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Surely one of the strangest twists in the adventures of Whiteheadian ideas is that a concept of God developed under the dictum that God must be the chief exemplification of metaphysical principles should find itself revised precisely on the grounds that it leads to an arbitrary disconnection of these principles. In A Christian Natural Theology John B. Cobb, Jr., contends that greater coherence is obtained if God be considered not as an actual entity, as Whitehead deemed necessary, but as a society of occasions such as obtains in living persons. The problem of God’s satisfaction, the difficulty of the prehension of contemporaries, and the means whereby the abstract primordial nature attains a relevance for a new occasion are all cited as leading to an incoherence which can be avoided if the idea of God is revised from an actual entity to a society of living Occasions.

I suggest that close attention to the necessity and the implications of the reversal of poles which Whitehead attributes to God’s actuality will prove that the above difficulties are pseudo-problems, arising only when the importance of the reversal of poles is not seriously considered. Since these problems are resolvable through Whitehead’s own model for God, the extensive revision of that model raises the possibility that the revision itself may violate the basic principles in the process scheme.

To develop these thoughts, I shall proceed with the necessity for the reversal of poles and then discuss the implications for concrescence which follow. These implications hold the answer to the problems raised by Cobb and also suggest the dangers entailed by the societal view.

I

Why the need for a reversal of poles in God? Why must God "originate" in the mental pole, conversely to every other actual entity? The answer rests with the requirement for an actual ground to the novelty which is experienced in the world. The initial aim of an occasion is always an aim toward novelty; the question, particularly acute in the case of high grade entities, is: what is the source of novelty?

Novelty cannot simply float into the universe out of nowhere; otherwise, the ontological principle, which has been the bedrock of Whitehead’s realism, is violated at its most crucial point. For "nothingness" would then become equivalent to a deus ex machina for the philosophy of organism, happily providing the novel possibility in the nick of time. Clearly, novelty requires a ground, a source in some actuality, if it is to be rationally incorporated into a philosophical understanding of experience.

Can novelty be understood as the natural fruit of the past? "No two actual entities originate from an identical universe" (PR 33); therefore, each occasion is a unique combination of elements from the past which have never before been experienced in actual togetherness. Is not this very uniqueness of the combination of factors from the past sufficient to account for the novelty of the emerging present? If the entities to be combined have never before been combined, then surely the combination in the present will naturally be novel. The reason for the novelty would then rest precisely in the actuality of the past.

But unfortunately, such an argument assumes what it must explain. For why has the past never been combined in just such a way prior to the novel combination of the present? The difficulty is that the past, in its own time of presentness, was itself unique. Its occurrence therefore added novelty to its own past, creating a new past for an emerging present. If one looks to the past in this way for novelty, one is involved in an infinite regress, for the novelty of the past must always be explained in terms of its own presentness. It is, then, no explanation at all. Why does each present occasion create a newness, such that it is a new combination of the past, and requires a novel combination in a future?

A different attempt to locate the source of novelty in the actuality of the past flows from the essential relatedness of all possibilities in an eternal hierarchy in the Whiteheadian system. In Whitehead’s delineation of eternal objects, he notes that each object is the very thing which it is by virtue of its pattern of relatedness to every other object. Each object, therefore, can be said to imply all others through these definite relationships. Should even one of these relationships be changed, the object itself would be replaced by quite another possibility -- and yet, strictly speaking, it could not be "replaced," for the second object under consideration is neither new nor a replacement in any sense. It is simply one of the other variant possibilities of relationships, existing in precisely that pattern from all eternity. There are as many objects as possibilities of relationships; each object, having a definite place in the pattern, implies all others.

Since, then, each possibility contains a necessary internal reference to every other possibility, is there not an entry point for novelty through this very relatedness? That is, an actual occasion demonstrates the ingredience of an eternal object which is itself related to all others. Could not an emerging occasion, utilizing hybrid prehensions, bypass an ingredient object manifested by its past, moving instead to an eternal object suggested by its implied presence through relatedness?

If this mode of entrance for novelty were in fact the case, then order would be inexplicable. For it implies that all things are possible for the emerging entity, that there is no possibility outside of the conceivable limits of the entity. If the infinite relatedness of eternal objects which obtains in the realm of possibility is effective through the agency of any and every entity, then the limitation of the past is no limitation at all. Real potentiality and sheer potentiality would be indistinguishable, and with the loss of distinction between them, order disappears as well. In its place random chance should be the nature of actuality, and in such a "world" novelty would have no meaning. For novelty presupposes order. Since, then, the availability of all possibility through the past, understood through the principle of essential relatedness which characterizes the realm of eternal objects, amounts to a theoretical dispensing of order, it cannot ground novelty.

