1. Henry J. Folse, Jr. "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory and Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism," Tulane Studies in Philosophy 13 (1974), 32-47.

Notes

1 For example, cf. Abner Shimony, "Quantum Physics and the Philosophy of Whitehead," Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, ed. by Robert S. Cohen and Marx Wartofsky (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), pp. 307-30; Robert Palter, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 214-18; Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. vol.7 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1971), p.304f.; David Bohm, "The Implicate Order: A New Order for Physics," PS 8:73-102 (Summer, 1978); and (I -- see REFERENCES, above),

2A very clear ‘analysis of Bell’s theorem appears in Bernard d’Espagnat, "The Quantum Theory and Reality," Scientific America 241 (November, 1979), 158-81. Unfortunately, d’Espagnat draws conclusions from this analysis which do not seem fully warranted; cf. his exchange of letters with Victor F. Weiskopf, Scientific American 242 (May,1980) 8-10, as well as T. A. Brody and P. E. Hodgson., "Comment on d’Espagoat’s ‘Quantum Theory and Reality,’" Epistemological Letters 62.0 (April, 1981), 7f.; and H. D. Zeh The Problem of Conscious Observation in Quantum Mechanical Description, Epistemological Letters 63.0 (July, 1981), 1-12.

3 Henry Pierce Stapp, "Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality, and Process Philosophy," ed. by William B. Jones, PS 7:172-82 (Fall, 1977); Charles Hartshorne, "Bell’s Theorem and Stapp’s Revised View of Space-Time," PS 7:183-91 (Fall, 1977); and William B. Jones, "Bell’s Theorem, H. P. Stapp, and Process Theism," PS 7:250-61 (Winter, 1977).

4 The constraints of a journal article make this overview is necessarily brief; a full account of my interpretation of complementarity and an analysis of how Bohr arrived at his views will appear in Henry J. Folse, The Framework of Complementarity, forthcoming. Cf. also my articles, "Complementarity and the Description of Experience, International Philosophical Quarterly 17/4 Dec., 1977), 377-92, and "The Formal Objectivity of Quantum Mechanical Systems," Dialectica 29/2 (1975), 127-43.

5A complete survey of these developments in philosophy of science is given by Frederick Suppe in, "The Search for Philosophic Understanding of Scientific Theories" and "Afterword -- 1977" in The Structure of Scientific Theories, second edition, ed. by F. Suppe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 3-241 and 617-730.

6These aspects of the framework are discussed in my article, "Rationality and the Ideal of the Description of Nature," Section Papers: 16th World Congress of Philosophy (Dusseldorf, 1978), 243-46.

7This notion of the relation between the findings of science and the task of philosophy is developed by C. A. Hooker, "Systematic Realism," Synthese 26, 414f. Cf. also my article "Belief and the New Scientific Realism," Tulane Studies in Philosophy, Fall, 1981.

In Warrant and Proper Function (WPF), Alvin Plantinga argues that the probability of human cognitive faculties "being reliable (producing mostly true beliefs)" must be regarded as quite low, if "metaphysical naturalism" is taken as valid and "human cognitive faculties arose by the mechanisms to which contemporary evolutionary thought directs our attention" (WPF 219). Since the reliability (proper function) of human cognitive faculties is a precondition of any warranted belief whatsoever, Plantinga concludes that it would be intrinsically irrational to adhere to naturalism and also to the generally accepted evolutionary account of origins. He advocates replacing evolutionary naturalism with a "theistic" approach.²

In Darwin on Trial,³ Philip E. Johnson, a professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the use of evidence in legal proceedings, examine the evidentiary basis for the currently accepted interpretation of biological evolution, "the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis." He finds that basis decidedly deficient. Among his strongest points is that observations that demonstrate gradual evolutionary changes in specific characteristics (beak shape of finches, color of forest moths, for instance) do not establish how gradual changes could bring about major evolutionary transitions that require concerted functioning of many specialized organs -- such as the change from arboreal mammals to night-flying bats, or the origin of life. In a more recent work, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law and Education (P.3), Johnson continues his argument, and makes clear what was implicit in the earlier work. That is, that one of the main reasons for his attack on Darwinism is his conclusion that insufficiently critical adoption of evolutionary modes of thought by the majority of scientists, and also by educational (e.g., John Dewey) and legal (e.g., Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) leaders, has led to a highly unsatisfactory cultural situation, and to many evil consequences. Johnson styles himself a "theistic realist" -- while distancing his positions from that of the "fundamentalists" and "creation scientists," he accepts the name "creationist’":

Johnson defines naturalism as "the doctrine that nature is ‘all there is’" (RB 7) and distinguishes pernicious "metaphysical" naturalism from relatively benign "methodological" naturalism (the strategy of proceeding as if naturalism were true). Johnson contends that the metaphysical disagreement between naturalists and theists -- the clash of two incompatible "creation stories" (RB 12) -- is a central issue in a "culture war" now raging in the United States.

Naturalism and theism appear to many thoughtful people as contraries -- mutually exclusive ways of dealing with questions of great significance.⁴ But from some points of view, the opposition between these modes of thought, and perhaps even their sharp distinction, may be less clear. Specific notions of deity, and of divine action, that have figured in theistic conceptual systems of long-past civilizations have certainly been influenced by then-prevailing technology -- the ways in which people made their living.⁵ In our own time, recent developments in technology and in science have had major influence on how the object of religion is conceived, at least for some theists.⁶ Whitehead wrote:

To the extent that this is the case, serious investigators of whatever sort employ modes of thought that could be considered to have "theistic" overtones. Both naturalistic and theistic approaches are in continual change and development -- greatly complicating comparison of the two points of view. In particular, the science and technology of the last decades of this century differ in important ways from the science and technology that went just before. In recent decades, theoretical developments and widespread availability of powerful computers have drastically changed the sorts of problems that scientists and technologists can tackle, greatly altered the methods they use, and brought about major upheaval in rather fundamental concepts used in scientific work. Major re-conceptualization of causality has occurred.⁷ It seems at least possible that some formerly serious conflicts between theistic and naturalistic outlooks may well have become moot. This paper reviews a novel approach to the scientific understanding of the origin of life -- and to development of biological order and diversity in general -- and explores, in a preliminary way, possible relationship between this new approach and some contemporary philosophical theologies of creation.

Richard Dawkins has been engaged in an extended polemic against standard theistic interpretations. Even though he did make what might be called a "theological" contribution⁸ regarding "God’s Utility Function," clearly he should be counted as a "naturalist" rather than a "theist." Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins’ most recent popular work,⁹ is mainly a refutation of arguments put forward over many years by a number of distinguished physical scientists who have claimed that biological evolutionary change by natural selection is intrinsically unreasonable, using arguments from probability theory. Dawkins holds that those objections falsely assume that evolution necessarily involves a major, abrupt alteration of a preexisting situation -- analogous to a foolhardy mountain-climber essaying an assent straight up the face of a sharp precipice. Dawkins claims that what actually occurs in natural evolution is incremental change, analogous to a more cautious climber’s slow ascent up along, but gentle, slope around the back of that steep cliff.

For Dawkins, by far the most important aspect of biological nature is the ability of certain stretches of DNA ("genes") to engender faithful copies of themselves, under conditions that prevail. In earlier works, Dawkins noted that there are other entities in the world, in addition to genes, that have the property of self-replication -- units of cultural transmission ("memes") are also "replicators." Recently, Dawkins has re-narrowed his focus to the level of the gene. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Sazthmáry considered five major evolutionary transitions, ranging from the origin of life to the beginnings of human language, using an approach somewhat similar to that of Dawkins.¹⁰

Curiously, Dawkins does not discuss much the work of Stuart Kauffman who published a major work in 1993, The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution (OOSSE), dealing with basic mechanisms of evolutionary change. (Dawkins does include brief reference to Kauffman’s more popular 1995 work, At Home in the Universe[HU].) Kauffman, like the eminent physicists Dawkins quotes, regards the standard understanding of evolutionary change by natural selection as radically unsatisfactory, but his argument has a quite different structure from the ones that Climbing Mount Improbable rebuts. Kauffman was trained as a physician, but gave up medical practice to study fundamental questions in biology: "I entered biology because the magnificent wonder of cell differentiation overwhelmed me" (HU94).

To better understand biological morphogenesis, Kauffman took up computer-modeling of abstract systems designed to mimic important features of biological nature. The Origins of Order contains rather detailed accounts of computer simulations designed to illuminate a wide range of problems of fundamental biological interest: origin of life, development of mammalian embryos, ecosystem dynamics, etc. At Home in the Universe covers much the same ground as The Origins of Order, but in a less technical manner, and it extends arguments based in biology to questions of wider interest, such as the place of humans in the cosmos. As the title of the work indicates, Kauffman concludes that humans are integral parts of evolutionary nature, rather than intrinsically outsiders, as some others -- both theists and naturalists -- have held.

