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The Church of the Living God

I count it an honor and a privilege to have been invited to be with you this evening, to have been accorded an opportunity to strengthen the relationship between the United Theological College in Bangalore and the theological communities of Princeton, and to participate in this Valedictory Service. I extend to you for whom this service marks both an end and a beginning my sincere congratulations on your accomplishments to date and my heartfelt prayers as you enter upon new ventures of ministry to Christ and his church. Having served as a pastor of Christian congregations for over 30 years prior to becoming the Director of the Center of Theological Inquiry, I feel qualified to assure you, if this be your call, that the ministry of a Christian congregation is the most challenging and the most rewarding, the most demanding and the most fulfilling, vocation in all the world. The opportunities afford the pastor of a church to stand in the matrix where meaning and materiality intersect, to identify the nuances and to illumine the consequences of grace in the midst of life, will be both numerous and profound. My hope and prayer for you might well borrow the words with which W. H. Auden concluded his Christmas Oratorio: For the Time Being.

He is the Way.

Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;

You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.

Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;

You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life.

Love Him in the World of the Flesh;

And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

Now, "The Church of the Living God."

Anyone who reads the letters of the Apostle Paul cannot help being struck by the fact that Paul had a high doctrine of the church. Paul could become terribly discouraged about the church at times, but he could not deny the conviction that the church is part of the Gospel, that its origin is rooted and grounded in the will and purposes of God, and that in the end, though the gates of hell prevail against it, the church will not be denied its destiny.

Needless to say, many people today do not share Paul’s high doctrine of the church. Many who once loved the church and championed its cause in the public square have become discouraged if not disillusioned with it. At least, it is so in Europe and the United States . . . you must tell me how is it here. In fact, some people have become so skilled at criticizing the church for its failures, its inconsistencies, its divisions, and its uncertain prospects that they neither see nor say anything good about it at all. To be "spiritual" is in these days, especially among the young, whereas to belong to the church is somewhere between "slightly embarrassing" and "out of the question altogether."

What a contrast that is. this depleted sense of the church, to the high doctrine of the church represented by the Apostle Paul! Paul believed in the church . . . or we might better say, Paul believed the church. That is, he believed, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, that the church exists, that it is held in and sustained by God’s almighty hand, and that it has a future in which he, by grace, had been included.

What’s more, Paul believed the church at a time when there was much less to show for it than there is today. Small in number, the church had no money to speak of, no buildings, no prestige in the community. It was often and in many places the object of ridicule and scorn, if not of persecution. Yet in one letter after another, Paul spoke of the church in the language of devotion, using words one might use to speak of mother or father, wife or husband, lover or dearest friend. Paul loved the church; he spoke of it in terms of endearment. And we might well ask why. What was it about the church that elicited from Paul such love? What is there about it that elicits our love on this Valedictory evening? I want to spend the next few minutes thinking about these two questions, and to guide our thoughts in doing so I want to focus on those great words written by Paul, or someone under his influence. . . I Timothy 3:15 . . . "the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth."

Those thirteen words . . . "the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth". . . identify two aspects of the church, both of which are important for any understanding of it, and each of which merits our attention on an occasion such as this. On the one hand, they speak of the church as stable and solid, something on which you can lean, something capable of bearing the weight of a life . . . a pillar upon which a foundation can be built, a bulwark of protection and defense for those seeking refuge from harm. On the other hand, the text suggests just the opposite without ever contradicting itself, when it identifies the church as dynamic, flexible, always in process, on the move in company with a God who neither slumbers nor sleeps. "The church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth."

Now let’s look more closely at these two aspects of the church, and let’s do so for the sake of convenience in reverse order.

1. First, the church as "the pillar and bulwark of the truth." What does that mean?

That the church has the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in its doctrines and creeds; that there is no truth to be found anywhere else; that we must believe without question what the church believes about God, Jesus, the resurrection, eternal life? That was not how Jesus treated either truth or people.

Martin Luther once told of a peasant who was asked by a stranger what he believed. "I believe what the church believes," the peasant replied, in response to which Luther said that the man could not possibly be saved! No one can believe for another person, just as no one can die for another person. Each of us must work out our own salvation with fear and trembling; each of us must give account for the hope that is in us, and no one can do it for us.

And yet there is a sense in which being Christian does mean "believing what the church believes." We do not have to begin "de novo" in every new generation, as if we were the first to come to grips with the claims and consequences of Christian faith and life. We are the beneficiaries of a long history of Christian believing and living. We have the faith of the church through the ages to guide, correct, and strengthen us against the distortions that our natures so willingly design. We not only have the testimony of the church beneath us as a pillar on which to build the foundation of our lives; we also have it as a bulwark to which to retreat when we grow weary and doubtful, faint of heart and slack of soul.

In fact, you and I have far more cause than Paul to rejoice in the church as "the pillar and bulwark of the truth." For we have beneath and behind us now, not 40 or 50 years but 2,000 years of Christian experience and conviction on which to reply and by which to test our own. "We are not the first to cope with this," wrote a missionary in Egypt of the problems he faced. Those "who really had a hard time were the people in the first centuries when there was no church history. We have only to look up the early Fathers to see that our troubles have been survived before. Blessed be God for history."

It will be increasingly incumbent upon the church in this increasingly pluralistic, multi-cultural, globalized world to recall and reclaim its confessional history if it is to be the "pillar and bulwark of the truth" in the future that it was in the past. What that confessional history is defies any brief summary, but it is possible to call to mind some of the great and familiar texts that have borne it from one generation to the next for some two thousand years. Texts, such as:

Genesis 1:1. . . "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

John I:1f . . . "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

Psalm 23. . . "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. . . even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me."

Micah 6:8 . . . "He has shown you, O mortal one, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

John 3:16 . . . "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life."

I Corinthians 15 . . . "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve."

Romans 5:1. . . "Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Mark 2.5 . . . "My little child, your sins are forgiven."

John 14 . . . "Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you . . . . that where I am, there you may be also."

Philippians 4:7. . . "And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus."

Once, while thumbing through my grandmother’s Bible, I found those words underlined in pencil. . . "And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus". . . and a note written in the margin in her own hand, some eight years after her husband, my grandfather, died. The note reads: "This peace passing all understanding came to me the next morning after David died and I felt I could stand it. It never left me. This is June 12, 1944."

These texts are arbitrarily chosen, I grant you. You might well identify others. They are, however, a fair summary of the truth upon which the existence of the church rests, the word the church has to speak that will not be spoken if the church does not speak it, the word that contemporary people, despite all of the attractions and distractions thrown up by contemporary culture, still long to hear. It is "the pillar and bulwark of the truth," which has enabled men and women to live with grace, serenity, and a fair measure of "grit" amid the manifold vicissitudes of life, and to face faith’s last and severest test, death.

Justin Martyr, the 2nd century apologist, declared that Jesus Christ "is the Reason of which every race of man partakes. Those who lived in accordance with Reason are Christians, even though they were called godless." In this sense, Christian faith can in principle encompass all truth, since ultimately all truth is from God. Christian faith is open to . . . indeed, welcomes . . . interdisciplinary and inter-faith dialogue, not only because it believes it has something to share, but because it knows it has much to learn from the various intellectual disciplines and other religions, as well as from the developments of a technological and electronic society. Modern knowledge can enrich and deepen Christian understanding if and when the church is clear about its own identity and normative convictions. Christians since Nicaea have claimed that Jesus is the "final" revelation of God, not because God has ceased to reveal himself, and not because truth is not to be found elsewhere, but in the sense that any other revelation or truth-claim is most clearly seen and understood in the light of Jesus Christ. This is part of what it means to be Christian: to understand modern scientific, social, and cultural achievements, including the insights and conviction of other religions, in the light of Jesus Christ.

This discerning faith, this continuing process of faithful discernment, carried on in an atmosphere of profound respect and gratitude for the other, is our heritage, bequeathed to us in the providence of God by the church. And we are its trustees, with a fiduciary responsibility to the future, to see that it is passed on with our love to generations yet to come.

But that is only half the story, half the text.

2. The other half refers to the church as "the church of the living God."

And that is the part of the text that causes us no little discomfort. That is the part that we cannot entirely nail down or contain in our institutional structures, strategies, and processes.

The church of the living God . . . who said "let it be" and everything that it was; who created people of every race, region, and religion . . . not Christians only . . . in his own image: who wills the life, health, and well-being of all human beings . . . the living God, who led an oppressed people out of the land of bondage with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; who, through the law and the prophets promised and demanded justice for all who are poor, powerless, excluded, and oppressed . . . the living God, who emptied the tomb on Easter morning, raised Jesus from the dead, and thereby began a revolution of hope and expectation that not even death can extinguish . . . the living God, who endowed the church with so powerful a Spirit that it literally out-thought and outlived the ancient world; who has from time to time so shaken the foundations of the church that it has been radically reformed and renewed . . . . the living God, who is active and at work in our own time no less than in previous times, making old things new, bringing into being that which does not exist, as the One with whom you and I, as well as all peoples and princes of peoples, daily have to do. The living God!

So, "why do people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?" asks the American novelist, Annie Dillard.

"On the whole, I do not find Christians outside the catacombs sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return" (Teaching Stones to Talk, pp. 40-41).

The sin of the church, according to Annie Dillard, is the absence of expectancy in its life and witness, the failure to take adequate account of what the living God is contemporaneously doing in the world to bring his reign to visibility in, with, and under the affairs of the earth; the practical denial of the trustworthiness of the Father, the efficacy of the Son, and the agency of the Holy Spirit in personal and public life.

Simply put, the faith which Jesus confers is faith that the living God cares for people in the order of nature and in the processes of history. His words declare in language that even a child can understand that the structures of nature and the processes of history are open to the grace of God. And not only that God cares for people, but that God does things with and for people . . . and not only for people one-by-one, but for whole groups, tribes, systems, nations, and cultures. Simply put, what this means is that there are no dead-end streets in personal or public life in which sin and evil have the last word, no enclosures from which there is no exit. Grace lives and is active in the midst of life, not merely as a fact of the past to which we look back, but as the determinative factor to which we can look forward. That is to say, a high doctrine of the church, to say nothing of the Christian hope for the world, is shot-through with eschatology!

Is this not what we see as we watch that strange figure riding into Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover. Jesus had wept over Jerusalem, but Jerusalem had rejected him. He loved those people, but in the end they crucified him. They all forsook him and fled. He could have turned his back on them; He could have taken his disciples into the wilderness, after the fashion of the Essenes, and created a monastic retreat of study, prayer, and waiting for the last day to dawn. Or he could have become the charismatic leader of the Zealots, taken up the sword, and won for himself the title of master of the city.

What he did was neither of these things. What he did was to choose for his moment of truth the festival of Passover, the moment of maximum national feelings, when thoughts of a mighty deliverance for Israel were uppermost in people’s minds. What he did was to choose for his entry, not a warhorse or a chariot but a mount that would call to mind ancient prophesy of a king who would come in lowliness to claim his kingdom. What he did was to challenge the powers and principalities that had regularly usurp God’s rightful rule over personal and public life. Then he ascended the throne that was rightfully his. The throne was a cross, but it was, and still is, his throne. And on that cross "the ruler of this world" was dealt the mortal blow and the powers and principalities were disarmed once and for all.

Surely Palm Sunday is to be the controlling image for our thinking about the mission of the church and the task of ministry today. Leslie Newbigin, often spoke of the central role of the Christian congregation in mission and the urgent need to equip ministers whose primary task will be the enabling of grass-roots participation in mission. "The only hermeneutic of the gospel," he said, "is a congregation of men and women who believe it and live by it."

As one committed to the unity of the church and to every possible ecumenical expression of that unity. I would not want to limit the hermeneutical occasion to the -congregation only. It is the church, in every configuration of its gathering and scattering, that is called to the hermeneutical. But Newbigin was on target, it seems to me, when he identified the task of ministry as that of leading the church as a whole in mission to the world as a whole, to claim its public life as well as the personal lives of all its people for God’s rule. He was right to stress the pastoral importance of equipping the church by means of preaching, liturgical leadership, teaching, pastoral care, and church administration, to understand and to fulfill this mission through the faithfulness of its members in their daily work. And it that is to be seriously undertaken it will mean training and equipping the church to be a corporate follower of Jesus in its confrontation of the principalities and powers which he disarmed on his cross. And it will mean sustaining the church in bearing the cost of this confrontation.

There is a story of a medieval Pope, standing with a Cardinal inside the Vatican, watching wagons of treasure pass by on their way to the papal treasury. The Cardinal, thinking of the story in Acts where Peter and John heal the lame beggar, says: "The time is past, Holy Father, when the church could say, ‘Silver and gold have I none."’ To which the old Pope sadly replies, "Past also is the time when the church could say to a lame beggar, ‘In the name of Jesus, rise up and walk."’

Was he right? Is that true about the church, about your church? Are the best days of the church all in the past? Our answer will largely depend on who we believe God is and what we are prepared to expect, whether we believe that God is the living God, or whether we are like those "Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls," of whom the poet E E Cummings said, "they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead."

The church of the living God needs men and women who know who it is with whom they have to do when they say, "I believe." The church of the living God needs men and women who will expect great things from God and attempt great things in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

My prayer for you is that you are, and will continue to be, "the church of the living God," in this difficult time and strategic place, and that in so being you will fashion a compelling, courageous, consistent witness to the truth that still sets people free.

God bless and keep you, now and forever Amen

Day Care: A Need Crying to Be Heard

Clearly, the American family is experiencing unprecedented change. The nuclear family system has been described by some commentators as dead or dying. But while change cannot be stopped, one important way of reinforcing the family is to establish, throughout the nation, day-care centers to which parents can entrust their young children. Indeed, the Harvard child psychologist Jerome Kagan warns that if the family is to remain the central unit in our society, billions must be spent developing a system of day-care facilities.

Parents themselves are clamoring for such a system. University students and working mothers everywhere are demanding free day-care services for their children while they themselves pursue their studies or their jobs, and housewives are asking for relief from the pressures of 24-hour-a-day mothering. It was these demands, as well as the widespread fears of family disintegration, that prompted the 1970 White House Conference on Children to recommend as its number-one priority that "the Federal Government fund comprehensive child-care programs, which will be family centered, locally controlled, and universally available." Moreover, the 4,000 conference members insisted, day-care services must be understood "as a supplement, not a substitute, for the family as the primary agent for the child’s development as a human being."

In response to this recommendation, Congress passed comprehensive day-care legislation in 1971, but it was vetoed by President Nixon. In doing so Nixon gave support to reactionary arguments that new child-care services would weaken the American family structure and lead to "the sovietization of our children." The opposite is true. However, prospects of further federal legislation in this field appear dim at the moment.

Meanwhile, the need for child-care services is everywhere evident. As Carl Schoenberg, editor of Child Welfare, notes:

Day-care service to children and their families has had a historical development of rise and ebb reflecting national emergencies and socio-economic exigencies. These trends determined who advocated the criteria, goals, availability, and costs of the service. Today day care reflects the fight against poverty, the provision of career opportunities for women in the labor market, and programs that stimulate the early potentials for growth and development of the preschool child. These are social necessities that will not recede with shifts in the social tides; day care not only is now here to stay it will expand through all classes and subcultures in this country and elsewhere ["Foreword," The Changing Dimensions of Day Care (Child Welfare League of America, Inc., 1970)].

Americans often are accused of being "child-centered" to the exclusion of other legitimate concerns. In contrast to the popular Head Start program, however, day care is primarily meant to meet the needs of parents, which may or may not be identical with the best interests of their children. The question which confronts us is not whether women should work outside the home or whether day-care children’s centers should be established. Those questions have already been answered. Of every three working women, one is a mother, and 40 per cent of these mothers have preschool-age children. With skyrocketing inflation and liberating impulses toward self-fulfillment, these percentages can be expected to increase. As of today, 6 million children under the age of six have mothers who are working, but only 10 per cent of those children have access to a licensed day-care center. In addition, there are millions of "latchkey" children who come home to an empty house after school and are left unattended (save for the television set).

New Dimensions of Child-Rearing

Thus the need for more day-care centers is obvious. However, it is the quality of day-care programs now in existence or being developed that is of first importance. These programs represent a phenomenal new dimension of child-rearing on the American scene. Here the Christian church, with its historic emphasis on the family, can play a strategic role. Joining forces with child-care professionals, we can help protect both the best interests of children and the rights of parents against grasping profiteers who are concerned for neither. For one thing, we need to resist "kennel"-type operations, which permit 24-hour care for infants and preschoolers.

It is of course a fact that day-care centers are not a radically new concept in the U.S. Back in 1863, during the Civil War, an agency in Philadelphia offered care for children whose mothers were hired to make uniforms and bandages for the Union army. In the Depression days of the 1930s the WPA set up centers to look after the children of poor families (and at the same time to give employment to teachers and nurses). And during World War II, when so many mothers took jobs in the country’s factories, child-care centers multiplied. Many industries provided in-plant facilities, and federally financed centers were opened in highly industrial areas. However, once the national emergency was over, most of those facilities were closed on the assumption that women would resume their "normal" role as mothers and housewives. In contrast, countries like Israel, Sweden and the U.S.S.R. have developed day care extensively in the past 20 years.

Early understanding of what constituted quality day care was severely limited. The primary emphasis was on meeting children’s physical needs: shelter and adequate diet, and protection from danger and abuse. Nurses in white uniforms symbolized the sterility of this approach. The trends today are more comprehensive and creative. Concern for the physical safety of children has not diminished, but quality day care is psychosocially oriented, stressing optimum opportunities for a child’s emotional, mental and bodily growth. As Bettye M. Caldwell writes, "Day Care can no more be separated from education than it can from welfare or health" (Saturday Review, February 20, 1971, p. 48).

We all know that a child’s outlook and approach to life are decisively conditioned in the formative years, for in those years he or she learns not only the alphabet but values. Hence it is important that the persons in charge of the young child share the parents’ value system or at least feel an obligation to it. Such persons, however, are hard to find. Grandmother no longer lives nearby, or else she is busy with her own work, while babysitters are often unreliable even if available. To further complicate the situation, in too many cases parents have no options when it comes to selecting a center for their child to attend. Countless communities in this country simply refuse to develop their resources in this field. The only thing they offer is impersonal centers operated primarily for profit, with a fast turnover of underpaid staff. Such an environment is bound to have long-range negative effects on the personality development and character formation of the children subjected to it. Children lacking consistent, caring "mother and father figures" have difficulty discovering their own worth and selfhood.

