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In the foregoing essay, which represents a continuation of a conversation that Professor Hasker and I began in Searching for An Adequate God,¹ he reconsiders the idea, conceded by many traditional theists, that process theism enjoys an advantage with regard to the problem of evil. Hasker was one of those.² Having now given the matter more thought, however, he has come to hold that there is one version of traditional theism that "is very much on a par with process theism in its treatment of the problem of evil."

The version of traditional theism of which Hasker speaks is what he calls "classical free will theism" but I will call "traditional free will theism." Hasker rightly points out that I have used the former name for the position in question, as in Searching for An Adequate God. More recently,³ however, I have advocated reserving the term "classical theism" for the version of traditional theism affirmed by classical theologians such as Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas, according to which God is timeless, immutable, and impassible in all respects -- a doctrine that implies that creaturely freedom must be denied or affirmed at most in a Pickwickian, compatibilist sense. "Traditional theism" would then be the inclusive term for all views affirming the traditional doctrine of divine omnipotence, with the classical and free will versions being the two main types. In any case, having made this terminological clarification, I will now challenge Hasker’s parity claim, dealing with his various arguments in roughly the order in which he makes them.

I. The Distinction between Process and Traditional Free Will Theism⁴

In his summary of the main differences between the two positions, Hasker appropriately emphasizes the issue of creation out of (absolutely) nothing. Consistently with its rejection of this doctrine, process theism holds that God necessarily and hence always exists in relation to "others" with their own power, whereas traditional theism’s acceptance of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo means that God faced "no prior constraints apart from those of logical consistency." My only quibble with Hasker’s account would involve his statement that for process theists "the traditional doctrine of creation ex nihilo must be abandoned." Besides suggesting that we give up this doctrine reluctantly (whereas we do it with enthusiasm), Hasker’s reference to the doctrine as "traditional," with no qualification, could be taken to mean that the doctrine is biblical. However, as I have pointed out elsewhere,⁵ the scholarly consensus is now that this doctrine is postbiblical, having been developed near the end of the second century of the Christian era. That quibble aside, however, there are no significant problems in Hasker’s account of the basic differences between the two positions.⁶ But there are problems in his argument that the apparent advantage possessed by process theology is "largely an illusion."

II. Moral Evil

Hasker begins by pointing out an important commonality between the two positions -- namely, that they both believe in "libertarian freedom," which is the view that when a free agent has a decision to make, it has genuine power to choose among alternatives. Freedom in this libertarian sense stands in contrast with "compatibilism," which says that our freedom is compatible with our decisions and actions being fully determined by some other cause, whether this cause he God (theological compatibilism) or molecules (cosmological compatibilism). Both views reject both types of compatibilism.

The problems in Hasker’s account begin with his claim that, because of this rejection, "[b]oth views agree" that "the primary responsibility for [the morally wrong actions of human beings] lies with their human perpetrators and not with God." Within the traditional free will framework, process theists contend, the primary responsibility is arguably God’s, given the twofold fact that God’s gift of freedom to human beings is arbitrary and that, with regard to any instance of moral evil, God could have prevented it. That conclusion, however, presupposes my rebuttal to Hasker’s arguments against the idea that process theodicy has an advantage in relation to moral evil. I will, accordingly, move directly to those arguments.

Hasker’s first argument begins with the supposition that process theists argue thus: Because the God of traditional theism "has deliberately chosen to endow his creatures with [libertarian] freedom," this God "bears a heavy responsibility for turning loose upon the world a freedom that has had such devastating consequences," but that this is not a problem for process theism because for it "freedom is not the result of a divine choice." Hasker then points out that this argument is unsound. Although "[f]reedom in some form or other maybe necessary according to process theism," he says, the "sophisticated variety of freedom involved in human agency . . . is indeed the result of a divine decision." That, however, is what I have always argued. It is, in fact, on the basis of a quotation from me that Hasker rebuts his imaginary process theist. The apparent strangeness of this fact may be explained by the assumption that I did not understand the import of my own statement. A quick check of my writings, however, would show this assumption to be untrue. In God, Power, and Evil in response to the traditional question as to why God created free beings, I said: "Of course, in process thought all actualities have some freedom, so that question has to be modified to ask, Why did God bring forth creatures with high degrees of freedom?" (292). Although this is a book that Hasker did not cite, he does cite Process Theology, in which I say that "God’s stimulation of a more and ‘more complex world, which has the capacity for more and more Intrinsic value, means the development of creatures with more and more freedom . . . in relation to God" (73). Although Hasker concludes this argument by pointing out that for it too "it is God who is responsible for the existence of creatures who have the freedom and power to bring about great evils," I had explicitly said that "God is responsible for [the distinctively human forms of evil on our planet] in the sense of having encouraged the world in the direction that made these evils possible" (Process 75; cf. God 308-09).

My conclusion was that, although God is in this sense responsible for the world’s humanly caused evil, God is not indictable, because the risk of all these evils was inseparable from all the positive values that the creation of human life made possible. Because the capacity for realizing positive values and the capacity for freedom or self-determination are correlative, rising in proportion with each other, creatures capable of the kinds of values we can enjoy are necessarily creatures with a very dangerous level of freedom. Process theism’s advantage on this point, I argue, lies in the fact that this correlation does not necessarily hold for traditional free will theism. In a statement quoted by Hasker in his discussion of what he calls a "more subtle form" of the above argument (although it simply is my argument), I said that according to traditional free will theism it would have been possible for God to create "creatures who could enjoy all the same values which we human beings enjoy, except that they would not really be free" (Process 74).

Hasker takes issue with this argument, saying that it "abounds in problems." The first alleged problem involves my further point that although these creatures could have been created so that they would always do the best thing, they could think that they were doing so freely. Hasker, pointing out that this would involve deception on God’s part, expresses shock at my apparent failure to recognize, with him and Descartes, that it would be "impossible for God to engage in a policy of massive deception."⁷ But there are several problems with Hasker’s claim here.

First, in saying that it would be impossible for God to deceive us, Descartes was arguing against the idea that solipsism might be true, that our sensory impressions might not correspond to actual objects. Believing that his ontological argument had proved the existence of a divine being perfect in goodness as well as in power, Descartes argued that we could trust the testimony of our senses. With regard to whether we can trust our feeling of freedom, however, Descartes is not so clearly on Hasker’s side. As Hasker emphasizes, his free will version of traditional theism differs from the classical version, held by Augustine, Thomas, Luther, and Calvin, precisely on this point -- that this classical version held that all of our feelings, thoughts, and actions are in reality wholly determined by God, so that we have freedom only in a compatibilist sense -- or, otherwise stated, that our feeling of freedom is an illusion. Descartes, far from disassociating himself from that view of divine omnipotence, held an especially strong version of it. Insofar as he agreed that we seem to have libertarian freedom, therefore, he evidently believed, implicitly, that God had deceived us.

A second problem with Hasker’s argument, which is more serious, is that his criticism of me for suggesting that God could engage in massive deception involves stepping outside the framework at issue. I was not suggesting that it would be acceptable for (the real) God to do this, because, given the understanding of God held by process theists, the question does not arise. I was only asking: Given the God of traditional theism, who could have created a world in which the kinds of values distinctive of human life would be enjoyed but none of the evils resulting from human sin would be suffered, should this God not have done so, even though this would have involved the deception about freedom?

Hasker, in fact, then formulates my argument correctly (although he calls it a "modification" of my argument). That is, he points out that although the God of process theism "could not create beings possessing the positive capacities of human beings but lacking in libertarian freedom," the God of traditional theism, not being limited by any metaphysical necessities, could have. But then Hasker again misinterprets, suggesting that my claim is that traditional theism’s God "morally ought to have done so," thereby suggesting that I would not consider such deception morally problematic. However, in more extensive treatments of the problem of evil (the one in Process Theology, which he cites, is only seven pages), I make clear that the issue is that traditional free will theists face a dilemma that process theists do not. In Evil Revisited (which Hasker also cites), I said:

The issue, in sum, is not whether an omnipotent deity’s deception of its self-conscious creatures would be morally problematic but only whether such deception, if necessary in order to have a world with all the positive values of the present one but without its horrendous evils, would be justified as the lesser of evils.

Hasker’s next argument takes issue with the idea that "all of the higher values enjoyed by human beings could be available to creatures lacking libertarian freedom." He holds, for example, that "libertarian freedom is essential for moral responsibility" I agree. But the claim that I had made, which Hasker quoted, was that the God of traditional free will theism could have created "creatures who could enjoy all the same values which we human beings enjoy, except that they would not really be free" (Process 74). My claim, in other words, was not about "values" in the abstract but about the values enjoyed by the creatures. Although genuine moral responsibility would not exist, these otherwise humanlike creatures would believe they were freely doing good. As I said elsewhere: "Since they would think they were free, they could even enjoy the smug satisfaction derived from complimenting themselves on their moral virtue" (God 293; qtd. in Evil 85). Only God would know otherwise, so no loss of value would be experienced by the creatures.

Hasker also says that libertarian freedom is essential for "a genuinely personal relationship between God and human beings." Again, I agree, but my argument was only that fully determined creatures could believe they were enjoying a personal relationship with their creator. This argument was originally worked out in relation to the theodicy of John Hick, who suggested an analogy with the relationship between a hypnotist and a patient. A hypnotist could give a patient a posthypnotic suggestion that the patient would be a loving and trusting person, acting with love towards other people and having attitudes of love and trust toward the hypnotist. From everyone else’s point of view, the patient’s attitudes would be enjoyable and praiseworthy.⁸ But to the hypnotist these attitudes would be inauthentic, because the hypnotist would know that they had not arisen freely. By analogy, God (as understood by Hick) could have created us so that we would necessarily respond to God with worship and trust. But God, says Hick, would not find this satisfying:

As Hick’s analogy illustrates, the only one who would suffer any loss of value would be God. In order not to suffer this personal loss of value, Hick’s deity gives human beings genuine freedom -- freedom vis-à-vis God, which I have called theological freedom (Evil 17) -- so that their love and trust for their creator, when it develops, will be authentic. This gift of theological freedom comes at a high price, because human beings can use it to violate the social, political, and economic freedom of other human beings, inflict great suffering on other animals, and destroy the planet in general. Because of this trade-off I questioned the success of Hick’s theodicy in justifying the divine decision, saying:

Hasker seems to hold about the same position as Hick. My question to him, accordingly, is whether my argument does not tell against the adequacy of his position as well.

My critique of Hick’s theodicy would also seem germane to Hasker’s with regard to the question of divine deception. I-lick has argued that if the existence of an omnipotent creator were clear to human beings, it would be so obvious that we should obey God’s will that we would not really be free in relation to God. Hick’s deity, accordingly, has deliberately created "epistemic distance" between itself and us, thereby making the world thoroughly ambiguous with regard to whether there is a divine being or not. In response to my statement that it would have arguably been preferable for Hick’s deity to have prevented all the suffering and destruction resulting from human sin forgoing the satisfaction of having us develop authentic love and trust, Hick gave the same response as Hasker -- that such deception would be improper. In reply, however, I asked Hick: "Why is [the deception involved in the deliberate creation of epistemic distance], which has resulted in most of the evils of human history, acceptable, whereas the deception about freedom, through which all those evils could have been avoided, would be unacceptable?"⁹ It would seem that this question would apply to Hasker as well.

One final charge by Hasker is that the kind of argument I have made reveals me to be a "disappointed Calvinist." Process theists like me are said to believe, in other words, that "it would be better, all things considered, if God had been able to exercise complete, unilateral control over the world, exactly as postulated by Calvin." Because our God cannot do this, however, we "are obliged to settle for second best," a universe "containing the peril and potential destructiveness of libertarian freedom." But Hasker has again stepped out of the framework of the argument. My argument against traditional theism is an internal argument within its framework, according to which divine determination of all events is possible. Within that framework, I have said, it is not obvious that the Hick-Hasker deity; who disguised its existence from us while freely giving us theological freedom with all its dangers, is preferable to a God who would be Calvinistic in power but Whiteheadian in goodness (so that the world would truly be the paradise that traditional theists long for in Heaven but so dread on Earth). I have simply suggested that, given those alternatives, the latter might be preferable. No conclusions about my own position can be drawn from this internal argument within an alien framework. Within my own framework, as I pointed out before, the question of whether it "would be better" to have a universe in which the creator exercises complete control does not come up, because it is a metaphysical impossibility. This universe is not considered "second best," because that other imagined universe is not considered a metaphysical possibility. It makes no sense whatsoever, furthermore, for Hasker to say that if some process theists would prefer a fully determined universe "they would most likely have been Calvinists all along," as if our theological positions should be based entirely on our wishes rather than what we think really to be the case. (One can hope that Hasker has not here inadvertently revealed the basis for his own philosophical-theological positions.)

III. Natural Evil

Having pointed out the failure of Hasker’s various attempts to show the apparent advantage of process theism with regard to moral evil to be illusory, I turn to his attempt to show the same with regard to natural evil, understood as evil not caused by human agents. Hasker begins with the issue of animal suffering not due to human agency. This has been an especially difficult problem for the traditional free will defense, because that defense is oriented around the idea that human suffering can be justified in terms of God’s "soul-making" purpose of producing moral and spiritual virtues. Because nonhuman animals are not, by hypothesis, capable of developing such virtues, it is hard to see why a creator who is both omnipotent and benevolent would make them so susceptible to pain (insofar as warning devices are needed, omnipotence could have fashioned nonpainful ones, as pointed out in the book Catch 22). It is sometimes suggested that animal suffering is for the sake of calling forth human compassion. But even if one overlooks the extreme anthropocentrism of this argument (which implies that the sufferings of millions of other species are justified because they contribute to human soul-building), there would be the problem that most of the animal suffering on the planet has occurred beyond the ken of human beings. It is especially puzzling why the deity of traditional free will theism, who created the universe for the sake of soul-building, would have taken over 10 billion years simply to set the stage, employing an evolutionary process involving hundreds of millions of years of animal suffering prior to the rise of human beings. The facts seem inconsistent with the hypothesis of an omnipotent creator of unbounded goodness and wisdom.

In response to this argument, Hasker says that animal suffering, being an "inescapable part" of the natural world, "does not negate the world’s goodness overall." Saying that "Griffin evidently disagrees with this," Hasker suggests that my disagreement might reflect the belief that "the world of nature as we know it is a had thing, so that its existence is worse than its non-existence." Again, however, Hasker is speaking as if my arguments within his framework could be taken to reflect my own position. Seeing, however, that the view that nature is a bad thing could not reflect my own position, he then correctly stares my contention, which is that "the world of nature, though not bad overall, is nevertheless distinctly inferior to alternative worlds we can envisage which a God endowed with classical omnipotence would have brought into existence."

His first attempted rebuttal is to claim that, given my own views, according to which God bad quasi-coercive effects at the outset of this cosmic epoch and later brought about evolutionary saltations, "it is quite unlikely that the world of nature is radically different than God intended it to be." It is hard to see what this argument even if it were sound (which it is not),¹⁰ would prove. In order to rebut my claim that there is a big gap between the world as it is and the kind of world that a benevolent creator with traditional omnipotence would be expected to create, Hasker argues that there should be no gap between the kind of world the process deity wanted to create and the world it actually created. How could the implications of my view of the creator and the creative process, even if they were as Hasker’s portrays them, be relevant to my argument about the implications of Hasker’s view of the creator and the creative process? Here again Hasker has confused the frameworks, arguing as if hypothetical points relevant within one were relevant within the other. This confusion is reflected in the sentence at the end of this argument, in which he says: "I conclude that, on process assumptions, it is unlikely that the world of nature is radically different than God intended it to be." In speaking of God there, he means not just "God as conceived by process theism" but simply God, the real God -- which for him means the God of traditional free will theism.

Besides this confused argument, however, Hasker has another rebuttal to my contention, which he summarizes as the view that the world of nature "is less good than other worlds that we can see to be possible." That, however, is emphatically not my contention. Given my rejection of creatio ex nihilo and therefore my acceptance of metaphysical principles that would necessarily be involved in any world, I do not believe that a world that is significantly different from ours in terms of issues germane to the problem of evil would be possible. (That is the point of my "variables of power and value," according to which increases in the capacity for intrinsic value are not possible apart from correlative increases in the capacity for experiencing and causing suffering.) My contention must be put as Hasker had phrased it earlier, namely, that our world is less good than a world that, we can imagine, could be created by a God endowed with traditional omnipotence.

This correct phrasing is important in evaluating Hasker’s response, which is that

This response fits with Hasker’s earlier-cited claim that animal suffering is an inescapable part of the world of nature. What happened, however, to the God of traditional theism, whose power is constrained by no principles other than purely logical ones? Hasker is here instead presupposing a God like that of process theism, who is constrained by metaphysical principles. In a later recursion to this issue (in the second point in the section on Divine Intervention), Hasker says:

All this is true. And it is all germane to process theodicy. But all these facts about the world "as we know it" are not germane to traditional theism, according to which "God created the world ex nihilo, with no prior constraints apart from those of logical consistency," It is not a logical truth that beings capable of medium- and high-level intrinsic values can exist only by predation on other such beings. There is nothing logically self-contradictory in the idea that we and other animals could have existed without requiring food (as angels presumably do) or by getting our nourishment directly from the atmosphere or the ocean (as do some plants). It is not a logical truth that a world supporting sentient beings would need water or that hurricanes would be necessary to get the water properly distributed. And the idea that a world of high-level sentient creatures could be created only through an evolutionary process is surely not a logical truth -- as illustrated by all the creationists who deny that our world was so created.¹¹ Hasker has defended his view of God only by implicitly giving it up.¹²

With regard to this last issue, Hasker points out that the process theist might "maintain that, while an evolutionary process was the only option available for the process God, a God endowed with classical omnipotence would rather have chosen to short-circuit the process by instantaneously bringing about the universe in its present state." To reply to this criticism, Hasker again steps outside the framework at issue. This time, in fact, he does this explicitly, saving that this challenge -- that God should have created the world instantaneously rather than using an evolutionary process involving natural selection – "cannot sensibly be made by a process theist," because process theists believe that God has in fact used an evolutionary process. And to insist that at least the God of traditional theism should have created the world instantaneously would be, Hasker again says, to imply "that the world of nature is a bad thing, one whose existence at present must perhaps be tolerated as instrumental to the existence of moral agents," and to hold this, Hasker continues, would be at odds with the process theism’s advocacy of reverence for nature.

But this whole response is confused. What we process theists believe about the relation between God and nature is irrelevant to the cogency of our critique of the self-consistency of traditional theism. It is traditional theists who hold that God could have created the world instantaneously. And it is traditional free will theists who have implied, and sometimes explicitly said, that the whole universe was created for evoking moral and spiritual virtue in free human (and perhaps, on other planets, humanlike) souls, so that it is only this divine-human drama that contains intrinsic value. It is the combination of these theological hypotheses that leads to the rhetorical question as to why this creator would have taken over 10 billion years simply setting the stage for the only part of the process in which something truly important is occurring. The rhetorical question does not apply to process theists because we accept neither of the hypotheses in question. The fact that we endorse theistic evolution and reverence for nature is, accordingly, irrelevant to the question of the plausibility of traditional free will theism. Indeed, the same questions about the self-consistency and plausibility of traditional free will theism could be, and have been, raised by philosophers with other perspectives. Hasker is misguided, therefore, in thinking that he should direct his answer "in the first instance, to the process theist." What he needs to do is show that his position can meet the challenges to its self-consistency and plausibility, regardless of the origin of these challenges.

One of Hasker’s attempts to improve the defensibility of traditional free will theism involves making its view of nature more like that of process theism. Being impressed by "Hartshorne’s suggestion about generalizing the free will defense to include natural evil," Hasker suggests that the benefits from this generalization "need not be limited to process theism." Citing the evidence from physics that "natural processes are inherently indeterministic" and from experience that living creatures "exercise a genuine spontaneity," Hasker says that he need not hold "that God directly decreed the existence of the AIDS virus."

Hasker is right, I believe, about physical particles and living beings, but he has confused two meanings of spontaneity. The evidence in question is evidence against the doctrine of cosmological determinism, according to which physical processes are wholly determined by antecedent causes within the world. But the question relevant to theodicy concerns theological determinism, which is whether God fully determines the behavior of physical processes, including the behavior of animals. The affirmation of cosmological spontaneity is fully compatible with the affirmation of theological determinism -- as illustrated by the beliefs of countless traditional theists from Augustine to the present.¹³ I am glad that Hasker denies "that God directly decreed the existence of the AIDS virus."¹⁴ But the generalization of cosmological freedom or spontaneity to all levels of nature does not suffice -- within his theological framework -- to ground this denial.

Within this framework, furthermore, one can wonder if God’s free gift of theological spontaneity to individuals at every level of nature would be wise. In process theology, this question does not arise, because the presence of theological spontaneity throughout the world is metaphysically necessitated: To be an actual entity is to embody creativity and this creativity as embodied by creatures cannot be wholly controlled by God. Within the framework of traditional theism, by contrast, there would be no need for theological spontaneity to be given to nonhuman individuals. Even if the divine gift of theological freedom to human beings can be justified (which, as we have seen, is at least questionable), it is hard to see any justification for giving it to nonhuman individuals, at least those below the level at which any virtues could be developed. Hasker’s God, accordingly, seems guilty of having made the world far more dangerous than it, in terms of his theological framework, needs to be.

My conclusion is that Hasker has not shown process and traditional free will theism to be "on all fours with each other" with regard to natural evil.

IV. Divine Intervention

I turn now to Hasker’s attempt to show that process theism, despite initial appearances, has no real advantage over traditional free will theism with regard to the question of divine intervention. Process theism’s initial advantage is that, according to its principles, God cannot occasionally interrupt the normal causal pattern of the world, whereas the God of traditional free will theism can. The resulting question, which Hasker calls "the problem of divine non-intervention," is "why does God not intervene, or do so more frequently, to prevent great evils?" Hasker’s answer to this problem takes the form of four propositions.

The first proposition is that this problem "is a serious difficulty for [traditional] free will theism only if it is clear that there are situations in which God ought to intervene but fails to do so." One problem with this proposition involves the word "clear." Just how clear does Hasker mean it would have to be? Clear beyond any reasonable doubt, or clear beyond any possible doubt? Defenders of classical theism often implicitly use the latter criterion, claiming they have defended their God’s failure to prevent horrendous evils by simply pointing out that there might be some reason, knowable only by God, as to why it was good not to intervene.¹⁵ I would say, in any case, that it need not be "clear" in a strong sense of the term. Traditional free will theism has a problem insofar as it seems likely to people that God should have intervened to prevent the tragedy in question.

Hasker’s second proposition -- "Frequent or routine invention would negate many of the purposes for which the world was created in the first place" – is also problematic. Hasker says that "it is of great inherent value for persons to exercise free moral choice" and that this value "would be negated if God were to interfere each time a wrong action is about to be performed." Most critics of (traditional) theism do not hold, however, that God should do this each time, but only that God should have done so in some of the most egregious instances. We need to remember, furthermore, that the "inherent value" realized by choices that are free vis-à-vis God is appreciated only by God, because for the person the inherent value would be enjoyed as long as the person thought that the choice was free. God’s intervention (within the framework of traditional free will theism) would undermine only the value God would enjoy by witnessing the occurrence of a good choice that was truly free. It would, at the same time, increase the intrinsic value of at least most of the creatures involved. Is it not rather selfish of Hasker’s God to refuse to intervene in such situations?

Another claim made by Hasker is that if God were "routinely to intervene to prevent evil from being done, there would be far less incentive to form effective human communities, a large part of whose function is to encourage good behavior and to restrain evil." Looking aside from all the other problems in this justification for God’s permission of evil, we can again simply note that most people led to atheism because of horrendous evils such as the Nazi holocaust do not say that God should routinely intervene but only that God should have prevented these extraordinary evils. The standard reply by defenders of traditional free will theism is that "worst" is a relative term so that, if God had prevented the worst evils, then the next worst evils would have been the worst, and the critic would claim that God should have prevented those, and so on, so that, in Hick’s words, "There would be nowhere to stop, short of a divinely arranged paradise," which would defeat the divine purpose of soul-making (363-64).

While admitting that Hick’s slippery-slope argument has an initial plausibility, I had argued that

I wish that Hasker, rather than simply repeating the type of argument that Hick and others have given, would have dealt with this response to it.

Hasker’s third proposition is that for the problem of divine non-intervention to be a real problem, "we must be able to identify specific kinds of cases in which God morally ought to intervene but does not" Many critics of (traditional) theism probably already have a more or less vague list of such cases, which might include genocidal events, such as the Nazi holocaust and the Rwandan massacre; wars; large-scale natural disasters; conditions of chronic poverty, in which millions of children die from starvation or are permanently stunted because of inadequate protein; the sexual molestation of children, which often leaves them psychologically scarred for the rest of their lives; death preceded by long, painful illnesses, such as cancer or AIDS, or by mind-destroying conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease; and the kinds of events described by Dostoyevski, such as the soldier using his pistol to get a mother’s baby to giggle with delight and then blowing its brains out.

Hasker claims that the amount of intervention possible for God compatible with the divine purposes would surely be "far less than would be needed to materially affect the overall balance of good and evil in the world." One can only wonder from what perspective he is speaking. If God had prevented that particular soldier’s barbaric act, so that that mother would have been able to raise her darling baby instead of living the rest of her life with the memory of its murder, the "overall balance of good and evil in [her] world" would have been greatly affected. If God had prevented World War I -- a senseless war, the only real accomplishment of which was to plant the seeds for World War II -- the overall balance of good and evil would have been greatly affected for the millions of people who lost sons, husbands, brothers, or friends in that war. It seems to many thoughtful people, in any case, that a God endowed with traditional omnipotence could have made this a far better world, even for the purpose of soul-making, by preventing a wide range of evils that have destroyed or stunted billions of lives throughout human history.

Hasker says, however, that "we must remember that we are (by hypothesis) dealing with a God of infinite wisdom," which means that "we must be prepared to defer to that wisdom concerning the suitable occasions for special intervention." Hasker’s insertion of this statement in his argument is puzzling. The whole question at issue is whether the hypothesis of traditional free will theism -- namely, that there exists a God who is perfect in goodness and wisdom and metaphysically unconstrained in power -- is believable, and yet Hasker seems to suggest that this hypothesis itself could be used to counter criticisms of it. The other puzzling thing about this insertion is that it should be a conversation-stopper, being reminiscent of Plantinga’s claim that he can defend his position by merely pointing out that the God in whom he believes may well have perfectly good reasons, unknowable by us, for allowing evil. Hasker, however, does not use his statement to stop the conversation but only to insist that, rather than simply listing evils that his God should have prevented, we must provide "a strongly supported criterion by which to discern the situations in which intervention would be mandatory."

Hasker’s fourth proposition states that this criterion cannot be the insistence that God should prevent all "gratuitous" evils, with those defined as evils "that God could prevent . . . without incurring any equal or greater evils and without losing any goods that would be sufficient to outweigh them." This definition seems to be identical to my definition for "genuine evil," namely, "anything, all things considered, without which the universe would have been better" (God 22). Given such an understanding of gratuitous evil, how could Hasker possibly deny that it provides the needed criterion? He admits that it does seem "reasonable to assume that a good [and omnipotent] God would of necessary prevent all such gratuitous evils." But that is surely an understatement, because the statement seems to be true by definition. We can understand that God could allow prima facie evils insofar as things that seem evil from a limited perspective may serve instrumentally to make the world better than it would have been without them. But what could we possibly mean by calling God perfectly good other than that God would, if possible, prevent all gratuitous evil -- all things that would make the universe worse than it would have otherwise been? For traditional theism, the qualifier "if possible" can be deleted, so that its God, to be considered perfectly good, would simply prevent all gratuitous evils.

In attempting to rebut this criterion, Hasker mixes it with another issue -- a paradox that would result if "God were known to prevent all gratuitous evils" (my emphasis). Having added the second issue, which deals not with the proposed criterion as such but with an imagined situation in which we could know that God is abiding by it, Hasker then argues that God should not prevent all gratuitous evils. For if we knew that God did so, then we would know that every prima facie evil was simply allowed by God to produce some more-than-compensatory good. We would be deterred from preventing evils for fear that by doing so we would make "the world overall to be worse than it otherwise would be!" We would, accordingly, not become the responsible moral individuals God wants us to be. God’s whole purpose in creating the universe would be undermined.

There are two problems with this argument. First, the claim that I and other critics of traditional theism make is simply that a perfectly good God would (by definition) avoid as much genuine evil as possible consistent with evoking as much genuine good as possible. We do not add any additional claim about our knowing that God in fact prevents all genuine evil. The paradox produced by Hasker’s addition of that claim is, therefore, not a problem for the criterion as such. Hasker cannot rebut the sensibleness of this criterion by changing the subject.

A second problem with Hasker’s argument is that, although he claims that he is arguing that God should allow gratuitous evils, he is in fact arguing that even the gratuitous evils are not really gratuitous, because they contribute to "God’s intention to make us responsible moral individuals," which from his perspective is a more important consideration than the relative balance of enjoyment and suffering in the world. Hasker’s real position, in other words, seems to be that although at one level the prima facie evils of this world are gratuitous evils, they at another level are not, because their very gratuitousness is intended by God to evoke our moral efforts to overcome them.

Rather than rebutting the criterion as such, accordingly, Hasker has simply proposed a more complex understanding of it. The fact that this is really his argument, however, brings us to an additional problem, which is whether it is plausible to believe that all the suffering experienced by human beings really serves the soul-making purpose. Are not many people simply crushed by evil rather than stimulated by it to rise to new heights?

My conclusion in this section is that Hasker has not undermined the advantage that process theism has with regard to the problem of divine non-intervention, just as he failed to undermine its advantage with regard to moral and natural evil. My overall conclusion, accordingly, is that his attempt to show that process and traditional free will theism are on a par with regard to the problem of evil fails in all respects.

V. Psychological Appeal

Recognizing that I will not agree with his parity claim, Hasker closes his argument by commenting on my discussion about the need for a theodicy to have psychological appeal, seeking to turn this discussion to his favor by pointing out that traditional theism has been accepted by more people than has process theism. I should not, he says, invoke psychological appeal as a criterion "and then disregard the actual track record of practical success." There are two problems with this argument. First, my statement was made in a discussion with the Basingers. I was not claiming that process theism has more psychological appeal to more people than their position but merely reacting against a comment by them that appeared to denigrate the importance of psychological appeal.

Even if we turn to the issue of the relative psychological appeal of the two positions, however, Hasker’s contention is problematic. This contention is that "a very large majority of Christians are unconvinced and unsatisfied by the process doctrine of God." The more accurate statement, however, would be that most people have thus far not even heard of process theism and fewer still have heard it presented by an advocate. The more relevant question, therefore, would be: Among those who really understand both traditional theism and process theism, what percentage has come to prefer the latter? Even this test would be somewhat unfair to process theism because of religious conditioning by traditional theism, which makes it difficult for many people to take seriously the idea of a God without omnipotence in the traditional sense (see Griffin, God 258-59; Griffin, Evil 209-13). A more realistic test, accordingly, would be to have two large groups of people, one of which had been raised in terms of traditional free will theism, the other in terms of process theism. One could then have each group exposed to a thorough presentation of the opposing doctrine of God by a persuasive advocate and compare the number of conversions. Actually conducting such an experiment would, of course, be virtually impossible, but my own experience suggests that, insofar as such an experiment could be approximated, process theism would win. That is, I have heard of very few people who, after having accepted process theism, have later found some form of traditional theism more adequate. But I know of many people who, after having long accepted traditional theism, even in its free will version, have subsequently been converted to process theism.

Notes

1. John B. Cobb, Jr.. and Clark H. Pinnock, eds. Searching for an Adequate God. Hasker and I, besides being asked to write essays extolling the merits of our respective theological positions, were each asked to write a response to the other’s essay.

2. William Hasker, "A Philosophical Perspective," in Clark Pinnock et al., The Openness of God, 126-54, at 139.

3. See Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion.

4. Although Hasker prefers to call his position simply "free will theism," I resist this usage, as I explained in Searching for an Adequate God (7-8), not only because process theism is also a type of free will theism but also because its affirmation of creaturely freedom is much more thoroughgoing, so that Hasker’s type of position could well be called "hybrid free will theism."

5. See Griffin, "Creation out of Chaos, and the Problem of Evil."

6. One slight problem is present in his definition of divine omnipotence, as traditionally understood, as the "power is do anything that is neither logically incoherent nor inconsistent with God’s moral perfection." The final phrase does not belong. Traditional theologians have usually distinguished between the "metaphysical perfections" of God, which include the divine omnipotence, and God’s "moral perfections." Hasker’s confusion of the two issues, how-ever, seems to be without consequence for his argument here, with the possible exception mentioned in the next note.

7. It may be that Hasker’s definition of omnipotence, quoted in the prior note, leads him to think that it would be ontologically impossible for his God to engage in deception, not simply morally impossible.

8. In Hick’s discussion, the focus is solely on the relation between the hypnotist and the patient. I have slightly altered the analogy by also including the relation between the patient and other people.

9. See Griffin, "Response to Hick," in Davis, ed., Encountering Evil (57).

10. The main problem with Hasker’s argument is his attempt to downplay the extent to which, over time, even very small deviations from the divine aims would lead to enormous gaps between the actual and what would have been ideal in an abstract sense. It is now commonplace (as in the "butterfly effect") that tiny changes in the initial conditions can lead to enormous differences down the line. Over the almost four billion years during which life has been evolving on earth, there would have been countless opportunities for an ever-increasing gap to grow between the actual and the ideal. Between every major evolutionary transition, there would have been an enormous number of events with some degree of power to deviate from the divine aim for it. Even if the evolutionary saltations involved highly conformal responses to the divine presented forms, the forms that God could present at these moments would have increasingly represented compromises with what would have been ideal in an abstract sense. As Whitehead says, the divine aim is "the best for that impasse," but "the best [may] be bad" (Process 244). It is not implausible, accordingly, to account for the major sources of natural evil by appeal to creaturely freedom (along with, of course, other metaphysical principles).

11. It is widely affirmed by traditional theists who accept evolution that God could have created the world in another way. For example, Ernan McMullin, whose view of the relation between God and evolution is similar to Hasker’s (see Ch. 3 of my Religion and Scientific Naturalism), says that although God has chosen to work through natural or secondary causes, "God could also, if He so chose, relate to His creation in a different way" (76-77).

