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Whitehead’s writings are liberally sprinkled with quotations from, and references and allusions to biblical passages. The following list of these has been accumulated over a number of years and is believed to be substantially complete for the works covered. These include PNK, CN, R, SMW, RM, PR, FR, AI, and MT as well as the miscellanies AE and ESP. Also included is his Introduction to Mathematics. The highly technical nature of Universal Algebra, "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World," and Principia Mathematica makes it unlikely that they contain biblical references. Passages with an asterisk contain an exact quotation. When Whitehead quotes, he regularly uses the Authorized Version except that in one case (103) he seems to have the reading of the English Revised Version in mind. In the brief discussion which follows the list, passages will be referred to by their numbers.

These references are to specific passages or ideas. General comments about the Bible or large divisions thereof are not included.

Genesis

(1) 1:1 -- "Plato’s notion has puzzled critics who are obsessed with the Semitic theory of a wholly transcendent God creating out of nothing an accidental universe" (PR 146).

(2) 1:3 -- "When God said ‘Let there be light,’ then there was light and not a mere imitation or statistical average" (AI 145).

(3) 1:26-31 -- "The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech, and they became souls" (MT 57). See also Gen. 2:7.

(4) 2:19 -- ". . . in the garden of Eden God saw the animals before he named them: in the traditional system [of education] children named the animals before they saw them" (SMW 285).

(5) 3: 6-7---"Too many apples from the tree of systematized knowledge lead to the fall of progress" (MT 79).

(6) 3:7-- ". . . empiricists who refuse to admit experience naked and unashamed, devoid of their a priori fig-leaf" (PR 221).

(6a) 3:19 -- "The curse which has been laid on humanity, in fable and in fact, is that by the sweat of its brow shall it live" (AE 67).

_(7) 4:9 -- "The workmen were conceived as mere hands, drawn from the pool of labour. To God’s question, men gave the answer of Cain -- ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ and they incurred Cain’s guilt." (SMW 292).

(8) 5:27 -- "If Methuselah was not a well educated man, it was his own fault or that of his teachers [not lack of time]" (AE 96).

(9) 8:8,11 -- "A system of dogmas may be the ark within which the Church floats safely down the flood tide of history. But the Church will perish unless it opens its window and lets out the dove to search for an olive branch" (RM 145).

(10) 11:1-9--"Once Babylon had its chance and produced the Tower of Babel. The University of Paris fashioned the intellect of the Middle Ages. Will Harvard fashion the intellect of the twentieth century?" ("Harvard: the Future," in ESP 208).

(11) Ibid. -- "The confusion of tongues . . . may be historically doubtful . . . it is at least well founded as a reference to the confusion of races amid the slave populations supplying the mechanized manpower for the building of cities" (AI 15).

(12) 11:31; 12:5, 10, etc. -- "I assume it as an axiom, that motion is a physical fact. . . [It] presupposes rest . . . Abraham in his wanderings left his birthplace where it had ever been" (CN 105).

(13) Ibid. -- "The history of rational religion is full of tales of disengagement from the immediate social routine. . . . Abraham wandered, the Jews were carried off to Babylon and after two generations were allowed to return peacefully. St. Paul’s conversion was on a journey, and his theology was elaborated amid travel" (RM 30).

(14) 28:12 -- "It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general unless afterward we can reverse the process . . . ascending and descending on Jacob’s ladder" (AE 80).

Exodus

(15) 1:13-14 -- [The ancient assumption was] "that a complex civilization requires a base of slavery. . . . The Egyptians wanted bricks, so they captured the Hebrews" (AI 14).

(16) 7:12 -- [Descartes assumes mind and matter.] "There is Aaron’s rod, and the magician’s serpents; and the only question for philosophy is, which swallows which; or whether, as Descartes thought, they all lived happily together" (SMW 204).

(17) 11:2, 12:36 -- "The New Learning reacted violently against the schoolmen who were their immediate predecessors, but like the Israelites when they fled from Egypt, they borrowed their valuables" (H 6).

(18) 20:9 -- [Moral codes must be construed with common-sense] "Can we really think that no work whatever can be done on Sundays?" (MT 19f).

(19) 20:13 -- "The ten commandments tell us that in the vast majority of cases . . . slaughter should be avoided" (MT 20).

Deuteronomy

(20) 30;19 -- "The history of the Mediterranean lands, and of Western Europe, is the history of the blessing and the curse, of political organizations, of schemes of thought, of social agencies for large purposes" (PR 514).

I Samuel

(21) 3:4,6, 8 -- "No one ever says, ‘Here am I, and I have brought my body with me"’ (MT 156). Cf. Is. 6:8.

(22) 4:22 -- He remembers that at Sherborne a boy translating from the LXX, "Alas, the glory of Israel had departed" was corrected, "No, No, laddie: the glory of Israel has gone away as a colonist" [apóikistai]. ("Education of an Englishman" in ESP 37).

(23) 8:5 -- " . . the Hebrews feeling the inefficiency of casual leadership, and asking for a king -- to the disgust of the priests, or at least the later priests who wrote up the story" (Imm 696)

(24) 15;32 -- "Alien groups are then evil groups. An energetic prophet hewed Agag in pieces. Unfortunately the spiritual descendants of Samuel still survive, archaic nuisances" (AI 62).

I Kings

(25) 3:5-15--"Here I must remind you of the fine story of the Eastern king who, in a vision, chose wisdom, because for its own sake he preferred it to all the treasures of Oriental magnificence" ("Education and Self-Education" in ESP 169).

(26) Ibid. -- "The whole story of Solomon’s dream suggests that the antithesis between the two functions of Reason is not quite so sharp as it seems at first sight" (FR 30).

(27) Ibid. -- [How speculative schemes] "fulfill the promise of the dream of Solomon" (FR 57).

(28) Ibid. -- ". . . about four or five hundred years after the date of Solomon’s dream" [the Greeks initiated the theoretical development of mathematics for the love of it] (FR 58).

(29) 10:1-13 -- "We can watch Samuel and Agag succeeded by Solomon and the Queen of Sheba" (AI 66f).

(30) 11:3 -- "It is the nemesis of the reign of force . . . that the ideals of semi-divine rulers center upon some variant of Solomon’s magnificent harem of 300 wives and 700 concubines" (AI 108).

(31) Ibid. -- [He said] "his eyes twinkling, ‘It seems a little odd that a person like Solomon with his million wives and thousand concubines should have been chosen to write parts of" [the Bible] (Dial 330f).

(32) 18:44 -- [The orthodoxies of universities] "are our dangers, as yet only to be seen on the distant horizon, clouds small as the hand of a man" (ESP 26).

II Kings

(33) 18: 13 ff. -- ". . . the Jews were carried off to Babylon and after two generations . . . allowed to return peacefully" (RM 40).

Ezra

(34) 1:1-3 -- ". . . the Jews were allowed to return peacefully" (RM 40).

Job

(35) 2-15 -- "From savage legends up to Hume’s civilized Dialogues on Natural Religion, with its conversation between Job and his friends as an intermediate between the two, the same problem is discussed" (AI 141f).

° (36) 11:7 -- " ‘Canst thou by searching find out God?’ is good Hebrew, but it is bad Greek" (AI 132).

(37) lbid.. -- "Canst thou by searching describe the Universe?" (AI 185).

Psalms

(38) 8:4a -- "The brotherhood of man at the top of creation ceased to be the well defined foundation for moral principles" (AI 36).

(39) 8:5 -- "Man who at times dreamt of himself as a little lower than the angels has submitted to become the servant and minister of nature" (SMW 141).

(40) 19:1 -- "The heavens had lost the glory of God" (SMW 280).

°(41) 24:1, 10 -- [An illustration of] "the glorification of power, magnificent and barbaric ‘The earth is the Lord’s. . .’ there is no solution here of the difficulties which haunted Job" (RM 54f).

° (42) 42:22 -- "Religion is the longing of the spirit that the facts of existence should find their justification in the nature of existence: ‘My soul thirsteth . . ."’ (RM 85).

°(43) 127:2 -- "The evil of the world is . . . that those elements with individual weight, by their discord, impose upon vivid immediacy the obligation that it fade into night. ‘He giveth his beloved -- sleep’" (PR 517f).

°(44) Ibid. -- "So long as the temporal world is conceived as a self-sufficient completion of the creative act . . . the best we can say of the turmoil is, ‘For so he giveth his beloved -- sleep’" (PR 519).

Proverbs

°(45) 1:7 -- " ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge’ an odd saying if it be true that ‘God is love’" (RM 75). See also I John 4:8.

° (46) 30:7-9 --"The search after wisdom has its origin in generalizations from experience: ‘Two things . . ."’ (RM 52f).

Ecclesiastes

(47) 1:7-9 -- " ‘All the rivers run into the sea . . . there is nothing new under the sun’ was the final judgment of the Near East" [in favor of a static world] (AI 108).

° (48) 9:11 -- "There is a keen appreciation of actual fact, even when the moral is not over-clear. For example: ‘I returned. . ."’ (RM 53).

Isaiah

(49) 64:6 -- "Puritan divines spoke of ‘the filthy rags’ of righteousness" (SMW 274).

(50) Ibid. -- [In Calvinism] "Even good works will not save [a man], they are ‘the filthy rags"’ (Dial 61).

Ezekiel

°(51) 37: 10 -- "The subjective ways of feeling . . . clothe the dry bones with the flesh of a real being. . . The miracle of creation is described in the vision of the prophet Ezekiel; ‘So I prophesied. . ."’ (PR 131).

Daniel

(52) 5:27 -- "When [the cry for freedom] wakes, the day of God’s judgment has arrived, and the worth of human societies is being weighed in his scales" ("Education and Self-Education" in ESP 169).

Hosea

°(53) 6:6 -- "These are words which Hosea ascribes to Jehovah; and he thereby employs the principles of individual criticism of tribal custom, and bases it upon direct ethical intuition" (RM 36).

Amos

° (54) 5:21 -- "The condemnation of idolatry pervades the Bible, and there are traces of a recoil which goes further. ‘I hate . . ."’ (RM 37).

Habakkuk

(55) 2:2 -- "So far as concerns religious problems, simple solutions are bogus solutions. It is written that he who runs may read. But it is not said that he provides the writing" (AI 207). (Whitehead, like most people, interchanges the running and the reading.)

Matthew

(56) 2:1 -- "The wise men of the East have been puzzling and are puzzling as to what may be the regulative secret of life. . ." (SMW 4).

(56a) 3;12 -- "Atè, the goddess of mischief [Iliad 9.500]. The chaff is burnt" (PR 373).

(57) 4:4 -- [Re Voltaire.] "If men cannot live by bread alone, still less can they do so on disinfectants" (SMW 87).

(58) 5-7 -- "At first sight the notion of any important connection between the multiplication table and the moral beauty of the Sermon on the Mount is fantastic" (MT 104).

(59) 6:28 -- ". . . formal training has a limit to its usefulness. Beyond that limit there is degeneration: ‘The lilies of the field . . ."’ (PR 514).

(60) Ibid. -- ". . . the final route of percipient occasions . . . ‘toils not neither does it spin’" (PR 516).

(61) 6:28, 34 -- "The rational conclusion from Hume’s philosophy has been drawn by those among the lilies of the field, who take no thought for the morrow" ("Uniformity and Contingency" in IS. 118f).

(62) 7:13 -- "In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place" (AE 7).

° (63) 7:14 -- "The final phase introduces the note of solitariness. ‘Strait is the gate . . . and few there be that find it"’ (RM 28f).

(64) 8:20 -- "Jesus homeless and self forgetful" [in list of elements evoking response] (AI 214).

° (65) 11:7 -- "In respect to our reactions to novelty we are still living in the ancient ages of Faith. "What went ye out into the wilderness to seep ("Historical Changes" in ESP 203).

(66) l1:28 -- "lowly" [in list of elements evoking response] (Al 214).

(67) 12: 1ff. -- "The disciples plucked corn on the Sabbath and are chidden by the mayor and the village council. They reply brusquely .‘What does it matter? . . ."’ (Dial 66).

°(68) 13:30 -- "Once and forever, this duty of toleration has been summed up in the words, ‘Let both grow together’. . ." (SMW 267). Cf. AI 63.

(69) 17:20 -- [Science is impossible on Hume’s principles.] "But scientific faith has risen to the occasion and has tacitly removed the philosophic mountain" (SMW 6).

(70) 18:22 -- "In this ideal world [of the Galilean peasantry] forgiveness could be stretched to seventy times seven; whereas in the real world sevenfold forgiveness touched upon the impracticable". (AI 20).

°(71) 22: 14 -- "Religion can be, and has been the major instrument for progress. But generally . . . it has not been so: ‘Many are called . . ."’ (RM 37).

(72) Ibid. -- "Many were called and all were chosen" (RM 28).

(73) 22: 21 -- "The church gave unto God the attributes which belonged to Caesar" (PR 520).

(74) Ibid. -- " ‘Render unto Caesar. . .’ was uttered by Christ in the reign of Tiberius and not by Plato four hundred years earlier . . . [But] very soon God was conceived as a principle of organization in complete disjunction from Caesar" (AI 69).

(75) Ibid. -- "Even Christ himself said practically nothing about managing a complex society, except ‘You had better pay your taxes’ but that is not a civil constitution exactly" (Dial 160, cf. 262).

(76) Ibid. -- "Render unto Caesar. . . But beyond Caesar there stretches the array of aspirations whose coordinating principle is termed God" ("An Appeal to Sanity" in ESP 65).

(77) 25:25 -- "Is [education] a talent to be hidden away in a napkin?" (AE 3). Cf. Luke 19:12 ff.

(78) Ibid. -- "So far as we can see, inorganic entities are vehicles for receiving and storing in a napkin, and for restoring without gain or loss" (PR 269).

°(79) 24:35 -- "Greek, Hebrew and Christian thought embodied notions of a static God and a world . . . finally fluent -- ‘heaven and earth shall pass away’" (PR 526).

(80) 27:24-50 -- ". . . the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair" (AI 214). [In list of elements evoking response.]

(81) 27:35 -- "Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world -- the fairies dance and Christ is nailed to the cross" (PR 513).

(82) 27:46 -- ". . . the solitary Man on the Cross. It belongs to the depths of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God" (RM 20).

(83) 28:1-8--"The whole with the authority of supreme victory" [In list of elements evoking response.] (AI 214).

Luke

(84) 2:7 -- "Since a babe was born in a manger it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir" (SMW 3) [Refers to the emergence of the scientific outlook.]

(85) Ibid. -- ". . . the Mother, the Child, and the bare manger" (AI 214). [In list of elements evoking response.]

(86) 2:19 -- "Mothers can ponder many things in their hearts which their lips cannot express. These . . . constitute the ultimate religious evidence beyond which there is no appeal" (RM 67).

(87) 17:21 -- "The heaven, which Christ taught was within us, was by the popular sentiment placed above us" ("First Physical Synthesis" in IS. 6). [Explaining the shock produced by discoveries through the telescope.]

(88) Ibid. -- "The first point is the association of God with the Kingdom of heaven, coupled with the explanation that ‘The Kingdom of heaven is within you"’ (RM 72). [Referring to points receiving decisive emphasis in Jesus’ teaching.] Luke actually has "kingdom of God." There is no distinction in meaning.

(89) 23:34 -- ". . .brute necessity . . . urging on mankind apart from any human conception of an end intellectually expressed . . . Men knew not what they did" (AI 9).

John

(90) 1: l-15 -- [John introduces] "the doctrine of the Logos" (RM 73).

°(91) 3:8 -- "The vast mass of operations of nature appeared due to mysterious, unfathomable forces. ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth"’ (Introduction to Mathematics 36).

(92) 4:21 -- "An altar neither in Mount Gerezim nor yet at Jerusalem" (RM 146).

(93) 14:2 -- "In the realm of truth there are many mansions" (Al 314). [Referring to types of truth which sense perception is incapable of grasping.]

(94) Ibid. -- "In the house of forms, there are many mansions" [including forms of imperfection] (MT 94).

(95) 17:15-16 -- "The kingdom is in the world, and yet not of the world" (RM 88).

(96) 18:36 -- [In addition to the three main strands of thought about God there is in the Galilean origin of Christianity a strand which] "finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world" (PR 520).

(97) 19:23 -- [Science] "divides the seamless coat" [by concentrating on the more superficial aspect of experience] (MT 211).

(98) 20:25 -- "The sense of touch gives a particularly vivid reference . . . Doubting Thomas wishes to touch his Lord" (Uniformity and Contingency," IS 122).

(99) 21:25 -- "I suppose even the world itself could not contain the bones of those slaughtered because of men intoxicated by" [the attraction of glory] (RM 55).

Acts

(100) 9:3 ff. -- "Paul’s conversion was on a journey" (EM 40). Cf. Genesis 12:5.

(101) 25:10 -- "After all, it is the empiricists who began this appeal to Caesar" (PR 264).

Epistles

(102) Rom. 12:21 -- [Christianity, in contrast to Buddhism] "overcomes evil with good" (RM 52).

(103) Rom.. 16:9 (ERV) -- "The early Benedictine monks rejoiced in their labors because they conceived themselves as thereby made fellow-workers with Christ" (AE 67).

(104) 1 Cor. 10:11 -- "When the Bible said, ‘All these things happened unto them for ensamples’ we did not need a higher critic to tell us what was meant or how it came to be written. It was just how we felt" ("Education of an Englishman" in ESP 34).

(105) 1 Cor. 13:9 -- "We can mean ‘Now we know -- in part,’ or we can mean Now we know -- completely.’ The distinction marks the difference between Plato and Aristotle" (MG 670; Whitehead’s italics).

° (106) I Cor. 15:32 -- "The cry, ‘Let us eat, and drink; for tomorrow we die’ expresses the triviality of the merely finite" (MT 108).

(107) Gal. 1: 17 -- "Seeming indifference to direct historical evidence, notably in the case of St. Paul, who retired to Arabia when we should have expected him to have recourse to the disciples who had seen his Lord" (AI 212).

(108) Phil. 4:7 -- "The contrast . . . between evil and good is the contrast between the turbulence of evil and the ‘peace which passeth all understanding"’ (RM 97f).

° (109) II Thess. 1:8, 9 -- "‘In flaming fire . . .’ The populace did well to be terrified at such ambiguous good tidings" (RM 75f).

(110) 1 Pet. 2:2 -- "The pure milk of the word of the sociological Gospel, perfected in the late eighteenth century has gone sour" ("The Study of the Past" in ESP 155).

(111) 1 John. 3: 17 -- "We can prolong Hume’s list . . . the compassionate yearning is in the bowels" (PR 181).

(112) Ibid. -- Literary habits have directed attention to superficial sense evidences;] "the deeper notions of ‘bowels of compassion’ and ‘loving hearts’ are derived from experience as it functioned three thousand years ago (Imm 695).

(113) 1 John. 4:8, 16 -- [Implications of God as Father] "expounded with moving insistence in the two [sic] epistles by St. John, the author of the Gospel. To him we owe the phrase ‘God is love."’ (RM 72f).

(114) 1 John. 4:20 -- "You remember the great text of Scripture, ‘How shall a man love God whom he has not seen, if he love not his brother whom he has seen?’ This text explains the comparative failure of pretentious schemes for liberal education" ("Education and Self Education,"ESP 172).

(115) Rev. 3:16 -- "People not too hot nor too cold" (Dial 159).

° (116) Rev. 18:10-13 -- "Latin has one theme and that is Rome, the mother of Europe, and the great Babylon, the harlot whose doom is described by the writer of the Apocalypse: ‘Standing far off . . . etc. ("Place of Classics in Education," AE 105f).

(117) Rev. 21:1 -- ". . . the vague insistence of another order, where there is no unrest, no travel, no shipwreck: ‘There shall be no more sea (PR 516).

In addition to the above passages there are a number of references to ideas which cannot easily be tied to any specific passage. Such are: the Covenant (AI 82); the Day of Judgment (ESP 169); the Kingdom of Heaven (RM 87f); the concept of God as Father (RM 70); Paul’s denunciation of the Law (SMW 274).