The Need for a Secure Environment

Happily, the churches are beginning to take great interest in starting child-care centers. Their object is not to inculcate specific religious doctrines, but rather to provide structures whose staff and program embody the values of love and individual attention.

The Head Start program which captured the public imagination in the 1960s was conceived of as a means of elevating the so-called "culturally deprived." Day care in the 1970s has more encompassing purposes. The professionally trained people in charge of the centers are able to meet a variety of needs besides those of working parents and of AFDC mothers who seek schooling in order to walk the bridge from welfare to employment. For instance, children of emotionally disturbed or alcoholic parents are sometimes placed in the enriching atmosphere of day-care centers rather than in foster homes. Children with special learning, speech or emotional problems are often placed there too, and in many cases are helped through selective participation with groups of "well-balanced," healthy children. More broadly speaking, the interaction between staff and children facilitates the latter’s ability to communicate. It has been noted that parents too busy to talk with their children are making them "verbal cripples."

The need for care does not end when children start school. Every day over a million youngsters over six are unsupervised for several hours before their parents return from work. They desperately need after-school care -- a secure environment where they can be safe from physical harm, improve their socialization skills, relate to interested adults, and be removed from the temptations of wandering on the street.

The Case for Church Involvement

As we have said, day care is an area in which the church can and should play an important role. After all, the church is oriented to meeting human need, and love of little children is one of its cardinal emphases. But there are also specific reasons why the church and its members should be involved:

First, Christians should be involved because of the decisive impact day care may have on family life in America. If children are to be nurtured in a stable, loving environment, nursery schools and day-care centers of quality are a must. The trend toward women’s liberation appears to be irreversible. Certainly more and more mothers of even very young children are away from home, at jobs, many hours every day. Hence the need to develop centers where day care will be "a supplement, not a substitute" for the home.

Second, Christians should be involved in order to promote higher-quality care. At present, quality is threatened by business interests which view child care as a financial enterprise that promises to yield a sizable profit. So far, more than 20 franchising operations -- including a fried-chicken chain and a toy manufacturer -- have sought permission to establish chains of day-care centers across the country. Among the services envisioned are 24-hour facilities where a child can be placed while the parents take a vacation. Perhaps profitable centers are required, but we must beware of losing the "human" element which is vital in the care of children.

Unless churches provide funds and facilities for day-care programs, they will scarcely have opportunity to influence either the policies of local institutions or the standards contemplated by state and federal licensing authorities. Our own battles against the lowering of standards in South Dakota have made us aware of the demonic tendency to sacrifice quality care for another person’s child at the altar of the profit-motive. Children have few lobbyists. Unless the church actively pleads their case before our federal and state legislatures, their need for day care is likely to find only minimal response.

Third, Christians should be involved because God calls us to meet unmet human needs. Concern for the orphan and the widow and love of children are a deep Judeo-Christian tradition. Theologically, the church must understand itself as the "servant-critic" of day care, serving the genuine needs of families and communities yet remaining free to judge and to promote higher standards of humane care.

The sad fact is that when it comes to services for children, the U.S. is an underdeveloped nation. Day care in America is a need crying to be heard. At present the federal government provides only limited funds directly for day care. What money is available for this purpose is channeled through programs for disadvantaged and low-income families (e.g., Head Start and the Work Incentive Program). Children from middle-income homes are ineligible for these programs; and of those who are eligible, most are being neglected: openings exist for only 10 per cent of those needing any care. The challenge for the church is to create or help to create openings for an additional 4,850,000 children.

The church can meet the challenge. For instance, local congregations can exercise responsible stewardship by making full use of the resources and facilities they already possess. In thousands of American communities, large or small, fine Christian-education buildings sit empty most of the week. Some churches have now turned these tax-free structures into day-care centers to meet the public need; but too many churches keep them closed most of the time, and reserve them exclusively for private use on weekends and special occasions. Yet a relatively small financial investment would enable them to adapt these buildings to other uses and thus to contribute greatly to the solution of a social problem that looms large in the 1970s and beyond. The needs of America’s children cannot be met unless the churches open their doors for service.

Incidentally, child care offers a unique opportunity for church-state cooperation. Church and state share a fundamental concern for the protection of children and the preservation of family life. And, since religious indoctrination is not the purpose of the church’s involvement in day care, government can legitimately assist families in church-sponsored programs.

In centuries past the church pioneered in social services by establishing colleges, orphanages and hospitals. Today offers a new opportunity for Christian witness. As America celebrates its bicentennial, the church can advance the nation’s welfare and strengthen its family life by promoting the development of quality child-care centers. A button issued by the Child Development Council of America captures the spirit that should move us. The button reads: "Birthday Parties Are For Kids -- Child Care ‘76." Let Christians do their part to make Americas 200th birthday a new beginning for America’s children.

Discussion Upon Fundamental Principles of Education (1919)

[Several years ago, in the course of a three-way correspondence on Whitehead’s educational theory, Victor Lowe directed Brian Hendley’s and my attention to a one-page summary of a 1919 lecture on education by Whitehead. It was a discussion of fundamental principles of education: "2. Discussion Upon Fundamental Principles in Education, opened by Professor A. N. Whitehead, F.R.S." Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Bournemouth, 1919. London, John Murray, 1920, p. 361.

We agreed that this should be made more visible and readily available by publication in Process Studies, and with the permission of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it is reprinted here.1

Three things are particularly interesting about this summary. The first is its initial epigram, "All education is the development of genius." (This is often quoted, but its exact source seldom cited.) The present context is very helpful in understanding what Whitehead meant by the ambiguous term "genius" here.

The second thing that strikes one is the very sharp criticism of "dead languages" and "classical education." "Classical learning has had its chance . . . and has failed." Professor Lowe suggested, quite reasonably, that these comments may have been responsible, in part, for Whitehead’s inclusion in the Commission on the Place of Classics in Education, in 1921. (We have Whitehead’s own later remarks in his 1921 article, "The Classics in Education.")2

The third point of interest is the date. The Principles of Natural Knowledge was published in 1919, The Concept of Nature in 1920, The Principle of Relativity in 1922. The present lecture helps to show that there was no discontinuity in Whitehead’s interest in education during this period of intensive technical writing in the philosophy of science. On the contrary, from 1912 to 1933, Whitehead persistently lectured to learned societies, calling their attention to the importance of the teaching of the relevant subject-matter. He thought the best talent of these learned societies should be applied to the relatively unstylish tasks of conceptual analysis, course design, and texts for secondary school and college undergraduate courses.3

At the same time, there was another theme that he advanced in his educational addresses. This was the need to include aesthetic appreciation as an educational aim, a counterweight to words and numbers in the form of attention to the concrete. This theme reaches its final statement in 1925, in the final chapter of Science and the Modern World, "Requisites for Social Progress." There had been anticipations of it much earlier, however, particularly in Chapter III of The Organization of Thought, "A Polytechnic in Wartime," dated 1917.4 And we see the theme anticipated, or at least hinted at, in the discussion of "relevancy" and "genius" in the present remarks. "Relevancy," in particular, already looks like a counterweight to the precision of high-order abstraction.5]

 

Discussion Upon Fundamental Principles of Education, opened by Professor A. N. Whitehead, F.R.S.

All education is the development of genius. Genius is the divine instinct for creation, incident throughout life, a certain quality of first-handedness accompanying and directing activity. An education mainly devoted to the development of genius is the best education for eliciting common sense. The three factors of genius are the habit of action, the vivid imagination, and the discipline of judgment. Criticism is the antagonist of genius, though it is essential for the discipline of judgment. The function of criticism is the education of genius by the aid of knowledge.

The acquisition of knowledge is the ultimate substratum of education. Knowledge and genius are the twin factors of effective personality, and the true ultimate problem before the educator is how to impart knowledge so as to stimulate genius.

A curriculum should start with obvious relevancy, and should progressively widen as the field of relevancy expands -- the subject-matter of early education should issue quickly in securing some definite acquirement. The stimulus of success is essential for any broad effectiveness of culture.

Literary education is of overwhelming importance. Language is essential. The study of language has importance, relevancy, and the certainty of a large measure of success. You can only spoil its effect by one procedure -- namely, by teaching a language which the pupils can never acquire, will never want to use, and which is the vehicle of a literature whose relevancy is only immediately obvious to a mature mind. You must not go on to a dead language until a modern language has gripped the imagination. Classical learning is the superstructure of a literary education, not the foundation. Classical learning has had its chance with the well-to-do-class, and has failed -- failed to impress on them that learning should mould life, a failure which originates in a lack of relevancy in the subject-matter of education. The technical triumphs of science in war and in industry have startled English thought back into sanity, for it is sanity to believe in the importance of knowledge. Learning is not advocated for the sake of mere utility, but utility for the sake of learning. Knowledge should proceed from the concrete to the abstract. General education, the basis of culture, should be compact of material which will enter into the habitual lives of its recipients, a doctrine which applies alike to language, literature, history, natural science, and to mathematics. Beyond this general education every educated person should push on to a specialism dominated by finer theory and subtler ideas -- for one it may be Greek, another scientific theory, for another mathematics. There can be no complete education without specialism, but classical specialism is not general culture.

It is the demand of genius that it lives its own life in its own way. It is the function of education to supply criticism and knowledge.

The one fundamental principle of education -- that the pupils are alive, and not mere portmanteaus to be neatly packed.

 

Notes

1I want to thank the British Association for the Advancement of Science for its permission (letter from Dr. David Morley, March 15, 1984).

2 For a comparison of Whitehead’s conclusions and the recommendations in the Committee Report, see R. S. Brumbaugh, "Whitehead’s Educational Theory: Two Supplementary Notes to The Aims of Education," Educational Theory (1966), pp. 210-15.

3 For an indication of the frequency and austere occasions of these lectures, see the contents table of The Organization of Thought, and the Acknowledgements section of Essay in Science and Philosophy. For changes in references to textbooks between the OT chapters and their versions in The Aims of Education," see my notes, cited above, p. 214f., note 2.

4 Some particularly important statements are quoted in my notes, supra n. 2, p. 213.

5 Note the "three factors of genius," "the habit of action, the vivid imagination, and the discipline of judgment" in Whitehead’s present Remarks.

Liberty and the Enfranchisement of Women

Editor’s Note: The following "Extract from the speech of A. N. Whitehead, Esq., Sc.D., at the Annual Meeting of the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association, Nov. 5, 1906" was published as a four-page pamphlet by the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association (Mrs. J. Ward, 6 Selwyn Gardens, Hon. Sec.). At the time 50 copies could be obtained for a shilling, post free, but Professor John C. Slater of the Department of Philosophy, the University of Toronto, appears to possess the sole surviving copy.1

 

"A few years ago the political emancipation of women was merely the dream of a few political idealists, today it is a living political issue, popular among large masses of voters. This is a fact which should give us confident hope and renewed energy. I will not waste time speculating upon the causes which have produced this progress, but will pass to a consideration of the reasons which animate the Women’s Suffrage agitation.

"Speaking for myself, I base my adherence to the cause upon the old-fashioned formula of Liberty: that is, upon the belief that in the life of a rational being it is an evil when the circumstances affecting him are beyond his control, and are not amenable to his intelligent direction and comprehension. External constraint upon the rational self-direction of conduct is, indeed, inextricably interwoven in the nature of things. But wherever it exists, and is removable without some corresponding loss of liberty, it is the evil, it is the enemy. Progress in science, progress in thought, progress in civilization depend for their good ultimately upon this, that they deliver the life of man into his own hands.

"But the chief and noblest of the external activities of human beings is concerned with the life of the State, that great organism on whose well-being depends the nature of the opportunities which life can offer to each individual.

"It follows, therefore, that except for plain, overmastering reasons connected with the necessary efficiency of Government, it is a crime against Liberty deliberately to deprive any portion of the population of possibilities of political action. That such overmastering reasons for limitation of political functions do exist in many states, perhaps in all states, I am not concerned to deny. They may arise when there is a cleavage in the population produced by inferiority of race, inferiority of civilization, or by deficiency in goodwill.

"But what we are here today to assert is that in the case of women in England at the present time, there is no reason for any exceptional treatment which does not also exist for the corresponding class of men.

"For what reasons have been alleged against the enfranchisement of women? It can no longer be maintained that women are prevented by social usage from interfering in Politics. Both the great parties in the state now make use of large political organizations of women.

"Again, Mr. Asquith tells us that women have now a vast political influence, and that it will be destroyed if they possess the suffrage. I grant that it is true that women have great indirect influence, and for this very reason they should be accorded a definite and determinate place in the political organization.

"Their influence as a class, at present, is necessarily irresponsible and often uninformed. When they have the vote they will take themselves seriously, and form their opinions with a sense of responsibility.

"During the last General Election nothing has struck me more than the educative effect of the vote upon the agricultural labourers in the village in which I live. They listened to both sides with care and attention, and their random political ideas were transformed into an instructed body of opinion. So we may agree that women now have influence, and from this we deduce that they should be admitted within that class to which direct political teaching is addressed.

"Again we are told that women are virtually represented by the votes of the men. This theory of virtual representation is ever the last bad argument of prejudice. In another connection it was long ago examined and torn to shreds by the historian Macaulay. Either the virtual representative will act as his so-called virtual constituents wish, and then, why not give them the direct vote? Or the virtual representative will not act as his virtual constituents desire, and then in what sense is he their representative.

"Lastly, there is the physical force argument; namely, that the ultimate direction of affairs must be vested in those who in their own persons possess the fighting strength of the nation. This argument goes far. In fact it goes much too far, and it proves that the vast majority of Governments, that have ever existed, were impossible. It proves that the government of Louis the Great of France was impossible, because in his own person he was unable to coerce the French nation. It proves that any despotism is impossible, and that any oligarchy is impossible. And when I contemplate these results of the argument, I wish it were true. But unfortunately it is manifestly false.

"In the name of Liberty, then, we demand the Suffrage for Women."

 

Notes

1We are indebted to Victor Lowe for calling this item to our attention. During recent years Lowe has learned of several previously unidentified works of Whitehead besides this one:

"A Visitation," Cambridge Fortnightly 1 (March 6, 1888), 81-83.

"The Fens as Seen from Skates," Cambridge Review, 12 (February 20,1891), 212-13.

"On Ideals: With Reference to the Controversy Concerning the Admission of Women to Degrees in the University," Cambridge Review 17 (May 14, 1896), 310-11.

"The University Library,’’ co-authored with Ernest W. Barns, Cambridge Review 24 (May 14, 1903), 295.

‘‘The Philosophy of Mathematics," Science Progress in the Twentieth Century, 5 (October, 1910), 234-39.

"Foreword," The Father Shore: An Anthology of World Opinion on the Immortality of the Soul, edited by Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Lawrence Hunt (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1934), xvii.

"James Houghton Woods," Undercurrents in Greek Philosophy (James Houghton Woods, privately printed pamphlet, 1945), 5. (A copy of this document is on file in the collection of James Houghton Woods’s papers at Harvard University.)

These new entries also appear with annotations in Alfred North Whitehead: A Primary-Secondary Bibliography, edited by Barry A. Woodbridge (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1977).

The Peirceian Influence on Hartshorne’s Subjectivism

Charles Hartshorne has defined his philosophy as the "social view of reality." Elsewhere he has termed it "Realistic Idealism." Two fundamental principles underlie this philosophy: the plurality of events and the primacy of subjectivity or inclusion. Intrinsic to these principles are Hartshorne’s view of internal and external relations.

In this paper we shall be principally concerned with investigating the role Peirce’s categories play in the full development of these principles. We will try to show how, together with the influence of Whitehead, they helped to shape in its mature form Hartshorne’s philosophy of subjectivism.

Hartshorne’s philosophy can accurately be described as a philosophy of feeling. If there is anything primordial in Hartshorne’s thought, it is the central place of feeling. The universe -- all reality for that matter -- is a complex of feeling centers. Feeling centers or psychic events plus their correlative term, values, are the root out of which the universe emerges and is. In Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method Hartshorne brings this out quite clearly. He is concerned in this text with describing H. G. Wells’s vision of reality during the latter’s theistic period. Nevertheless, it is the best description to my knowledge of Hartshorne’s own view of his philosophy of feeling.

Now if the physical as given is essentially feeling, then, since thought can expand, generalize, extrapolate, and abstract, it follows that thought can arrive at no world other than a world of feelings, with their relations, aspects, varieties, and so forth. This is, in one respect, the social view of reality. (CSPM xvii)

From the earliest period of his reflective thought, the period prior to the years at Harvard, Hartshorne had clearly formulated the insight that there was a "unity of feeling between the self and nature as immediately given" (RSP 19). This basic subjectivism would never be lost.

Nevertheless the direction of his thought was along monistic lines. As late as his dissertation in 1923 Hartshorne was grappling with the problem of how to have monistic inclusiveness as the foundation for universal value and truth and still retain feeling centers which would be autonomous of that inclusion (TPP 22-34). An adequate subjectivism had to entail two elements: there had to be feeling centers capable of including objects felt, and there had to be other subjects who were also feeling centers and thus values capable of being included without loss of their own subjectivity. To maintain such a doctrine a clear philosophy of relations had to be formulated, one which contained real internal relations, thus grounding a real sense of inclusion, and also one which contained real external relations, thus establishing a true pluralism of external centers of feeling and value.

The influences of Whitehead and Peirce during the years from 1925 through roughly 1933 help to account for the final clarification and maturation of these principles. As we shall presently see, Whitehead aided Hartshorne in conceiving a truly pluralistic universe through an event-ontology. At the same time Whitehead’s dipolar theism helped safeguard the needed doctrine of inclusion. Peirce, on the other hand, provided suitable categories for expressing Hartshorne’s metaphysics of feeling and also provided the doctrine of the continuum which enabled him to develop a theory of emergent possibilities in contrast to Whitehead’s doctrine of eternal objects.