12. Hasker mentions (his note 3) that he is indebted to David Basinger’s writings. This indebtedness may extend to the present problem. In an article written with his brother (Randall), Basinger argues that traditional free will theism, if consistently thought through, ends up with the same implications for the relation between God and nature as does process theism. However, as I showed in Evil Revisited (90-94), this argument relies on principles drawn from the philosophical theology of F R. Tennant, whose position on the God-world relation is essentially the same as Whitehead’s. Like Hasker, the Basingers try to defend their supernaturalistic theism in terms of principles that make sense only within the framework of a naturalistic theism.

13. I developed the distinction between theological and cosmological freedom, with Augustine’s position in view, in Ch. 7 of my God and Religion in the Postmodern World.

14. I do worry, however, that Hasker’s insertion of the word directly signals his belief that God decreed it indirectly.

15. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga’s "Reply to the Basingers on Divine Omnipotence" (28).

Works Cited

Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.

Cobb, John B., Jr., and Clark H. Pinnock, eds. Searching for an Adequate God: A Dialogue between Process and Free Will Theists. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000.

Griffin, David Ray "Creation out of Chaos and the Problem of Evil." Ed. Stephen T. Davis. Encountering Evil, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Westminster/ John Knox, 2001. 108-144.

____ Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations. Albany: State U of New York P, 1991.

____ God and Religion in the Postmodern World. Albany: State U of New York P, 1988.

God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976; reprinted with a new preface, Lanham: Md.: UP of America, 1991.

_____ Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001.

_____ Religion and Scientific Naturalism. Overcoming the Conflicts. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000.

Hick, John H. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Harper, 1966.

McMullin, Ernan. "Plantinga’s Defense of Special Creation." Christian Scholars Review 21.1 (1991): 55-79.

Pinnock, Clark, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger. The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994.

Plantinga, Alvin. "Reply to the Basingers on Divine Omnipotence." Process Studies 11.1 (1981): 25-29.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. 1929. Corrected Edition. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

James Lindsey’s essay on the subjectivist principle (PS 6:97-102) first came to my attention in an earlier version in Connection with my role as co-editor of the Corrected Edition of Process and Reality. Lindsey’s essay contains some proposals for textual changes; insofar as my essay is a response to his, it is limited to the matters related to these proposals. (Hence I do not deal with his main point, concerning Whitehead’s diagnosis of modern philosophy’s malady.) My response takes the form of an alternative interpretation of some of the variants of ‘subjectivism.’ Since this is more of an independent essay, with the response to Lindsey made in passing, rather than a point-by-point reply, it may be helpful to summarize in advance the problems in Lindsey’s view which my own interpretation avoids (I summarize the problems I see in my own position at the end of the essay):

1. Lindsey’s view requires that the text be changed at PR 253.24-25 (lines as well as pages are given for easy reference) from ‘subjectivist principle’ to ‘subjectivist bias’ (PS 6:98). This is not an error that could easily be explained, e.g., as a misreading or a typing or printing error.

2. Lindsey’s view requires that the text at PR 252.35 be changed from ‘subjectivist principle’ to ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ (PS 6:-101).

3. On Lindsey’s view the term ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ is a misnomer, since the principle in question involves not a reformation but a complete rejection of the ‘subjectivist principle’ (PS 6:101).

4. On Lindsey’s interpretation, the chapter title "The Subjectivist Principle," refers only to a principle which Whitehead completely rejects, something that is not true of any of his other chapter titles.

5. On Lindsey’s view the only referent of the ‘subjectivist principle’ is a principle which is on par with the ‘sensationalist principle,’ since the two of them combine to constitute the ‘sensationalist doctrine.’ Hence his view implies that Whitehead arbitrarily took the name of one of these two subordinate principles for the chapter title.

My central and (as far as I know) novel claim is that Whitehead uses the term ‘subjectivist principle’ in two ways: one use refers to a principle which he rejects, while the second refers to a more general principle which he accepts. Supporting this thesis and responding to Lindsey’s position requires considerable scholastic thrashing about. But I believe the importance of getting clear about Whitehead’s use of ‘subjectivist principle’ and other variants of ‘subjectivism’ is sufficient to justify this scholastic analysis, since the issues signified by these terms (and the variants of ‘sensationalism,’ which are discussed in notes 1 and 2), are at the heart of Whitehead’s epistemological revolution.

Analysis of Terms

The Subjectivist Principle,): Whitehead begins the chapter entitled "The Subjectivist Principle" by pointing out that the ‘sensationalist doctrine’ (which is a way of summing up Hume’s doctrine of ‘impressions of sensation’) is composed of two subordinate principles, the ‘subjectivist principle’ and the ‘sensationalist principle.’ The latter concerns the manner in which the datum in the act of experience is initially received.’ The former says that "the datum in the act of experience can be adequately analysed purely in terms of universals" (PR 239.3-5). Hume and Kant accepted this subjectivist principle, while Locke and Descartes held it inconsistently (PR 238.13-25, 239.32-34). Whitehead rejects it, affirming that the datum includes actual entities, not just eternal objects.

Since these definitions occur at the beginning of the chapter, it has been natural for readers to assume that the subjectivist principle as defined here is the subjectivist principle with which the chapter is concerned (and hence to which the chapter title refers). However, I believe that the subjectivist principle as defined here (PR 239.3-5), i.e., as stating that the datum of experience involves only universals and hence no actualities, is only one of two subjectivist principles which Whitehead has in mind. Since this one concerns the datum of experience, I refer to it as ‘the subjectivist principle.’

The fact that it is not the only subjectivist principle is suggested by the italicized words in this quotation: "It is only by the introduction of covert inconsistencies into the subjectivist principle, as here stated, that there can be any escape from what Santayana calls, ‘solipsism of the present moment’" (PR 240.3-7; italics added). Furthermore, the fact that there is a subjectivist principle which applies to the datum and another one which applies to something else is suggested by the fact that Whitehead sometimes speaks of "the subjectivist principle as to the datum" (PR 239.33-34; cf. 242.24-25). I turn now to that other subjectivist principle, which is synonymous with the ‘subjectivist doctrine.’

The Subjectivist Principle, The Subjectivist Doctrine: The subjectivist principle which Whitehead accepts deals with the nature of reality as a whole (hence I call it ‘the subjectivist principle,’): "The subjectivist principle is that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experience of subjects" (PR 252.35-37). It is this principle to which Whitehead refers when he says: "The difficulties of all schools of modern philosophy lie in the fact that, having accepted the subjectivist principle, they continue to use philosophical categories derived from another point of view" (PR 253.23-26). (These are the two passages which, on Lindsey’s interpretation, must be altered.) The ‘philosophical categories’ he has in mind are, as Lindsey stresses, clearly the "substance-quality categories" which "have lost all claim to any fundamental character in metaphysics" if the "subjectivist bias which entered into modern philosophy through Descartes" is accepted (PR 241.17-18, 34-37). (The ‘subjectivist bias,’ which, I believe, logically follows from the subjectivist principle, will be discussed below.)

Identical with the subjectivist principle is the ‘subjectivist doctrine’: "The consideration of experiential togetherness raises the final metaphysical question: whether there is any other meaning of ‘togetherness.’ The denial of any alternative meaning . . . is the ‘subjectivist’ doctrine" (PR 288.26-31). This subjectivist doctrine is explicitly accepted by Whitehead (note the parenthetical phrase, "as here stated," which provides further evidence that he was aware of using ‘subjectivism’ in different senses): "The philosophy of organism admits the subjectivist doctrine (as here stated), but rejects the sensationalist doctrine: hence its doctrine of the objectification of one actual occasion in the experience of another actual occasion" (PR 290.1-5). The ‘sensationalist doctrine’ includes, it will be recalled, the ‘subjectivist principle’; in fact, most of the places where Whitehead writes ‘the sensationalist doctrine’ (or simply ‘sensationalism’), he has the subjectivist principle,) principally or even exclusively in mind.² Whitehead is here contrasting his position with Kant, who accepted not only the subjectivist doctrine (i.e., the subjectivist principle), but also the subjectivist principle:

This, together with the previously quoted passage, suggests that there is a general subjectivist position which Whitehead accepts along with modern philosophy in general, but that there are two forms of this subjectivism, depending upon the analysis of the datum of experience. In other words, there are ‘reformed’ and ‘unreformed’ versions of the subjectivist doctrine. The unreformed version, accepted by Hume and Kant (note the phrase, "his form of the subjectivist doctrine," in the previous quotation), and inconsistently by Locke and Descartes, involves the subjectivist principle. I will discuss Whitehead’s ‘reformed’ version of the subjectivist doctrine after discussion of the ‘subjectivist bias.’

The Subjectivist Bias: This term refers to the data for philosophy (as Lindsey says):

Two pages later Whitehead refers to "Descartes’ discovery that subjective experiencing is the primary metaphysical situation which is presented to metaphysics for analysis" (PR 243.14-16).

Since the ‘subjectivist bias’ deals with the data for philosophy, it is not strictly identical with the subjectivist principles (or doctrine). But it is closely related, and logically follows from it. If there is no togetherness not based upon "togetherness in experience" (PR 288.19), so that "the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experience of subjects" (PR 252.35-36), it follows that the primary data for the philosopher should be the "subjects enjoying conscious experiences" (PR 241.14). Hence, after stating the subjectivist principles, Whitehead adds: "It follows that the philosophy of organism entirely accepts the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy" (PR 253.1-2; italics added). (My claim here is only that the subjectivist bias logically follows from the subjectivist principles, not that historically the former had to wait upon an explicit recognition of the latter.)

The Reformed Subjectivist Doctrine, The Reformed Subjectivist Principle: This is a doctrine about both the nature of reality and the datum of experience. It is a reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine (i.e., the subjectivist principle), the ‘reformation’ consisting in the fact that (unlike the unreformed version) the datum of experience is taken to include actual entities. Whitehead first discusses the reformed subjectivist principle in the context of the subjectivist bias (which, as we have seen, logically follows from the subjectivist principle). He contrasts his position on the datum of experience with Hume, who "discarded the objective actuality of the stone-image" (Descartes ‘realitas objectiva’) in favor of "sensation of greyness" (PB 242.15-23).

In the next paragraph, he adds: "Descartes’ discovery on the side of subjectivism requires balancing by an ‘objectivist’ principle as to the datum for experience" (PR 243.26-28).

The fact that the reform involved in the reformed subjectivist doctrine has to do with an objectivist view of the datum is further supported by the statement that "The reformed subjectivist principle... is merely an alternative statement of the principle of relativity" (PB 252.22-24). This principle, which states that "it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’" (PR 252.25-27), is usually used by Whitehead to stress that actual beings are experienced (PR 33.29-32; 42.9-17; 71.19-24; 79.29-35; 101.29-36; 224.8-14; 226.18-22; 340.17-21; 371.18-24). And that point is made in the passage in question: "The way in which one actual entity is qualified by other actual entities is the ‘experience’ of the actual world enjoyed by that actual entity, as subject" (PR 252.32-34).

Summary Of Advantages

The above interpretation of the variants of ‘subjectivism’ has several advantages. It not only allows the chapter title to refer to a principle which Whitehead accepts, and to a general principle rather than to a subordinate principle which is merely one of two parts of the sensationalist doctrine. It also allows the reformed subjectivist principle (or doctrine) indeed to be a reformed version of a subjectivist principle, i.e., of the subjectivist principle. If, on the contrary, the subjectivist principle were taken to be defined at PR 239.3-5, then the reformed subjectivist principle, which is concerned with an objectivist view of the datum, is not a reformation of it but a complete rejection of it (as Lindsey sees, PS 6:10 1). Finally, my view avoids the need for textual changes at PR 252.35 and 253.24-25.

Textual Problems

However, my interpretation does require one minor textual change. ‘This’ needs to be changed to ‘The’ at the beginning of the last sentence of the following paragraph:

As it presently reads, the ‘subjectivist’ doctrine is equated with the ‘reformed subjectivist doctrine,’ whereas my view of Whitehead’s meaning is that many modern philosophers (including Kant, who is in view here) accept the subjectivist doctrine, as here defined, while the reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine’ is not accepted by them. The change of ‘This’ to ‘The’ would have the text make this distinction. (The printing of ‘This’ instead of ‘The’ is easily explainable as the typist’s misreading of Whitehead’s handwriting, whereas the errors Lindsey thinks are present elsewhere are not so easily explainable.)

The interpretation which entails this change makes sense of the present paragraph as an anticipation of the contrasts to be described in the following four paragraphs. In this paragraph (as emended), Whitehead defines the subjectivist principle, and announces that he accepts thc reformed version of it. Then, in the first paragraph following it, he describes the epistemological problem which arises if one assumes that there is a nonexperiential togetherness.

In the second paragraph, he says that this difficulty is the point of Kant’s ‘transcendental’ criticism. Note: he means that Kant recognized the difficulty and that this recognition is the basis of his critical philosophy; Whitehead does not mean that Kant has this difficulty, i.e., that he accepted a nonexperiential togetherness -- Whitehead speaks elsewhere of the chaos (i.e., nontogetherness) of the data of experience for Kant (PB 111.23-30; 172.31-35; 379.37-380.1). The point of the paragraph is that Kant accepted the subjectivist principle, but not the reformed version of it: "He adopted a subjectivist position, so that the temporal world was merely experienced. But according to his form of the subjectivist doctrine... no element in the temporal world could itself be an experient" (PR 289.6-10; italics added).

In the third paragraph, Whitehead explains the source of Kant’s problem: "The difficulties of the subjectivist doctrine arise when it is combined with the ‘sensationalist’ doctrine concerning the analysis of the components which are together in experience" (PR 289.15-18). By the ‘sensationalist doctrine’ here, Whitehead has in mind the subjectivist principle) (since Kant rejects the other half of the sensationalist doctrine, i.e., the sensationalist principle): This means that the datum of experience contains no actualities and hence no entities which could be affirmed to be experients in their own right.

Finally, in the fourth paragraph, Whitehead states the two-fold point which had been anticipated back in the paragraph in question (i.e., if the emendation I am suggesting is accepted): "The philosophy of organism admits the subjectivist doctrine (as here stated), but rejects the sensationalist doctrine: hence its doctrine of the objectification oi one actual occasion in the experience of another actual occasion" (PR 290.1-5). This means that Whitehead accepts the subjectivist principle, but that he rejects the subjectivist principle; hence, lie accepts the reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine. He next states how the resulting doctrine of the temporal world differs from Kant’s, who had to regard it as phenomenal: "Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope" (PR 290.5-6). Whitehead then points out how this metaphysical position, which is implied by the reformed subjectivist principle, overcomes the epistemological and metaphysical difficulties regarding the truth and falsehood of propositions which have plagued other views (cf. PR 288.2-16).

That concludes the justification for distinguishing the ‘subjectivist principle’ and the ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ in the way I have, and hence for changing ‘This’ at PR 288.31 to ‘The.’

One other apparent textual problem remains for my interpretation. At the close of the chapter entitled "The Subjectivist Principle" Whitehead writes: "Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PB 254.3-6). The problem is that this seems to be merely a restatement of the subjectivist principle; it seems to state nothing about the datum of a subject’s experience, and hence seems not to be a restatement of the reformed subjectivist principle as I have interpreted it.

However, this statement can be read as differing from the formulations of the subjectivist principle. The formulation at PR 252.35-37 states that the "whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects;" that leaves open the possibility that the "elements disclosed" might be mere universals. But the statement at PR 254.3-6 about the reformed subjectivist principle says that there is nothing apart from the experiences of subjects; hence the data themselves have to be subjects or abstracted from subjects. Thus it can be read as a statement about the datum of an experience. The statement at PR 288.26-31 about the subjectivist principle says only that there is no meaning to ‘togetherness’ which is not abstracted from ‘experiential togetherness;’ it leaves open the possibility that there could be some nontogether because nonexperiential elements in the universe, e.g., Kant’s chaotic data. But the statement at PR 254.3-6 about the reformed subjectivist principle says that there is nothing in the universe apart from the experiences of subjects; hence if a subject’s experience has data (which none of the philosophers in question denies), these data must be other experiencing subjects or abstracted from the same. Accordingly, this statement can also be regarded as a statement about the data of experience and thereby a formulation of the reformed subjectivist principle.

Therefore, the subjectivist principle can be seen as distinct not only from the subjectivist principle, but also from the reformed subjectivist principle, and hence as the central topic of the chapter entitled "The Subjectivist Principle."

Problems with my View

While the above interpretation makes more sense to me of the various data than any other view I now know of, it has its problems. I will state in summary form the ones that are evident to me.

1. If Whitehead did have in mind a distinction between two meanings of the ‘subjectivist principle,’ one would expect him to have distinguished more clearly between them. I have shown that some of his language does give hints of a distinction, but one would have expected a clearer, terminological distinction.

2. If Whitehead indeed intended the chapter title, "The Subjectivist Principle," to refer to a principle which he endorsed, one would have expected the chapter to have begun somewhat differently.

3. If the reformed subjectivist principle is indeed a reformed version of a more general subjectivist principle, the word ‘This’ at PB 288.31 must be changed to ‘The.’

4. Also a somewhat forced interpretation of the statement at PR 254.3-6 is needed to maintain a distinction between the reformed subjectivist principle and the subjectivist principle.

These problems do not seem so formidable as to rule out the interpretation I have offered; but they are great enough to make me hope that a less problematic view can be attained. Hence, my essay is offered with the hope that it will prod others to seek a better interpretation.

Notes

1 Lindsey’s essay reflects a misunderstanding of the ‘sensationalist principle.’ He sees it as concerned directly with the datum as such (PS 6:100). But the definition at PR 239.6-9 states that it is concerned with the ‘primary activity’ on the part of the experiencing subject in entertaining the datum, i.e., it denies that this primary activity involves any subjective form of reception. This (Humean) sensationalist principle says that one first entertains ‘impressions of sensation’ and only derivatively has forms of response to them, such as emotional and purposive reactions. Whitehead’s clearest rejection of this principle is the following statement: "Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvey fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon Hume’s impressions of sensation" (PR 246.13-16). In support of his view that the sensationalist principle concerns the datum of experience, Lindsey cites Adventures of Ideas, chapter 11, paragraph 7. But this passage concerns the ‘sensationalist doctrine,’ which contains both the subjectivist principle (see my discussion in the text, below), which does deal directly with the datum, and the sensationalist principle. The statement that summarizes the sensationalist principle says "that our emotional and purposive experience is a reflective reaction derived from the original perception . . ." (AI 228).

The view that this principle deals with the question of the subject’s activity in receiving data is further supported by the fact that Locke is said to have affirmed this principle, while Kant is said to have rejected it (PR 238.18-19, 23-25). Locke, of course, is famous for speaking of the mind as an ‘empty cabinet’ (cf. PR 83n, 84.30-32), while Kant thought of the mind as receiving the data from the outset in terms of certain subjective forms, e.g., ‘forms of intuition’ (cf. PR 111.23-26).

However, there is one passage which sup orts the view that the ‘sensationalist principle’ is concerned with the datum as such. In discussing Hume’s rejection of the objective actuality of the stone-image in the datum of experience, Whitehead says: "He is aware of ‘this sensation of greyness.’ What he has done is to assert arbitrarily the ‘subjectivist’ and ‘sensationalist’ principles as applying to the datum for experience: the notion ‘this sensation of greyness’ has no reference to any other actual entity" (PR 242.22-26). This passage seems to say that the sensationalist principle, as well as the subjectivist principle, involves the question of whether or not the datum of experience includes actualities. The proper interpretation, I believe, is that the sensationalist principle directly involves the issue of the subjective form of response to the datum, and indirectly involves the datum itself.

Discussions of the sensationalist principle directly concern the issue as to whether the subject’s initial response to its datum is devoid of a subjective form. The denial of this sensationalist principle does not strictly require the denial of the subjectivist principle and hence the affirmation of the direct objectification of actual entities. This is shown by the fact that Kant held the subjectivist principle and yet denied the sensationalist principle. However, the ‘subjective forms’ of response which Kant affirms are radically different from the ones which Whitehead has in mind in his own way of denying the sensationalist principle. For Kant, the subjective forms are conceptual forms, and ones which are not affirmed to be conformal to the things-in-themselves beyond the experience. But for Whitehead the subjective forms are first of all emotional forms, and ones which are thought to he conformal to the actual entities constituting the initial data of the experience. Hence, in regard to Whitehead’s own way of rejecting the sensationalist principle, the question of the nature of the datum is involved. The affirmation that the subject’s initial reaction to the datum involves subjective forms requires (for Whitehead’s particular way of affirming this) that this datum contain actual entities. The connection between the nonderivative status of subjective forms and the nature of the datum is shown clearly in the following statement: "Hume and Locke, with the overintellectualist bias prevalent among philosophers, assume that emotional feelings are necessarily derivative from sensations. This is conspicuously not the case; . . . . Emotions conspicuously brush aside sensations and fasten upon ‘particular’ objects to which -- in Locke’s phrase -- certain ‘ideas’ are ‘determined.’ The confinement of our prehension of other actual entities to the mediation of private sensations is pure myth. The converse doctrine is nearer the truth: the more primitive mode of objectification is via emotional tone, and only in exceptional organisms does objectification, via sensation, supervene with any effectiveness. We prehend other actual entities more primitively by direct mediation of emotional tone, and only secondarily and waveringly by direct mediation of sense" (PR 214.5-31). This explains why Whitehead can refer to the ‘sensationalist’ principle as applying to the datum (P11 242.23-25). ‘Sensations’ are data in the mode of presentational immediacy. The sensa which were felt in the mode of causal efficacy as emotional forms are transmuted by the mode of presentational immediacy into forms characterizing external nexus (PR 174.6-11, 446.16-33, 496.21-27). In this mode, i.e., as sensations, the emotional aspect tends to be played down in favor of the geometric aspect. Accordingly, we tend not to be conscious of the emotional nature of the sensa (PR 246.32-36, 247.3-5, 480.11-13). Hence, if sensations are taken to be the primary datum in the act of experience, it will be natural to think in terms of a bare entertainment of the datum and to assume that emotions arise only secondarily. Therefore, since Whitehead himself thinks of the fundamental subjective forms with which we receive the datum as emotional, he can regard the question of whether one is a sensationalist as virtually settled by one’s position on the nature of the primary datum of experience. Hence in the passage in question he could speak as if the sensationalist principle directly concerned the datum itself. But the example of Kant shows that one’s position on the datum does not completely settle the question as to whether one is a sensationalist, and thereby that the sensationalist principle does not directly concern the datum of experience, but the status of subjective forms of response to the datum.

Incidentally, this means that the term ‘sensationalist principle’ in the second sentence of the following passage must be erroneous: "Descartes held, with some flashes of inconsistency arising from the use of ‘realitas objectiva,’ the subjectivist principle as to the datum. But he also held that this mitigation of the sensationalist principle enabled the process’ within experience to include a sound argument for the existence of God" (PR 239.32-37. Since it is not the sensationalist principle, but the subjectivist principle, which is directly concerned with the issue as to whether there is any realitas objectiva (actual entity) in the datum of experience, Descartes’ occasional use of ‘realitas objectiva’ cannot he a mitigation of the sensationalist principle.

The passage would make sense if ‘sensationalist principle’ were changed either to ‘subjectivist principle’ or to ‘sensationalist doctrine.’ The fact that Descartes’ position was inconsistent, in that he only sometimes spoke of a realitas objectiva, would be a ‘mitigation’ of the subjectivist principle, i.e., that the datum of experience is exhaustively constituted by universals. Likewise, since the sensationalist doctrine includes the subjectivist principle as one of its two parts (and the one which is generally in view -- see note 2),it would equally be ‘mitigated’ by the occasional use of ‘realitus objectiva.’ (This suggested change is not included in the summary’ of the problems with my interpretation in comparison with Lindsey’s, since this point is not integral to the main points at issues.)

2 Of the 19 instances in PR of ‘sensationalism’ or ‘sensationalist’ (when it is followed by something other than ‘principle’), there are only three in which the sensationalist principle is centrally in view (PR 214.5-8, 221.19-22, and the definition of the sensationalist doctrine at 238.11). All of the other instances of ‘sensationalism’ or ‘sensationalist’ (as in ‘sensationalist doctrine’) have the ‘subjective principle’ primarily or exclusively in view (with the possible exception of PR viii. 25, which only’ mentions the doctrine). Here are some examples: (1) "Thus the philosophy of organism is . . . a doctrine of experience prehending actualities, in contrast with Hume’s sensationalist phenomenalism" (PR 114.24-28). (2) "Santayana would deny that ‘animal faith’ has in it any element of givenness. This denial is presumably made in deference to the sensationalist doctrine, that all knowledge of the external world arises by the mediation of private sensations" (PR 215.23-27). (3) "The philosophy’ of organism . . . rejects the sensationalist doctrine: hence its doctrine of the objectification of one actual occasion in the experience of another actual occasion" (P11 290.1-5). For the other instances, see PR 83, 89, 196, 205n, 220, 221, 223, 235, 237, 289, 371, and 379.

When Whitehead refers to Kant as a ‘sensationalist’ he has to have the ‘subjectivist principle’ not only primarily but exclusively in mind. For example, in discussing the fact that Locke sometimes affirmed a direct a p prehension of exterior things, Whitehead says: "The philosophy of organism here takes the opposite road to that taken alike by Descartes and by Kant. Both of these philosophers accepted (Descartes with hesitations, and Kant without question) the traditional subjectivist sensationalism, and assigned the intuition of ‘things without’ peculiarly to the intelligence" (PR 371.3-9). Here it is only the subjectivist principle which is in view. It is this principle about which Descartes has reservations (PR 117.29-36, 239.32-34). Most importantly, Kant is said to reject the sensationalist principle (as documented in note 1); so it can only be the subjectivist principle which he accepts "without question." This use of ‘sensationalism’ to refer exclusively’ to the subjectivist side of the sensationalist doctrine is shown also at PR 379.31-37, where Kant is considered a member of the "sensationalist school." The clearest example of this use is at PR 289.5-28, where Kant is discussed as one who accepted "the sensationalist’ doctrine concerning the analysis of the components which are together in experience." Again, since Kant rejects the sensationalist principle, Whitehead has to be thinking exclusively of the subjectivist principle when referring to Kant as an exponent of the sensationalist doctrine.

3 Of course, the subjectivist principle is also about the nature of reality as well as about the datum of experience, insofar as it is an unreformed version of the subjectivist principle, and thereby includes this more general principle.

4 The missing sentence indicated by the ellipsis reads: "But this doctrine fully accepts Descartes’ discovery that subjective experiencing is the primary metaphysical situation which is presented to metaphysics for analysis." Leaving out this sentence (which refers to the ‘subjective bias’) for the sake of clarity is justified, for the following sentence’s reference to ‘this doctrine’ is not a reference to the subjectivist bias. It is, rather, a reference back to the two previous sentences, to which the deleted sentence also referred with the words ‘this doctrine.’

5 See note 2.

In my response, I raised many questions about Hasker’s claim to have shown that traditional free will theism is on par with process theism in relation to the problem of evil. Hasker quite rightly points out that I made more criticisms than he could answer in the space allotted. Having recently faced the same problem,¹ I am sympathetic to the selectivity of response it requires. One approach is to focus on the criticisms that truly seem most formidable. Another approach is to try to poke holes in the criticisms that seem most easily answerable, thereby hoping to suggest that the remainder are similarly flawed. Hasker seems to have taken the latter approach. I will briefly point out why, from my admittedly biased perspective, his attempted refutations ("swats") do not succeed.

Hasker’s first complaint is that I should have realized that his "first version of the process argument against free will theism" was not attributed to me. But I am a process theologian and believe that my position on theodicy is consistent with that of process theologians more generally. So it is natural for me to assume that something presented as, in his present words, a "version of the process argument" would apply to me. I am still puzzled why he thinks some process theologians would make that argument.

Hasker next says that I was mistaken to say that his modified argument simply is my position because he adds the idea that humans would be aware of possessing only compatibilist free will. But there is nothing about this in the argument itself. That argument, which comes after his statement that "the argument would go as follows," is exactly my argument, namely, that the God of traditional theism could have created human-like beings without libertarian freedom, thereby avoiding all the evil due to human sin.

Hasker’s third argument challenges my statement that Descartes is "not so clearly on Hasker’s side" with regard to deception. Descartes does clearly affirm, in many places, that we are conscious of having libertarian freedom. But he also says that "nothing can possibly happen other than as providence has determined from all eternity" and that the idea that there is contingency in the world "is based solely on our not knowing all the causes which contribute to each effect."² Hasker is right to say that Descartes would not have (explicitly) "allowed that we are deceived by God about our free will." But my claim was only that this belief is implicit in Descartes’ position.

Hasker’s fourth argument involves my statement that, within a Hick-Hasker type of theism, it would be difficult to say whether its deity would be more blameworthy for deceiving us about the kind of freedom we have or for gratuitously giving us genuine, dangerous freedom. Hasker believes that my doubt about this means that I do not hold the ethical premise in m argument against free will theism to be clearly true. But my argument raises no question about the ethical premise that a perfectly good creator would want to avoid as much genuine evil as possible consistent with bringing about the greatest amount of positive value. It merely points out that within the framework of traditional theism it is difficult to say which of the two options would do less violence to that premise.

Hasker next suggests that my position on the nature of intrinsic value is counter-intuitive by concluding -- from my argument that within the Hick1-lasker type of theism our enjoyment of freedom could be the same whether we had real or only apparent freedom (as Hick himself had said) -- that I would hold that falsely thinking one is loved and knows the truth is "just as valuable" as really knowing the truth and really being loved, so that these latter relations are "not of any worth in themselves." But Hasker’s phrases are ambiguous: Although they can be regarded as equivalent to Whiteheadian "intrinsic value," which is the value of a moment of experience in and for itself, they can also be taken to point to the total value of something, which would include its "inherent value" in the sense of the tendency of something to produce intrinsic value, which is the kind of value involved in most of Hasker’s examples, and also its value for God. Really knowing the truth is good "in itself," therefore, although it does not increase the intrinsic value of an experience of believing something to be true. For example, Hasker’s belief that his theodicy is true contributes to the intrinsic value of his experience while he writes essays on the subject. But that value is the same whether his belief is true or false (although his later judgment that his belief had been false would change his estimation of the total value of that earlier enjoyment).

Hasker next complains that, having said that a position should be criticized in terms of its core doctrines, "not on the basis of views that may have been espoused by some adherents but are not essential to the position itself," I have criticized him in terms of ethical views that he has disclaimed. In the passage at issue, however, I simply said that "[m]y question to [Hasker] is whether my argument [against Hick] does not tell against the adequacy of his position as well." We would be better able to answer that question if Hasker had told us exactly which views often held by other traditional free will theists he has abjured.

Against my claim that the God of traditional theism could have created a world with a much greater balance of good over evil than ours has, Hasker suggests that the imagined values of such a world may not really be compossible. But even though Hasker denies it (note 5), he does thereby seem to be implicitly presupposing metaphysical principles that God cannot surmount -- something that Leibniz, whose position the word "compossibility" evokes, did not do, clearly stating that God could have created a world without any sin or suffering.³

With regard to cosmological and theological freedom, I overstated in saying that the former is, within the framework of traditional theism, completely irrelevant to the latter. But Hasker ignored my main point, which is whether his deity, not needing to give theological freedom to nonhuman animals, was wise to have done so.

With regard to when the traditional deity should intervene, Hasker alleges that I say there is no need for a criterion. In response to Hasker’s fourth proposition, however, I argued against his contention that the notion of gratuitous evil does not provide the needed criterion.

In relation to the discussion of "psychological appeal," Hasker argues that the issue of philosophical adequacy is more important but that, insofar as one does consider popular appeal, one needs to "deal with the actual situation," which is that "the vast majority of Christians" affirm traditional theism. That is true of people who are still Christian. But part of the "actual situation" is that many people in what was once Christendom, in which traditional theism had a virtual monopoly on the meaning of "God," have moved to atheism. This move has been especially striking among intellectuals, who are presumably best able to evaluate the philosophical adequacy of a position.

Hasker, finally, claims that it is not question-begging to say that "we should not suppose that it is up to us to determine which are the situations in which God ought to intervene." That would be true if we already knew that Hasker’s God existed. But it is question-begging to use that argument to defend the very existence of such a deity against the appearances (which is very different from Whiteheadians using their principles to illuminate the appearances). Hasker believes, of course, that his idea of God corresponds to the real God, so he is naturally upset by criticisms of his idea of God, because he regards these as criticisms of the very Creator to whom we owe our existence. From my Whiteheadian perspective, however, his reaction simply illustrates the importance of making known our new vision of our Creator, so that more people will realize that they are not limited to the choice between traditional theism and atheism.

Notes

1. I refer to an exchange I had with Robert Segal and Samuel Preus in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2000).

2. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. For a discussion of Descartes’ failure to reconcile his theism with our experienced freedom, see Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism.

3. See my God, Power, and Evil, 133-34.

Works Cited

Griffin, David Ray, Robert Segal and Samuel Preus. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 68 (2000): 99-149.

Descartes, Rene. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. I. Ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothof. and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge UP, 1984. 379-80.

Marion, Jean-Luc. On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosby. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999.

The primary purpose of this essay is to defend the "s" word -- speculation. My thesis is that for Christian theology to do its job in our day it must not only seek to be both fully empirical and fully rational, but that it must also be speculative, partly because speculation is inherent to Christian theology as such (in any day), and partly because speculation is necessary if the ideals of being fully empirical and fully rational are to be conjoined.

By "fully empirical" I mean being adequate to all the fads of experience. By "fully rational" I mean achieving coherence or self-consistency (which, for the purposes of this essay, I equate), having no beliefs that contradict other beliefs or logical deductions therefrom. (The terms "empiricism" and "rationalism" both have other connotations. One can speak of genetic, conceptual, and justificatory empiricism, for example, and rationalism can be understood as the search for a system that is necessary as well as self -consistent. I address these issues in section VII) Combining these two ideals, into rational empiricism or empirical rationalism, means that one cannot achieve rational coherence by simply denying or ignoring some facts of experience, and that one cannot achieve empirical adequacy by being inconsistent (even if inconsistency is re-labeled paradox, mystery, or ambiguity, and referred to in hallowed tones). By being "speculative" I mean forming hypotheses about what things are in themselves (including how they are related to other things), in distinction from how they appear to us. Speculative thought thereby stands in contrast with purely positivistic and phenomenological approaches. I will first explain why theology today must be fully empirical and fully rational, then come to the question of why it must also be speculative.