Kauffman states the opinion that the present general understanding of evolution by natural selection is inadequate:

Kauffman holds, in addition to dealing with natural selection, that any adequate theory of evolution must also account for the spontaneous generation of coherence -- what he calls "order for free" (HU 71-92), His emphasis on this point is a major contrast between Kauffman and most other contemporary writers on evolutionary topics.

The novelty of Kauffman’s approach may be illustrated by considering his discussion of the origin of life. The best known researchers in the field of proto-biology have focused on the currently prevalent apparatus of biological organization and reproduction – the complex networks of DNA, RNAs, and proteins that constitute present-day biological organisms. They have attempted to infer (or imagine) what simpler states of affairs might have preceded what we now observe. Manfred Eigen’s approach¹¹ envisions self-reproducing cycles of catalytic and autocatalytic chemical reactions (hypercycles) that undergo modifications that lead to other more complicated self-reproducing networks of interaction (larger hypercycles). In this view, the predominant direction of evolutionary development is from simpler states of affairs to more complex ones. Enlargement of a hypercycle to produce a larger hypercycle requires that a number of new chemical species come into play. In order for the new hypercycle to function well enough to replace a former hypercycle, these new molecules must each possess quite specific catalytic and autocatalytic functions. Functional constraints of this sort put severe restrictions on the structure and composition that the required new molecules must have. This stringency seems to provide some grounds for the type of probability-based anti-evolutionary argument that Dawkins sets out to refute in Climbing Mount Improbable, and provides some support for the arguments Johnson makes in Reason and the Balance concerning the unlikelihood of major evolutionary transitions occurring solely by Darwinian mechanisms.

At least in part to deal with such points, Eigen more recently pointed out that each biological genome is not a single sequence of bases on DNA (a unique "point in sequence space") but rather a fairly large number of variant sequences that have quite similar -- even indistinguishable -- biological functions.^11b,11c Most of these functionally similar sequences differ from the "wild-type" sequence in only one or a few locations, but some have fairly large discrepancies. Rather than being a point in sequence-space, each such quasi-species" may be regarded as a cloud of such points, with high density in the region of the wild-type but with significant, long extensions in several directions. Eigen also points out that biological systems generally operate near what Kauffman calls "the edge of chaos"’ -- that is, it usually happens that certain small changes will lead to disintegration of a quasi-species. On this basis, Eigen maintains that abrupt changes of a quite major sort are to be expected in the normal course of events, as a quasi-species centered on one sequence is rapidly replaced by a rather different successor quasi-species centered quite far away on one of the extensions of the former species.

An argument formally similar to Eigen’s quasi-species concept has recently been shown^11d to provide a satisfactory account of the occurrence of major structural changes on binding of a small molecule to a specific antibody. In the absence of the small molecule, the antibody has a range of possible structures that give rise to a specific "consensus structure," binding the particular small molecule shifts the probabilities of all those configurations, and produces a new consensus structure vastly different from the original one.

In the case of the origin of life, Eigen’s main interest, and also the other major transitions considered by Maynard Smith and Sazthmáry, closure of cycles of relationships is of central importance -- and each such closed cycle has one or more components with the property of self-enhancement known as autocatalysis. A typical autocatalytic change is one in which the product of the change enhances the speed of the process such that the change keeps getting faster and faster, unless controlled by some other interaction. Formation of sets of processes (at least one autocatalytic) in such a way that original conditions are regenerated is considered, by Eigen, to be the main origin of evolutionary development -- but how these closures come to be is not fully explicated.

Kauffman has an alternative and quite non-standard approach to the question of the origin of life: an approach that does not seem to be subject to objections that can be made against prior suggestions. Kauffman rejects the assumption that life began with simple catalytic cycles, such as Eigen originally envisioned. He consider the sort of chemical mélange that is likely to have arisen from spontaneous, garden-variety chemistry on the primitive Earth, prior to the origin of life. Any aqueous solution that contains a large number of chemicals must necessarily give rise to an even more complicated set of chemical reactions between and among those molecules, producing yet more chemical types. On the pre-biotic Earth, it seems likely that there were vast numbers of locations, including many energy-rich ones, where such complex reaction-systems existed. Kauffman argues that, given a sufficiently complex network of reactions, eventually a self replicating cycle of chemical reactions must necessarily arise. That is, if enough different chemical changes are going on, sooner or later some collection of chemicals must undergo a series of alterations that generates a set of conditions much like the original situation. Once that occurs, that cyclical process will continue indefinitely. Laboratory experience with chemical networks of this type (such as the Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction) have shown that such oscillatory reactions are often remarkable tolerant of changes in reaction conditions, within rather wide limits. Closure of such a autocatalytic network of reactions is made more likely, rather than less likely, by increase in complexity of the mixture.

Such a self-replicating cycle would resemble Eigen’s hypercycle in that it would be a closed network of catalytic and autocatalytic processes, but the kind of cycle that Kauffman envisions as the origin of replication is highly complicated -- not at all initially simple, as prior workers in the origin-of-life field have tended to assume. The new view holds that the initial closure of a self-replicating cycle was a necessary consequence of the complexity of the situation produced by prior strictly chemical processes, and the cycle that was thus produced was surely large and ungainly. For Kauffman, an important part of evolutionary advance must have been simplification of such initially complex cycles -- gradual elimination of ineffective and redundant steps.

On this view, there existed once, before the origin of life, fairly concentrated solutions of molecules -- including a plethora of carbon-containing ones. Many of these molecules were catalysts, each one facilitating one or more reactions of a wide variety of types. Each of those reactions yielded still other molecules -- some catalytically effective in novel ways. Eventually (and necessarily, in Kauffman’s view) it happened that some large set of these reactions produced a closed cycle that had the property of regenerating (more or less) the original catalysts and reactants. Such a cycle would keep on going (since it generated its own starting conditions) while other reaction sequences that were not cyclical would play themselves out relatively rapidly. Over time, compounds that were parts of the successful cycle would come to make up larger and larger fractions of the chemicals in the solution. Once established, such a cycle could change by simplification -- taking shortcuts around unnecessary steps. By the same reasoning as used previously, the slightly simpler cycle would be expected to persist and spread, at the expense of a more-complex progenitor. The conditions for simplifying a complex cycle (while maintaining closure) are much less stringent than the requirements for expanding a smaller cycle to produce a larger one. Kauffman proposes that larger cycles may be formed readily by combination of smaller cycles.

The prevailing view holds the plethora of biological forms that now exist have evolved through transitions from simpler autocatalytic reaction-networks to more complex ones. According to Kauffman, the origin of life -- and other major evolutionary change -- should be envisioned to start from a relatively confused and disorderly state, involving entities of many types, each one a result of previous processes. Since there were many entities in interaction, there were very many ways in which they interacted, and all those interactions had consequences leading to yet further changes. If the situation became sufficiently complicated, the probability that networks of autocatalytic interactions closed -- that some novel "dissipative structures" (a term due to Ilya Prigogine) came into existence -- became so large as to approach certainty. All of the changes mentioned depend on the availability of energy, either from a heat-source such as a deep-ocean hot-spring or from weakly bonded large molecules produced by prior chemical processes. Once produced, the closed autocatalytic sets of interconnected changes persisted and expanded their influence, crowding out non-cyclical processes.

The origin of chemical coherence envisioned by Kauffman can be seen as related to the origin of coherent molecular motion in heat-driven convection. When a viscous liquid is heated from below, random motion of molecules transfers heat across the layer. But as the heating continues, eventually a closed loop of molecular movement develops in some region -- a column of rising molecules happens to be next to a stack of sinking units -- so that a more or less circular path becomes available. Once that happens in one small region, the motion of molecules in neighboring regions will be influenced so that the coherent, organized mode of motion spreads -- and eventually the whole liquid is covered with hexagonal convection cells." The spontaneously organized joint activity of molecules transfers heat across the liquid layer much more rapidly than did the original, random motion,

A homely example¹² may clarify how networks (say, of chemical reactions) would be expected to become simpler with the passage of time, as unnecessary steps drop out. If a sugar-cup is placed near an ant-hill, eventually a roaming ant will stumble onto it. To get back to the nest, the happy explorer will retrace the route used to make the discovery; this route will be a long and winding one. Additional ants will join to exploit the newly-discovered resource -- by following the trail of the first ant. Each subsequent ant will follow the path taken by the ant ahead of it, but each will cut corners in doing so. Because of these shortcuts, after a fairly brief time, the trail from the ant-hill to the food will be as straight as if it had been laid out with a ruler. The final path is quite different from the tortuous route the initial insect had used. In Kauffman’s view, the first achievement of any new coherence is likely to be messy; simplicity will only be approached over time -- as efficiencies, such as the ant shortcuts, are stumbled upon.