I

Whitehead’s philosophy is also a theory of subjectivism. Its "reformed subjectivism" holds subjectivity primary, but it also holds a strong doctrine of objectivity. Objects are given to and not created by the subject. "The many become one and are increased by one" (PR 32). Yet, simple or naive pluralism is not intended. The "many" enter into a novel unity, a new reality. An emergent or creative synthesis, to use Hartshorne’s expression, becomes the "very principle of process and reality." The principle of relativity states: "to be is to be a potential for every (subsequent) becoming" (PR 33). Each item of reality, comments Hartshorne on Whitehead’s principle, is destined to form material for endlessly compounded and recompounded acts of synthesis, producing new and more complex realities (WP 162).

Real relatedness is rooted in this doctrine of prehension. Internal relations are constituted by the feeling or awareness of that which is efficaciously present to it. On the other hand, that which is prehended does not in turn prehend its prehender. The former retains its own objectivity and is only externally related to the actual occasion prehending it. Even in the synthesis by which the "many become one," the "many" remain objectively distinct in themselves. It is the novel occasion, the new "one," which is internally related to that which it prehends and realizes in a new unity.

Memory is the paradigm case of prehension. We prehend and are really related to our past experiences. Yet, the past experiences are not really related to the present memory. The past is not remembered as anticipating the present memory of itself. Relatedness, taken as internal, runs one way only. There is no converse. In short, this is the doctrine of asymmetry so central to Hartshorne and Whitehead in their theories of time, causality, and feeling (WP 11).

The doctrine of prehensions and actual occasions provided Hartshorne with a necessary clarification of inclusion and objective value. Feeling centers are able to include their objects and thus be internally related to them without the loss of the object’s value and freedom. At the same time true creativity could be maintained since the new unity synthesized from the many which were prehended was not merely an aggregate of the many externally related, but something "formally" new.

If this can be asserted about finite centers, what might be said concerning the ultimate center of feeling, God? Sessions clearly points out that during the early period up to and including the dissertation, Hartshorne was troubled by a monistic concept of God which came quite close to the classical concept of Pure Act. Given this absolutist notion with its radical implications for inclusiveness, understood as the source of ultimate value and truth, how could a genuine doctrine of pluralism be held? Sessions tells us that Hartshorne answered in the dissertation with a claim upon divine benevolence flowing from a perfectly good omnipotence (TPP 32). This could hardly do. In fact, such absolutism, whether benevolent or not, argues for a determinism with regard to finite centers of value and freedom. Hartshorne’s pluralism would run the risk of collapsing.

The stress on absolute inclusiveness may well have been a residue of the classical notion of God, at least in terms of the divine omnipotence. It may well have been due, though Hartshorne is not clear on this point, to his awareness of Royce’s concept of inclusiveness found in The World and Individual. In any case, he seems to be caught in a dilemma. How could he maintain a true pluralism while retaining an absolutist concept of God?

W. E. Hocking had suggested to Hartshorne the possibility of dipolar theism. Hocking made some attempts at formulating the possibility of conceiving God both as absolute and relative (contingent), eternal and temporal. Nevertheless, it was Whitehead who had given the most comprehensive and consistent view to date. It was Whitehead’s view, I believe, that brought to finalization Hartshorne’s dipolar theism and thus a way out of the dilemma.

By distinguishing the primordial nature from the consequent state or actuality of God, Whitehead was almost the first, claims Hartshorne, to deal seriously with the divine individuality. While the primoridal nature is absolute, independent, abstract, and neutral with respect to particular determinations, the consequent or relative nature is one in which the divine actuality is conceived as a sequence of determinate, contingent experiences which express both the essence of God and the de facto content of the world God experiences at a given moment. Whereas the divine essence (the primordial nature of God) is absolute impassive, and neutral, the consequent actuality is relative, passive, and value-oriented, with a supreme sensitivity or responsiveness that is "without equivocation, love itself in unadulterated purity" (WP 13).

In terms of internal and external relations, the consequent or relative nature of God is internally related to the world. The world, however, as prehended by God is not in turn internally related to him. It is true that the world has an internal relationship to God in that the world prehends its past and its past is included within the divine consequent nature. In this precise sense the world prehends God. However, in terms of the divine envisagement of the actual world, the relation is asymmetrical. There is no internal relationship, taken in the exact same way, between the world and God, and God and the world. There is a stubborn objectivity to the world in the divine experience. God is passive to the world in the sense that he is dependent upon it for his concrete actuality. If this were not the case then the divine inclusion would mean mutual internal relatedness. The world would lose its independence and identity. The relativity of God in his actual states avoids this difficulty and makes inclusion without monism possible.

II

There also seems to be a constant theme running through Harts-home’s writings concerning Peirce, especially with regard to his categories and theory of emergent possibilities. The theme is basically an appropriation of the Peirceian theories either in support of his own positions or as providing a more suitable categorical scheme for expressing them. This appropriation is not without adjustment. Nevertheless, the overall impression given is one of general favor, as we shall see.

With regard to the categories and their place in his system, Harts-home relates in The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation his concept of feeling to the Peirceian categories in terms of the interrationship of feelings: sensations, volitions, and thoughts.

That this union of sense and feeling under the same head is the only scientific one was effectively shown by the analysis of Charles Peirce, who pointed out that the most decisive classifications in science are those based upon mathematical form, and that the common form of sensation and of feelings is given in the fact that both exhibit (relatively) unitary or "simple" qualities (redness, pleasure) whereas willing, or better "striving," is conspicuously dual (an "effort" is always sensed as correlative to "resistance"), and whereas knowing or "meaning" is irreducibly triadic (sign, thing signified, larger mental context or "idea" to or for which it has this signification). (PPS 37)

The categories are presented in this text as reflecting in logical clarity his own doctrine of feeling. In mathematical form they express the doctrine of the interrelatedness of feeling.

This same theme is reiterated in and elaborated on in Beyond Humanism:

Now blueness is not primarily conflict or meaning, but feeling-quality, while "awareness" refers chiefly to meaning, the use of signs. All three categories are "psychic": the "mind" is in all cases a unity of feeling, striving, and meaning. The doctrine of sympathy, which Peirce was one of the first to bold, is that all feeling feels other feeling, all reaction has an object which itself is reactive, and all meaning means other meaning, as well as reactions and feelings. Since the three categories exhaust experience, we could have no other predicates with which to clothe objects; and that we have objects at all is due entirely to the sympathetic duality or imminent sociality of experience. (BH 185)

Recalling Hartshorne’s description of the social view of reality, the categories are able to be seen as the adequate categorial scheme of reality because the mind can only "expand, generalize, extrapolate, and abstract" that which is given in feelings. They "exhaust experience." Thus, they have metaphysical universality since no experience can be instanced which would not be a monad, dyad, or triad.

The phrase "all reactions have as an object that which is itself reactive" is not, strictly speaking, Peirce’s doctrine. Hartshorne modified the notion of the monad or first as a simple independence, claiming instead that it was itself a reactive agent in one context and an independent entity in another. We shall consider this modification in greater detail later.

In any case, Hartshorne claims that "Peirce’s definition of feeling, reaction and meaning in terms of the monad, dyad and the triad, is one of the few great achievements of its kind" (BH 285). In Reality as Social Process, he attests that the Peirceian categories reaffirm his own beliefs that feelings and their relationships constitute the essence of reality (RSP 20).

Finally, an overall assessment of the categories is made in Creative Synthesis.

Values may be considered under three heads: acting rightly, thinking correctly, and experiencing satisfyingly. In other words, goodness, truth and beauty. But as Peirce held, the order is wrong. The basic value is the intrinsic value of experiencing, as a unity of feeling inclusive of whatever volition and thought the experience contains, and exhibiting harmony or beauty. . . . Thinking, Peirce held, is one form of acting, and hence logic as a normative science is a branch of ethics. Both presuppose aesthetics, in a generalized sense; the study of what makes experiences good in themselves. (CSPM 303)

The categories are not explicitly mentioned, though they are implied. All logic is reduced to ethics and ethics to aesthetics. All meaning, therefore, is a relationship of feelings to feelings. This entails that all meaning, ethical and logical, is ultimately intelligible only through the relationship of feelings. These latter find their ultimate meaning through the categories. Therefore the metaphysics of feeling, the heart and soul of Hartshorne’s philosophy, is contained and expressed in the categories formulated by Peirce.

Hartshorne goes so far as to claim that his "neoclassicism, surrelativism and creativism . . . can be viewed as Peirceian" if the "categories are purified of certain ambiguities" and if the "one-sided emphasis upon continuity (his synechism)" which he thinks "inconsistent or confused, is corrected" (CSPM xvi).

The complete appropriation of the Peirceian categories as a vehicle for expressing his metaphysics of feeling depends on the purification of "certain ambiguities" in the categories, principally "Firstness" and the removal of the inconsistencies in Peirce’s synechism. The problem of the categories and the problem of synechism are mutually relevant. The correction of the former leads to the correction of the latter.

Hartshorne’s problem stems from Peirce’s definition of the monad as a simple quality of feeling (CP 6:198). The monad is a kind of feeling abstractable from any particular instance. Peirce defined the monad or first more precisely as "the absence of reaction -- of feeling another." In sensing a specific quality, such as magenta, we imagine that all the rest of our consciousness -- memory, thought, everything except this "feeling of magenta -- is utterly wiped out, and with that is erased all possibility of comparing the magenta with anything else or of estimating it as more or less bright. That is what you must think the pure sense-quality to be" (CP 6:198).

If the first is conceived in this way, Hartshorne responds, it appears at best to be "nothing but a limiting concept, a vacuous case which no actual experience could quite realize." The first would be the same as abstractness, possibility or essence. No actual feeling with its actual quality could be a first. Firstness would thus have to be conceived in total independence of concrete and definite actuality. It would be mere potentiality (SPCP 459).

Instead of such an understanding of Firstness, Hartshorne insists that an actual feeling is always a second. This may be assumed if an actual feeling is always conceived in terms of its relationship to a stimulus, that is, to a prior first. The question might arise, however, if such an assumption were made, whether it would follow that the "stimulating entity is in its turn related to the feeling it elicits." In other words, would this entail direct symmetry? Hartshorne thinks not. The stimulus as event need not be taken as relative to the subsequent feeling. Rather, the "feeling is second to the thing felt, which in this context is first; and this relation is not reversible or symmetrical." There is an actual first and an actual second. The first event to which the second is relative, may in another context be itself a second to prior firsts.

Hartshorne is prompt to admit that in fact Peirce had implied this, though he (Peirce) had failed to develop it adequately. Hartshorne probably had in mind the text in which Peirce states: "If state A is affected by state B, and state B by state C, then A is affected by state C, though not so much so. It follows that if A is affectible by B, B is not affectible by A" (CF 6:129). Hartshorne’s own position reflects this quite clearly: "The Firstness or Absoluteness is, to be sure, relative only, but for all that, perfectly definite and genuine. The earlier experience was strictly independent of its successor, but not of its predecessor (SPCP 459).

Even admitting a doctrine of asymmetry, Peirce’s category of Firstness, taken as simple independence, and his use of vision as his model, made it "impossible for him to conceive a definite unit of experience having definite predecessors and successors, to the former of which it could be second or relative, and to the latter first or absolute." As Peirce conceived it, "no definite Firstness or Secondness can be found in a syncretistic conceived process" (SPCP 460). Without definiteness, neither asymmetry nor a developed logic of internal and external relations would be possible.

Looked at more closely, the problem concerns the continuum. Peirce conceived the continuum as consisting of both actualities and possibilities. Between any set of feelings there exists an infinite number of actualities. Between feelings x and y there is an infinite number of z’s. Upon seeing one color pass into another, an infinite number of shades must be passed through. The time interval is said by Peirce to be infinitesimal (CP 6:131).

Given an infinite number of actualities between x and y, no definite value can be assigned to either x or y because no clear delineation of terms is possible. The terms x and y would have an infinity of intermediate values between them. Neither the relative absoluteness of firsts, nor the internal relatedness of seconds could be maintained. Neither asymmetry nor internal and external relations could be sustained. A form of Zeno’s paradoxes would apply.

Hartshorne’s criticism is clearly stated in Creative Synthesis:

That continuity belongs with the abstract, indefinite, possible, infinite, not with the concrete, actual, finite, is the truth missed by Bergson, Peirce and Dewey, but seen by James and Whitehead. . . .It seems to be the real bearing of the Zeno paradoxes. A continuum either has no parts, or indefinite or infinite but merely possible parts; definite multiple actuality must be discrete, and, at least for any finite portion of space-time, finite in its actual constituents. Peirce saw that possibilities form continua, thus all possible hues, shades and tints of red. But it seems obvious that the actual array of colors does not present all of these: there are always gaps. . . . It could not be otherwise. Actuality as such implies arbitrary breaking of a continuum. . . . Peirce’s bias towards continuity, which made him blur the distinction between discrete actuality and continuous possibility in favor of a belief in actually continuous becoming and motion, was responsible. It led him to his extraordinary doctrine that a human experience has neither finite or zero but infinitesimal duration so that in a single second, say, we have an infinite number of successive experiences, each drawing inferences from the previous, and thus we are always infinitely far from identifying a definite experience with definite unmediated data. (CSPM 122f)

Hartshorne’s criticism and correction rest upon the distinction between actuality and potentiality The relatively nonrelative, the first, in a sense is abstract because the predecessor of an event can only be conceived by way of an abstraction. To know the past, for example, as the "content of memory we must abstract from the novelties introduced by the remembering experience. Yesterday as known today is today minus all that is new about today." The relatively nonrelative or absolute is thus relatively abstract. Furthermore, the relatively absolute is a potential for future experiences. Yesterday was no mere possibility. It was a possibility in a relative sense since it furnished that possibility for a certain kind of successor which would not have been otherwise possible. Yet, it remains only abstract with reference to its successors. Actuality adds definiteness to potentiality. Today adds definiteness to the kind of today which yesterday made possible (SPCP 460).

On the basis of this distinction a continuum of possibilities can be had without the risk of Zeno’s paradoxes becoming applicable to it. The definiteness of terms is established through the actuality of seconds while the continuum of firsts is a continuum of abstract possibility.

On the basis of what we have just examined, we can conclude that at least two significant elements were derived from Peirce: the categories and the doctrine of the continuum with its emergent possibilities. Once corrected of their inconsistencies and confusions, they became suitable for Hartshorne’s metaphysics of feeling. The Whiteheadian doctrine of prehension enabled him to criticize Peirce’s category of Firstness and thus make it suitable for the more important doctrine of the emergence of possibility in the continuum. Whitehead’s role is obviously important because it aided Hartshorne in adapting the categories and the continuum to meet the needs of his own system. Both Peirce and Whitehead thus contributed to the clarification of internal and external relations which grounded Hartshorne’s subjectivism and facilitated his metaphysics of experience.

III

While admitting the enormous role played by Whitehead in refining the Peirceian categories and the doctrine of the continuum, it was the Peirceian vision which ultimately dominated in the construction of Hartshorne’s metaphysics. This can be seen if we examine Hartshorne’s departure from Whitehead on the matter of realistic essences. Hartshorne shifts to a temporalistic interpretation of emergent possibility radically transforming the atemporal view which the doctrine of eternal objects suggests.

The key to understanding this fundamental shift lies in the distinction between potentiality and actuality, i.e. between generality and definiteness. Hartshorne follows Peirce in identifying possibility and generality, while definiteness or determinateness is found in actuality. These terms appear synonymous for both Peirce and Hartshorne, but Whitehead distinguishes definiteness from determinateness (PR 38). Eternal objects are defined as "forms of definiteness" (PR 32). They confer on actual occasions that formal unity which enters into the identity of the actual occasion. The determination of the actual occasion, the complete actual identity in all its detail, results from both definiteness and position. Definiteness is "the illustration of select eternal objects," and position is "relative status in a nexus of actual entities" (PR 38) Actuality or definiteness is thus constituted by both definiteness and position. Definiteness appears on the side of the eternal objects and thus on the side of potentiality. For full actuality position must be present as well as definiteness.

Hartshorne’s position eliminates this distinction between definiteness and determinateness. Potentiality and generality go together. Definiteness can only be on the side of actuality. In an important paper written on the subject of realistic essences in Santayana, Hartshorne gives perhaps his most detailed arguments against the definiteness-determinateness of essences qua potentials.

If essences are determinate and complete apart from existence, then all relations of essence to existence, or by virtue of existence, are external to essence. Its relations to existence are purely contingent. But can the determined receive a relation, even contingently? What relevance could the relation possibly have? It could make no difference to the essence that it has the existential relation. In short, "it" would not have it. Existence would thus be like the Thomist’s God, who is said not to be related to the world . . . although the world is related to Him. (Santayana 171)

The language in this text is classical. Existence and actuality are here identified. Normally they are distinguished (discussion of the ontological argument rests upon this distinction). The context indicates, however, that Hartshorne intends by existence concrete actuality.

With this in mind, the gist of Hartshorne’s objection is that qua potentialities, the definite essences leave nothing for actuality to confer upon them in terms of further determination. If actuality were to add anything, what would it be? If the addition were internal to the essence, then they would no longer be what they were. In this sense, definiteness would not be a valid designation for the essences because definiteness in fact would be due to the actualization of the potential. If only an external relationship were conferred, actualization would have absolutely no significance for the essence itself. Actuality would add nothing, and concreteness would lose any significant meaning. Existence or actuality would thus be "formally empty."