I. Why Theology Today Must be Fully Empirical and Rational

The theological task today involves (among other things -- see section VIII) trying to develop a self-consistent worldview that is adequate to all the facts of experience. Theology today must make this attempt in order to fulfill its task of defending the truth of the beliefs involved in Christian faith. I take for granted here the notion that Christian faith involves cognitive content -- meaning propositions capable of being true -- and that Christian theology involves the defense of their truth.

The former point, that Christian faith involves cognitive propositions, does not imply that any particular doctrines, meaning verbal formulations, belong to a self-identical essence of Christian faith that has endured for twenty centuries. It does not even imply the same for any propositions, that is, the meanings which verbal statements seek to express and evoke, except for a few highly vague, abstract ones. The point is that Christian faith is not reducible to a noncognitive "blik," or to a subjective form (fides qua creditur) alone. Beneath the various attempts to articulate the content of Christian faith lies a "vision of reality" with implications for beliefs about God, the world in general, human existence in particular, and even some historical events, especially about Jesus. Any attempt to "explicate" Christian faith must, to be adequate to it. contain doctrines about these realities.

The reason that theology must develop a worldview intended to pass the tests of adequacy and consistency is that the method of authority is no longer tenable.

Under the method of authority, the theologian argued that the content of Christian theology was true because it was guaranteed extrinsically. We could believe Christian doctrines because they came in undistorted form from God, through divinely inspired prophets and the Son of God himself, and then (to us) through infallibly inspired scriptures and possibly an infallibly inspired church. The truth of all this was usually argued through proofs from prophecy and miracles, sometimes in conjunction with other evidences." In any case, because the truth of Christian doctrines was vouchsafed extrinsically, they did not have to prove themselves by their intrinsic convincingness. The Christian story, with its worldview, did not have to be, in Plato’s sense, the intrinsically most likely tale to be worthy of belief. It could contain doctrines that were not inherently understandable (such as the doctrine of the trinity), or that seemed to be self-contradictory (such as the full humanity and deity of Jesus), or that were contradicted by other doctrines (as, for example, human freedom by divine predestination, or God’s omnipotent goodness by human sin). The Christian story and worldview could also include assertions that went against ideas that otherwise seemed very probably true (such as that the sun cannot "stand still," or that this is not "the best of all possible worlds"). Christian beliefs, in other words, were not to be believed because of their adequacy to all the facts of experience and their self-consistency; indeed, the fact that Christian faith included "mysteries" which soared above human reason, or even ran counter to it, was usually counted as a strength, showing that it was more than merely human wisdom. This is not to say that Christianity was not in fact accepted in part because of its intrinsic convincingness; after all, Christian theology from the beginning was always adequate to many facts of experience, and was always formulated in a somewhat coherent way. But it ultimately rested its case not on intrinsic convincingness but on extrinsic authority. Christian theology was true because it was revealed by God.

Because the method of authority is no longer tenable, theology must now rest its claim to truth on its intrinsic convincingness. This means that lobe acceptable it must seem to be more (or at least not less) self-consistent and adequate to all the recognized facts of experience than any rival hypothesis.

A third criterion, distinguishable from what is often meant by adequacy and coherence, is illuminating power. This is the power of a hypothesis to illuminate previously unrecognized facts of experience and/or to show how seemingly contradictory facts are compatible. In science this criterion is referred to by such terms as predictive power, fecundity, or fertility. In philosophy, theology, and ordinary life we speak of "revelation," "insight," and the "aha" or "eureka" experience. Theories that first led to new discoveries are usually favored over subsequent theories that can give an equally coherent account of the same facts, which is why this criterion is usually distinguished from the other two. But in reality a theory’s predictive power is no more evidence of its truth than its retrodictive power. Accordingly, illuminating power can either be considered a distinct criterion, or it can be subsumed under adequacy and coherence taken together and comprehensively. I will accordingly sometimes mention it but not treat it as a fully distinct criterion. In any case, the main point is that theology now must rest its case for the truth of the Christian faith upon the intrinsic convincingness of a Christian worldview, and this requires fulfilling the criteria of adequacy and coherence.

II. Adequacy to the Facts and Hard-Core Commonsense Ideas

Before coming to the question of the necessity for speculation, I must deal with the fact (!) that the criterion of "adequacy to the facts of experience" is a problematic notion. In philosophical circles today, it is often dismissed as a false or even meaningless ideal. It is widely claimed that this criterion is purely circular, because what the so-called facts of experience are is entirely a function of one’s theory. All observational facts are theory-dependent, it is said; they therefore do not provide an independent criterion with which to adjudicate between theories. The fact that my theory takes account of my facts in a coherent way cuts no ice in relation to a theory that cannot deal with some of my facts, because for that theory they are not facts. Another way of formulating this theory about the relation between theory and facts is to speak of "the myth of the given." This phrase uses "myth" to mean an illusion, a false idea. Experience includes no "given" element, it is claimed, meaning an element that is received or encountered prior to interpretation. On the basis of the recognition that a language embodies interpretations, philosophers often make this point by denying the existence of any prelinguistic experience. In any case, on this theory it makes no sense to speak of one’s theory or interpretation as being adequate to some "facts of experience" as if experience included some preinterpreted facts. The notion of truth as "correspondence of (interpretative) idea to (preinterpreted, given) reality" therefore makes no sense. Truth must mean coherence, at best, or what our peers will let us get away with, at worst. But whatever it means, it cannot mean correspondence of theory to fact.

That many modern philosophers of our time have come to this conclusion should be no surprise to anyone who has studied Whitehead. The quintessential feature of distinctively modern philosophy is, for him, the subjectivist analysis of the datum of experience, according to which it contains nothing but one’s own ideas, nothing but universals, qualities. According to this analysis, in other words, no actualities are given to experience. Taken to its logical conclusion, as it was by Santayana, this view means that we are locked up in "solipsism of the present moment." Why we all inevitably interpret some of our ideas as having referents, as deriving from and pointing to actualities beyond our experience, is therefore a big mystery. Instead of assuming that some of our ideas are symbols, pointing to actualities beyond ourselves, why do we not assume that they point, if point they must, only to other symbols? That is, of course, the conclusion to which many deconstructionists have come. Signs point only to other signs. Reference is deconstructed. Truth can therefore at best be the coherence among signs.

Whitehead surely devotes more of his philosophical writing to this issue than to any other. The source of the problem, as he sees it, is this set of assumptions: that those elements that are prior (clearest) in consciousness are genetically primitive, that sensory data are the most primitive data of experience, that the elements of experience most clearly expressed by language are the most primitive, and that conscious introspection is the best way to identify the most fundamental elements of experience. On the basis of these assumptions, he says, it is no surprise that philosophers cannot find any "given" elements. Although experience begins with given data, it is an extremely complex process of self-construction, in which these given data are overlaid, in fact virtually swamped, by partially autonomous valuations, supplementations, modifications, integrations, interpretations, accentuations, and diminutions. This is especially the case in high-level experience, such as moments of human experience in which consciousness arises. And when this consciousness does arise it tends to light up the later products of this constructive process most clearly, such as sensory data, which are "secondary qualities," being produced by experience more than given to it. Consciousness tends to leave the earliest phases of experience, with its given elements, largely in the dark. Because of this, and because human experience is so complex, conscious introspection is not the best way to examine experience for its most fundamental elements. Assuming that experience does have given, universal dimensions, a better way to identify them is to look for elements that seem to be presupposed in all human practice.

Whitehead believes that such elements can be identified, and that they should constitute the ultimate criteria against which all philosophical construction is to be checked (PR 13/19, 151/229). These presuppositions of practice are the most fundamental of the "facts" to which systematic theory should be adequate. I have come to call these presuppositions of practice "hard-core commonsense ideas." I use "common sense," as did the commonsense philosophers, to mean that sense common to all humanity. But the term nowaways usually connotes, in the words of my dictionary, a "set of general unexamined assumptions," and these are for the most part simply the parochial prejudices of one’s time and place. It was once common sense that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the earth, and it is now common sense that molecules do not have feelings and that a healthy economic system requires continual growth. Accordingly I refer to this kind of common sense as "soft-core," because it can be changed, and the kind in which I am interested as "hard-core," because it cannot, Of course, hard-core commonsense truths can be denied verbally, but they will nevertheless continue to be presupposed in practice. For example, the idea that our present actions are partly free, not being wholly determined by causes external to the person at that moment, is often denied in theory; determinists are legion. But all determinists reveal that they presuppose, in the practice of living -- including the practice of espousing their determinism -- that they and other people are partially free. It is because these hard-core commonsense notions cannot consistently be denied that they should be considered the ultimate "facts" to which theory should be conformed, and in terms of which the conflicts between competing theories should be adjudicated. Although various theories may be in some respects incommensurate, the various theorists will all in practice share these presuppositions, so they can and should provide a common standard of measurement.

What are some of these universal presuppositions of practice? I have already mentioned freedom. A complementary presupposition is causation, meaning the real influence of one thing upon another. Anyone attempting to persuade others that we have no knowledge of causality would show in that very act that this knowledge was being presupposed. An adequate philosophy, then, can neither deny causal influence nor consider it all-determining, at least on human experience. Another idea always presupposed in practice is the reality of time, meaning the distinction between a settled past, a settling present, and a partly unsettled future. (Time thus understood is in fact implied in the above notions of causality and freedom.) Any worldview that denies the ultimate reality of time, or that contains a doctrine implying this unreality (such as a doctrine of determinism, or of immutable omniscience), is ipso facto in tension with something we all inevitably presuppose in practice. Another presupposition is the reality of an actual world beyond ourselves; no adequate philosophy can deny or even doubt this fact. (The silliness of solipsism is revealed by the story of the professor who, after announcing that he was a solipsist, heard a member of the audience say, "Thank God, I was afraid I was the only one!") Closely related to the notion of an actual world beyond our present experience is the notion of truth as correspondence between our ideas of the world and that world itself. Every attempt to deny that truth in this sense is meaningful presupposes this notion; for example, the denial that there is a given element in experience is a claim that this description of our experience somehow corresponds, more closely than competing accounts, to the true nature of our experience. Also closely related to the notion of actuality, in fact correlative with it, is the notion of possibility. We all presuppose that at least some events could have turned out differently than they did, which means that other possibilities could have been actualized. (This presupposition is contained in the presupposition of freedom.) Closely related to this notion of alternative possibilities is the distinction between better and worse possibilities. The universal emotions of shame, guilt, anger, resentment, and regret presuppose that something worse than the best real possibility is often brought about. Included in this distinction is the awareness that our world is not, at least in its concrete details, the best of all possible worlds. Also related to better and worse, in turn, is the notion of importance -- the assumption that some things are important, and some things more important than others. Also related are the twin notions of intrinsic value, meaning that which is good in and for itself, and instrumental value, meaning that which is good insofar as it contributes to intrinsic value. The idea of the holy and of ultimate meaning comprise another set of closely related presuppositions. By the holy I mean an intrinsic value that is ultimate and nonderivative. The presupposition of ultimate meaning is the presupposition that what we do and experience somehow makes an ultimate, permanent difference.

Whitehead’s strategy against relativistic subjectivism seems to consist of two mutually reinforcing elements. One is the analysis of normal human perception, called symbolic reference, into the two primary modes of presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. The latter mode, which constitutes the "given" element in human experience, occurs prior to the rise of the interpretative element, and is therefore not culturally conditioned. We in fact share this mode of perception with nonhuman occasions of experience. This feature of Whitehead’s epistemology constitutes the reformation involved in his "reformed subjectivist principle." This epistemological analysis shows how it is possible that we could have a direct, culture-free perception of some primordial truths about the nature of existence. (No moment of experience is culture-free, of course, but every moment has abstracted factors that are culture-free, being common to people of all cultures.) This first element in Whitehead’s response to radical relativism is therefore supportive of the second element, which is the focus on those presuppositions of practice that do indeed seem to be culture-free in the sense of being common to all people. If we come to agree that such a set of common presuppositions does underlie the various worldviews of humankind, we need an explanation for this fact. The notion of a preconceptual, prelinguistic, preinterpretative perception provides such an explanation. The presuppositions of a presymbolic perception and of a set of hard-core commonsense notions thus mutually reinforce each other.

Having made this correlation, I should add that the hard-core commonsense notions are not limited to elements derivable from perception in the mode of causal efficacy, or what Whitehead also calls physical feelings. From these feelings we get the notions of actuality, causality, the past, and hence of givenness. But the notions of freedom, possibilities, and intrinsic value, for example, evidently come more from the awareness of our own concrescence than from the prehension of the past (although we can surely get these notions from there too). And the notion of the future, inherent in the notion of time, and the notion of ultimate meaning come primarily from the dimension of anticipation in a moment of experience. The more complete statement, then, would be that the notion of hard-core commonsense ideas stands in a relationship of mutual reinforcement with the notion that our stream of experience is comprised of occasions of prehensive, self-creative, anticipatory experience.

On this basis, we can see the stance process theology should take to that movement called anti-foundationalism On the one hand, there is much that comes under this name with which we should agree. In particular, the denial that epistemology is wholly prior to ontology; the denial that we can have an absolutely certain starting point; the idea that those elements of experience thought by most people to be primitive givens are in fact physiologically, personally, and socially constructed; the idea that all of our descriptions of our observations involve culturally conditioned interpretations; the idea that our interpretations, and the focus of our conscious attention, are conditioned by our purposes; the idea that the so-called scientific method does not guarantee neutral, purely objective, truths; and the idea that most of our ideas do not correspond to things beyond ourselves in any simple, straightforward way (for example, red as we see it does not exist in the "red brick" itself).

But, on the other hand, process theology, if it is to retain any semblance of empirical adequacy, cannot go all the way with typical anti-foundational rhetoric. We may not need a foundation, as that term is currently understood, but unless we have something concrete under us we will be left hanging. In some passages, for example, Bill Dean and Nancy Frankenberry seem to endorse the rhetoric of "the myth of the given," and completely to relinquish the idea of any prelinguistic, preinterpretative, given element in experience (Dean, ARE 16, 80; HMH 139; Frankenberry, RRE 3-6, 31-32, 70, 83, 91, 131, 137-43). To do so would be not only to leave James and Whitehead, with their "stubborn facts," behind; it would also be to have a radical empiricism without empiricism. (In other passages Dean and Frankenberry retain the element of givenness required for empiricism [ARE 2,47,94,97, 106; RRE 23, 34, 38, 83, 85-89, 91, 92, 94, 99, 105, 143-44, 158-64, 168, 171-72, 188].

A second extreme that must be resisted is the idea that there are no nonrelativistic truths in terms of which to measure competing theories. Essential to the pragmatism of both James and Whitehead is the idea that we should not deny ideas in theory that we cannot live without in practice, and that there are some such ideas.

A third feature of the anti-foundationalist rhetoric that must be resisted is the wholesale rejection of the correspondence theory of truth (see Dean, HMH 8, 15,25, 91, 133, 141, 143; ARE 16,83). One of the foundations of the complete rejection of this notion, the denial of a given element inexperience, has already been dealt with. Whitehead also provides good answers to the other difficulties raised against the notion. One objection is that an idea can correspond only to another idea; it cannot correspond to a thing. This Berkeleian objection should not, in the first place, create any problems for talking about the correspondence between one person’s ideas and another’s, and in fact wholesale critics of the correspondence idea, such as Rorty, continue to presuppose that their accounts of other philosophers, for example, correspond to what those philosophers really said and meant. In the second place, Whitehead’s panexperientialism, combined with his doctrine of eternal objects, shows how we can speak meaningfully of the correspondence between an idea, in the sense of a proposition (the meaning expressed or elicited by a linguistic sentence), and a nexus of actualities. To say that there is correspondence is not to say that there is identity -- a proposition and an actuality are obviously different types of existents. What is meant by speaking of correspondence is that the same actual occasions and eternal objects that are together in the proposition are together in the nexus. This correspondence is not identity because they are together in the nexus in the mode of realization whereas they are together in the proposition only in the mode of abstract possibility (AI 313-14). A second objection is that an actuality is indefinitely complex, so that no proposition, even an extremely complex one, could exhaustively describe it, even in the mode of abstract possibility. But the idea of correspondence does not require this impossible ideal. The proposition is true if what it predicates of the actualities in question was really actualized by them, regardless of what other possibilities they realized. One can speak of truth, therefore, without committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Yet another objection is that the correspondence theory of truth is meaningless because it requires us to compare our idea of the thing with the thing itself, but we cannot examine the thing itself, in distinction from how it appears to us. If we have only our interpretations, it is absurd to have a theory of truth that requires us to get outside our interpretation to see if it corresponds to the thing prior to our interpretation of it. This objection, at least in some authors, seems to presuppose the subjectivist view of perception, with its denial of the givenness of other actualities, which has already been criticized. Aside from that problem, this objection positivistically conflates meaning and verification. The correspondence theory of truth is a definition of the meaning of truth, not a statement of how truth, thus understood, is to be tested. With regard to testing, Whitehead usually speaks of coherence and pragmatism.

In these ways, the objections to the idea of truth as correspondence can be cleared away, and we can explicitly reaffirm this notion, which we all implicitly affirm in practice, and we can therefore reaffirm that the task of the theologian involves the attempt to formulate the Christian faith in true doctrines, and to defend the truth of these doctrines by showing them to be self-consistent, adequate to the facts of experience, and illuminating.

III. Empirical Adequacy, Natural Science, and History

The "facts" to which theology must be coherently adequate are not exhausted, of course, by the hard-core commonsense ideas; these ideas only provide the ultimate criteria for testing adequacy. Another type of facts very important in our time is the type provided by the natural sciences. Here theologians must be very careful. The "facts" seemingly vouchsafed by science come and go, so theologians need to try to avoid modifying doctrines on the basis of scientific ideas of today that may be rejected tomorrow. Equally important is to avoid the appearance of resting the argument for the truth of particular doctrines upon such ideas. Making theology "empirical" in this sense is one of the best ways to discredit it. Newton’s argument for God’s reality and power on the basis of inadequate calculations, later corrected by Laplace, provides the best-known case of this type of empirical theology. Laplace’s undercutting of this particular argument is generally taken to mean that the entire basis for the Newtonian God was undercut. The fact that Newton had other, more metaphysical, arguments for God is usually ignored. This is no brief for the Newtonian God, only an emphasis on the danger of making theological doctrines appear to be dependent primarily upon features of today’s scientific consensus that are liable to be rejected tomorrow. But one should not, I think, say that contingent facts about the world seemingly vouchsafed by science, in distinction from strictly metaphysical features of reality, should never be used. For example, I do not hesitate to appeal to the idea that our world was brought into its present form over billions of years, even though this idea could in principle be undermined. Although we cannot be as certain of this idea as we can of a hard-core commonsense notion, we can, I believe, be much more certain of it than, say, of the neo-Darwinian theory of how evolution occurred. This neo-Darwinian notion, in fact, provides a good example of the type of "scientific idea" to which theology, in my opinion, should not have adjusted.

If theology is to be empirical in the sense of being adequate to the data of the natural sciences, how should these data be employed? As Hartshorne says, they can be used both negatively, as evidence against false views, and positively, to support process theology’s views. For example, against both dualism and reductionistic determinism and in favor of the pancreationist, panexperientialist view that the actual world is made up exhaustively of partially self-determining, experiencing events, there is considerable evidence, such as the fact that a lack of complete determinism seems to hold even at the most elementary level of nature; that bacteria seem to make decisions based upon memory; that there appears to be no place to draw an absolute line between living and nonliving things, and between experiencing and nonexperiencing ones; and that physics shows nature to be most fundamentally a complex of events (not of enduring substances). Some recent developments in physics are moving toward the affirmation of the reality of irreversible time at the level of fundamental physics (PUST). If recent evidence for Lamarckian inheritance (the inheritance of mutations induced by an organism in response to its immediate environment) holds up and is expanded, it would provide a way of showing not only the importance of self-determination and hybrid physical feelings in evolution, but also of how divinely rooted initial aims could be effective. Another example was alluded to before: the fact that our world seems to have taken shape over a period of many billions of years, rather than having been created in essentially its present form a few thousand years ago, provides evidence against the view that the creation of our world required omnipotent coercive power; this fact is much more consistent with the view that the divine creative power is solely the power of persuasion, the kind of power we can experience working in our own lives. While these scientific ideas, insofar as they are accepted as true, disprove false metaphysical views, they cannot prove process theology’s view, but they can show that all the known empirical evidence is consistent with it.

Another kind of empirical facts is provided by historical research. Insofar as theology makes claims about historical events, for example about Jesus, these claims must be compatible with the best historical research. Theology cannot be historically empirical in the sense that claims about Jesus’ special relationship to God could be proved by historical evidence, for the evidence will always be consistent with various speculative hypotheses. But any speculative hypothesis should be plausible in the light of the best historical evidence.

IV. Theology as Fully Rational

Having discussed various senses in which theology should be empirical, I turn now to the question of the role of reason, or rationality, in theological construction. By reason as a criterion I mean primarily the principle of noncontradiction. The rational urge is the urge to develop a consistent position. It presupposes the desire for truth, and involves the recognition that a self-contradictory position cannot be true, in the sense of corresponding to reality, because real things cannot be self-contradictory. This intuition I include among our hard-core commonsense truths. This is one way in which rationalism and empiricism are in harmony rather than conflict. An empirical survey of our fundamental intuitions, a task that Whitehead calls "assemblage" (MT, Ch. 1), reveals rationality among the deep-seated passions of humankind.

Rationalism and empiricism are not in conflict, furthermore, if we understand rationalism, as we should, as the drive, in Whitehead’s words, to "put the various elements of experience into a consistent relation to each other" (PR xi/v). Whitehead agrees with Plato that the mark of the philosopher, as distinct from the sophist, is the "resolute attempt to reconcile conflicting doctrines, each with its own solid ground of support" (AI 153). Hartshorne agrees with Whitehead on this point, endorsing his definition of rationalism as the "search for the coherence of the presuppositions of civilized living" (LP viii; CSPM xvi). Hartshorne makes the same point by characterizing philosophy at its best as "an agonizing struggle for balanced definiteness" (CSPM 93). His point is that animals have the basic truths in a balanced way, but vaguely, whereas any bright person will become definite about such truths, but usually in a one-side way. Philosophy’s task is to struggle for "the sharp vision of the whole truth" (CSPM 93).

To be sure, the desire for rational consistency for its own sake can, and often does, work contrary to the criterion of empirical adequacy. The thinker in pursuit of rational consistency may simply deny certain facts that do not fit (PR 6/9). Whitehead in fact says that "the chief danger in philosophy is that the dialectic deductions from inadequate formulae should exclude direct intuitions from explicit attention" (AI 177-78). For example, the inadequate formulation of one hard-core commonsense notion, such as the intuition that all events have efficient causes, may lead to the denial of another hard-core commonsense idea, such as that human actions are partly free. But this perversion occurs when rational consistency is sought for its own sake, apart from its place in the search for truth. As part of this search, the desire for rational consistency is not in conflict with the desire for empirical adequacy, because it is nothing other than the desire to find a way to coordinate all of our well-grounded intuitions.

Far from being in conflict with the empirical urge, in fact, the rational urge supports it, because the drive to link up the various known facts in a self-consistent system often leads to the discovery of facts not previously known, at least not consciously. In natural science, the rational deduction that there ought to be another planet, or another subatomic particle, for example, has led to the discovery of these facts. In philosophical theology, where the primary facts are the hard-core common-sense facts, the facts are already "known" unconsciously, in the sense of being presupposed in practice; but rational reflection can lead to the conscious knowledge of such principles. For example, the attempt to reconcile the principle of universal causation with the experience of guilt perhaps first led to the consciousness of self-causation. In either case, our empirical eye is rendered more acute by the rational passion in our soul, because the desire to find connecting links between presently known facts means that, in Whitehead’s words, "experience is not interrogated with the benumbing repression of common sense." (PR 9/13; here Whitehead uses "common sense" to refer to what I call soft-core common sense). It is primarily at this point that the need for speculation becomes evident in relation to the drive for a rational empiricism, or empirical rationalism. I turn now to this topic.

V. Rational Empiricism and the Need for Speculation in Philosophical Theology

Ideal first with the need for speculation to fulfill the twin ideals of adequacy and coherence with regard to philosophical theology, or "natural" theology, meaning theology insofar as it deals with data that are in principle universally accessible.

Seeing how two intuitions about something are compatible with each other quite often requires a hypothesis about the nature of the thing in question. Speculation, meaning the formation of hypotheses about what things are in themselves, is therefore a necessary feature of the task of rationally coordinating all of our well-grounded beliefs. I will provide several examples to illustrate the point.

Whitehead says that showing the relation between efficient causation and final causation (or self-determination) is one of the basic tasks of philosophy (PR 84/130). His way of carrying out this task is to suggest, as a speculative hypothesis, that actual entities of which the world is comprised all have the character of actual occasions, that these all embody creativity, and that creativity oscillates between two modes: transition or efficient causation, and concrescence or final causation. A further hypothesis, articulated more clearly by Hartshorne, is that some spatiotemporal societies of actual entities are "compound individuals," in which a higher-level individual gives the society as a whole a unity of experience and action, and thereby a capacity to be directed by purposes, while other societies, such as rocks, have no dominant member, which leaves the behavior of the society as such at the mercy of efficient causation.

The intuition that I, with my conscious experience, am an actual individual with the power of self-determination, to make decisions and to cause my body to do my bidding, is reconciled with the equally strong sense that my body is real, and that it exerts powerful causation upon me, in terms of the speculative hypothesis that all actual occasions are occasions of experience, so that interaction of body and mind is not the unintelligible interaction of unlikes (the unintelligibility of which has led philosophers to deny the distinct actuality either of the mind or of the body).

The intuition that reality for human beings, and indeed for all living things, is necessarily temporal, with an irreversible distinction between past, present, and future, is difficult to reconcile with the idea, long orthodox in the physics community, that time does not exist for subatomic particles or even for single atoms. (The idea is that "the arrow of time" is based on entropy and therefore only comes into existence when there are sufficiently organized collections of atoms.) How could our experience, or that of the life of a cell, with its essential temporality, interact with things that are essentially nontemporal? Whitehead and Hartshorne overcome this conflict with the hypothesis that time is real for single atoms, electrons, and photons, because they are all temporally ordered societies of occasions of experience, different only in degree from living cells or human minds (see PUST).

Having thus far spoken of the need to speculate about the nature of finite actualities in themselves, including their causal relations, I now move to the question of God. Whitehead came to the conclusion that his metaphysical cosmology had a God-shaped hole in it, that speaking of "the divine immanence" in worldly occasions was "a completion required by our cosmological outlook" (AI 206). His reasons for speaking of God’s causal presence in the world revolved primarily around the notions of order, novelty, values, and truth. But how can one speak coherently of God’s influencing the world? If the principle that unlikes cannot interact prevents a dualistic understanding of mind and body, must not the same principle prevent a dualism of God and the world? Whitehead’s reconciliation involved combining the earlier point, that all actualities in the world are occasions of experience, with the idea that God is the chief exemplification, not the exception to, the metaphysical principles applicable to all finite actualities. ‘With the hypothesis that God is not a single actual entity, but a personal society of divine occasions of experience, Hartshorne carries this suggestion through more clearly, thereby making interaction between God and worldly occasions more intelligible.

I have just spoken of (two-way) interaction between God and the world, not simply the influence of God on the world. When Whitehead later came to see that, if God influences the world, the world must influence God in turn, he did not need to add anything to the points summarized in the previous paragraph. The same causal principles applicable in all other cases could apply. This speculative notion of our immanence in God provided the basis for reconciling two other beliefs, namely, that our lives somehow have ultimate meaning, but that our world, meaning not only our planet but this whole universe understood as a "cosmic epoch," will eventually pass away. This conflict has been felt especially strongly by Whitehead and Hartshorne insofar as they have not believed that the human psyche will continue to have new experiences after bodily death. This conflict between a hard-core commonsense idea (about ultimate meaning) and a scientifically and philosophically based idea (that our world is temporally finite) is resolved by the speculative hypothesis that God, far from being impassible, is divinely relative, cherishing all events everlastingly, so that reality as a whole will never be as if we had not been. It does seem to be the case, incidentally, that Whitehead moved from thinking of the idea of God’s consequent nature as based purely on rational inference (if God acts, God must be an actual entity and therefore must participate in the universal relativity of things) to thinking of it (most clearly in MT 110, 116,120) as based also upon direct experience. The idea nevertheless remains a speculative one. In his last essay, "Immortality," he says: "This immortality of the World of Action, derived from its transformation in God’s nature, is beyond our imagination to conceive. The various attempts at description are often shocking and profane. What does haunt our imagination is that the immediate facts of present action pass into permanent significance for the Universe" (I 698). This seems to agree with his earlier statement that the idea "God and the World" involves more interpretation than the other opposites, such as permanence and flux and good and evil, not being present with the same directness of intuition (PR 341/518).

Thus far I have discussed the need for speculation in natural theology with regard to particular doctrines; but the point can be made more globally. Christian theology must make its case, I have argued, by presenting a worldview that is intrinsically convincing to people because of its rational coherence and its adequacy to the facts of experience. Included under the facts are the facts vouchsafed by science. But most people still assume that science vouchsafes a worldview very different from that of process philosophy -- if not a wholly deterministic, reductionist, materialistic worldview, at least a view in which "physical nature," meaning that which is studied by physics and chemistry, is understood in materialistic terms, except for whatever modifications are thought to be required by quantum physics. The worldview suggested by a process Christian theology cannot be considered adequate to the "facts," let alone illuminating of them, until the connection between "science" and the materialistic view of nature is broken. It cannot even be considered consistent, because process thought’s talk of the soul will seem dualistic as long as the modern view of nature as insentient stuff is held. This view of nature will not be overcome simply by rejecting it, perhaps by recommending a phenomenological bracketing. It will only be overcome when it is replaced by a more convincing view. Speculation about what nature is in itself, backed up by rational arguments, particularly about the mind-body problem, and empirical evidence from the sciences, is therefore a necessary dimension of a process Christian theology.

VI. The Need for Speculation in Christian Theology Proper

In the previous section I dealt with doctrines that belong to philosophical (or natural) theology, to show how doctrines that may initially seem to conflict can be made compatible. Speculation is also needed for the same reason in relation to doctrines that belong less to natural theology than to the more strictly Christian aspect of the total theological enterprise. I believe less in a hard-and-fast line between these two aspects of the theological enterprise than in a difference of degree. This is partly because I accept the view that even our natural theology is inevitably a Christian natural theology, in the sense suggested by John Cobb, and partly because some of the doctrines that should be placed under the more strictly Christian aspect, such as the problem of evil, are not as strictly limited to Christian theology as are some others, such as christology. Nevertheless, a real distinction does exist, and discussing the more or less strictly Christian doctrines raises special methodological issues.

I begin with the problem of evil. Christians (as well as many others) believe that God is both the supreme power of the universe and perfectly good. This two-fold belief seems, prima facie, to be in conflict with the evil in the world. One solution, the most popular among traditional theologians, is to deny the ultimate reality of evil. But this is a classic case of "boldly denying the facts," especially because the genuineness of evil is one of our hard-core commonsense ideas which we all presuppose in practice. As Whitehead says, against Leibniz, "the imperfection of the world is the theme of every religion which offers a way of escape" (PR 47/74). Another solution is to deny God, but then one is left without an explanation for order, value, and novelty in the world, the experience of objective values, and the locus of truth. The solution of Whitehead and Hartshorne is to reject the speculative idea that our world was created ex nihilo in the absolute sense, which implied that God freely chose all the metaphysical principles, including the way the world is related to God. Their alternative speculative suggestion is that a realm of finite actual occasions has always existed, that it exists as necessarily as does God, and that the basic God-world relation belongs to the very nature of things. In Whitehead’s words, "metaphysics requires that the relationships of God to the World should lie beyond the accidents of will, and that they be founded upon the necessities of the nature of God and the nature of the World" (AI 215). This position also entails, as Hartshorne has said more clearly, that the metaphysical principles did not derive from a decision, even a primordial one (which he takes to be self-contradictory), but are strictly necessary, belonging to the very nature of God, or God-and-a-world. (Although Hartshorne argues that we can, at least to an extent, directly see this necessity, I am not here opening this rationalist issue, but simply speaking of the hypothesis that the principles exist necessarily.) The upshot of all of this for the problem of evil is, more basically, that worldly occasions necessarily have their own freedom, so that God’s power in the world can only be persuasive power. God does not work by persuasion alone only because of a divine decision to do so, as in a voluntary self-limitation, which could in principle be revoked from time to time. We need not wonder, therefore, why God does not intervene coercively sometimes to prevent particularly horrible outcomes. I have developed, in terms of five or six variables of value and power, some more points implicit in this position. One of these is that higher forms of actual occasions, which can enjoy greater intrinsic value (which is, by hypothesis, the divine aim), must necessarily have more freedom of self-determination, which means more power to diverge from divine aims. Another implication is that they also must have more power of efficient causation, which can be used for evil as well as good. Therefore a world with creatures like us is necessarily a very dangerous world. It is by means of this very complex speculative hypothesis, involving the nature of God, creation, worldly actualities, and possibilities, that process theology can reconcile God’s goodness and providence with genuine evil.

I have also developed (in forthcoming books) the position somewhat further with regard to the notion of the demonic. The devil in the Christian imagination seems to be both a creature and yet more than a creature. Satan is a creature of God who exists only because of God’s creative activity, and yet, now that Satan exists, he is not simply under the divine thumb but is engaged in mortal combat with the creator for the devotion of human beings. Traditional Christian theology, with its doctrine of divine omnipotence, could not do justice to the latter intuition. I have suggested that worldly creativity (in distinction from creativity insofar as it is embodied in God) can be employed to reconcile these two ideas. With the rise of human beings, in whom worldly creativity becomes self-conscious, it can become demonic, going strongly against the divine will, and with powerfully destructive consequences. This demonic reality is a creature, because without God’s stimulation of the evolutionary process over billions of years, humanlike beings would not have arisen. On the other hand, it is more than a creature, because worldly creativity exists necessarily, not arbitrarily, and because, now that creativity at the human level exists, it cannot be unilaterally controlled. This notion of the demonic, especially when it is developed to explain the widespread proclivity of human beings to evil (through being born into cultures more or less dominated by demonic habits, symbols, beliefs, and attitudes), provides a further basis for reconciling God’s goodness with the world’s evil.