Kauffman’s thesis is that growth in complexity leads eventually and ineluctably to a situation where coherence on a new level emerges, through closure of a network of catalytic and autocatalytic processes. Once this new type of organization has come into being, progressive simplification is to be expected. Kauffman provides results of "experiments" -- done with computer-models of various types -- dealing with biological structure--generation on many diverse levels -- to support this conclusion.

In Personal Knowledge,¹³ Michael Polanyi writes as follows:

From Kauffman’s point of view, the "ordering principle" involved in the origin of life is the closure of appropriate self-replicating chemical networks.

Strictly speaking, there is no scientific point at issue between Dawkins and Kauffman, the question is one of emphasis. But as Whitehead pointed out, "emphasis is valuation" (PR 477). The issue should be understood as "which is more important, the individual replicator (the gene), or the patterns generated by interactions of a myriad of replicators with a complex environment?"

To explain the gaudy colors of certain male maniken birds of the tropics, Dawkins would point to the efficacy of replication of the genes. Kauffman might well observe that it as true to say that the pattern of reproductive behavior ("lekking") characteristic of that species of tropical bird "causes" the set of genes that bird carries, as it is true to say that the nature of those genes "causes" that pattern of behavior.¹⁴ Kauffman could claim that the coherence and efficacy of the macroscopic behavior-pattern (lekking) needs to be taken into account in any adequate understanding of the behavior of those birds, or of their genetic composition. The pattern of behavior that is effective in a lekking bird species is the important "ordering principle," in Polanyi’s terminology. The difference of opinion between Dawkins and Kauffman may be understood as a contemporary version of medieval nominalist-realist controversies.¹⁵

The whole process of spontaneous generation of organization is described by Kauffman as "order for free." Kauffman joins in the proclamation of post-modern science -- Nature is self-organizing.¹⁶

Howard J. Van Till¹⁷ recently discussed the relationship of scientific doctrines of "self-organization" to the Christian tradition, particularly to the writings of Saint Basil of Caesarea (330-379) and Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Van Till’s conclusion is that those ancient authors clearly understood that nature has the intrinsic capability to generate novel forms of coherence. Both of these ancient churchmen were well able to incorporate this understanding into their theistic philosophies. Van Till describes their view as "the doctrine of creation’s functional integrity." If this is so, why do many find that the notion that nature is self-organizing is somehow contrary to theistic commitments?

The doctrine (widely held until recently) that "matter" itself is fully real (rather than an abstraction, derived from intellectual analysis of concrete really-existing things, as Aristotle held), and that such self-subsistent "matter" is intrinsically inert (as opposed to self-organizing), arguably reached its full flower in the late Renaissance.¹⁸ Part of contemporary divergence between theistic and naturalistic approaches may be understood to arise from overly complete internalization (by both naturalists and theists) of the cosmology that emerged from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century -- the cosmology in which "matter" was full real, but intrinsically inert. As I have argued elsewhere, this cosmology is now rapidly being replaced by a rather different one that draws attention to the form-generating capabilities of concrete entities.¹⁹

Brief consideration of some recent contributions to the theology of creation may suggest that the divergence between the approaches of Dawkins and of Kauffman to biological questions are at least tangentially related to the naturalism/theism tension. As part of a larger work, Robert Sokolowski²⁰ presented a concise summary of "the Christian understanding of the world as created and God as Creator." He points out a major difference between Christian and "pagan" or "natural" ideas of God. For the later, God is "part of the world" -- in contrast, for the Christian, "God is hidden not just because of human psychological limitations, but because he is not one of the things of the world" (see note 20, page 52).

Joseph Bracken, S.J., John Cobb, Lewis Ford, Charles Hartshorne, Schubert Ogden, Marjorie Suchocki, David Tracy, and others, have developed theological approaches influenced by the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.²¹ For Whitehead, God is involved in each event, in the concrescence of every actual entity. God is the source of the "form of definiteness," the "subjective aim," of each occasion. Lewis Ford develops this idea:

W. Norris Clarke, Sj.,^22a who is quite conversant with process theology as well as with Thomistic thought, concedes that some aspects of the process approach are valuable and should be taken into account. But he also points out deep discordance between that approach and traditional Christian thought, particularly as that thought developed after the incorporation of Neoplatonic notions of "a positive infinity.., an excess of perfection above all form and not below it."^22b From quite a different perspective,^22c Robert Neville also finds much of process theology unsatisfactory:

On the basis of such considerations, Neville describes his approach as creation ex nihilo. Neville maintains that God transcends the world but is related to each and every created thing as the creator of that thing:

Although Neville differs from traditional Christian theistic doctrine in important ways (such as dealing with the personal nature of God), he asserts divine transcendence emphatically.

Kauffman’s understanding of evolution seems much more conducive to theistic understanding than is Dawkins’ approach. The dipolar deity of process theology, as developed, for instance, by Lewis Ford, appears to fit rather well with Kauffman’s "order for free." Intrinsically new coherences arise from chaotic antecedents at many levels in the course of the development of every biological organism, and ecological community. Kauffman calls attention to the importance of understanding this sort of spontaneous order-generation and its causes. Much of what Ford says about "the lure of God" could readily be transferred into Kauffman’s conceptual scheme. Sokolowski probably would regard Ford’s approach as excessively naturalistic" (a characterization that Neville also employs). Neville claims that his system preserves both the divine transcendence that Sokolowski insists upon, and also the intimate relationship between creature and creator that Ford’s system provides.

Each of these three theistic authors is engaged in a difficult but necessary task, the attempt to craft a conceptual scheme adequate to the full range of contemporary human experience, giving appropriate attention to the valuable insights of venerable theistic traditions. Both Dawkins and Kauffman, as scientists, focus more sharply on their biological and modeling data -- but they both claim that their work is relevant to more general human concerns.

Plantinga and Johnson aim to defend theism by attack on evolutionary naturalism, which they consider to be antithetical to their notions of God and divine action in the world. In so doing they tend to emphasize God’s involvement in the major evolutionary transitions -- changes that, by any account, are wonders and marvels -- but they seem to neglect God’s action in more mundane matters, such as the arrival of Spring in the woods, or a toddler’s rapid mastery of language.²³ Neville takes pains to make clear that while God is necessarily involved in each natural event (remarkable or not), God is, as Sokolowski requires, "not one of the things of the world." In a sense, this approach falls under Johnson’s definition of metaphysical naturalism, since it turns out that nature is all there is in the world, since God is not. A deity that mainly operated in major transitions (as seems to be tacitly assumed by Johnson) seems to be "one of the things of the world" more than does the deity envisioned either by Neville or by Ford.

Johnson surely is correct that the scientific evidence for the current understanding of the origin of life -- and other major evolutionary transitions -- is incomplete. From a judicial point of view, the Scotch verdict "not proven" surely seems appropriate -- as it would be for very many other major items in current science. The wide and growing acceptance of the evolutionary outlook indicates that it is a highly suitable platform for "stories scientists tell." Those stories, even if few reach even close to certain and irreformable knowledge, are, in our day, adding up to a highly coherent account of the world and of major segments of its functioning.

Even if not quite all the deleterious societal consequences that Johnson recounts can be laid solely at the feet of "Darwinism," surely some of them can. As might be expected, religious, educational, and other social institutions require time to adjust to intellectual changes, such as the vast increase both in human understanding and in the scope for human action (for both good and ill) that modern science and technology have made possible. Theists quite properly see the hand of God at work in major evolutionary changes such as the origin of life, but also in such everyday occurrences as the development of a fertilized egg into a cocker pup, and too in the social turmoil -- including very real moral and physical evil -- that accompanies economic, technological, and intellectual change. Process theism, such as that of Lewis Ford and his colleagues, seems the best present means to provide interpretation (at once theistic and naturalistic) that extends to all events, including major evolutionary developments -- and might even provide adequate theological and philosophical basis to moderate some culture-war hostilities.

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Conference on Naturalism, Theism, and the Scientific Enterprise (NTSE) held at Austin, Texas. March 20-23, 1997 under the title "A New Approach to Biological Evolution and Some Concepts of Creation." Papers presented at the NTSE conference are available for downloading at the web page: hstp://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/philosophy/faculty/koons/ntse/main.html

2. See also Alvin Plantinga. Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

3. Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial, revised edition (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993).

4. Many of the papers at the NTSE Conference (note 1) illustrate this point.

5a. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, translated by J. and D. Weightman (New York: Atheneum. 1974).

5b. Colin Renfrew, "The Archaeology of Religion," The Ancient Mind; Elements of Cognitive Archaeology, edited by Renfrew and Zubrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

6. John Haught, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (New York: Paulist Press, 1995).

7. Theological implications of developments of this sort have been discussed in a recent Vatican Observatory publication. Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, edited by Robert Russell, Nancey Murphy, Arthur Peacocke (Notre Dame. Ind.: Vatican Observatory Publications, 1995).

8. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1995).

9. Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (New York: Norton, 1996).

10. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Sazithmáry. The Major Transitions in Evolution (New York: Freeman, 1995).