In Hartshorne’s view of creative synthesis actuality is far from "formally empty." In terms of the Peirceian categories, secondness confers something upon firsts which the latter could not provide for insofar as they are firsts or potentials, namely, their formal determination and significance (causal) in a new actual entity. That which was merely determinable now is made determinate by the formalizing process of the second in its act of synthesis. The firsts acquire new meaning and definiteness as causally efficacious in the new unity, a definiteness they did not possess as potentials for the becoming of a subsequent event (CDLC 62-66). Hartshorne provides an example:

Let us take an example of choice. I may choose to try to be kind rather than injurious to a person who has injured me. But the actual word or deed must be more definite than anything such choice can envisage prior to action. Choice is among "intrinsically general alternatives," although what is done is never general in the same degree. This is the meaning of choice: it is determining which determinable to particularize through further determinations not yet in being. (Santayana 172)

On these terms, definiteness cannot be attached to potentiality without either destroying the formal unity of the essences or the import of actuality in conferring something significant upon essences. The chain of firsts would not be increased through seconds, since seconds would add nothing real or significant to the antecedent chain. Potentialities would be eternally and definitively fixed. To avoid this difficulty, one which would vitiate his entire system, Hartshorne denies any such definiteness in essences and identifies instead definiteness with determinateness on the side of actuality, with universality and determinability being conceived on the side of potentiality. Hartshorne boldly asserts in Creative Synthesis that the ultimate principle of definiteness is "the principle of experiencing as partly free or self-creative, and this principle being ultimate, accounts for definiteness without the help of any other principles" (CSPM 62).

Hartshorne’s view can best be summarized as a temporal view of possibility. In the act of creative synthesis only two factors are involved: the past as the data providing for a determinable future and the actual experience which, in causing its own formal unity and concrete actuality, gives definiteness and determination to its own potentiality. White-head’s view requires a third factor, the novel form supplied by the initial aim. Peirce’s position does not and thus coincides with Hartshorne s. Their views depend on the identification of determinability and universality, determination and actuality. In my judgment, the general metaphysical foundation for Hartshorne’s philosophy is exactly this temporal view of possibility and actuality, generality and concreteness. It is precisely the relations, internal and external, between seconds and firsts elaborated on and systematized by Peirce, though transformed by Hartshorne, which provide the foundation for Hartshorne’s metaphysics.

IV

Hartshorne’s thesis, derived from Peirce, that determination renders specific that which is only general and universal, poses some difficulties when examined from a Whiteheadian perspective. The actual occasion creates its own determinateness from a determinable but indefinite past through its act of creative synthesis, but its formal principle of unity, its initial aim or principle of purpose according to which the occasion chooses its self-determination, that by and for which the synthesis occurs, is not given. It appears to come from the occasion itself, but its act of self-realization already presupposes it. It cannot come from the past, for that past by definition is indefinite as to the final form of its unity. Hartshorne’s temporal view of possibility excludes any other alternatives.

Whitehead’s own account, which seems to assign the exact degree of relevance of every eternal object to each and every temporal situation by means of the primordial valuation of God (PR 46, 64, 248) has its own problems, for then the specification of the initial aims occurs without recourse to God’s temporal, responsive experience. Lewis S. Ford seems to have resolved this issue by retaining a formal principle of unification, namely, a doctrine of eternal objects in the primordial nature of God constituting pure possibility without sacrificing Hartshorne’s insights concerning the temporal emergence of real possibility, namely, a doctrine of emergent real possibility due both to logical possibility and to position, the latter established by the emergence of the past actual world in the consequent nature (TPP 58-65).

Although Whitehead’s analysis of prehension and his dipolar theism enabled Hartshorne to construct a consistent theory of internal and external relations, Peirce provided the major categorial scheme which Hartshorne finally adopted. As corrected by recourse to Whiteheadian principles, it provided the basic structure for Hartshorne’s temporal view of process, which allowed for the emergence of possibility without requiring any eternally definite essences.

It may be, however, that further modification of Hartshorne’s Peirceianism is in order to resolve the difficulties surrounding the actuality’s formal principle of unity. It would seem that it is through Whitehead that the Peirceian character of Hartshorne’s philosophy can be brought to full fruition.

 

References

BH -- Charles Hartshorne, Beyond Humanism: Essays in the New Philosophy of Nature. Bison Book Edition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968.

CDLC -- Charles Hartshorne, "Creativity and the Deductive Logic of Causality," Review of Metaphysics, 2811 (Sept., 1973), 62-75.

CP -- Charles Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds. Volume 6. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935.

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. LaSalle: Open Court Publishing Co., 1971.

PPS -- Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1964.

RSP -- Charles Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process: Studies in Metaphysics and Religion. New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1971.

Santayana -- Charles Hartshorne, "Santayana’s Doctrine of Essences," pp. 135-85 in The Philosophy of George Santayana, Paul Arthur Schillp, ed. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951.

SPCP -- Charles Hartshorne, "Charles Sanders Peirce’s One Contribution to Philosophy and His Most Serious Mistake," pp. 445-74 in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Second Series, Edward G. Moore and Richard S. Robin, eds. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1964.

TPP -- Lewis S. Ford, "Whitehead’s Differences from Hartshorne, pp. 58-83; and William Lad Sessions, "Hartshorne’s Early Philosophy," pp. 10-34 in Two Process Philosophers. Lewis S. Ford, ed. Tallahassee: American Academy of Religion, 1973.

WP -- Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead’s Philosophy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.

Becoming: A Problem for Determinists?

A doctrine that appears often in the process philosophies of this century holds that the causal determinist is contradicting himself when he talks about a fully determinate future. The idea seems to have originated with Henri Bergson. It also appears clearly in the context of a refutation of determinism in the writings of Milic Capek, Charles Hartshorne, and Paul Weiss, and at least the germs of it are in the work of A. N. Whitehead and William James. The low initial plausibility of the doctrine combined with the high importance of it in current process metaphysics makes an intriguing problem. Is this argumentative strategy effective against modern determinists?

The causal determinist maintains that the future relative to any moment is fully determinate at that moment and is predictable on the ground of natural regularities by any perfect knower of the initial conditions and relevant laws. That looks harmless enough with respect to a philosophy of time. But the theory I am to examine holds that if the determinist is really serious about what he is saying, he is committed to the view that tensed language must be dispensed with. If past, present, and future are equally definite (closed to alternative possibilities), then it makes no sense to say that an event is "now" definite, as distinguishable from "was" or "will be" definite. The determinist may reply that he is not at all sure about tenses, but he can surely distinguish between the earlier and later relative to any temporal moment. The effect still comes after the cause, even if both cause and effect are timelessly definite. That kind of reply, however, simply puzzles the process thinker, for if events do not really "happen", no unique temporal sense can be given to "earlier" and "later." Time is spatialized, and "earlier" and "later" become odd spatial directions, like "left" and "right." Time is odd as a spatial dimension, because it is supposed to display features of asymmetry not dependent on the orientation of the observer, but the process thinkers cannot figure out in what the asymmetry is supposed to consist if determinism is true. The past seems like the future in all respects if the determinist is right. But then the temporal talk is about nothing at all. If time does not add anything to the definiteness of reality, time does nothing, and hence time is nothing. A determinate future is an actual future, an example of the absurdities that result when the determinist introduces temporal language. The point of all this for the process thinker is to show that determinism conflicts with a common sense understanding of time and is to be rejected on that ground.

Since there already exists an impressive body of literature on the relation between determinism and becoming, I want to provide a preliminary sketch of what I hope to contribute to it. I will reject the idea found in the process writings that there is a conceptual link between causal determinism and the "block universe" where consciousness, to borrow an apt phase from Richard Gale, sneaks up on (LT 235) and illumines what is tenselessly there. That may not seem to be a terribly exciting thesis to readers of Adolf Grünbaum, who stresses the independence of the determinism issue from the question of a metaphysics of becoming. However, what Grünbaum is primarily intent upon is showing that causal indeterminism is perfectly compatible with the theory that becoming is mind-dependent. Since the question of whether causal determinism requires his metaphysics of time is not at all a threat In his metaphysics, that issue does not attract his attention very much. When the process writers allege an entailment relation between causal determinism and the block universe, they do so not to defend their own metaphysics of time but to show that causal determinism is false. That issue is not in the forefront of Grünbaum’s mind. I think the process writers have some interesting arguments for their alleged entailment relation. I want to show wherein they go wrong and to show that other aspects of process metaphysics can be held independently of the attack on determinism. I shall assume that the process thinkers are right in holding that an adequate metaphysics of time must recognize dynamic becoming in nature as well as in human consciousness. The question then is whether time as the process philosophers think of it is incompatible with causal determinism. Recently Frederick Ferré discussed what forms of determinism Grünbaum’s metaphysics of time entails (1). Now let us begin from the other end and examine the allegation that causal determinism entails Grünbaum’s theory of time.

The various strands of current process thinking converge on Bergson, whose analysis of the durée is closely tied to a defense of a kind of creativity which is incompatible with determinism. Bergson was worried about the interpretation of relativity theory proposed by Minkowski in which time is a fourth dimension of space and in which the experience of temporal relations is analogous to shining a flashlight through the fourth dimension and finding the things that are "already there" (timelessly there). Bergson saw, I think rightly, that the spatialization of time loses time, except as an appearance to consciousness. Some form of determinism, but not necessarily a causal determinism in which the future is predictable in principle, is the result of such thinking. The future relative to any present would be timelessly determinate or definite.

The more troubling problem is whether causal determinism entails the spatialization of time. Bergson thought it does. This comes out clearly in both Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution where he says that to be a determinist is to hold, with Spinoza, that the future is logically contained in the present. To predict is to produce before the predicted thing is produced (CE 6). Since the conclusion of a deductive argument is timelessly contained in the premises and since predictions follow deductively from premises stating initial conditions, time is spatialized. That is, the future exists side-by-side with the present, and there is no radical becoming. If there is to be temporal process at all, time must gnaw at reality; time must make a difference (CE 46). The thesis is argued in the same way for our own generation by Milic Capek, who recognizes both its crucial importance for Bergson and the controversy it rightly inspires (PICT, BMP). And Paul Weiss in his Nature and Man, a book strikingly like Bergson’s Creative Evolution in the territory it covers and the positions it takes, introduces us early to the Bergsonian theory: "Things come to be. They are therefore free" (NM xxii).

Has anything gone awry? True, the lawlike generalizations and the initial condition statements used in the premises of a prediction are all true at the time of the initial conditions, and the predictions are timelessly deducible from them. However, the lawlike statements contain within them temporal distinctions, the concept of events taking place at different times. The only way we can maintain that the predicted happenings are "contained in" the present state of the universe described in the premises is to read back into the premises the dubious thesis at issue, that all events that are definite now are also actual now.

Milic Capek maintains in Bergson’s defense that the incompatibility of temporally subsequent states of affairs proves the falsity of determinism. The determinist deduces the future from the present. Since the conclusion of a valid deductive argument is always logically compatible with the premises, the determinist must hold that the temporally subsequent state of affairs is compatible with the temporally prior one. But this is clearly a mistake, for the world we predict is one that cannot be actual at the same time as the initial conditions. Hence, the determinist is committed to an absurdity, that the predicted state of affairs is deducible from the initial conditions yet is logically inconsistent with them (BMP 114).

Once again, we must note on the other hand that the laws that sustain the predictions make use of the concept of temporal succession. True, we should be worried if we produced the concept of time in the conclusion of a deduction where it is not present in the premises. But that does not happen here. And, as we shall see later in greater detail, the Bergsonian argument proves too much, for it entails that we should never be able to speak truly now of a future event that is incompatible with the present state of the universe.

In the writings of Charles Hartshorne we do not find the picturesque Bergsonism that has time gnawing at reality. The argument is cast in a somewhat different form, but it turns out to be a different route to the same destination. Look deeply enough into anything and you will, it may be, find its ancestors and its history inscribed upon its nature. But will you equally find its posterity and its destiny? This is the question of indeterminism, in one of its forms" (DR 68). Events are related to past particulars, and that allows us to find the ancestors of an event by examining it carefully. Presumably one will not find out everything about the event’s ancestors, but one will find out the causally relevant facts about them. However, particular events are not related to future particulars.

The reason there can be no relation to future particulars is that what has relation to X has X, for X is a constituent of relation-to-X. Now if the cause has the effect, by virtue of having relation to it, then in the cause the effect already is, and the whole time process is the illusion of new events, whereas all events were pre-contained in their predecessors. This reduces the idea of time to an absurdity. (DR 69)

But in what sense does the causal determinist find posterity inscribed upon the present? The minimum and important sense is that, if the relevant causal laws are known, a perfect examination of the present would yield perfect predictions. But according to the above passages, the causal determinist is supposed to believe not only that the future can be perfectly inferred from the present but also that the future already is present. There are two meanings of "inscribed" and the argument plays upon the ambiguity. In one sense of inscription, a perfect reading of the present provides a perfect reading of the future. The inferences one can validly make from a reading may be regarded as part of the reading. But in another sense of inscription, the future is already actualized in the present. Because the determinist can hold to the former sense of inscription and not the latter, the argument is incorrect.

What about the idea that a relation of a particular to a past particular is possible but to a future particular is impossible? By parity of reasoning, the impossibility of relations of particulars to past particulars can be shown. Suppose that Y, a particular effect, is related to X, a particular cause. X then is a constituent of Y-related-to-X. Therefore, X, by virtue of having a relation to Y, is contemporaneously present to Y. This means that all causes have to be contemporary with their effects. So there is no novelty, and everything is present at once. So there is no time.

The difficulty here is in supposing that both constituents of a dyadic relation have to be copresent contemporaneously. Let us deny that assumption. Then one can readily conceive a relation between an effect and a prior cause. Furthermore, one can also then readily conceive a relation between a cause and a subsequent effect. True, in the latter case the causal relationship is not yet fully actualized. Must we go on and say the relationship does not yet exist even in part, since there can be no dyadic relationship where one of the members related does not exist? But that would make it impossible for us to talk about a causal relationship between a present effect and a past cause, under the assumption that the past cause is now no longer in existence. We may be mistaken in supposing there is a symmetry here, but it would seem that if we can talk of a causal relationship between a present effect and an already perished past cause, we can also talk of a causal relationship between a present cause and a yet to be actualized effect.

Hartshorne would probably deny the symmetry. Although the past event that is inscribed on the present has perished, its memory remains, and that is the memory of a particular. But why, then, can we not maintain that if there are memories of particulars inscribed on particulars there can also be anticipations of particulars inscribed on particulars? I think the only way to deny the symmetry is to beg the question, that is to suppose that future particulars are not yet determined. The position then amounts to this: Relations to past particulars are possible because the past is now determinate and carried into the present in memory. Relations to future particulars are impossible because, although there are some anticipations inscribed on the present, the future is not now in every detail determinate. But this position gives no argumentative support to indeterminism, because it assumes it in the first place.

Not only does the Bergsonian thesis appear in current process philosophies, but it plays a central role in the process systems. Determinism is considered to be one of several if not ‘the chief metaphysical pitfall which must be ruled out for the process system to succeed. The philosophers I have cited do not simply believe determinists are wrong, that in view of the unpredictability of subatomic "particles" we must apply Occam’s razor and not admit determinism as a metaphysical doctrine. If that is all the objection were, determinists could be regarded as holding an implausible, unconfirmable, and scientifically unnecessary position. But the problem runs deeper than that for these process metaphysicians. For them, determinism must be soundly refuted, for if determinism is true, process metaphysics logically must be false. The Bergsonian argument is thus a two-edged sword for the process metaphysicians. On the one hand it is introduced as a powerful ploy against the determinists, provided the opponents want to regard the difference between "now" and "will be" as objective. But once this move against the determinists is made, the stakes become very high indeed. For if determinism should turn out to be true, hardly anything could be salvaged from process metaphysics. Every new advance in successful prediction would become falsifying evidence with respect to the entire process system of thought.

I have now commented critically on some presentations of the Bergsonian doctrine. Next I shall speak to some of the systematic considerations that bear on the attraction the doctrine holds for many thinkers. I see part of the difficulty as a confusion regarding what is involved in the "existence is not a property" idea. What Bergson, Weiss, and Hartshorne want to do is to deny that a given event can be determined or definite now but is to be actualized later. What are we to suppose that the actualization adds to the already determined and definite event? It does not add anything, because existence is not a property. Since actualization adds nothing to the determinate event, we are told we must suppose that an event’s actuality comes right along with its definiteness. Therefore, if the future is determinate now, it is also actualized now, and there is no time.

What difference does time make? If the determinist believed existence is a property, he might reply that time makes the difference between the existence and nonexistence of definite states of affairs. The future is fully determinate, but it does not exist yet, and that is an important "but." An existing $100 is more than a nonexisting $100; otherwise why should we worry about bringing it into existence? And what does it matter whether the bringing of the $100 into existence is predictable in principle? One is wealthier if he has the $100 than if he does not have it, regardless of the truth or falsity of determinism.

At this point the disciple of Bergson can respond that the determinist’s case is really not aided one bit by taking refuge in the view that existence is a property. Let us try that view out. Suppose the future is fully determinate or definite and existence is a property. In specifying the future possibilities that will be actualized, one produces a list of properties. If the list is to be complete and if existence is a property, existence must be on the list. Then, the definiteness of future states of affairs that will be actualized must include existence. Suppose a determinist were to describe a future conflict between two nations which he believes is already causally definite. Since existence is a property, existence can and should be included in the list of properties which specify the already definite possibility. The already definite future conflict will be, among other things, an existing future conflict. But that is a contradiction in terms. If it is existing, it is not future; if it is future, it is not existing. So if determinism is true, the course of history is indeed timeless even under the hypothesis that existence is a property.

The dilemma is this: If existence is not a property and if the future is determinate, there is no difference between a future definite state of affairs and a present definite state of affairs, and time is unreal. If, on the other hand, existence is a property and the future is determinate, the definiteness of the future includes existence along with its other properties, the future is now, and time is unreal. This is the dilemma that gives force to the Bergsonian position. I think the determinist is best advised to grasp the first horn of the dilemma.

Although "existence" is in some contexts a grammatical predicate, I would say Kant is right in thinking it is not a determining predicate that can be used in specifying possible states of affairs, for that would play havoc with the distinction between actualized and unactualized possibilities. A determinist could agree here and still hold that there is a difference between a determinate future and a determinate present. In what can the difference consist if the determinate future possibility and the determinate present actuality are identical with respect to every constituting property? A number of considerations can be urged in reply.

1. The point of the "existence is not a property" doctrine is to deny the suggestion that the existence of a conceived entity can increase or decrease the conceived entity in character, quality, value, or perfection. The point is not to say that existence makes no difference, that it does not matter whether or not one has the $100. The boundaries of existence are still important in specifying temporal order, temporal relation, causality, etc. The boundaries of existence make the difference between being thankful and hopeful. They lend to human life its moral concern, its joy, and its tragedy.