Observations

Of the 119 references, 48 per cent are to the Old Testament, 52 per cent to the New. Most often referred to in the O. T. are Genesis (15 times), I Kings (8 times) and Psalms (7 times). Some 64 per cent of the O. T. references are to narratives. In the New Testament the Gospels account for most of the references (45, or 72 per cent). The Pauline Epistles (raising no questions about II Thess.) account for 8, I John for 4. Among the Gospels Matthew is the favorite (29 references, almost half the total for the N. T.), with John second (10 references). Mark seems never to be noticed, reflecting the fact that prior to the rise of modern critical theories Augustine’s slighting comment about the second gospel led to its general neglect.

Among Whitehead’s later works, the largest number of references is to be found in RM with 24; AI has 22, PR has 18 (two thirds in part V); SMW 11; FR 3, Imm 2, MG 1. Earlier works on mathematics, science and philosophy of science have 7 -- Introduction to Mathematics (the first reference noted); "First Physical Synthesis," CN, R have one each; "Uniformity and Contingency;" has 2. Nine references occur in papers on education, mostly in NE. Is it significant that the first allusion occurs in the book he wrote just after leaving Cambridge for London?

If we look at the topic under consideration in the immediate context the results are as follows: religion 35 per cent; philosophy (including ethics) 31 per cent; education 13 per cent; civilization (including history, evolution of society, government) 11 per cent; science 10 per cent.

When Whitehead quotes directly (22 times), he generally quotes quite accurately, though he does conflate (item 77) the parables of the talents (Matt.) and the pounds (Luke). He almost never gives chapter and verse (but see items 41, 46, 47, 50); these latter he must have looked up. (Did he read through the Wisdom literature in preparation for RM?) Otherwise, he seems usually to be quoting from memory. It seems reasonable to suppose that his knowledge of the Bible was, in general, acquired in childhood and youth.

He uses the Biblical material in various ways: often as an illustration of the point he is trying to make, but frequently simply as the source of a telling phrase which he uses in his own way, without regard to its original meaning (item 55). He uses the same passage to make quite different points (items 60-62; items 73-76).

One trivial but amusing conclusion is perhaps justified. Whitehead arrived in Boston at the end of August, 1924. That fall he was invited to give the Lowell Lectures the following February. These are the backbone of SMW. Is it too far fetched to infer from the reference to shepherds and wise men in the first few pages of SMW that he did not begin serious work on his lectures until the winter vacation, in an atmosphere of Christmas preparations? We do know that they were written very rapidly, and that he was never more than a week ahead with his completed texts (Dial 149).

There is nothing in this study to indicate that Whitehead got any of his philosophical or religious ideas directly from his contact with the Bible. Any influence it may have had was too deep and too subtle to be revealed by a survey such as this.

References

Dial -- Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as recorded by Lucien Price. Boston: Little, Brown, 1954.

Imm -- "Immortality," pages 682-700, and

MG -- "Mathematics and the Good," pages 666-81 in The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Schilpp. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1941.

In the interesting and stimulating book, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, the authors John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler compare passages from two of Whitehead’s works -- The Concept of Nature and Science and the Modern World -- and declare them to be mutually incompatible (ANC 216). (Barrow and Tipler assumed that I reached the same conclusion in one section of my book, Bergson and Modern Physics, [252-53], but my conclusion was different. I believe that the alleged inconsistency is only apparent, and I have never claimed that there is any inconsistency between those two passages.) They are correct that the impression of inconsistency between these two passages comes up very naturally, but it can be dispelled by a careful and attentive analysis.

Although this is not the usual language in which the special theory is presented in the textbooks on relativity, all essential concepts of this theory are presented in this passage and their differences from their classical counterparts stated. While Newtonian mechanics admitted at each instant a single instantaneous space which was a substrate for all objectivity of simultaneous events, the theory of special relativity denies it: in the four-dimensional "world" (I would prefer to call it the "world-history") of Minkowski, there is no privileged instantaneous three-dimensional cross-section, and therefore no privileged frame of reference which Newton identified with absolute space. Hence the multiplicity of time-systems each having its own instantaneous space -- in other words, the multiplicity of "discordant" time-series. Although Whitehead does not explicitly use the phrase "relativity of simultaneity," a denial of absolute simultaneity is clearly implied; it is in complete agreement with what he wrote in Science and the Modern World, where the existence of "the unique present instant" is explicitly denied:

This is the second passage cited by Barrow and Tipler and referred to above. Despite the difference in formulation, it certainly does not contradict the first passage from The Concept of Nature.

Why then, an appearance of contradiction? It is certainly due to Whitehead’s defense of "the creative advance of nature," which seems to be nothing but a poetic term for the uniform time of Newton. But it is not so, since Whitehead explicitly insists that it is "not properly serial [not metrical] at all"; it in some sense underlies different metrically discordant time-series which express all its properties which are measurable. Unfortunately, Whitehead made very little effort -- at least in this over-concise passage -- to clarify the relation of his" creative advance into novelty" to the plurality of measurable time. But with the use of more explicit and less poetic terminology, such clarification can be obtained.

In a language which would probably be more acceptable to physicists, one can say that Whitehead, in asserting "the creative advance of novelty," wanted to preserve the topological unity of time. Now the topological properties of time are those concerning the relations of "before" and "after," independent of the quantitative relations between the temporal intervals -- in other words, the relations of succession. Those are precisely the relations which the special theory preserves as long as the events in question are causally related; the successive character of such events is topologically invariant, i.e., independent of any particular frame of reference. Only the succession of causally unrelated event, what Hans Reichenbach called "unreal sequences" (PST 147-49) can by an appropriate choice of the frame of reference be reduced to apparent simultaneity or even inverted; but the real concrete causal links -- the "world-lines," in the language of relativity -- are objectively irreversible since the order of succession of the events of which they consist remains the same in every frame of reference. The world of Minkowski is nothing but a network of such irreversible, intrinsically successive world-lines; this is why it should be more appropriately called "timespace" rather than "space-time.

Why then is Minkowski’s union of space with time so frequently interpreted as a spatialization of time? Apart from some traditional philosophical influences, this is due mainly to the fact that relativity excluded the universal cosmic "Now" as the substratum of absolute simultaneity; and since such "Now" was naturally viewed as a boundary between past and future events, its elimination was interpreted as a denial of the successive character of the world. In this context it is difficult not to recall the observation of Eddington, made a half-century ago (NPW 47-58) that in Minkowski’s time-space the past is separated from the future even more effectively than in the world of Newton: instead of an instantaneous three-dimensional cross-section, it is a four-dimensional region of "Elsewhere" which separates the causal past from the causal future. Moreover, an attentive inspection of Minkowski’s space-time diagram discloses that while there is no "world-wide Now-instant," there is such a thing as "absolute future" -- not only for my own Here-Now, but for every other conceivable observer, i.e., for all observers located anywhere in the Elsewhere region. Furthermore, such an absolute causal future is physically empty, since it is intrinsically unobservable by any conceivable observer mentioned above: for it is included neither in my own causal past (of Here-Now), nor in the causal past of any other observer anywhere in the Elsewhere region. To postulate the existence of such intrinsically unobservable entities runs contrary to the most elementary rules of scientific methodology.

It may be objected that my own present Here-Now is arbitrarily chosen since it is continually shifting toward the future; and that the future events are included in the causal past of my future Here-Now. The answer to the first part of the objection is that to admit the "moving" character of my own Now is tantamount to the recognition of the reality of succession. Furthermore, as Hans Reichenbach pointed out (AHT 157), our own present Now is inescapable since the very act of denying it reasserts it. The second part of the objection can be reduced to the harmless truism that "the future events will be observed in my future frames of reference." The disagreement begins when the future tense "will be observed" is replaced by the tenseless "is observed." If the latter is understood in the timeless Eleatic sense, then all systems of reference, including those which "are" in my causal future, would be absurdly on the same footing, being all "equally real." But they cannot be; we are certainly not living in the Cretaceous period, nor in the year 2000.

Thus Whitehead’s term, "creative advance of nature" is not a mere poetic metaphor; it expresses the irreducibly successive character of time-space. Unfortunately, Whitehead weakened his argument by an ill-advised defense of the concept of simultaneity in his first book, referring to "blind people barking both their shins at the same moment" (PNK 53), without realizing that simultaneity at the same place is not denied by relativity. This has been pointed out by G.J. Whitrow (NPT 253). But clearly there is no inconsistency between the two passages referred to at the beginning of this paper.

Concerning Barrow’s and Tipler’s remarks on Bergson and the special theory of relativity (ACP 216), I must refer to my previous books as well as to my detailed analysis in Revue de synthèse (RS 313-44). I cannot see what is "incorrect" in the view that no asymmetrical aging can ever occur unless some acceleration occurs at a certain point and instant in the path of the traveling twin. This occurs at the point where the traveling twin reverses the direction of his motion and where his acceleration -- not only with respect to the twin "at rest," but also with respect to the large masses of the universe -- takes place. This is what was correctly seen by Paul Langevin (PDV 292-97), Hans Reichenbach (AHP 157). and Whitehead (AS 34-41), among others, and what Bergson failed to see. But Bergson was correct that as long as both systems remain Inertial, the dilation of time is reciprocal, i.e., only referential. Only the acceleration-gravitational field can cause an effective "slowing-down" of time, i.e., asymmetrical aging.

References

ACP -- John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

AHP -- Hans Reichenbach. "Les fondements logiques de la mécanique de quanta." Annalesde l’Institut Henri Poincaré 13(1952): 157.

AS -- A.N. Whitehead. "The Problem of Simultaneity." Aristotelian Society, Supplement to Vol. 3 (1923): 34-41. (This article was reprinted in The Concepts of Space and lime, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 12, ed. Milic Capek [Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976]: 441-46.)

BMP -- Milic Capek. Bergson and Modern Physics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971.

NPT -- G.J. Whitrow. The Natural Philosophy of lime. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

NPW -- A. E. Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World. Cambridge, Macmillan, 1933.

PDV -- Paul Langevin. "L’Evolution de l’espace et du temps." La physique depuis vingt ans. Paris: Gaston Doin, Èditeur, 1923: 292-97.

PST -- Hans Reichenbach. The Philosophy of Space and lime. New York: Dover Publications, 1956.

RS -- Milic Capek. "Ce qui est vivant et ce qui est mort dans la critique bergsonienne de la relativité" Revue de synthese c/99- 100 (1980): 313-44. (Now in its English translation, What is Living and What is Dead in the Bergsonian Critique of Relativity," in Milic Capek, The New Aspects of lime [Boston: Klüwer Academic Publishers, 1991]: 296-323.)

In his fair and generally sympathetic review of my book Bergson and Modern Physics, David Sipfle raised some important and significant questions which clearly show how extremely complex the questions concerning the nature of time are and how difficult it is to agree on their solutions even for those who share a basic philosophical view. The question which he raised is as follows: "What I ask Capek is further explanation of the distinction between my immediate memory of the earlier portions of my specious present and my memory of my former present" (PS 2:311). This is, indeed, a fundamental question. That there is a difference between these two kinds of memory is beyond doubt, and neither Bergson nor Whitehead denies it. All that Bergson asserts -- and we shall see that in many of his texts Whitehead implicitly adopts the same view -- is that this difference, real as it is, is nevertheless only that of degree, not that of nature, for one simple reason: that the past is always totally immanent in the present, even though in different degrees of vividness. More specifically, the integral immanence of the past in the present is differentiated in the following way: the more remote a certain phase of the past is, the less vividly its influence within the present is felt. But, once more, the totality of the past is present -- not as a homogeneous bloc, but in the form of qualitative continuum of different degrees of vividness.

The assertion that the totality of the past is immanent in the present follows as an inescapable consequence from the immortality of the past. The past is immortal by its own nature: what has happened, happened, and its happening cannot be unmade; it cannot be erased from the total texture of existence: as St. Thomas (following in this respect Aristotle) observed, "However, for the past not to have been involves a contradiction" (S.T., q. 24, a. 4). This means that the past, precisely in virtue of its indestructibility, cannot be a mere nothingness, a mere existential void; in this respect it differs from the future; while it does not exist in the same sense as the present, it still subsists, and by its own everlasting subsistence it contrasts with a sheer nonexistence of the future. The very nature of time, that is, its asymmetry, is based on this contrast. Only in this way is the mnemic influence of the past, that is, memory, in its most general as well as in a psychological sense, possible. If the past were a mere nothingness, the whole distinction between the faithful and false memory, between history and myth would collapse.¹

But this causal influence of the past (i.e., its immanence in the present) is diversified: the more remote the past event is, the less intense its effect in the present is. Unlike the indestructibility of the past which follows logically from the law of contradiction, this "fading of the past" is the result of empirical observation. In our direct introspective experience it is perceived as a gradual fading of the present moment into its own recollection; every sensation and feeling gradually acquires the character of the pastness even when its sensory vivacity remains quite pronounced; this character of the pastness is correlated with the emergence of a new present which, metaphorically speaking, pushes its predecessor pastwards. (Of course, we must be careful not to confuse "recollection" and image : the true recollection has always the character of the pastness, and it is usually "dated" [i.e., "located"] in the past, while the image is not. Phenomenologists are correct in stressing this important difference.) In the physical sciences the diminishing impact of the remote past is well known; the farther an event is in the past, the lesser is its action on my Here-Now.

Prior to Einstein this was regarded as a consequence of the inverse square law, that is, as an effect of the increasing spatial distance; today when we know that there are no mere spatial distances, but only spatiotemporal distances, we also know that to be remote in space from any particular Here-Now means also to be also distant in time, i.e., to be in the past with respect to that particular Here-Now. It would be otiose to give examples: a distant thunder is in the past as much as a distant star; but no matter how far in time-space a star or galaxy is, it is always faintly immanent in my Here-Now even when its action is below the threshold of human perception; its action can be made visible by a combination of lenses or a prolonged photographic exposure. Thus the diversification of the mnemic influence of the past according to its remoteness seems to be a general law. (Perhaps with our deepened insight into the nature of time even this empirical law can be justified in an a priori fashion; but I prefer not to go into this problem now.)

Now how is all this related to the question raised by Professor Sipfle? The answer is obvious: if the process of "fading of the past" is continuous, there cannot be any radical difference between the immediate and mediate memory. The apparently paradoxical character of this assertion will disappear after the apparently most serious objections are analyzed.

Let us first analyze the very language in which Sipfle formulates his question. He speaks of the immediate memory of "the earlier portions" of my "specious" present. Is it legitimate to speak of "the portions" of our psychological present? Is it possible to divide the present moment into two successive subintervals one of which is "immediate recollection" and another is "pure present"? There is a great temptation to do so because we are naturally inclined to symbolize any time-interval by a geometrical segment and, of course, every segment can be bisected. But such geometrical symbolizations of time are the source of endless confusions and vicious distortions which from the time of Zeno of Elea have interfered with our true insight into the nature of time. Bergson’s great merit, still not sufficiently appreciated and understood, was to show how seriously "the fallacy of spatialization" prevents us from grasping the authentic nature of time. On this point Whitehead explicitly agreed with him in several places, although he did not believe that the spatializing tendency is inevitable (SMW 74, 212; PR 126, 174, 319). (Neither did Bergson -- otherwise his criticism of this tendency would be pointless.)

Let me mention at least three instances of distorting spatialization. First, to symbolize time by a geometical line tends to obscure the dynamic and essentially incomplete character of temporal process. A geometrical line consists of simultaneous, juxtaposed parts; it is essentially static. Second, any geometrical line is continuous in a mathematical sense, i.e., infinitely divisible, which is certainly not true of any concrete temporal process: there are indivisible minima of duration not only in psychology (the so called "specious present"), but in the light of quantum phenomena, even in physics. The third instance of vicious spatialization is merely another form of the previous one: the belief that every temporal process consists of a dense succession of durationless instants in the same sense as a geometrical line consists of dense continuum of dimensionless points. But there are no "infinitely thin" instants either in psychology or in physics.

For the same reason, the atomistic theory of time is equally inadequate. Time consists neither of durationless instants nor of sharply delimited segments; either of these views is inspired by a false analogy between time and a geometrical line. It is ironical that "the atom of time," conceived of as antithetical to the concept of durationless instant, really presupposes the very concept which it purportedly negates; for what else but the durationless instants can constitute the boundaries of a sharply delimited temporal "atom"? We must not be confused by Whitehead’s atomistic language as some of his disciples apparently are; the so-called "epochal theory of time" is atomistic only in name. We have seen that the concept of "atom of time" requires that of instant -- the very same concept which Whitehead always rejected as early as in 19.19 (PNK 2f, 6-8; SMW 54, 172).² Both concepts -- "atom of time" and "instant" -- presuppose the notion of simple location in time which Whitehead denounced as the most dangerous fallacy (SMW 84f, 98, 132).³ His whole doctrine of prehensions is incompatible with the doctrine of external relations which the atomization of time implies.

From this point of view it is futile to look for instants anywhere since they simply do not exist. Instants are merely virtual stops in the stream of our experience which goes on without ever being arrested. Consequently, there is neither the initial nor the final instant of the present moment; nor is there any instant bisecting it. Only when we begin to map the temporal progress geometrically on the axis of abscissa do we start looking for such fictitious entities. But then we are dealing not with time, but with its static and inadequate symbolization.

Now let us return to Professor Sipfle’s question: "What is the distinction between my immediate memory of the earlier portions of my specious present and my memory of my former present?" If by "former present" he means my "immediately preceding present" then the only possible answer is: none. For the former present acquires its character of immediate pastness or anteriority in virtue of its being immediately remembered; the content of immediate memory is constituted by the former present which has just acquired the character of immediate recency. These two terms refer to the same phase of the duration. But, of course, this phase of duration is qualitatively different from the previous phase when the former present was not yet "former" and when the new present was still nonexistent. But this relation of succession cannot be symbolized by a single static diagram because any diagram consists of simultaneous parts and thus cannot convey adequately what is non-simultaneous.

If, however, by "former present" Sipfle means a moment which is not immediately preceding, then the question becomes different. Then, by definition, we have two distinct degrees of pastness which are qualitatively different, two recollections, one of which refers to the immediately preceding past, another to a more "distant" past. (We do not have in our language a comparative for the adjective "past’ -- something like "paster" -- thus our language again has to use a metaphor of spatial distance: "more remote in the past.") Needless to say, our experience is not restricted to the memory of two successive phases only. In the perception of memory there is the mnemic awareness of the multiplicity of successive phases. This is what Husserl calls "temporal horizon." But we have again to be very much on guard against the misleading terminology. This is not the arithmetical multiplicity of externally related and mutually exclusive units.

Logicians will probably never like the Bergsonian terms "qualitative multiplicity" or "heterogeneous continuity" with the possible exception of Brouwer and mathematical intuitionists in general whose concept of "one-manyness" points in the same direction (cf. BMP 150, 180). As James stressed long ago: "The experience is from the outset a synthetic datum, not a simple one; and to a sensible perception its elements are inseparable, although attention looking back may easily decompose the experience and distinguish its beginning from its end" (PP, I 610). He might have added that this distinguishing would be impossible if the original datum were completely homogeneous, that is, if it were not qualitatively diversified (not divided!) into successive phases (not "parts"!). Nobody will accuse Whitehead of irresponsible Hegelianism when he speaks of "self-diversity of actual occasions"; by this term he obviously tries to express the synthesis of unity and diversity, of continuity and difference, which constitutes the very nature of succession.

One question naturally comes to our mind: why is the temporal horizon limited? If the whole past is immanent in the present, why do we not remember our whole personal past? The temporal span of the immediate memory is clearly limited and it obviously varies according to the degree of wakefulness and attention. But again we would be looking in vain for any precise point-like limit; this is why James speaks of the "vaguely vanishing backward fringe of the specious present." What is temporally beyond its "rearward fringe" is the imageless feeling of our whole personal past, what James in the later period of his thought identified as the feeling of our "full self": "the whole is somehow felt as one pulse of our life, -- not conceived so, but felt so."⁴

The amazing facts of hypermnesia, whether spontaneous or artificially induced, indicate that no phase of our past is ever destroyed. An impressive number of testimonies suggest that in some instances of extreme danger the totality or quasi-totality of our past is glimpsed "at once, more accurately, in a present moment which is contemporary with a very short interval of public time. Such "panoramic vision of the past" (la vision panoramique du passé) had been discussed extensively at the turn of the century; Bergson took notice of it in Matter and Memory, and the same problem was discussed more recently by George Poulet, the author of Études sur le temps humain.⁵

Thus Professor Sipfle is quite correct when he writes:

This is, indeed, how Josiah Royce and Henri Bergson defined the divine consciousness, trying, both in different ways determined by their different philosophical outlooks, to do justice to both time and eternity.⁶ Whitehead was moving in the same direction when he insisted that in God novelty is present without the fading of the past, without "perpetual perishing" (PR 134, 517, 524f).