11a. Manfred Eigen, with Ruthild Winkler-Ostwatisch. translated by Paul Wooley. Steps Towards Life A Perspective on Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

11b. Manfred Eigen, "Viral Quasispecies." Scientific American 269 (1993), 42-49.

11c. Manfred Eigen, "The Origin of Genetic Information: Viruses as Models," Gene 135 (1993), 37-47

11d. Gary J. Wedemayer, Phillip A. Patten, Leo H. Wang, Peter Schultz, and Raymond C. Stevens, "Structural Insights into the Evolution of an Antibody Combining Site." Science 276 (1997), 1665-1669.

12. Alfred M. Bruckstein, "Why the Ant Trails Look So Straight and Nice ," The Mathematical Intelligencer 15 (1993), 59-62.

13a. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

13b. John F. Haught and D. M. Yeager, "Polanyi’s Finalism," Zygon 32 (1998), 543-566.

14. David B. McDonald and Wayne K. Potts, "Cooperative Display and Relatedness Among Males in a Lek-Mating Bird," Science 266 (1994), 1030-1032.

15. Edward 0. Wilson, "Biological and Human Determinants of the Survival of Species," Individuality and Cooperative Action. Edited by Joseph E. Earley (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990).

16. John H. Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926,101-102).

17. Howard J. Van Till, "Basil, Augustine, and the Doctrine of Creation’s Functional Integrity," Science and Christian Belief 8 (1996), 1996.

18a. Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (New York: Humanities Press, 1972).

18b. Frederick Ferré, The Matter with Matter (Nobel Conference 31, 1995).

18c. Frederick Ferré, Being and Value Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

19a. Joseph Earley, "Collingwood’s Third Transition: Replacement of Renaissance Cosmology by an Ontology of Evolutionary Self-Organization," With Darwin Beyond Descartes-The Historical Concept of Nature and Overcoming "The Two Cultures, edited by L. Zanzi (Pavia, Italy, forthcoming).

19b. Joseph Earley, "How Do Chemists Know When ‘Many’ Become ‘One’? Can Others Do It Too?" Philosophy of Chemistry and Biochemistry, edited by N. Psarros (Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen and Neumann, forthcoming).

20. Robert Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1993).

21a. John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology an Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976).

21b. Santiago Sia, Santiago, editor, Process Theology and the Christian Doctrine of God (Petersham, Mass.: St. Bede’s Publications, 1986 [Word & Spirit 8]).

21c. Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God, edited by Joseph Bracken, S.J. and Marjorie Suchocki (New York: Continuum, 1997).

22a. W. Norris Clarke, SJ., "Christian Theism and Whiteheadian Process Philosophy: Are They Compatible?" Logos 1(1980), 9-44.

22b. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., "Infinity in Plotinus," Gregorianum 40(1959), 75-98 (cited in 22a).

22c. Neville is influenced by Paul Weiss, by Eastern thought, and by John Smith and the American pragmatist tradition.

23. On the basis of contemporary understanding of the origins of human language, the efficacy of human communication, and hence the reliability of beliefs, is itself a result of long evolution. This seems to imply that notions of God and of divine action also would be expected to undergo development, even beyond notions of infinity based on Neoplatonic concepts (22a, 22b).

23a. Rom Harré and Daniel Robinson, "What Makes Language Possible? Ethological Foundationalism in Reid and Wittgenstein?" Review of Metaphysics 50(1997), 483-483. Human language is held to be connected, in its origin, with "natural signs" (facial expressions, postures, etc.).

23b. Merlin Ronald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Development of human culture is traced to repeated innovations in representational systems, including language.

References

LG Lewis Ford, The Lure of God A Biblical Background for Process Theism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. See also the "Special Focus: Tribute to Lewis S. Ford" in Process Studies 27/1-2 (1998), 2-77.

RB Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against NATURALISM in Science, Law and Education. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1995.

OOSEE Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

HU Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

GC Robert C. Neville, Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology, new edition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).

Nature abounds in compound individuals. Discrete, functioning entities are made up of components which are, in some sense, also individuals. Scientists sometimes need to be concerned with whether aggregates (e.g., species of plants^l) or components (e.g., quarks²) are ‘real’, but such questions are not generally regarded as having great importance for science. It has often happened, however, that scientific developments have had major significance for subsequent philosophical discussion of problems of the one and the many. Recently, there has been considerable increase in scientific understanding of the spontaneous development of spatial and temporal organization (structure) in physical, chemical, and biological systems.³ In an earlier note (PS 11:35), I suggested that this progress in science raises points that may be helpful in dealing with a question of current importance for process philosophy. This paper provides support for that suggestion. The first section introduces the philosophical problem. The middle sections provide brief nontechnical introduction to scientific concepts. The final section combines both topics.

I. The Problem of the Compound Individual

In rejecting Plato’s doctrine, and also the atomistic cosmology of Democritus, Aristotle had assigned fundamental importance to ousia (‘substances’ or ‘supposits’), the discrete persistent entities of ordinary experience (this ox, that tree) (NPE 45, 204). Whitehead’s rejection ofthat position was emphatic: "It is fundamental to the metaphysical doctrine of the philosophy of organism that the notion of an actual entity as the unchanging subject of change is completely abandoned" (PR 29/ 44).

Paul Weiss disagrees with his teacher’s doctrine, stating:

Most interpreters agree that Whitehead, in his final synthesis at least, held that "the final real things of which the world is made up" (PR 18/ 27) are both microscopic and noncomposite. For instance, William Christian states "now actual entities and nexus belong to different categories of existence" (IMW 408). When John Cobb suggested that a chemical molecule might properly be regarded as an "enduring object" (CNT 89), Donald Sherburne rejected the idea, maintaining that "electrons and protons are structured societies" and stating that it was Whitehead’s opinion that "at the level of electrons and protons we have not yet gotten down to personally-ordered strands of actual occasions" (PPCT 89). Ivor Leclerc has summarized (NPE 286) the orthodox interpretation: "Fundamental in this [Whitehead’s] doctrine is that it is the ultimate constituents into which all compounds are analyzable that are the tine physical existents."

It is clear that Whitehead was keenly aware of contemporary scientific developments as he constructed his system. His final synthesis was completed during the period in which chemistry and nuclear physics were being systematized in terms of a small number of "elementary" (noncomposite) particles. The particle physics of our day offers no similar confidence that specific entities of any sort may correctly be regarded as simple. "Elementary" is used in an operational sense that varies with the circumstances.⁴ Entities which are properly regarded as elementary in low-energy experiments turn out to have definite and significant internal structure when higher energies are employed. To the extent that Whitehead’s actual entities must be both microscopic and noncomposite (as the orthodox interpreters hold), then to the same extent there is a problem as to how the category of actual entity could be applicable, as Whitehead required all his categories to be (PR 3/4), at least in the universe accessible to physical science.

Whitehead considered each enduring individual human person to be a society of actual entities and that at any moment in the life of a person there exists a "regnant" occasion which somehow "presides" (PR 109/ 167) in the human body. Rem Edwards (PS 5:195) discussed severe problems that arise in applying Whitehead’s categorial scheme to human individuals. Edward Pols agrees that Whiteheadian actual occasions are "miniscule," but finds a different interpretation necessary for "high-level" entities. In a subtle analysis of rational action and the rational agent Pols⁵ explores the consequences of considering both the agent and the action as being "primary in an ontological sense. From the standpoint of psychology, as well as from that of microphysics, Whitehead’s conceptual system seems to have difficulties that may not have been apparent some years ago.⁶

Justus Buchler has developed a system⁷ which seems to be the polar opposite of Whitehead’s position, as described above. "Whatever is discriminated in any way (whether it is ‘encountered’ or produced or otherwise related to) is a natural complex, and no complex is more ‘real’ or more ‘natural’ or more ‘genuine’ or more ‘ultimate’ than any other." In contrast to the doctrine, ascribed to Whitehead by Leclerc, that "the truly active entities must be identified with the ultimate constituents, those which are not themselves composite" (MN 104), Buchler teaches that there is no level of complexity which has any sort of priority, that any one sort of aggregate is, ontologically, just as good as any other sort.

Recently F. Bradford Wallack has claimed that the orthodox interpreters have all been mistaken; that Whitehead intended the category of actual entity (actual occasion) to include such macroscopic, long-lived, and diverse entities as Julius Caesar, the Castle Rock at Edinburgh, a system of nebulae. She defends the proposition that "the actual entity is any concrete existent whatever" (ENPWM 16ff.). It seems to me that Wallack’s interpretation of Whitehead is close to the doctrine of Buchler. It might seem to be a scandal to the faithful that a thesis so at variance with the received interpretation of Whitehead’s system should be given any hearing.