But, one may object, this whole argument begs the question, which is whether God is perfectly good. This process theology may well render the world’s evil compatible with an antecedent belief in the perfect goodness of the world’s creator. but why accept that belief? It is not a hard-core commonsense idea; it is not a fact vouchsafed by science; and it certainly cannot be read off the historical record. What basis is there for holding it? Have we not here gone beyond any empirical basis?

This question forces my methodological position to become more complex. I will make four points, which are meant to have relevance beyond this particular issue. First, my statement of the primary way in which theology should be empirical only talked about being adequate to all the facts of experience. It did not say that nothing was to be allowed into the theological position that was not empirically grounded and/or could not be empirically justified. To say this would be to give a more stringent meaning to "being empirical" than I had given. I will, however, return to this issue later.

Second, as I suggested earlier, each of the various religious traditions, I maintain, is based upon a particular preconceptual "vision of reality." This is something like the "blik" discussed by philosophers in an earlier decade, but it is not wholly noncognitive: explicating it requires propositions capable of being true or false. It is something like an "understanding of existence," except that it has implications for the nature of the holy reality and the world in themselves, not simply human existence. A vision of reality is not argued to; it is the presupposed stance from which all argument proceeds, because it lies behind the data focused on and the propositions taken to be self-evident. This is not to say, however, that a vision of reality is like a "basic belief" as defined by Alvin Plantinga and others, meaning that it need not be justified. A vision of reality must prove itself, once it emerges into a pluralistic, nonauthoritarian setting, by showing that it can give birth to a conceptualization of reality that is more coherent and adequate to the facts of experience than other visions can. The notion of different visions of reality does somewhat relativize the notion of "facts of experience," to be sure, by saying that different visions will lead people to notice different facts consciously and/or to valorize the same facts differently. Nevertheless, this relativization is not complete, thanks to the hard-core common sense notions and to scientifically and historically established facts (which do have considerable context-independence, even if not as much as earlier thought).

To apply this discussion to the point at hand: the idea that God is a perfectly good, loving being belongs, I would say, to the Christian vision of reality. The Christian theologian therefore properly takes this belief as one of the "facts" to which a theological position should be adequate, even if it is not a fact in as strong a sense as hard-core commonsense ideas and very well-grounded scientific and historical ideas. The attempt to be adequate to this "fact" is not a duty of Christian theologians as much as something they naturally seek to do, insofar as they share the Christian vision of reality. Insofar as a Christian theology, with its inherent theodicy, can do justice to the more neutral facts in a more coherently adequate way than theologies (including a/theologies) starting from a different vision of reality, the idea of the perfectly good, loving nature of God is warranted. Accordingly, the idea of God’s loving goodness might be empirically justified, in that very indirect way in which metaphysical and theological ideas can be justified, even if it is not empirically derived.

Third, we can argue that the idea has in fact been empirically (experientially) derived. From a Whiteheadian point of view, not only the initial aim of God but God as a whole (God’s "consequent states," in Hartshorne’s language) can be prehended. One could thereby feel the divine subjective form. Abraham Heschel has suggested just this, that the prophets felt the divine pathos for the world. Mystics of all ages and traditions have reported experiences that could be understood as direct experiences of the divine love or compassion. More precisely, from a Whiteheadian standpoint, we should say that, if God is loving, then we all feel this, at some level, all the time, so that the only extraordinary feature of mystical experiences is that in them this feeling of the holy rises to the level of conscious awareness. The biblical vision of reality, which is shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, can therefore, in containing the vision of divine loving goodness, be understood as expressing an experientially derived truth about the nature of reality. A truth of universal import can be experientially derived even if it is not in fact equally accessible to everyone because the different cultures into which people are born, with their different visions of reality, predispose them to notice some universal features of reality and not to notice others.

Fourth, a doctrine of this nature can be held with even more conviction if it can be given metaphysical support, and this is true of the doctrine of God’s goodness. I have followed Hartshorne in pointing out that the necessary goodness, in the sense of the impartial compassion, of God follows from combining the doctrines of God’s omniscience and ubiquity (as soul of the universe) with the doctrine of the conformity of subjective forms in physical feelings. From this viewpoint, God would love the world necessarily, analogously to the way in which we naturally love our bodies, feeling their pains with compassion and their delights with sympathetic joy (GRPW, chap. 8).

In these third and fourth points, I have suggested how speculation can be used to bolster doctrines belonging to the Christian tradition, showing (in this case) how they might be more empirically rooted, and might have more rational justification, than would appear at first glance.

I move now to the question of speculation about past historical events. The possibility of paranormal cognition aside, the data for doctrines about past events are not consciously available. We must rely on authority. I refer primarily to those events in the biblical record that are generally held to be especially revelatory of God. Because for Christians Jesus is the decisive event of this nature, I will focus on him. The question I will address is whether speculation about what Jesus was in himself, especially how he was related to God (meaning how God was present in him), is an essential or at least important task for Christian theology. I will suggest two reasons why it is.

First, Christians in the past, from theologians to preachers to ordinary believers, have engaged in such speculation -- or at least accepted the speculations of others. Most of this is, from a process point of view, bad speculation. (While it may have been the best possible at the time, given the assumptions and available categories, it denies the full humanity of Jesus, does not provide a basis for understanding God’s ideal relation to us, and entails all the problems of supernaturalism, among other problems.) And the only way to replace bad speculative ideas is with better speculative ideas. One cannot do so simply by exhorting people to forswear all speculative ideas.

Second, the Christian vision of reality includes implications not only about God, humanity, and the world, but also about a particular historical tradition, with Jesus at its center. The vision implies that the decisive truths about God, humanity, and the world have been revealed through this tradition, especially through Jesus. More pointedly, these events are held to involve a decisive self-revelation of God, through which we learn about God’s nature, purpose, and mode of agency, and thus about humanity and the world. Part of the apologetic task of Christian theologians is to show the reasonableness of this belief. This is in large part to be done, I have suggested, by conceptually explicating the Christian vision of reality in such a way that it proves its truth through the intrinsic convincingness of the worldview to which it gives birth. But another aspect of this task is to show how it is conceivable that the truth about God, and thus about reality as a whole, could have been revealed through these events. It is not enough simply to say that these events have in fact been taken as revelatory, and that the continued appropriateness of doing so is demonstrated by its fruitfulness. It is also important to support the continued appropriateness of giving special attention to these events by showing how, if God, humanity, and the world are such as we say they are, these events could have been in themselves, prior to our taking them as such, special self-expressions of God, in which the divine nature, purpose, and mode of agency were especially expressed, so that they are appropriately received as special revelations of God. In other words, I take it to be implicit in the notion that Jesus is a decisive revelation of God to us that he was in himself a special self-expression of God. If that notion is implicit, then the kind of question debated at Chalcedon is still an important question, namely, how was God related to Jesus in a special way? The issue is not whether we can know this; we cannot have sufficient probability to speak of knowledge. The issue is whether we can have a plausible idea of how it could have been possible, and by plausible I mean self-consistent and consistent with whatever historical facts we have. Providing this plausibility requires speculation about Jesus in himself, including how God was present in his experience.

VII. Some Stronger Meanings of "Empirical" and "Rational"

I have argued that the ideal of a theology that is fully empirical is not in competition with the ideal of its being fully rational, and that the resulting ideal of rational empiricism does not exclude, but in fact requires, theology’s being speculative. But it may seem that I have made the case too easy, that I guaranteed a pre-established harmony, by giving a too-limited definition of "empirical" and/or "rational," thereby only advocating that theology be partially empirical and/or partially rational. If I were to go beyond my limited, innocuous definitions to the really interesting ones, it could be said, then the conflicts would become apparent. My response would be that my definitions were indeed designed to allow harmony between the empirical, rational, and speculative dimensions. But I deny that this harmony would now be destroyed by introducing stronger meanings of empirical and/or rational, as long as these are meanings that we ought to accept.

One meaning of empirical is "conceptual empiricism," which means that all concepts, to be meaningful, must be based upon direct experience. Whitehead and Hartshorne both accept this Berkeleian point. Whitehead, for example, says that "Hume’s demand that causation be describable as an element in experience is . . . entirely justifiable" (PR 166-67/253). And Hartshorne endorses "the whole drive of modern philosophy to relate concepts to perceptions" and the empiricist principle that all meaningful ideas are derived from experience and refer to experience (BH 229,135: MVG 79,86; RSP 44). Hartshorne even refers to "the principle of empiricism" in this sense as "the basis of intellectual integrity" (BH 321). This conceptual empiricism, needless to say, does not equate perception with sensory perception. The doctrine that all actual entities are to be understood by analogy with our own experience is based on this idea, as is the doctrine that God is to be conceived as the chief exemplification, rather than an exception to, the metaphysical principles. I intend everything I say to be consistent with conceptual empiricism.

A stronger meaning of empiricism seems to be expressed by Whitehead’s statement that "the elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought" (PR 4/6). This could be read to mean that every element in a theological position should be nothing other than an explication of ideas implicit in everyone’s experience. This doctrine of empiricism would rule out, for example, all historical doctrines, such as assertions about Jesus’ experience in itself, as distinct from phenomenological descriptions of Jesus’ meaning for me or my community. It would also rule out any ideas of God that went beyond some sort of God-consciousness that could be ascribed to all people. (People could well differ on what this would allow us to say about God, with some opting, for example, for Whitehead’s primordial nature of God while rejecting the consequent, with others considering even the primordial nature too speculative and speaking only of "creative interchange" or "creative passage," and with still others considering the consequent nature of God the most empirically grounded feature of Whitehead’s doctrine.) But I do not believe Whitehead’s statement should be read so rigidly. For a thought to "elucidate" immediate experience does not necessarily imply that the thought was already implicit in experience, perhaps down deep, merely awaiting a Socratic mid-wife. The ideas of relativity and quantum physics, for example, which were so important to Bernard Meland as well as to Whitehead, could not be so described. The same is true for most scientific ideas; think, for example, of the theories developed to explain the evolution of the universe and of life on our planet. These theories do elucidate items of immediate experience, such as pointer-reading, red-shifts, and fossils. But the ideas developed go far beyond anything implicit in every person’s immediate experience. Theories about God’s primordial and consequent natures, and about the structure of Jesus’ experience, including God’s role therein, are not different in kind in this respect. What can be called "genetic empiricism" therefore does not rule out speculation.

The kind of empiricism that has probably been most discussed in our century in relation to theology involves the testing of conjectures. It is now generally agreed that no conjectures can be verified in the strict sense, if this means ruling out all other possible interpretations of the experiential data. (All interpretations are "underdetermined" by the data, in the current jargon.) It is generally agreed that scientific theories, in distinction from metaphysical ones, are empirically falsifiable, meaning that some observations could conceivably conflict with them. And it is now generally agreed, after much spilled ink, that metaphysical theories, not being empirical in this sense, are not thereby meaningless. But this does not mean that empirical evidence is irrelevant to them. Indeed, if a metaphysical assertion is one that is intended to describe all beings, or all actual beings (or perhaps all individual actual beings), then a false metaphysical assertion could in principle be falsified by any instance of the category of being in question. And any true metaphysical assertion will be exemplified by every instance of the category and therefore increasingly verified by accurate observations. This is Hartshorne’s position (BH 147,260,292, 293), and it seems to me correct with regard to the strictly metaphysical dimension of philosophical theology.

I believe it is also consistent with Hartshorne’s position to say that, although no possible and therefore truly conceivable world is incompatible with the true metaphysical position (we here touch on that side of Hartshorne’s rationalism in which the rational and the discernibly necessary are equated), many imaginable worlds are inconsistent with it. (We can imagine all sorts of things that are probably not genuinely conceivable, such as traveling into the past or foreseeing the contingent future.) Examples of imaginable worlds that would be incompatible with process metaphysics are: a world in which the elementary units of nature were enduring substances, especially if they were inert and fully determined; a world in which space and other things existed independently of temporal processes; a world in which an absolute gap separated living and nonliving things, or sentient and insentient individuals, or else a world in which there were no sentient things whatsoever. In this sense the metaphysics of process theology is not empirically vacuous, because it does rule out many worlds that philosophers have thought to be possible, in fact actual. With regard to process theism in particular, we can list some other imaginable worlds that are ruled out: a world that had lasted indefinitely in essentially its present form; a world that remained indefinitely in a state of chaos, in which only the most trivial forms of experience could occur; a world in which otherwise humanlike creatures never showed any interest in novelty and intensity of experience, or any passion for truth, beauty, and goodness. Through this form of imaginative contrast, process theology can be seen to make nonempty assertions about the world that can be verified by contrasting the experienced world with imagined ones. In this sense the "method of difference" can be used, even if only one metaphysical position is possible and genuinely conceivable.

What about this aspect of Hartshornean rationalism, according to which metaphysical truths are necessary truths -- and not only ontologically but rationally, meaning that only one metaphysical position is genuinely conceivable? Does not talk of "necessity" leave empiricism far behind? How can we have any experiential warrant for thinking that the basic principles that happen to be exemplified in our world do not just "happen" to be thus exemplified but are the only basic principles that could be exemplified, and are the only ones that are truly conceivable? How could we possibly know this? Has not the Hartshornean form of process theology distorted process thought, which is more empirical, more modest? Furthermore, does not this rationalistic necessity also rule out speculative hypotheses? To respond: In the first place, we should not exaggerate the difference between Whitehead and Hartshorne on this point, because Whitehead too speaks of "necessity" and defines metaphysical principles as those devoid of conceivable alternatives (PR 3/4, 4/5, 288/441; ESP 123, 124). In the second place, Hartshorne says that certainty is not readily attained in metaphysics (CSPM 32). In any case, it seems to me that the notion of necessity should not play much of a role methodologically. That is, we should not seek directly to demonstrate that one and only one set of metaphysical principles is genuinely conceivable, and that this means that one and only one set of metaphysical principles is really possible. This is quite different from the hypothesis that the most basic principles exemplified in our world are in fact metaphysical in character, meaning that they would necessarily be exemplified in any world. As a hypothesis, this claim is to be accepted insofar as it is an essential feature of a worldview that proves itself in terms of the criteria of adequacy, coherence, and illuminating power. Necessity in this ontological sense is not in conflict with tentativeness and speculation.

The aspect of Hartshorne’s position that is most often lifted up as illustrating his extreme rationalism, and thereby his remoteness from empiricism, is his ontological argument. But Hartshorne’s position can be explicated quite well without reference to it. (I have sought to do so in "Charles Hartshorne’s Postmodern Philosophy," in Robert Kane and Stephen Phillips, Hartshorne, Process Philosophy and Theology [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989], 1-33.) In any case, this is only one argument for God’s existence among many that Hartshorne offers, and the rest of them consist of showing that belief in God is implicit in our experience, meaning that it is "required for the interpretation of some fundamental aspect of life or experience" (CSPM 280). They are, therefore, like Whitehead’s, attempts to elucidate some aspect of immediate experience. Like the rest of his philosophy, then, Hartshorne’s theistic arguments, aside from the ontological argument, are experientially rooted. The role of the ontological argument in Hartshorne’s philosophical theology should not be exaggerated by pointing to this argument as evidence of the anti-empirical character of Hartshorne’s position, as a whole. In any case, I reject the ontological argument, although not because it is nonempirical, but because I do not think it works. It may be that the reason it does not work, if it doesn’t, is because it is not empirically rooted. But if we reject the ontological argument, we should do so because it does not work, not because we have decided a priori that only empirical arguments are to be accepted. That would seem to be the more empirical approach.

VIII. An Inclusive Program

I can perhaps make the foregoing reflections more intelligible by showing how they fit into an overall program, which has six aspects.

The basic task of philosophical theology in our time, I agree with Hartshorne, is to discover, through cooperation, "what the bottom layer of our common human thought really is" (MVG 80). I have suggested (in the essay mentioned above) that this method, instead of "a priori" and "nonempirical," could better be called "deep empiricism," because it seeks the universal features at the depths of every experience, beneath the fleeting superficialities. It could also be called "deep ecumenism," because it involves seeking out those elements that are already common to, or could become common to, all the religious traditions. The assumption behind this statement is that each religious tradition has noticed and thematized some of the hard-core commonsense notions while ignoring many others. Between any two traditions there will be some overlap and some divergence. Accordingly, any two traditions will have much in common but also much to learn from each other. This learning may often be difficult, because each tradition may have formulated its primordial truths in ways that exclude the primordial truths thematized by the other. Some speculation will be needed to facilitate rational coordination. This process also requires empiricism, in the sense of truly listening to each other. This enterprise, as Hartshorne says, must be a cooperative one. All human traditions, including modernity, are to make their contribution. (This enterprise raises very serious methodological problems, of course. For example, should Christian theologians try to seek a "perspectiveless perspective" or frankly recognize that their appropriation of truths and values from other traditions will be largely controlled by their Christian perspective? But I cannot address this huge question here.) For me, this is primarily a task for the future.

The second task of philosophical theology is that of constructing a speculative worldview in which all the discerned hard-core commonsense truths are reconciled with each other and with the data from ordinary and scientific experience.

A third task for the Christian theologian is to reinterpret and reformulate the doctrines of historic Christian faith in the light of the foregoing and following dimensions of the overall task. A central feature of this task is to portray the "worldview" of the previous point as a "story" rooted in the creative, liberating, sanctifying love of God.

A fourth task, to be done not after the foregoing tasks as an "application" of them but as an integral dimension of theological construction from the beginning, is to relate theological insights to concrete problems of our day. Theological truths should be presented as liberating truths. In my own case, I have decided to focus primarily upon liberation from the inclusive problem of modernity itself, while recognizing that some of the problems, such as racism, patriarchy and anthropocentrism, run deeper.

A fifth dimension of the theological task is to present theological insights in ways that captivate the human imagination and emotions, not simply the intellect. This can be done through use of story, poetry, ritual, metaphor, drama, and music, for example. My own work has been weakest in this regard.

A sixth dimension, closely related to the first, third, and fourth dimensions, is grounding the theological position historically, showing the new features to be authentic developments of the Holy-Spirit-inspired trajectory of the human spirit that is recorded in the biblical tradition. My own work has also been quite weak in this regard.

A final comment about speculation and the present context: What has come to be called "foundationalism" is the attempt, through empirical and/or rational procedures, to establish an absolutely certain starting point. More generally, "empiricism" and "rationalism" have often been intended as methods designed to provide certainty. The belief that certainty is attainable, if only the right method can be found and consistently practiced, has fostered a climate in which "speculation" has been negatively appraised. This climate has perhaps played a role in the development of those forms of process theology that have been labeled "empirical" and "rationalistic." In any case, the present recognition of the impossibility of an absolutely certain foundation for thought -- an impossibility that Whitehead had recognized decades ago -- should free us to engage more boldly in that speculative adventure of ideas exemplified by Whitehead’s own procedure.

References

ARE -- William Dean. American Religious Empiricism. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986.

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

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. London: SCM Press, 1970; Lenham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983.

GRPW -- David Ray Griffin. God and Religion in the Postmodern World. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989.

HMH -- William Dean. History Making History: The New Historicism in American Religious Thought. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1988.

I -- Alfred North Whitehead. "Immortality." The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941: 682-700.

LP -- Charles Hartshorne. The Logic of Perfection. and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics. LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1962.

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

PUST -- Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time: Bohm, Prigogine, and Process Philosophy. Ed. David Ray Griffin. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986.

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

RSP -- Charles Hartshorne. Reality as Social Process. Glencoe, ill.: The Free Press, 1953.

Since the 1970s, the relation of the mind to the body has increasingly been discussed in the philosophical community in terms of "supervenience." This term, which has been closely related to physicalist views, is a variant on the older concept of "emergence." The use of this new term, however, has not brought with it a solution to the formidable problems that have always confronted those attempting to provide a physicalist account of human consciousness. For example, John Searle advocates a reductionist account of consciousness, according to which it is supervenient upon certain neurophysiological states in the same way that liquidity is supervenient upon certain states of H₂ O molecules (RM 14, 87). Searle admits, however, that his account does not allow for human freedom, the reality of which, he emphasizes, he cannot help presupposing in practice (MBS 85-98). Also, many other physicalists do not think that Searle’s account even solves the problem of consciousness as such. For example, Galen Strawson, speaking of the idea that experiential properties are "reducible to nonexperiential physical properties in a way that is ultimately similar to the way in which the property of liquidity is held to be reducible to van de Waals molecular-interaction properties," says: "This reduction is very hard -- impossible -- to imagine" (MR 68). A similar judgment is tendered by William Seager, who points out that if the psychological is supervenient upon the physical, it is so in a way that is crucially different from the way in which liquidity is supervenient upon certain molecular states, because we have no idea as to why the joint activity of insentient neurons should give rise to consciousness (MC 179). On this basis, Sager cites Simon Blackburn’s statement that the supervenience of the psychological on the physical is part of the problem, not the solution (MC 180).

As this brief glance at the recent discussion shows, the concept of supervenience is at the heart of the current attempt by physicalist philosophers to provide an adequate account of the mind-body relation. It has been central both to the problem of how consciousness could arise out of the brain (which Searle believes he has solved) and to the problem of "mental action," which is part and parcel of the problem of freedom (which Searle knows that he has not solved). One of the philosophers who has devoted extensive attention to the concept of supervenience in relation to the problem of mental action is Jaegwon Kim, who has been considered one of the leading analysts of the concept, especially since the publication in 1993 of a collection of his essays as Superveniece and Mind (henceforth SM). A careful reading of this book reveals that his reputation is richly deserved. Besides being an acute analyst, he is circumspect and honest. Indeed, at the close of his book, he says that his efforts have apparently led to a "dead end." In the present essay, I will examine Kim’s position as reflected in his book. My strategy will be to show that it is the acceptance of a materialist version of physicalism that led to Kim’s problems, and that a panexperientialist version of physicalism based on Whitehead’s philosophy would overcome those problems.

I. Jaegwon Kim’s Failure to Reconcile Mental Causation with Physicalism

Kim’s writings on the mind as supervenient upon the body have revolved primarily around the effort to reconcile mental causation – "arguably . . . the central issue in the metaphysics of mind" (SM xv) -- with physicalism. His primary preoccupation, as he puts it, has been "the problem of delineating the place of mind in a physical world" (SM xv). This is such a problem, he says, because of two basic assumptions: physicalism, "the claim that the world is fundamentally a physical world governed by physical law," and mental realism, "the view that mentality is a real feature of our world," which "requires that mentality have genuine causal powers, powers to affect other events and processes of this world, whether these are mental or physical" (SM xv). The problem of reconciling mental realism with physicalism is felt more keenly by Kim than it is by some of his fellow physicalists because of a third basic assumption, "the principle of explanatory exclusion:" which says: "No event can be given more than one complete and independent explanation" (SM xii, 239). Although Kim tried, in essays written over the course of more than a decade, to reconcile these three assumptions, he confessed at the end of this period that he seemed "to be up against a dead end," with the problem of the mind appearing "intractable" (SM 367). To see what led to this conclusion, we need to unpack his three basic assumptions, to see what each entails. I will begin with physicalism.

One dimension of physicalism, as Kim defines it, was mentioned above: the belief that the world is governed by physical law. Kim more characteristically speaks of physicalism as "the view that what is physical determines all the facts of the world" (SM xv). This implies another principle: "the causal closure of the physical domain," which is "the assumption that if we trace the causal ancestry of a physical event, we need never go outside the physical domain" (SM 280). This principle is a denial of "the Cartesian idea that some physical events need nonphysical causes." That Cartesian idea would contradict yet another way of formulating physicalism: the belief that "there can in principle be [a] complete and self-sufficient physical theory of the physical domain" (SM 280).

These latter formulations, in insisting that every physical event has a physical cause, might seem compatible with the idea of an at least partly autonomous mental realm, according to which some mental events are not fully determined by physical causes. However, Kim’s physicalism, in holding that "what is physical determines all the facts of the world," rules out this possibility. A "thoroughgoing physicalism," he says, cannot tolerate "the existence of irreducible psychological features or properties." The reason for this intolerance is that physicalism entails that physical theory can in principle provide "a complete and comprehensive theory of the world" as a whole (SM 96) -- not simply of the "physical domain" understood as a limited part of the world.

In speaking of "physical theory" as that which can in principle explain everything, Kim means, essentially physics. "Not for nothing," he says, "do we think of physics as our basic science" (SM xv). This point leads to yet another, and in some respects the crucial, implication of Kim’s physicalism: ontological reductionism. All the observable behaviors and properties of things are to be understood in principle "in terms of the properties and relationships characterizing their microconstituents" (SM 96). Part and parcel of this reductionism is the claim that "macrocausal relations should be viewed as in general reducible to microcausal relations" (SM 99), meaning those that are studied by physics.

Kim suggests that we describe this reducibility by saying that macrocausation is supervenient upon the microcausation, which means that the former is entirely a function of the latter. In other words, "macrocausation is to be viewed as epiphenomenal causation" (SM 99). The reducibility of the characteristics of whole to parts is, more specifically, called "mereological supervenience." This doctrine "requires that each macrocharacteristic (including each causal relation] be grounded in some specific microcharacteristics" (SM 101). It is, in other words, a doctrine of "upward determination" (SM 353), according to which all observable properties of wholes are fully determined by their most elementary parts.

The fact that all macrocausation is to be regarded as supervenient, and thereby as epiphenomenal, Kim has insisted, does not mean that it is illusory or unreal. Offering a reductio ad absurdum of that view, he says: "To take microreducibility as impugning the reality of what is being reduced would make all of our observable world unreal" (SM 102). Kim will later have second thoughts about this claim, at least with regard to causation. But before looking at these later reflections, we need to examine his second basic assumption, which involves the reality of mentality and thereby of mental causation.

Kim takes it as virtually self-evident that eliminative materialism, with its denial of the reality of mentality, is an inadequate solution to the mind-body problem. And, on the basis of what he calls "[Samuel] Alexander’s dictum" -- namely "To be real is to have causal powers" (SM 348) -- he says that the reality of the mental entails the reality of mental causation: "What possible good could causeless and effectless entities do for us?" (SM 287) Mental causation involves not only the power of one mental event to cause another mental event, as when a pain leads to the decision to call a doctor, but also psychophysical causation, as when that decision causes one to walk to the telephone and dial it (SM 286). One’s theory should have a place for this "commonsense conviction in the reality of psychophysical causation" (SM 105). The reason we need to make room for this conviction is that it is basic to "the whole framework of intentional psychology;" in terms of which we ordinarily explain human behavior "We standardly explain actions by . . . providing ‘reasons for which’ we did what we did; and … it is difficult to evade the conclusion that the explanatory efficacy of reasons derives crucially from their causal efficacy" (SM 287). To renounce this idea, Kim says, "would render our moral and cognitive life wholly unintelligible to us, plunging us into a state of self-alienation in which we could no longer understand, or care, why we do what we do, or how our norms and beliefs regulate our deliberations and decisions" (SM xv).

The efficacy of norms, just mentioned, is central to Kim’s position; he believes that we must maintain both normative ethics and normative epistemology (SM 236). The intentional psychological scheme, "within which we deliberate about ends and means, and assess the rationality of actions and decisions," is necessary because only within this framework are our normative activities possible.

Kim concludes this reflection on our need for the intentional framework with the Kantian assertion that "our need for it arises out of the demands of practical reason, not those of theoretical reason" (SM 215). Be that as it may, it is clear that this need imposes a constraint upon theoretical reason: Our theoretical reason must not affirm epiphenomenalism. Citing what William Kneale has called "the great paradox of epiphenomenalism," which arises from "the suggestion that we are necessarily mistaken in all our ordinary thought about human action" (SM 105), Kim states that we must avoid this paradox (SM 106). Kim himself formulates this paradox as a reductio ad absurdum: "if our reasons and desires have no causal efficacy at all in influencing our bodily actions, then perhaps no one has ever performed a single intentional action!" (SM 104)

The issue of epiphenomenalism arises, of course, because of Kim’s first basic assumption, physicalism, which, in contrast with mental realism, is presented as a demand of our theoretical reason. (He supports the contention that physicalism seems unavoidable with the assertion that, "if we take our science seriously -- that is, if we are concerned to base our beliefs and judgments on our best knowledge of the world -- it is difficult to resist the view that what is physical determines all the facts of the world" [SM xv].) Kim has, accordingly, a seemingly impossible task to reconcile opposing implications of practical and theoretical reason. In his own words: "The delicate task is to find an account that will give the mental a substantial enough causal role to let us avoid ‘the great paradox of epiphenomenalism’ without infringing upon the closedness of physical causal systems" (SM 106). How can this be done?

One thing we know is that Kim will not solve this Kantian problem with a Kantian solution: The idea that theoretical reason deals with a merely apparent world, largely created by mind itself is ruled out by Kim’s physicalist assumption that "the world is fundamentally a physical world governed by physical law" (SM xv). The question, accordingly is: "How can the mind exert its causal powers in a world constituted by physical stuff and governed by physical law?" (SM xv). Kantian compatibilism, accordingly, is not an option. But what about compatibilism without the Kantian rationale for it? Why not just say, with many philosophers, that mental causation is compatible with the idea that all events are fully determined by physical causes? A purely physiological, mechanistic account of human behavior, on this account, would not rule out intentional psychology, with its rationalizing explanation of human behavior in terms of beliefs, desires, and volitions, which allows norms to play a role in shaping human attitudes and actions. This resolution, however, is ruled out by Kim’s third basic assumption -- his "principle of explanatory exclusion."

Although Kim believes that this principle obtains more generally, his application involves causal explanations, and, in fact, he sometimes refers to it as the principle of "causal-explanatory exclusion" (SM 291). As such, it essentially rules out the idea that there can be two sufficient causes for any event. More precisely, it says that, if one cause provides a sufficient explanation for any event, any other causal explanation is ruled out, unless that second explanation is simply an aspect of the first or reducible to it. For example, in the case of a man climbing a ladder to retrieve his hat from the roof, there would be no incompatibility between a purposive explanation and a physiological explanation if neither is considered complete in itself. That is, if the physiological explanation were regarded as merely a partial cause of the act, needing supplementation by reference to the man’s beliefs and purposes, there would be no problem. But if, as physicalism claims, the physiological explanation is by itself a complete and thereby sufficient explanation, then there is no room for an explanation in terms of intentional psychology.¹ Or, rather, that is the case if the two explanations are also considered independent, so that neither is reducible to the other. With this latter proviso, Kim provides a possible opening for a form of compatibilism: Rationalizing explanations may be compatible with physical explanations, but only if they can be regarded as reducible to them.

Kim allows, however, for no easy compatibilism, in which one simply leaves the relation between the two types of explanation a mystery. Instead, Kim adds to the metaphysical exclusion principle, already stated, an epistemological corollary "No one may accept both explanations unless one has an appropriate account of how they are related to each other" (SM 257). With this corollary, Kim has stated the task of much of his writing over the past two decades: to try to provide such an account.

The approach to take, he has suggested, is to regard the mind-body relation as a type of mereological (part-whole) supervenience (SM 168) and thereby to treat mental causation as a species of supervenient causation (SM 103). That this must be the basis for a solution, Kim believes, follows from the fact that no other alternative seems conceivable. For an example, he employs "a typical case in which we would say a mental event causes a physical event a sharp pain in my thumb causes a jerky withdrawal of my hand" (SM 103). We surely could not say that the pain, or a decision resulting from it, acted telekinetically on the muscles of the arm, causing them to contract (SM 103); rather, we must say that the pain somehow makes use of the physiological causal path from the brain. But it is also impossible, from Kim’s viewpoint, to say that the mental event somehow initiated the causal path that led to the physical motion, and this for two reasons: The first is the usual problem of understanding how a nonphysical event could influence physical processes. The second reason is that such an influence, even if conceivable, would violate the closed character of physical theory. "It would force us to accept a conception of the physical in which to give a causal account of, say, the motion of a physical particle, it is sometimes necessary to go outside the physical system and appeal to some non-physical agency" (SM 104). Having thereby ruled out mentality as an independent causal agent, Kim concludes that its causality must be dependent upon, in the sense of supervenient upon, physical causation.

Kim’s resulting analysis is that, "when a mental event M causes a physical event P, this is so because M is supervenient upon a physical event, P*, and causes P" (SM 106). In terms of the above example, to say that a pain caused you to withdraw your hand means that the pain was determined by (supervenient upon) a particular physical state, and that that physical state then caused the withdrawal of your hand.

As made clear earlier, Kim’s physicalism entails not only that no mental event can cause a physical event (except in the supervenient sense just explained, but also that every mental event must be fully explainable in terms of purely physical causation. That is, one mental event cannot directly cause another mental event, except in a supervenient sense. Accordingly; "when mental event M causes another mental event M*, this is so because M supervenes on a physical state P. and similarly M* on P*, and P causes P*" (SM 106). In terms of the above example, let us say that we thought that the pain did not directly bring about the withdrawal of the hand but only by first causing another mental event, namely, the decision to withdraw the hand. According to Kim’s explanation in terms of supervenience, to say that the pain caused the decision means that the pain was supervenient upon a physical state, and that that physical state then caused a second physical state, upon which was supervenient the decision to move the hand. (And then, of course, by the above analysis, that second physical state caused, as a third physical state, the actual withdrawal.)

Does this explanation provide what Kim needs -- an account that avoids epiphenomenalism while also maintaining physicalism’s dictum that the physical realm must be causally closed and that, in fact, purely physical theory must be deemed adequate in principle to explain everything that occurs? Kim’s explanation certainly remains true to physicalism. But does it avoid epiphenomenalism? At one time Kim evidently believed that it did. This belief is puzzling, given the fact that he was portraying mental causation as a species of supervenient causation, which he portrayed as epiphenomenal. He, in fact, explicitly described mental causation as "epiphenomenal causation" (SM 107). Although it should have thereby been clear that physicalism, as he conceives it, makes it impossible to avoid "the great paradox of epiphenomenalism," he did not then think so, saying instead that his account seemed "sufficient to redeem the causal powers we ordinarily attribute to mental events" (SM 107).