Yet the same question still remains: what in a normal human consciousness prevents the totality of the past from being integrally present? The only answer which is plausible can be given by the biological theory of knowledge: in the same way as our perception carves Out of the whole physical reality only that zone which has practical importance for our organism, only those recollections which are relevant to our present situation are transmitted into our present moment. The limiting, selecting factor is our "attention to life," embodied in our normally functioning nervous system. Since, as Whitehead observed, "the relevance of the remote past is practically negligible" (PR 58f),⁷ it usually remains outside of our immediate memory, subsisting mainly in the form of imageless, virtual awareness.

It is more or less clear how our perceptual organs operate the selection of "the zone of the middle dimensions" from the physical universe; but any attempt to explain the mode of selecting action of our brains from the totality of our pasts would involve us in a lengthy, complex, and untraditional discussion of the mind-body problem which is clearly beyond the scope of this short article. Let me only say that the problems touched upon in this article simply do not exist for any present naturalistic or even idealistic doctrine; for materialism, epiphenomenalism, double-aspect theory, or even idealism, only the present exists, and what we call the past is nothing but a less vivid present "trace" which is interpreted -- sometimes correctly, sometimes not -- as "belonging to the past." In this respect the influence of Hume’s claim that the recollection is nothing but a weakened perception unfortunately still persists.

Conclusion

Let me then restate my answer to Professor Sipfle as concisely as possible:

(a) Durationless instants are mere fictions; consequently, it is otiose to look for any instantaneous boundaries of the present moments or for any instant bisecting these moments.

(b) Two apparently rival theories -- that of mathematically continuous time as well as that of the atomistic time -- presuppose the existence of durationless instants and thus cannot be adequate representations of our experience of time.

(c) The absence of instantaneous cuts in any temporal process does not exclude qualitative diversity of successive phases. "To be qualitatively different" and "to be sharply separated by instantaneous cuts" is not the same.

(d) Novelty of the present is possible only on the background of the immediate memory of its antecedent past.

(e) Immortality of the past is the basis of memory in general, whether immediate or mediate. These two kinds of memory do differ, but in degree rather than in nature; a more detailed analysis of these differences can be done only within the framework of a comprehensive theory of the mind-body relation.

References

BMP -- Milic Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1971.

PP -- William James, The Principles of Psychology. Two volumes. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1890.

Notes

1 I have dealt with this topic extensively in two articles: "The Elusive Nature of the Past" (in Experience Existence and the Good, Essays in Honor of Paul Weiss, ed. by Irwin C. Lieb, Southern Illinois University Press, 1961, pp. 126-41) and "Memini Ergo Fui?" (in Memorias del XIII Congresso Internacional de Filosofia 5 [Mexico. 1963], 415-26).

2 See also my article "The Fiction of Instants," Studium Generale, 24 (1971), 31-43.

3 See also Whitehead’s criticism of durationless instants in CN 72f. The fallacy of simple location although not yet named so, is criticized in the same book (CN 145f.) Professor Sipfle himself established that the contrast between Bergson’s and Whitehead’s theory of duration has been greatly exaggerated: "Henry Bergson and The Epochal Theory of Time." in Bergson and the Evolution of Physics. ed. by P. A. Y. Gunter (The University of Tennessee Press, 1971), pp. 275-94.

4 A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longman’s, Green Co., 1947), p. 289. On this point see my article "The Reappearance of the Self in the Last Philosophy of William James," The Philosophical Review 62 (1953). 526-44, esp. p. 539f. Compare with James’s view, quoted above, the following passage of Charles Hartshorne: "If it be asked how the individual can be aware of this infinite range if his experience is finite, the answer is that it is only the distinct or fully conscious aspect of human experience which is finite; while the faint, slightly conscious background embraces all past time" (Beyond Humanism. Essays in the Philosophy of Nature [Chicago: Willett, Clark & Company, 1937]. p. 122; italics mine).

5C. Poulet, "Bergson et la vision panoramique des mourants," Revue de theologie et de philosophie 10 (1960). 23-41.

6 Cf. my article "Time and Eternity in Royce and Bergson," Revue Internationale de Philosophie, No. 79 (1966), 22-45.

7 This is, so far as I know, the only passage where Whitehead comes close to a biological theory of knowledge.

In his study of three educational philosophers, Dewey, Russell, Whitehead, (Southern Illinois University Press, 1986) Brian Hendley pointed out that Whitehead’s approach to educational reform was different from that of the other two thinkers he treated. Where Russell aimed at an experimental school that would be a demonstration of his ideas, and Dewey set up a school that would be a laboratory for testing his, Whitehead went another way. He combined lectures to experts, directing their attention to the importance of education, and work on Committees, contributing to collective implementation of the expert ideas. His new insights apparently could be used to help adapt and redesign existing programs and institutions, and he put some trust in the collective experience and influence of his professional colleagues. His own individual commentaries could be presented as separate articles or lectures commenting on additions to or modifications of the programs and reports. Thus, after his textbook Introduction to Mathematics, illustrating his conviction that a few fundamental ideas should be made clear and looked at in every connection and application, his critical suggestions for the teaching of classics (growing out of committee work on the topic) were almost the only treatment of curriculum that he left to illustrate his general convictions.

Professor Hendley and I were curious about material that could illustrate Whitehead’s public presence, either as teacher or planner, and in that way add more examples to precepts that we wish had come with more illustration. It was with this in mind that I brought up the question of Whitehead’s educational work with his former colleague, Professor G. J. Whitrow.

In the course of correspondence I asked Professor Whitrow whether he knew of any material at the Imperial College that would bear on Whitehead’s educational theory. Professor Whitrow did not, but wrote:

H. M. Young of the Palaeography Room of the University of London Library kindly sent me a copy of the 1924 Syllabus for the Master of Science degree (M. Sc.) in Principles, History, and Method of Science, for the University of London, Regulations and courses for internal students for the session 1924-25. It is reproduced here in part with my acknowledgement and thanks for the permission given by the University of London. This was part of the program Professor Whitrow had referred to.

When Whitehead later told Lucien Price that he had been able to write each Lowell Lecture (each of which was a chapter of Science and the Modern World) in a week, because "he had been thinking about it for forty years," he might have added that the 1924 syllabus was, in a way, the outcome of a very recent review of that thought.

If we cannot say what Whitehead himself put into this report, it is at least worth noting some topics that he was to recur to later which are not left out. Probably two items reflect his personal phrasing. First, "Non-confinable simple substances" (B. 1 .h) echoes a quotation from Shelley:

This quotation was also used in chapter V of Science and the Modern World. Second, looking simply at style and phrasing, "Conceptions of natural law" (D. IV) has as its single subhead (in the published version), "uniformity, causation, necessity and contingency." Whitehead had fairly recently given a lecture on "Uniformity and Contingency" to the Aristotelian Society (IS 108-24).

For the rest, parallels with Science and the Modern World suggest that its author and the present syllabus are thinking along many of the same lines, whether at his direction or with his participation. (Unlike his article on the classics in education, which was in part a strong dissent from the report of the Commission he had belonged to in 1921, the added philosophical material in Science and the Modern World seems to presuppose and supplement the Syllabus; the drastic changes that mark a departure by Whitehead from the basic outline of the enterprise don’t appear until 1929).

The main philosophic difficulty that the Syllabus faces comes out in "General scientific tendencies since the end of the Seventeenth Century. Interrelation of physical and biological sciences" (A. VI.) That topic will continue to occupy Whitehead; one of his latest lectures, reprinted in Modes of Thought gives his final resolution as an epigram: "what is energy in physics is life in biology."

For the immediate future, however, the Syllabus served well as the background for Whitehead’s own views on the history of science. In addition to the phrasing of B.I.h, with its echo of the Shelley quotation, B.I.e, "General dynamics and the principle of least action," reminds one, by anticipation, of the role Maupertius will play as hero of "victorious analysis" in Science and the Modern World.

Victor Lowe’s biographical scholarship reminds us that B.II.d, "Current electricity and electro-magnetism. Ampere, Oersted, Faraday, Clerk Maxwell," had been the theme of many courses both at Cambridge and in London, and again we find Clerk Maxwell a hero of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World history. The notion that there are "Modem mathematical ideas" (Bill.) too specialized for the historian of biological sciences to be concerned with certainly reflects Whitehead’s continuing interest in mathematics; his fellows may well have been impressed by their colleague’s work on mathematical logic and the equations of relativity theory when they agreed to this subsection in addition to "Prolegomena to Mathematics" (D.VI), one of three options open to the degree candidate.

This subsection itself bears comparison with Chapter II of Science and the Modern World; again it is entirely congenial to Whitehead’s approach, if indeed it is not his own statement of it, that is reflected in the openings of subsections "(a) Nature of number," "(b) Fundamental concepts of geometry," and "(c) Nature of applied mathematics The theme of starting with clear principles in mathematics has run throughout Whitehead’s earlier work, particularly his lectures on the teaching of mathematics and his textbook. Again, the conclusion of part H, "The steam engine and other mechanical inventions. The rise of scientific technology" (B .II.m), parallels the concluding concern of Science and the Modern World with "Social Progress" in the face of a technology that has mastered the invention of inventions and accelerated the pace of occupational change well beyond any past rate, which was always less than one generation per major innovation. The section is also a reminder of Whitehead’s 1921 suggestion that the history of technology play a part in the teaching of classics (this is made anonymously toward the end of the Commission Report, and singled out for particular emphasis in Whitehead’s subsequent article on "‘The Classics in Education.")

The concerns relating to our knowledge of the physical world (D. VII) were philosophic themes that had already found repeated treatment in Whitehead’s writings; and they were standard topics at the time, on which any such Committee as the present one would agree. The case may not be quite so clear for D. VIII, though the nature of life and organism is a topic fundamental to biology.

Looked at retrospectively, the challenge of this Syllabus to Whitehead seems to look ahead toward Process and Reality. The crucial problem is reflected in the split of the historical material into physical and biological sciences; there is a common past reflected in part A and a prospective future synthesis foreshadowed in "general scientific tendencies since the end of the Seventeenth Century. Interrelation of physical and biological science" (A.VI). More strongly still, we find the ideal of a synthesis built into the structure of the Syllabus, in its requirement that all students have a common examination on Method and Principles of Science (sections I-V). And section V could almost be a prospectus for Process and Reality, I-IV: "Empirical characters of mental activity. Cognition, feeling, conation, language, symbolism, abstraction." The components are there for feelings and propositions in Whitehead’s later work, even if they appear in arbitrary order.

What strikes me as another salient detail is the final topic in the historical section of the biological sciences, "The physiology of the nervous system and its application to psychology" (C.II.m). This is a good transition from historical to philosophical sections. It was also, no doubt, a good topic for faculty conversations Whitehead’s knowledge of the biological sciences which occasionally occurs in Science and the Modern World makes one wonder whether he didn’t learn something from this topic. For example, his selection of smell as a primitive "feeling," connected with his observation that the dominance of the brain began with an enlarged development of the olfactory center, may well have been suggested by the present discussion. So may his stress on a background of "visceral feeling" of an external world of presences against which our sensations offer a fleeting conscious foreground. Somewhere here one suspects that he is aware and thinks of these feelings as a property of the sympathetic, not the autonomic nervous system.

At any rate, here we have a record of part of the context Whitehead was working in just before his invitation to come to Harvard, and his decision to come and write about education and philosophy. Some of the problems set up by this syllabus evidently continued to occupy his thought through Process and Reality to his two Chicago Lectures, "Nature and Life," in 1934, later incorporated in Modes of Thought.

My discussion here is not an attempt to anticipate Victor Lowe’s work on Whitehead’s biography, or Lewis S. Ford’s on the development of his thought. It is rather my own effort to see Whitehead at work as an educator whose audience, specified in the present case to specialized M. Sc. candidates, nevertheless can be envisaged as including his colleagues on the Faculty of Sciences in their interchange of ideas, his more general audience addressed in the Lowell Lectures, and any teachers or scholars interested in an outline of the history and philosophy of modern science that singles out the basic ideas of the past and raises the issues that present philosophy most urgently needs to resolve. If I am right, Whitehead does not divorce his role as educator from that of philosopher, even in his most austere later treatments of the problems he has helped formulate for the University of London special M. Sc.

APPENDIX

University of London. Regulations and courses for internal students for the session 1924-25. London, 1924, 380-385.

FACULTY OF SCIENCE

MASTER OF SCIENCE

M.Sc. in PRINCIPLES, HISTORY AND METHOD OF SCIENCE

The M.Sc. Examination in the Principles, History, and Method of Science will take place once in each year commencing on the last Monday in May, provided that if the last Monday in May be Whit Monday, the Examination will commence on the last Tuesday in May. Except as provided below, no person shall be admitted as a candidate for the Degree of M.Sc. in the Principles, History, and Method of Science as an Internal Student until after the expiration of one academic year from the time of his taking the B.Sc. Degree in this University as an Internal Student.

FACULTY OF SCIENCE

The examination will consist of four papers as follows:

The Examiners shall be at liberty to test any candidate by means of viva-voce questions.

Note on the Historical papers -- The student will be expected to appreciate both the character of the problems as in the minds of the thinkers of the time and the general nature of the solutions attempted, illustrated by the simplest details.

SYLLABUS

The mention of names in the syllabus is to be regarded merely as a guide to the meaning of terms. The list of names is not intended to be exhaustive, nor does the omission of any name imply that the work of its bearer is not of primary importance.

MASTER OF SCIENCE

A. General History of Science.

I. The Beginning of Science in Early Civilizations.

II. The Greeks.

III. The Middle Ages.

IV The Renaissance.

V. The Seventeenth Century.

VI. General scientific tendencies since the end of the Seventeenth Century. Interrelation of physical and biological sciences.

B. History of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in Modern Times.

1. The Rise of the Academies. The Eighteenth Century.

II. Since the end of the Eighteenth Century.

C. History of Biological Science in Modern Times.

The rise of the Academies. The Eighteenth Century.

II. Since the end of the Eighteenth Century. Organic evolution.

D. Method and Principles of Science.

I. Ideals of Science.

II. The problem of Knowledge.

III. Inductive and deductive methods.

IV. Conceptions of Natural Law.

V.¹ Empirical characters of mental activity.

Cognition, feeling, conation, language, symbolism, abstraction.

VI. Prolegomena to Mathematics.

VII. Prolegomena to the Physical Sciences.

VIII. Prolegomena to the Biological Sciences.

Notes

1. In the margin, just before V. is a caret, with the Archivist’s pencilled note in the margin: "Here Senate Minutes has Thought and its Instruments."

Ideas applied from process thought, A. N. Whitehead’s in particular, suggest that our contemporary view of education is framed in a far too narrow philosophic context. The result is a misplaced emphasis on proposed practical reform which will, unfortunately, have an effect just the opposite of what is intended. Meant to develop socially effective technicians who are also perceptive and creative human beings, these tactics will do neither.

Whitehead’s ideas bridge the gap between philosophic principles and the everyday world of teaching and learning. They are applicable to, and offer reasons for, the behavior that we usually find presented, but unexplained, in descriptive anecdotes or statistical tabulations. There are reasons, for example, and reasons based on principles, that explain not only why classroom furniture should not be bolted to the floor, but why maps should not have political frontiers drawn in darker ink than other lines, and why epic poetry should be introduced by reading selections in their original language. And there are also philosophical reasons that show why living teachers can’t be replaced by hardware, and why a "no nonsense" program of discipline will never sustain interest or produce mature human beings.

There are also new criticisms to be made of old and misleading educational metaphors. For example, the equating of "intellectual capacity" with the volume of a milk jug has managed to survive past criticism and still to misdirect some popular educational projects today. Expert educational theorists have long since dismissed such models as that of "filling minds with ideas" as "dead," but their ghosts still haunt common sense and popular practice, and we must be thankful for any new help in exorcising them.¹

Not only does process thought offer new theoretical foundations and common sense warnings and applications, but it also directs new attention to feeling as an essential part of intellectual experience. That attention comes at a particularly apt time, as feminist critics argue that society tends to discourage "nurturing" attitudes in favor of the "domination" stance that runs through Bacon and Descartes, and seems inescapably built in to modern pragmatism. (Built in because, if the function of intelligence is not taken to be modifying the organism’s environment, while nurturing may make sense, pragmatism won’t.)

In spite of its increasing technical difficulty, we can’t dispense with Whitehead’s later work, since it is here that there are some of the most spectacular potentialities for educational application. One elegant example is an account of time that combines the precision of science with the creativity and freedom we presuppose in the humanities. This analysis also gives reasons, by extension, for the conclusion Whitehead anticipated earlier: that there is a single best pattern for realistic and effective teaching and learning, and that we can specify what the stages and sequence of that pattern are. And one consequence that follows from this discussion is particularly relevant today. That consequence is that learning will not be improved simply by technical "re-structuring," however radical. By "re-structuring" I mean such changes as altering the length of school year, the time allocated for class periods, or the number of required science or "literacy" courses. And a vision of time in the unfolding periods of history, or in cosmology with its current theories poised for revision, can also be an extension of this insight from Whitehead’s "technical" philosophy.

From his early work to late, however, Whitehead has a theme that I consider his most important practical contribution, and the place where he adds a dimension to Dewey. This is, that aesthetic appreciation gives experience its full impact, and brings with it a sense of reality which neither abstract classification nor practical manipulation will convey. The impact of this sense of reality gives energy to our experience, and makes the difference between actively engaged learning and detached and passive encounter. As I have argued, sheer single-minded operation on things -- transforming walnuts into ice-cream topping, pepper-grass into impromptu salad -- is not equivalent to full attentive engagement, however much energy it expends. The best example that occurs to me, offhand, of the alternative way I have in mind is what has happened when I have brought a fifth-century BC. Athenian tetradrachma to any of my college seminars. This makes the world of ancient Greece tangible and present, with its strange combination of exact formal design and inept mint technology, and present in a way that words and photographs do not. And contrary to what a dogmatic pragmatist might expect, the questions "what would this buy?," and "what does a coin like that cost today?," come quite late in class conversation.

It may be, however, that this judgment of relative importance is only my own. For Whitehead himself comes to focus more on the problem of reconciling a "scientific" picture of nature dead, mechanical, devoid of quality, and the world of humanism that "science" dismisses as a wistful pathetic fallacy. That duality sets the stage for a dramatized nightmare. For if we, the teachers, can’t fit the forcibly divorced domains of real fact/imaginary value, actual causes/fanciful ideals, feeling/form, concrete/abstract, together, how do we expect our students, shuttled between worlds without transition as they flow between classrooms through school corridors, to do the job? It is amazing that they remain as balanced as most of them do. And Whitehead’s conciliation, needed here, may be even more important than his stress on concrete appreciation, which Nathaniel Lawrence and I singled out for special contemporary attention.

Whitehead’s ideas developed progressively, along with his awareness of their implications for education. As early as 1917 he was protesting against a then-current model of students as portmanteaux, to be packed with "inert ideas," which were then unpacked on occasions of external examinations3 (The contents, on that theory, were the mental images which have passed since Locke as "ideas" in the British empiricist tradition.) This was a challenge to the still recurrent basic metaphor of "intellectual capacity" as something modeled on quarts and pints, and yielding minds "well-stocked with ideas." As early as 1912, Whitehead had begun this crusade from a different direction, when he attempted to interest the nation’s learned academies in the isolation and clear articulation of truly fundamental foundational concepts of mathematics and science. The purpose of this was to be an improvement of elementary education, an aim learned societies have traditionally let strictly alone. He himself had practiced what he was preaching, however, in his Introduction to Mathematics in 1911. In 1917, in an informal lecture, Whitehead offered the suggestion that aesthetic appreciation is central to education ("Aesthetics, but not in the usual sense"). Not in the usual sense since this appreciation was to take in the "wonder" of London’s harbors, warehouses, and places of trade. And he suggested, even in the midst of World War I, that the vocational school students he was addressing should get reproductions, study, and take sides in, the controversy then going on in France over the new Oriental influences in French painting. Later, in 1925, he gave the full rationale for this recommendation, namely that concrete appreciation is our only means of direct encounter with full-bodied, vital reality.