I agree with James Felt, S.J., (PS 10:57) that it is necessary to reject Wallack’s contention that Whitehead, in his final synthesis, propounded the doctrine that she advocates. However there are many passages in Whitehead’s writings (e.g., SMW 93f.) which indicate that the orthodox interpretation catches only a fraction of the richness of Whitehead’s thought. Some admixture of the Buchler-Wallack tinge might well be appropriate for a neo-Whiteheadian system which would be consistent with main currents in contemporary thought. Considerations that are connected with recent progress in understanding self-organizing chemical and physical systems lead me to propose a criterion for application of the category of actual entity that retains many of the distinctive features of the philosophy of organism while dealing with some of the objections raised against that system, and including aspects of the Buchler-Wallack approach.

II. Structure and Stability in Chemistry

A new kind of organization, called dissipative structure has recently been discovered³ in physical and chemical systems (SNS). Before dealing with this new development, we briefly review well-established concepts.

The diiodine molecule, I₂, is composed of two iodine atoms joined by a covalent bond. Each of the two iodine atoms is composed of a positively-charged nucleus, a number of core electrons which comprise filled electronic shells, and an unfilled (valence) shell of electrons. The covalent bond arises from delocalization of the valence-shell electrons of both atoms, so that all these electrons may be regarded as pertaining to the molecule as a whole. The result of this bond-formation is that there is a single value of internuclear distance which is a defining characteristic of the molecule of diiodine. If, for any reason, the distance between the two iodine-atom nuclei should be less than that distance, there will be an unbalanced force (mainly arising from interactions of the filled shells) which will tend to increase the distance between the atomic centers. Conversely, if the atoms should be further apart than this equilibrium internuclear distance, then there would be an unbalanced force (primarily due to valence-shell interactions) which would tend to decrease the interatomic distance. At ordinary temperatures diiodine molecules vibrate continuously around the equilibrium internuclear distance, alteratomic distance. At ordinary temperatures diiodine molecules vibrate continuously around the equilibrium internuclear distance, alternately becoming stretched and compressed. The diiodine property of self-restoration after a disturbance.⁸

The flat, pungently-scented, purple crystals which are the most common form of elemental iodine consist of diiodine molecules packed in layers. Fairly weak forces within and between these layers arise from cooperative motions of the electrons in the outer electronic shells of the diiodine molecules. The structure of this regular aggregate of molecules cannot be described in terms of any one variable (in this respect it differs from the diiodine molecule, for which the single variable of internuclear distance sufficed). It is possible, however, completely to describe this structure in terms of a small number of independent parameters. Examples of such variables would be: the distance between layers, the distance between adjacent molecules, and soon. For a simple aggregate such as solid iodine, a half-dozen or so parameters would suffice; for more complex structures, a larger but still finite number of parameters would be needed. There is one geometric structure, corresponding to particular values for each of the defining parameters, which has the same property of self-restoration after disturbance that was noted for the molecule of diiodine. At any real temperature (one that is above absolute zero) all the components of the crystal are in motion, but all remain near their equilibrium positions.⁹

A purple haze can be seen in closed vials containing iodine crystals. The forces holding diiodine molecules in the crystal are modest, and liquid iodine is not stable at ordinary temperatures and pressures, so that solid iodine sublimes to give a rather large concentration of diatomic molecules in the vapor phase. At any given temperature, there is a particular concentration of gaseous iodine that is in equilibrium with solid iodine. If the vapor is pumped away, more solid will sublime; if additional gas is introduced, new crystals will form. The combination of solid iodine and one particular concentration of gaseous iodine is similar to the spatial structures previously discussed, in that this arrangement has an intrinsic capacity for regeneration after a modest perturbation.¹⁰ Both of these classes of arrangements are called equilibrium structures. They have the capacity to persist in closed systems indefinitely.

Just as the diiodine molecule vibrates about its equilibrium internuclear distance, and molecules in solid iodine jiggle around in three dimensions, still keeping the overall structure of the crystal intact, so, too, there are fluctuations in the concentrations of all chemicals which participate in chemical equilibria. In each small region of space the concentration of a given reagent is not quite constant, but undergoes increases and decreases, usually small.

III. Chemical Dissipative Structures

Ordinary chemical reactions are messy affairs. Customarily, chemists hold that any real reaction may be regarded as being composed of a number of elementary steps. The defining characteristic of an elementary step is that its rate is proportional to the product of the concentrations of the reactants involved in that step. An elementary step that will be important for our purposes involves the reaction of one molecule, called Y, with two molecules of another kind, denoted X. To the extent that this reaction is elementary, the reaction velocity doubles as the concentration of Y doubles, but increases by a factor of four if the concentration of X doubles. All real reactions are composed of many elementary steps, and the equations which tell how rate varies with concentration for real reactions are more or less complicated algebraic combinations of the simple equations which apply to the several elementary steps.

When many chemicals interact, the rate of production (or of destruction) of each molecular species is influenced by the concentrations of all the others, as well as by such environmental factors as temperature and whether or not the system is illuminated. Increasing the concentration of X, say, may speed production of molecule P, but, at the same time, it may retard production (or increase the rate of destruction) of species Y. In the vast majority of cases that have been studied, mixtures of chemicals change in composition, as time proceeds, in such a way as to approach a condition of chemical equilibrium.

Novel chemical principles are illustrated by the rather simple reaction sequence:

This sequence of reactions describes the conversion of A and B (the reactants) to P and Q (the products) while X and Y are both formed and destroyed (intermediates). The first three reactions are not remarkable, but the fourth step (used above as an example) has the unusual feature of being autocatalytic. That is, because this reaction leads to net production of species X, and the rate of reaction increases as the concentration of X increases, this fourth step keeps getting faster and faster.

In the particular reaction sequence shown, the second and third reactions increase in rate as the concentration of species X increases, but these two reactions use X up, rather than producing it. Differential equations can be used to state the same relationships that the chemical equations express. The concentrations of A, B, P, and Q are held at constant values throughout the system for a single experiment, but these values can be varied from one experiment to another. For certain values of these adjustable parameters, a remarkable result is found. Concentrations of X and Y do not smoothly approach their equilibrium values (as do concentrations of all chemicals involved in ordinary reactions) but rather these concentrations oscillate around the condition of equilibrium. That is, the concentration of X repeatedly increases above the equilibrium value, then falls below it. Meanwhile, the concentration of Y is varying in the converse sense, being lower than its equilibrium value when X is high, and higher than its equilibrium value when X is low. This reaction sequence describes a chemical oscillator. In recognition of the extensive study of this abstract model by Ilya Prigogine and his associates in Belgium (SNS), this mechanism is called "the Brusselator."

A real chemical reaction which gives rise to repeated oscillations of solution color (red to blue, and back again) has been discovered by Russian workers. (It is called the Belousov-Zhabotinskii, or B-Z, reaction.) The detailed sequence of elementary steps (about twenty) which must be involved in the B-Z reaction has been worked out by Richard Noyes.¹¹ This mechanism (called "the Oregonator" in honor of the location of Noyes’s laboratory) is well understood and involves nothing but ordinary chemistry, but it is too involved to discuss here.

Both the Oregonator (the model of the mechanism of an actual chemical system) and also the Brusselator (an abstract scheme which lends itself to study and simulation) have the important feature that they give rise to true limit cycles. What this means is that the values (for various times) of the variables (concentrations of the intermediates X and Y for the Brusselator) that are solutions of the differential equations all lie on a single closed trajectory. That is to say, there is one unique sequence of states of X concentration (and a single definite sequence of states of Y concentration which is associated with the X sequence) which will be followed by the oscillating system. For given values of system parameters (temperature, reactant concentration, etc.), each oscillation will be a duplicate of the previous one, once an initial ‘warm-up’ period is over.

A system that is on a limit cycle may be said to be stable in a sense that is related to, but differs in an important way from, the kinds of stability that have previously been described. Any perturbation that causes the system to be in a state that lies off the limit cycle will cause chemical reactions to occur that will bring the system closer to that cycle. (This must be the case if the limit cycle is the only set of states that satisfies the defining differential equations, under the environmental conditions that prevail.) Stability is the defining property of structure. The self-restoring characteristic of the limit cycle indicates that some novel sort of structure is present.¹²

The important difference between this new kind of structure and the kinds previously discussed is that the new sort exists in open rather than in closed systems. In the Brusselator, for instance, reactants (A and B) are continually supplied and converted to the products (P and Q). Somehow, these products must leave the system, if the concentrations of P and Q are to remain constant. In order for the network of reactions to operate, and to maintain the system on the limit cycle, part of the energy-content of the reactants is dissipated in formation of lower-energy products. To maintain constant temperature, this energy must be removed. Heat must flow out of the system. The system must be capable of exchanging both mass and energy with the surroundings: it must be open. The new sort of structure which forms under such conditions is called "dissipative structure." Such structures should clearly be distinguished from "equilibrium structures" which persist only in closed systems.

The stability of the diiodine molecule results from interplay of mutually opposing forces. The repulsion of inner-shell electrons is balanced by attraction resulting from delocalization of valence-shell electrons. The stability of the crystal of elemental iodine is due to an analagous balance, but one involving a larger number of factors. The stability of the chemical dissipative structure is due to a balancing of processes. The autocatalytic production of intermediate X is balanced by two processes using X up, and supplemented by formation of X from A. There is a balance struck, but one that leads to oscillation, rather than to stasis.