More recently, however, he has questioned the tenability of this position, asking whether it really is different from epiphenomenalism. There is, to be sure, a technical difference, as he had pointed out: The epiphenomenalist says that every mental state is caused by a corresponding physical state, whereas in Kim’s account the mental state is supervenient upon the physical state, the difference being that in the latter relationship the two levels are understood to be simultaneous whereas the epiphenomenalist’s causal relation allows for a time lapse between the physical state and its mental effect (SM 359). But Kim now, besides seeing that he had given no reason as to why this should make a difference, adds that the epiphenomenalist might be happy to think of the mental as supervenient upon the physical and even to attribute supervenient causation to the mental. This acceptance raises the question: "If ‘supervenient causation’ is something that even the epiphenomenalist can live with, might it not be ‘causation’ in name only?" (SM 359). Kim now sees that there may be only "a very fine line" between epiphenomenalism and his own view that "mental causal relations are not among the fundamental causal processes of the world but are only supervenient or dependent on them," and that "any ‘physicalistically correct’ account of mental causation must . . . expos[e] itself to the charge of epiphenomenalism" (SM 360).

The problem is that, given the two assumptions of causal exclusion and the closedness of the physical domain,

In other words, in the account of supervenient causation, M1 is said to be supervenient on P1, which is said to be a sufficient cause of P2.

With this analysis, Kim has in effect rejected his own earlier claim that the analysis of mental causation as supervenient "does not treat mental phenomena as causally inert epiphenomena" so as to "reduce mental causation to the status of a mere chimera" (SM 107).

Kim’s (virtual) admission that his account has not attributed any real causal power to the mental is momentous, especially given his acceptance of Alexander’s dictum that to be real is to have causal powers. It means that he has not, after all, provided a basis for saving the reality of the mental from elimination.

It is at this point that Kim says that he appears to be "up against a dead end."

And a serious dead end this is, given Kim’s recognition of the necessity of affirming mental causation. Without this affirmation, as he pointed out, all of our ordinary, commonsense explanations of human action, in terms of beliefs, desires, and decisions, are undermined. There is no room for normative explanations and evaluations. And Kim’s own reductio – "if our reasons and desires have no causal efficacy at all in influencing our bodily actions, then perhaps no one has ever performed a single intentional action?" (SM 104) -- reduces his own position to absurdity. Something must be amiss.

One way to state the mistake at the root of Kim’s dead end is in terms of the conflict, as he portrayed it, between practical and theoretical reason. As he sees, we in practice cannot help but presuppose the efficacy of our conscious decisions. We walk to the refrigerator, for example, because we decide to get something to eat. In Kim’s view, however, our theoretical reason, which tries to determine how the world really is, is constrained by a set of beliefs -- those constituting "physicalism" -- that are incompatible with our presupposition as to the efficacy of conscious decisions. This conflict forces a decision as to which of his two basic assumptions to modify. His choice is to take physicalism, as he has defined it, as virtually beyond question and thereby to try to redefine "mental causation" so as to make it compatible with this physicalism. In effect, accordingly; he takes his version of physicalism as more certain than our assumption as to the reality and thereby efficacy of conscious experience. I would agree with Whitehead (PR 13, 151), by contrast, that those notions that we inevitably presuppose in practice should be regarded as the nonnegotiable elements in our belief systems. We would, accordingly, have an "intractable" problem only if two such beliefs seemed to be at loggerheads. That complex of beliefs constituting Kim’s version of physicalism, however, does not belong to the inescapable presuppositions of practice. It does, to be sure, constitute the dominant opinion within contemporary scientific and philosophical communities and, thereby, perhaps within the intellectual world in the West in our time. But as such it is still a fallible, revisable opinion, so that it should not be allowed to veto any of those notions that we cannot help but presuppose in practice (because if we deny them in theory, we are implicitly violating the law of noncontradiction by explicitly denying a notion while implicitly presupposing it). The way to avoid the dead end, accordingly, is to reconsider physicalism.

One way to reconsider physicalism would be to ask whether it should, after all, be given up for some other position. Dualists take this approach, and I have elsewhere advocated panexperientialism as an alternative to physicalism as well as dualism. Another approach, however, would be to ask whether physicalism itself can be reconceived so as to overcome the problematic features of the hitherto dominant version of it. This is the approach I am taking in this essay. From this perspective, Kim’s problems arise from the fact that he has held a materialist version of physicalism. Of course, to speak of "materialist physicalism" is redundant, given the normal practice of most philosophers, including Kim (SM 266n), of using "materialism" and "physicalism" interchangeably. My proposal here, however, is that we could distinguish the two terms, enlarging the meaning of "physicalism" so that it would have two versions, a panexperientialist as well as a materialist version.

In the next section, I will show that Whiteheadian panexperientialism can plausibly be regarded as a form of physicalism. In the third section, I will show why it is the materialist version of physicalism, not physicalism as such, that created the problems that led Kim to a dead end, and why the panexperientialist version of physicalism would avoid these problems.

II. Panexperientialism as a Penn of Physicalism

Given the widespread equation of materialism and physicalism, or at least the idea that to be a physicalist is to be a materialist, the idea of a nonmaterialist physicalism will seem strange, at least initially. There is, however, no consensus as to exactly what physicalism means, partly because, as Kim points out, there "appears to be no generally accepted account of exactly what it means to say that something is ‘physical"’ (SM 340). I will show that Whiteheadian panexperientialism concurs with physicalism as portrayed by Kim on most of its basic points, although the two positions give somewhat different formulations of the various underlying intuitions. Of course, it does nor agree with the other form on all the points; if it did, there would be no reason to present it as an alternative. My twofold argument will be that (1) while panexperientialism shares most of the basic intuitions of materialist physical. ism, (2) it differs with regard to precisely those aspects that led materialist physicalism to a dead end on the mind-body problem. The second part of this argument will be reserved for the next section. In the present section, 1 will show the similarity of the two positions, while also pointing to some of their basic differences, in terms of eleven more-or-less distinct points.

1. Perhaps the basic claim of physicalism is that every actuality is physical, in the sense that it has a physical aspect. In this regard Kim quotes Donald Davidson’s statement that "all events are physical; that is, every event has some physical property" (SM 279). This definition permits at least some actualities also to have a mental aspect. What is ruled out is the notion of things, such as Cartesian souls, that are purely mental (SM 126, 340). Panexperientialism agrees: Every actual entity has a physical pole. There can be no purely mental actual entities (PR 108, 239).

2. In a closely related formulation, Kim speaks of "ontological physicalism" as "the claim that all that exists in spacetime is physical" (SM 266). Panexperientialism agrees, in that spacetime is constituted by actual entities, all of which have a physical pole. Panexperientialism does also speak of "eternal objects," or "pure possibilities," which are not physical. But such objects, such as the number 2 or the color red, exist outside spacetime. Although they, of course, become ingredient in some spatiotemporal loci, they are essentially outside the spacetime continuum, being no more bound to one spatiotemporal locus than another. These wholly nonphysical entities, accordingly, do not contradict the point that spatiotemporal entities have a physical aspect.

3. Materialist physicalism also claims that, in actualities having a mental as well as a physical aspect, the physical is prior to the mental. Kim speaks, for example, of the "thesis of primacy, or basicness, for physical properties in relation to mental properties" (SM 340). Panexperientialism agrees: the mental pole is always derivative from the physical (PR 108, 247).

4. In relation to his statement that "there appears to be no generally accepted account of exactly what it means to say that something is ‘physical’," Kim suggests that one necessary feature of a definition would be that "a physical entity must have a determinate location in space and time" (SM 340). Panexperientialism agrees. In Whitehead’s system every actual occasion has a determinate spatiotemporal location relative to all others (PR 25, 195).² This point is applicable to the "dominant occasions" belonging to a human mind as much as to any other actual occasions.

5. One of the conditions often given for being a "physical entity" is that of being an embodiment of energy. That Kim presupposes this condition is suggested by his proposal that "physical" be defined by reference to current theoretical physics, perhaps in conjunction with chemistry and biology (SM 340). Panexperientialism, by virtue of its hierarchy of actual entities, could not, of course, accept such a reductionistic approach. It does agree, however, that all actual entities are capable of affecting, and being affected by, the entities studied by these sciences. This universal interactionism is possible because all actual entities are embodiments of "creativity," which is an enlargement of the notion of energy as understood in current physics. So, although some "physical entities" do not embody any of the forms of energy currently recognized by contemporary physics, they all do embody creative power that can be converted from or into the creative power embodied in the entities studied by physicists. In this sense the physical is defined by reference to the entities of theoretical physics.

6. While claiming that there are no purely mental actualities, materialist physicalism says that some spatiotemporal things have no conscious mentality. Kim says, for example, that "there can be, and presumably are, objects and events that have only physical properties" (SM 340). Again, panexperientialism agrees -- with one (all-important) proviso: that such things are not individual actualities but aggregates or aggregational societies of individuals. In such things (such as a rock) or events (such as a rock concert), there is no overall experience, therefore no mentality.

7. Because many materialists in speaking of "mentality" mean conscious mentality, the prior point could be taken simply to mean that some spatiotemporal things have no conscious mentality. Panexperientialism agrees with this point even with regard to individual entities, as the experience of the vast majority of them is said not to be conscious.

8. I had cited earlier Kim’s formulation of physicalism as the view that "what is physical determines all the facts of the world" (SM xv). Given panexperientialism’s view that all actual entities have a physical pole, it agrees. Indeed, at the center of Whitehead’s philosophy is his "ontological principle," according to which only actual entities can act. All explanations must finally be in terms of actual entities: "to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities" (PR 24).

This point holds true even with regard to aggregational societies of actual entities, as Whitehead says that they are efficient only by means of the causal efficacy of their component actual entities (PR 91). The panexperientialist version of physicalism would, to be sure, resist what Kim, as a "robust materialist," assumes to be an alternative formulation of the same point, namely, "that what is material determines all that there is in the world" (SM 63). That is, given the distinction that I am making between physicalism and materialism, the latter formulation would mean that "vacuous actualities," devoid of experience, exert all the causal efficacy in the world (which is one of the basic points that led Kim into insuperable difficulties in affirming the reality of the mental). But the two kinds of physicalism do agree that all causal efficacy is exerted by "physical entities," as characterized in points 1-5 above.

9. One of the central tenets of Kim’s physicalism, as we have seen, is the thesis of the closed character of the physical domain. This tenet is, in fact, virtually equivalent to the previous point, because this tenet insists that the actual world consists of a nexus of cause-effect relations among physical things that is not open to influence from alleged nonphysical agents. This point is affirmed not only by panexperientialism’s insistence on the "ontological principle," according to which only actualities can act (PR 19, 24, 43), but also by its rejection of both dualism and supernaturalism. Of course, in the panexperientialist version of physicalism, all individual actual entities are physical-mental actualities, and it would resist Kim’s assumption that to say that every event has a physical cause must mean "that this physical cause, in virtue of its physical property, causes the physical event" (SM 280; italics added). Panexperientialism holds that the physical-mental cause can exert causal efficacy upon subsequent events in virtue of its mental as well as its physical aspect. But both views agree that there can be no occasional interruptions of the universal causal nexus among physical things.

10. Closely related is Kim’s assertion of universal causal determinism, according to which "every event has a cause" or, more precisely put, "every occurrence has a temporally earlier determinative condition" (SM 22, 76). Panexperientialism resists the completely deterministic interpretation of this idea, according to which the temporally prior condition fully determines every present event: When the event in question is an individual occasion of experience, it has a mental pole, which is partly self-determining (In Whitehead’s words, the ontological principle "could also be termed the ‘principle of efficient, and final, causation,"’ because it says that "every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence or in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence" [PR 24].) Given that (all-important) qualification, however, panexperientialism agrees that every event is (more or less) determined by antecedent conditions. In fact, in line with the Einsteinian definition of the "past" for any event as everything that causally affects it, Whitehead says: "The whole [past] world conspires to produce a new creation" (RM 109). To be sure, he also recognizes, in line with the common distinction between "conditions" and "causes," that some past events are far more important in determining the character of a present event than others. In any case, panexperientialism accepts the assumption, which lies behind the scientific search for explanations in terms of efficient causes, that d events are causally conditioned by antecedent events. It even agrees that some events (namely, those devoid of experiential unity) are fully determined by antecedent events. There are no events that have no causes; there are no events that have purely nonphysical causes; and there are no events that are fully self-caused. In all this, there is agreement.

11. Besides holding that only physical things can exert causal influence, Kim’s physicalism also maintains that all physical things do exert causal efficacy. This principle is contained in his endorsement of "Alexander’s dictum" that "To be real is to have causal powers" (SM 348). This point is central to the panexperientialism of Whitehead, who, although he was also influenced by Alexander traces the point back to Plato, citing his statement that "the definition of being is simply power" (AI 129). Accordingly, besides the fact that every occasion begins by being an effect of the past universe, every occasion also ends by being a cause (an "object" or "superject"), exerting causal power on future events. Each actual occasion is physical, accordingly, in the twofold sense that it begins with a physical pole, which means as an effect of prior events, and concludes by becoming a causal ingredient in the physical poles of subsequent events.

Given all of these points of agreement or at least similarity, accordingly. thinking of panexperientialism as a version of physicalism would not seem to involve an implausible extension of the meaning of "physicalism" as established by prior usage. Of course, nothing of substance hangs on this point. Construing panexperientialism as a type of physicalism, however, may be helpful by showing how much more materialism and panexperientialism have in common than might otherwise be readily apparent. In any case, having made this point. I will, in the next section, show how Kim’s problems, being rooted in the materialist version of physicalism, would be avoided in the panexperientialist version.

III. From Materialist to Panexperientialist Physicalism

Although materialism rejects the Cartesian dualism of two kinds of actual entities, it does accept the Cartesian view of "matter" or "the physical" upon which that dualism was based. The difference between Cartesian dualism and post-Cartesian materialism, accordingly, can be formulated in terms of the ‘material cause" of things in the Aristotelian sense -- that is, the "stuff" that is instantiated by actual things. In Descartes’ ontology, there are two fundamental kinds of stuff. Consciousness is the stuff that is instantiated by minds, while bodies, or physical things, instantiate spatially extended stuff, thereby being wholly devoid of experience and spontaneity (in the sense of final causation, self-determination in terms of ends). Post-Cartesian materialism, which I am here calling materialist physicalism, holds in effect that this latter kind of stuff; this pure matter (now sometimes called matter-energy), is that which is instantiated in all actual things. Indeed, Kim characterizes his physicalism as the idea that the world is "constituted by physical stuff" (SM xv). It is this idea that makes his physicalism incompatible with our hard-core commonsense presuppositions about our own experience.

This idea, for one thing, leads to Kim’s complete causal determinism. His "physical stuff" is, in its individual instantiations, capable of exercising only efficient causation, not also final causation in the sense of self-determination. All the causality exercised on a present event, therefore, must come from prior events; no present event, including a moment of human experience, can exert causation upon itself so as to be (partially) self-determining. Given this view, Kim must assume that "the existence and properties of an event are determined by its temporally antecedent conditions" (SM 102).

This claim, insofar as it is generalized to aLl events, conflicts with our inescapable assumption that we, at least sometimes, exercise a degree of freedom, because this assumption, upon analysis, can be seen to presuppose that an event in which we exercise this freedom is partly self-determining. The sufficient cause of the event would, accordingly, include not only its "temporally antecedent conditions" but also the event itself. Like everyone else, Kim himself presupposes a degree of freedom, as when he speaks of making choices (SM 366) and of our ability "to intervene in the course of events and alter it to suit our wishes" (SM 53). But his starting-point leads to a position that implies the denial that this freedom is genuine.

To be sure, Kim seems to consider the complete causal determinism implied by his position as a strength rather than a liability, in that it supports and is supported by theoretical (in the sense of scientific) reason. On the one hand, the thesis of causal determinism supports the scientific strategy of explaining events "in terms of their causal antecedents" (SM 77). On the other hand, this thesis is said to be supported by the success of this strategy. Kim’s statements reflect his awareness, however, that the success of this strategy is far from complete: He follows the statement about the success with the qualification, "limited though it may be"; and he says that the metaphysical thesis of causal determinism provides "an explanation of why this strategy works as well as it does" (SM 76-77, italics added). It would be preferable to have a metaphysical position that, besides doing justice to the human freedom that we cannot help presupposing, correctly predicts the degree of success that the method of explaining events in terms of antecedents would have in various domains. Panexperientialism provides such a basis.

With regard to the universal stuff embodied in all actual things, the panexperientialist version of physicalism refuses not only the Cartesian dualism of stuffs but also the choice between the Cartesian material and mental stuffs (the choice that has led to the split, among would-be nondualists, between materialists and idealists). Regarding each of them as an abstraction from an abstraction, panexperientialism in effect combines them into a more inclusive stuff,³ Whitehead’s "creativity." By virtue of embodying this creativity, individual actual entities have the capacity to exert at least an iota of self-determination before passing on the creative energy they have received from antecedent events to subsequent events. This modification of materialist physicalism provides one of the elements necessary to allow for freedom in human beings (and, to a lesser extent, other animals).

Another necessary element is the distinction between mere aggregational societies, such as rocks, on the one hand, and compound individuals, such as animals, on the other. In the latter, a higher-level of actuality has emerged, thereby giving the society as a whole a unity of experience and activity Kim’s position, however, does not allow for such a distinction: "Atoms and their mereological aggregates exhaust all of concrete existence. . . . There is no room in this picture for any concrete existent not fully decomposable into atoms and other basic physical particles" (SM 345).

This conclusion, like that of causal determinism, can be seen to follow from his assumption as to the nature of the universal stuff embodied in all actual entities or events. That is, besides being capable of exerting only efficient causation, this stuff is also, to use Whitehead’s word, "vacuous," meaning wholly devoid of experience, so that events embodying it have no "inside." Such events exist wholly as objects for other things, not also as subjects for themselves. As such, they are incapable of internal relatedness, in the sense of being partly constituted by their appropriation of influences from other things. Given this idea, it is inconceivable that evolution could lead to the emergence of higher-level actualities, to which causal power could be attributed. In Whitehead’s words:

Given this view, all things big enough to be directly observed would be of the same type: We could not regard living cells or multicelled animals as being, or containing, higher-level actualities to which causal efficacy could be attributed. We would have to think of them, with Kim, as ontologically "decomposable into atoms and other basic physical particles," to which all causal efficacy would be assigned. There would, in other words, be no difference in principle (but only in complexity) between living cells and living animals, on the one hand, and rocks and billiard balls, on the other. Accordingly, the former, which are more easily studied, can be taken as paradigms for understanding the causal principles involved in the latter. In Kim’s words: "the paradigmatic examples of macroobjects and properties are medium-sized material bodies around us and their observable properties" (SM 95). The implication is that all causation exerted within and by human beings must finally be reducible (ontologically if not epistemically) to the causal efficacy of the elementary particles constituting the human body. It is from this basis that Kim concludes that all mental causation must be epiphenomenal.

The argument for this conclusion runs as follows: (1) In material things such as rocks and bodies of water, the observable properties of the whole are mereologically supervenient upon (totally determined by) the powers of the microconstituents (SM 77, 96, 101). (2) In such things, therefore, "all causal relations involving observable phenomena -- all causal relations familiar from daily experience -- are cases of epiphenomenal causation" (SM 95). (3) All observable things are of the same organizational type, so that human beings are analogous to material things such as rocks and bodies of water. (4) We should, accordingly, regard the mind -- meaning that property of persons that we call mentality, which is observable in ourselves – "as an instance of mereological supervenience," meaning that its existence and properties are wholly determined by the microconstituents of the body (SM 168). (5) Mental or psychological causation, therefore, "is to be construed as supervenient epiphenomenal causation" (SM 95).

As this summary brings out, Kim’s argument involves treating two very different kinds of "observability" as if the difference between them were irrelevant. That is, in the "medium-sized material bodies" such as rocks and bodies of water, which he takes as paradigmatic for "macroobjects" in general, the "observable properties" are observable through our sensory perception, especially vision and touch. With regard to the mind or mentality, however, the "observable properties," such as conscious thoughts, images, and decisions, are not outwardly observable through our physical senses. We know of the nature and reality of the mind only by introspection. Given these radically different ways in which they are "observed," it is not self-evident, to say the least, that "mental phenomena" should be regarded as analogous to observable physical phenomena such as the wetness of water and the hardness of ice. The conclusion that they must be analogous follows not from their evident similarity, but as a deduction from the metaphysics of materialist physicalism, with its "Democritean doctrine of mereological supervenience, or microdeterminism" (SM 96), according to which all the features of all wholes are ontologically reducible to the most elementary constituents of nature, This metaphysics, according to which these elementary constituents are devoid of experience and thereby of internal relations, does not allow for the evolutionary emergence of higher-level actualities with genuine causal powers of their own.

In panexperientialist physicalism, by contrast, the universal stuff embodied in all individuals is not vacuous energy, but experiential creativity. A moment of human experience can, accordingly, be regarded as a full-fledged actuality with the power to receive and exert causal influence, not only because the brain cells are themselves regarded as centers of experience (so that there is no problem of dualistic interactionism), but also because it is the nature of actuality to be largely constituted by its appropriation of data from its immediate vicinity. The extremely rich (experiential) data provided by the human brain, accordingly, can be thought to allow the emergence of a higher-level actuality, which we call the mind. This emergence of human (and other animal) minds out of brains is not, furthermore, a unique type of emergence. Living cells themselves provide a lower-level example, in that the cell’s living occasions of experience have emerged out of the cell’s more elementary constituents. Panexperientialist physicalism, accordingly, agrees with materialist physicalism in regarding the mind-body relation as a species of a more general type of relation. It differs, however, in distinguishing between mereological emergence in aggregational wholes, in which the emergent properties and causal powers are fully a function of the properties and powers of the parts’ and the emergence of regnant occasions of experience in compound individuals, in which the higher-level emergent exerts causality -- both final and efficient -- of its own. Mental causation, accordingly, is not regarded as epiphenomenal. Besides the upward causation from the body to the mind, there is self-determination by the mind and, on the basis of this, downward causation from the mind to the body.

Could we, in the framework of panexperientialist physicalism, say that the mind is supervenient upon the body, especially the brain? On the one hand, this might be confusing, insofar as "supervenience" has become identified with the idea of microdetermination, according to which all determination that is not horizontal is upward. On the other hand, however, the term "supervenience" was first used, according to Kim (SM 134), as a variant of "emergence," and panexperientialism clearly says that the mind emerges from the brain. Also, as Kim says, "supervenient dependence does not represent a single, homogeneous type of dependence" (SM 166). In fact, advocating the attitude of "Let one hundred supervenience concepts bloom!", Kim says: "Each may have its own sphere of application" (SM 155). What I am suggesting is that the part-whole relationship involved in compound individuals is different in principle from that involved in aggregational societies, so that a radically different concept of supervenience is required. Building on Kim’s distinction between general and specific supervenience (SM 157-159), we can, with regard to the supervenience of the mind’s experiences upon the brain’s activities, make a twofold point: The general fact that this relationship occurs is (at least usually) fully determined by the brain -- by whether it is providing adequate support. But, although some of the specific experiences, such as pains, may be (at least virtually) determined by the brain (at least in what we usually consider "normal," as distinct from "altered," states of consciousness), others, such as thoughts and decisions, are not, but are based upon the mind’s self-determination. Panexperientialist physicalism, accordingly, rejects the view of materialist physicalism, enunciated by Kim, according to which all the mind’s experiences are fully determined by the brain (SM 76, 86, 278). The self-determination by the mind, furthermore, brings about effects in the brain.

This dual idea of self-determination and downward causation raises the question as to whether panexperientialism can affirm what Kim calls the core maxim of supervenience: "No difference of one kind without a difference of another kind" (SM 155). Panexperientialists certainly cannot affirm this maxim in the sense in which it is intended by materialists, namely, that any difference in the mind’s experience would depend upon a difference in the brain but not vice-versa. In other words, panexperientialism rejects the materialist doctrine that the dependence relation between brain and mind is asymmetrical, always running upward (SM 76, 86, 278,353-354). The maxim, however, can be affirmed in an interactionist sense: Not only does any change in the brain bring about a change in the mind; but also any change in the mind brings about a change in the brain. This interactionism means, furthermore, that supervenience is not distinguished, as it is by Kim, from causation as another kind of determination. Rather, to say that the mind emerges out of the brain in each new moment means that it is causally dependent upon the brain activities that occurred a fraction of a second earlier. This causal dependence is not, however, complete determination, because, as emphasized earlier, causal relations do not involve complete determination, at least when the "effect" is an individual actuality. And the human mind is evidently the individual actuality (at least on this planet) having the greatest power of self-determination. In any case, the mind’s supervenience upon the body is such that it can exert downward causation back upon the body.

With this point, we come to the different meaning given by panexperientialist physicalism to the principle of the "closedness of the physical domain." Given the impossibility of conceiving of the emergence of higher-level physical individuals, the materialist version of physicalism interprets this principle to mean that all causal efficacy must be exerted by the level of physical entities studied by physics. Affirming downward causation by the mind upon the body, accordingly, would violate this principle (SM 356). It is this rejection of downward causation, of course, that has led Kim to the recognition that his position cannot do justice to our commonsense belief that, for example, we sometimes walk to the water fountain because we want a drink. The panexperientialist version of physicalism can affirm this belief because its "physical entities" are phyk4-riseatd entities, and because there are various levels of such entities, one level of which is that of the dominant occasions of experience constituting the human mind. To affirm the existence of minds or souls is not necessarily, as Kim assumes (SM 126), to affirm the existence of things with mental but no physical characteristics. The closure of the system of physical causes to influence from nonphysical causes does not, accordingly, exclude human minds from the universal causal nexus. It does not even exclude downward causation on the body from the specifically mental aspect of the dominant occasions constituting the mind. This version of physicalism can, therefore, provide what Kim recognizes to be necessary "an account of psychological causation in which the mental qua mental has [a] real causal role to play" (SM 106). It can do this because it rejects Kim’s contrary principle, according to which, when causation is exerted by a "physical cause" with both physical and mental aspects, the causation always occurs solely by virtue of its physical aspect (SM 280). According to panexperientialism, the causal efficacy can also occur by virtue of the mental aspect of an occasion of experience, meaning that aspect in which self-determination may occur.

This doctrine of panexperientialist physicalism entails yet another divergence from the materialist version. The latter takes the closedness of the physical domain to mean that physical theory, essentially equated with theoretical physics (SM xv, 356), can in principle give a complete account of the world. For example, having said that "the causal closure of the physical domain" means that "if we trace the causal ancestry of a physical event, we need never go outside the physical domain," Kim adds:

Indeed, both materialist and panexperientialist physicalists find dualistic interactionism unacceptable. The question, however, is the acceptability of the picture presented by materialist physicalism, according to which physics is supposed to be able, in principle, to give a complete causal account of every physical occurrence, even when such occurrences occur in human bodies, For example, Kim says, in a parallel passage, that rejecting the closure of physical theory

But how credible is Kim’s scenario, according to which physics can in principle give a complete account of all the motions of the electrons in, say, the hands, throat, and mouth of an American president giving a speech? We all in practice assume that, when speakers raise their hands, thereby (among other things) changing the spatial location of the electrons in them, they do so because they decided to do so; or, if we take the speaker’s hand gestures to be involuntary, we at least assume that they occurred because of points the speaker had decided to make. And we assume that, had the person decided to give a different speech, or no speech at all, the person’s mouth and throat, and thereby all the physical particles therein, would have been in somewhat different states. According to the materialist version of physicalism, however, all the states of all the particles in a person’s body would be explainable in terms of physics, which takes no account of the person’s mind -- that is, the person’s beliefs, desires, purposes and decisions.

The idea that physics by itself could predict, or even causally explain, all the movements of living human bodies is a pure pipedream. Contemporary physical theory is not even remotely close to such a capacity. The idea that physics ever will have such a capacity, or even the more modest (and completely unverifiable) idea that physics in principle has such a capacity, is radically underdetermined by the evidence. In fact, most if not all of the relevant evidence, as the previous example illustrated, counts against the idea that physics can in principle provide a complete account of the physical world, especially given the existence of human and other animals in it. This idea is almost entirely a product of faith, inspired far less by evidence than by the metaphysics of materialist physicalism.⁴ It can, indeed, be considered the form of superstition distinctive to the reductionistic worldview engendered by materialism.

This materialist physicalism rules out the influence of the mind’s (partially) self-determining decisions on the physical processes in our bodies for two reasons. First, from its point of vie’s given its acceptance of the Cartesian construal of the physical as devoid of experience and spontaneity, belief in "the mind" as an actuality distinct from the brain that could influence it is excluded, because this would imply dualistic influence of the experiential on the purely physical. Second, materialist physicalism’s acceptance of causal determinism, along with the correlative acceptance of the idea that "science" provides precise predictive laws,⁵ excludes the idea that a partially self-determining mind could affect the physical course of nature, It is these two metaphysically-based exclusions that, as we have seen, prevent materialist physicalism from doing justice to our inescapable presuppositions about the reality and efficacy of our mental life.

Panexperientialist physicalism, with its alternative metaphysics, implies a different understanding of both causality and science, one that does not conflict with our inevitable presuppositions about ourselves. To begin with, having (like materialism) rejected the early dualists’ supernatural deity who imposed absolute laws upon nature, it also rejects the notion of absolute because imposed laws.⁶ The so-called laws of nature are really its habits. This means that the laws of a particular domain are not prescriptive, specifying how its entities must behave, but descriptive, describing how they in fact do behave. It also means that the laws for different domains may be more or less exact if the habits they describe are more or less exactly followed in different domains.

That this is indeed to be expected follows from two other features of this metaphysical position: the distinction between lower and higher levels of individual actualities, and the distinction between genuine individuals and aggregational societies of such. The latter distinction implies that there would be two kinds of laws: First, the laws applying to aggregational societies, which by definition have no overall experience and thereby no power of self-determination, would be absolute (or virtually so), so that predictability and repeatability would be (virtually) complete. This prediction indeed fits the results of the Galilean-Newtonian science of aggregational societies, such as billiard balls and stellar masses. Second, laws applying to genuine individuals, whether simple or compound, would be statistical, because all individuals have at least an iota of mentality and thereby spontaneity. This prediction is fulfilled, for example, by the laws of quantum physics, which predictively describe the behavior of groups of particles, not that of any individual particle.

The former distinction mentioned above -- that between lower and higher levels of individuals -- suggests that the habits of the higher-level ones will be less binding, so that as scientists move to increasingly higher levels, the laws will become increasingly imprecise, gradually becoming what some would prefer to call mere "generalizations." This prediction also seems to fit the facts. For example, the laws applying to living cells are less predictive than the laws of physics and chemistry The laws discoverable about multicelled life are even more distant from the (deterministic) ideal of complete predictability. Students of animal behavior are not even remotely close to having a predictive science. And, especially since the demise of behaviorism, the idea of having such a science of human behavior seems so impossible that the very idea of "social sciences" is widely disparaged, and many -- still presupposing the notion that science must provide rather precise, predictive laws -- say that we should take a hermeneutical, rather than scientific, approach to human beings.

Although Kim is ambivalent about it (SM xiii), he seems to accept a version of this disciplinary dualism, seeing no way around Donald Davidson’s view that psychology is "a hermeneutic inquiry rather than a predictive science" because the laws of the mind "are normative rather than predictive laws" (SM 211). Kim regards this as a Kantian rather than a Cartesian dualism, because it rejects interactionist dualism (SM 214). It is, nevertheless, Cartesian in dividing the world into a purely physical realm, which is ruled by efficient causation, and a purely mental realm, in which there is only final causation, so that the mind is constrained only by "the norms and rules that guide actions and decisions, and form the basis of rational evaluations of our motives, cognitions, and emotions" (SM 211).⁷

Surely, however, our psychological life is constrained by efficient causation -- much of it from our bodies, in the form of hungers, thirsts, desires, pains, and pleasures -- as well as by ideal norms. Many of our decisions, in fact, notoriously involve a tension between these two constraints -- between duty and desire. The panexperientialist version of physicalism does justice to this fact by portraying the mind in each moment (that is, each dominant occasion of experience) as having both a physical pole, which is constituted by the causal influences from the physical environment, and a mental pole, which entertains ideal possibilities, including logical, ethical, and aesthetic norms. This way of regarding the human mind does not create a disciplinary dualism, furthermore, because both physical and mental poles are attributed to all animal minds and, in fact, to all individuals. Human psychology differs greatly, to be sure, not only because we have much less access to the psyches of other animals, but also because their mentality is so much less developed, so that they -- at least most of them -- seem incapable of entertaining norms as such, The difference is, nevertheless, one of degree, not of kind. This difference of degree, in fact, extends all the way down, to the simplest individuals. Insofar as a disciplinary dualism is entailed by panexperientialism, it involves not an ontological dualism between two kinds of individuals, but only an organizational duality between compound individuals, such as animals, and aggregational societies, such as rocks. In any case, from this point of view, psychology is not to be excluded from the "sciences" because it cannot provide predictive laws like those of physics, chemistry, and cell biology. Rather, the test is whether it provides true, testable knowledge about its domain, the human psyche. Part and parcel of such knowledge would be knowledge of the degree to which the mind can transcend efficient causation on the basis of normative ideals.

To those who have been informed by a materialistic, deterministic, reductionistic metaphysics, the suggestion that human psychology can in principle not discover laws as predictive as those of physics and chemistry, because there are no such laws to be discovered, will seem like defeatism. From the point of view of our inevitable presuppositions, the results of scientific studies thus far, and panexperientialist physicalism, however, it is simple realism. In fact, the primary virtue of panexperientialism is that, in spite of its initial implausibility (at least to those taught to see through dualist or materialist lenses), it enables us to coordinate our hard-core commonsense presuppositions with what we have learned about the world from the special sciences. It does this, with regard to the mind-body problem, by reconciling the truth in Cartesian dualism -- that mind and brain are distinct and interact -- with the truth in materialist physicalism -- that all actual things are physical, so that there is no dualistic interaction.

Kim has been led to a dead end because, correctly seeing that a nonreductive materialism is impossible,⁸ he believes that there are only three other options, all of which are extremely problematic: reductive materialism, which reduces the psychological to the physical (as conventionally understood); eliminative materialism, which, realizing that reduction is impossible, excludes the psychological from its ontology; and ontological dualism, which rejects physicalism altogether. I have proposed a fourth option: a nonreductive, panexperientialist physicalism. I thank Jaegwon Kim for the stimulation that his thoughtful book has provided, and I invite his response to this critique.

Notes

1. The idea that mental causation is a partial cause of the man’s climbing the latter, says Kim, violates the causal closure principle in that it regards the mental event as a necessary constituent of a full cause of the physical event" (SM 280). The idea that mental and physical causes are each independent sufficient causes of the effect would also violate the physical causal closure principle, as this idea would imply "that if the physical cause had not occurred, the mental cause would have occurred and caused the physical effect" (SM 281).