2. The argument that the determinist cannot tell us the difference between a definite future and a definite present appears symmetrical with regard to the past. The past is now determinate, hence the past is now actual. The indeterminist may want to say that the past is completely held in memory by the present and therefore the past is indeed actual. But then, in what does its pastness consist? Is not this just as absurd as what the Bergsonian accuses the determinist of believing? If the concept of the fully determinate future is logically forbidden, so must the concept of the fully determinate past be also.

3. Some indeterminists would want to say that some future events are now determinate. But if the Bergsonian argument were taken seriously, that position would be inconsistent (2). If there is present determinacy, there is also present actuality, and to speak of the events as future is illegitimate.

4. A position that would be more likely to be accepted by Weiss and probably by Hartshorne is that the future is determinate often in broad outline, but not in its every detail. If an apple is thrown from the window five minutes from now, it is now definite that it will fall down to the pavement and that it will be damaged upon impact. But exactly how it will fall and how it will land and how it will be bruised or smashed is now indefinite. But if that is the position, one must now hold that the predictable aspects of the apple’s flight and end are timeless, whereas the aspects that are indefinite prior to the fall are temporal. The result would be a bifurcation between the predictable and unpredictable aspects of reality.

Another systematic commitment which lends appeal to the Bergsonian position is a use of "possibility" such as to preclude antecedently determinate states of affairs from being possible states. I do not recall A. N. Whitehead’s presenting the argument in the Bergson-Weiss form. However, there are in Whitehead some clues that he accepts the idea in a modified way. At any rate, there is an oddity in Whitehead’s technical terminology that is grist for the mill of the Bergsonians.

A possibility for Whitehead is something which may or may not be actualized. That might appear unexceptionable, were it not for the fact the "may or may not be actualized" says more than that the state of affairs in question is logically possible. Whitehead writes, "An actual event . . , is divested of all possibility" (PNK (61). Why should that be? After all, an actual event is a logically consistent state of affairs. Should not an actual event be considered a logical possibility? Maybe so, but what Whitehead means by saying an actual event is divested of all possibility is that it is restricted to one definite kind of thing. What then does the determinist believe? The determinist says that the future has the same kind of restrictedness. The future is closed to alternatives. The future is not the area of what may or may not be. Instead, what will be will be, and what will not be will not be. The past cannot be the area of possibility either, because that too is restricted to being exactly the way it was. For the determinist then there are no possibilities in the requisite sense. It follows that there would not be any unfulfilled possibilities. The distinction between actualized and unactualized possibilities is collapsed. The only distinction the determinist can draw is between actuality and impossibility. The predicted future for the determinist is not impossible. So we must conclude that it is for him actual. Hence the philosophy of creative process requires the refutation, repudiation, or dismissal of determinism. An actual future is no future at all.

Milic Capek accepts the Bergsonian argument as well as the Whiteheadian use of "possibility". Capek also cites William James in this connection. Time is incompatible with the preexistence of the future, and the preexistence of the future is what Capek thinks the determinist is committed to. A real future must have the status of possibility (PICP 336). But if the future is determinate, it is divested of possibility and thus is not future at all. In this way Capek accuses the determinist of believing that everything conceivable must be either impossible or actual.

This terminological oddity in Whitehead and James obscures a distinction which the determinist wants to make and which I think is reasonable. That distinction is between being a possibility and being closed to alternative possibilities. For the determinist, past, present, and future are equally closed to alternative possibilities. However, what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen are all possibilities. They are logical possibilities and causal possibilities. A more precise way of putting it is that with regard to every future logical possibility the causal probability of occurrence is either 1 or 0. Because our abilities in prediction are not perfected, we may for practical purposes have to put up with probabilities somewhere between, as we do when we predict what electrons will do. But with respect to every logically possible future state of affairs, it either will be or it will not be. Although we cannot distinguish between past, present, and future on the ground of being open or closed to alternative possibilities, we can distinguish between them on the ground of whether or not the possibilities have been actualized and on the basis of the temporal order of the actualization. There is no reason to suppose that a possibility’s being closed to alternative possibilities entails that it is not a possibility at all.

Given any conceivable future state of affairs, the causal determinist believes either it will be or it will not be. Some thinkers believe that admission in itself is sufficient to rule out transiency or becoming in nature. It is true that the causal determinist is committed to the view that all events can be tenselessly described. "World War II (tenselessly) ends in 1945" would for the causal determinist be true before, after, and during 1945. So would any true description, even those of allegedly free actions that were not decided" until the time they occurred. However, the causal determinist is free to adopt a compatibility thesis. The timeless truth of "World War II (tenselessly) ends in 1945" is compatible, he could say, with the tensed truth of "World War II ended in 1945" when uttered in 1946 and the tensed falsity of "World War II will end in 1945" when uttered in 1946. Under the compatibility thesis, tensed descriptions say everything the corresponding tenseless description says and more. Corresponding to every true tensed description, indeed constituting every true tensed description as one of its components, there is a timeless meaning core which is tenselessly expressible and which is true both before and after the occurrence of the event in question. However, there is also in every true tensed description a tensed component which is not timelessly true. It is necessary but not sufficient for the truth of the tensed description that the timeless meaning core be true. Consequently, there is no logical route from the thesis that "what will be will be" to the further thesis that the future tense in the old adage is illegitimate.

There is one other important aspect of Bergson’s challenge to the determinist which I need to comment on, and that is that the determinist cannot find any asymmetries in nature upon which the objective distinction between before and after can be based. This makes the attack on determinism even stronger, because here determinism is said to be incompatible with any understanding of time, not just with process philosophy’s understanding of it. The claim here is that only the indeterminate’s becoming determinate can establish any ‘temporal distinctions or direction whatsoever. Bergson would say that he at least is giving a philosophical account of time, whereas the determinist is silent on the subject. For the Bergsonians, time is a process of becoming determinate, whereas for the determinists time, if it is said to be a process at all, can be nothing more than a process of becoming -- mere becoming. But what is it to say that tune is a process of becoming? It is simply to say that time is time. The determinist is stuck with a symmetry between prediction and retrodiction such that he cannot specify the difference between saying "It will happen" and "It happened." Well, one refers to the future and the other to the past, but what is that distinction all about? And even if the determinist is willing to give up tenses, he is still in trouble, because he is unable to specify the difference between the relative earlier and later.

My first response is a tu quoque. Is our understanding of time really enhanced by believing time is the process of becoming determinate? The very idea of "becoming determinate" includes the idea of becoming, a temporal idea. It is not possible to know what becoming anything is unless one has some concept of time already. To say that time is a process of becoming determinate is to presuppose the very concept we are out to clarify. A tu quoque argument is reasonable in this context, because the claim we are examining is that only the indeterminist can give an account of what temporal relations are. What is time? Augustine and Whitehead both saw mysteries and paradoxes they were unable to unravel, though Whitehead moved much further toward a solution than did Augustine. Bergson thought time is duration, which would not be very enlightening if one is puzzled by the concept to begin with. Quite possibly temporal words are like moral words in that any attempt to define them either presupposes or betrays the concept in question.

If the determinist is asked to move on to a positive proposal of what time consists in, he might try to provide the requisite asymmetries Outside of nature, in logic or consciousness for example. Storrs McCall proposes in behalf of the determinist that the difference between past and future is logical, rather than physical or metaphysical in character. The determinacy of the future is a logically contingent matter, whereas the determinacy of the past is logically necessary (3:279). I think McCall means that, even if determinism is true, it would not do violence to our language to consider the possibility that the future or some aspects thereof is indeterminate, whereas we cannot even coherently think about the past’s being indeterminate. Process would then be the logically contingent’s becoming logically necessary. The "now" would be the moment of the change, and temporal order would be the succession of changes from contingency to necessity. The process would be irreversible, because logical necessity is not a characteristic a proposition can lose once it gets it. Apparently McCall does not have in mind arguing for determinism from the premise that the law of the excluded middle applies to all untensed propositions, for then the determinacy of the future would be just as logically necessary as the determinacy of the past. Apparently he would argue for determinism from the observation that causal regularity is a contingent feature of human experience.

However, I do not see that it matters whether determinism is an alleged logical or a contingent truth. The logical contingency of the future’s determinacy does not in one whit alter its determinacy. We are not reassured to learn that the timelessness of determinacy is logically contingent. Exactly what is it that is alleged to happen in becoming? A logical feature of propositions is said to change. Nature does not change, but propositions do and hence also the minds that entertain them. Then we wonder whether the future of consciousness is determinate. If it is, changes cannot take place there either. If it is not, then we must admit that the only way one can introduce tensed language is under the veiled assumption that at least some aspect of reality, i.e., propositions and/or the entertaining of them, is not subject to causal determination. Besides, if becoming is only a feature of logic, language, or consciousness, we get a serious mind-body bifurcation and an unbridgeable gulf between appearance and reality. And so, I think we must ask, if process is not a matter of the indeterminate’s becoming determinate, what then is its physical or metaphysical basis?

There is the suggestion that the asymmetry of temporal process can be linked to increasing entropy. Capek rejects that idea on the ground that time is more basic to reality than the contingent feature of increasing entropy in some systems. Furthermore, the recognition that there are or may be systems of decreasing entropy would involve contradictory ways of talking, because then relatively later stages at which entropy is decreased would have to be regarded as earlier (PICP 349). More simply, there is absurdity in talking of time’s going ahead backwards. Finally, to define time in terms of increasing entropy seems circular, because we are defining time in terms of entropy that increases with time.

I do not see absurdities here. We can compare two states of a system with respect to energy distributions. We then note that psychological time goes in the direction of greater entropy. In Bergsonian terms, the élan vital fights against this tendency, but matter finally wins out and there is death. We can then talk about systems of decreasing entropy, but only relative to systems of increasing entropy (including psychological time). Citizens of systems of decreasing entropy would not experience time in reverse; they would not experience time at all. Time would not be a feature of their system, for there would be no traces, no memory, no anticipation. I am speaking figuratively about there being citizens of such a system, for there could be no languages or persons under such conditions. So I see no problem in linking temporal asymmetry to entropy increase.

There are some phenomenological clues to this. The closest we get phenomenologically to a system of decreasing entropy is in our moments of creativity. Our creative moments are those when we come closest to escaping temporality. Suppose our awareness of temporality, our memory and our anticipation, bring us anxiety. The best remedy for temporal anxiety is creative endeavor. The causal traces of the past become least determinate upon us, and anticipation of all but the immediate future becomes irrelevant as every moment is endowed with an integrity of its own.

As a corollary to these observations, I suggest that causal indeterminacy is far from being the ground of temporal asymmetry, but is instead a lurking threat to time. If causal indeterminacy were complete, there would be no traces, no memory, no temporal order. If the present depended causally on nothing, there would be no sense of the past. That is the truth in the causal theory of time, and that truth is not endangered should our successes in retrodiction and in prediction match each other, for still causal dependency is an asymmetrical relation. Whitehead’s prehensive relationship that the present has to its past is one of causal dependency. The relationship is asymmetrical in even those very stable societies where our abilities in prediction are highest. The prehensive relationship remains asymmetrical even in those systems of lawfulness that permit both retrodiction and prediction.

But quite apart from the possibility of establishing a physical direction of time, process philosophers have as a matter of fact in their metaphysical systems recognized temporal asymmetries that have nothing to do with an indeterminate future. For example, Bergson himself metaphorically compared the temporal process to a rolling and accumulating snow ball. The accumulative nature of the process has, so far as I can see, nothing whatever to do with the absence of predictability of the future.

Whitehead adopts an asymmetry of memory and anticipation, quite similar to Bergson’s rolling snow ball. The present grasps the past within it. The present is dependent on the past for its very constitutive reality. Although the present anticipates and makes choices which bear on the future, the present is independent of the future in the sense that the reality of the present is not in one whit diminished or altered by the failure of the anticipated events to occur. Further, the status as future of anticipated states of affairs is not diminished by the assurance that they will occur. The asymmetry is independent of Whitehead’s doctrine of indeterminacy. I see no reason why the determinist must blur the distinction between memory and anticipation, and some of the process metaphysicians themselves supply all the conceptual apparatus the determinists need to handle this distinction.

If I am right, process metaphysicians should be able to take a more relaxed attitude toward determinism. Logical and empirical arguments appear indecisive with respect to whether there is universal and complete predictability. Determinism is subject to internal paradoxes and requires us to say at a good many places that what we think are choices between indeterminate alternatives are really not what they seem. Both Sartre and Whitehead in providing us with conceptual schemes for handling self-determination have shown us that indeterminism is not a confused idea. Perhaps too the indeterminist’s recognizing not only causality but also chance and self-causation produces a more comprehensive and somewhat less dogmatic position. On the other hand, determinism remains a possibly true theory which does have its attractions. I hope to have shown that how this issue is resolved is of little systematic importance to process metaphysics. Process philosophers can maintain their critique of classical substance, of absolute idealism, of materialism, and of classical theology without having it rest on the rather flimsy structure of a "refutation" of determinism. Determinist theory may be wrong, but it is not absurd. A now determinate future can yet be authentically future.

 

References

BMP -- Bergson, Henry. Bergson and Modern Physics. Dordrecht-Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1971.

CE -- Bergson, Henry. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911.

DR -- Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

LT -- Gale, Richard. The Language of Time. New York; Humanities Press, 1968.

NM -- Weiss, Paul. Nature and Man. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965.

PICT -- Capek, Milic. The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics.

Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1961.

1. Frederick Ferré, "Transiency, Fate and the Future," The Philosophical Forum 2/3 (1971), 384-95.

2. Paul Fitzgerald, "Is the Future Partly Unreal?" The Review of Metaphysics 21/3 (1968), 421-46.

3. Storrs McCall, "Temporal Flux," American Philosophical Quarterly 3/4 (1966), 270-81.

Quantum Mechanics, Local Causality, and Process Philosophy

(This essay was edited by William B. Jones, who teaches philosophy at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia.)

I. Science and Quantum Theory

Science can be pragmatic or fundamentalistic. The aim of pragmatic science is to make predictions about what will be observed in different situations. The aim of fundamentalistic science is to understand the fundamental nature of things. The choice between these aims is a matter of taste and interest.

The adequacy of quantum theory depends on which view of science is adopted. Pragmatically it is an adequate theory of atomic phenomena, but it eschews description of underlying realities and is hence fundamentalistically inadequate. In view of quantum theory’s silence regarding underlying entities the Copenhagen claim of completeness must be interpreted as a claim of pragmatic completeness (8:1098-116).

Pragmatic science and fundamentalistic science have different aims, but are mutually supportive. The former, through its study of detail, yields facts the latter must fit. The latter, through its search for unity, yields concepts the former can use. Thus each is justified by the standards of the other.

The basic problem in fundamentalistic science is to find a unified model of reality that is consistent with relativistic quantum theory. The aim of the present work is to adduce support for a model of reality similar to Whitehead’s from an examination of the constraints imposed by Bell’s theorem.

II. Bell’s Theorem

Bell’s theorem (1:195-200; 7:1306-308; 6:1-10; 2:526-35) is the most profound discovery of science. It shows that, if the statistical predictions of quantum theory are approximately correct, then, in certain cases, the principle of local causes must fail. This principle asserts that events in one region are approximately independent of variables subject to the control of experimenters in distant contemporary regions. The statistical predictions of relativistic quantum theory conform to this principle, but their character is such that the principle cannot hold for the individual events themselves.

The particular predictions of quantum theory upon which this conclusion rests follow directly from the most basic principles of quantum theory, independently of the detailed dynamics. And they have been experimentally tested and confirmed (3:938-41).

Bell’s theorem has focused attention on the possibility, not seriously considered before, that although the distance between two individual events may be too great for a light signal to traverse it during the time interval separating them, the character of one of them may yet depend upon that of the other, in spite of the fact that such "superluminal" connections disappear at the statistical level. The central mystery of quantum theory has always been the puzzling way that information gets around. Thus the new information provided by Bell’s theorem seems to be exceedingly pertinent.

Bell’s Theorem imposes a severe condition on models of reality, for it demands that an adequate model account simultaneously for the observed causal structure on the statistical level and the non-causal structure on the individual event level. Bell’s theorem shows that no theory of reality compatible with quantum theory can allow the spatially separated parts of reality to be independent: these parts must be related some way that goes beyond the familiar idea that causal connections propagate only into the forward light-cone.

III. A Modified Whiteheadian Theory of Events

Whitehead has proposed a theory of reality that provides a natural ontological basis for quantum theory. The basic elements of his theory are events that actualize, or bring into existence, certain definite relationships from among a realm of possibilities or potentialities inhering in the set of prior events. This model of nature accords with Heisenberg’s idea (5) that each quantum event actualizes a definite result from among a realm of possibilities and that the wave function describes the probabilities, or potentials, for the occurrence of the various possible results. Whitehead’s events have certain characteristics of mental events, and hence his theory accords, to some extent, with Wigner’s suggestion (11:284-302) that the actualizing of definite results is associated with mind or consciousness. However, Whitehead’s events are not confined to higher life forms, but constitute all of nature. Hence, Whitehead’s theory accords also with Heisenberg’s view (5:54) that in the observation of atomic phenomena the critical quantum event that actualizes one result, rather than a macroscopically different alternative, occurs already at the level of the experimental devices that detect the atomic disturbance, rather than at the level of the perceiving human observer.

It is fundamental to Whitehead’s theory that the potentia of each event is conditioned by the entire preexisting world. This feature corresponds to the fact, often stressed by Bohr, that in describing quantum phenomena, the whole experimental arrangement must be taken into account. Indeed, the basic conceptual problems of quantum theory disappear once it is admitted that the potentia for each event is conditioned by the entire preexisting world. For example, interference effects in optical experiments pose no problem in principle if the event of photon absorption by a particular grain in the photographic plate has a potentia to occur that is conditioned by the entire experimental setup.

No detailed dynamics of event generation was worked out by Whitehead, but the general ontological framework is broad enough to cope with the quantum facts.