In describing chemical oscillators, I said that the concentrations of the intermediates X and Y alternately went above and below their equilibrium values. Strictly speaking, that was a misstatement. Chemical dissipative structures occur only under conditions that lead to what is called ‘chemical instability’. That is, a situation for which there is no ‘equilibrium’ Solution of the defining differential equations, but rather at least three steady-state solutions, some of which are not stable. For instance, in the case of the Brusselator, there is a single steady-state solution if the concentrations of reactants (A and B) is not large,¹³ relative to the concentrations of products (P and Q). However, if products are removed and/or reactant concentrations are increased, we come to a critical concentration ratio (SNS 98). Once that ratio is exceeded, there turn out to be not one but three steady-state solutions to the defining equations. Two of these steady-state solutions are stable, in the sense explained previously (small perturbations engender forces which tend to restore the system to the steady state). The third solution (the one that corresponds to the equilibrium state that had existed before the critical concentration-ratio was exceeded) is an unstable steady-state solution. It is possible (at least in principle) to arrange matters so that the system is in this unstable steady state. Barring fluctuations, the system will remain in this condition indefinitely. But should the system suffer any perturbation, however infinitesimal, the state of the system will start to change, and that change will continue until one or the other of the two steady states is reached.

An interesting question is: how does the system decide which of the two possible nonequilibrium steady states to approach? The answer to this contemporary version of the problem of ‘Buridan’s Ass’ turns out to be that the detailed nature of the initial perturbation makes all the difference. From a given initial state, a system will change in one sense if stimulated by certain fluctuations and will change in entirely other ways if set in motion by different infinitesimal disturbances (SNS 289).

One of the most striking features of the B-Z reaction is its propensity to generate spectacular patterns ofcolor¹⁴ that retain their definition while undergoing repeated color changes. Using computer simulations based on the simpler Brusselator model, it is possible to understand the development of such spatial order. The diffusion of chemical species through the reaction medium requires time. In cases for which reactant and product (A,B,P,Q) concentrations are not held constant but are allowed to follow the usual (nonlinear) equations which govern ordinary diffusion, development of spatial order is to be expected, if the chemical equations of the Brusselator apply.

Pretty examples of this feature of chemical dissipative structure are given in computer-simulations of the diffusion-dependent Brusselator in a one-dimensional medium (SNS 124). The four reactions shown above are considered to occur in a tubular container. The concentrations of A, B, P, and Q are held fixed at the ends of the tube, but, in the body of the tube, these concentrations vary in accordance with the kinetic relationships that result from chemical reactions going on, and also in accordance with the usual laws of diffusion. There is a steady-state solution which corresponds to a monotonic variation of concentrations between the ends and middle of the tube. Once the reactant concentrations have been increased (or the product concentrations have been decreased) so that the critical ratio has been exceeded, that steady state becomes unstable, and two other steady-state solutions come into existence.

This experiment illustrates some features of chemical self-organization that seem to be especially important from the point of view of process philosophy, so it seems worthwhile to present additional heuristic discussion. Suppose we start with a tube containing an orange jell, and we provide reservoirs containing a green-colored reagent at both ends of the tube. In the presence of a high concentration of the reagent the tube is green, for an intermediate concentration it is white, and for a low concentration, orange. Inside the tube, the Brusselator reactions (given above) occur. The subcritical steady state would have the end regions similar and the center different: like the Nigerian flag, green-white-green. As the concentration of reagent is increased, the system would be taken beyond the chemical instability, and there would be two equally probable nonequilibrium steady states. To continue our simile, one of these would resemble the flag of The Ivory Coast, orange-white-green, while the other would resemble the flag of Ireland, green-white-orange. In the computer simulations, the concentrations at the ends of the tubes can be varied in a regular manner. Under that simulated change the initial steady state, once set up, persists far into the regime of instability, providing no adventitious variations of concentrations away from that steady state are allowed. However, if fluctuations (that exceed certain minimum values in magnitude and extent) are included, then the instability of the initial (Nigerian) steady state is demonstrated, and the system approaches one (Irish) or the other (Ivory Coastian) of the two stable nonequilibrium steady states. The interesting point is that which of the two steady states is approached depends on the details of the initiating fluctuation.

In the computer simulations, the start-off perturbations can be specified to any desired degree of accuracy. In real chemical systems, the B-Z reaction for instance, quite similar bifurcation of spatial solutions occurs. Decision-points of the same sort arise repeatedly in the natural development of the embryo of every biological organism. There are many situations in biology¹⁵ and economics¹⁶ in which opposing nonlinear relationships give rise to instabilities that are quite analogous.

For real systems, things are so involved that it makes little sense to talk of the details of the initiating fluctuation. Any measuring device which was adjusted so as to gather information about the macroscopic changes which follow upon decision would not be able to register information about parameters which distinguish one sort of fluctuation (Irish) from the other sort of fluctuation (Ivory Coastian). In Whitehead’s words, these transitions must be regarded as "internally determined, but externally free" (PR 27/ 41). That is, the system is governed by deterministic laws, and the nature of the possible steady states are fixed by these laws (the differential equations corresponding to the chemical equations which have been given previously). But these deterministic laws allow for several steady-state solutions. (There are several ‘real potentials’ [PR 65/102] accessible.) The choice between these possible futures is made, in a condition of chemical instability, by stochastic (nondeterministic) processes, such as random internal fluctuations of the system.

One additional feature should be mentioned before we conclude this discussion (regrettably technical) of computer simulations of development of spatial structure by the Brusselator. For some combinations of external conditions and internal fluctuations, regions of high order can occur imbedded in larger regions of a lower degree of order (SNS 136). (At the risk of straining an analogy beyond usefulness, I call attention to the flag of the Republic of South Africa.) These computer simulations of an abstract model (closely related to the features which characterize self-organizing chemical and biological systems) clearly show that the origin of intrinsic capacity for self-definition can be understood in detail, at least in relatively simple cases.

IV. Process and Agency

In the passage quoted previously, Weiss contends that neither a process nor an event can be a source of action. After a study of earlier opinions on such questions (NPE 1-253), Leclerc comes to a conclusion that seems to be close to the position that Weiss advocates. Leclerc proposes that, in certain cases, compound individuals can function as unitary, persistent sources of agency. When the acting of component entities on each other" is "fully reciprocal," then "the compound entity acts as a whole, that is, as one, with reference to, and on, other wholes." This, he suggests," is how many substances are to be conceived as constituting one substance" (NPE 113). Leclerc does not further specify what he means by fully reciprocal action.¹⁷

Considering that the world is, at bottom, composed of ‘elementary particles’ amounts to using bricks or building-stones as models of actual entities. Using ‘fully reciprocal action’ as a criterion would qualify a diatomic molecule like diiodine or, less naively, a set of molecules in chemical equilibrium, as a model of an actual entity. Regrettably, both of these classes of models run into the objection that Weiss puts so trenchantly. A molecule, or a chemical equilibrium, is a closed-system structure. No such structure can persist if it is engaged in any significant relationship with the rest of the world. As Weiss correctly observes, "it would disperse itself in the very act of making its presence evident" (FC 107). If the container in which solid and gaseous iodine are at equilibrium be opened, the odor of iodine will fill the room, but the equilibrium will be destroyed, and the vessel will, soon enough, be empty.

Whitehead’s principle of relativity (PR 148/ 224) requires that the interaction of an entity with the rest of the world be intrinsic to that entity’s existence. Any criterion of applicability for the first category of existence (the category of actual entity or actual occasion) must involve consideration of at least some of the details of interactions between entities. Dissipative structures, in contrast to equilibrium structures, exist in open-systems and require interaction with the rest of the world in order to maintain themselves in being. In this respect, at least, dissipative structures are more widely-applicable models of reality than are equilibrium structures. Before proposing that there may be a relationship between dissipative structures and actual entities, we give a brief ‘genetic analysis’ of chemical self-organizing systems.

A chemical dissipative structure comes into existence when environmental conditions of a complex open system change, so that an equilibrium state becomes unstable, and a network of relationships (among components of the system) gives rise to several nonequilibrium steady states. In nature, changes of environmental conditions arise from such sources as the melting of polar ice-caps, explosion of dwarf stars, the fall of night. Highly complicated chemical mixtures can be found in any mud-hole. (Simple chemical systems are products of high art.) Autocatalysis is required for existence of dissipative structure, but natural systems at many levels have this feature. The kinds of nonlinear relationships needed to give multiple steady states are common in physical, chemical, biological, and social interactions. The type of organization modeled by the B-Z reaction and by the Brusselator is quite widely distributed.