2. This aspect of Whitehead’s philosophy, according to which every actual entity and therefore every occasion in the life-history of an elementary particle is folly determinate, which involves its having a definite position relative to other particles (PR 25), has been used as an argument against it. Abner Shimony has said that this element of Whitehead’s philosophy is contradicted by quantum theory, which says that elementary particles have no definite position apart from being observed ("Quantum Physics and the Philosophy of Whitehead," now Chapter 19 of Shimony’s Search for a Naturalistic World View [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993]; Vol. II: 291-309, esp. 298-299, 304; this essay was originally published in Max Black, ed., Philosophy in America [London: Allen & Unwin, 19651). That indeed has been the dominant interpretation of quantum theory. Now, however, we have the ontological interpretation provided by David Bohm and B.J. Hiley, which is equivalent mathematically and superior philosophically, and in which a well-defined position is an intrinsic property of every particle (The Unfinished Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory [London & New York Routledge, 1993], 2, 110, 113]).

3. Whitehead at one place seems to reject the term "stuff" as descriptive of the ultimate reality embodied in all actual entities, saying (with reference to the "neutral stuff" of certain realistic philosophers): "An actual entity is a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a ‘stuff’" (PR 41). However, he is rejecting less the idea that "creativity" can be called a "stuff" than the idea that it can be described morphologically rather than as a dynamic process. For example, he elsewhere says: "‘Creativity’ is another rendering of the Aristotelian ‘matter,’ and of the modem ‘neutral stuff.’ But it is divested of the notion of passive receptivity" (PR 31).

4. One of Kim’s many virtues is that he recognizes the extent to which his positions are based more on metaphysical than on empirical considerations. For example, with regard to belief in psychophysical supervenience, according to which all psychological states are determined by brain processes, he says that the belief "seems to be based on broad metaphysical and methodological considerations . . . , buttressed by what empirical evidence there is for specific psychophysical correlations" (SM 193).

5. For Kim, science is nomothetic, so that, for example, if psychology cannot provide laws, it is not a science. Contained in this requirement is that the laws be precise laws, not mere generalizations (SM 194,199). Kim also seems to accept "the received view" that "events standing in a causal relation must instantiate a causal law" (SM 288).

6. That Kim still presupposes the idea of imposed laws is suggested by his statement that the world is "governed by physical law" (SM xv).

7. This disciplinary dualism is reflected in Kim’s recommendation that the right way to save vernacular psychology "is to stop thinking of it as playing the same game that ‘cognitive science’ is supposed to play -- that is, stop thinking of it as a ‘theory’ whose primary raison d’étre is to generate law-based causal explanations and predictions. We will do better to focus on its normative role in the evaluation of actions and the formation of intentions and decisions. If vernacular psychology competes against cognitive science in the prediction game, it cannot win" (SM 264 n46). Besides gratuitously granting to future "cognitive science" powers that its achievements thus far in no way support, this recommendation, in seeming to deny vernacular psychology any significant explanatory-predictive powers whatsoever, seems in strong tension with Kim’s recognition, cited earlier, that we ordinarily "explain, and predict at least in a limited way, the behavior of our fellow human beings and ourselves" within the framework of vernacular or intentional psychology, with its motives, desires, beliefs, hopes, and decisions (SM 261). Clearly what is needed is a viewpoint that allows us to combine physiological and normative factors -- efficient and final causation -- within a single explanation.

8. See especially Chapter 14 of Supervenience and Mind, "The Myth of Nonreductive Materialism."

Whitehead’s method of the working hypothesis, according to which philosophy begins with the observation of particular experience and the tentative formulation of its general features, testifies to the fact that the Category of the Ultimate is Whitehead’s initially provisional statement of the ultimate or most general conditions for experience. These conditions are exemplified by that experience. They are what Whitehead called the "more abstract things" which emerge from the more concrete things" (PR 30), the former being universals, or more accurately, patterns of eternal objects which it is the task of philosophy to explain, or in Whitehead’s more empirical manner of expression, to describe. With this in mind Whitehead carried out the detailed development of the Category of the Ultimate in terms of twenty-seven Categories of Explanation (CE 1-27). It is my contention that three of these categories are of primary importance in this regard.

My working hypothesis is that the Category of the Ultimate declares the ultimacy of three concepts, the ‘one,’ the ‘many,’ and ‘creativity,’ and that it thereby entails the ultimacy of three corresponding principles. The ‘one’ is developed in the eighteenth Category of Explanation (CE 18) as the ontological principle, the ‘many’ as the principle of relativity (CE 4), and ‘creativity’ as the principle of process (CE 9). In this way, the Category of the Ultimate entails the ultimacy of these three principles signifying that they are necessary conditions for experience.

The Category of the Ultimate. The term ‘one’ refers to the ‘singularity’ of an entity. The entity is singular because it is definite in its unity. This unity consists in the conjunction of many other entities in the environment of the entity in question. It is a synthesis of many other entities experienced as data into a new entity, namely, the singular ‘one’ which is synthesizing. This synthesis is a complex of relations creating ‘one’ out of ‘many.’ The newly created entity consists of such a complexity. This is the ultimate notion of the ‘one’ involved in the Category of the Ultimate.

The term ‘many’ refers to another such notion. It is the concept of a plurality or multiplicity of entities which itself is not an entity but a relational condition entailed by the character of the actual entity. The ‘many’ "conveys the notion of disjunctive diversity; this notion is an essential element in the concept of ‘being.’ There are many ‘beings’ in disjunctive diversity" (PR 31). The actual entity, because it is ‘one’ and singular, is distinct or disjunctively diverse from others,

The idea of ‘creativity’ denotes the interrelation of the ‘one’ and the ‘many.’ Creativity is "the advance from disjunction to conjunction creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction" (PR 32). It is the process whereby a plurality of entities become a new unit of experience. "The many become one, and are increased by one" (PR 32). In this way, Whitehead distinguishes the notion of advance, which he variously calls creativity, creative advance, or process.

Creativity is a concept involving ‘one’ and ‘many,’ but is distinguishable from both, Although they are analytically distinct, these three notions are inseparable in fact. In other words, the concrete experience or complete fact is a single process which is fully analyzable in terms of three distinct but interrelated concepts, unity, plurality, and advance.

The Ontological Principle. The singularity of an actual entity refers to its conjunctive unification or syntheses of other entities in its own constitution. This, in effect, describes the becoming or concrescence of the actual entity. Concrescence is the process whereby the actual takes on individual form, the process which is the actual taking that form. The essence of this entity is its synthetic individuality, its conjunction of other entities as data in such a way as to produce a definite actuality which is itself a new unity of experience. The actual entity in concrescence is at once an individual unity and that which is related to others.

That experience functions under this condition described by the Category of the Ultimate is precisely what is expressed by the ontological principle (CE 18):

Whatever is, directly or indirectly, derives from the internal constitution of an actual entity. That is to say, whatever is real is, or is derived from, a singular experience. This notion is further analyzed by Whitehead in terms of prehensions. But the point relevant to this essay has already been made: that the Category of the Ultimate proclaims the ultimacy of the condition of concrete experience by the ontological principle. Thus this principle is an ultimate one for Whitehead’s metaphysics.

As we will see however, the ultimacy of the ontological principle does not preclude the ultimacy of other principles.

The Principle of Relativity. The actual entity concresces and perishes. Such an entity by concrescence becomes an individual unity which, in ceasing to become any further, acquires ‘being.’ The ‘becoming’ of the actual entity and its ‘being’ are analytically distinguishable but inseparable in fact: they constitute two conditions of the one process which is the actual entity. The concrescence is its attainment of individual unity, and the perishing its acquisition of objective status as an available datum for inclusion in other actual entities. The latter idea defines the ‘many’ in the Category of the Ultimate. The character of the actual entity as an objective datum available for other actual entities establishes it as a distinct member of a plurality.

The principle of relativity (CE 4), however, also describes the objective character of the actual entity:

This principle asserts that the objective character of the actual entity constitutes the data it makes available for inclusion in other actual entities. But as we noted above, this communicates the ultimate notion of the ‘many’ in the Category of the Ultimate. Hence the principle of relativity may be said to be an ultimate principle expressing the general condition of plurality.

The Principle of Process. The Category of the Ultimate states that ‘creativity’ is an ultimate notion. It denotes a process of advance from an unordered state of affairs to a unique occasion of togetherness. Many disjoined entities become one new actual entity distinct from the many it unifies. ‘Creativity’ is a complex principle according to which the ‘many’ are related with the ‘one’: "The many become one, and are increased by one" (PR 32).

Elsewhere the same idea is expressed in different terms by White-head: "the very essence of real actuality -- that is, of the completely real -- is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing" (AI 274). Creativity is process, and process involves the interrelation of the ultimate notions of becoming and perishing. This expresses the principle of process (CE 9): "How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is; so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ This is the ‘principle of process (PR 34). Thus, the ‘creativity’ of the Category of the Ultimate is analyzable in terms of the principle of process, which is therefore an ultimate principle in Whitehead’s metaphysics.

The principle of process involves interrelation of the ontological principle and the principle of relativity. For the "two descriptions" which are "not independent," one of the ‘being’ of the actual entity and the other of its ‘becoming,’ refer, respectively, to the principle of relativity (CE 4) and the ontological principle (CE 18). This correspondence is even more apparent in the preceding Category of Explanation (CE 8):

Whitehead omits mention of the principle of process when he specifies those categories directly explanatory of the doctrine of process or ‘unrest’:

That the principle of process (CE 9) is not specified here is a rather glaring and inexplicable omission, especially since it is a more explicit general statement of the doctrine than is the first category which simply asserts "that the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities (PR 33). For process also involves both ‘becoming’ and ‘being,’ which entails interrelation of the ontological principle and the principle of relativity. The final category Whitehead also mentions (CE 27) is simply a more detailed expression, in terms of prehensions, of the eighteenth Category of Explanation.

Whitehead appears to have appreciated in some sense the special role of these three Categories of Explanation. They alone, the three which jointly explain the Category of the Ultimate, are specifically designated as "principles."

[Editor’s note: In a forthcoming essay delineating the process challenge to Thomism in terms of creativity and esse, David L. Schindler appears to have independently discovered the intimate connection between these three Categories of Explanation and the Category of the Ultimate.]

"Speculative Philosophy" Whitehead defines at the outset of Process and Reality as "the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted" (PR 4). Our experience includes both elements ordinary and elements extraordinary. I want to examine in Whiteheadian terms some extraordinary elements as they are manifest in psychedelic experiences, particularly those consequent upon ingestion of the psychoactive chemical diethylamide of lysergic acid (LSD). I have two main reasons:

First, a description of the LSD experience may illuminate some of Whitehead’s notions about the becoming of an actual entity. If this is the case, examination of the LSD experience in Whitehead’s terms serves both to test and extend the scope of his scheme, in accordance with his ideal that speculative philosophy should interpret "every element of our experience." We can be sure that Whitehead would not try to explain away the LSD experience as a "delusion,"¹ for he says, "The word ‘delusive’ is all very well as a technical term; but it must not he misconstrued to mean that what we have directly perceived, we have not directly perceived" (PR 99). In the case that "we may have been taking drugs, [it may simply be] that the chair-image we see has no familiar counterpart in any historical route of a corpuscular society" (PR 100). Many of the perceptions in the LSD experience may have no familiar counterparts, but I believe that the very unfamiliarity casts light on the relation of our mind to ordinary experience by amplifying features that become dim through familiarity.

Secondly, interpretation of the LSD experience in Whiteheadian terms shows the experience to be useful for promoting the intuition which is ultimately necessary to understanding the relation of God and the World. Also, providing a Whiteheadian scheme of interpretation for the LSD experience places its psychological aspects in a philosophical perspective and thereby helps to elucidate the relationship in general between ordinary and extraordinary experience. Otherwise there is the danger of an arbitrary disjunction. This disjunction is evident, for instance, in the controversy over whether LSD is a source of religious and mystical enlightenment or whether it is a "psychotomimetic," a drug that induces a state simulating psychosis.²

I will not provide a detailed account here of any particular psychedelic experience because there is ample literature in this regard)³ Also, there is great variety in regard to the specifics of even one individual’s repeated experiences. To give some point of reference, however, for the discussion to follow, let me briefly characterize some occurrences one might experience under the influence of LSD.

At the outset there is an enhancement of visual perception; for instance, colors look more vivid, more intense than usual. While this enhancement is most apparent with visual perception, it may also occur with auditory, and to a lesser extent, tactile and olfactory perception. As the experience develops, perception becomes infused with ideation, even to the point where it becomes impossible to separate one from the other. It is a commonplace, of course, that all sensory perception is involved with ideation. Ordinarily, however, this involvement is so habitual and conventional as to be utterly beneath notice. Usually, a tree is a tree; only occasionally is it an inspiration. Under the influence of LSD, one might first focus on how incredibly green the leaves are, then the green gradually becomes more an evidence of vitality, then living, breathing nature itself. The tree no longer a tree, but quintessential tree itself; form, idea, perfection; its movement that of universe itself. Wind, tree, self all one -- swirling, universal dance.

Everything seems to take on deeper significance, a myriad of meaning unlock in each individual thing. Events brim over with significance. A paper cup becomes a chalice, printed flower jewels, then a grail. Momentarily it is lost; and battles must be fought for it, seas crossed, terrors braved -- but then the cup-grail reappears as just another piece of trash. In the tangle of ideas and perception a pattern will seem to appear in, say, the way gravel is strewn on a driveway, a pattern that becomes the fine pattern of atomic structure underlying universe; and driveway is road, way, truth. Meaning unlocks new aspects of old things; patterns form, grow, fade into the cosmic swirl. Through it all runs heightened emotion, heightened to awe.

But just as one candle may become light itself and illuminate the entire universe, a glimpse of uncertainty may unlock menace on the face of every passerby, ultimate evil in the particular way the door over there stands ajar. Metaphor shifts, but it remains universal and suddenly everything, all the patterns read fear, death -- no escape. At this point the reassurance that "it’s all in your mind" becomes a terrifying sentence to eternal damnation.

Meaning and pattern may point up beauty or terror, shifting one to the other for reasons beyond comprehension, but always the feeling is endless, depth unfathomable, and this very infinity makes beauty perfection and terror absolute. Constantly perception flows into itself and into ideas, and ideas into perception, as do ideas flow into each other, better than the best poetry, the best philosophy. In the ceaseless flow old ideas break down to reveal new. Old categories become inadequate, any category becomes inadequate. At the height of inadequacy, not only do ideas fail, categories fail, but even the possibility of category, even self as category, even universe fails: No me, no it, everything, nothing is anything is . . .

I

LSD has been called a consciousness-expanding agent (RHU, chapter 5). This term is inaccurate for several reasons. First, the LSD experience does not exhibit widened consciousness as a constant characteristic. On the contrary, it can become difficult during the experience to concentrate on just the ordinary range of things: attention may even narrow to a single object. Second, there can be attained in the experience a peak feeling of universe/void that is all pervasive and nonobjective. As such this feeling completely contradicts the feature of discrimination that ordinarily characterizes consciousness. This feeling does not always occur during the experience, but it is more apt to occur the more the experience is repeated, and when it does occur it is clearly the most significant aspect of the experience. Third, the notion of direct action on consciousness does not readily admit physiological explanation, especially given the variation of result LSD engenders.

We can trace the problems of describing LSD as consciousness-expanding to the Cartesian tradition, which conceives consciousness (and its modern partner, the unconscious) as a substance that contains our thoughts, perceptions, and feelings. There is, at least, a logical difficulty here. Consciousness, as a substance, must contain either a finite or an infinite number of things. If we say it can only contain a finite number, then we must adopt one psychological theory or another to provide a description of consciousness as some sort of finite entity. This opens the door to all the problems of solipsism. If we adopt the other alternative that there is no limit to what consciousness can encompass, then we have made it in some sense coextensive with universe. On this account, consciousness cannot belong entirely to individuals. Rather, we should have to differentiate between an ordinary, objective, finite consciousness and a transcendent, nonobjective state that is the utter opposite of ordinary consciousness. This involves a disjunction, whereas "expansion" would imply a continuum.

The description of consciousness as a function, which Whitehead adopts from James, fits the situation better. It makes consciousness a derivative, not a primary, fact of experience. It saves us from having to explain how LSD works directly on consciousness, and it leaves room for the great variety of effects that LSD can produce. I contend that LSD works to promote mental functioning,⁴ and that what is in turn promoted in the functioning of consciousness is not expansion, but rather depth -- in the sense of intensity.

In order to support my contention, let me begin by summarizing the way Whitehead explains consciousness as a function, deriving from prior modes of experience. His explanation rests on the basic tenet that, "Rather than experience depending on consciousness, consciousness presupposes experience" (PR 83).

Instinct is a primitive component of experience. Long before man is conscious of the feeling of hunger, e.g., he has a hungry feeling, and he eats. After instinctual procedure there is intelligence. "The intellectual operations consist in the coordination of notions derived from the primary facts of instinctive experience into a logically coherent system" (AI 59f). Intellectual feelings involve a focus of attention which makes certain aspects of experience more important than others.

We have physical and mental activity, but we do not yet have consciousness. Whitehead is working against the assumption that mental phenomena and consciousness are one and the same. Pure mental feelings and pure physical feelings are exactly parallel in that their origination does not involve consciousness. When consciousness does arrive, however, it does so "peculiarly in connection with the mental functions, and has primarily to do with their product" (AI 271).

The origin of consciousness is in the feeling of contrast. The contrast is between the physical and the mental aspects of experience, between concrete fact and the abstract element that we conceptualize out of experience. In other words, consciousness awakens in the comparison of an immediate feeling with the conceptual prehension of that feeling, which treats only certain aspects of the feeling.

This interpretation of consciousness provides a way to explain how it is that consciousness seems sometimes to widen and other times to narrow during the LSD experience. Increased mental activity can, on the one hand, provide a wider than ordinary range of experience for consciousness to work on. On the other hand, the increase in mental activity may be so drastic that consciousness is practically overwhelmed and unable to integrate all the quantity of experience that is provided)⁵

II

In his discussion of the "Higher Phases of Experience," Whitehead says, "An intense experience is an aesthetic fact" (PR 426). Furthermore, "All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity" (PR 427).

Identity depends on the continuity of physical feeling; the contrast is provided by mentality. The simplest example of contrast under identity is the phenomenon of vibration that characterizes subatomic occasions (wave-particles). The most complex example is God’s experience. In between we find human experience.

In normal human experience mentality promotes a selective inattention that drops physical feeling mostly below notice. We more often feel ourselves as individuals apart from the rest of the world, for instance, than as part of it. Those moments when we do feel ourselves in closer relation to the world tend to be more intense than normal experience. They often come with some shift of attention that heightens the activity of mind. I contend that it is this heightened activity that brings back into attention the physical feeling that normally drops below our notice. It is not, for example, that the red we see in the beautiful sunset is different from the color we have already seen several times before in the day. Rather, our attention to it is heightened, and we feel more our relation to this particular instance of it.

Our attention is heightened because there is an increase of mental feeling, and this in turn procures a greater depth of feeling in general by virtue of the fact that the contrast with physical feeling is increased. Not only does this greater depth of feeling attach to the particular object on which our attention is focused, but also the physical feeling that is always there becomes dramatized generally by the contrast. Thus, physical feeling wells up into our attention as a companion of our increase in emotion toward the object, and we feel both heightened attention to the object and a strengthened sense of relationship to the world and the object as part of the world. ⁶

This phenomenon from ordinary experience develops substantially under the influence of LSD. This development explains the enhancement of perception that occurs in the experience, first, in the greater vividness and intensity of colors and sounds, and second in the fusion of ideas into perception. Every event, in Whitehead’s description, prehends the entire universe, with gradations of relevance. In our ordinary perception of events we take into account only those aspects with high grades of relevance, but as our attention deepens the lower grades come into notice, and in attending to these lower grades we discover the endless patterns of relationships that bind that event to the rest of the universe. Not only do we make this discovery in regard to the occasions of the world, but the same deepening takes place in ourselves. That is to say, the enhancement of physical feeling not only brings into attention our relationship with the external world, it also reveals the internal world of the "unconscious." If we interpret the unconscious in terms of Whitehead’s doctrine of physical feeling, it is easy to understand why amplification of mental processes elicits strong feelings of relationship to the world around us as well as it reveals elements of the unconscious: both are elements of our physical inheritance.⁷

III

The deepening or intensification of feeling that is characteristic of initial and low level LSD experience attains full import in the more significant peak experience. It is difficult to explain the peak experience in terms of a simple expansion of consciousness because the type of consciousness exhibited in this experience seems to represent a transcendent disconnection from the ordinary, discriminate modes of consciousness:

From the perspective of this peak experience one feels not so much that he is in an expanded state, but rather that ordinary consciousness is only a partial, incomplete aspect of true consciousness. The problem with taking the variation of consciousness as the primary effect of LSD is that there is a discontinuity here between ordinary and transcendent consciousness that has no ready explanation. If, instead, we use the notion of LSD as an amplifier of mental processes, which in turn results in intensification of feeling due to the development of contrast, we can provide an explanation of peak experience as a logical extension of the lower level phenomena.

The ultimate contrast in the Whiteheadian scheme is that between the physical and mental poles of an actual occasion. Physical feeling is a constant. It is massive, total, and undifferentiated. In it there are no contradictions. Mentality introduces discrimination. But mentality can discriminate either by ruling out, contradiction, or including, contrast, As mentality broadens, what were initially contradictions become contrasts.⁸ Mentality grows by the transmutation of contradiction into contrast, The increase in mental functioning begets in turn greater depth of contrast, which in its own turn further promotes mental functioning.⁹ This explains to some extent why it is not necessary to increase LSD dosage on subsequent occasions to promote greater effects. More Importantly, it illustrates the exponential character of the experience that contributes to the feeling of peak experience as ultimate and climactic.

The transcendental nature of peak experience results from transmutation such that the polarities felt in ordinary experience as oppositions or contradictions come to be felt rather as contrasts within the Void,

From this perspective it appears that the ostensible opposition of these dualities is underlain by a more fundamental unity, the manifestation of which is to be found precisely in the contrast provided by duality.

The most fundamental opposition transmuted into contrast in the peak experience is the object/subject differentiation. Because of this transmutation the experience is sometimes said to be devoid of object, but it is more proper to say that it is an experience of object as subject and subject as object, in which the two are felt as a contrast within oneness, each the manifestation of the other.

This interpretation avoids the type of disjunction that arises from the description of LSD as consciousness-expanding. What appears in the description "consciousness-expanding" as a fundamental disconnection between ordinary and transcendental consciousness is replaced by the notion of exponentially developing contrast. The feeling of ultimacy in the peak experience derives from the transmutation into contrast of the subject/object polarity that one feels ordinarily as an opposition. This contrast is felt as ultimate because it sets the limit to human experience. At the point of this transmutation a person becomes one with God, but it is impossible for a person to go any further and become God: at this point a person would no longer be human. Because of this fact human experience cannot truly transcend itself, nor can ordinary and extraordinary modes of consciousness be utterly disjoined.

IV

The feeling of oneness with the universe that grows during the LSD experience and culminates at its peak finds explanation in Whitehead’s doctrine of physical feeling. The universe, according to Whitehead, is comprised of atoms of experience, events whose happening each is a moment. Describing the happening of an event as the "coalescence of many feelings" is the best language can do, but in actuality the manyness is not. Only the unity is. We can analyze an event into various diversities, but the analysis destroys the being of the event. The event is the only being; the products of analysis are abstractions that are less than shadows, This statement expresses what Whitehead calls the "ontological principle."

Each event feels most immediately only those events which are illustrated by a selection of eternal objects as definite factors involved in their objectifications. Each event, however, feels less immediately all other events in its past. This feeling is less discriminate. The discriminate feeling is mentality, the indiscriminate physicality. (These two feelings are, of course, only one. We are merely looking at feeling in two different ways.) Mentality ferrets out only a portion of eternal objects from the welter of physical feeling.

For Whitehead, feeling is what holds the universe together. It is the most primitive form of experience: the present feels the past, and the future will feel a past that includes our present. Physical feeling, which is the inheritance of the past by the present, manifests itself on a low level as the causal influence of the past on the present. This feeling of the past loses dominance as we progress up the evolutionary ladder. For the electron, causality is all-important. Man enters evolution at a point where novelty has begun to play an important role (PR 516). The feeling of the past is to a large extent submerged below man’s immediate attention.

Because it promotes depth of feeling, LSD brings into attention aspects of feeling that, in terms of evolution, have long been lost to us. LSD lets us delve into physical feeling. As the developing of contrast sinks us into deeper and deeper awareness of physical feeling, we become progressively aware of how the universe is manifest in the oneness of feeling that constitutes each event, especially the event that is oneself. In Whitehead’s words, "the concrescence is an individualization of the whole universe incarnating itself as one" (PR 250). Also, "Each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one" (PR 375). It is the awareness of this phenomenon that might lead a person to say that he sees (feels) the world in a grain of sand.

V

In this paper I have tried mainly to show how Whitehead’s notions about the origin and role of consciousness as a function in experience can provide a framework for a theoretical explanation of the LSD experience. The reason this approach works, I would contend, is both because Whitehead’s scheme is adequate in its endeavor to frame a system for interpreting experience in its diversity, and because LSD is a powerful tool for amplifying the subtle processes of the mind, the seat of human experience. Pertinent to this latter point, Stanislav Grof comments, "It does not seem inappropriate and exaggerated to compare [the] potential significance [of LSD] for psychiatry and psychology to that of the microscope for medicine or the telescope for astronomy" (RHU 32f). The significance obviously extends to philosophy, at least to the extent that the discipline represents the study of human experience. The metaphor suits the contention that the LSD experience magnifies the process of becoming in one’s own experience. More importantly, specific results of clinical investigation provide empirical support. At this point I would like to depart from the larger theoretical scheme of this paper to deal with some of these specifics, particularly as they serve to indicate directions philosophical research might pursue. It should be mentioned, of course, that the material of the LSD experience is as raw as the data of the microscope and needs a great deal of reflection to get it into a shape valuable for research.

Subjects report that in the LSD experience, "minutes can be experienced as centuries or millennia, or, conversely, a long time [as] seconds. [Time even] can stop completely, so that the sequential nature of events disappears; past, present, and future are experienced as juxtaposed" (RHU 10). I interpret this report according to Whitehead’s doctrine that an act of becoming "itself is not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become" (PR 107). By virtue of the magnification in experience of the present moment of becoming, a subject appreciates the lack of extension in the becoming of the event more than the succession of other events: without time’s ticking, millennia are indistinct from minutes, and conversely. Subjects also report experience of spacelessness (RHU 11), to which similar analysis on the basis of Whitehead’s doctrine of extension applies.

Another phenomenon: "Many LSD subjects reported in their sessions unusual aesthetic experiences and insights into the nature of the creative process" (RHU 3). This report endorses, on the one hand, Whitehead’s notion (see section II, above) that "an intense experience is an aesthetic fact" (PR 426). On the other hand, it satisfies the expectation, given Whitehead’s claim of creativity to be the ultimate principle of becoming (PR 31), that a magnification of the process of becoming ought to afford insight in this respect.

Other reports of the LSD experience illustrate the microcosmic quality of the actual entity in support of Whitehead’s description of concrescence (see section IV, above) as "an individualization of the whole universe" (PR 250). For example, what is seen "in the LSD experiences and in various situations surrounding them appears to be basically an exteriorization and magnification of the conflicts intrinsic to human nature and civilization" (RHU 6). The fullest extension of this phenomenon occurs in the peak experience of being one with the universe, which is the discovery that the individual act of becoming is "the universe incarnating itself as one" (PR 375). The effect of the peak experience is to promote what Whitehead calls "Peace," which is "a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized, and yet momentous in its co-ordination of values" (AI 367).¹¹

Finally, we need to consider whether to apply the term "mystical" to the LSD experience. Descriptions of the mystical state as a transcendence of duality (SC 249f) and an apprehension of ultimate unity (CEW 105) agree with the peak phenomena reported by LSD subjects (RHU 13f.) . On the other hand, the description of mysticism as a process in which the peak state is simply a phase (CEW 1055 ff.) might deny that LSD produces mystical experience. Grof’s work shows, however, that the peak experience usually follows successive sessions of working up through lower-level material and that it can lead to the integration of spiritual values into one’s way of life (RHU 154, 208). The only respect in which the LSD experience might fail to qualify as mystical would be in terms of the definition of mysticism as a process; and then the failure would not be a failure of the experience itself, but a failure by a subject to integrate the peak experience into the greater whole of experience. This is particularly apt to happen with random self-experimentation of the sort that has taken place often in the immediate past in this country. In this respect, however, the LSD phenomenon compares with various frenzies of religious awakening in both the past and present of this country. The point of similarity in both cases is frequent failure to integrate ultimate experience into a way of living. This failure of integration can be understood partially in terms of Whitehead’s doctrine of causal efficacy and presentational immediacy.

We attribute primacy ordinarily to those aspects of experience made most clear by consciousness, and we neglect those elements which consciousness only dimly illuminates. Causal efficacy is one of the prime modes of experience, but consciousness leads us to interpretation on the basis of the mode of presentational immediacy. As consciousness deepens, the mode of causal efficacy comes more into awareness, expressed ultimately as the feeling that I am one with the universe -- which, of course, I am. In the mode of causal efficacy I feel the entire universe: I am the entire universe felt as one occasion, myself, right now. This is the reason mystics and LSD subjects say all is one. What tends to be neglected in the light of this experience is the mode of presentational immediacy. This explains, for instance, why the mystic may be characterized as out of touch with the rest of humanity, for whom presentational immediacy is the dominant mode of functioning.

The converse difficulty, which LSD can also produce, is that the increase in mental functioning can overwhelm physical functioning and result in insanity. In this instance, causal efficacy is the neglected mode of functioning. Though humanity in general neglects this mode of functioning, persons manifesting psychosis neglect it to a far greater degree, and become out of touch, albeit in the other direction from the mystic. Cases of insanity exhibiting the phenomena of alienation and hallucination evidence excessive domination of presentational immediacy. Alienation represents a disruption of felt relation to the world; hallucination is delusion in the technical sense mentioned at the outset of this paper.

The conflict over whether LSD is a psychotomimetic or an instrument of enlightenment comes to resolution in the understanding that mystical experience and insanity are both possible results of the heightened mental functioning that LSD produces. This understanding also provides a basis for distinguishing between mysticism and insanity, which are prone to being confused.

There is no question that LSD can be dangerous to mental health under conditions of unsupervised self-experimentation. On the other hand, it has enormous potential for use as an intellectual tool, even as an evolutionary agent. It might be a valuable means to combat the alienation in modern society that emerges from the gulf between intellectual and emotional experience.¹³ Certainly, one of the best safeguards for the use of LSD is a systematic intellectual account of its functioning. I think Whitehead provides a system that can serve as a firm base for such an account, just as Buddhist philosophy has provided systems for integrating extreme experience with ordinary experience.¹⁴ Whitehead’s advantage for us is that he has incorporated into his system the scientific principles that inform our age.

References

CEW -- Kenneth R. Pelletier and Charles Garfield. Consciousness: East and West. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

RHU -- Stanislav Grof, M. D. Realms of the Human Unconscious. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1976.

SC -- Charles Tart. States of Consciousness. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1975.

Notes:

1A dismissal would parallel "a tendency among many professionals to discard the experiences in LSD sessions as manifestations of a toxic alternation of the brain function (toxic psychosis) that have little, if any, relevance for the understanding of the human mind as it functions under more normal circumstances" (RHU 25).

2A good, brief account of this controversy appears in RHU 1-6.

3 Particularly good philosophically oriented accounts include Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) and Alan W. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology (New York: Random House, 1965).

4 Crof supports this contention: "careful analysis of the LSD data strongly indicates that this substance is an unspecific amplifier of mental processes," but he continues on to say "that brings to the surface various elements from the depth of the unconscious" (RHU 6). The latter part of this statement unfortunately obscures the earlier in Grof’s RHU because the book is opaque as to the relation between (Un)consciousness and mentality.

5 Huxley’s speculation in The Doors of Perception that the brain functions as a "reducing valve" serves the point here, as does the "jammed computer" analogy in CEW 93.

6 "The main function of (intellectual feelings] is to heighten the emotional intensity accompanying the valuations in the conceptual feeling involved, and in the more physical purposes which are more primitive than any intellectual feelings" (PR 416).

7 Interpretation of the unconscious in terms of Whitehead’s doctrine of physical feeling affords a means whereby one might reconcile the apparent conflict between the Freudian individual unconscious and the Jungian collective unconscious: the inheritance ingredient in the human event comprises both idiosyncratic elements immediately relevant to the thread of personal identity and universal elements which have lower grades of relevance.

8 "The heightening of intensity arises from order such that the multiplicity of components can enter explicit feeling as contrasts, and are not dismissed into negative prehensions as incompatibilities" (PR 128).

9 This is especially notable in successive Sessions: "the experiential content seemed to represent a successive unfolding of deeper and deeper levels of the unconscious" (RHU 20).

10 Cf. AI 171f.

11 "In my experience, everyone who has reached these levels develops convincing insights into the utmost relevance of the spiritual and religious dimensions in the universal scheme of things" (RHU 95).

12 "The two sides of the [higher] organism require a reconciliation in which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences find an emotional illustration" (PR 23).

13 This provision of Buddhism helps explain why there has been an appropriation of Oriental ideas into psychedelic culture. It also indicates further possibilities for comparing Whitehead’s thought with Buddhism: cf. Ryusei Takeda and John B. Cobb, Jr., "Mosa-Dharma and Prehension: Nagarjuna and Whitehead Compared" (PS 4:26-36).

Death and immortality, taken together, form a pervasive theme in Whitehead’s metaphysics. Death does not simply happen once in a lifetime, for this loss of one’s own subjectivity is a perpetual occurrence, from moment to moment. Subjectivity is identified with present immediacy, which is always fading into the past. With the attainment of its own self-unification, each momentary self dies -- though what it has achieved objectively affects the supervening future. By perishing in its subjective, present immediacy the actual occasion becomes objectively immortal, as the process of becoming unified terminates in a unified being capable of causally influencing those processes of becoming which supersede it. As Locke had written, recalling Plato: time is a "perpetual perishing."