The earlier essays on The Aims of Education had already tended to emphasize the fact that students have bodies, which they bring to class with them. Some of the comments are almost ancient Greek in their appreciation of athletics. ("Being tackled at rugby; that is the Real!") Again, in Whitehead’s later philosophical writings we find the explicit rationale for this earlier attention: the sole "external world" that we inhabit is our own bodies entertaining feelings that include an efficacy that seems to come from "the outside." In a different way, this is again the theme of abstract versus concrete; but the abstraction involved is a selective attention by our senses that has developed over eons of evolution.

Whitehead’s work in education and science and philosophy continued in parallel. In 1921 -- perhaps because of a tactless lecture remark in 1919 that "the classics have had their chance, and they have failed" -- he was appointed to a Commission on the Place of Classics in Education. His experience there led him to generalize his educational ideas to cover the humanities as well as the sciences. Conventional as his defense of classics seems to readers today, Whitehead was far from an uncritical believer in them. In an article on the subject in 1921, he expresses his firm belief that "there are no glories of Latin literature," His final iconoclastic judgment that English is a better philosophic language than classical Latin or ancient Greek did not find its way into print, however, until 1925. On the positive side, in his 1921 article he suggests the inclusion in classical study of the history of science and of technology. That suggestion may in fact be a key to teaching elementary science as though it were important and good for something, as well as a step toward breaking down the class lines between liberal and vocational studies, curricula, and occupations.

In 1922, Whitehead generalized his educational ideas in a pamphlet, "The Rhythm of Education." This rhythm is a sequence of three stages which effective learning (and therefore effective teaching) must include, and include in a definite order. These stages Whitehead called Romance, Precision, and Mastery (or, sometimes, Generalization or Satisfaction). The first stage gives the interest and energy needed to carry through the second -- if the precision of the second stage is not disconnected violently from the initial interest. Whitehead here takes sides with the Platonic thought that "students should be taught in play" and enjoy learning, against the Aristotelian observation that "all learning is a painful process," and the later Kantian notion that the main reason for sending children to elementary school is to teach them to sit still. The final stage, by whatever name it is called, must include an awareness on the student’s part that something has been accomplished -- mastery of negative numbers or the route of march of the Greek mercenaries with Cyrus toward the battle of Cunaxa. Interestingly enough, by 1929 Whitehead had concluded that three similar stages constitute the "life cycle" of the organic "actual occasions" which are his elemental units of reality. There is, for each, a momentary phase of encounter, a displacement; then a moment of selective adaptation; and a final completion that marks a passage into "objective immortality" of the completed event as a datum for the future. He himself never remarked on the relation of these two triads, but it seems clear that the stages of learning are in fact grounded in the more elementary three-phase structure of reality. Here, as elsewhere, Whitehead’s talk about education turns out not to be mere casual conjecture, but part of a philosophy that shows why practice, if it is to be realistic, must take place in a certain way.

In moving from the rhythm of education (1922) to the phases of concrescence (1929), I have jumped over Science and the Modern World (1925). It may be Whitehead’s best known book; it is clearly and elegantly written, and continues to enjoy wide popularity. In this book, Whitehead traces the origin of modern natural science as it generalized laws of nature from new observations of aggregates -- cannon-balls, stars, grains of sand -- and then assumed these laws to apply to individual organisms as well. The success of the seventeenth century in physics led to a generalization of its territory to metaphysics -- the claim to explain all of reality -- in the following centuries, This extension left no room for life, beauty, value, or even perceived qualities in the supposed "real" world it defined. This was natural enough since the range of data the new science was originally intended to explain was limited to space, time, mass, matter, and motion. But it was historically disastrous that what had been perfectly acceptable, and brilliant, generalizations covering the phenomena of physics were taken as exclusive cosmic principles. The historical timing of this mistaken notion that the selected data ("abstractions") of physical science exhausted the concrete could hardly have been worse, coming as it did just when the industrial revolution and new political revolutions should have been based on the most precise attention to relevant value. The final chapter of this book gives Whitehead’s reasons for thinking that social progress depends on a new educational system, one that will give equal importance to "appreciation of the concrete" and "facility with abstractions."³ It is here that we find out why the passing applications of this notion of attention to aesthetics and concreteness that I have cited are much more than tactical chance observations. They are rather conclusions that follow from an account of reality which guarantees that they are "realistic," not merely fanciful.

If this last point seems vague and general, let us take my earlier remark about political boundary lines on a map as a concrete illustration. These, if dark enough, reinforce the sense that space is an insulator, so that things in (or "inside") different places are out of relationship with one another. That idea worked well for the postulated hard particles of pure physics; but it certainly leads to mischief when it inspires the notion of supposedly separate "sovereign states," each within its own body (a "body politic") marked off from the rest by the sharp lines defining their collision. Nor does this spatial notion do more justice to the individuals that make up a nation -- or those that make up a more modest classroom full of students. The ideal of one "proper place" per student -- in earlier classrooms, often a proper place bolted to the floor -- projects this philosophic error, which Whitehead proposes to correct, of treating all space as insulating, all places as solipsistic enclosures.

It would be easier to explain the applications of Whitehead’s insights if they had stopped in 1925, with nothing substantially new added in his later philosophical writing. But the appearance of Process and Reality, in 1929, adds new ideas that are important. The difficulty is that this time the ideas are offered in a new unfamiliar language and a system difficult to appreciate and apply. The first of these new ideas carries forward a suggestion from earlier works, that science should postulate small organisms as its units of reality. Then, given this proposal, and guided by the theory of evolution, we can see what such units must be like by tracing in reverse the emergence of complex thought, specialized organization, sensitive sense-experience, from a level of primordial "feeling." One corollary of this account is a cosmology in which all "nature" is alive; aim, feeling, life are not accidental epiphenomena, but built into the very foundation of things. And feeling, moving from relatively passive grasping to awareness of imagined "propositional" alternatives of response, is prior in this scheme to thought. In fact, it is shared feeling that binds all nature together into a community. (The ecology of the last half-century can be seen as one selective application of this insight; the implications for education still need to be made more evident.)

A further set of ideas in Process and Reality that we have seen before, and that we can’t overlook in our educational theory, is the claim that the three phases making up the life of an elementary organism are different. This difference creates a time that is "atomic," unlike the "equable flow" of time in Newton. In the atomic time, the past appears as data, dead, fixed, definite, necessitated. But the present is rather a locus of indecision and still indeterminate adaptation: it is not definite, not necessary in outcome, nor determinate in observable objective structure. The future is a complex set of intertwined possibilities. (By attending to the characteristics of just one phase, and generalizing it, one can get a logical empiricism based on science, an existentialism based on present decision-making, or a pragmatism based on past and present as tools for shaping the future.) This analysis clears up two questions of particular educational interest. First, it shows why our collections of data show no trace of creativity or freedom. Second, it explains in depth the magical sense of presence (or co-presence) which is so important in teaching and learning experience, and which has proven so evasive of attempts at explanation. ("Never wear the same necktie twice," was the prescription given one of my teachers by his mentor as the key to evoking this magic of shared communication. It may work, but I must confess that even with Whitehead’s theories to help I can’t spell out any necessary demonstration that presence coimplies a change of necktie!)

Finally, the cosmology of Whitehead’s work from 1929 through his last lectures, "Mathematics and the Good" and "Immortality," extends the vision of a new philosophy of organism to a universe in which every human individual is important, is at home, and has a share of immortality. If we seem to be digressing or regressing somehow when we find Whitehead in this context saying that "all education is religious," the impression is corrected by his definition of religion. Religiousness consists in "duty and reverence. In that sense, the vision of the cosmos whose future we must create and whose present we now admire and share surely applies to both conservative sectarian religion and the most liberal secular humanism. The main lesson here is that we must not only teach and learn about a "new heaven and a new earth," but must create in our classrooms and activities the kind of small-scale cosmos where these are more nearly realized and approached. In that setting, reason can attain its proper tripartite aim: "living; living well; and living better" (FR 8). This is the aim, as well, of education.

This concludes my brief survey of Whitehead’s philosophy as it becomes and implies a full-scale theory of education. It is important and relevant, and I hope that the group of us who are presently committed to its study will be joined by many other educators and philosophers, and that -- as Plato’s hope ends his Republic -- "we shall fare well." Why Whitehead? I have offered a partial answer to the question. If it is a correct answer, it implies that we must support such organized efforts as that of the APPE⁴ to deflect current educational momentum into other channels than a mere reshifting of the same materials and approaches, putting forward of dead models as new panaceas, or the temptation to begin with precise discipline where in fact learning should start in a different way. The modesty of our associational effort so far is no measure of its importance.

Notes

1Hearing Dr. Mortimer Adler use these outmoded metaphors to defend the Great Books on a recent Sunday television program made me question those books’ effectiveness. He began by comparing human capacities to jars to be filled, a metaphor most of the great authors would not have thought very apt. He then went on, overlooking the implications of Bacon’s rather better slogan that reading provides food for thought, to argue that the Great Books were good curriculum independent of capacity. We should, he thought, fill all the jars with "equally rich cream." Even without the discovery of milk allergies, this could be seen as a pretty good formula for widespread mental indigestion.

2That this caution is still relevant was the theme of President Hannah Gray’s address to the entering University of Chicago freshman class in 1987.

3E. D. Hirsch’s "cultural literacy," which consists in a general recognition of "shared schemata," brings out the poverty of a passing, everyday acquaintance with words and phrases, and by implication the importance of Whitehead’s stress on the non-schematic concrete. "Ninth (Beethoven’s)" should conjure up more than "music -- orchestral -- important," and "ninth (inning)" more than some vague nostalgic notion that we are "about to leave the ballpark." Without more counterweight, cultural literacy is just the wasteland of Heidegger’s "time’s everydayness."

4The Association for Process Philosophy of Education was founded in 1987 to apply Whitehead’s process philosophy to current educational problems. Its materials are available from Malcolm Evans, 85 De Hart Drive, Belle Mead, NJ 08502.

Historically, process philosophers have been fascinated by time, and rather bored by space. There are reasons for this: spatially oriented models and plans lead naturally to philosophies which "spatialize" time and change. It is a mistake, however, to overlook the notions of space and location: it is not necessary to leave these concepts to the abstractness of a static formal model or to unanalyzed technological "common sense." In fact, it is necessary not to do so, if we want to philosophize well, for inattention to spatial concepts may interfere with both the theoretical consistency and the practical efficacy of process philosophy.

Aristotle, an excellent observer, thought that every change of location in terrestrial space took place through a medium that had some resistance. If the space which related places were wholly empty, he thought, it would be pure nonentity, and so unable to have contents or contain relations; while a wholly filled space would be a plenum, an extended substance in its own right, and thus unable to contain or transmit anything else. In regard to places and the space that contains and relates them, this Aristotelian empirical notion of a field which is neither vacuum nor plenum seems to me to be right. Interaction must take account not only of intensity and distance, but of the space through which the distance is measured, and its coefficients of conduction and insulation.

I

Between the time when Aristotle included the "where" in his categories and the time when Whitehead criticized "simple location," the question of places "where things are" attracted rather slight attention from philosophy. The tacit assumption was that the physical or metaphysical places in question could be identified with sets of mathematical points, or with knife-edged states, or with quasimathematical monads. And Whitehead’s reopening of the theme used this concept only in passing, as an arbitrarily chosen case-study of the difference between scientific abstractions and adequate common-sense. Nevertheless, it was an important case-study. It was important because the abstract scientific concept of location that Whitehead found dominant in current common-sense led to further notions of "inside" and "outside," "here" and "there," that were inadequate philosophically and inefficient practically.

Whitehead himself, particularly concerned to protect the primary role of time in his physical theories, made space abstract and derivative. By contrast, my discussion will center on space as primary, as a kind of venture in metaphysical topology; the project is Whiteheadian in inception, but my own in execution. I propose to show the inadequacy of two extreme notions of "space" and "place" by testing them against our experiences of social space, in situations in which we are the entities contained by the social field. This assumes as a premise that such social fields are in fact spaces, and that the behavior of contained entities in such spaces is relevant to any philosophical theses about location in general.

II

A space is a continuous field made up of "distance" relations, which can be defined geometrically. Whether the space is something substantial that contains related entities, or whether the field is simply generated by the relations of the things that create it, will not matter for the present discussion. Space can contain entities, and entities can interact in and through space. That interaction can be thought of apart from dynamic time, as forces at a moment, state, or small section. Space is alike in all directions; the entities and relations it contains are all actual; and for "distances" such as S, S (x,y) always equals S (y,x). Further, an object moved through space, then returned to its starting point, is not affected by its shifts of position.

Unlike space, time is a set of relations of entities which form a sequence. A sequence is not the same in every direction, but has an irreversible "temporal" direction of its own. The terms are transitively connected, but they are not reversible. Some terms of a sequence are actual (its past), some only potential (its future). The actual terms are entities which are causally connected.

An actual entity is a substance or set of properties located at a point of intersection of a spatial distance scheme and a temporal causal sequence. (Thus the definitions of space and time also specify what sorts of entity the spatiotemporal system can include.) A process is a sequence in which a special kind of causality, "creative activity," gives direction to the constituents.

In physical spaces we can disregard temporal effects. There remains, however, interaction along "distance" lines, or lack of it, which pure mathematical space does not have. And an adequate general characterization of space, able to include natural as well as mathematical types, must be able to accommodate spaces that are neutral, that are insulators, and that are conductors.

In fact, at the very limits of the natural world, there seem to be fields in nature which would correspond to perfect conducting and insulating spaces. At the one extreme lies the superconduction of the field at absolute zero temperature; at the other, the lack of radiation in a field of "black hole" entities with infinite density (so that they no longer exert even gravitational influence mutually). By and large, however, the spaces we are interested in are "normal" in the sense that their counterparts in nature fall somewhere between the infinitely full and the infinitely empty.

III

A first experiment with a concept of space follows a suggestion of Whitehead’s. He pointed out that the idea that physical things are each "simply located" in a Cartesian pure space is a case of a past technical concept diffused into present common sense (SMW ch. 3). What happened seems to have been that the past technical notion of "location" from Cartesian physics was made into a metaphysical notion of location generally, and this generalization was what common sense uncritically accepted. Whitehead described this differently, saying that current common sense was the heir of past metaphysics. But in the present case, what we have seems rather to be a current common sense (and metaphysics) resulting from generalization of past technical science.

In this current version, all spaces are presupposed to be perfect insulators. Thus, two things in distinct places are totally irrelevant to each other, unless those places are in immediate or mediated contact. For some purposes, this conception of things, each in its proper place, will work quite well: it seems quite congenial to a context of mechanics, invention, and technology. But in other contexts, it runs into difficulties, both theoretic and practical. A case of the practical problems that convinced me that something was wrong was the implication of this "sensible" view for educational practice. In a classroom there is a concrete space, as in the library there is a kind of logical space that contains items of information. The classroom space contains as its local entities students -- active, sensitive, and restless organisms. In the simple location model, the function of us as teachers is to give the students "ideas" which they are to "keep in mind." The ideas are thought of as though they were workbench parts and gears, the minds on the analogy of separate cabinets in which the gears and parts are stored after they have been sorted.

The aim is, for the teacher, "covering the material"; for the student, speed and accuracy in "information retrieval," The rigid application of this paradigm is well illustrated by the teaching of classical languages in the nineteenth century. There was initial rote memorization of the words that, in their various inflections, were the elements of the language -- usually more of them than any ancient speaker ever used, or ever knew. Then followed analysis of the syntax of single sentences. Finally paragraphs and verses were read, and classified in terms of style and meter. In this logically impeccable form, the scheme killed off interest in the classical languages so effectively that it had to be modified. In fact, the description of Greek and Latin as "dead" languages was sometimes felt as more than metaphor. But the modifications were thought of concessively, as sugar coating to "enrich" what was essential.

Though we think we know better now, I suspect that every teacher has worried about not covering the material, has speeded up coverage, and come away wondering what went wrong. But it has seldom occurred to anyone that what went wrong was the presupposed notion that education meant covering the material.

Another damaging consequence of this technology of education, in addition to what we have seen, is its deduced practical rule that maximum learning efficiency should involve minimum student-with-student interaction. For if, realistically considered, each "mind" to be stocked with information is as separate from every other one as one Kansas silo waiting to be stocked with grain is from one other in a rail-side row, contact and conversation between students can only be regarded as inefficient -- as "noise" in both the ordinary and the technical sense. One inspired noise-reducing device is to nail each desk to the floor and confine each student to an insulated "proper place" in the classroom. This is considered part of "discipline."

The whole model and technology rest on a mistaken view of where things are, which has led by strict deduction to an equally mistaken view of what is "really" going on. But this sort of deduction about entities in space, based on this presupposition about its character, still is widespread, still fancying itself "sensible."

IV

At this point, it may be helpful to go back to ancient Greece. There we find, in the classical atomic theory, the first appearance of the idea that space is a neutral insulator; and at about the same time, the antithetic view that it is a perfect superconductor. This historic topic, at any rate, is not overstudied; in 1963, Max Jammer noted that his history of concepts of space was the first he knew of, and the field has seen few others since then. One virtue of this going back to classical concepts is that they are often "classical" in their logical consistency and their purity.

Classical atomism was generated by an intersection of formal logic, ordinary sense experience, and technology. In defense of his thesis that "only Being is," Parmenides argued that if there were plurality or change, there would have to be a nonbeing to divide the single whole of Being into simultaneous or successive separate "parts." Since he held that the statement "non-Being is" was unintelligible and without any referent, that, he thought, ended the matter. But this doctrine had the very counterintuitive consequence that plurality and change, which seem to pervade our world, not only are unreal, but are nothing at all, hence do not even seem to be! In partial defense of this view, Parmenides’ student, Zeno, showed that both science and common sense ran into paradoxes when they assumed (as they did at that time) that space and time are made up of elementary units, but still are continua. His particular line of attack was to show that taken together these views made it impossible to define and describe motion with finite velocity.

The atomists began their reasoning here. Since change does appear, they reasoned, nonbeing must exist as well as pure being. And that pure being must come in a plurality of packets that are indivisible These indivisible atoms escape Zeno; the nonbeing postulated to accommodate Parmenides’ argument becomes the "space" in which the being particles move. That space, to satisfy Parmenides’ demands, must be a perfectly neutral nothing: if it had positive properties, it would be a kind of "something," and the old difficulty of explaining plurality would arise again.

The world view of atoms of pure being in a spatial sea of nothing still needed to offer some explanation of causality and change. Here mechanics supplied the final notion needed to complete the theory. Quite clearly, the only change a classical atomist can admit as real is mechanical change -- particles can transfer momentum, rebound, cling together, but that is all. And in principle, the theory held, all events can be given this type of mechanistic causal explanation.

The seventeenth century revived this notion of an insulating space, via Gassendi and Descartes, and that revived notion became generalized and built into succeeding Western common sense. (Newton’s ideas were not so easily generalized and simplified.)

As Whitehead suggested, if this view of location is taken as a complete and concrete account, it works badly: for, taken in this way, it equates a highly abstract selective construct with a full concrete reality. As we saw when we considered the application of this view to education, it runs into practical failures which show that something must be wrong. The theory runs into theoretic failures as well. These difficulties facing the classical atomic theory are well known: secondary qualities remain inexplicable; no meaning can be given to the notion of an external world outside of the sense organs of the observer; organic time must be reversible -- which it is not; we can never choose among hypotheses, since all of our mental states follow "from necessity," so we don’t have theories, but can only report autobiographies, and so on.