If novelty is not wholly explicable in terms of the past, can it be understood in terms of the present? We have noted that insofar as the past allows novelty, it is because it itself manifested novelty within its own present -- perhaps, then, the present provides an explanation of novelty. Since the occasion is the manifestation of novelty, can it not be the "whence" as well as the "where" of novelty? Not in a Whiteheadian world: the occasion is not sufficient to originate the potential qua potential for the very reason that the occasion is evoked by the potentiality relevant to its becoming; the potentiality logically precedes the actuality in the sense that the new occasion is dependent upon possibility in order to become anything at all. In a process metaphysics there is no substance contemplating that which it shall become; there is only becoming as such. The possibilities, therefore, must be given for the production of a subject. The very becoming which is subjectivity is an active feeling of given possibilities relevant to a particular locus; it is a sifting, a contrasting, an evaluating which is in itself the transformation of possibility into actuality. The occasion therefore does not create the possibility; it actualizes the possibility, and its newness as actuality is just this transformation.

However, although the possibility is presupposed by the occasion, and hence is logically prior to the occasion, the actualized occasion is new, an actual event never before existent in the universe. Thus the presupposed novel possibility is not something contained by the past actual occasions; it transcends the past. Nor is it wholly accounted for through the present, for since it appears to evoke the present, it transcends the present as well. And novelty cannot be a function of the future, since the future, as nonactual, cannot provide the requisite agency. The reason for novelty must rest in "either the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence" (PR 36). Yet novelty can be accounted for neither by the past occasions nor by the concrescing entity, and in its transcendence of both past and present it appears to require timelessness.

There is a further consideration to the conundrum, if possibilities as pure possibilities transcend time. For they are only possible if there is an actuality to which they can conceivably relate. While actuality, as we have seen, depends upon possibility, it is also the case that possibility depends upon actuality; were nothing actual, nothing would be possible. The requirement then emerges that in order to account rationally for the presence of novelty there be in some sense a timeless actuality which is the ground of all possibility. This actuality must be timeless in order that all possibility shall be possible; without some such actuality there is only impossibility; with such an actuality there is infinite possibility -- infinite in that all things become possible. If all ‘things are possible, there would then be a sufficient and rational accounting for the novelty within the universe in full accordance with the fundamental ontological principle of the categoreal scheme; the reason for novelty rests within actuality.

Yet for this to be the case, coherence demands that this nontemporal actuality be fundamentally and integrally related to all possibilities in a way essentially different from that of the temporal occasions. For if indeed the actual entity in question is to ground all possibility, then the relationship to these possibilities must be eternal, and eternally open. Otherwise, there is no ground to the unlimited experience of novelty in the world. A temporal occasion closes possibilities; its very nature is the elimination of many possibilities in election of just one. The ground of possibility cannot exhibit this feature and still be conceivable as a ground of novelty. How, then, can this actuality which is so necessary be eternally related to all possibility?

The answer, of course, will lie in Whitehead’s reversal of poles in the understanding of God. An occasion originating in its feeling of other entities encounters an essential limitation in that unification requires elimination. The occasion feels a specific past which can only be coordinated on the basis of selective simplification. Manyness gives way to the one. Thus a physical origination cannot ground all possibility, since it necessarily requires elimination of possibility. The mental pole, however, even while it is the prime means of simplification, is also the route to novelty by virtue of its essential affinity for eternal objects. For through the mental pole, the occasion abstracts the ingredient objects from its feelings of the past, instigating the comparing process whereby it selectively achieves a new, unified possibility. If this route to novelty were not bound by the physical past, then neither would it be bound to elimination. Unification then would not be based on incompatible actualities, but on infinitely open possibilities which, as possible rather than actual, can exercise no real exclusion. An origination in the mental pole, therefore, offers an infinite openness to possibility.

Unification would still be necessary, of course, but since this unification requires no elimination, it would be an eternal valuation of all objects. Such a valuation provides unification since it would be the togetherness of what would otherwise be sheer multiplicity. The conceptual feeling for the infinite ways in which possibilities can be together is at once a valuation and a unification of the possibilities. As valuation, it exhibits the adjustments of aversion and adversion relevant to the various possibilities of combinations; as unification, it exhibits the ultimate togetherness of possibilities unbounded by actuality.

Further, the very actuality of the entity thus originating in its mental pole would require that the multiplicity of eternal objects be felt in an inclusively unified way. For finally, the mental pole is a unification of purposeful feelings; an origination in this pole cannot be a simple feeling of multiplicity, but it must be a unification of multiplicity. Therefore, an actual entity originating in its mental pole, such that it grounds all possibility, must be an "unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects" (PR 46). Since it is a valuation, the situation holds that the final result of a physically originated entity -- that is, the satisfaction which is the definite selective valuation of one possibility -- is now reversed to be the infinitely complex "beginning" of the mentally originated entity.

Novelty is grounded, therefore, in a nontemporal actual entity whose primordial origination exists through the "all-inclusive unfettered valuation" (PR 47) of all possibilities. The locus of sheer possibility, and the agency whereby novel possibilities evoke a new becoming, are rationally explained only through the existence of such an entity.