The theory proposed here is not exactly the one proposed by Whitehead. In the first place it ignores the mental aspects and concentrates instead on the space-time and momentum-energy aspects, in order to bring the theory into contact with theoretical physics. However, this concentration on the nonmental aspects is not meant to deny that any theory claiming to be an ontological description of reality should have the potentiality of dealing adequately with the mind-body problem. Indeed, Whitehead’s detailed analysis of the mind-body problem in the framework of his theory constitutes a significant factor in the overall credibility of theories of this general kind. A second departure from Whitehead concerns a change in the space-time structure. This change is discussed below.

The following postulates define an ontology that is similar to that of Whitehead.

1. The creative process. There is a creative process that consists of a well-ordered sequence of individual creative acts called events.

Remark 1. -- This assumption affirms that there is a real coming into being, or coming into existence, and that the process of creation can be decomposed into a well-ordered sequence of individual creative acts. Whatever is created exists, and nothing else exists. Nothing passes out of existence, and at the end of each creative act the whole of creation is settled and definite: all that exists is unambiguously fixed.

Remark 2. -- This set of discrete events appears highly pluralistic. However, each event is assumed to "prehend" all prior events in the sequence. In particular, each event embodies within itself all of prior creation and establishes a new set of relationships among the previously existing parts. Thus each event embraces all of creation and endows it with a new unity.

Remark 3. -- The sequence of creative events is well-ordered. One event is "prior" to another if it precedes it in this primordial sequence. This primordial sequence, which contains all that exists, is defined without reference to the space-time continuum: existence is logically prior to space-time.

2. Space-time position. Each event has characteristics that define an associated region in a four-dimensional space. This mathematical space is called the space-time continuum. The region in this space associated with an event is called its location.

Remark 1. -- Space-time has no independent existence in this theory. Rather each event has characteristics that can be interpreted, theoretically, as a region in a four-dimensional mathematical space. For physical applications this metaphysical distinction is unimportant, and one can imagine the events to appear at a well-ordered sequence of locations in a pre-existing space-time continuum. The order of occurrence of events need not coincide with any particular temporal order.

Remark 2. -- The positions (i.e., centers) of the actual events are nowhere dense in the space-time continuum. Thus the actual events atomize space. However, the possible position of any event, before it is actualized, ranges over a continuum. Thus as regards potentiality space-time is continuous.

Whitehead’s ontology differs from the one described above in two important respects: 1) Whitehead does not specify that the set of events forms a well-ordered sequence. 2) Each of his events prehends (and is dependent upon) not all prior events, but only the events of its own "actual world." The actual world of a given event is the set of all actual events whose locations lie in the backward light-cone of its own location.

These differences between Whitehead’s ontology and the one proposed here originate in Whitehead’s attempt to bring his ontology into conformity with the demands of relativity theory. These demands are discussed next.

In prerelativity physics temporal ordering is considered to define the order in which things come into existence. But in relativity theory the temporal order of two space-like-separated events depends on the frame of reference, and hence it is not well-defined in an absolute sense. Thus if one tries to retain in relativity theory the notion that temporal order specifies order of coming into existence, then the order in which two space-like-separated events come into existence is not well-defined in an absolute sense. This line of thought leads to a relative concept of existence in which what exists depends on space-time standpoint.

An alternative point of view is that the space-time coordinates of an event merely label its position in the space-time continuum; they do not specify or determine the order in which events come into existence. This second point of view allows one to retain the absolute concept of existence, in which what exists does not depend on space-time standpoint.

Whitehead’s use of the concept of "actual world" suggests his acceptance of the relative concept of existence. In opposition to this relative concept the following points can be raised: (1) The observations dealt with by physicists depend, as far as we know, on the relative space-time positions of events, but not on the order in which they come into existence. Thus in pragmatic science the question of order of coming into existence is irrelevant: ontological questions need be answered only if one demands an ontology. Thus the theory of relativity, considered as a theory of physical phenomena, says nothing about the issue in question. (2) The 2.7’ K background radiation defines an empirically preferred frame of reference that can be used to define an absolute order of coming into existence. (3) Kurt Gödel (4:555-62) has remarked that all cosmological solutions of the Einstein gravitational equations have preferred systems of space-like surfaces that can be used to define an absolute order of coming into existence. (4) One of Whitehead’s chief aims was to fulfil the philosophical demand for unity of the world. This unity is destroyed if each event prehends, not all of creation, but only its own actual world. Thus Whitehead’s general philosophy should lead him to embrace the absolute concept of existence. (5) Bell’s theorem apparently requires some events to depend on events whose positions lie outside their backward light-cones. This would be contrary to White-head’s scheme. (6) A simple concept, if adequate, is preferable to a complex one. The relative concept of existence makes existence dependent on something else, namely space-time standpoint. This concept entangles existence with space-time and is much more complex than the absolute one, if indeed it can be understood at all (see Gödel’s remark).

One argument in support of the relative concept of existence is that one should refrain from introducing into the basic theoretical structure any noncovariant feature, because it will then be difficult to recover in a natural way the general covariance of the physical laws.

This argument has no force against the ontology proposed here because that ontology does not specify any one frame as preferred over any other, at the level of general principle. Of course, the actually existing world will be described in a particular way in a particular frame of reference, but we can (and shall) assume that the positions of the events are relational constructs that have significance only relative to one another.

A second argument for the relative concept of existence rests on the claim (1) that what exists for an event consists precisely of that upon which it depends and (2) that an event depends precisely on the events in its backward light-cone. Claim (1) goes far beyond usual ideas, which allow an event to depend only on a small part of what exists. Claim (2) seems to be contradicted by Bell’s theorem.

A third argument for the relative concept of existence rests on the fact that in prerelativistic thinking temporal order defines simultaneity, which in turn specifies order of coming into existence. The claim that this linkage should be maintained in relativity theory has no rational justification. For temporal ordering depends on arbitrary labeling conventions, whereas existence should be independent of arbitrary conventions. The natural way to deal with this disparity is simply to decouple the temporal order from the order of coming into existence.

The essential change wrought by the ontology proposed here is to make the process of creation manifestly global: the entire universe is regarded as an organic whole. This conceptualization is entirely in line with Whitehead’s general aims and ideas. However, Whitehead chose to reconcile his philosophic aims with the empirical facts by imposing special ad hoc conditions on his basic ontology rather than allowing the empirical facts to follow from his philosophic principles. These ad hoc conditions are complicated, unnecessary, and apparently incompatible with the quantum facts represented by Bell’s theorem.

For these reasons the ontology of Whitehead has been modified here to bring it into accord with his own general principles. The modifications entail a dependence of events on space-like-separated events, in accordance with the apparent implications of Bell’s theorem. However, no violation of the general principles of relativity theory is entailed by this change: the general covariance of physical laws can be maintained, along with the prohibition against faster-than-light signals.

3. Conservation of momentum-energy. Among the events prior to a given event are some events called its antecedents. Any event is a successor to each of its antecedents. The location of each event is connected to the location of each of its antecedents by a positive time-like geodesic (a straight line in space-time) that runs from the location of the antecedent to the location of the successor. Each geodesic is associated with a real mass-value m and also with a momentum-energy vector mv, where v is the four-velocity defined by the direction of the geodesic. The sum of the momentum-energy vectors associated with the geodesics coming into the location of a given event from the locations of its antecedents is equal to the sum of the energies associated with the geodesics going out from the location of the event to the locations of its successors.

Remark -- This physical assumption, like those that follow, is holistic rather than mechanistic; it is formulated as a mathematical condition on the overall space-time structure of what emerges from the process of creation, not as a dynamical law that governs the detailed way in which reality unfolds.

IV. Bell’s Theorem and the Theory of Events

The noncausal structure of events demanded by Bell’s theorem is incomprehensible in the framework of ordinary ideas, but is a natural consequence of the theory of events described above.

In the simplest cases involving Bell’s phenomena there are three (scattering) events E0, E1, and E2. Their locations L0, L1, and L2 lie in three well-separated experimental areas A0, A1, and A2. Experiment E0 is an antecedent of both E1 and E2. Thus there is a time-like geodesic from Lo to L1 and another from L0 to L2, as shown in FIG. 1. An experimenter in A1 can choose to perform experiment E11 or experiment E12. An experimenter in A2 can choose to perform experiment E21 or experiment’ E22. Now according to the ordinary idea of causality (i.e., the principle of local causes), the result of E21 (or E22) in A2 is independent of which experiment (E11 or E12) is performed in A, and vice versa. But Hell’s work shows this requirement to be incompatible with the statistical predictions of quantum theory.

According to the theory of events proposed here, one of the two events E1 or E2 is prior to the other. Suppose E1 is the prior event. When it occurs, the possibilities for events in A2 are radically changed. For example, if the locations L0, L1, and L2 are effectively points (compared to the large distances between them), then the two locations L0 and L1 determine the geodesic L0 L1, and hence the energy-momentum carried from L0 to L1. This fixes in turn the momentum-energy available for the geodesic from L0 to L2, which fixes this geodesic itself, assuming that the two geodesics exhaust the momentum-energy available from E0.

Fig. I. Space-time picture of Bell’s phenomena

 

 

 

Thus after E1 occurs, the event in A2 is required to lie on a fixed geodesic that is determined by the events E0 and E1.

At this stage only space-time and momentum-energy considerations have been introduced, and Bell’s phenomena do not enter. The correlations between the events in A1 and A2 are just those expected from classical ideas: the course of events in A2 is correlated to what is observed in A1, but not on decisions made by the experimenter in A1.

Though the results at this stage are similar to those of classical particle theory, the logical structure is different. In the classical theory what happens in A2 is determined by what happens in the earlier region A0, whereas in the theory of events proposed here the possibilities for E2 are limited jointly by the prior events E1 and E0. This logical difference becomes important in experiments involving spin, which are the ones in which Bell’s phenomena occur.

Suppose the geodesics L0 L1 and L0L2 are associated with spin-s representations of the Lorentz group. Just as before, the possibilities for E2 are limited jointly by the prior events E0 and E1. Part of the information determined by E0 and E1 is represented by the momentum-energy four-vector associated with the geodesic L0 L1. However, these two events E0 and E1 determine also another vector associated with the geodesic L0 L1, namely a spin vector associated with the corresponding spin space.

The spin vector and the momentum-energy vector associated with L0 L1 are both determined jointly by E0 and E1. Thus it would be unnatural, in the framework of the theory of events, to treat them differently. It is accordingly assumed that these two vectors should be treated in the same way.

Treating the spin and momentum-energy vectors in the same way leads to very different effects with respect to the ordinary idea of causality. This difference stems from the fact that the two experimenters can independently manipulate the directions of the two spin vectors (modulo signs), but cannot do this with the two momentum vectors without disrupting the experiment. For the two momentum vectors are required by the conservation laws to be essentially parallel, whereas the two spin vectors (modulo signs) can be independently fixed by the two experimenters. Thus the directions of the two spin vectors are variables subject to the independent control of the experimenters in the two separated regions, whereas the directions of the two momentum vectors are not independently controllable. It is the availability of the independently controllable directions along which the spin is measured that is the basis of the phenomena dealt with by Bell’s theorem.

The spin vector associated with L0L1, like the momentum vector, is determined by events E0 and E1. But the experimenter in A1 can, by choosing the experiment to be performed, fix this spin vector, up to a sign. Thus, in the theory of events proposed here, the event E2 can depend on what the experimenter in A1 decides to do. This effect is contrary to the ordinary idea of causality, but conforms to the requirements imposed by Bell’s theorem.

This theory of events does not conform to the ordinary idea of causality. But it provides an alternative possible space-time picture of causality. This picture arises by regarding the geodesic associated with a spin-J representation of the Lorentz group as a conduit of spin-J information. This information flows from an event both forward to its potential successors and backward to its antecedents. For example, the determination in event E1 of the spin vector associated with geodesic L0 L1 is viewed as being instantly communicated along L0 L1 to L0, where it can be tapped by geodesic L0 L2 in the assessment of a possible successor to E0 having location L2.

[Editor’s note: This essay was specially prepared for the readership of Process Studies from various published (9, 10) and unpublished articles authored by Professor Stapp. Support from the Old Dominion University Research Foundation for the editing is gratefully acknowledged.]

 

References

1. J. S. Bell, "On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox," Physics, 1/3 (1964), 195-200.

2. John F. Clauser and Michael A. Home, "Experimental Consequences of Objective Local Theories," Physical Review D, 10/2 (July 15, 1974), 526-35.

3. Stuart J. Freedman and John F. Clauser, "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," Physical Review Letters, 28/14 (April 3,1972), 938-41.

4. Kurt Gödel, "A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy," pp. 555-62 in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951.

5. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, New York: Harper, 1958.

6. Henry Pierce Stapp, "Correlation Experiments and the Nonvalidity of Ordinary Ideas About the Physical World," LBL-5333, Berkeley, California, 1968.

7. Henry Pierce Stapp, "S-Matrix Interpretation of Quantum Theory," Physical Review D, 3/6 (March 15, 1971), 1303-20.

8. Henry Pierce Stapp, "The Copenhagen Interpretation," American Journal of Physics, 40/8 (August, 1972), 1098-116.

9. Henry Pierce Stapp, "Bell’s Theorem and World Process," II Nuovo Cimento, 29B/2 (October 11, 1975), 270-76.

10. Henry Pierce Stapp, "Theory of Reality," Foundations of Physics, 7/5-6 (1977), 313-23.

11. Eugene Paul Wigner, "Remarks on the Mind-Body Question," pp. 284-302 in Irving John Good, ed., The Scientist Speculates, London: W. Heinemann, 1961.

[Editor’s note: Stapp’s essay effectively singles out those aspects of Whitehead’s theory which can be handled by the techniques of contemporary physics, and then seeks to examine them in the light of the familiar conservation laws. These laws are apparently well established in physics, but Whitehead’s explicit theory provides no place for them.

Instead of Stapp’s broader usage of "prehension" to designate any "prior" event in his well-ordered series, let us think of a prehension in more Whiteheadian terms as comparable to a geodesic (world-line in space-time) linking a present event with one of the events in its causal past. Thus, as in Stapp’s illustration, A1 and A2 prehend A0, and, we shall assume for purposes of simplification, they alone prehend A0. If the momentum-energy of A0 is to be conserved, then A1 and A2 must jointly possess this. Hence, if in prehending A0, A1 prehends a larger share of this momentum-energy, there is less available for A2. A1 and A2 are contemporaries, but it seems that the portion of A0 which the prior event A1 prehends affects what is available for A2 to prehend.

It is not necessary to assume that the prehension of A1 affects the already past A0. The initial datum may well be undisturbed. What is affected is the sum total of objective data available for prehension by A1 and its associates. The sum total of objective data for whatever properties as are conserved, such as momentum-energy, must be equal in amount to the initial datum (A0).

This suggests a well-defined meaning for the immediate and the distant past for Whitehead’s theory, even though on other grounds he seems to have dispensed with this distinction. We can state these meanings conversely in terms of the immediate future for A0. It consists in all those occasions whose appropriations of A0 (i.e., whose objective data relative to A0) are precisely equal in amount to the initial datum A0. Any occasions influenced by A0, but lying beyond this immediate region, would be influenced only indirectly by A0 by means of those occasions directly influenced by A0. The conservation principle thus defines for us the meaning of immediate future. The immediate past of an occasion would consist in all those events in which such conservation factors would be decisive. The conservation principles would have to be satisfied in all situations, but there is no reason in principle why events which appear "distant" to a given one by other spatiotemporal criteria might not be the ones which complete a given locus of objective data equal to some initial datum.

Also, there seems a sense in which Stapp’s work requires that physical prehension be symmetrically internal, both to the prehending occasion and what is prehended. While the past initial datum remains unaffected, the way its present objective data (insofar as they must remain constant by the conservation laws) are ingredient in the world is affected by each prehension of that initial datum.]

Cartesian Roots of the Ontological Principle

In his article "Analysis and Cultural Lag in Philosophy" (1), Hartshorne notes that Whitehead is one of few modem philosophers, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, who have taken seriously and even adopted many tenets of classical philosophy. Whitehead is free from "cultural lag" -- that is, he, "far more than most recent writers, [is] acquainted with the relevant history of ideas and with the results of analytic exploration" (1:111). Unlike Wittgenstein, Whitehead does not dismiss precontemporary philosophy as simply a series of mistakes, as unsuccessful attempts to exit from bottles whose necks any sober fly could easily find.

This is not to deny that Whitehead approaches the history of thought with a critical eye, given his concern to diagnose modern conceptual ailments originating centuries ago. Like Wittgenstein, Whitehead is not, of course, opposed to the concept of a "philosophical illness;" the difference lies in the seriousness with which the two thinkers approach traditional philosophical issues: Wittgenstein seems to see no legitimacy in questions that science or common sense cannot answer, while Whitehead struggles with classical metaphysical problems, stepping beyond the strict boundaries of the scientific method.

A simple if slightly facetious. answer to the ancient question "What is there?" along Quinean lines is "Everything," but this will not do for Whitehead. He looks for guidance to the seventeenth century, specifically to Descartes, whose philosophy was meant as a handmaid of science and whose physics -- developed much more fully by Newton -- became the foundation of the new cosmology. Metaphysics took a radical turn with the Scientific Revolution, and some of the questions it asked then are still relevant today. This is certainly Whitehead’s view.

As an example, consider the ontological principle, which Whitehead spells out in several ways, one of which is: "actual entities are the only reasons; so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities" (PR 37). I have analyzed this principle elsewhere; in this paper I deal only with those aspects of it that Whitehead believes to have been rooted in Descartes’ philosophy. The study will thus serve to support and illustrate the claim that Whitehead is a "traditional" philosopher -- one aware of classical metaphysical problems, critically yet seriously willing to entertain them as basic to intellectual inquiry.