Whitehead’s extensive use of this phrase tends to obscure the fact that it is employed to describe two different kinds of perishing. There is the perishing of subjectivity just described, as the process of becoming naturally ceases in the attainment of the being it has come to be. This perishing is natural, rhythmic, incessant. There is also the perishing of objectivity, however, for the being thus attained persists in being only to the extent to which it is positively incorporated into fresh acts of becoming. Subjective becoming perishes as it attains objective being, but this too fades. "The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling" (PR 517). This need not be the whole story, however, for God experiences everlastingly the full objective being of each actuality. Just as subjective perishing is remedied by objective immortality, objective perishing is remedied by- reception into the divine nature. In this way every actuality perishes, yet lives forevermore as part of the divine experience.

Perpetual perishing and objective immortality are the great themes of Whitehead’s meditations on death, but many, sensitive to the impending loss of their own personal subjectivity and perhaps still more to that of others, feel this is not enough. Classically, this yearning has been focused on the hope for the survival of the soul after the dissolution of the body. Here Whitehead meant to be accommodating, for he believed no metaphysical decision could be made:

Elsewhere, however, his views take on a sharper tone:

In this particular context, Whitehead is presenting his own resolution to the problem posed by the fluency and transience of the world, so subjective immortality of the soul takes on the guise of a discarded alternative. Even if possible, it is not necessary, nor is it needed.

In any case, Whitehead understands by the ‘soul" not some statically enduring substance but a temporal thread of conscious, living occasions interwoven among other living occasions within the brain. It is conceivable, and therefore theoretically possible, that this personal thread should persist and continue to propagate itself beyond the dissolution of the body. The crucial question, however, concerns the quality of existence we may expect such a disembodied soul to enjoy, for in this life the powers and activities of the soul are intimately bound up with the other living occasions within the body. Thus the body, particularly the sensory organs, serves as a complex "amplifier" for the soul, such that without it the soul would be robbed of all sense-perception (PR 182; cf. 271).

Thus the soul receives what it experiences from the body, and it acts by directing the activities of the body. The soul without the body is like a president out of office. He no longer has access to all those intelligence reports, nor is the vast organizational bureaucracy still at his disposal to do his bidding. To be sure, the president can still write his memoirs, if he can make use of his presidential papers. We may suppose that the soul retains its memories, but only if the soul includes these memories within itself -- which is questionable.

Whitehead did not speculate on the precise location of memory within the animal organism, but the most plausible extension of his theory suggests rather that memories are maintained for the soul by other occasions, thereby freeing the soul for its adventure into novelty.² The way in which the conscious ego draws upon the ocean of unconscious feeling which sustains it may well reflect the way the soul draws upon other living occasions. If so, the soul is the thread of coordinated consciousness wandering through an enveloping unconscious mind composed of all (or many) of the entirely living occasions existing in the cells of the brain. To account for the dynamics of this unconscious, we may postulate other enduring (personal) strands of entirely living occasions besides the one living person Whitehead singles out as the soul. This one living person accounts for the experienced unity of consciousness and the coordination of activity with which the mind provides the body. Other enduring strands could account for persistences within the unconscious. Thus, memories may be unconsciously transmitted along such personal strands within the brain until such time as they may be recalled by the conscious mind. Such an account fits with the empirical evidence indicating an intimate relationship between portions of the brain and particular memories, for those portions of the brain would then be housing particular subordinate enduring strands. Where the brain has been damaged, and portions have been severed or destroyed, there is often partial or massive amnesia. With the loss of the entire brain and its attendant enduring strands, then, we should expect any surviving soul to be bereft not only of sense-perception and the capacity to act, but of memory as well. In that case we may well wonder whether such survival is worth it.

Despite these difficulties, Whitehead returned to this problem once again in his next book:

As before, the question of such survival is left open, but a new note is struck by the reference to the everlasting nature of God, which is his consequent nature as the weaving of his temporal physical feelings of actualities upon his nontemporal conceptualizations of all pure possibilities (PR 524). The problem is still raised in its classical form as the persistence of the disembodied soul, but the question really concerns the retention of subjective immediacy for any occasion, and Whitehead’s language suggests that there may be "a peculiarly intense relationship of mutual immanence" between the occasion and God supportive of its subjective immediacy. At least this is the idea we propose to explore, particularly in terms of the closing pages of Process and Reality, for we are persuaded it offers a more fruitful way of conceiving the preservation of subjective immediacy than the notion of a disembodied soul can provide.

I

We begin our investigation by considering the actual occasion’s contribution to God. Here we must take note of the systematic contrast between God and the World: "In every respect God and the World move conversely to each other in respect to their process" (PR 529). Every actual entity, including God, is a synthesis of physical feelings of other actualities combined with conceptual feelings of formal possibilities. Every actual entity, that is, has both a physical and a mental pole. "Any instance of experience is dipolar, whether that instance be God or an actual occasion of the world. The origination of God is from the mental pole, the origination of an actual occasion is from the physical pole" (PR 54). Such mental origination is unique, nontemporal, and infinite: "Unfettered conceptual valuation, ‘infinite’ in Spinoza’s sense of that term, is only possible once in the universe" (PR 378). Physical origination, on the other hand, deriving from other actualities, must be multiple, temporal, and finite, thereby’ making up a World of many actual occasions. Each requires the other: God requires the World for his physical experience of concrete actuality, while each actual occasion of the World requires God for its unifying possibility.³

Without this systematic contrast and reversal there would be no metaphysical basis for God’s difference from the World, and lie would differ only contingently. If this difference were merely contingent, however, it need not be; in other words, God need not exist as a distinct reality. We take Anselm’s reflections concerning divine perfection and necessary existence to have demonstrated a symmetrical truth: if God could possibly exist, he must; but if God could possibly not exist, then his existence is forever impossible. By this principle, then, God cannot differ contingently from the World, for were he to, he could not exist. If, on the other hand, we seek to insure God’s necessary difference by introducing a categoreal difference, we jeopardize his metaphysical intelligibility and violate Whitehead’s cardinal rule: "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification" (PR 521). God is the chief actual entity, yet by his reversal of the ordering of physical to conceptual feeling, he maintains a necessary, systematic contrast to all finite actual occasions. Thus the term "actual entity" includes God within its scope, while "actual occasion" excludes him (PR 135).

Now the final state of an occasion’s process is its determination of value, its ultimate decision of its own significance, resulting in its satisfaction. The satisfaction thus represents a movement from the many values of the past actual world to the one novel value created through the occasion’s own concrescence, or process of coming into being. If "in every respect God and the World move conversely to each other in respect to their process" (PR 529), then the converse must in some sense be true of God. If for the occasion concrescence issues in satisfaction, then for God satisfaction must somehow issue in concrescence. Yet this cannot be the ease with respect to God’s nontemporal aspect or primordial nature. "The ‘primordial nature’ of God is the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings" (PR 134), which "achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects" (PR 48) or pure forms, thereby generating the entire structuring of pure possibility.⁴ Seen in terms of his everlasting aspect or consequent nature, however, the only way God is directly related to the World, the converse is true. Here God’s nontemporal satisfaction, insofar as it is relevant, precedes the everlasting concrescence it issues into. This primordial satisfaction fulfills its superjective role by being objectified for every emergent occasion as its initial aim or unifying possibility (cf. PR 48, 135). Through the agency of the World, therefore, the multifaceted aspects of this primordial structuring of possibility as suffused with divine appetition seek multiple, finite, concrete actualization. This plural actualization in turn is taken up into the divine everlasting experience.

Thus "it is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many" (PR 528). The latter assertion is true in a two-fold way. On the plane of finite actualization, the past actual world becomes one in each concrescence as guided by its unifying aim, which is God become many for the many concrescences in unison of becoming. Also the World is one as unified within the divine experience, while God becomes many in respecting and preserving the manyness of the World. "God is primordially one, namely, he is the primoridal unity of relevance of the many potential forms: in the process he acquires a consequent multiplicity, which the primordial character absorbs into its own unity" (PR 529). The primordial satisfaction thus serves as both the source from which the divine everlasting concrescence springs and the unity to which it returns as a subordinate element within that culminating satisfaction, but we shall focus our attention upon the intermediate multiplicity.

In what way does God become many in respecting and preserving the manyness of the World? "The consequent nature of God is the fulfillment of his experience by his reception of the multiple freedom of actuality into the harmony of his own actualization" (PR 530; italics added). This sentence is usually interpreted as meaning that God experiences the objective character of each actual occasion as part of his cosmic experience, but can this do justice to the freedom and the manyness of the occasions? "Thus the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization. It is just as much a multiplicity as it is a unity; it is just as much one immediate fact as it is an unresting advance beyond itself. Thus the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation" (PR 531; italics added). This last phrase strongly suggests that these actual components enjoy their own subjective immediacy within God, which is also a way by which they can preserve their multiplicity as a plurality of distinct individuals. That which is solely objective can only be transitorily multiple, for it loses its multiplicity in the ensuing subjective unification. These actual components must enjoy their own subjective immediacy to retain their individuality, yet how can this be?

We may approach this problem in another way. God’s primordial valuation aims at Beauty, at a structuring of forms to constitute a qualitative harmony for the enhancement of any and all existence whatsoever. This harmony is the goal of his primordial activity, the principle of value which orders his vision of all possibilities. No pure possibility is excluded from this vision; it is a pattern of potentiality which is completely "devoid of all negative prehensions" (PR 524). This harmony is all-inclusive, yet in itself it remains abstract. It is capable of including within itself all determinate actualities, but its very inclusiveness prevents it from generating these actualities by its own activity. Actualities are concrete and determinate precisely because they are finite and exclusive. To be all-inclusive, then, the primordial satisfaction needs the finite actualities of the World. This has been widely recognized, but we wish to go further and claim that the actuality required is provided supremely by, the living immediacy of the finite occasions, the exclusive sharpness of the very act of decision whereby one value becomes actual. The wholeness of an occasion in its subjective unity is the vital and exclusive actuality which is completely lacking in the inclusiveness of the primordial vision taken by itself. For the occasion values just this togetherness of actuality, cutting off all alternative possibilities in the decisiveness which is its immediate experience. This sharpness, this vividness, this intensity forged in the immediacy of the occasion becomes its gift to God. This subjective immediacy of decision, could it be experienced by God, would be the most fitting complement for God’s all-inclusive vision by’ providing the contrasting opposite of exclusive experience. The exclusive character of these finite actualities would be lost if they were only objectively prehended as aspects of a single, unified experience.

On the other hand, the very exclusiveness of the occasion’s decision, whereby it forms a determinate bond with every item in its universe (PR 71), prevents any continuation of its own subjectivity. By that decision the occasion is what it is. "The final ‘satisfaction’ of an actual entity is intolerant of any addition" (PR 71), for any addition would change what it is. Because each actuality is internally related to its own world, it cannot change (PR 92). "Actual entities perish, but do not change; they are what they are" (PR 52; cf. 122). "Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of ‘feeling’ the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex feeling, in every way determinate. . . Also the creature cannot have any external adventures, but only the internal adventure of becoming. Its birth is its end" (PR 124). In actual occasions, subjectivity is exhausted in the act of coming into being, for any continuation of subjectivity beyond this concrescence would involve it in external adventures of change.

Because of the centrality of this doctrine of the perishing of subjective immediacy in objective immortality, it is all too easy to read past Whitehead’s statements which hint at another dimension. Thus, for example, we are told that in the consequent experience of God "there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison of immediacy. The property of combining creative advance with the retention of mutual immediacy is what . . . is meant by the term ‘everlasting’" (PR 524f). "Mutual immediacy" may be read as simply referring to God’s feelings, namely, that God experiences every event objectively, but that experiencing is now still going on in the divine present, no matter how distantly past an event may have come into beings. But may not this retention of mutual immediacy also mean that in some way the subjective immediacy of the perished actual occasion is retained by God?

II

Subjective immediacy cannot continue, but there may be a way in which it can be reenacted. Here we shall be departing from the strict interpretation of Whitehead’s intended meaning, for we wish to press home some far-reaching implications of his theory. First, we must review Whitehead’s theory of the reenaction of subjective form in conformal feeling, originally introduced to handle a very different issue, namely, our sense of the continuous flow of feeling in extended experience. "There is a continuity between the subjective form of the immediate past occasion and the subjective form of its primary prehension in the origination of the new occasion" (AI 235). Thus, to use Whitehead’s example, I do not now merely experience myself as angry in the previous moment, but continue to feel that anger -- better, continue to feel angry -- even if I decide to abate my anger. In more unsophisticated occasions this even applies to the vectorial transmission of blind emotion. The subjective form is how a subject feels its world (PR 35, 131, 249), and this way of feeling grows out of the feelings of its predecessors.

This conformation of feeling, however, is only partial. For the subjective form is also the vehicle of the occasion’s freedom and novelty (PR 354; AI 332). The occasion determines itself in the way it determines to react to the data it inherits. If it is to exercise any freedom, it must be able to transform the initial ways of feeling it receives from the past. Moreover, it receives a great many different ways of feeling, as it feels the feelings of a multiplicity of past actualities, and it must synthesize all these into one final subjective form, the one final attitude it adopts towards its world (cf. AI 327). In this sense, "the concrescence is an individualization of the whole universe" (PR 250). Finally, and most importantly for our present purposes, the first categoreal condition of subjective unity requires that what is prehended be compatible for synthesis, and this requires perspectival elimination. Only a portion of any past actuality can be unified together with other past actualities, themselves present in partial fashion (PR 362). "A feeling is the appropriation of some elements in the universe to be components in the real internal constitution of its subject. The elements are the initial data; they are what the feeling feels. But they are felt under an abstraction. The process of the feeling involves negative prehensions which effect elimination. Thus the initial data are felt under a ‘perspective’ which is the objective datum of the feeling" (PR 353).

Now an actuality for Whitehead is one integral feeling, its satisfaction, but this is the integration of many feelings. Perspectival elimination is possible because of the divisibility of the satisfaction in terms of these many feelings. "By reason of this ‘divisible’ character causation is the transfer of a feeling, and not of a total satisfaction" (PR 364). In conformal feeling the datum occasion is felt in terms of one of its feelings, not in terms of its total feeling, and the subjective form that it so reenacted is the subjective form of that one partial feeling.

This line of reasoning, however, applies only to actual occasions God’s feelings do not employ negative prehensions to effect perspectival elimination.⁶ Finite occasions prehend other occasions from spatiotemporal standpoints which are different from those occupied by the occasions prehended, and therefore their prehending must be perspectival. In contrast, God prehends an occasion from its own standpoint, for "he shares with every new creation its actual world" (PR 523). Hence he prehends the entire satisfaction with no loss. Since such physical feeling is conformal, he prehends that satisfaction in terms of its own subjective form, since that subjective form must be reenacted in his own feeling.

Let us note carefully what this subjective form is: it is the very personal way in which that subject experiences its world. It is also the final aim of the occasion, that final unifying pattern it has decided upon in order to bring all of its prehensions into a single, coherent experience. But it is that unifying pattern clothed with emotion, with felt intensities derived from the initial subjective forms of its conformal feelings. This final subjective form epitomizes the achievement of the occasion’s subjectivity: "The subjective form is that immediate subject in that state of subjective feeling" (AI 327). "It is enveloped in the immediacy of its immediate present (PR 354). "Spontaneity, originality of decision, belongs to the essence of each actual occasion. It is the supreme expression of individuality: its conformal subjective form is the freedom of enjoyment derived from the enjoyment of freedom. Freshness, zest, and the extra keenness of intensity arise from it" (AI 332).

Subjective immediacy is compounded of two factors, which we might describe as its form and its matter. The material component is creativity, this restless activity of unification, present in terms of the occasion’s own act of becoming a unified being. That act of self-creation perishes in the achievement of satisfaction. The formal component is to be found in the subjective form, first as distributed among the many conformal feelings, finally as unified in the subjective form of the satisfaction. This can survive the perishing of creative becoming if reenacted in its entirety in a new subject, that is, if taken up into another activity of unification as informing it with its unique subjective way of experiencing. Now God prehends each occasion by means of one of his physical feelings. As in the case of all physical feelings, "the feeling felt has a subject diverse from the subject of the feeling which feels it" (PR 362). In the final unity of his primordial subjectivity, God is vastly different from that occasion. Nevertheless this divine subjectivity can give considerable room to the interplay of component part-subjectivities. For the moment we may restrict ourselves to that portion of God’s self-creativity reenacting with perfect conformation the subjective form of one of my experiences. This means that God experiences the same situation I confronted in exactly the same way I felt it. The subjective form of my experience is not objectified as part of the content of God’s experience, but becomes the subjective means whereby God has that experience. Now it becomes problematic: whose experience is it, mine or God’s? It is God’s materially, in that the activity of subjective unification is his, mine having perished. But it is mine formally, for I am the author of that particular way of experiencing that situation. The experience is mine, reborn in God. As we may put it most succinctly, God experiencing through me is the same as my experiencing in God.

All this has a wildly counterintuitive ring to it. Isn’t my subjectivity radically different from God’s? How can they somehow be the same? Furthermore, why am I not now conscious of my experience in God? These questions are incontrovertible, if a substantialist understanding of the enduring self is assumed. Whitehead denies this, as he must, if there is a perpetual perishing of subjective immediacy. The human person is not one enduring actuality undergoing many adventures, but a temporal series of momentary selves, each with its own experience. "An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors" (PR 531). I can include my past experiences and count them as mine because there has been a continuous overlapping in the subjective forms of my experiences. From one experience to the next there has been a massive underlying similarity in the way in which I experience the world, no matter how much the contents of that world might change, and despite wide differences in my superficial emotional reactions. They all partake of a basic underlying character preserved through the conformation of subjective form from experience to experience. But this conformation is imperfect and incomplete. "The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling" (PR 517). That past experience of mine may be remembered but it is not now being experienced by me with full immediacy. Yet it is by God. Since the reenactment of subjective form is perfect in God, without negative prehension, my past self is more fully itself in God than in my present self. If my past self was conscious, then it is now conscious in God, since consciousness is part of the subjective form being reenacted,⁷ but it is the consciousness of that past self, not my present self. For in the temporal world that past act of consciousness has perished, to be replaced by my present act of consciousness. I experience God only in terms of his primordial satisfaction, not in terms of his consequent experience, and hence not in terms of my past self as conscious in God. As each self dies, it awakes to new life in God, but its successors cannot experience this until they undertake that great journey for themselves.

The occasion in God differs in significant ways from its earthly counterpart. It no longer decides, for its decision has been made and cannot be changed. Were it to make a new decision, it would become a new occasion and would no longer be that occasion in God. Hence in God we no longer act but contemplate. This has its advantages, for the values we have actualized are now secure on equal grounding in God’s consequent nature. Occasions in their coming-to-be struggled with incompatibilities, but as reenacted in being they no longer find that competitiveness need be the case. Each, having already forged its own uniqueness, finds complementing contrast from those occasions which formerly threatened it. There is no more competitive vying for one value at the expense of another, for all chosen values are now quite actual. The meaning of each realized value receives importance again and again as it is contrasted and complemented by other realized values within the diverse unity of God. Destructiveness is thereby turned to enrichment; discord makes way for peace.

In the temporal world, "the final ‘satisfaction’ of an actual entity is intolerant of any addition" (PR 71), because it would alter that occasion’s decision. For the occasion comes to its decision by the way it relates to its past actual world; this is the means whereby it is enabled to separate omit one unifying possibility from the continuum of graded alternatives God offers it, and to clothe that possibility with emotional intensity. Were it to receive an addition to its world, it would have to relate to that world differently, and thereby alter the selection of its unifying pattern in some detail. It would then no longer be the actuality which it is, since its actuality lies in its decision (PR 68). Once that decision has been made by means of this determinate internal relation to the past, however, additions can no longer threaten it. In God the occasion experiences an enlarged and enlarging world, which contains new occasions as they come into being, but the occasion remains the same insofar as it experiences this enlarged world in the same manner as of old, by means of the one unique subjective form it decided upon. To be sure, not everything that emerges can be compatible with that chosen mode of experiencing, but insofar as it is, it will be experienced. It is difficult to know just what that range of compatibility might be, but we have good reason to suppose that each occasion would experience the consequences of its own actions as it experiences those occasions lying in its own relevant future as these come into being. For according to the category of subjective intensity, the subjective aim of an occasion is directed not merely at intensity of feeling in the present subject, but also in its relevant future. If it neglects the latter in its pursuit of the former, it may well reap the consequences hereafter.

The temporal occasion perishes; its divine counterpart does not. For the ground of the temporal occasion’s subjectivity was its own concrescence, an act of deciding concluded in satisfaction, while the ground of the counterpart’s subjectivity is God’s consequent experience, which is everlasting. Thus the occasion is reborn through the reenactment of its final subjective form to a life everlasting. The subjective forms of most occasions, however, are too narrow and too trivial to sustain much further experiencing by themselves; their futures are too meager to be relevant in any significant way. This need not mean that these subjective forms become objectified along with the contents of these experiences. They may retain their subjective role of being a means of experiencing by becoming included within a larger subjective form. Two compatible subjective forms may be fused into a larger whole without altering the decision of either, by means of conceptual supplementation derived from God’s infinite conceptual imagination. To some extent this enlargement of perspective occurs in personal existence due to the overlapping of successive subjective forms. In profound moments of insight we are accorded a width of understanding and sympathy capable of including and transforming the narrower subjective stances of much of our past. Sometimes these moments even include a transcendence of personality as well. Thus as occasions in God exhaust the temporal experience of their own relevant futures they may become knit together, first in the personal lives they belonged to, in accordance with the massive underlying similarity among these subjective forms, and then perhaps in a merging of personalities along lines of personal affinity and affection.

There can be no clearly defined "border" of the personality; what obtains is more likely a center of personality which then extends and flows to others in the giving and receiving which is the Harmony of God. This is fitting, for the temporal purpose of personality was primarily suited to the greater intensity of feeling made possible by the complex structures of personality. This intensity now having been achieved, it may now be put at the disposal of its ultimate purpose -- the enrichment of the whole. In the process the narrow confines of the self have been lost, but not its subjective reaction to the universe as a way of experiencing that whole. It is its own value and meaning, and no other, which is affirmed, contrasted, deepened, and intensified in this trans-individual and even transpersonal widening of experience, for throughout the transformation it contributes its particular subjective pattern to the way that whole is being experienced. Peace is achieved, which "results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the field of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest -- at the width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to co-ordinations wider than personality" (AI 368).

In the last paragraph we have sketched the life history of a single occasion in God, as experienced from its perspective, with its gradual widening as more limited modes are exhausted. If we look at God’s consequent experience as a whole, however, all these levels of experiencing exist simultaneously. As in all concrescences, there is a mutual sensitivity of feeling among the subjective forms of God’s physical feelings. Since the divine integration of feeling is instantaneous,⁸ all of these subjective forms are immediately integrated into the subjective form of God’s consequent satisfaction. This final integration of subjective form does not obviate the role of the individual subjective form of a particular occasion, however, since "the consequent nature of God is composed of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization" (PR 531; italics added). We may look upon these levels as ever-widening areas of divine subjectivity. At the top this subjectivity is severally restricted to the individual occasions. This is God as many, experiencing the world separately and exclusively through the many subjective perspectives of the individual occasions. This is "the Apotheosis of the World" (PR 529) in its plurality, while the deeper levels give this apotheosis its unity. The deeper we go, the more finite subjective forms are knit together by divine conceptual supplementation to become the subjective form of a wider portion of God’s subjectivity, till at bottom it becomes coextensive with the whole. Thus the divine experience is "always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward, and never perishing" (PR 525). Individual occasions in God eventually lose their individuality as their experience of the future fades into insignificance and they imperceptibly merge with the next lower level, but they are continuously being replaced by freshly created occasions. In its individual exclusiveness, while it lasts, each occasion provides a way for God to pluralize his experience. For God engages in no temporal decisions of his own, as these would undermine the subjective unity of his own nontemporal, primordial decision. Having none of his own, he must utilize the decisions of finite occasions to provide him with the means for temporal experience. Since his interest lies in the intrinsic value of each occasion as it might contribute to his own multiplicity, and not in the reduction of that value so that it might provide him with a novel decision, God in no way violates the subjective unity of the satisfaction he prehends. Thus each occasion in God is a way God is in the world as "the great companion -- the fellow-sufferer who understands" (PR 532).

III

In the last section we have gone far beyond Whitehead’s explicit argument. He nowhere reflects upon what the experience of reenacting the subjective form of the entire satisfaction would be like. His discussion of the conformation of physical feeling is dominated by considerations pertaining to finite actualization, where that conformation is always partial, and hence never applies to the total satisfaction. Yet by his principles God must prehend the entirety of the satisfaction, by means of a reenactment of its subjective form, its way of experiencing its world. Our concern has been to draw out some of the implications of these principles, whether Whitehead himself thought of them or not.

Whitehead seems also to have been an intuitive thinker, capable of forming conclusions which outrun any rational justification he was explicitly aware of. Many statements in the last two chapters of Religion in the Making first find their warrants in Process and Reality. The closing pages of both Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas are strongly intuitive, as Whitehead soars beyond the careful, explicit argumentation he had been building on. If we have achieved our purpose, then we have found one way of justifying some of these intuitions by his own principles. If so, our endeavor becomes once more interpretive, hopefully illuminating such passages as: "In this way God is completed by the individual, fluent satisfactions of finite fact, and the temporal occasions are completed by their everlasting union with their transformed selves, purged into conformation with the eternal order which is the final absolute ‘wisdom’" (PR 527; italics added). In this world we perish, but in the everlastingness of God, we live forevermore as he lives through us.

Notes

1 This essay was completed in January, 1974, in a moment of close agreement which made this joint effort possible. Since then the authors have pursued the issue further in ways which preclude any simple joint revision. Ford believes that subjective immortality, were it metaphysically possible and religiously desirable, would be actualized by divine power, but he wonders about both of these conditions. Full reenactment of subjective form, as described in this essay, however, seems to be a necessary if not a sufficient condition for subjective immortality, and he is persuaded that this line of investigation is the most promising of the current alternatives. Suchocki is more persuaded of the general possibility for subjective immortality, but has been also exploring alternative, and perhaps complementary, approaches to this end. See her essay on "The Question sf Immortality" in the Journal of Religion, July, 1977.

2 This extension of Whitehead’s theory is prompted in part by Donald W. Sherburne’s analyses, "Whitehead’s Psychological Physiology," Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7/4 (Winter, 1969-70), 401-07, and "Regional Inclusion and Psychological Physiology," PS 3/1 (Spring, 1973), 27-40 (written in debate with John B. Cobb, Jr.).

3 These claims are more fully substantiated in Ford, "Whitehead’s Categoreal Derivation of Divine Existence," The Monist, 54/3 (July, 1970), 374-400.

4 This dynamic interpretation of the primordial nature is further developed in Ford, "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead’s God," International Philosophical Quarterly, 13/3 (September, 1973), 347-76.

5 So it is interpreted in Ford, "Boethius and Whitehead on Time and Eternity," International Philosophical Quarterly, 8/1 (March, 1968), 38-67. Our present concern was dismissed rather cavalierly: Subjective immediacy, to be sure, is inevitably lost [in God], but that is all" (p. 67, n. 40).

6 On this point, that God has no negative prehensions, see William A. Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 344-49.

7 We follow here John B. Bennett’s proposal that PR 130 be interpreted as meaning that the satisfaction of an occasion cannot also be a datum for experience within that concrescence, not that the satisfaction cannot be experienced consciously: "A Suggestion On ‘Consciousness in Process and Reality," PS 3/1 (Spring, 1973), 41-42.

8 See "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead’s God," p. 370. This argument for instantaneous divine integration presupposes considerations about finite genetic succession made in Ford, "Genetic and Coordinate Division Correlated," PS 1/ 3 (Fall, 1971), 199-209.

In "The Human Self: An Actual Entity or a Society?" (PS 5:195-203) Rem B. Edwards proffers a provocative polemic against Whitehead’s theory of the self as a society. He rightly sees that the social-self theory is an inevitable outcome of the epochal theory of time. Thus, he wishes to exempt the human self from that theory by means of two fundamental criticisms. (1) On Whitehead’s theory, God is a nonepochal self who is nevertheless temporal in his consequent nature. Since God is exempt from the epochal theory of time, so may man be. (2) The epochal theory of time implies that between any two successive occasions in the self "there is a gap during which nothing exists" (PS 5:197). This criticism is based on certain early statements in Science and the Modern World about the discontinuity of an electron’s path and the presupposition that without such gaps atomic actual occasions cannot be delineated.

Edwards’ criticisms fail for two reasons. (1) Not only is God not exempt from the epochal theory of time, but it is precisely this theory of time which makes the actual entity Whitehead calls "God" a nontemporal, continuous concrescence dependent upon the temporal world for his being. (2) Edwards’ "gap theory" criticism rests on a surreptitious return to Newtonian time and to the fallacy of simple location.

I

The epochal theory of time states that time is created by actual entities and that it is created in extended epochs. The creation does not take place in time, but it is what creates time. The epoch of time comes into being when the creation of the actual entity whose temporal extension that epoch is, is complete. This completeness comes with the satisfaction of the subjective aim (PR 106, 434, 29, 38, passim). But God’s subjective aim, being infinite (PR 521-24), is never satisfied; thus, he is never complete, and thus, he is never temporally extended. This is why he is a single continuous concrescence rather than a society: Every actual entity is a single continuous concrescence until it is complete. Edwards, as I see it, errs in claiming: "Whitehead recognizes two species of actual entities, God and actual occasions. The latter exist discontinuously, the former continuously. . ." (PS 5:199). Whitehead recognizes actual entities, each of which is -- regardless of its species -- internally one continuous concrescence until its end. God is unlike the self because, in relation to the principles of time, he is exactly like any one actual entity in any electron or in any human self. God is not exempt from the epochal theory of time, and Edwards’ first attempt to exempt the human self from that theory fails.

Thus, whatever theological problems Whitehead’s theory may have, there need be no philosophical problem of exempting God from the principles of atomicity. Whitehead’s method of God-talk should be remembered: "We must investigate dispassionately what the metaphysical principles, here developed, require . . . as to the nature of God" (PR 521). God’s nontemporality may be seen as the natural, dispassionate working-out of the epochal theory of time. It is one of the great virtues of his philosophy that when Whitehead needed a nontemporal entity for the grounding of eternal objects, he did not create nontemporality by philosophical fiat, but by working out his general principle of time.

Doubtless there are serious problems with Whitehead’s nontemporal God; the body of literature on these problems is huge. What Edwards has inadvertently done is reveal that if, in trying to solve these problems, we follow some interpreters (William Christian, for instance) in temporalizing God’s consequent nature, as Whitehead explicitly refused to do,¹ we may introduce an incoherence into the system which may cost us the social-self theory.

II

Turning now to Edwards’ "gap theory," let us note his words:

Since for Whitehead, time is created by actual entities and does not exist apart from them (PR 108,122), all duration is the duration of actual entities. There cannot be any "gaps during which." Gaps have duration only on the supposition that time is an independent container for actual entities, which is exactly what the epochal theory of time denies. For Edwards, actual occasions "create" gaps just as erecting buildings close together "creates" alleys: by leaving an independently existing "space" unfilled. Thus, Edwards has begged the question: He has shown that if we maintain the notion of absolute time, a theory based on its denial fails. He has not shown why we should revert to such a notion.

"The occasions do not touch or overlap," Edwards says. But Whitehead says:

Process and Reality expresses the same general notion when it defines "immediate objectification" as prehension of a contiguous actual entity and uses the notion of "successive contiguous occasions" in discussing physical transmission (PR 468). The communion of actual entities is fundamental to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. It is the very meaning of the doctrine of prehensions and of the denial of the Aristotelian doctrine that no substance is in another substance.

Edwards rejoins "if there are no gaps between occasions . . . the atomic theory of time has been abandoned. There are no discrete events" (PS 5:203). However, this rejoinder introduces a dichotomy between atomicity and continuity which Whitehead resolved in his cosmology. Edwards presupposes that "atomicity" means separation by a gap, which of course means simple location in an independent continuum. This is precisely how Whitehead did not distinguish between successive atomic occasions, since such a distinction would be unintelligible in the philosophy of organism. Successive occasions are distinct in terms of the "satisfactions" in which they culminate. Each concrescence proceeds from the indeterminacy of the many to the integrated, organic determinateness of the unified subject. The achievement of this determinateness is the achievement of one single, indivisible identity. Since further change would abrogate that atomic integrity, the process of becoming ceases. But this atomic occasion is a datum among the many severally atomic data out of which its successor is made. It is, because of its atomicity, a precondition for the continuity of the Universe as expressed in that self. That the atomic entity as itself passes into the further concrescence is no abrogation of its atomicity; it is a determinate datum for a concrescence which has not yet become fully atomic. It is part of that concrescence, and thus the dichotomy that the older metaphysics of scientific materialism could not mediate is resolved by Whitehead’s alternative conceptuality. The interrelations of completed and incipient atomic occasions is the becoming of the continuity of time.

I interpret Whitehead as saying that the process of becoming results in being.² Edwards has followed Hartshorne, Leclerc, and Sherburne in identifying becoming with being. How can that interpretation delineate individual occasions and avoid a continuity of becoming, except by gaps between occasions? Is this not the origin of Edwards’ gap theory? But such gaps cannot exist, since all duration is the duration of actual entities. How, then, can that interpretation delineate occasions? And how can it bridge the atomicity/continuity dichotomy? On the other hand, if becoming constitutes being, there is no need for any gaps in the social-self. Its experienced continuity does not undermine the individual atomicity of its successive occasions.

Notes

1 "Each actuality in the temporal world has its reception into God’s nature. The corresponding element in God’s nature is not temporal actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, ever-present fact" (PR 531; emphasis mine.)

2 Jorge Luis Nobo has marshaled evidence in favor of this interpretation in "Whitehead’s Principle of Process" (PS 4:275-84).

In a recent article Nicholas F. Gier announced a project which would involve "a comprehensive comparative analysis of phenomenology and process philosophy" (PS 6:197-213). My own article is not intended to introduce such a grand program, but only to derive from Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty in dialogue and comparison a sharpening of the question of commitment. I could not agree with Gier more that intentionality and prehension will be the major comparison in any such enterprise. One recognizes this development as something perceived earlier by Bernard Meland (1:299).