II

If the rational need to ground novelty in an actual entity demands the existence of a nontemporal entity originating primordially in a conceptual valuation of all possibilities, it is also the case that the coherence of the system demands that this unique entity shall nevertheless conform to all of the categories of explanation applicable to actual entities. That the entity originates in the mental pole is not an exception to the system; it is a completion to the system -- but to make this truly a completion, truly an integral and rational part of the whole, it is necessary that this entity manifest the categoreal requirements in a manner consistent with the reversal of the poles. If the entity were to act in precisely the same manner as all other occasions, the reversal of poles would be overlooked, and the entity would thereby be an arbitrary exception to the metaphysical principles. Therefore, the rational coherence of the system demands that the nontemporal actual entity concresce conversely to those occasions originating in the physical pole.

Such a reverse concrescence would exhibit the following features: satisfaction, which is the conclusion of an occasion, would belong to the primordial condition of God. The subjective aim, rather than leading toward satisfaction, would issue from satisfaction and would therefore naturally entail superjectivity as well. Further, these two aspects of satisfaction, e.g., aim and superjectivity, would result in an infinitely increasing physical pole, such that the reverse entity would move not from multiplicity toward a simplified though complex unity, as do the occasions, but from a complex unity toward an ever greater multiplicity. This concrescent multiplicity, in conformity with the essential unity of an actual entity, would be absorbed into the primordial unity in an everlastingly dynamic process. Satisfaction, aim, superjectivity, and unification would have to be understood as continuous terms rather than as temporally successive terms, in accordance with the internal, nonlinear "time" of concrescence.

I am maintaining, of course, that all of the unique features of Whitehead’s God -- those features which are cited as leading to incoherence -- are consistent, necessary, and therefore coherent within the system, since they are entailed by the reversal of poles and consequent reversal of concrescence. By taking three of these features -- satisfaction, aim, and superjectivity -- I hope to demonstrate how the three objections mentioned at the beginning of this essay are overcome.

The most obvious result of the reversal of concrescence is the primordial satisfaction. Perhaps this can be made clearer by demonstrating the comparison between Whitehead’s description of an occasion’s satisfaction and his description of the primordial nature of God.

Whitehead gives, in one of his many delineations of an occasion’s satisfaction, the following account:

Here the process of concrescence is stated in such a way that the two latter stages lead to what appears to be a final valuation of the eternal objects relevant to the occasion. But if the final satisfaction is indeed the result of the progressive gradation of eternal objects relative to the occasion throughout its concrescence (see PR 248), then the satisfaction is quite analogous to the primordial gradation in God:

The origination in the conceptual pole necessarily involves a primordial gradation of objects in such a way that they are adjusted in a unified togetherness of valuation. But this definite valuation is precisely the aim of every occasion as it moves from multiplicity to unity. And just as the achievement of this valuation is the satisfaction of the occasion, the primordial and eternal valuation in God is the satisfaction of God. Thus what is the end with the occasion is the beginning with God.

At this point we should consider the possible categoreal objection that a satisfaction cannot be a component in the process of a concrescence. For obviously if satisfaction marks the beginning with God and if God must be in concrescence, then satisfaction is a component in his concrescence. Does this mark a violation of the metaphysics?

There are two points at issue: first, a satisfaction which was a component in the process of an occasion would never truly be complete, for it would require successive modifications according to the new data made available through its relative effectiveness. But second, and underlying our first issue, is the violence done to the givenness of the past, and hence the whole analysis of process and relativity. The inclusion of the satisfaction in the occasion as a contributory component would amount to a return to a substance metaphysics; the process insights of a dynamic becoming would be replaced by reference to substances undergoing accidental changes. If satisfaction is to be included in the primordial nature of God, it can only coherently be done if at the same time it avoids such undermining dangers.

The dangers are avoided because of the very completeness of God’s primordial satisfaction. The difficulty of the changing nature of the satisfaction which would occur should it be a component of the occasion is due to the limited initial selectivity of the occasion. In its finitude, the occasion must negatively prehend many eternal objects in order to achieve its final complex unity. But if the occasion enjoyed the effects of its satisfaction, then previously irrelevant objects would move into relevance, and a necessary alteration would take place. Formerly negated eternal objects would require positive ingredience, "stubborn facticity" would give way to ambivalence -- each occasion in the past would thus lose its definiteness of valuation, and the givenness of the occasion as past would be overthrown.

But Whitehead quite explicitly states that God’s primordial nature is "infinite, devoid of all negative prehensions" (PR 524). Since God’s conceptual valuation involves every conceivable possibility, eliminating none through negative prehensions, there is no way in which the satisfaction of the envisagement can be essentially altered. In this case the satisfaction of God can be a component of his concrescent nature without requiring any deviation from the satisfaction or consequent change in its essential character. There simply are no new possibilities which could alter the satisfaction. Therefore, only when a satisfaction is concerned with the partial envisagement of a finite occasion would the fundamental principles of process break down; in the completeness of God’s vision such a breakdown cannot occur.