Once change in system parameters has led to a condition of chemical instability, a stochastic internal fluctuation (or a perturbation from the outside) sets off an evolution (change) of the composition of the system. For instance, in the B-Z reaction the ‘decision’ as to which of several possible spatial structures will actually form may (in the absence of external stimulation) be made by random fluctuation, a fortuitous local excess of one reactant. Subsequently, the system may reach a new steady state, or alternatively, a limit cycle involving several quasi-steady states. In these two cases, a dissipative structure, perhaps with temporal and spatial inhomogeneity, will have come into existence. If neither a steady state nor a limit cycle is reached, the system will continue to evolve. Eventually, whatever features had defined it will be changed, so that the system will become indistinguishable from the surroundings.

In a new dissipative structure (either a steady state or a limit cycle), concentrations of chemicals and rates of mass-transfer between the system and surroundings will not be those characteristic of the previous equilibrium state (or the nonequilibrium steady state that corresponds to it under conditions of instability) but rather they will be the (perhaps quite different) average values which pertain to the new structure. What this means is that the closure of the network of relationships (such as the set of four equations that defines the Brusselator) has been the occasion of (caused) a change in the relationship between a system and its surroundings. Such closures of relationships are not restricted to any particular spatial or temporal scale. Microscopic, short-lived structures of this sort are possible, as are large ones with long characteristic time-scales.

Lewis S. Ford has pointed out that various stages in the development of Whitehead’s doctrine can be discerned by textual analysis (PS 8:145). In the stage that Ford (1:251) has called his ‘first metaphysical synthesis’, Whitehead held that ‘value’ ("the intrinsic reality of an event") could exist on a multiplicity of levels, not just a microscopic one (SMW 93). Ford (PS 3:109) has suggested the characterization ‘divisible but undivided’ as being more appropriate for Whiteheadian actual entities than descriptions such as microscopic or noncomposite. During the years between the completion of SMW and the publication of PR, Whitehead tried out an idea that he does not seem to have included in his final synthesis.¹⁸ "Whenever the ‘all or none’ principle holds, we are in some way dealing with one actual entity, and not with a society of such entities, nor with the analysis of components contributory to one such entity" (S 28). I suggest that a coherent neo-Whiteheadian synthesis might result from development of this point of view. There is an ‘all or none’ character about the closure of the networks of relationships that define dissipative structures. Closures of this type provide a basis for understanding how entities, in interaction with others, can be ‘divisible but undivided’.

Each actuality is related to other entities by prehensions, which are components of the concrescences of the others. Prehensions are ‘simple’ if they arise from objects which are single actual entities, but are ‘transmuted’ if they arise from a nexus which functions as a unit, insofar as a particular concrescence is concerned (PR 232). The notion of a simple prehension is related to the assumption that there do exist ultimate components which are not composite. Philosophically significant problems involve highly transmuted interactions. It is important to show how effective transmutation of a multiplicity into a unitary source of action can be achieved. Consideration of some details of physical interactions involving chemical dissipative structures clarifies how effective transmutation may occur for actual entities in general.

Any interaction that can be studied by physical or chemical techniques can be understood in terms of one or more of four classes of fundamental forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, weak). All of these are held to operate by exchange of quanta. Every observing device can be understood on this basis, as functioning by quanta exchange. Sufficiently sensitive detectors may, perhaps, register single such events, but most observing devices, human eyes for instance, are sensitive only to resultants of a myriad of such transactions. Whether or nor particular quanta considered in this kind of an explanation are capable of further analysis, or yet other sorts of forces (and quanta) are subsequently discovered, is not, after all, the most significant point. Since important observing devices function by transmutation, the unification, rather than the generally unobservable ultimate unit, is of principal interest. In this connection, it seems that insufficient attention has been paid to variation in response-times of percipients.

No observer functions instantaneously. There is a characteristic resolution-time for every percipient. Whether a subject finds an object to be a multiplicity or a unit depends on the relationship between the time-parameter appropriate to the object and those that pertain to the percipient.

In the case of chemical dissipative structures, there is a time-parameter which is characteristic of the structure as a whole¹⁹ (roughly, the time it takes for the system to traverse the limit cycle). Any observing device that has a time-scale short with respect to the time-parameter of the dissipative structure (as a whole) will register a regular and repeated change of the properties of the system. (The system will be perceived as a multiplicity.) On the other hand, any percipient with a slow response-time, relative to the cycle-time of the structure, will register a steady effect due to the system (now perceived as a unit). This sort of transmutation occurs quite widely. It is difficult (impossible, I would say) to think of a specific perception or interaction which does not involve this kind of transmutation.

The thesis I want to propose is that a compound individual should be considered to be one ‘actual entity’ or one ‘actual occasion’ if, and to the extent that, particular percipients interact with that entity as a unified source of effective action. Patterns of relationships among component parts of the compound individual, exchange of components between the entity and its surroundings, adventitious fluctuations, all are important in concrescence, but characteristics of percipients are also important. It would be high abstraction to inquire whether a certain thing is or is not properly regarded as an actual entity, apart from consideration of the interaction of that entity with others.

It might be objected that all that has been done here is to amplify Whitehead’s dictum, "For physics, the thing itself is what it does" (AI 157). A critic might claim that we have ignored what Neville calls ‘the ontological perspective’ (2:79).

The ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ (PR 167/ 254) requires that satisfaction of ‘subjective aim’ be an intrinsic feature of all actualities. Achievement of subjective aim belongs to the ontological aspect of an actual entity. The relationship, if any, between achievement of subjective aim and interaction with the others is not obvious. It is clear, though, that Whitehead teaches that the efficacy of an actual entity in the ‘creative advance into novelty’ (PR 349/ 530) is intimately related to satisfaction of subjective aim. As Felt (PS 10:57) has pointed out, what needs to be done is to elucidate how the ontological aspect (achievement of subjective aim) of an actual entity might be connected with significant interaction of that entity with others (the epistemological aspect).

In the case of chemical dissipative structures, closure of a defining network of relationships makes a difference for the rest of the world. For certain percipients at least, that difference is such that the system, as a whole, is perceived as, and therefore is, a unified center of agency. This set of relationships is capable of being expressed in mathematical (abstract) terms. If one considers the structure, as a whole, as one actual entity then this set of relationships would be the corresponding subjective aim.

Considering, as I suggest, certain compound individuals as single actual entities does not entail a major change in the interpretation of the ontological principle ("actual entities are the only reasons," PR 24/37). It does require that we attend to the point that: "The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive many which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one" (PR 21/32, emphasis added). There is no single level of size or time that has unique status. ‘All or none’ principles operate on many levels and give rise to effective actualities of many sorts. Each one of these entities is, by reason of specific closures of relationships, ontologically unified. Every entity defined by such a closure is one actual entity, as well as being a nexus of components.

Main concerns of process philosophy can be dealt with using the approach advocated above. It is not possible to treat these extensively here, but brief notes may indicate the applicability of the point of view that I favor.

The existence of a steady-state solution or of a limit cycle depends on the system parameters (including the initial concentrations of all the chemicals present) and also on what Whitehead terms ‘the primordial nature of God’. Whether or not a new structure emerges is influenced by the conditions that prevail, but the existence (or nonexistence) of high-level interaction patterns, of the sort that mathematicians might discover, is also involved. There is a sense in which these patterns of relationships are entailed in the characteristics of lower-level components, but in a more significant sense, these relationships exist at the level of the emergent structure rather than at the level of the components. The property of X that is significant for origin of the dissipative structure is how-it-reacts-with-Y. It is impossible to discuss such properties for X apart from discussion of X and Y together in the presence of A, B, P. and Q (in short, the system).²⁰

An important task for process philosophy is to clarify the sense in which an entity may be said to retain self-identity while being engaged in action. The time-period characteristic of a dissipative structure is the time required to traverse the limit cycle. The system functions as a society with personal order. Each circuit (oscillation) may be considered a single occasion. (It would be egregious misplacement of concreteness to be concerned about at which part of the cycle one occasion leaves off and the next begins.) Successive members of this personally-ordered society share the same defining network of relationships (subjective aim) and are, thus far, the same. They do differ numerically, as do the many loops that constitute a coil spring. Dissipative structures require continual interchange of mass and energy between system and surroundings. The system must therefore be engaged in continuous, significant interaction with the rest of the world. The world cannot remain exactly the same over the time that the dissipative structure exists. No two circuits of the limit cycle (occasions) are precisely alike in all particulars.

It is possible to deal with ‘upper-level’ or hierarchical structures without resorting to ‘regnant’ occasions. Since percipients encounter relatively persistent sources of agency, patterns of interactions of these agents with each other can give rise to compound individuals of indefinitely-high degrees of complexity.²¹ Whitehead often wrote, particularly in his less-formal work, as if entities of various sizes could properly be classed as actual entities. Wallack (ENPWM) has developed this idea, but, in my opinion, she has leaned too far in the direction of the ontological universalism that Buchler⁷ advocates. To consider all heaps, aggregates, and mélanges as equally actual misses the insight that "the ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism" (PR 35/ 53). This seems to be a serious mistake. There do exist, on many levels, patterns of interaction that give rise to structures, that provide the basis for well-founded discriminations of unity. Not every nexus or ‘natural complex’ should be considered to be an actual entity. Some, but not all, compound entities have the property of retaining self-identity while engaged in action, and therefore have an ontological status that is different from the status of those nexus which lack that property.