But first a point of clarification: the ontological principle is no simple concept, for Whitehead spells it out in different contexts by emphasizing different shades.1 Without a doubt, Whitehead considered it to be an Aristotelian principle at root; at the same time, however, Locke, Hume, and certainly Descartes are given due credit for helping him formulate it. Descartes’ role in particular seems to me especially worthy of attention, considering the significance of epistemological considerations in Whitehead’s cosmology. Whiteheadian scholarship appears to have done less than full justice to Descartes in this respect. Consider for example Ivor Leclerc’s otherwise excellent book Whiteheads Metaphysics, where Descartes’ contribution to the ontological principle is mentioned all too briefly, if not misleadingly:

Thus, Whitehead points out, the ontological principle ‘underlies Descartes’ dictum: "For this reason, when we perceive any attribute, we therefore conclude that some existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed is necessarily present."’ In this dictum Descartes is inconsistent with the subjectivism which dominates his thinking. (WM 27, citing PR 64)

This last statement could certainly use some elaboration, for it seems actually to contradict a later section in Leclerc’s book, where White-head’s praise of Cartesian subjectivism is cited:

Descartes, Whitehead maintains, made a most important philosophical advance when he "laid down the principle, that those substances which are the subjects enjoying conscious experiences provide the primary data for philosophy, namely, themselves as in the enjoyment of such experience. This is the famous subjectivist bias which entered into modern philosophy through Descartes." (WM 119, citing PR 241)

So Descartes’ subjectivism was a positive contribution. Leclerc goes on to cite a Whiteheadian passage praising "the advent of Cartesian subjectivism [for as a result] the substance-quality category has lost all claim to metaphysical primacy" (WM 120, citing PR 243). Explication is in order regarding Whitehead’s indebtedness to Descartes.

To be sure, Descartes’ subjectivism was not "reformed" in the manner required by Whitehead, since Descartes failed to apply adequately the objectivism implicit in his own cogito. But the fact that such objectivism was detectable (and detected by Whitehead) in Descartes throws a clearer light on the ontological principle’s legacy.

Whitehead claims that his ontological principle was all but spelled out by Descartes:

Descartes does not explicitly frame the definition of actuality in terms of the ontological principle . . . that actual occasions form the ground from which all other types of existence are derivative and abstracted; but he practically formulates an equivalent in subject-predicate phraseology. (PR 116)

He points out that Descartes was the first modern philosopher to address himself to the problem of justifying ontological assertions in general, having asked questions such as these: When can I correctly and legitimately say that something persists over a certain time interval? When can I be sure that I know the correct answer, if ever? Could I be deceived all the time by a demonic prankster? Descartes’ skepticism was laid to rest by an elaborate, now well-known decision to trust "clear and distinct" ideas. This was more than a strong conviction in personal judgment and trust in oneself -- it accompanied a complex set of metaphysical principles. One such principle asserts that only substances (one, two, or more, it is not always clear) can truly be said to exist. Substance alone is truly actual because it needs nothing else in order to exist. It follows that clear and distinct ideas, insofar as they reveal to us what exists, what is real, are ideas regarding substance. We learn about substance through attributes which "depend upon" it or "are rooted in" substance.

Whitehead sympathizes with Descartes’ approach to actuality:

Descartes does not explicitly frame the definition of actuality in terms of the ontological principle, . . . [namely] that actual occasions form the ground from which all other types of existence are derivative and abstracted; but he practically formulates an equivalent in subject-predicate terminology when he writes: ‘For this reason, when we perceive any attribute, we therefore conclude that some existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed is necessarily present.’ (PR 116, quoting H&R 1:240)

This same passage from Descartes is mentioned in another context in Process and Reality where the "true general [Aristotelian] principle" which underlies Descartes’ statement in the passage is spelled out by Whitehead as follows: "apart from things that are actual, there is nothing -- nothing either in fact or in efficacy" (PR 64).

Descartes’ statement deserves closer analysis, especially since White-head has quoted it Out of context. The sentence begins with the words "for this reason;" what reason? Turning to Principle 52, we find that Descartes believes the existence of a substance cannot be discovered merely from the demonstrated, rational principle that it exists, for discovery must somehow involve observation (H&R 1:240). The existence of substance must be discovered by means of its attributes available to sense-perception. It is a common notion, claims Descartes, that there must be something which possesses those attributes or qualities (an attribute is an attribute of something). This is (to Descartes) the obvious "reason for" the statement quoted by Whitehead, namely, that perception of an attribute is ipso facto perception of a substance.

Whether such an idea is truly obvious has been debated at length and denied by many. It may be argued that Descartes is prejudicing the whole issue by formulating it as he does. Whitehead, for example, argues that Descartes is assuming an unacceptable dichotomy between the attributes or qualities we perceive and something which truly exists but cannot be ("directly") perceived. Why not collapse the dichotomy and restrict reality to what is perceived, allowing only for inferences involving observed data? Descartes might have said: what is conceived or perceived is grounded in something actual. By appropriately stretching the italicized expression, Descartes might be considered to be in the same philosophical camp as Whitehead.

To emphasize their common intentions, Whitehead cites another perhaps more appropriate passage from Descartes:

‘For every clear and distinct conception (perceptio) is without doubt something and hence cannot derive its origin from what is nought. . . .’ [Quoting H&R 1:1781 This general principle will be termed the ‘ontological principle.’ It is the principle that everything is positively somewhere in actuality, and in potency everywhere. (PR 64)

Thus Whitehead claims that his ontological principle is in fact "the true general principle which [also] underlies" this passage quoted from the Meditations, part IV (PR 64). Whitehead clearly accepts the Cartesian principle that what is perceived or conceived is necessarily something real, originating in substance. The statement that "everything is positively somewhere in actuality and in potency everywhere," however, seems to have no obvious relation to Descartes’ words. Has Whitehead been engaging in extrapolation?

Whitehead’s ontological principle plays a basic role in his philosophical system which presupposes that the universe is a "solidarity" of actual entities, solidarity made possible by "feelings." Everything in the universe is supposed to be connected in an intimate, organic fashion; whenever there is causal interaction among two entities, whenever something "feels" something else, both entities involved are actual. The organic connection among all things suggests that everything is in potency everywhere; the actuality of causally interacting entities may imply that everything exists somewhere in actuality at some time -- that is, whatever is felt ipso facto exists. This may be what Whitehead argues, but is it Cartesian philosophy?

Perhaps so. To support this claim, Whitehead cites the following passage from Meditations, part II:

‘Let it be so; still it is quite certain that it seems to me that I see light, that I hear noise and that I feel heat. That cannot be false; properly speaking it is what is in me called feeling (sentire); and used in this precise sense that is no other thing than thinking.’ (PR 65, quoting H&R 1:153)

Descartes seems to believe that there is an element of reality in everything we feel, everything we "think." Mind or the thinking substance is constantly confronted with perceptions; ideas or perceptions are actual when an outside object is present and being perceived, and merely "in potency" when the mind is dormant. To put it differently, more in accordance with Cartesian terminology, the mind, whose essence is thinking, potentially feels or thinks at all times because that is what it means for it to be a mental (rather than a physical) thing. Similarly, an extended thing is at all times manifesting its essential quality of "extension or matter, whatever its various modes may look like to the various observers at various times. Whitehead’s principle, therefore, "that everything is positively somewhere in actuality, and in potency everywhere," seems not to be inconsistent with Descartes’ system.

Nevertheless, it must seem strange that Whitehead could have found the ontological principle foreshadowed in the work of as staunch a mind/body dualist as Descartes. Whitehead’s broad theory of perception is above all an attempt to eradicate the distinction between causal interactions and perceptions as ordinarily understood. Descartes, on the other hand, seems to have established a clear dichotomy between the two, mirrored in the mind/body dualism for which he is famous.

In truth, however, Descartes’ dualism is no insuperable obstacle to Whitehead, since Descartes does acknowledge that interactions between mind and body exist -- they are discussed in considerable detail in The Passions of the Soul. Descartes attempts to explain such interactions -- in particular, sense perception -- by appealing to the unusual powers of the pineal gland. Despite Whitehead’s opposition to Descartes’ overall dualism, therefore, he finds many aspects of Descartes’ approach to the problem of perception most interesting and says of him that

in his effort to guard his representative ‘ideas’ from the fatal gap between mental symbol and actuality symbolized, he practically, in some sentences, expresses the doctrine of objectification here put forward. Thus: ‘Hence the idea of the sun will be the sun itself existing in the mind, not indeed formally, as it exists in the sky, but objectively, i.e., in the way in which objects are wont to exist in the mind; and this mode of being is truly much less perfect than that in which things exist outside the mind, but it is not on that account mere nothing, as I have already said.’ (P11 118, quoting H&R 2:10)

This ad-hoc assumption of the sun itself "existing in" the mind, though questionably clear, appeals to Whitehead. The fact that Descartes seems to see a need to assert that a perceived object is quite literally incorporated into the perceiver seems highly significant; it indicates that Descartes must have felt that a proper account of perception -- of conscious perception in particular, and of causality in general -- has to assume that real interaction of actual entities takes place. This is precisely Whitehead’s view; he therefore considers Descartes to have had an early glimpse of the ontological principle (PR 116).

Descartes’ major error, however, lies in his "unquestioned acceptance of the subject-predicate dogma [which] forced him into a representative theory of perception, involving a ‘judicium’ validated by our assurances of the power and the goodness of God" (PR 77f). For Whitehead believes that a sensationalist theory is by no means necessary to a system based on the cogito. The subject-predicate dogma, the scholastic dualism Descartes seemed unable to reject, only obscures some of the truly important aspects of the cogito which inspired Whitehead’s ontological principle.

Whitehead sees the cogito as the paragon of clear and distinct ideas, involving a fusion if not identity of knower and known. The necessity of one’s existence is evident from the fact of experiencing doubt, since doubting (indeed, thinking in general) is a part (Or "an attribute") of the self. It seems natural, then, to apply the same reasoning, the same model, to all knowledge, all perception I suggest that Whitehead reasons as follows:

The paradigm case of knowledge is self-knowledge which involves self-awareness or perception of one’s thoughts (doubts, etc.). All knowledge must involve such perceptions -- indeed, everything that we experience becomes in a sense part of us, becomes an intimate component of our two-poled (mental/physical) being. Conscious knowledge is only a small, surely not the most important part of experience. To think is "to feel oneself," but this applies not only to introspection -- rather, it is meant to include all activities of the mind, of "the mental pole." Therefore to experience something other than oneself is still to "feel oneself." To put it differently, feeling something (interacting with another entity) involves having (experiencing) that thing as part of oneself, indeed as oneself. This is not to deny that what we feel is "external" to us, or real; on the contrary, by emphasizing the intimacy of our interaction with the world, the reality of that world is therefore manifest. Epistemology thus becomes naturalized, and realism is placed on a solid foundation.

If this is Whitehead’s actual interpretation of Descartes -- and it certainly follows the pattern of arguments in Process and Reality, though it is nowhere spelled out quite in this form -- its originality may compensate for its less than perfect faithfulness to scholarly accuracy. There can be no doubt that Whitehead’s understanding of Descartes involves a serious concern with the Cartesian problem of justifying our belief in realism: Whitehead’s debt to tradition is not inconsiderable.

To the objection that tradition is a fickle mistress to pursue, the answer is that some traditions are of course more worthy of attention than others. Descartes’ interest in analyzing the foundations of scientific knowledge, an interest Whitehead shares, is still with us, as it well should be. By working toward a realistic metaphysics -- in line with common sense -- Whitehead is attempting to answer some of the basic questions about the nature of causality, actuality, the mental and physical poles. And by seeking a system that unifies knowledge, Whitehead is keeping alive the Cartesian approach to science and philosophy.

 

References

H&R -- Elizabeth S. Haldane and C. R. T. Ross, eds. The Philosophical Works of Descartes, two volumes. London; Cambridge University Press, 1968.

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

1. Charles Hartshorne, "Analysis and Cultural Lag in Philosophy," Southern Journal of Philosophy, 11 (1973), 105-12.

 

Notes

1. For interesting suggestions regarding the place of the ontological principle in the hierarchy of Whiteheadian metaphysics, see the essays by William I. Garland, "The Ultimacy of Creativity," and Robert C. Neville, "Whitehead on the One and the Many," in Southern Journal of Philosophy 7 (1969-70), 361-77, 387-95.

Lockeian Roots of the Ontological Principle

It is a commonplace that creative thinkers are often unskilled in the historiography of philosophy; indeed, a penchant for distortion is all too common among the most outstanding intellects, as witness Bertrand Russell in his History of Western Philosophy. It would be wrong, however, to underestimate a priori the historical acumen of all luminaries in this discipline: Whitehead is a case in point. With some exceptions, Whitehead’s understanding of his predecessors is unusually insightful, the envy of historians surpassing him in diligence alone. It is especially useful, therefore, to trace the sources of Whitehead’s system, as he sees them, for the sake of a correct perspective.

Whitehead specifically directs his readers to Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, and Hume for early glimpses of his own philosophy, especially in connection with the ontological principle. As I have indicated in an earlier article (PS 6:249-54), Descartes’ contribution has to be explored further; as we shall see, the same is true of Locke. We shall analyze Locke’s concept of power by examining the contexts in which that term is used in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (E),1 thus shedding light on problems common to both Whitehead and Locke. One formulation of the ontological principle, however, is particularly relevant to the discussion that follows: "actual entities are the only reasons; so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities" (PR 37).

If we are to judge from Ivor Leclerc’s authoritative book on Whitehead’s metaphysics, Whitehead’s inspiration came from highly imperfect sources. Descartes is offered as a case in point, being "inconsistent with the subjectivism which dominates his thinking." Leclerc then goes on to claim that "a similar inconsistency with his [Locke’s] dominant subjectivist sensationalism is found in Locke’s doctrine that external things have the ‘power’ to produce sensory ideas in us." At the same time, that doctrine is "in full accord with the ontological principle" (WM 27). Confusion ensues: what does Whitehead borrow from Locke, and where do they disagree (and why)?

Upon closer examination, one is tempted to conclude that Leclerc may have underestimated Whitehead’s debt to Locke. For example, consider this passage from Whitehead:

In a simple physical feeling there is a double particularity in reference to the actual world, the particular cause and the particular effect. In Locke’s language (III, III, 6), and with his limitation of thought, a simple feeling is an idea in one mind ‘determined to this or that particular existent’. (PR 363)

Leclerc comments: ‘But it is to be noted that in Whitehead’s theory the representative theory of perception is avoided. For in Whitehead’s doctrine the objectification of the cause in the effect, i.e., in the percipient, is not a ‘representation’ of the cause or perceived actuality" (WM 161). I propose that, in fact, Locke’s account of perception and causality in general is very much in line with Whitehead’s own, that the concept of power is more complex and rather less "sensationalistic" -- indeed, more Whiteheadian -- than Leclerc seems to suggest.

Whitehead himself says quite explicitly that he believes both Descartes and Locke attempted to avoid a representational theory of perception. This is why ". . . both Descartes and Locke, in order to close the gap between idea representing and ‘actual entity represented,’ require this doctrine of ‘the sun itself existing in the mind’ " (PR 118). I shall attempt to show how Locke’s concept of power illustrates his struggle along Whiteheadian lines against a treacherous sensationalism.

According to Whitehead, Locke’s notion of power qua principal ingredient of an actuality "adumbrates both the ontological principle, and also the principle that the ‘power’ of one actual entity on the other is simply how the former is objectified in the constitution of the other" (PR 91). Since Whitehead never fully explains how it is that the notion of power "adumbrates" the ontological principle, further study is required. Unfortunately, the second principle (namely, that the ‘power’ of one actual entity upon another is simply how the former is objectified in the constitution of the other) tells us little about the sense in which the former entity can be said to be "objectified" in its effect. From the above quotation we can conclude only that the notion of "power" is a genuine predecessor of the ontological principle which is also somehow concerned with "objectification."

Consider, then, the sun in the mind, which represents the (objectified) power of the real sun to cast an impression in the sense that there is "something" in the sun that can do that. But "power" is clearly a relational term: we know what power a thing has from what it does to something else. Locke recognizes the two-sided character of the concept: when A exercises active power upon B, B exercises passive power insofar as it is equipped to receive A’s activity. If I didn’t have an adequate perceptual apparatus, the sun could go on shining forever without impressing any ideas upon me; if gold were not capable of being melted, fire could not be said to have the power of melting gold. So "power" is not simply a term relating unconnected, separate entities (as a library collects various books); rather, the objects involved are intimately interrelated.

But how do we come to the idea of power? Whitehead approaches this question by turning to Locke’s Essay where Locke reflects upon the fact that changes take place both in the universe and in the mind, there being a constant passage of things as well as a passage of ideas (book II, chapter xxi). The actuality of change gives rise to the reflection that some objects seem to initiate change while others are capable of responding. We feel ourselves capable of bringing about new states of affairs by exercising our will, so we say that we have power to do things. So far, at least, such reflections do not go beyond ordinary usage and common sense.

But Locke intends to transcend the vernacular. Thus, waxing philosophical, he agrees that "power" is a relational concept and yet at the same time he considers it to be a simple idea, one that cannot be "divided" further, being but one uniform appearance or conception of the mind -- it is received by observing both in ourselves and in natural bodies an ability to produce various effects. Writes Locke:

I confess power includes in it some kind of relation (a relation to action or change,) as indeed which of our ideas, of what kind soever, when attentively considered, does not? For, our ideas of extension, duration, and number, do they not all contain in them a secret relation of the parts? Figure and motion have something relative in them much more visibly. And sensible qualities, as colors and smells, etc., what are they but the powers of different bodies, in relation to our perception, etc.? And, if considered in the things themselves, do they not depend on the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of the parts? All which include some kind of relation in them. Our idea therefore of power, I think, may well have a place amongst other simple ideas, and be considered as one of them. (E-I 310f; original emphasis)

The idea of power, therefore, is simple even though it involves the interaction of two (Or more) distinct objects. This is no mere confusion;2 rather, it vividly conveys Locke’s belief in the dynamic character of the universe. But since, according to Locke, all our ideas when carefully considered contain some sort of relation (to action or change), and sensible qualities such as colors and smells have some relation to our perception, the idea of power is no more complex than our ideas of figure, motion, and sensible qualities. This point of view, which certainly seems to take dynamism as intrinsic to all our experience such that we have simple ideas of relational events, of change, is in keeping with the intent of Whitehead’s belief in the primacy of process. (It is also, adds Whitehead, an advance over Cartesian metaphysics, where "power" is not given a significant place. Change, according to Descartes, is a function of relative displacements rather than of energy and powers [PR 91], which runs counter to the spirit of the ontological principle.)