We earlier cited the objection against Whitehead’s conception of God on the grounds that God as an actual entity could never know satisfaction. Specifically, Cobb states, "In all other entities satisfaction is not attained except as the completion of the entity. If God is a single entity who will never be completed, then on this analogy, he can never know satisfaction" (CNT 189). Yet when the reversal of poles is taken into consideration, the problem disappears, for the satisfaction is then revealed to be primordial and hence eternal.

The second objection to consider is the relevance of God’s primordial envisagement for the finite occasions, or "the perplexing problem as to how the eternally unchanging primordial nature of God can provide different initial aims to every occasion" (CNT 179f). Like Cobb, we must approach this problem by insisting on the essential unity of God, or the actual integration which obtains between the primordial and consequent natures. But unlike Cobb, we do so not through the analogy of the living person, but through the requirements of a reversal of poles.

God is not first a primordial nature and then a consequent nature. The distinction is one of abstraction for the sake of analysis. In actuality the mental and physical poles are not divisible, since there is no actuality without both. Even so in the actual entity, God: in order that understanding can be clarified, we speak of a primordial nature in abstraction, as if it preceded the consequent nature in time. The priority is logical and foundational, not temporal: in actuality God is always primordial, always consequent; always in satisfaction, always in concrescence; always superjective, always prehensive. He is eternal and everlasting; necessarily so, as the reversed entity.

In the unity of the two natures, then, the satisfaction of God yields a subjective aim which "issues into the character of his consequent nature" (PR 524). What can this aim be? Whitehead speaks of it as an aim that "the subjective forms of the feelings shall be such as to constitute the eternal objects into relevant lures of feeling severally appropriate for all realizable basic conditions" (PR 134). This is further described as "the intensification of ‘formal immediacy’" (PR 135). "The prehension into God of each creature is directed with the subjective air" (PR 523), and "the wisdom of subjective aim prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system" (PR 525). There is a two-fold emphasis in these four statements; the first two show the aim in its direction toward the world, and the latter two indicate a return movement, from the world to God. The subjective aim might well be considered the satisfaction of God as manifested in a superjective nature and in a consequent nature: superjective in its influential appetition toward the world, and consequent in its prehension of the world, and in the integration of the prehended world into the unity of the primordial character (PR 529). This double movement of process, with its essential unity, provides the relevance of primordial envisagement for the world’s individual occasions.

If we understand the primordial satisfaction of God to be that of the togetherness of eternal objects in valuation, then we must know that this satisfaction is a supreme harmony. As Whitehead describes such a harmony in ‘the closing chapters of Adventures of Ideas, its integral components are zest, adventure, beauty, truth, and peace. These are not appendages to harmony, as if somehow the togetherness of objects in God’s vision could dispense with such elements -- harmony itself is a complex unity which is supremely achieved insofar as its component parts intensify and illumine one another. These qualities, in their reciprocity, exemplify togetherness. Insofar as God’s conceptual envisagement is the togetherness of all possibilities, it is the ultimate harmony.

When this satisfaction is translated into subjective aim, then the "intensification of ‘formal immediacy’" becomes an extremely illuminating description of the aim. Since harmony is achieved most intensely when a greater rather than a lesser number of possibilities are combined in complementary togetherness, intensification of immediacy signifies an aim toward complexity in the world, so that a "creative advance of nature" shall occur. God’s superjective aim requires that a twofold harmony of interrelatedness must develop: first, the microcosmic harmony of each occasion, in which the occasions are enabled to incorporate as many elements in harmonious togetherness as possible, and second, the macrocosmic togetherness of the individual occasions, so that the individually attained harmonies might be interwoven in each new becoming. This macrocosmic harmony becomes the basis for ever growing levels of microcosmic intensity.

The return phase of the subjective aim, wherein the microcosmic and therefore macrocosmic harmonies are unified with the divine harmony, demonstrates the relevance of the primordial satisfaction for the world. Whitehead describes this phase of God’s concrescence as an integration within God (PR 524), as the everlasting completion of God (PR 527), and as the source of relevance for the world (PR 532). How is this so? The primordial harmony is all-inclusive, yet it is associated with the abstractions of possibility. The integrating process whereby God interweaves the prehended world with his primordial satisfaction is the concretization of this satisfaction, the brilliantly moving experience of its reality. With each actuality prehended, however minute it might be, the beauty of God’s harmony is given determinate form, for possible relations yield to actual relations. By clothing each actuality with a subjective form derived from his primordial conceptualization, God feels the actuality in its ever-changing relationship to the whole of his nature (PR 523, 525). Since the whole of his nature is one of ever expanding actuality, no relationship within that nature is ever static: the satisfaction of God is one of dynamic harmony.