With the atomic theory, Greek philosophy proposed a world of atoms and the void as a way to respect logic, yet save appearance. An alternative way to escape Zeno was, of course, to have space and time be continuous, with no atomic particles whatever. Such a continuous space would be a sort of "impure" being: a theater of overlapping, mixing qualities, with no postulated "substances" underlying them (because such underlying substances would be like the impassive pure being of Parmenides). This line of thought was pursued by Anaxagoras at about the time Democritus was working out his atomism. As the theory develops, it becomes clear that Anaxagorean space is a perfect conductor.

It is very important for us, at this point, to recognize that the rejection of a Democritean view of space does not constitute a proof that space must be Anaxagorean. If there were no intermediate options, it would do that, but there are. A comparable case in modern thought would be the idea that Whitehead’s rejection of simple location establishes the metaphysics of Hegel.

In some ways, Anaxagoras anticipates process philosophy. His spatial field (setting aside "mind" as a special case) is a continuum of overlapping qualities. There are no lines of nonbeing to cut this up, since an "empty space" is a contradiction in terms on this view; and thus the field is a pure conductor. like its dialectical opposite, this view breaks down pragmatically, and theoretically as well. Pragmatically, the idea that size and distance make no difference in the efficiency of central control fails to work. A single central accounting office for the postal service, the army quartermaster corps, or the Soviet Russian economy, however economical it seems in Anaxagorean theory, is cumbersome and self-destructive in actual operation. On the theoretical side, we find that in a world of this kind, there is no more chance of our discovering objective theories than there was in the world of atomism. The trouble this time is not that the theorist is walled off from the subject-matter, but rather is melted into a fusion with it. Since when any two things are brought close together in this space (whatever "close together" can mean) they blend and a single new third thing emerges, there is no standpoint that can qualify as "objective." (Anaxagoras kept nous "unmixed" to avoid this objection: perhaps, indeed, a divine Mind, in his scheme, would have a Pythagorean, nonperspectival view of space and time.) There is also an aesthetic, intuitive objection: that I see the desk as next to me, but I do not -- as on this theory I should -- identify the desk with myself. Most important, there is a moral problem, parts lose their separate identities when they enter larger wholes -- the exactly the converse of the atomic theory’s savage individualism: since State, the Church, the CIA -- we cannot defend an ethical conviction that individuals have freedom or that persons each have responsibility.

V

Well, then, if both of these antithetic classical views have failed, where, indeed, are things? Neither in isolated boxes, nor in one great porridge melted together. Things extend out from centers of identity, overlapping and influencing each other variably, depending on (1) the intensity of each property a thing has, (2) the relevant "distance" between centers in a field, (3) the resistance, or conductivity of the field in question. It seems that each entity in space has a center of identity which holds together ("prehends" in Whitehead’s vocabulary) its aspects or perspectives that spread out into the places of other persons and other things. This accounts for my feeling when I encounter a desk that the desk is really where I am, but that it has a center of identity different from mine.

It is not easy to construct a static spatial design that is an adequate diagram of this sort of "modal location," and even Whitehead, expert mathematician that he was, seems never to have found a general one. Perhaps he thought that his early graphs for physics did supply the structural design for elementary cases, and that his new humanistic vocabulary in Process and Reality indicated a transferability from the simpler cases to more complex ones. If that is so, it seems to me he was mistaken. Of the two projects, the transfer from complex to simple entities is more plausible and clear.

While location that is neither simple nor diffuse may be hard to imagine in any detail when we populate it with atomic particles or physical aggregates of molecules, it becomes transparently clear when we substitute guests at a dinner for the abstract "entities" in a general location formula. ". . . Joe and George had better be separated by as many places as possible; they get noisy when they are close together . . . Joe and Jane go well next to each other, but not Jane and Anne; they just gossip together." Authors and hostesses have always been sensitive to the complex overlaps and interactions of characters who meet "in" convivial or literary situations. But they have usually not cared about the validity of metaphysical generalizations based on their expertise. (An exception is Empedocles, whose six cosmic "elements" included, in addition to Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, Love and Hate.) I propose to regard these "social" interactions as typical cases of the way entities in space relate to each other, except that in these instances the "entities" have more than average sensitivity.

While I am sure that Empedocles was right in thinking that attraction and repulsion are experienced directly, I am not clear whether there is an additional literal "telepathic" overlapping of thoughts and feelings between selves. But even if there is not, it is clear that the extreme location concepts will fail to match either sound theories, or sound practices, or sensitive intuitions.

VI

Up to this point, I have been focusing on the relation of "and": item by item adjunctions of "entities." The ideas and implications are very similar for the relations between containers and contents, the "in" relations. When we wonder how sharply a boundary separates space into "inside" and "outside" regions, simple location again offers a tempting model. By uncritically accepting the model it offers, we can make mistakes in our attitudes toward such relations as those of organisms to their environment, of a human self to other selves, of one sovereign state to other nations.

I want to glance at this pair of ideas -- inside and outside -- from the standpoint of pure mathematical topology, where they are not simple even though the spaces and entities involved are purely mathematical. Then a look at pragmatic operations with inside and outside locations will be followed by a conclusion about the container-content relation in general.

A look at pure mathematics shows how far from obvious the theorem that "every actuality has an inside and an outside" is. For, once we have defined inside and outside by specifying that every closed curve in a plane or curved surface in a space divides the plane or space into two regions in such a way that pairs of points in different regions cannot be joined without crossing the boundary, very odd things happen. A long tube, for example, turns out to be one-sided, since by going around the open ends, the points on the interior and the exterior can be connected without passing through the wall. The familiar one-sided Moebius strip is an even more exotic example. Common sense suggests that we can generalize our description by saying that "pairs of points differing in inside-outside location can be joined by a straight line that cuts the boundary once"; but that is not true at all. For complex, zig-zag polygons, such as illustrated in FIGURE 1,¹ the general condition is rather that such a connecting straight line cuts the boundary an odd number of times. Thus already, in the pure nonconducting and noninsulating space of mathematics, the concepts of inside and outside prove far from "simple."

That these relations might nevertheless be simple for the "pragmatic" social spaces we inhabit is shown to be false by the evolution of the British castle. Here, from the Norman Conquest on, a need for insulation was reflected in spatial designs intended to keep persons and property safely "inside" a fortification. In the eleventh century, the castle design projected a simple notion of inside and outside. The inside of the castle was insulated from the rest of the world by a single high wall, with square towers at the corners. Unfortunately, this is a design where a single break at any point completely destroys the inside-outside distinction. (And the higher the towers, the more easily the break can be made by mines and fire.) The prize of the British castles -- one that Cromwell could never take -- is not Chepstow, high above the Severn, with its single wall; but rather a flat, polygonal fortress, Beaumarais (see FIGURE 2),² last-built of the castles in Wales, which to the commonsense tourist looks like the most vulnerable of the lot.

The castle builders progressively mastered the rules of pragmatic space. Thus, in a relatively peaceful time in the district of Kent, they devised plans in which each part of a castle is "inside" every other; while in the hostile world of Beaumarais, they contrived plans in which every part of a castle is "outside" of every other part. (To do this, Beaumarais takes advantage of such devices as D-shaped half-towers, open on the inner side: so far as arrows and missiles are concerned, an enemy who has captured an outermost D-shaped half-tower, but not the inner ones, is just as effectively outside of the central castle as before. The same relation holds between different levels of archers’ platforms and battlements, the inner higher and overlooking the outer. The "sociable" design, by contrast, arranges its space about a central circular stairwell so that the rooms are all connected, while openings in the boundary -- windows, gateways, gardens -- break down the barrier between outer world and inner castle -- see FIGURE 3)³

Although pure mathematics and impure practice thus combine to suggest that living things, human selves and societies, should not be pictured on the model of Chepstow Castle -- as though they were ping-pong balls, single shells that either insulate or shatter -- our generalized common-sense notions of inside and outside by and large remain early Norman in their simplicity. (Two exceptions are our recognition that "separately located" cells are the best design for espionage and revolutionary

organizations and that "round-table" patterns work best for educational and convivial purposes.)

An individual self is, like a social group, neither wholly private nor wholly public, but with a location vague about the edges. Clearly, a good deal of our development as selves takes place socially: through learning a language, imitating roles, identifying our feelings with those of other persons, and so on. (This is important to remember in connection with the political metaphor of "national self-determination" a self, there too, must to some extent be created and grow; it is not innate and ready-made.) The boundaries certainly are not sharp: looking from the inside, I am rather constant in seeing my body as part of myself, but I am not so sure about my property. Is that property a "substantial" part of my identity? And what about my family, or my country?

If I suppose a self, in this case mine, to be a simple, defensive castle, with "my" experience inside it, insulated abruptly from a "not mine and "not me" domain outside, then what will count as important for me will be my own "inner" interests, pains, and pleasures. A social order, while it may be useful to protect me from invasions of privacy by other persons or from other damage by the environment, will always be external, operating by coercion. It will seem clearly realistic to judge that my actions, as well as everyone else’s, are and must be guided by calculations of self-interest, looking toward some maximum excess of pleasure over pain for some segment of an expected lifetime. While it would give one a warm emotional feeling to believe that the individual pursuit of private good and the general welfare will coincide, if the insulating location model we are using is right, we can prove that this coincidence is infinitely unlikely. Suppose that the consequences of an action that will give me pleasure are nevertheless undesirable in other ways. For example, suppose that if everyone chose to act in this way, the end we aim at would be destroyed; or that if my choice were repeated often enough, the human race would disappear. On the present view, these suppositions are ethically irrelevant, except for some inner perturbing effect they just might have. For I am not proposing that everyone else do as I do, nor even that anyone else be permitted to; their experience, like a remote future in which the human race might disappear, lies outside of my own self-interest, and the inner "I" is uniquely important to me.

VII

Practically every area of human knowledge and behavior may find itself faced with problems created by mistaken notions of location. In the present discussion, I have concentrated primarily on the consequences that follow from the "simple location" version. That is because I think these consequences are more widespread and less easily recognized than the errors that follow from the "diffuse location" view. In any case, the problems generated by diffuse location concepts are directly derivable, simply by asserting the contrary, from the problems consequent on the adoption of the notion of simple location.

Setting up an archive by mentioning in passing some of the relevant confusions, we can begin by noting that in ethics we have just seen simple location leading to radical ethical egoism. In politics it leads to ideas of nationalism-of sovereignty and self-determination -- that are unrealistic and brittle. In religion, the misapplication of ideas of location leads to problems of God’s relation to the world, to history, and to time that become insoluble. In technology, consistent application leads to the self-destructive techniques of the efficiency expert’s point of view. In aesthetics, alone, the notion has been relatively ignored and harmless: creativity has managed to remain outside the range of misguided sensible or metaphysical strait-jacketing.

VIII

One function of the philosopher is to be "a critic of abstractions." Our notions of location are a case where, in the absence of that criticism, common sense may lead us into mistaken and disastrous ideas and plans involving space and time. And since the misleading notions in question not only seem so sensible, general, and familiar, but carry a penumbra of scientific respectability, we are often either unaware of them or wholly indisposed to question them.

Another function of the philosopher is to offer speculative alternatives to traditional positions and hypotheses. If we are not satisfied with what our current practice, science, and philosophy have to say about such a topic as space and place, can we propose an alternative that is more general, more coherent, more potentially effective in practice? I think that we can.

Space is symmetrical in its mathematical, abstract form: isotropic, static, one-modal. But concrete process finds space entangled with acting entities and with time, and in this concrete domain, the symmetries of abstract fields do not exactly match the facts of location. (It is not a mismatch, but a nonidentity between the generic abstract scheme and its correct specification.) Yet the fact that there is a distance and difference between concrete existence and philosophic abstraction does not guarantee the applicability of notions that derive their appeal from a rejection of all intellectual abstractions in favor of some anti-rational alleged "intuition."

In the twentieth century, process philosophy seems to offer the most promising context for a discussion of new notions of space, place, and location -- physical, social, or formal. The process orientation is not yet committed to school-wide orthodoxy regarding either the spaces of science or those of common sense, nor to any dogmatic identification of physical place with mathematical.

Since there are no such commitments, we are free to entertain the idea that the attempt to understand space by thinking away all contents may yield an eccentric abstraction. Though it seems that the resulting concept does match a space in nature, it is the space at a temperature of absolute zero, and the match with our social, pragmatic spaces is not good at all. An alternative route of abstraction, by thinking away all energy that sets up physical relations, and thinking this away by having substances too dense to release radiation, also leads to a space concept that may be approximated somewhere in nature. But if it is, this matching space is a field between super-dense "black holes," too dense to permit any light or gravitational influences to move between them. And our normal pragmatic spaces, with usual temperatures and densities, do not match this concept either. What space is conceived to be must depend to some extent on what it contains and what it does; oversimplified abstractions defining location are a danger when science erects them into "theoretical" or when common-sense makes them into "practical" generalizations that are put forward as exhausting the concrete situation.

Notes:

1 Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, What Is Mathematics? (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 245.

2 B. H. St. J. O’Neil, An Introduction to the Castles of England and Wales (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1954), pp. 49, 56.

3 Ibid.

It is undoubtedly true that Whitehead’s conception of the presence of one actual entity in another plays a key role in his metaphysics. On it, indeed, he bases such central themes of his philosophy as his concepts of organism, internal relations, universal relativity, process, and time. Nevertheless, not all Whiteheadian scholars have been convinced that he has successfully accounted for the immanence of substance within substance.¹ The following study will undertake an investigation of Whitehead’s metaphysics in order to determine whether it provides adequate support for his claim. At the same time, since Whitehead supposes his position to traverse directly an Aristotelian thesis, the article will also attempt to establish in what manner and to what extent Whitehead is in fact in opposition to the Greek philosopher.

I

Although Whitehead’s actual entities, being relatively short-lived events, differ radically from Aristotelian substances, they nevertheless have this feature in common: they alone are what exist fully, actually, and as ultimate individual entities. Now it is precisely as that which exists fully, actually and as an ultimate individual entity that the Aristotelian primary substance cannot be present in a subject, for it is itself the ultimate subject. It is this that Whitehead challenges. One such actual entity can be present in another, he maintains. In fact, any actual entity is such as to be constituted of a multiplicity of other actual entities.

Evidence for the constitution of an actual entity, according to Whitehead, is to be found in subjective experience. Indeed, our occasions of experience are examples of actual entities. Whitehead’s method, in part, is to analyze these occasions of subjective experience in order to find factors capable of being generalized into principles applicable to all actual entities: "In describing the capacities, realized or unrealized, of an actual occasion, we have . . . tacitly taken human experience as an example upon which to found the generalized description required for metaphysics" (PR 172).

Now the inspection of subjective experience reveals a number of objects woven together into the unity that is this occasion of experience. Whitehead insists, however, that the examination of experience at its lowest and most basic levels reveals something more, something which is usually overlooked. Our basic experience, he claims, is emotional rather than cognitive. What is evident in emotional experience is the active, subjective response to something other. Three factors stand out as essential to Whitehead’s account of emotional experience: (1) active response on the part of the subject, (2) the qualitative character of this response, and (3) the object as causally related to the subjective response. As Whitehead sees it, the whole occasion of experience with its several relations to different objects is the subject; the response to a particular object is a prehension or feeling (in this case, a physical prehension of an actual entity as distinct from the conceptual prehension of a form); the qualitative aspect of the prehension, the "how" of the feeling, is the subjective form. The object is causally efficacious insofar as it determines, at least partially, the subjective form of the prehension, and hence, to some extent, the whole occasion of experience. What Whitehead stresses in all of this is that on this basic level of emotional experience, the object presents itself not as an abstract universal quality (e.g., red) but as an efficacious, actually and fully existing individual -- another actual entity. Such an occasion of experience becomes for Whitehead the model for all actual entities.

Several points concerning this model, however, must be made more explicit. For one thing, although it is the object that is causally efficacious, nevertheless all activity belongs to the subject. The activity by which the subject relates itself to the object is prehension. The object is not active with respect to the subject. It is merely there. But herein lies its causal efficacy. As given, it must be prehended, and as prehended, it is determinative of what the prehending entity will be.

Further, any actual entity involves many prehensions of objects and is essentially a process of synthesizing these various prehensions with their various subjective forms into a novel unity with one complex form.

Also to be noted is the temporal character of the process itself and of the process as related to its objects. Every actual occasion has temporal thickness and every present actual entity is a response to actualities of the settled past. Once it has completed its concrescence, attained unity, and become fully determinate, it becomes part of the past from which new actual entities arise. It thus exchanges its role of self-creative subject for efficacious object.

For Whitehead, therefore, the basic structure of all actual entities is subject constructing itself out of objects, and it is by becoming an object for a subject that one actual entity becomes present in another.

It must be emphasized here, however, that Whitehead has clearly in mind the presence of individual actual entities in individual actual entities. It is not merely a question of a causal relation whereby the past conditions the present. It is not merely a question of the transmission of an abstract quality or form. More than that is involved, he claims. Furthermore, although it is not inappropriate to speak of a flow of feeling (as does Whitehead himself at times), this phrase does not capture all that Whitehead is saying. Any present actual entity, he maintains, is actually constituted essentially of individual actual entities of its past. The past endures in the present, not merely the character of the past, but the past as a group of individual entities. Indeed, he insists on this immanence of past individuals in present individuals to the point of distinguishing between two modes of existence for every actual entity: formaliter, as the actual entity is in itself as enjoying its own immediacy of self-creation, and objectivé, as fully determinate object given for other actual entities. Through the latter mode of existence every actual entity achieves "objective immortality." It endures not as a "living" individual, that is, as a subject in actual process of self-formation, but as an object for another. It endures not in its entirety but as a certain aspect (or aspects) of itself. Nevertheless, as object it is still an individual, the same individual that it was as a subject.

But there is a problem here. Whitehead speaks of actual entities entering into the constitution of other actual entities by means of prehension. But the question arises: Just how does the prehension of an object bring the object within? The actual entity is made up of prehensions. They are what is within, it would seem, not the objects. The prehension is an active response to the object which is other and elsewhere. Obviously Whitehead is not asserting that prehension is a grasping of the object in its physical reality so that the actual entity would be made up of objects like so many physical atoms. The model of experience indicates something quite different from that. How then does the object become immanent?

There is a passage in part III (PR 361-65) which spells out what Whitehead has in mind. These few pages are worth careful consideration since it shows Whitehead to be much more scrupulous in working out the details of his philosophy than even many of his supporters give him credit for. Indeed the idea is sometimes given that the presentation of prehensions as feelings is adequate explanation of the immanence of objects. But that certainly is not the case. It is not at all evident how feelings in the broad metaphysical sense of the Whiteheadian doctrine bring objects within. Indeed, it is not even evident that conscious feelings qua conscious bring their objects within. But even if on the basis of experience we were inclined to think that they do, we would still have to give some philosophical account of just how they perform this function. And even if we were to do that, the question of whether the account would hold true for feelings in the broader sense, including nonconscious physical responses, would still have to be dealt with.

There are some Whiteheadian philosophers, no doubt, who would tend to think that immanence is adequately explained by the temporal aspect of process: present prehending actual entity following in temporal succession past actual entities which have completed their concrescence and become fully determinate. Though this temporal schema explains how one actual entity becomes an object for another (at least in the Whiteheadian metaphysics), it does not explain how the object becomes immanent. As a matter of fact, the temporal character of process only heightens the difficulty. Whereas in an Aristotelian substance philosophy the problem of the immanence of object within perceiving subject is how that object there can become present in this subject here, in Whiteheadian process philosophy the problem for perception (or prehension in general) is how that object there-then can become present in this subject here-now? In other words, the temporal character of process emphasizes transcendence rather than immanence.

However, Whitehead does in fact account for the introduction of objects within the subject. As he explains in the passage indicated earlier, what happens is that the object is reproduced in the subject. The initial physical feelings of an arising actual entity, Whitehead tells us, are conformal feelings. What this means is that the initial feeling derives its character, or subjective form, from the object felt, and insofar as it assumes the same form it reproduces the object: "In the conformal feelings the how of feeling reproduces what is felt" (PR 249). More specifically, a feeling conforms not to the datum actual entity as a whole, but to one aspect of it, that is, to one of its prehensions. Indeed the object, being an actual entity, is constituted of prehensions each with its subjective form and all synthesized under one complex form. In this complex form there is an element that corresponds to the subjective form of each of the prehensions (PR 359). The present actual entity prehends the past actual entity under the aspect of one of its prehensions and conforms to this aspect, that is, it shares the form of that particular prehension, and thus prehension reproduces prehension. Finally, since no prehension can be totally abstracted from its subject, the past actual entity itself is reproduced under the aspect of one of its prehensions.