Formation of open-system structures (whether considered from the point of view of chemistry, or from that of process philosophy) requires structures (of some stability) to exist in an antecedent world. But novel concrescences emerge, due to networks of relationships involving these antecedent structures and also due to specific, contingent fluctuations. The point that needs to be emphasized is that when relationships between components give rise to open-system structures then novel concrescences attain ontological parity with antecedent and component structures. I do not claim that this was Whitehead’s final doctrine, but I do maintain that it accords well with many of the distinctive features of ‘the philosophy of organism’ and is better suited to further development, and to application, than is the orthodox interpretation of Whitehead’s final synthesis.

References

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

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

FC -- Paul Weiss. First Considerations. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959.

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

MN -- Ivor Leclerc. "Some Main Philosophical Issues Involved in Contemporary Scientific Thought," in John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin, eds., Mind in Nature. Washington: University Press of America, 1977.

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

PPCT -- Donald W. Sherburne. "Whitehead Without God," in Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves, eds., Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971.

SNS -- Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine. Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977.

1. Lewis S. Ford. "Whitehead’s First Metaphysical Synthesis," International Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1977), 251-64.

2. Robert Neville. "Authority and Experience in Religious Ethics," Logos 1 (1980), 79-92.

Notes

1Donald A. Levin, "The Nature of Plant Species," Science 204 (1979), 381-84; R. R. Sokal, "Population Differentiation: Something New or More of the Same?" in Ecological Genetics, Peter F. Brussard, ed., (New York: Springer, 1980).

2 Kenneth A. Johnson, "The Bag Model of Quark Confinement," Scientific American, 241/1 (1979), 112-21; Yoichiro Nambu, "The Confinement of Quarks," Scientific American 235/5 (1976), 48-71. After reviewing the evidence that neutrons, protons, and some other subatomic particles consist of yet smaller bits (the quarks), Nambu presents arguments to establish that it will never be possible to observe an uncombined quark. He then asks: "If a particle cannot be isolated, or observed, even in theory, how will we ever be able to know that it exists?"

3Advances related to those discussed here have been made in several areas of science. This paper is most closely related to the work of Ilya Prigogine in far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics. Professor Prigogine reviewed his work on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977. This review was published as "Time, Structure and Fluctuations" in Science 201 (1978), 777-85. He has pointed out some of the philosophical implications of his work in a book for persons literate in physical chemistry: From Being To Becoming (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980). In collaboration with a professional philosopher, he has published a work for the general reader (I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, La Nouvelle Alliance [Paris: Gallimard, 1978]). A revised version of that work, in English, is in preparation. I am grateful to Professor Prigogine for hospitality at the Free University of Brussels during the fall semester of 1976.

4 E.g., R. Rajaraman, "Elementarity of Baryon Resonances in Nuclear Matter in Mesons in Nuclei, volume 1, Monnique Rho and Denys Wilkinson, eds., (Amsterdam: North Holland. 1979).

5Edward Pols, "The Ontology of the Rational Agent," Review of Metaphysics 33 (1980), 689-710. See also Edward Pols, "Human Agents as Actual Beings, PS 8:103-13 (1978).

6Douglas H. Hofsteader has summarized current topics in the study of hierarchically-organized systems in an excellent hook for general readers: Goedel, Escher, Bach (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Herbert L. Simon has made remarkable progress in related areas. Some of these developments are significant for the problems Whitehead treated, but appear not to he fully consistent with his final synthesis, as usually interpreted.

7Justus Buchler, Metaphysics of Natural Complexes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), p. 31. See also P. Hare and J. Ryder, PS 10:120.

8 The relationships that define molecules like diiodine are frequently discussed in terms of potential energy. The configuration corresponding to the equilibrium internuclear distance has lower potential energy than any other configuration. Stretching the molecule, or compressing it, increases the potential energy of the molecule. The diiodine molecule is said to occupy a potential energy ‘well’, an inferred depression in an imagined surface in a hypothetical potential energy-configuration ‘space’. Closely related statements can be made about any entity that can be said to ‘exist’, in the sense in which that word is used by chemists.

9 For any such structure it is possible to imagine (if not actually to construct) a surface in a multi-dimensional space which represents how potential energy varies with all of the parameters that define the structure. The structure of the diiodine molecule corresponds to a minimum in potential energy as the single parameter, internuclear clear distance, varies. The structure of the crystal of elemental iodine also corresponds to a minimum in potential energy, but now more than one parameter is important. In both cases the imagery of a patio a potential energy surface is used. Every chemical entity, properly so called, can be regarded as corresponding to such a pit (whatever its dimensionality might be). The defining characteristic of chemical structure is that there exists a configuration such that deviations from that configuration entail forces (broadly used) such that there is a tendency to restore the reference configuration. (Chemists sometimes discuss entities, such as exiplexes and activated complexes, that do not correspond to potential energy minima, but these are not regarded as being ‘real chemical species’.)

10 J. Willard Gibbs showed that each chemical equilibrium can be considered to correspond to a minimum in a free-energy-composition space, closely analogous to the potential energy-configuration pit which corresponds to every spatial structure.

11 Richard M. Noyes and Richard J. Field, "Mechanisms of Chemical Oscillators: Experimental Examples," Accounts of Chemical Research 10 (1977), 273-80; Joel Keizer, "Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics and the Stability of States Far from Equilibrium," Accounts of Chemical Research 12 (1979), 243-49; Richard M. Noyes, "Oscillations in Homogeneous Systems," Ber. Bunsenes Gesell. (Physical Chemistry) 84, (1980), 295-303. (This issue is devoted to articles on various aspects of chemical oscillators.)

12 No analog for potential energy or reaction free energy is now known to be associated with this sort of structure. Discussion of whether a criterion of relative stability of nonequilibrium steady states exists is currently being carried out in the literature.

13The ‘chemical affinity’ of a system is related to the ratio of concentrations of reactants to that of products, both compared to equilibrium values, and is a measure of distance from equilibrium.

14Arthur T. Winfree, "Rotating Chemical Reactions." Scientific American 230/6 (1974), 82-95.

15 (a) Armin Weiss, "Replication and Evolution in Inorganic Systems," Angew. Chem. Intl. Ed. Eng. 20 (1981), 850-60. (b) Manfried Eigen and Peter Schuster, The Hypercycle, A Principle of Natural Self-Organization (New York: Springer, 1979). (c) Manfried Eigen and Ruthild Winkler, The Law’s of the Game: How the Principles of Nature Govern Chance (New York: Knopf, 1981). (d) Hans Kuhn and Juerg Wasser, "Molecular Self-Organization and the Origin of Life," Angew. Chem. Intl. Ed. Engl. 20 (1981), 500-19. (e) H. Fredrik Nijhout, "Color Patterns of Butterflies and Moths" Scientific American 245/5 (1981), 140-53. (1) Gunther S. Stent and David A. Weisblat, "The Development of a Simple Nervous System" Scientific American 246/1 (1982), 136-47. (g) Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson, Genes, Mind and Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

16 Thomas C. Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: Norton, 1978).

17 For application and some further specification of this position, see Ivor Leclerc, Motion, Action and Physical Being," International Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1981), 17-26, and Ivor Leclerc, "The Metaphysics of the Good," Review of Metaphysics 35 (1981), 3-26, and references therein.

18 The question of why Whitehead chose to develop the position he did develop, rather than this one, cannot be discussed adequately here. Whitehead’s attack on ‘scientific materialism’ in SMW and his eventual adoption of a position which is interpreted by many, to teach that there are two sorts of actualities, microscopic physical entities and human persons (e.g., Wallack, ENPWM 6), calls to mind Pope’s lines (An Essay on Man, IV):

19 The existence of a limit cycle requires that there be two time-scales in the underlying chemical mechanism (e.g., John W. Avitabile, Jr., and Andrew C. DeRocco, "Time Delay, Epigenetic Dynamics and Circadian Oscillations," Biophys. Journal 15 [1975], 180), but the time-scale characteristic of the dissipative structure is not simply related to any underlying process; rather, it arises by the interaction of these component reactions.

20 It has been argued that subatomic particles require a different logic than the one that applies to macroscopic entities. Different levels involve diverse principles. It is inappropriate to ground a scheme of thought on any single level. R. I. C. Hughes, "Quantum Logic," Scientific American 245/4 (1981), 202-13. See also Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Strange Attractors: Mathematical Patterns Delicately Poised Between Order and Chaos," Scientific American 245/5 (1981), 22-43.

21 Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: Freeman, 1981).