This integration of actuality with the primordial nature provides a dimension of "real potentiality" for further occasions in the world which goes beyond the "real potentiality" of the temporal past. This is because God feels a prehended occasion for what it can be in a perfected system -- not just "any" perfected system, but a definite system which is what it is fully as much by the inclusion of the new occasion as by all others. Beauty, zest, truth, adventure, and peace are not abstract in the integrated nature of God, but are concretely experienced in definite patterns of relatedness: given this actual occasion, this pattern of beauty is, in a continuously shifting panorama of feeling. In this concrete experience of integration, the realized pattern is composed of the occasion’s own relatedness to its temporal past, and the conformation of this occasion, with this past, into the whole complex of God’s satisfaction. The occasion is related to all possibilities through the subjective form with which the occasion is clothed in God (PR 523). Given this integration, then, God feels the occasion, its past, and the finest potentialities this occasion renders possible for a temporal future. The relevance for the world is precisely in this feeling, for it is nothing less than an appetition for the future of the world. Thus it passes superjectively into the world as the evocation of a new intensity, a new occasion. Calling forth a specific new occasion, this feeling of appetition is the most relevant and the most real potential for that occasion -- it is received as the initial aim.

Thus a nascent occasion inherits its real potentiality not only from its finite past, but from God’s feeling for it as a possible future. "God has objective immortality in respect to his primordial nature and his consequent nature" (PR 47). This double influence, attained through the integration of the world with the primordial vision, renders the satisfaction of God, and hence the subjective aim, immediately relevant to a concrescing world. This relevance depends upon a reverse concrescence, for it assumes a fullness of satisfaction which is then manifested in an ever changing form of determinate actuality.

This brings us to the final objection being considered here, which is the ability of an occasion to prehend an everlastingly concrescent God. The difficulty is not with God’s prehension of the world, since he only prehends an occasion upon its completion. His evocation of a nascent occasion is appetition, and not prehension. But it is another matter concerning the occasion’s prehension of God, for if "the process occurring within an occasion has no efficacy for other occasions" (CNT 188), how is it that God’s internal integration can be causally efficacious? How can an occasion prehend an initial aim which derives from the activity of God’s concrescence?

Efficacy depends upon determinateness. An actual occasion acquires efficient causation when that occasion is fully realized, complete, decided, determinate: as such, it imposes an obligation upon the future. This state of efficacy is objective immortality and is the superjective aspect of the occasion’s satisfaction. We maintain that it is determinateness which allows causal efficacy, rather than the pastness of concrescence as such. An occasion’s internal concrescence is not an object for another occasion’s direct prehension precisely because this internal nature, as indeterminate, is not yet given. How can that which is not given be an object for prehension? Determinateness is required.

Given the primordial satisfaction of God, God satisfies the requirement of determinateness. In his origination through the mental pole, God’s satisfaction is primordially definite; in his process of concrescence, that definiteness simply manifests itself as a continuously moving determinateness. Since determinateness is necessary for objectification, there is no categoreal reason why God may not be prehended by an occasion, despite the fact that his concrescence is everlasting, and hence "with" all occasions. His conceptual beginning and satisfaction make all the difference in this regard.

In summation, the reversal of poles entails a concrescence which in every respect moves conversely to the world. This reversed concrescence, wherein satisfaction issues into a superjective aim, allows a relevance of God to the world, an availability of God to the contemporary world, and the everlasting completion of God through his unification of the world with his primordial satisfaction.

We suggested earlier that to overlook the necessity and implications of the reversed concrescence, and to make God more analogous to occasions within a living society, entailed the possible danger of making God an exception to the metaphysical principles of process philosophy. The prime difficulty is that a reversal of poles requires an everlasting concrescence which is incompatible with the succession of concrescences required by the societal view. If an entity originates in a reversal of poles, then it must move from one to many in an increasingly complex unity. A primordial satisfaction necessarily requires, through its superjectivity, a concrescence toward ever greater complexity. The concrescence must be everlasting, since there can be no end to the superjective nature of an all-inclusive valuation of possibilities. To deny the everlasting nature of the concrescence, therefore, requires an equal denial of the reversal of poles. But once this is denied, we have undercut the very route to the rational completion of the process understanding of reality, for we have ‘then eliminated the only rational understanding of novelty. Novelty requires the admission of an entity whose primordial origination is conceptual, but such an entity must then be everlastingly concrescent -- and everlastingly one.

References

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

We women are weavers -- makers of things from the stuff at hand. The image is an old one, calling up visions of women with spindles and looms, taking raw cotton or flax or wool and turning it into a refined thing for cultural use. Beauty, too, was woven into the final product, witnessing not only to the pragmatism of the work, but to the sense in which the soul of the weaver found its way into the finished object. We women are weavers. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that we turn to ideas in a weaving way, seeing them, too, as raw material for cultural use. To work with ideas, weaving them together, impressing them with beauty from the knowledge of living -- such an impulse drives the thinking of those whose very being remembers the weavers.

I would like to weave two ideas together, pulling these ideas into the fabric of human existence. The resulting cloth, I hope, will have dimensions of both beauty and cultural usefulness: the beauty of a vision of wholeness, emphasizing an awareness as well as the actuality of interdependence, and the usefulness of guiding action toward an approximation of the vision into a more just society. The materials for this weaving are feminist theology and process theology. While I call only indicate here portions of each, my hope is that this will be sufficient to set others, too, to weaving with these ideas, checking the resulting cloth for the making of a mantel which will not only clothe society, but also mold society toward its shape.