Now one thing that is evident in all of this is that physical prehensions and reproduction take place through the intermediary of forms, or as Whitehead himself puts it, "by the mediation of universals" (PR 230, cf. also 78) -- though of course physical prehension is not of forms. This statement, as well as the whole account of the reproduction of actual entities, appears to support those who see in his doctrine merely a transfer of character (cf. D. Emmet; see note 1). In the face of his own assertion, however, Whitehead emphatically states that what is involved is not the transmission of a universal character but immanence, the presence of actual entity within actual entity. Now this precisely is the problem we have to contend with. It does appear that what is involved is just this, the transmission of form, reproduction being the assumption of the same form, and consequently it would seem that Whitehead cannot claim in any strict sense that one thing is in another but only that one thing is like another. But such a claim might appear to differ in no important respects from Aristotle’s doctrine of efficient causality according to which the agent assimilates the effect to itself. If this is so, one would be inclined to conclude that, however much Whitehead’s doctrine differs from Aristotle’s on other points, in respect to the immanence of substance within substance he has not traversed the Aristotelian dictum. But let us take a closer look at Aristotle’s position concerning substance within substance.

II

Aristotle, it is true, denied that substances can be present in substances. Yet there is one case in which Aristotle does allow for such a presence.

We shall recall that Whitehead derives his substance-within-substance doctrine from his analysis of perception. When we turn to Aristotle on perception, we find an account in many respects quite similar. "In a sense, sax’s Aristotle, "the soul is all existing things" (DA 431b21). When it knows, the soul becomes its object. However, the object is not within in its own physical reality; it is not the stone that is in the soul but the form of the stone (DA 432a1). Thus the presence within is effected through the intermediary of form. In Aristotle, therefore, as in Whitehead, the percipient conforms to the object. For Aristotle, too, perception is of the particular, and the percipient becomes the individual thing perceived. Furthermore, the reason for this, it would appear -- though Aristotle is not at all explicit here -- is that it is the individual thing that is causally efficacious in the reproduction of itself in the percipient. What we have in perception according to Aristotle, therefore, is the production of individual substance within individual substance through the intermediary of form and the efficacy of individual entities, in other words, in much the same way, it would appear, as we find it in Whitehead.

Whitehead’s philosophy, of course, differs in many important respects from the Aristotelian view, as is to be expected in a philosophy that takes activity rather than matter as fundamental. As we have seen, what the examination of perception brings to light for Whitehead is an occasion of experience which is a self-creative process, a subject synthesizing past objects into a novel unity. In Aristotle, on the other hand, though perception is an activity it involves passivity as well, and furthermore, the perceptual occasion is not a substance, that is, an individual existing entity, and it is not a temporal process. These are, indeed, radical differences. Nevertheless, concerning the point under discussion, the immanence of substance within substance as evidenced in perception, the Whiteheadian account would appear on first sight to be strikingly close to that of Aristotle.

We have seen that Whitehead generalizes the pattern observed in an occasion of perceptual experience. This, of course, is what Aristotle does not do. For him, the immanence of the object is a peculiarity of perception and knowing in general. It is precisely what distinguishes mental activity from the workings of basic nature. Yet when we look at his analysis of purely physical or nonconscious natural activity, we find the transmission of form under the agency of actually existing individual substances with the consequent conforming and assimilating of substance to substance. It would seem, therefore, that in this area, no less than in perception, we have the reproduction of substance in substance.

Let us take a closer look at Aristotle’s conception of physical change. All activity in nature, for Aristotle, has its source in the urge of form to communicate itself. But it is not, strictly speaking, the form that acts but rather the individual natural substance. And what it acts on is also an individual natural substance. It is in virtue of the passive factor in nature, matter, that substances can be acted on and changed. Change is the acquiring of a new form by matter and the accompanying loss of the old form. The activity of the agent substance is the giving of form to matter, and the consequent assimilation of the passive substance to itself. The picture, of course, varies to some extent and is more or less complex according to the type of substances involved. Nevertheless, in all cases, what is essentially implied is the activity of an individual substance on an individual substance, the transmission of form, the assimilation to some extent and in some way of the effect to the cause. It might appear from this that physical activity in Aristotle does not essentially differ from perceptual activity.

Such is not the case however. Aristotle, indeed, emphasizes the difference, as well as the continuity, between mental activity and the basic workings of nature. And the main difference concerns the presence of substance within substance. When it is a case of physical causation, Aristotle never speaks of the effect becoming the cause, but merely becoming like the cause. In the case of perception, however, he speaks of the soul becoming the object and of the object being present in the soul. Perception for Aristotle does involve being acted upon physically and being changed by natural agents, but sensing is not explained by these bodily transformations alone. Becoming red is not the same thing as seeing red. Perception involves in addition to the physical assumption of form the holding of the form apart from matter. The percipient as such has the capacity to actively hold the form disengaged from its own material constitution as well as from the matter of the object so that the form retains its identity and its distinctness from the percipient.² It is thus that the sensible thing in Aristotle assumes the role of object as well as agent, but the two are not identified as they are in Whitehead. The sensible form within the percipient has a dual character, being at once an accident of the percipient and the form of the perceived. And thus perception, though itself an accident of substance, would involve the introduction of other substances within the percipient substance. It is the detached form which is the distinguishing mark of perceptual activity for the Greek, and it is this which accounts for the presence of substance within substance.

It is true that for Whitehead also sense perception involves the detached form. Conscious perception, as he sees it, is a complex prehension integrating the prehension of another concrete actual entity, or physical prehension, and prehension of an abstract form, which he calls conceptual prehension. However, as we have seen, it is physical prehension that is given the function of introducing the other substance, and physical prehension is not peculiar to conscious perception. Whether or not it is capable of this task was the problem presented in the last section.

Must we conclude that ironically it is Aristotle after all who has given us a doctrine of substance within substance? A further examination of the Aristotelian position will be taken up in section IV. Let us now return to Whitehead and to the problem of whether physical prehension is adequate to account for the presence of one substance in another.

III

Aristotle is intent on pointing up the difference between conscious perception and the interplay of purely physical forces, i.e., those powers peculiar to bodies as such rather than specifically to sentient bodies. Whitehead, of course, does not stand in opposition to Aristotle by any materialistic tendency. Indeed, when he is criticized, it is usually for the contrary, for panpsychistic leanings. The immanence of the object in perception, effected basically through physical prehension, is but one instance of a general pattern to be found throughout nature. The question to which we must now return consequently is the following: Is physical prehension adequate to the task of introducing one actual entity within another?

Let us take a second look at physical prehension. What is important to note is that Whitehead’s physical prehensions are like Aristotle’s physical changes at least in this respect, that what is involved in both are causal relations. A simple physical feeling, indeed, according to Whitehead, is an act of efficient causation. The causal relation is obviously not construed in the same way by Aristotle and Whitehead. Indeed, for one the cause is active, while for the other the effect is active; also, for one cause and effect are contemporary, whereas for the other they are sequential. Nevertheless, it is significant that for both alike what is fundamental is the transmission of a form from cause to effect with consequent assimilation or conformation of effect to cause.

To return to the question, is this causal relation sufficient to allow one to speak of the first actual entity as present in the second? On first consideration, it seems that the only claim that can legitimately be made is merely the Aristotelian claim that the first entity becomes like the second. It is to be noted that the object to which the actual entity responds is external. What is internal are prehensions, nothing more. For Whitehead the physical prehension is the object inasmuch as it reenacts the same subjective form -- or at least one aspect of it. But can the prehension really be the object? After all, the form assumed by actual entity B, responding to actual entity A, is truly B’s form: its whole function is to give B real and inherent definiteness. True, in a sense, B has the same form as A had, if one means by form the universal. But that consideration would provide no grounds for taking B to possess A’s form precisely as A’s form, or for thinking of B as including the individual actual entity A as one of its components.

This seems obvious enough. And Whitehead himself would surely agree that B can have the same form as A only if we mean the same universal form. He is quite explicit, in fact. The subjective form in a particular actual entity, he tells us, unlike the abstract eternal object, is an "element in the private definiteness of that actuality’ (PR 444), and the subjective form cannot be torn apart from its particular subject without becoming a mere universal (PR 354, 356).

Nevertheless, in the face of such statements, Whitehead refused to think of physical processes merely in terms of the transference of an abstract universal quality (see note 1). In his view, this would be to Ignore, among other things, the fact of causal efficacy which has its source in concrete individual entities. The efficacy of these individuals, nevertheless, is explained by the transmission of form. Whitehead, however, wants to go further and identify the transmission of form from cause to effect with the introduction of the cause as an individual entity into the effect (PR 363). It would appear that Whitehead has not made good his claim concerning the immanence of substance within substance. At least that must be the conclusion if his claim is to be supported merely by conformation and reproduction, which ultimately involve nothing more than the transmission of character. I would suggest, however, that there is something more to the Whiteheadian account, certain additional elements which are not always made sufficiently explicit.

To begin with, I think we must admit that when Whitehead speaks of the subject being constituted of its objects and the cause passing into the effect, he means, at least in part, that the objects/causes are reproduced by way of likeness insofar as the subject/effect assumes the same forms. If this were the whole story, however, there would be no significant difference from the Aristotelian idea of a transfer of form, of causes making effects like themselves. Whitehead, however, differs from Aristotle in some very significant respects, and it is precisely these that will allow him to speak in terms of immanence.

For one thing, as we have seen in section I, the Whiteheadian account introduces the idea of the synthetic unit as the fundamental unit of nature. The actual entity, though basic, is itself made up of a number of quasi-units, its prehensions, each of which has an individual character without however being capable of independent existence (PR 28f, 35, 72, 435, 436). Even though the parts of such a whole are not independent of one another and are ultimately integrated into the one complex prehension which is the satisfaction, they function, nevertheless, as quasi-individuals to the extent that each component derives its individual character in part from the object to which it initially conforms and retains it throughout the whole process. Thus instead of one substance like another, we have one substance made up of many parts each of which is like another. In other words, there is a containment of parts, an immanence of individual units within a synthetic whole.

This alone of course does not explain the immanence of other substances. What is needed is an explication of the Whiteheadian idea of feelings as "vectors." Physical feelings, we are told, are "vectors" insofar as they "feel what is there and transform it into what is here" (PR 133). Now what is implied in this much quoted statement is not always fully brought out, even by Whitehead himself. The idea is partially explained in terms of conformation and reproduction, but only partially. What is made fully explicit only in part IV (PR 445-47) is that a physical feeling feels what is there and feels it precisely as there. It is an active subjective response to another actual entity not merely as qualitatively determined but as spatially and temporally located, hence as individual and as other. It is to be noted that feelings as vectors must be explained in terms of forms (eternal objects) of the objective species. These are forms of the object as such and not the subjective forms of feelings; they are mathematical rather than qualitative, and are essentially nontransferable. Relational in character, they are precisely the means by which the other qua other is introduced into a prehending subject. Thanks to them, Whitehead’s philosophy is more than a doctrine of causation; it is a doctrine of objectification.

The physical prehension as conformal feeling, we have said, reproduces the object by assuming the subjective form of one of its prehensions, but as vector it is, and remains throughout the "life" of the subject, an essential relation to that individual object as other, as there and then. Thus it is at once integral part and reference beyond. It is the vehicle of immanence and the basis of transcendence. What we find in Whitehead, then, is certainly the transmission of form, but it is much more than that. It is the containment of parts by the whole in such a way as to retain to some degree the individual distinctness of the parts and their essential reference, as well as their conformity, to a number of other individual actual entities. And this precisely is what Whitehead means when he speaks of immanence.

That this view of substance is radically different from Aristotle’s is readily seen. Although Aristotle does of course recognize synthetic wholes -- the syllable, for instance, and the house -- the natural substance is not seen by him to be such a whole. It has a tighter unity. The compound substance, in Aristotle, although it is made up of several elements and exhibits a balance of the opposite elemental qualities, does not retain the elements in their distinctness, and its form is not one of a complex of distinct qualities. The living substance, it is true, does have diversified parts for him, but they are in no sense quasi-individuals and the whole is not a synthesis of these parts. Rather the unifying form alone is what gives each of these parts its essential character. The Whiteheadian whole, by contrast, is made up of prehensions each of which is qualitatively determined in part by another actual entity to which it remains essentially related.

This is by no means to deny all essential relations to the Aristotelian universe. In its own way it is an organic whole with interlocking active and passive parts, each part characterized by the function it performs in the whole. It too has a sort of universal relativity, though of a weaker sort. But this relativity attaches the substance to the whole. It does not penetrate to its essential constitution, distinguishing and separating parts and linking them to distinct and separate entities. As Whitehead himself indicates in the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, what at bottom directly traverses the Aristotelian dictum is the Whiteheadian doctrine of universal relativity.

It is true, of course, that the Whiteheadian doctrine does not present the actual entity as being constituted of other actual entities in the most literal sense. Strictly speaking, the prehensions are not the other actual entities themselves but reproductions of them and essential references to them. Again strictly speaking, they are not themselves actual entities at all, but integral parts of an actual entity. But White-head, after all, never intended the presence of actual entity within actual entity to be taken in full literalness, i.e., in the sense of "one actual entity... added to another simpliciter" (PR 80).³ What he means, he tells us, is better expressed as "objectification.’ He himself alerts us to the fact that the doctrine of objectification, with all its emphasis on concrete individuality, relies ultimately on the role of eternal objects or abstract universals. But this is not to say that objectification consists merely in the transfer of form. If such were the case, it would not be a doctrine of objectification at all, since actual entities would not be objects but merely causes.

IV

For Whitehead other actual entities are introduced on the basic level of physical prehension. It is true that he very frequently discusses his doctrine within the context of perception, and one of the ways to the theory, probably the dominant one, was through the analysis of perceptual experience. Nevertheless, the immanence of actual entities is not a peculiarity of perceptual experience, but is universal throughout nature. With Aristotle, however, we have a different story. As we have seen, he makes no claim for the immanence of substances in the case of purely physical interactions; he does, however, make such a claim in the case of perceptual experience. In this final portion of our study, we shall undertake a closer examination of the Aristotelian account of perception in order to find out whether his manner of bringing one substance within another is any more or less satisfactory than the Whiteheadian way.

There are similarities between the two accounts of perception, as we have already indicated: perception has as its object an individual; it introduces the object within the percipient; it comes about through the causal efficacy of the object; and it presupposes the transmission of form from object to subject. However, there is one significant difference. In Aristotle it is not merely through natural causation or physical interaction that the object is brought within. It was his dissatisfaction with the purely causal explanation of perception that led him into the various distinctions that advanced his treatment of perception beyond the conclusions of his predecessors. The causal relation entails the other merely as transcendent. The perceptual relation, on the other hand, presents the other both as transcendent and as immanent to the subject’s experience. Aristotle attempted to come to terms with this dual character of the perceptual object by his doctrine of the reception within the percipient of a form that remains the form of the perceived. The form thus received is within the percipient substance as a quality, in accord with the doctrine of the Categories, but insofar as it remains the form of the thing perceived it performs the function of introducing within the perceiving subject another substance. It is the special capacity not merely to receive a form but to receive the form apart from matter that characterizes the perceiver as such. In this way Aristotle avoids the predicament whereby the immanence of the object collapses into a physical qualification of the subject and the transcendence of the object is nothing more than the complete externality of the cause.

But has Aristotle really produced a viable theory of the immanence of individual entities? The presence of the object in the percipient is explained by the reception of the form alone of the object. The stone in its physical reality obviously is not in the soul. The stone is in the soul, Aristotle tells us, insofar as its form is there. But herein lies a problem: How can a form without matter refer to an individual as such? How can it still be the form of that particular stone?

The reception of form without matter in Aristotle approximates the notion of conceptual prehension in Whitehead. Indeed, as far as the assuming of form is concerned, one might say that physical prehension stands to conceptual prehension in much the same way as reception of form in matter stands to reception of form without matter. For both philosophers, perception involves both the state of being causally affected and the derivative activity of entertaining the form alone. Whitehead, however, relies on the causal activity of physical prehension to bring the object within, whereas Aristotle for this purpose looks to the derivative activity of holding the form apart from its material embodiment. In virtue of physical causation, the form of the object becomes merely the subject’s form, a difficulty Aristotle saw and wanted to avoid. His solution was the disengaged form, but with that the form of the object becomes abstract -- not in the sense that it is grasped as an abstract essence but insofar as it no longer remains the form of that individual -- and this is the problem that Whitehead saw and tried to solve.

The question as to whether either philosopher presents a sound epistemological theory of perception is not at issue here. The problem concerns solely the immanence of substances. It is conceivable that Aristotle’s account could be filled out to provide reference to individual as well as immanence of form, but if we take it as it stands, it would appear that the doctrine does not establish how one individual substance can be present in another.

Though Whitehead’s emphasis on the individual actual entity expressed in his Ontological Principle is Aristotelian in character, as he himself indicates, the twentieth century philosopher goes beyond the Greek in the prominence accorded to the essential interdependence of individuals. There are essential relations in Aristotle, but substances are not essentially constituted of relations to other substances. In Aristotle an effect is like its causes, but a substance is not a synthesis of reproductions of its causes, and its causes are not all the individuals in its world. Aristotle, with his conception of matter as the vehicle of past determinations, could also speak of the present as being, to a certain extent, an accumulation of the past, but he would make no claim concerning the immanence of the individual of the past in the individual of the present. Consequently, though the Aristotelian world is not the pluralistic world of totally independent substances which Whitehead so emphatically rejected, it is likewise not the organic world in which every individual entity can be said to become an integral part of some other actual entity. These then were the ideas -- developed under the headings of objectification and universal relativity -- that Whitehead had in mind when he insisted upon immanence, rather than the mere transmission of form, as the characteristic theme of his philosophy.

I would conclude, therefore, that Whiteheads philosophy does provide adequate support for his assertions concerning immanence. It is possible, however, that his emphatic claim of traversing the Aristotelian dictum has hindered rather than helped certain readers, leading them to understand what he did not mean or to assume he meant more than in fact he intended to convey. If Whitehead fails at all in this matter, it might well be in his self-appointed task of "making clear."

Reference

DA -- Aristotle, De Anima.

Notes

1 Cf. Dorothy Emmet, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism (New York: 1966), pp. xxii-xxvi. After reading her hook, Whitehead expressed appreciation, but took her to task for stressing the transmission of form to the neglect of his theory of immanence. You seem to me at various points," he writes, "to forget my doctrine of ‘immanence’ which governs the whole treatment of objectification. Thus at times you write as tho’ the connection between past and present is merely that of a transfer of character." In the preface of the second edition, Emmet confesses that she is at a loss to explain what Whitehead meant. "I do not know," she says, "that anyone has really elucidated it. Professor Christian had a try at it in his An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics but came down on the view that what are repeated from one actual occasion to another are characteristics. ‘[his is undoubtedly the view which is easiest to make plausible, and I was inclined to it myself; but we have Whitehead’s emphatic statement that it is not what he meant." Victor Lowe also testifies to the fact that "many philosophers laid down Process and Reality unconvinced that the author had said clear y how one actual entity can be present in another" (Understanding Whitehead [Baltimore, 1966], p. 360). Quoting Whitehead, he indicates what he thinks might be the reason for this lack of understanding: "The truism that we can only conceive in terms of universals has been stretched to mean that we can only feel in terms of universals." However, even if one admits on the basis of experience alone that one feels individuals, and that by this very fact one is inclined to the view that somehow individuals are immanent, the question still remains: Does Whitehead’s metaphysics provide an adequate philosophical account of this fact of experience?

2 Not all readers of Aristotle interpret him in this way. To my mind, however, this is the only interpretation that renders all the Aristotelian passages on sense perception intelligible. I have argued for it in "Sensing and the Sensitive Mean in Aristotle," The New Scholasticism 47/3 (Summer, 1973), 279-310. It is to be noted that this interpretation of Aristotle p resents him as maintain in some sense a doctrine of substance within substance. The other reading, which limits the Aristotelian account to a mere physical qualification of the subject, would not. Nevertheless, even if this latter interpretation were taken as the correct one, none of the conclusions reached in this article concerning Whitehead would be altered.