The question of moral responsibility in a dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead has been initiated by William S. Hamrick (PS 4:235-51). Hamrick is able to show us that in Merleau-Ponty "to be really effective, spontaneity must be anchored in habitual patterns of behavior," and that "personal existence consists primarily of habitual patterns of behavior." Dealing with Whitehead’s psychological physiology, Hamrick is again able to demonstrate that personal identity "is a temporally continuous pattern of habitual, behavioral definiteness sustained by the regnant society and its supportive nexus," thus dispelling doubts raised by Paul Weiss concerning the possibility of grounding moral responsibility in Whitehead.

My contribution to this discussion is more a matter of supplementation than argumentation. I draw Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ambiguity into comparison with Whitehead’s adventure and investigate the presence of both in the successive phases of the concrescence of an actual occasion. I then investigate the notion of ambiguity as it relates to sedimentation and immanence. Ambiguity emerges as the necessary context for decision and commitment. Personal identity emerges as an ontologizing of the notion of commitment.

Methodologically, there is at least one major problem in comparing Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty. The former operates as a cosmologist and metaphysician, whereas the latter functions as a phenomenologist, or (at least in his earlier works) a describer of states of human consciousness with reference to objects appearing in the world. The human body is the special concern of Merleau-Ponty, and ambiguity is of the essence of human bodily existence. The term "ambiguous" most basically refers to that which has several meanings. The body is ambiguous "because its many parts are not isolated from each other but rather permeate and interpenetrate each other" (PMP 79). Whitehead describes the nature of the universe and of reality as such, while Merleau-Ponty describes the relatedness of the body and the world as perception.

In order to compare Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, it is necessary to see the phenomenologist in Whitehead and the cosmologist in Merleau-Ponty. Whitehead, as cosmologist, testifies to the psychic dimension, the subject-object relationship, in every morsel of cosmic reality. Merleau-Ponty, as phenomenologist, points to the build-up of experience in terms of sedimentation by analogy to the way in which the crust of the earth is built up. In general, Merleau-Ponty favors a view of the world in which the contribution of the subject is of paramount importance.

The world as described by Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty is basically plural and political. It is a field of several possibilities for a body or subject. Objects in the world support a variety of interpretations or valuations. The subject determines himself or herself as an open possibility for several new perfections.

The world is an interplay of a multiplicity of free forces. The forces do play upon, affect, determine one another, but that determination is always partial. This partiality of determination by others is exactly the condition that leaves room for, and actually elicits, the self-determination of each individual.

Whitehead shows how meaning is built up in the world of nature. The past offers its accumulated actuality and projected possibility to each newly forming event. The new event exercises a freedom of self-determination regarding itself, taking into account the entire past, but reinterpreting its immanent predecessors.

Whitehead never completely applies his insights into nature to the human condition. For instance, there is a quality of evil in human life that is not approximated in natural evils. There are qualities of stability and responsibility in human life that are not explained fully by Whitehead. His doctrine of the immanence of one event within another does not adequately explain how a present subject can be responsible for past acts that are "objectively immortal" in it.

Whiteheadians might wish that Whitehead had developed the theme of decision or commitment or dedication in the detail in which he showed how similar feelings are passed on in a strand of actual occasions (AI 183). Whiteheadians are left with the problem as to how to handle decisions in series, decisions as they revise and reshape one another in a temporal line. Such a series of decisions, one building upon the other, is what a commitment would be. Earlier acts of decisiveness would serve as a sedimentation upon which later ones might repose. The ever-present condition of a newly forming top layer would supply ambiguity to the accumulated archaeology of stratified decisions.

Merleau-Ponty has an approach to the world and to nature that is much like Whitehead’s. Merleau-Ponty carefully balances the past and present, determinations by others and self-determination, with his notions of sedimentation and spontaneity. Careful study of Whitehead’s ideas on immanence and the decision each new event contains will show the same structure and intention as the approach of Merleau-Ponty.

When this illuminating comparison is achieved, a Whiteheadian doctrine of commitment can be articulated, which will also be faithful to Merleau-Ponty. A Whiteheadian concern for present responsibility for a person’s past acts can also be articulated. Generally, the notions of sedimentation and ambiguity will be borrowed from Merleau-Ponty to supplement Whitehead, while the notions of decision and prehension will be taken from Whitehead to supplement Merleau-Ponty. When the necessary exchanges are made, a single Whiteheadian and Merleau-Pontian elaboration of commitment will be achieved.

The Actual Occasion: Atom of Ambiguity

In Whitehead, the universe is made up of miniscule events which come into and go out of existence in the same moment. Each one has its own meaning in a brief and ephemeral sense, but meaning in the ordinary sense is built up out of patterns of sense which emerge moment by moment in the course of a myriad of microevents happening and vanishing and passing on the meaning they briefly achieve.

Each one of Whitehead’s "actual occasions," or brief flickerings of existence, contributes its own meaning to the universe. Everything originates some contribution. Each also preserves in itself all the meanings of its actual world, that is, of the past of which it is the result and original retainer. It is because each "actual occasion" is host to several meanings and creator of its own meaning that the occasion is ambiguous. Each occasion is at once caused by the world that produced it and cause of an entirely new reconstruction of the world from its new and original perspective. Each occasion is an atom of ambiguity.

An "actual occasion" is, for Whitehead, an element in the environment which is objectively established as an influence upon others, a "stubborn fact." Each actual occasion has as its center a "decision" (PR 68) in virtue of which it has actualized itself. All the actual occasions in a person’s environment serve as stubborn facts or "transcendent decisions" in reference to a concrescing occasion, or an occasion presently in its own "immanent" decision-making process (PR 248f).

It is precisely as an atom of ambiguity that Whitehead’s actual occasion is an atom of adventure, the search for new perfections (AI 258). Since the highest achievement involves spontaneity and freshness of approach, here can be no static perfection.

Such spontaneity requires courage, daring, initiative. Perfection, insofar as it is not only preservative or backward-looking, but is more importantly prognosticative and forward-looking, involves adventure.

Every actual occasion is to some degree an adventurer. Its necessary originality insists on that. There is no adventurer that is not the product of its previous experiences, but neither is there an adventurer which is not the discoverer and inventor of a novel experience. Reality must be open, that is, it must be ambiguous, if every new instant is to be a birth of novelty and adventure.

In Whitehead, there are actually four phases in the process that each actual occasion is. The phases are: dative, process, satisfaction, and decision (anticipation) (PR 227). The dative phase has to do with the givenness of data from the world. The process phase has to do with the new values these data are given in the new situation. It is the very condition of ambiguity among the data that allows passage from the dative phase to the process phase.

The satisfaction phase has to do with the self-enjoyment of each actual occasion (AI 193). In this sense, the satisfaction phase is consummatory and should not be confused with the dative and process phases. It is once again the condition of ambiguity in the universe and in the construction of each occasion that allows a new situation to come about with its own private and consummatory enjoyment.

In its phase of decision, each occasion passes itself over for "transition" (PR 322) into a novel occasion, realizes its own hope to be retained and to be retained with particular importance in some new occasion. The occasion here relishes its instrumentality in the formation of its successors. With decision is generated hope, and this hope, without the possibility of totally determining how it shall affect another, is exactly what ambiguity would mean in a Whiteheadian sense.

The process of an actual occasion begins with a centripetal relation to its environment. The environment flows in upon it in a determining way, and it passively receives what the world offers; its own importance is satellite to the world’s importance. Then, it takes a stand of its own, deciding how the world shall affect it, taking the centrifugal place of importance, with all other occasions revolving about its own decision. Finally, it offers itself to the world in its private completeness, allowing itself to become centripetal in import once again.

The actual occasion or actual entity takes a distinctive attitude toward each of the data which are its objects. There is a uniqueness to the way in which each particular subject prehends each of its particular objects. This unique perspective of subject upon object is its "subjective form" (PR 35), or particular affective tonality with reference only to this object as apprehended by this subject. One subject draws in a myriad of data in its instantaneous flicker of subjectivity, and in that instant, each morsel of data is assigned its own subjective form.

The actual occasion, insofar as it is a past occasion, is ambiguous with reference to a present occasion, that is, it supports several meanings for the present one. The fact that the "subjective form" assigned to a past entity by a present entity in prehension is variable testifies to this basic condition of ambiguity of past occasions with reference to present ones.

The novel occasion may not be characterized as an atom of ambiguity as easily as the past occasion. The occasion’s core of decisiveness cuts off all ambiguity in an act of ultimate determination. It is only as in the past of others, or "for others," that an occasion is both a stubborn fact and an ambiguous entity, open to interpretation by subjective forms that future entities will assign to it.

The process doctrine of actual entity extends the notion of body to all the occasions in the universe. Each actual entity is a material experient, a body-subject, a psychosomatic occasion, a world-related organism which is part of the world as a general field of interconnected meanings. Whitehead generalizes for all entities the conditions that obtain for human bodies in phenomenology. The nature of reality is disclosed in the description of the experiences of human subjects (PR 252).

The body and the world are so interrelated phenomenologically that one is always both source and receptacle of meanings with reference to the other. The body has its definition only with reference to its particular world; the world is the world it is only with reference to this body. Because meaning is placed mutually in the two poles of body and world, Merleau-Ponty refers to meaning as equally centripetal and centrifugal (PP 116, PMP 135). There is a sense in which the body is satellite to the world and a sense in which the world is satellite to the body.

The relation between an actual occasion and its actual world is acutely similar to the relationship between the human body and the world. There is a dialectical relationship of meanings of the world and meanings for the body. The body is also capable of perceiving itself as for the world and of respecting the world’s meanings as intrinsic to the world. The subject-object relationship is described both in Merleau-Ponty’s body-world relation and in Whitehead’s actual occasion-actual world relation.

Prehension: Molecule of Intentionality

Intentionality (PR xviii), in Merleau-Ponty, has to do with the state of affairs in which an object is always referred to a subject and a subject to an object. Prehension (PR 35), in Whitehead, is a like notion, in which each occasion exists to be prehended by another, and every prehended occasion is grasped in a way determined by the occasion which grasps it. Intentionality might be called the dynamic polarity in prehension; and prehension might be called a molecule of intentionality, or a physical case of subject-object relatedness.

The world is a world of relation and interrelatedness. The subject-object relation describes the world, and, with equal primordiality, phenomenologically speaking, the interrelatedness of human subjects describes the world (PP 359). Whitehead accounts for the interrelatedness of subject and object in the world in his doctrine of "prehension. This is his description of the world as completely composed of incidents of relatedness between actual occasions. Accordingly, every speck of matter is also a morsel of mind, an incident of subject-object relatedness.

A prehension has several elements: an actual entity which is felt or prehended by another entity; the entity which prehends the first actual occasion; and the "subjective form" (PR 338), or unique way in which the second occasion prehends the first one. So, in phenomenology, no subject would grasp an element in its world in a way exactly like the way in which another subject would grasp the same data. Every phenomenological subject would, therefore, describe its own world. In Whitehead, no two occasions would have the same "actual world" (PR 34), or manifold of elements converging upon its private moment of decisiveness.

Whitehead gives to Merleau-Ponty a cosmological way of interrelating the notions of ambiguity and intentionality. Intentionality is given a physical as well as psychic description in the doctrine of prehension, and ambiguity is given a material as well as mental description in the doctrine of actual occasion. Every occasion is a being for others as well as a being for itself. No other or combination of others can completely determine an occasion in its being for itself. Every being must take account of its own relatedness to other occasions in its environment.

Every occasion in the environment supplies to a new occasion a possibility for its own realization, and every possibility must somehow be taken into account. This presence of many possibilities is the very condition of ambiguity. The presence of possibilities in its environment coincides exactly with the process of drawing the environment into itself by prehension. Prehension is thus the dynamic by which intentionality operates. Intentionality rests upon ambiguity as the condition out of which prehension arises.

By correlating prehension and intentionality in this fashion and by referring to prehension as a molecule, we do not intend to imply that a prehension is bigger than an actual occasion. We need to remind ourselves that for Whitehead the prehension is a part or a function of an actual occasion and that the actual occasion is inclusive of its prehension. However, prehension is the category in Whitehead that is responsible to describe the subject-object relation, which is also an object-object relation and the relation between two occasions. In this last sense the prehension compares favorably to the molecule.

Eventually, we might expect that the two philosophers will explain freedom in similar terms. Freedom must be an occasion’s resolution of its ambiguous situation, a freedom for self-determination among many codeterminants, and a freedom exercised in relation to and respect for several codeterminants. Freedom is intentional, is a freedom for something (PP 437), freedom toward a novel possibility. Freedom is something demanded by an ambiguous environment and something that arises in individual privacy to become responsible to the external world.

If the body has a freedom to select among various possibilities for itself in its stance toward the world, that freedom rests upon the basic orientation of the body to the world. This basic orientation is not free for the body in the sense of being a condition dispensable for the body, but it is the necessary basis for the body’s freedom, as the body faces a world which offers it a variety of choices. There is a difference between the body’s overall and necessary disposition toward the world, and the body’s free self-disposing toward the plurality of possibilities in the world.

Whitehead’s Notion of Commitment

It is only in a discussion of this kind that the notion of commitment may be understood. Each occasion is committed to the data out of which it arises. It cannot change one iota the data given for retention. In the process of assigning values to the data, however, it can and must select the relevance of the various data to one another and to itself. This selection and assigning of values does not change an occasion’s commitment to its data, but is the only way in which it may be committed to its data. Part of being committed to certain things is to change the situation of those data and to construct oneself in relative appreciation of the data, assigning high values to some and low values to others. In any case, commitment does not mean mere preservation of a status quo, but the changing of what is retained for relevance in a new situation.

Each occasion is committed to the data out of which it arises. Each occasion is committed to reevaluate all of the data from which it comes. Each occasion is committed to itself, as having and being its own consummatory and self-enjoyed value. Each occasion is committed to the future as its free interpreter, retainer, and reevaluator. In this very last sense, each occasion is an adventurer, committed to a future in which it is sure of its retention, but not of the value of its contribution. This may be called a commitment to ambiguity. The very ambiguity that allows an occasion to arise, become, and enjoy itself also earmarks that occasion for reconsideration as to its value in the future.

Although we can articulate how ambiguity and how commitment structure each phase of the microscopic process by which an actual occasion realizes itself, we must also spell out just how ambiguity and commitment structure the macrocosmic process of commitment that structures ordinary experience, the moral life, social existence, responsibility for our past acts.

If we examine only a single actual occasion, we observe the data flowing in and the original synthesis being formed. What is most impressive here is the spontaneity in which this pulse of energy occurs. What cannot be observed, however, is the discipline of the universe, the obedience of an occasion to patterns built up for it before itself. In the human body especially, there are habits of behavior that cannot be appreciated in the examination of only one human act.

Only when we have a series of occasions, which series has a corporate identity which transcends the identity of any of its members, but which each of its members inclusively realizes at the moment of its actualization, can we have the ordinary experience of commitment. Commitment as a phenomenon has to do with why one occasion respects a pattern set for it by another occasion. Commitment has to do with an occasion’s spontaneous self-patterning according to the model set for it in a previous occasion.

Commitment, as a word, is not often found in Whitehead, and yet, we must recognize the presence and importance of the notion of commitment. The Anglo-American sees man in a situation in which many things are decided for him by others. This Whitehead calls transcendent decision (PR 248). There are also decisions that each person makes for himself: these are called immanent decisions. By his or her immanent decisions, each person decides not whether, but how, the transcendent decisions present in the situation will affect him or her.

A Whiteheadian notion of commitment concerns transcendent decisions, or decisions made for an individual prior to the individual’s self-determination. It also deals with immanent decisions, or decisions made by the individual, determining itself and its surrounding world. Thus, there is an inner and an outer aspect to decision-making, the externalizing of inner decisiveness and the internalizing of outer decisiveness.

Whitehead writes that "concernedness is of the essence of perception" (AI 232). He explains that what we experience are not bare sensa, devoid of contribution by the percipient. Experience always has an affective tone or interpretation of the perceiver, without which sensa do not occur. The entire field of perception influences each thing perceived. Concernedness would be the subjective contribution to experience. Every layer of sediment in experience would have its concernedness stubbornly inscribed in it, but each layer would also invite novel concernedness in the spontaneous forming of new layers.

"Adventure," the "search for new perfections" (AI 258) must be placed in context as one of several qualities giving definition to civilization. "Civilization" is the "unremitting aim at the major perfections of harmony" (AI 271). Civilization exhibits the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, and Peace. Adventure is an essential attribute of civilization, and civilization is the name of the supreme value to which Whitehead is dedicated, "ultimate good sense" (MT 238).

Commitment or some kindred notion should be included among the chief qualifiers of civilization. The vigor of civilized societies is "preserved by the wide-spread sense that high aims are worth while" (AI 288). Keeping its aims and keeping those aims high are crucial matters to civilization. It is also true that art and poetry, with their ability to inspire, are more important than morality. Zest and interest are of more importance than dull truths or inert ideas. The language of unremitting aims, of keeping aims high, and the treatment of civilization as ultimate good sense, are all instances of a language of commitment.

A Whiteheadian treatment of commitment must be one charged with adventure, just as a Merleau-Pontian treatment of ambiguity would have to be one fired in freedom. In Whitehead, adventure is that factor by which civilization moves forward. It is the restlessness by which the universe tires of perfections it has already achieved and leans forward to acquire new perfections. Adventure is the probative, tentative, restless quality of civilization. Adventure requires ambiguity as a residual slackness, necessary if civilization is to extend itself out of the past and into the future.

Columbus set out to discover a new route to the Orient; what he actually did discover was America. Columbus’ relation to the world was that of a discoverer, an adventurer, but his specific discovery was quite different than the one he originally intended. There was an absoluteness to his commitment as an explorer of new worlds and an ambiguity about which new world he would discover (AI 279).

Adventure, in Whitehead, is the atmosphere in which decisions are made. Adventure means, first of all, a sense of the future, and the sense a present event enjoys of its relevance for the future. Man is ever creating a future for himself and for the universe, because he is always projecting possibilities of arrangement, selection, or valuation which are not there before his presence as a decider.

Ambiguity: Necessary Condition for Adventure

In Merleau-Ponty life is an adventure because it is ambiguous. The many meanings or facets of meaning that a situation involves are not statically present and interpenetrating, but they generate new meanings, new moments of time. Ambiguity means an openness to the future and the sense that a present situation is not complete now, but requires interpretation by events and situations that issue from it, that look back upon it and thereby bring it forward to new meanings it could only presage in its own presentness.

Merleau-Ponty has recourse to Husserl’s doctrine of retentions and pretensions (PP 69, 416) to show how meaning grows and to show therewith his appreciation of the forward-looking and -moving quality of ambiguity. Each present moment retains its content as that content has developed though time. Each moment could only be what it is as the result of a process by which preceding moments have retained and reinterpreted contents which are now retained again in a novel way.

Similarly, each moment tends forward or portends toward possibilities in which it might be favorably retained, appreciating the conditions by which it will not remain exactly what it is, but by which it must change in order to be relevant in the future.

Every situation is ambiguous for Merleau-Ponty, because every situation is only partially determined, and requires the self-determination of the conscious subject of that situation. Every subject is a body, and as such is ambiguous; here ambiguity means that my body is both myself and the position from which I perceive others, and the body is also the objective "me" which others perceive. As both perceiver and perceived, the body is ambiguous.

Further, everything is ambiguous because it is not set in a hard and fast way. Rather, everything has a possibility for change, various ways in which it could be different in the future. Each thing supports not one but several meanings. The presence of a plurality of meaning or of possible meanings is exactly what ambiguity is. The body is ambiguous because it is myself, the "I" that perceives and gives meaning to others, and the "me" that is perceived and given meaning by others.

For Merleau-Ponty, all the elements in an environment influence a person in some way, but a person’s subjective attitude toward the elements conditions those elements, and the person’s decision about his environment feeds back into the environment in such a way that the surrounding world would not be the world it is without the conditioning subjectivity of the surrounded decider.

The world, for Merleau-Ponty, is always a person’s environment. It is always a subjectively conditioned world, just as it is always also a stubbornly objective world. The world is not accessible, except through the subjectivity which is ever part of the world. The atomic elements of the world in Whitehead, the actual occasions (PR 33), are also psychosomatic in an irreducible way, unbreakable atoms whose stubbornness is always taken account of by an interpreting and deciding presence. The presence to itself of each atomic entity is also a subjectivity, even on the most primitive levels of life.

"Existence," for an existentialist and phenomenologist, is life as it is attributable only to human subjects (PP 166), because subjectivity is presumed only to be found in human persons. For a Whiteheadian cosmologist, existence, precisely in the existentialist sense, can be attributed to every level of life, no matter how primitive. Whitehead finds subjectivity in all occasions, placing the basic elements of existence in molecules and mountains in the same sense that Sartre or Merleau-Ponty attribute it to men and women -- in the sense that there is a trivial but true level of subjectivity, of feeling, of decision, in all occasions.

According to Merleau-Ponty, there obtains on the human level of life an ambiguity whereby everything perceived is perceived as a possibility for the perceiver. An object is perceived according to a possibility it has for a human subject, or a possibility a subject has for it. Anything perceived is an article for use in the future. As a use-object, it may in its turn be discarded or recycled in favor of some later possibility. This situation, in which the body is committed to using objects, lives ever among such commitments and yet is ever revising these commitments, is ambiguity (PMP 138).

There are several dimensions to ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty. There is an ambiguous relation of the body to the world, whereby one is always referred to the other. There is an ambiguous relation of the body to itself as both subject and object. Meaning is always ambiguous, since it is generated concomitantly by the body which projects it and by the object in the world which supports it.

Ambiguity, in Merleau-Ponty, is the situation in which decisions are made. Ambiguity refers to the situation in which the world gives meanings to man and in which man projects his meanings upon the world. Man, situated ambiguously, is always a decider, discovering meanings in the world as he projects. himself into it, and discovering his own meaning by accepting or resisting the meanings that are projected upon him by the world.

Ambiguity means, most basically, that the same event or condition has many meanings; the many possibilities of meaning give rise to the decision. Adventure has to do with the quest of new perfections. Ambiguity and adventure suppose one another. Ambiguity is found as the condition of the world when the world is found to support new meanings as well as old ones. Adventure rests upon the possibility of things having several meanings to which new ones might be added, or which might be rearranged in novel orders of importance.

The world of adventure and the world of ambiguity are the same world. A summary of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of ambiguity points to Whitehead’s notion of adventure: (i) the irreducible polarity of body-world as the ultimate scheme of existence; (ii) the irreducibility of perception to either pole of the body-world schema; (iii) the affirmation of freedom as both centripetal and centrifugal. Like meaning, freedom arises from both poles of the existential situation. The body projects a space or field in which it can move freely, and the world offers possibilities or alternatives for which the body can be free.

Sedimentation: Structure or Commitment

"Sedimentation" is a term often used by Merleau-Ponty. It has to do with the way in which past experience is related to present experience. The French phenomenologist writes of spontaneity and sedimentation together, as the two stages of world-structure at the core of consciousness (PP 130). He holds together the present act of a body-subject as spontaneous and the past acts of the body-subject as sedimented in the present act.

Sedimentation is a notion applied to language (PrP 89), to the history of art (PrP 61), to history generally (PrP 63), and to truth (PrP 96). In language, it relates to all the past applications of a word which condition and give rise to a new and spontaneous usage of a word. In painting, it has to do with the way in which the history of art conditions each new painting and how each new painting overcomes and embodies all of its past.

There are other areas of Merleau-Ponty’s work in which he might have used sedimentation but did not. He might have used it in his description of time; indeed, when he speaks of truth, he says that it has to do with how the past is enfleshed in the present. He might have used it in his description of habit, for there, the body builds up attitudes of motility that enlarge the body-schema and facilitate the body-world relationship (PrP xix).

Sedimentation explains habits. Patterns of behavior in the present are products of past experiences (PMP 136). Phenomenology is interested in the residual tendencies or attitudes left in organisms by their past experiences. Process philosophy sees those past experiences themselves as structuring the skeleton of present occurrences. Habitual behavior is explained as history immanent in novelty. New moments, spontaneous and free, rest upon and root into the strata of former incidents of decisiveness. Habits are good or bad according to the way in which the strata are regarded: either as stabilizing a desirable tendency or as lending momentum to an undesirable attitude.

Most behavior is habitual. Pure spontaneity in behavior is extremely rare. Indeed, in the theory of phenomenology or of process, completely inhabited behavior is impossible. Insofar as behavior is always within a world of surrounding meanings, it is always conditioned (but never totally) by internal and external determining factors. Habits have both internal and external poles. Something external serves as stimulus to a response originating internally. Habits have an inner-outer, subject-object structure; they are relational attitudes of a body toward a world (PP 143).

A body is its habits. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is a complex of original attitudes toward the world. The body is both psychic and somatic, an irreducible unity of the two. As such, the body both gives meaning to and receives meaning from the world of which it is part. Meaning is always bodily and is never reducibly mental or material. Such dualism is methodically excluded by phenomenological description. This is precisely the error of bifurcation (PR 443) rejected by Whitehead.

Ambiguity does not reside only at the top of the sedimentary layers. It is shot through all the layers at every moment. A newly forming layer, a novel act in a habitual pattern, does not reserve its spontaneity completely to itself, but it spontaneously reevaluates all the layers it contains. It cannot eliminate a layer, but it can make the contributions of some layers trivial and the contribution of others massive. In every new act, the relative valuations of the layers will be different. As data, the layers will be retained if they are in the past of an occasion, but as values, these layers will undergo change constantly with the adding of each new layer.

Commitment is a notion found in both Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty. In the Frenchman, man always finds himself committed to a particular situation and invited to change that situation in some way. At the same time, the decision that alters the situation also alters the decider. There is free play in the field of living that man’s situation is, and decision is ever elicited of man. Even a decision to avoid the possibility of deciding something is itself a decision.

In both philosophers the factors in the environment which affect us are looked upon as decisions. The human decider is first of all a decider about the arrangement of many other decisions, which in fact he or she does not make. It is precisely in the situation of having many decisions made for us that we as deciders make our own decisions.

In general, it may be said that Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of commitment establishes: (i) the absolute commitment of the body to the world and of the world to the body, as the overarching schema of all perception and of all experience; (ii) the relative, reversible, and replaceable commitments in virtue of which the body realizes its absolute commitment. Merleau-Ponty does not discuss the ever-shifting hierarchy, of relative commitments as a scale ascending to and embodying the absolute commitment.

Whitehead’s Immanence

Sedimentation would translate into Whiteheadian parlance as immanence. Immanence is the condition whereby every entity is present in some other entity. Because no entity vanishes unprehended by some succeeding entity, all entities become immanent in their successors as soon as they actualize themselves. As such they become a real, physical past, intrinsically constituting the present occasion which bears them as parts of itself.

Each event is originally a present event which as present takes up its own inalienable position (PMP 128). The event then recedes into the past where it is seen through the accumulating thickness of subsequently experienced events. This description of events could equally well belong to Whitehead or to Merleau-Ponty; it describes the immanence whereby the Anglo-American would see one event lying within its predecessor, or it describes the sedimentation by which time layers itself out, event by event, experience by experience.

"Endurance," for Whitehead, concerns the building up of several experiences in such a way that one lies immanent in the other (AI 204). This notion compares to sedimentation in Merleau-Ponty, a notion that sees each new action layered upon a residue of past foundational strata, sometimes hindering the new from actualizing all of its novelty, sometimes facilitating the new by laying down a habit by which its performance is made easy.

In the way that each occasion actualizes and objectifies itself, it takes into account its own future. Part of every occasion is its legacy given to the world, and its inner hope of being taken account of by its successors in a particular way. It hopes to be sedimented in its successors in such a way as to have its most prized feelings reiterated or its most regretted feelings anesthetized. How it shall be stratified in a new structure is a concern to every micro-subject. Inscribed in each occasion is this tendency to perpetuate itself and its feelings, a tendency to habit. To this tendency all pattern in the universe must ultimately be ascribed.

A Whiteheadian appreciation of Merleau-Ponty’s sedimentation would tell of the way one occasion becomes immanent in another, of how an occasion that has outlived its own moment of spontaneity is retained in a novel occasion which values the presence and contribution of the former occasion by structuring itself in a similar way. The bodily habit is both a presently spontaneous movement and a residual readiness or potential for moving or acting in such a way.

Especially in Whitehead’s "enduring object" or "living person, patterns of continuity that are ever revised in new spontaneous moments are of crucial importance. The ambiguity between the continuity of the past and the spontaneity of the present is the life of every occasion. The sediment of the past is ever ready to receive upon itself a new layer. In each novel act of habit, the sedimentary layers become one and are increased by one. Ambiguity ceases for an instant in the coming to be of a novel occasion with its novel layer of sediment and immediately is regenerated as that occasion perishes and yet remains as superject.

The notion of immanence in Whitehead can profit greatly by being supplemented by the idea of sedimentation in Merleau-Ponty. While Whitehead has dealt adequately with the presence of one entity within another, he has given the impression to some that there is only a minimal impact of the past upon the present (Reality 207-17). This would reduce the importance of habit and of continuity; immanence would tend to become a mere physical inheritance without an important buildup of pattern and of responsibility in action, which pattern and responsibility would reside as habit even when not actively engaged.

Immanence cannot be the mere presence of one occasion of experience within another, but must be the readiness to act in a patterned way on the basis of this attitudinal residue. Whitehead’s notion of immanence needs to be fully explicated if it is to be applied to social and moral questions, and this can be accomplished if it is brought into dialogue with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sedimentation.

In Whitehead, immanence explains personal identity. A person has his or her identity by the sequential immanence of one dominant actual occasion within another. Each new occasion along a personal strand of occasions is a spontaneous existence which contains as sediment in itself all the personal occasions of its past. Insofar as each personal occasion is at its center a decision which creates itself and uniquely restructures its world, the personal strand of occasions is a sequence of decisions which are "internal" to one another, i.e., the new spontaneous decision rests upon a sediment of past decisions which are "immanent" in it.

Such an ever-mounting immanence or sedimentation of occasions, and therefore of decisions, affords a description of commitment. A commitment is a strand of personal decisions, corresponding to the strand of personal occasions in a human life. Commitment involves the immanence of the past in the present novel decision now in the making; as such it requires sediment and spontaneity. The important decisions of any life are not existentially intelligible as isolated incidents of self-determination, but as historically decided occasions in which the history itself is incarnated.

Between the atomic events of actuality and the sedimented layers of past experience, there abides the crucial climate of ambiguity. If there is to be the adventure of moving from one moment, from one layer of strata, to the next, there must be space for the incursion of new possibility, a condition of indeterminateness inviting new determination.

Whitehead’s notion of decision as part of the life of every occasion in the universe is needed by Merleau-Ponty to explain how ambiguity is momentarily resolved by every entity and therefore by the human subject. Ambiguity immediately becomes the condition of the universe again, but in the private recess of each newly forming event of experience, ambiguity is resolved in an atomic event. Ambiguity and decision need to be brought into sharp contrast in terms of one another. Sometimes in human experience ambiguity is cut off abruptly and decisions are made. Yet we need to understand why these moments of decisiveness rapidly evaporate back into ambiguity.

Commitments in Conflict

Sometimes the larger identity of an entity in the series in which it stands comes into conflict with the smaller identity of an entity with itself or with some particular entity or entities in the strand. In the process of identifying itself with the chain of entities in which it stands, an occasion finds itself identifying more with some entities than with others. Eventually, succeeding occasions, inheriting the conflict, may share as their dominant characteristic a trait of a comparatively small number of members of the strand. A trend for the future of the series is set in which the original defining characteristic, while still in some lesser way characteristic of the series, is no longer the dominant trait. A new defining characteristic now sets the future trend.

Merleau-Ponty handles this problem of a shift in commitment in a way which a Whiteheadian will accept. There is, first of all, a backdrop or general commitment upon which all other commitments rest. This most basic commitment is the commitment of the body to the world. It is in favor of this general commitment to the world that a body may disengage itself from one commitment and engage itself to a new commitment (PMP 138). It is to be expected that almost every life will experience at some time the need to withdraw from a particular project in order to serve its more general project and that then it might enlist itself in a novel project which more adequately realizes its larger intention.

Divorce serves as an example. Divorce is a civilized institution. It is not the brutal rejection of one marriage partner for another. Not without its pain and struggle, it is the putting away of one marriage partner by another in such a formal way as to allow both to remarry. The commitment to marriage itself as a value is still present as the more general commitment against which alone the divorce can be meaningful. If marriage itself were not a value, there would be no meaning in releasing a partner for remarriage. Divorce upholds the dignity of marriage as an institution, while it allows the shift of one particular commitment for another. Less dramatically, the changing from one major to another on the part of a college student would involve the same dynamic.

Profound change in a human life requires a change in sedimentation. The matrix of meaning in life alters its configuration. Old habits are shattered, and new ones come to replace them. Even so, the old habits are somehow retained in the new ones. An athlete who retires and becomes a sports journalist alters his lifestyle, but his old patterns of life are the foundation of his new ones. A divorced person who has carefully worked through a first marriage may become a better partner in a second marriage because of the first.

Knowing how shifts of commitment occur will have the practical outcome of helping those who are undergoing shifts of commitment. All shifts of commitment should be recognized for what they are early on in the transition process. Some shifts of commitment can then be prevented, if maintenance of the original commitment is desirable. Other shifts may be facilitated. Delays and detours may temporarily be arranged until more data is in or more clarity is reached.

The importance of commitment is here radicalized. The person is a commitment, as a series of sedimented decisions, a series of mutually immanent occasions. The person is an accumulated subjectivity. Perceptions and decisions are accumulated until a life becomes an immanent package of meaning with its own inner directionality. Personal life is necessarily a life of commitment, because it is metaphysically a life of commitment -- a person is a bundle of co-interpreting decisions.

A commitment is not an old decision to be slavishly held to, but a continuing series of decisions, including a new decision in each instant which more or less responsibly interprets all the former ones. The new decision must make sense of the old ones the best it can as it moves along through novel conditions of ambiguity with new data and new possibilities. Too tenaciously held to, an old decision can deplete life of its adventure, rendering a person "uncivilized" in Whitehead’s sense. Such a non-life would be all sedimentation and no spontaneity in the terms of Merleau-Ponty.

References

PMP -- John Bannon. The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1967.

PP -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.

PrP -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Primacy of Perception. Translated by James M. Edie and others. Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

Reality -- Paul Weiss. Reality. New York: Peter Smith, 1949.

1. Bernard Meland. "Can Empirical Theology Learn Something from Phenomenology?" in The Future of Empirical Theology, ed. Bernard Meland. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969.