Feminist theology, of course, is a special instance of liberation theology, taking its place in the liberation camp as the call to reexamine modes of theology which suggest or enforce the inferiority of half the human race. To be sure, many will rush to the defense of prevailing theologies of women, crying that the conferred status of women is not at all inferior, just a different mode of superiority -- or possibly, in less enthusiastic moments, a different mode of equality. In our culture this incidentally entails lower pay for equal work, fewer job opportunities, the exclusion of women from highly valued professions until very recently, and persistent questioning of the appropriateness of women occupying high office in church, government, or business. Such discrimination on the professional scene is paralleled brutally by the light regard which society has traditionally held toward crimes against women such as wife-battering or rape.

While the situation is changing, the changes are slow and often problematic. For example, it is great progress that academically there is official recognition of the importance of the study of women’s historical, literary, and cultural experience and work. But often if one listens carefully one hears a faint sigh of relief in the academy over the establishment of a "Women and Religion Section" among scholars, or a "Women’s Studies Department" in colleges or universities. The pesky question of women need not permeate the academy after all, but can be relegated to the new kitchen in the academy, where women play with the pots and pans of their ideas. There is ambiguity even in our progress.

One might object that these are cultural problems rather than theological ones. What is feminist theology? Feminist theology holds to the insight that there is a deep connection between our societies and our theological visions. In the reciprocity between the two, theological vision not only reflects a societal perspective, but also reinforces and shapes it. There is a deep sense among feminist theologians that to seek changes in society requires making changes in our theological visions as well. When theology supports and encourages the idea of woman as childlike, or as the source of evil, or as possession, or as primarily emotional and not overly given to intelligence, as essentially dependent, then feminists claim that theology is at that point invidious and simply wrong. Feminist theologians investigate and challenge the negative aspects of theology vis-à-vis women. Moreover feminist theologians work toward the building a of more holistic theology, one which reflects the reality rather than the lip-service of justice among all peoples. Feminist, black, and third-world critics of theology together point to the way injustices are woven into the prevailing theologies. Feminist, black, and third-world theologians call for the ideological as well as social redress of these injustices, certain that the justice of the Reign of God, which judges the church is not to the advantage of a privileged class or corner of the world Rather, the justice of God sees to the well-being of all within the context of the well-being of nature. The whole earth is the realm of God’s justice. While there is a sense of praxis -- that theology emerges out of right action -- in all three modes of liberation theology, there is also the awareness that right action is called right on the basis of a preceding vision of justice.

In feminist circles, there is an interdependent network of women working on various fronts of feminist theology, some with a stronger emphasis upon action and others along the scale working with the shaping of the ideas which shape us. The spectrum extends to women such as Mary Daly, whose approach is to see to the creation of a feminist society. She develops a strong critique of traditional theology and religion, constructing a feminist spirituality in its stead. Her strong criticism of Christianity in her first two books, The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father, gives way to an absolute repudiation of Christianity in her next two books, Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust.¹ Yet Beyond God the Father concludes with a call for a female messiah, and there are certainly grounds to speculate that this call is answered in the next two books by Daly herself. The vicarious suffering from the universal sins against women and the subsequent movement into the new life of feminist community strongly echo central Christian themes, and the apocalyptic setting in the midst of a death-loving and death-dealing patriarchal culture increases the parallel. However, despite the implicit Christian presence through such symbolism, the works are explicitly anti-Christian in their intent. They typify one strong thread of feminist thought.

A different mode of feminist theology is represented by Dorothee Sölle. In many works, but particularly in Political Theology,² she constructs a powerful and active political theology under the rubric of seeking the indivisible salvation of the whole world. The roots of the theology are explicitly Christian, with the force of development reaching toward an increasingly comprehensive vision of justice.

Still other feminist theologians concentrate on the texts of our tradition, seeking to find within the texts themselves an alternative and more constructive view of women. Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza³ and Phyllis Trible⁴ are outstanding representatives of such work. Out of their scholarship they provide material for women to find both rootedness and transformation within the Christian tradition. All feminists, of whatever camp, seek both to understand the world and to change the world, working from a criterion of wholeness and the interdependence of all on this earth.

Particular targets of concern in feminist theology are patriarchal assumptions of pre-established graded orders of being, and the concomitant notion that each grade of being is inferior and subservient to all orders above it, and free with regard to responsible rule toward all orders beneath it. A closely related theological notion involves an anthropological dualism between mind (superior) and body (inferior), intellect (superior) and emotions (inferior). Of course feminists also decry the corollary symbolism whereby man is seen essentially as mind and intellect, while woman is seen essentially as body and emotion. Feminists also call for reexamination of the notion of sin in traditional theology, noting that definitions of sin as pride and sensuousness do not reflect women’s experience of sin and are actually antagonistic toward the development of women. Finally, there is an adamant insistence by feminists that God is not "internally, supernally, eternally" male. All ofthese concerns together yield yet another fundamental position of feminist theologians: theology is relative to experience. Theologies in principle cannot be universal nor command universal assent. Deep in the heart of every theology is a perspective rooted concretely in a very particular human experience. Even and especially our thoughts of God are woven not only from our texts, but from ourselves. Thus the dicta of theology can in no way be deified.