3 It must be admitted, however, that Whitehead time and time again insists on the presence of one actual entity as an element within another without sup plying any distinctions or qualifications. It is not surprising, consequently, that many of his readers have remained puzzled. Cf. D. Emmet: "But the doctrine of the objective immortality of actual entities . . . in the constitution of other actual entities is, as Miss Stebbing points out, a departure from the earlier view of events as particular and transient, and objects alone as able to ‘be again’. This difficulty would however be mitigated if we could say (as Whitehead himself however nowhere does, as far as I know) that it is not actual entities which are objectively immortal in the constitution of other actual entities, but the characters, or forms of their experience which are reproduced" (op. cit., p. 128; cf. also p. 160).

The examination of human experience for factors which could be used to account for other natural occurrences presents itself as a normal method of procedure for one who rejects the Cartesian type of dualism. This, of course, was Whitehead’s chief approach in the establishment of his speculative cosmology. The analysis of human experience, or to be even more specific, subjective experience, Whitehead believed, would yield certain factors and patterns of factors susceptible to being converted into a general theory broad enough to embrace the findings of physics and other natural sciences. It would be a case of looking downward from the most complex product of nature rather than of looking upward from the least complex. One of the chief advantages of such an approach is the reduced likelihood of overlooking some real components of nature which in the simplest natural entities are minimal to the point of indiscernibility. But there are liabilities as well. There is always, for instance, the danger of paying attention to these facets of our experience which present themselves with a certain obviousness, to the neglect of other more submerged facets. Generally speaking, what is most distinctly obvious is what is least likely of generalization, being proper to more highly developed forms of consciousness. Furthermore, since even these items that might indeed be susceptible of generalization are realized differently in different types of entities, there is always something peculiarly human about their mode of realization in human occurrences. It is precisely these peculiarly human factors and modes of realization that must be dropped for the sake of greater generality. Just what these peculiarities are, however, is far from easy to determine. Yet the success of a metaphysics such as Whitehead’s depends upon this discrimination being made with accuracy.

No one is more aware than Whitehead himself that the generalizable factors are not to be found in the more developed stages of human experience, but rather in the most basic, most primitive levels. If human experience is to give us some clue as to what nature in general is like, we must descend to the very threshold of consciousness. Indeed, it is precisely in this respect that he diverges from the traditional subjectivist approach: his insistence on a more primitive mode of experience than is generally recognized as the starting point for metaphysical investigation. This emphasis on a basic form of experience to serve as ground and source of evidence as well as final arbiter for the metaphysical venture is one of the most, perhaps the most, distinctive features of Whitehead’s philosophy -- and, at least in my opinion, one of the most attractive. Nevertheless, I would like to raise the question whether Whitehead is not after all guilty of emphasizing and generalizing some factor that may indeed be peculiar to man and the higher animals, at the expense of another factor which could offer more genuine grounds for generalization. The discussion of this question will constitute the substance of the present study.

Let us briefly indicate the generalizable factors that Whitehead found in human experience and which form the central concepts of his philosophy. Our most fundamental conscious experience has generally been taken to be the perception of sensa, i.e., of relatively clear and distinct objects such as red, bitter, etc. Whitehead disagrees. The most basic conscious experience is emotional rather than cognitive, an affective response (expansion or retreat) to some vague presence dimly felt (AI 225f, PR 246-48). It is, Whitehead maintains, at a higher level of experience that the object disengages itself from emotional associations and appears to us simply as an object, i.e., as a cognitive object. It is this "crude," or "nonsensuous," perception, Whitehead believes, that we find in more elementary forms throughout nature. The jellyfish advances and withdraws; the plant reaches down to the moist soil (PR 268); everything throughout the universe "feels" its world and responds. Thus perception is generalized into "prehension," a term which drops consciousness as an essential element. Furthermore, prehension is identified with causality. Indeed, the more primitive form of perception is called by Whitehead "perception according to the mode of causal efficacy." (The more elaborated form, e.g., the perception of "red there," he called "perception according to the mode of presentational immediacy." Normal perception, we might add, is a synthesis of the two.) Our basic perceptions of the world, Whitehead insists, are feelings of causal efficacy. That we feel the world does not mean primarily that we entertain bare sensa (or universals, such as red, bitter) that represent the world. It means that we have the world within and, as occasions of experience, are constituted by the particular, concrete objects of our experience. It means that we derive from the world and are determined by it; that we conform to the world and reproduce it; that we inherit the world. Thus, it is though prehension that the world leaves its mark on us, exerts on us its causal efficacy.

What we experience in perception according to the mode of causal efficacy is precisely this causal inheritance. When it comes into consciousness, Whitehead tells us, it is already integrated with factors of a later stage, but it is nonetheless there to be discovered if we but avert to it. There is the sense, for instance, of the derivation of one mental state from that of the immediate past. In the experience of anger, we have the sense of the anger of a fraction of a second ago welling up into the present, exacting some degree of conformity with the past. Even more significantly, we have the sense, vague but insistent, of derivation from the body: the very dim awareness of the eye being causally involved in seeing and the stronger sense of the hand, or other part of the body, being involved in touch. This sense of derivation from bodily events, Whitehead reminds us, finds full corroboration in modern physiology. But the body fades off into external nature. At no fixed point does one’s body end and external nature begin. There is no reason not to believe that the sources of derivation extend beyond the body. What we have, then, is a series of actual occasions -- or a complex strand of many such series -- in which each occasion prehends and responds to the entities of the immediate past. Thus prehension is inheritance. Inheritance is causation. Causation is experienced, Whitehead insists against Hume, but is not a sensum or perceptum in any ordinary meaning of the terms. And it is just this causal element in primitive experience that extends into the fundamental scheme of the universe.

Accordingly, the world is made up of actual occasions or entities, each of them actively prehending the actual entities of the immediate past and conforming to them -- at least in the initial stages of formation. Each actual entity is a process of "concrescence," moving towards a synthesis of prehensions. But since the past entity too is constituted of its prehensions, what the new entity prehends and conforms to are prehensions of past entities. Thus the qualitative characters ("subjective forms") of the prehensions (feelings, energies) of the past occasion are reproduced in the prehensions (feelings, energies) of the present occasion. Reproduction and inheritance are therefore effected through the intermediary of form, or in Whitehead’s term, "eternal objects." In this way, "the qualitative energies of the past are combined into a pattern of qualitative energies in each present occasion. This is the doctrine of causation" (MT 226f).

Whitehead opposes the idea that perception involves no more than the bare entertainment of universals. In its basic form, perception is not of universals but of concrete singular entities, and it is not a bare, passive entertainment but an active response. Perception in its primitive mode, as we have seen, is perception of causal efficacy, that is, the causal efficacy of concrete singular entities, and, as a subjective response to such influence, it is emotional rather than cognitive. What is important to notice in Whitehead’s analysis of experience, however, is that although he substitutes "the emotional" for "the cognitive" as the primitive form of experience, this does not mean that he rejects the subject-object relation. To the contrary, he accepts it as a basic structure of experience beyond and below the purely cognitive level, and ultimately beyond the level of consciousness altogether. Actual entities are causally efficacious with respect to other actual entities only insofar as they are felt, i.e., only insofar as they are objects. The prehending subject, now in process of concrescence, in turn will leave its mark on the world insofar as it will solidify into an object for some future subject. Indeed, for Whitehead, causation is "objectification." Thus, what the analysis of experience brings to light is the subject-object relation, and on this foundation the whole Whiteheadian structure is built.

This is not to say, of course, that we have discussed here all the fundamental elements of Whitehead’s metaphysics. There is an entirely other side to the actual occasion: that aspect which falls into the area of final, rather than efficient, causality -- of freedom as against determinism -- and includes conceptual prehension of eternal objects envisaged as unrealized possibilities (as distinct from physical prehensions of concrete actual entities, which we have been discussing). This side we have passed over merely because it is not pertinent to the points we wish to make in this study. It must be noted, however, that this aspect also of the actual entity is entirely to be understood in terms of subject and objects.

The Whiteheadian philosophy is undoubtedly extraordinarily comprehensive, bringing together the most diverse areas of human experience -- religion, science, aesthetics, ethics, history -- into one comprehensive scheme. But, as Whitehead himself insists, "the ultimate appeal is to naive experience" (SMW 129f). Hence the question that remains before us is twofold: first, whether this subject-object scheme covers everything "naive experience" has to tell us, and second whether it is the factor that is truly basic and pervasive.

To test the soundness of his theories, Whitehead is wont to go beyond his own experience in order to measure it against the testimony of others: scientists, of course, but poets also, and obviously, other philosophers. We might follow his example and approach the question of sensory experience from another philosophical perspective. After all, again as White-head frequently reminds us, facts come to view in the light of a theory. Hence, if there are other facts to be seen, they will the more likely be observed if we look through the lenses of a different metaphysics. Let us take up the standpoint of a philosophy against which Whitehead so frequently and so radically contrasts his own, namely, the Aristotelian. As is well known, there are many significant points of divergence between the two philosophers, but we shall keep to our topic of human experience as manifested in its basic mode, primitive perception.

In Aristotle’s treatment of perception, we find two general characterizations perception (or sensing) is (1) a certain "being acted upon" (DA 416b33), and (2) a reception of form without matter (DA 427a17). Let us take the second point first. According to Aristotle, sensing is a way of having the object within. But the object obviously is not within in its physical being. Its inner presence is effected by the reception of its form (DA 432a1). In sensation, moreover, it is the individual object that is sensed, the individualized form that is received (DA 417b23). Only in the later stages of the cognitive process does a form become disengaged from association with the individual and thus reach the level of an abstract universal. It is to be noted, further, that with sensing Aristotle includes pleasure and pain, i.e., the affective response to the object, as a concomitant factor (DA 414b5f). Moreover, at certain basic levels of sensory experience, especially evident in the case of touch, this affective side is closely associated with bodily involvement and assumes a particularly dominant form. To this point we shall give further attention below.

Despite Whitehead’s protestations against Greek conceptions of perception (and he obviously had Aristotle principally in mind), we seem to have here, so far at least, a theory of sensing in many respects quite similar to the Whiteheadian. In both, the object is immanent in the perceiving subject and this, moreover, is effected through the intermediary of forms (eternal objects). There is a striking resemblance, be it witting or unwitting on Whitehead’s part, between his remark: "In one sense the world is in the soul" (MT 244), and Aristotle’s: "The soul in a way is all existing things" (DA 431b21). There can be no doubt that in the case of sensation for Aristotle one substance is in another just as much and virtually in the same way as it is for Whitehead, despite the latter’s claim to the contrary (cf., e.g., PR 79).¹

In both, furthermore, what is perceived is a concrete individual entity, not a universal and not a sensum representing the entity, and the form by which this is effected is an individualized form of the concrete individual object. True, for Aristotle the object is present in the sentient subject not in its entirety but with respect to some aspect, e.g., as red. Hut the case is quite similar for Whitehead: the actual entity is never prehended (objectified) as a whole but according to one of its component prehensions. And finally, for both, perception, especially in its basic forms, involves an element of affective response to the object -- a response that is an integral part of the basic experience rather than "a reflective reaction derived from the original perception" (AI 228). Without ignoring the very great differences that exist between the Aristotelian substance philosophy and the Whiteheadian process philosophy, it still must be affirmed that for the Greek also perception is truly a case of immanence of individual things, not a case of "individual substance qualified by universal quality" and not, absolutely not, a case of "subject qualified by predicate" (cf., e.g., PR 240-42).

The immanence of the thing perceived in the percipient, for Aristotle, is the result of the percipient’s "being acted upon" by the object. And this brings us now to the first Aristotelian characterization of sense perception: sensing is a type of "being acted upon." In other words, it is through the causal influence of the external world that form is received, the object is possessed and sensation takes place. Perception, consequently, is ultimately rooted in causation. Now this is precisely what Whitehead is telling us. He is, however, also saying something more: he maintains that at the lowest levels of experience we perceive the causal efficacy of the external world. Was Aristotle’s claim also based on an awareness of "being acted upon"? Or was it a result merely of a metaphysical preoccupation to tie up all elements of reality into one consistent scheme? There are a number of indications that Aristotle took certain forms of sensory experience to include not only awareness of an object but awareness of being acted upon by the object as well. He did not press the point, but there was no need to do so since when he came on the scene it was generally accepted that sensing is "a sort of being acted upon. What he had to insist on, against this wholly bodily account, was the psychic aspect.² Whitehead, on the other hand, in the wake of Cartesian dualism, was faced with the necessity of bringing his readers’ attention back to the bodily implications in perception.

That Aristotle included in some forms of sensing experience an awareness of being acted upon becomes fairly obvious when we compare his account of sight with that of touch. Indeed, he appears to be very much aware of the point made by Whitehead concerning the difference between the two senses. In the case of sight, Whitehead states, the bodily feeling is virtually absent; in touch, however, the feeling in the hand is dominant (PR 181). Aristotle most certainly had noticed this characteristic of sight. What else, indeed, could have led him to speculate that sight involves no bodily disturbance -- at least none of any ordinary type -- except the fact that he did not feel any. Indeed he went to great lengths, grappled with the formidable problem of the nature of light, made incredibly subtle distinctions between various types of change, all to explain the fact that in sight consciousness is consciousness of an object, pure and simple, apart from any feelings of bodily involvement. Surely this fact of experience was the given requiring explanation, rather than the other way around.

On the other hand, the case is quite different for touch. Touch, for Aristotle, is the sense of bodily contact (DA 435a17, 434b12f, 432b27). It is the sense of being bodily affected by other bodies. This experience of being affected must certainly have reinforced, if it did not suggest, the hypothetical, but by no means arbitrary, identification of the natural powers with the tactile qualities. He knew certain of these to be active, because he felt them acting on him. Touch, for Aristotle, is the most basic of the senses: the minimal sensory requirement for animal life, the sense of food (taste, for Aristotle, is a sort of touch), as well as the most universal and most bodily form of pleasure and pain (NE 1118a24-b4). Thus at the lowest level of sensory awareness what one becomes conscious of is the activity of bodies on one’s own body. The awareness of the stone is nothing other than an awareness of being affected by the stone. In the other senses, the feeling of being affected diminishes; indeed "being affected" diminishes, or, more accurately, and, assumes a more re. fined form, and in proportion the object gains in clarity and distinctness. It is certainly with this in mind that Aristotle asserts that sight is superior to touch in purity (NE 1176a1) and, as a cognitive power, is the most perfect of all the senses (NE 429a3, M 98a21). There seems little doubt, therefore, that Aristotle recognized in sensory experience, in varying degrees of prominence, both the perception of an object, as such, and also the sense of being physically affected.

What we have here is something very close indeed to Whitehead’s primary mode of perception. The sense of "being affected" is certainly nothing other than, in Whitehead’s terms, the "consciousness of the causal efficacy of the external world" (PR 184). As such it is to be distinguished from the perception of an object merely as passively situated in the external world and not experienced as affecting the sentient. (This, of course, would be Whitehead’s perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.) Such would be most perfectly illustrated in Aristotle, as in Whitehead, by sight taken merely as the sense of color. Touch, furthermore, as the sense of bodily pleasure and pain, involves to a high degree the effective response that, according to Whitehead, is more primitive than the clear perception of a distinct and definite object. The sense of "being affected," moreover, though it is strongest in touch, is not to be identified in Aristotle with any particular sense any more than is the feeling of causal efficacy in Whitehead. Each sense has its peculiar object, but the sense of being affected by the object is an integral and basic part of sensing in general -- at least in its more basic forms. The fault of philosophers since the time of the Greeks, Whitehead claims, has been that they have started with the visual rather than the visceral (PR 184), and have claimed a priority for the cognitive over the emotional. Where Aristotle started from is not the purpose of this study to determine. But this much is clear: those factors found on the most basic level of conscious experience are precisely those that he attributes to the world at large. And what Aristotle found was precisely what Whitehead found: causal efficacy.

Nevertheless, Aristotle’s first characteristic of sensing ("being acted upon") involves a radical difference from the Whiteheadian view. Where the divergence lies is not in what they saw in their examination of experience. It is rather in how they saw it. For Aristotle, being acted upon is being passive: sensing thus implies passivity. For Whitehead, the percipient is in no sense passive; he does not passively receive, he actively prehends. The object exerts its causal influence not by acting upon the subject, but solely as being inert, stubborn fact exacting conformity. Indeed, there is no activity apart from the subject, and here activity is not that of acting upon something but rather the inherent activity of internal synthesis or self-creation. As for passivity, there is none whatsoever in the Whiteheadian scheme, at least not in the Aristotelian sense of the term. If anything may he termed passive, it is the object in perception according to the mode of presentational immediacy, which is passive merely insofar as it is not felt as exerting a causal influence on the percipient.

With Aristotle too, as with Whitehead, sensing is an activity. Indeed, it is the actualization not of matter but of a psychic power. It is, moreover, an activity that remains within and is constitutive of the subject -- though it is not, as with Whitehead, a process of self-creation. Perception is certainly an activity for the Greek, but it also essentially involves passivity, i.e., being acted upon and altered by the entities of the physical world. Indeed, sensing for him is aroused by the active stimulation of the environment, and, as such, it is a response to the world not merely by reproduction of mode or character but with regard to its very existence. Objects, consequently, are more than objects: to be objects, they must first be agents. There is activity, therefore, not only on the side of the subject but on the side of the object as well. But in each ease the activity is of an essentially different sort. Whereas the activity of the subject is a fulfillment and perfecting of the subject, and thus an end in itself, the activity of the sensible object is an "acting upon" and, as such, presupposes a passive factor that is acted upon and thereby changed. This latter activity is not so much an actuality, simply, as the process of actualization of something else. It consists in the giving of form and has its source in the impulse of form to communicate itself. It thereby essentially involves a process of assimilation in some respect, to some extent, of patient to agent. In Whitehead, too, as we have seen, there is transmission of form and assimilation; however, the subject in no sense passively receives but actively prehends and conforms.

For Aristotle, then, sensing involves a passive-active relation between certain parts of the body and certain agent-objects of the physical world. Where sensing differs from any purely physical process is that on the sentient, as such, the agent-object has a twofold effect: the sense organ is not merely physically altered, but is also mused to the psychic activity of sensing. That is, the form is received in matter as it is in any physical change, but also the form is received without matter, that is, it is possessed in disassociation from the sentient’s material constitution.³ In virtue of this second mode of reception, the sensible thing is something more than an agent; it becomes an object for an experiencing subject -- though this is not, of course, how Aristotle expressed it. It is thus that sensing is a "movement through the body" (P 244b11), the bodily change giving rise to the psychic activity. It is precisely this bodily passivity that explains why, for Aristotle, the sensation of the stone is also and at the same time a sensation of being bodily affected by the stone.

With Whitehead, on the other hand, for whom perception is a wholly active prehending, precluding all passivity, the feeling in the hand is but part of the final datum prehended. That is, a "feeling" in the stone is prehended as a feeling, with reference to the stone, in the hand, which in turn is prehended as a feeling, with reference to the hand, in the final percipient occasion in the brain. It is only with the final percipient, of course, that consciousness supervenes.

Sensing, therefore, for Aristotle, is an activity that presupposes passivity or being acted upon and physically altered -- the passivity of matter -- and the passivity of pure receptivity -- the passivity of a psychic potency, the actuality of which is a psychic activity. In virtue of the first, knowing and feeling take their origins from the workings of basic nature. And thus sensation in Aristotle, also, most certainly has what Whitehead calls a "vector character." In virtue of the second, a natural being rises above the more primitive manifestations of nature to the immanent world of feeling -- a world reserved in Aristotle, but not in Whitehead, for conscious beings.