Locke proceeds to distinguish between the ordinary or vulgar notion of causality and power, on the one hand, and the true, philosophical notion on the other. To illustrate the former, Locke points out in book II, chapter viii of the Essay that the power in any body which seems to cause change in another is commonly considered as "the cause." The ordinary man is more ignorant about science than is the philosopher, for the latter knows that changes are to be attributed to the "particular constitution of its [a body’s] primary qualities" (E-I 179). Thus the sun’s making wax white and fire’s making lead fluid (these are practically the same examples as in chapter xxvi in the same book) "are usually called powers" -- a phrase added in the fourth edition. By "usually" Locke must mean "popularly," since he contrasts the philosopher’s correct use of "power" or cause as referring to the primary qualities: "The first . . . I think may be properly called real, original, or primary qualities. . . . [Light and warmth, e.g.,] are all of them equally powers in the sun, depending on its primary qualities " (E-I 181; original emphasis). It seems clear that while the common man is more ignorant than the philosopher since he, unlike the philosopher, doesn’t know that primary qualities within bodies are responsible for change, the philosopher can be ignorant as well, for he does not know how the primary qualities produce change. The mystery of causation, then, lies in ignorance concerning the nature of change, and such ignorance is not restricted to the many. In short, while Locke does not find the popular concept of power to be fully satisfactory (for secondary qualities are also popularly called "powers"), he certainly does not reject it but merely refines it, The definition of "power" advanced in book II, chapter xxvi, "that which produces any simple or complex idea we denote by the general name, cause, and that which is produced, effect" (E-I 433) is not inconsistent with common sense.

To complete his analysis, Locke uses the "historical method" for examining how we come to have the idea of cause qua power of initiating change. He remarks that it does not arise from looking at material objects (even though previously mentioned examples refer only to material or physical occurrences), but from introspection. Bodies "do not afford so clear an idea of active power, as we have from reflection on the operations of our minds" (E-I 311). Still, this statement implicitly does not rule out the possibility that some such idea of cause -- however unclear and perhaps indistinct -- might come from the observation of physical objects.

Now the metaphysical question is: do we find active power in bodies, or do we not? Locke occasionally seems to indicate that "spirits" alone, not bodies, can afford any idea of producing motion rather than merely undergoing it. Should we then conclude that bodies do not exhibit power just because we cannot experience such power? Locke says that "the idea of the beginning of motion we have only from reflection on what passes in ourselves" and adds that the power of the mind by which it can move bodies is the will (E-I 311 ff.; emphasis mine). Are we to conclude that there is no power in such objects as do not have some sort of "will"? Or -- which might seem a more likely conclusion -- is the power in inanimate objects at all comparable to the will? How is one to answer such questions?

Having ideas, whether clear or unclear, of bodies or of matter being active may in itself provide the evidence for the claim that causally active objects exist in the physical no less than in the mental world. Locke postpones the whole issue of whether matter is active, writing in chapter xxi of book II:

Whether matter is not wholly destitute of active power, as its author God, is truly above all passive power; and whether the intermediate state of created spirits be not that alone which is capable of both active and passive power, may be worth consideration. (E-I 309f)

Locke evidently has trouble deciding whether to restrict "activity" to the voluntary action of minds of spiritual beings. In any event, he certainly does not dismiss out of hand the possibility that seemingly inanimate matter might be capable of some sort of agency or "power."

To be consistent, the question should be asked whether any spiritual being other than myself (whose actions I can introspectively know) truly exhibits active powers. Indeed, there is some doubt as to the times when lam exercising active volition. While Locke does not go quite this far, he does seem concerned about the concept of activity in the physical world. Yet his dismissal of the "common apprehension" that active powers play a role "in our complex ideas of natural substance" as they do in voluntary action "they being not, perhaps, so truly active powers as our hasty thoughts are apt to represent them," is conspicuously hesitant, For what is the force (that is to say, the weakness) of "perhaps"? Of "truly"?

By book II, chapter xxiii, Locke seems to have made up his mind: "Pure spirit, viz., God, is only active; pure matter is only passive" and spirits not merely "perhaps" but unqualifiedly are both (E-I 414). Then is true causality strictly a relation between material objects, merely a matter of some sort of correlation? If this were the case, Whitehead could hardly have found Locke of much use. Context seems to show, however, that here Locke is talking about a "conjecture" (E-I 414).

In fact, Locke asserts in book IV, chapter iii that all matter, insofar as it consists of active ultimate particles, is basically active. For "these insensible corpuscles, being the active part of matter, and the great instruments of nature, on which depend not only all their secondary qualities but also most of their natural operations" should render all matter eminently active (E-II 216). The corpuscles are active in virtue of primary qualities -- mechanical affectations by which all the phenomena can be explained at least in principle. Although Locke is pessimistic with regard to what we can actually know about these particles, believing as he does that we will always be in "incurable ignorance about them since we cannot know the minute parts of matter nor the manner of their interaction, he thinks that at least in principle it is possible to discover the causes of natural events. The causal instruments of nature are to be found in active physical things.

But what about the origin of sense-perception? How do we know? This question, of course, was at least as important to Locke as the problem of insufficient factual knowledge regarding the interaction of physical objects. Indeed, closer examination will reveal them to be the same problem, insofar as primary qualities are held responsible for changes in bodies and also ultimately for producing impressions of secondary qualities.

Some may argue that Locke’s concept of causality is altogether divorced from the epistemological context. Consider the following passage from the Essay:

It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know, that something doth exist at that time without us, which causes* that idea in us; though perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it. (E-II 326)

A. C. Fraser footnotes "causes*" as follows: "i.e., occasions. Locke does not attribute active power to matter or bodies" (E-II 326). But after having uncovered Locke’s intense struggle on this subject, one should realize that Fraser’s interpretation is simplistic at best. I suggest, instead, that Locke uses "causes" in the above quotation in a perfectly deliberate fashion to bring metaphysics and epistemology together. When outlining the popular definition of causality he had remarked that we are ignorant about the manner in which one substance produces another, about the way they act upon and generate each other; similarly, we are ignorant about the way external objects are perceived by us. That is, the physical and the psychological or epistemological mystery go hand in hand -- resulting from ignorance regarding the same "primary qualities."

Notice that Locke’s remark is perfectly in line with the ontological principle: the actual receiving of ideas is evidence that something actual exists causing those ideas. The common nature of perception and causality in general is implicit in Locke’s concept of power, as Whitehead correctly observed:

The problem of perception and the problem of power are one and the same, at least so far as perception is reduced to mere prehension of actual entities. Perception, in the sense of consciousness of such prehension, requires the additional factor of the conceptual prehension of eternal objects, and a process of integration of the two factors. (PR 91)

One may wonder, in retrospect, why Locke did not follow the traditional British empiricist approach and reduce causality to chains of successive transformations, attributing it instead to the "real active" elements in matter. Locke himself explains why. There is a sharp distinction between transformation and production: "It is but a very obscure idea of power which reaches not the production of the action but the continuation of the passion" (E-I 312). Continuation of passion is not causality, production of action is. Real causes are active and categorically distinct from effects. So the common sense notion of power that Locke cited originally is, indeed, never really repudiated. The philosopher has to refine and extend that concept, applying it not only in ordinary contexts (e.g., the sun’s heating) but to all nature, to the subtle, complex activities of primary qualities, or, in Whitehead’s terms, to the workings of all actual entities. Yet common sense and philosophy must both accept that there is a difference between mere succession and dynamic production of a new effect by means of real powers. On this point, certainly, Locke and Whitehead are emphatically in unison. The various internal difficulties of Locke’s notion of power should not, therefore, obscure the many similarities between Locke and White-head, which I shall enumerate by way of conclusion:

(1) Locke believes that power is a simple relational term; like Whitehead, Locke emphasizes the dynamism of the universe, process, and change.

(2) Unlike Descartes and flume, Locke distinguishes ontologically the object that initiates change (or has "active powers") from the object receiving it or being acted upon; this asymmetry Whitehead adopts as well.

(3) Like Whitehead, Locke believes that the inner configuration of things (their primary qualities), the true causal agents, can -- at least in principle -- be discovered (an attitude antithetical to some interpretations of positivism).

(4) Locke struggles with the question of whether matter is passive or active -- he is no unequivocal dualist -- and there are strong indications that he thought matter was, indeed, active.

(5) Perception and causality, for Locke as for Whitehead, are two aspects of the same process. In virtue of their "internal configuration," actual entities exercise power upon inanimate" objects as upon perceptual systems.

(6) Both Locke and Whitehead dismiss epistemological skepticism: the causes of events can be known, in theory if not always (according to Locke, hardly ever) in practice.

As a final comment, it should be noted that my intention in undertaking this largely historical endeavor has been, in no small measure, to convey a metaphilosophical message. Students of seventeenth century British natural philosophy know that Locke was one of many in his day who saw their task as continuous with the efforts of "natural philosophers" -- their scientific colleagues. It is in this most important respect that Whitehead resembles Locke (and Descartes, as my earlier article [PS 6:249-54] sought to show). Though certainly philosophers, these men thought themselves to be engaged in the same endeavor as the scientists: the rational (which is not to say not empirical) pursuit of knowledge. The philosopher, however, reaches beyond, for he must of necessity question his assumptions as well as seek reflectively some unity of thought. To a philosopher, predictive strength is not sufficient -- though perhaps necessary -- in the pursuit of truth.

 

References

E -- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, ed. by A. C. Fraser. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1959. The Dover edition is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the first edition of Locke’s essay, republished through special arrangement with Oxford University Press. (E-I refers to volume I, E-II to volume II.)

WM -- Ivor Leclerc, Whitehead’s Metaphysics: an Introductory Exposition. London: George Allen and Unwin 1969. Reprinted by Indiana University Press, 1975.

1. Bart Kennedy, "John Locke and Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism," Philosophy Today 21 (Winter, 1977), 389-404.

2. Juliana Geran Pilon, "Whitehead and Solzhenitsyn on Freedom and Harmony," The Intercollegiate Review 12/2 (Winter, 1976-77), 99-103.

 

Notes

1 Whether or not Locke’s discussion of "power" is ultimately consistent with other aspects of his philosophy is an interesting question. Although Leclerc thinks not, he does agree that Lockeian scholarship would benefit from taking Locke’s analysis of power more seriously. I certainly believe that in light of Locke’s (and Whitehead’s) concern with individual freedom (2), it seems likely that both philosophers would wish to preserve the concept of "active power" in nature and, in particular, in man. Bart Kennedy (1) takes a position consistent with my own.

2A. C. Fraser notes that "the preceding sentences rather imply that the idea of power is an idea of relation, and not a simple idea, Locke calls it simple, because ‘power’, while involving the idea of relation to its effects, is in itself incapable of being defined" (F-I 311). This interpretation seems to overlook the possibility that Locke may have conceived of causality as essentially dynamic.

On Popper’s Understanding of Whitehead

While John Locke’s admonition against the "blind precipitancy" of passion should always guide the serious philosopher, an excess of zeal may well be forgiven when it involves the kind of innocent fallout that inevitably accompanies genius -- as is the case with Karl Popper. Sir Karl’s The Open Society and Its Enemies has become by now a classic argument for rationalism, as eloquent a defense of scientific tolerance as most believers in the law of noncontradiction are likely to want. Some exegetes, however, may take exception to Popper’s interpretation of what he calls Whitehead’s "wander[ing] off to such questions as the (Platonic) collectivist theory of morality" (OSE 248). I propose to show that Popper leapt to this conclusion a bit too hastily; for the passage he quotes by way of illustration does not permit an unequivocal reading. The contrary interpretation that I suggest has the added advantage of consistency with a rather straightforward 1939 article by Whitehead entitled, quite simply, "An Appeal to Sanity," whose message leaves uncharacteristically little room for confusion.1

The following passage Popper cites is certainly vague: "Morality of outlook is inseparably conjoined with generality of outlook. The antithesis between the general good and the individual interest can be abolished only when the individual is such that its interest is the general good" (PR 23). Collectivist overtones, surely. But are they inescapable? No one who has read Immanuel Kant closely can deny that "the general good" may be interpreted as referring to whatever is in accordance with the general law of morality:2 for Kant, only an autonomous will is a truly good will, only what is in accordance with the first principle of morality is truly (morally) good. The sentences immediately preceding the passage quoted by Popper may be understood to further support this deontological interpretation of Whitehead:

The selectiveness of individual experience is moral so far as it conforms to the balance of importance disclosed in the rational vision; arid conversely the conversion of the intellectual insight into an emotional force corrects the sensitive experience in the direction of morality. The correction is in proportion to the rationality of the insight. (PR 22f)

Surely Kant would not disagree. It is the rational vision alone that is truly good, and our individual actions are moral only when they conform to the good will. Insofar as the autonomous will is rational, moreover, it has precedence over our particular wills, thus being able to lead them in a moral direction. When one completes the sentence that Popper quotes only in part it reads as follows:

The antithesis between the general good and the individual interest can be abolished only when the individual is such that its interest is the general good, thus exemplifying the loss of the minor intensities in order to find them again with finer composition in a wider sweep of interest: (PR 23)

That "wider sweep of interest" may well refer to the requirements of a categorical imperative, the command of the general or universal law of morality. For it is unlikely that Whitehead meant by "the general good" merely "the good of the collective," especially in light of his words later on the same page:

Religion should connect the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society . . . [it] is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity." (Emphasis added)

And surely Kant would applaud the opposition to particular, heteronomous wills in favor of rational generality. No "collective interest" is here in sight.

One can only speculate as to the reason why Popper quoted only half a sentence when its continuation might have helped to elucidate its meaning. To be sure, Popper himself humbly admits the possibility that he may have misunderstood the direction of Whitehead’s thought. After deploring the fact that many rationalists took to irrationalism -- with disastrous ethical implications, according to Popper -- he concludes that "[t]his is what happened to Whitehead if I am not quite mistaken" (OSE 231). Alas, it seems to me that quite mistaken he is.

For consider Whitehead’s piece "An Appeal to Sanity," which contains thoughts meant to gladden the heart of any classical liberal:

each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs. Any particular community life touches only part of the ijature of each civilized man. If the man be wholly subordinated to the common life, he is dwarfed. His complete nature lies idle, and withers. Communities lack the intricacies of human nature. The beauty of a family is derivative from its members. The family life provides the opportunity; the realization lies in the individuals.

Thus social life is the provision of opportunity. If that opportunity be conceived as complete subordination to the limitations of one community, human nature is dwarfed. (ESP 65)

And more directly still:

There always remains solus cum solo. We have developed a moral individuality; and in that respect we face the universe -- alone.

This is the justification of that liberalism, that zeal for freedom, which underlies the American Constitution and other various forms of democratic government.

It is the reason why the ‘totalitarian’ doctrine is hateful. Governments are clumsy things, inadequate to their duties. (ESP 65, original emphasis)

Amen.

By way of conclusion, I feel compelled to reveal the hidden purpose behind my seemingly innocent exercise in speculative exegesis. That purpose does not involve primarily a defense of Whitehead’s liberal credentials -- I have attempted to do that elsewhere (1). Nor do I rest content in the mere spotting of an historical error in Popper, for Sir Karl’s (as, indeed, Whitehead’s) place in history is secure on grounds far more weighty than a reputation for faithful reiteration of the words written by one’s predecessors (important as such accuracy may be). Rather, I am intrigued by the possibility of reading in both Whitehead and, interestingly, Kant himself, precisely the kind of collectivist ethics that Popper so rightly abhors. One may thus find a very unusual sort of philosophical gymnastics performed with the categorical imperative, using it to defend collectivist ends, in a recent work on ethics by the Romanian philosopher Ioan Grigoras, Principles of Socialist Ethics (Bucharest: Editura Politica, 1974). But that is my topic for another article presently in gestation.

 

References

OSE -- Karl R. Popper. The Open Society and Its Enemies, volume 2: Hegel and Marx. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

1. Juliana Geran Pilon. "Whitehead and Solzhenitsyn on Freedom and Harmony." The Intercollegiate Review 12/2 (Winter, 1976-77), 99-103.

 

Notes

1Two recent articles, one by George V. Pixley, "Justice and Class Struggle: A Challenge for Process Theology" (PS 4:159-75) and another by Clark M. Williamson, "Whitehead as Counterrevolutionary? Toward a Christian-Marxist Dialogue," (PS 4:176-86) relate Whitehead to the Marxist tradition. But Pixley believes that "Whitehead’s own philosophical investigations into culture and civilization, if not counterrevolutionary, are open to appropriation for counterrevolutionary purposes" (PS 4:174), while Williamson disagrees. "Process thought," he writes. "seems singularly well equipped to develop a theology of work, in the full Marxist sweep of the term: man’s self-creativity in society" (PS 4:1785; original emphasis). It is unclear what Williamson has in mind. To be sure, there are those who believe that Marx has squared the circle, having allowed for maximum individual freedom and for collectivism at the same tune. I take Pixley’s side (in a manner of speaking) and shall proceed to suggest some counterrevolutionary ideas.

2 It is not my purpose here to claim that Whitehead’s ethics is Kantian in all, even most respects; I only suggest that some of his pronouncements are by no means inconsistent with a Kantian interpretation. Sylvia Ann Pruitt, in her dissertation An Inquiry into the Ethical Implications of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (Emory University, 1970), relates Whitehead and Kant as follows: after first citing from Kant -- "What else then can freedom of the will be but autonomy, that is the property of the will to be a law to itself?" -- she writes that "[w]hat Kant speaks of as autonomy and attributes to the will, Whitehead calls self-causality and attributes to all actual occasions" (p. 181).

Unfortunately, Pruitt is handicapped by what seems to be an unduly simplistic view of Kantian ethics. She writes: "[T]he Kantian view that duty is discerned (and, therefore, one is relatively certain he is acting ethically) only when the action is not one which is pleasing or desired seems unduly harsh" (p. 132). Rather, whether or not an action is pleasing is neither necessary nor sufficient for judging its morality.