My intent is to weave with two strands of thought, not one, so I now turn to an equally brief description of the second stand, process theology. The first and foremost insight of process thought is that to exist is to be in relation, and that relationships are internal, not external, to existence. Because of this, existence is a process of becoming, and not a steady-state reality. Also because of this, all existence is interdependent. Finally because of this, thought emerges from feeling. To begin to describe the "why and how" of these statements is to begin the weaving process with feminist theology.

To exist is to be in relation; relation is internal to existence. This point is perhaps best explained by being illustrated through the type of personal experience which sadly enough occurs to all of us at some time or other. I refer to the phenomenon of loss through death. Recently my mother died. Our relationship had been deep and rich, but now she is absent to me. I always used to think that in the death of someone we love, a part of the self dies, too, because the self called into existence by the other is no longer so called. Like some untended vine, that portion of the self withers, finally to die with the other. But I think now I was wrong, because it is not like that at all. It came as a perplexity to me the first time I tried to say, "I loved my mother," because the past tense of the verb seemed simply wrong: I still love my mother. But she is no longer there in person to evoke that loving, and love is most certainly relational. What does it mean, that the immediacy of loving survives death? I do not mean that sentimentally but ontologically. What does it mean when love continues beyond the time of its reciprocity or evocation by the other?

From a process point of view, I think the experience simply witnesses to the internality of relations. The love that was between my mother and me was not an external between, like telephone wires covering the distance between our two cities. It was an internal between, a creation of and within the self. To be sure, the love was evoked by my mother, but also by myself in response to her. The loving was not static, but changing over time. To love included not only the vagaries of circumstances -- annoyance, anger, pleasure, laughter -- but the growth from a childhood emotion, through all the changing years of becoming womanhood, to that which finally emerged in these last twenty years as an ever-deepening friendship. The love was not external to me, but rather a name I gave to a certain constitution of myself. Loving my mother became part of my character, one might say. My mother had every reason in the world to "take it for granted" that I loved her, because the loving had simply become part of who I am. But that part is integrated with the whole in such a way that it affects other relations and is affected by other relations in the interiority of who I am. Loving my mother turns out to be a complexity of relationships rather than the single relationship between my mother and me. This integration of relationships means that love continues beyond death of the one loved.

The experience of this integration and its import for continuing love took place in the following way. My brothers and I and my children all developed a new closeness around our mutual loss. It seemed that when the love from my mother no longer fed our daily realities, there was an intensification of the in-pouring love for each other from each other. The love ordinarily channeled to our mother/ grandmother now more intensely qualified the love each gave to the others; receiving such love reinforced the ongoing and living quality of loving my mother.

The experience has brought the following observations. The habit of loving my mother continues in me, but with her death there is a new qualification to the love. First, it carries the name of grief relative to her absence, and second, it adds new depth to the love I give my brothers and children. Just as love for my mother moved through various forms in my growing and adult years, it now has moved to yet this new form. But now here is the thing: the love is not separate from who I am, not something I "have," like baggage one could put down and take up. Were that the case, there would be no such phenomenon as grief¹! Nor in its internality to me is love like some optional treasure I carry around clutched in some psychic hand. It is not something I have, but something I am -- with the "am-ness" of it dynamic, rooted in a past and reaching into a future.

If this reflective account of the experience of love and loss carries any power of familiarity, then it can convey a sense of the central process image. Existence is relational; relations are internal to who we are, and our weaving response to relations becomes the history of our becoming. Relationships intertwine our existence, qualifying each other and intensifying each other according to the creative responses and purposes of each of us.

On an ontological level, process thought suggests that this experience of human existence as relational is not an exception to all other forms of existence, but is an exemplification of what existence is about. We are experience become conscious of itself; this consciousness can function as a light to illumine the rest of the world. It shows us not an alien place, but our own home, a world of which we are part, in deepest continuity. "Dust thou art . . ." says an old text, and process thought simply affirms our continuity with all the world. All existence, like our own, is taken to be constituted through relation and response; all existence is dynamic; all existence is interdependent through the process of relationship.