By this distinction of two modes of passivity -- of receiving forms-Aristotle sets off the world of conscious experience from the world of nature, but in such a way that not only the objects but the very workings of nature are included as part of what is felt. Consequently, though he does not include the activity of experience in unconscious nature, as does Whitehead, he does include the activity of unconscious nature in experience. Thus, for Aristotle, experience involves a factor that runs down beyond perception to the depths of nature. However, this factor is not part of the essential structure of experience as such; it lies rather at the base of experience. Though it enters in as experiencer, it is not strictly speaking an object as it is for Whitehead; it is rather the felt activity of the object-agent. The object of conscious experience presupposes the agent and the transmission of forms. But as object it is not agent. As object, it is form entertained in physical disassociation from matter. Because this disengagement in the lowest levels of experience is never total, perception involves the dual factors of object and "being acted upon." At the basic levels, indeed, the subject is, and must be, also patient, and thus the object is also experienced as agent. But what is essential to conscious experience as such, for Aristotle, is subject immanently entertaining object. And though the thing that is an object is at some point and in some respect an agent, there is no corresponding necessity for an agent to be an object. Below conscious experience, therefore, there are agents but no objects; there are forms transmitted and received, acting and being acted upon, inheritance of a sort, reproduction and assimilation, but there are no forms received and entertained as objects and there is no immanent activity.

With Whitehead the matter is quite otherwise. Though both philosophers found the same things in experience -- objects and causal efficacy -- they differ as regards what they took to be basic and general. Whereas Aristotle, as we have seen, took the first factor to be peculiar to conscious experience and the second to be the more general factor lying at the base of consciousness, Whitehead took the subject-object structure as general and fundamental and interpreted causal efficacy in terms of it. Thus, while Aristotle saw the object as in some respect an agent, Whitehead saw the agent as in every respect an object.

The root of the difference, of course, lies in their metaphysical approach. Though it is not at all impossible that Aristotle took certain clues from the examination of subjective experience to guide him in his investigation of nature at large, what he clearly did not do was take the subjective experience as a model for the essential constitution of the basic entities of the universe. And this, of course, was precisely Whitehead’s procedure. Any occasion of experience involves the objects felt and the subjective response to these objects. The first factor is especially obvious on the higher levels of experience, but the affective response, as integral part of the experience (rather than as reflective reaction), predominates in the more primitive forms. It is indeed in the more basic levels that the object appears to be exerting an influence to which the experient responds. But in what does this influence consist? For White-head it is in the influence of a world that is there for perception, stubborn fact not to be avoided, the ground from which the experient occasion must arise, the elements that must be taken into account. It is the iron hand of the given. The causal efficacy of the object, therefore, is its character of givenness exacting conformity. And this precisely is the facet of the object that extends beyond conscious experience, for it is doubtless true of any arising entity that it must take, and perhaps even take in, the world as it finds it. Thus any actual entity of the universe becomes for Whitehead a subject prehending objects.

The givenness of the established world as affecting the internal constitution of a developing being is not, of course, something extraneous to the Aristotelian metaphysics. It is accounted for in terms of the previous determinations of matter. The givenness of the actual world as objects of experience is also perfectly in accord with the Aristotelian view. But for Aristotle, there is, besides, this other factor of being at the receiving end of the activity of the external world, a factor which lies quite outside the subject-object structure, even with Whitehead’s extended meaning. For whereas the term "object," it seems, could quite legitimately be extended to include not only sensible objects as given but the given in general (its etymological meaning would indicate as much), the experience of being affected by an active world, as understood by Aristotle, on the other hand, is something quite irreducible to the experience of the merely passive given.

What we are left with is the very basic question of whether or not there is such a factor in experience. Interestingly enough, if we have regard for the way Whitehead speaks of experience rather than the way he interprets it, we would certainly be led to believe that he is including something more than inert objects actively prehended by a subject. Everywhere he speaks of the world as actively exerting an influence on the percipient. It is only when he comes to account for what he finds in experience that the percipient becomes full activity, the active world becomes the world of inert data, and the whole is thus reduced to the fundamental structure of experience: a complex of subject and object. The question specifically with respect to Whitehead, consequently, is whether he has accounted adequately for all that he himself appears to find in experience.

This is the same philosopher, it must be remembered, who wrote: "Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject of study" (FR 16). Could not somewhat the same charge be made against a philosopher who actively fills page after page to construct a metaphysics which leaves no place for real agents? For in excluding passivity from our experience, he has eliminated activity from the world -- at least any form of what might be called transient activity.

The question of whether we experience ourselves as passive leads therefore into its opposite: Do we experience ourselves as agents, i.e., as actively affecting and changing other things which relative to our action are passive? That we affect the course of history by what we become is not denied. And that this fact can be wholly accounted for by the Whiteheadian subject-object structure is also to be granted. But the question we are asking is whether experience does not also testify to ourselves as sources of action directed outwards to the world, that is, as engaged in an active doing and making that involves more than active self-creation. The point must be made that our doing and making in the sense indicated are at least as much a part of our experience as doing and making for a purpose. And it is to be noted that Whitehead himself appears to assert as much (SMW 130f). But once again when he comes to metaphysical theory, all activity dissolves into subjects prehending objects.

Perhaps it will be said that we do indeed appear to have the experience of being agents in the sense given above, but really what we experience is a phenomenon of a large-scale, highly organized entity, a phenomenon which on the level of the basic constituent entities could ultimately be explained purely in terms of subject and objects, entirely without recourse to agency. However, it is precisely this sort of "explaining away" of "widespread, recurrent experience" (PR 25f, SMW 268) that Whitehead himself finds repugnant. Obviously, there are certain factors of experience that are basic and the others, less basic, are to be explained in terms of these first. But when the account appears to distort some factor beyond recognition, the question must be raised as to whether the basic categories are not too narrow to embrace the whole of experience.

Could it be that Whitehead recognizes and insists on a very basic factor of experience but fails to capture it in a theory derived from factors less basic? The subject-object structure, as he himself indicates, stands out clearly only in the upper reaches of conscious experience. The lower levels bring something else into prominence: causal efficacy and subjective response. He insists, however, on understanding the latter entirely in terms of the former. In his concern to avoid reducing the higher to the lower, has he succumbed to the opposite temptation -- a reductionist theory in reverse? Despite his insistence on the primitive in experience and his remonstrances against Hume et al, for overlooking what is genetically prior (PR 85), did he not perhaps himself in the end rely too exclusively on what is characteristic of the upper echelons of experience to the point of losing much of what he had gained?

These questions bear on the very foundation of Whiteheadian metaphysics. What Whitehead wanted was "a more concrete analysis, which shall stand nearer to the complete concreteness of our intuitive experience" (SMW 97). The crucial question then is what precisely that experience reveals to us. If the general testimony appears to be that experience does indeed reveal passivity with respect to an active world (and for my part I am inclined to think it does), the Whiteheadian philosophy would have to face up to a charge of serious inadequacy -- an inadequacy moreover, not easily remedied, since the admittance of activity, in the Aristotelian sense, would result in total disruption of the Whiteheadian scheme. Whitehead’s own speculative system would thus appear to be but another case of "misplaced concreteness" (PR 11), and as such another target for philosophy functioning as "critic of abstractions" (SMW 86).

This, of course, is not to minimize Whitehead’s enormous contribution to speculative thought. He himself never claimed to have formulated the definitive system. On the contrary, he consistently reminds us that speculative philosophy is an ongoing adventure which is never finalized but "in which even partial success has its importance" (PR 14). Conscious of the tremendous novelty and scope of the Whiteheadian metaphysics, we might well agree that "[p] hilosophy never reverts to its old position after the shock of a great philosopher" (PR 16).

References

DA -- Aristotle, De Anima

NE -- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

M -- Aristotle, Metaphysics

P -- Aristotle, Physics

NOTES

1This way of being present in a subject, moreover, in no way contradicts what Aristotle has to say in the Categories. In that treatise he is saying that one substance cannot be present in another in the way an accident is present in a substance. In the De Anima we learn that in perception the object is present in the percipient insofar as its form is in the percipient. But the form is the form of the sensible object. It therefore has a twofold character: as form of the percipient it is an accident, but as form of the sensible object it introduces the other substance within the knower. This is how Aristotle distinguishes perceiving from merely being determined by a quality.

2 That is, sensing as the actualization not of matter but of a power of the soul; sensing as the reception of form without matter.

3 For a discussion of this way of understanding the reception of form ‘without matter, see my article "Sensing and the Sensitive Mean," The New Scholasticism 47/3 (Summer, 1973), 279-310.

Whitehead’s philosophy aims to approach the accurate expression of final generalities; his metaphysical categories are conceived as tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities. His candidate for the notion which best expresses this final or ultimate generality is "creativity." It is the "ultimate metaphysical conception," the "universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact" (PR 31). Since the world is, for Whitehead, actually in creation, actual entities are individualizations of creativity. As such they are primarily, completely existent. Eternal objects, in contrast, cannot exist in this "complete" sense, for they are not themselves in creation and so cannot "complete" themselves.

It does not seem to me to be the case, however, that "creativity" best serves as the concept of ultimate or final generality. It is not the concept which best expresses the most general perspective from which to view the world. "Creativity" is not generic with respect to every entity that Whitehead discriminates, It does not generically characterize "eternal objects," even though they are said to take part in the creative advance and are essential to it, They are not "actual" and are not in creation themselves. Only what is "actual" and in creation is generically characterized by the ultimate generality, This means that there are fundamental entities in Whitehead’s cosmology which are not species of the genus "creativity."

It is true, however, that as entities or elements in the creative advance, "actual entities," "eternal objects," and the other entities and elements discriminated by Whitehead have certain fundamental, general, or generic traits in common other than "creativity." Every element is complex, reflecting the category of the ultimate’s embodiment of the many ; every entity is unified and unique in some way, reflecting the category of the ultimate’s embodiment of the "one" (PR 31); every entity is ordered in the way that it is; and every entity is relational, i.e., each is related to other entities. This means that concepts which are more general, more pervasive, more generic than "creativity" prevail even in Whitehead’s own cosmology, viz., "complexity," "uniqueness," "unity," "relationality," and "order."

And yet Whitehead remains consistent to his doctrine that it is "creativity" that is ultimately generic or general. This is not to say that he is blind to the fact that other generic concepts prevail in his system. It is just that he fails to take them seriously, or that he considers them trivial in comparison to the ultimate concept. As he says about "order," for example, it is a "mere generic term" (PR 128).

This follows from his insistence that everything that exists in any way, exists in service to this creative advance. General concepts which fail to adequately reflect this essence are "merely generic" and not suited as ultimate generalities. Nevertheless, these generic terms are more general than "creativity," This is true, I submit, according to Whitehead’s discrimination of the elements which make up the world. Every element, for Whitehead, is complex, unique, unified, ordered, and relational. These terms generically characterize everything that is, It seems to me that if one takes Whitehead’s aim of ultimate generality seriously, one is forced to take these notions more seriously than does Whitehead.

Of course, to take these concepts as ultimately general, as opposed to "creativity," is to put Whitehead’s concept of the ontological priority of actualities in question. For if we imply thereby that reality as such is generically characterized as complexes which are unique, unified, ordered, and relational, we imply that whatever is complex, unique, unified, ordered, and relational is real and is as real as anything else. This is true if we have no other concept with which to grade reality in terms of its being more or less fundamental, but merely note that whatever is real is complex, unique, unified, ordinal, and relational. If Whitehead had taken his aim for generality as seriously as he takes his aim for a characterization of what he takes to be the essence of reality, he would have had to concede that actualities, as generically characterized by concepts which imply ontological parity, are no more real than anything else, for they are not more complex, unique, unified, ordinal, or relational than anything else. Should these concepts be taken as most general, then actualities cannot be seen as being ontologically prior to other entities, although they could be characterized as prior in some other way, e.g., as prior in the order of what is in creation, This order, it is true, is quite pervasive, but -- and this is the main point -- it is not, in Whitehead’s own terms, all-pervasive. It is not, therefore, ultimately general.

I learned a good deal about process theology and philosophy when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago in the late 1940’s. Also, Charles Hartshorne and later, Ivor Leclerc, were colleagues at Emory University, where I taught, for a number of years. But early in my career my own interests as a young New Testament scholar were in the sacred history point of view of Oscar Cullmann and Ethelbert Stauffer, and the existentialist point of view of Rudolf Bultmann, and in how to relate these two points of view fruitfully. My first work was in New Testament interpretation and theology. As time passed, I came to hope that process thought could offer a better way of relating the moments of time than that which I found in Cullmann and similar interpreters, while retaining the emphasis on decision that I found in Bultmann, without dissecting time into separate moments as he did.

In the early 1960’s I turned in earnest to process thought; my first "process" paper showed how an approach from a process perspective could take human creativeness more seriously than was the case in the traditional divine grace-human response pattern as it was usually developed ("The Motif of Fulfillment," TBS). Then I turned to the theme of hope, and in A House for Hope I showed how the urgent themes of biblical eschatology and human concern for history, as well as the weight of importance of the individual person’s life, could be reinterpreted from a process point of view. Something of the point of view of that book can be seen in the following quotation:

I have continued to-think about process thought and history since that time. In a recent paper I wrote:

II

Since I wrote the book on hope, I have come to appreciate more deeply a different approach to what I called the "indefinite totality which swallows up all concrete reality." A course of lectures by Masao Abe and John Cobb’s work on Christianity and Buddhism have shown me that the Buddhist concern with detachment and its grounding in the unformed nothingness or creativity out of which definite things emerge, offers a challenging alternative to the Christian focus on a principle of formation or rightness (God). In what follows I reproduce at some length a response which I wrote a few years ago to a paper by Professor Yoshinori Takeuchi. Since the present paper on process thought at the intersection of hermeneutics and theology was originally written for a Japanese audience, it seemed to me that an extensive reference to my response to Professor Takeuchi would be appropriate. The focus is on how a Whiteheadian perspective can bring into fruitful relation the Christian hope for the transformation of social structures and the Buddhist aim of detachment which frees us from suffering. I raised the question, what relation can we understand to exist between these two perspectives on the transformation of the conditions which result in suffering?

Typically, the Christian hope for the transformation of society expects to re-channel the energies of the members of society by appeal to a vision of a better world and by some program of structural reform which will embody in actual society some features of that vision. Though the doctrine of sin has loomed large in traditional Christianity, the assumption of social action has usually been that the vision of a better world and a new shaping of social structures will enlist people’s energies in a way that will free them from the self-serving "this is mine" which is so destructive a factor in the present world. (The term "this is mine" is taken from a paper on Minjung theology by Professor A. Sung Park of the School of Theology at Claremont, CA, USA.) The Buddhist, on the contrary, would make a radical freedom from any structures a first step; once one has recognized the pervasiveness of the negative factors, they can be re-entered, and transformed into their opposite. It is true that to a degree a vision of a better world does enter into Pure Land Buddhism in the form of a land or realm that is governed by the presence of the living Buddha. Nonetheless, we see a tendency of contrast between the two traditions in that Christian engagement with suffering tends to keep in view some alternative form or order of interrelationship, while the Buddhist vision tends to negate all forms of order at the deepest level.

Perhaps a process perspective can help us see a relationship here. If we look at Whitehead’s description of peace, we cannot help being struck by the various ways in which it approaches what Professor Takeuchi has said about peace of heart in Buddhism.

Peace, Whitehead tells us, has the effect of the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling, which arises from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. It comes as a gift. It is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction. Although decay, transition, and loss belong to the essence of the creative advance, peace is the understanding of tragedy, and at the same time its preservation. Peace is not engaged in concern about the future (AI Ch.20).

It is important to note how Whitehead saw at the foundation of action a peace which is in many ways analogous to the peace of heart of Buddhism. A deep kind of self-transcendence is common to both of them.

Yet we note that Whitehead’s discussion of peace lacks the powerful dialectic of negation and affirmation which is characteristic of Professor Takeuchi’s presentation. Peace for Whitehead is integrally involved in engagement with the quests for morality, for truth, and for beauty, liberating the seeker from narrow and self-serving aims in these quests. In a sense there is in Whitehead a dialectic of yes or no, in that the gift of peace comes as something beyond the specific quests while not denying their validity. Thus Whitehead believed that peace could hold in creative tension both the reach toward recognition of the formless ground of all existence ("creativity" in Whitehead’s terminology, "emptiness" in Buddhist language), and the relevance of form or order to all action (God is the source of order in Whitehead’s language).

Perhaps we could sum it up by saying that the Buddhist quest totally negates all form by relativizing it; this way leads to a freedom which is found through the path of total detachment. No underlying principle of beauty, truth, or moral order is exempt from this negation -- although in the Pure Land vision, an interrelated world of beauty, truth, and moral order is given back to the disciple in the vision of the Pure Land. In the Christian tradition, on the other hand, or at least in most of its forms, principles of order are seldom if ever so completely relativized. God as the principle of rightness is an ultimate. The actually-existing forms of order are not ultimate; but they do reflect an ultimate from which they are derived.

If we may follow the clue offered by Whitehead’s vision of peace, then these two traditions each need the other. The Christian tradition is all too prone to think that the believer can move directly into action. The unanalyzed energies of the believer are thought to be suitable to mobilize transforming actions in society, because it is assumed that those energies are (1) a response to fundamental patterns of order and (2) potentially, at least, expressions of a fundamental relatedness. This pattern provides a powerful and valid stance for confronting the destructive threats of technological society. Both the emphasis on relatedness, and the emphasis on response to patterns of order which are believed to have a transcendent source, are derived from a fundamental Christian vision of God as related and of God as the source of order. At the same time, this stance is tragically capable of being turned to destructive purposes. It is all too easy to think that the vision of order which comes to me is itself an appropriate response to the ultimate source of order. While the urge to attain the millennium has been a powerful motivation to action, it also has demonic potential, as a particular vision of order is projected as the ultimate and only valid one. The peace which is not dependent on any particular order can be a much needed corrective here.

Thus the Buddhist vision, which holds that permanent and inescapable features of existence -- transience and suffering -- cannot be evaded, but must be passed through, has much to teach Christians. But to affirm life’s positive possibilities, the interaction of the self which is freed from "this is mine" with the relatedness of human and of all existence is also essential if action is to assume a continuing responsibility. Here the Christian vision of God as the giver of order has much to offer (RT 6-8).

III

Another major interest of mine in process philosophy is Whitehead’s understanding of language, and how this understanding may be applied to interpretation. At the center of my interest is the way in which Whitehead recognizes that language is an arbitrary system, yet holds that we are not totally enclosed within language. The key to his thought is his separation of what is usually discussed under the head of "symbols" into two stages: symbols, which function in perception, and propositions, which function in decision and self-formation.

But, on the other hand, as I point out in another article,

Though there is increasing interest in this aspect of Whitehead’s thought, it is undeveloped in comparison with the study of his metaphysical theories. I believe that further study of Whitehead’s theory of language will be very important in dialogue with those who hold that our language is wholly enclosed within itself. This concern of mine relates, of course, to my interest in history and narrative. In a recent paper I have tried to show how a process point of view can enter into dialogue with contemporary French thought, and how the American black theologian Cornel West would have a stronger basis for his story of liberation in a process view than he has in the neo-pragmatism which he had adopted (VPT 63-80; 149-55).

I offer these comments on what process thought means to me in the hope that they show that process philosophy and theology are not restricted academic endeavors on my part. They also shape my life and faith. In recent years I have given a good deal of time to the Process and Faith Program of the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, a program which produces and distributes booklets, videotapes, and books which put process perspectives in lay people’s terms. The program is designed primarily to speak to lay people in the Christian churches.

References

HH -- William A. Beardslee. A House for Hope. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972.

JAAR47 -- William A. Beardslee. "Whitehead and Hermeneutic." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47 (1979): 31-7.

PS 12 -- William A. Beardslee. "Recent Hermeneutics and Process Thought." Process Studies 12: 65-76.

RT -- William A. Beardslee. "Response to Professor Takeuchi." Unpublished paper.

SHR24 -- William A. Beardslee. "Vital Ruins: Biblical Narrative and the Story Frameworks of Our Lives." Southern Humanities Review 24(1990): 101-16.

TBS -- William A. Beardslee. "The Motif of Fulfillment in the Eschatology of the Synoptic Gospels." Transitions in Biblical Scholarship. Ed. J. Coert Rylaarsdam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

VPT -- William A. Beardslee. "Christ in the Postmodern World," and "Camel West’s Postmodern Theology." Varieties of Postmodern Theology by David R. Griffin, William A. Beardslee, and Joe Holland. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.