The interdependence of all existence rather than only some aspects of existence follows from the reality of intersecting circles of relationship. Each point of existence has a certain ring of primary influences, but each of those primary influences has its own ring of influences which partially overlaps and partially extends beyond the circles of the others. Influences from beyond one’s immediate sphere are nonetheless mediated to one through those that are close. Human experience can illustrate the point: a friend may be upset over an accident which has occurred to a cousin. While I may never have known the cousin, I am affected by that cousin’s plight as I interact with my friend. The principle is that influences are in some cases direct, but in far more cases indirect, mediated through primary sources. In the interconnectedness of relation, everything eventually affects everything else. For how can we delineate the boundaries of relation? If relationships are internally constitutive of existence, then sooner or later everything affects everything! To be sure, the effect is variable in impact and in importance, and we grade the order of importance according to our own purposes and proximities. A mother is far more important to us than, for example, some tree a continent or so away. Of course, if there is enough pollution in the air, and that tree along with the forest in which it stands begins to die and is impeded in its production of oxygen, then we might call our relation to that tree quite important indeed. Everything affects everything else in a relational world.

My brother, a physicist, puts it in a rather poetic way: "You are stardust," he says, meaning quite literally that our very bodies are dependent upon unperceived but nonetheless inexorably effective relationships communicated throughout the universe. We are stardust! Existence is relational, and relations are drawn from all the universe, and are internal to what each reality is and who we are. But if all existence is relational, then who and how and what we are likewise has an effect upon all else in the universe -- some maximally, and most minimally, but an effect nonetheless. It matters, this becoming of ours, and not only to and for ourselves. We actually make a difference in the whole of this awesome universe.

There are deep implications for responsibility in such an understanding. If everything which exists has an effect upon us, then cannot we say that the whole universe is in some respect responsible for the context which so powerfully shapes us? But if our own becoming is our response to the universe of relation, and if we in our own purposive stance do what we can and will, then are not we, too, in some measure responsible to the whole universe? Ah, how marvelously large that is -- large enough to be either overwhelming or totally meaningless, for in saying so much, what can it mean? But see again, as in the illustration with my mother: our rings of responsibility are strongest toward those in our immediate circle of relation, yet inexorably, like the rings from a pebble spreading out until they touch the shores of the whole pond, our responsibility too continues to ripple through this pond of our world -- and universe. We are involved in gradations of responsibility, but responsibility nonetheless.

I have alluded to our continuity with all nature, or the sense in which relationality is fundamental to all existence. The human difference is not in terms of the dynamics of existence, but in terms of the intensity of that dynamic. Intensity signifies the sense in which many quite different relationships, each with its different effect, are nonetheless integrated positively within the becoming experience. The alternative, of course, would be the attempt to negate or minimalize most of the bombarding relations, allowing few to realize their fullest influence in the becoming experience. Intensity invites and produces consciousness as the mode of integration. Relationships themselves are not conceptual abstractions, but the primacy of this, affecting me here, now: raw feelings. Since relationships are them selves mediated through feeling, one can say also that feeling gives rise to thought. From the intensity and complexity of the many feelings in the depths of us, thought is pushed into existence.

For example, to understand what happens in love and in grief, must not abstract myself from my experience, but think my way into my feelings, wherein lies the source of thought. From feeling, thought emerges. Feeling is not antithetical to thought, but its root and possibility. Often Shakespeare’s King Lear seems to me to be one the finest illustrations in literature of this reality. The mad Lear is wandering on the moor, clutching a devastating letter, and he encounters the blind Gloster. When Lear asks Gloster to read the letter, and Gloster protests that he is blind, Lear exclaims, "Yet you see how this world goes!" "I see feelingly," replies Gloster. True knowledge involves the integration of feeling into thought. And feelings are the received data of the world, complete with emotional coloration which converge in myriad ways to produce the reality of our world and ourselves.

To summarize: to exist is to be in relation; relations are internal to existence; they are dynamic and hence push the creation of temporality and history. Relational existence embraces the universe in inter dependence and therefore mutual responsibility. Relational existence is mediated by feelings, which give rise, within the supporting context of the body, to thought.

These are some of the basic tenets of process thought, and it should be apparent why process theologians often feel drawn to liberation theologies. To perceive oneself existing interdependently in the world calls for responsible thought and action toward injustice anywhere in the world. I am affected by it and affect it. When in fact I have benefited from injustice through wealth or privilege, I am to that degree responsible for the perpetuation of the injustice. To sense is to move toward a different exercise of responsibility, which is to say one which seeks to change the situation of the world in the direction of justice.

John B. Cobb, Jr., has probably taken the strongest action in exercising such responsibility within process circles, since for well over a decade he has addressed himself toward issues of the well being of our planet. His steady movement into political theology is explicit in his writings of the past few years.⁵ Schubert Ogden and Delwin Brown are likewise deeply involved with issues of liberation theology.⁶ Ogden probes the distinction between witness and theology, inquiring into the theology of freedom which undergirds and springs from the witness to liberation. Delwin Brown, likewise, has’ listened deeply to the call of liberation theology, seeking to elucidate the history of the notion of freedom which is now embodied in liberation thought and action.

Perhaps the most striking correlation between process and feminist modes of thought appears when one considers the extensive research of Carol Gilligan, who is not a theologian, but associate professor of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. While working with Kohlberg in the early Seventies on this ground-breaking study of moral development, she noted that girls and women were consistently graded as less moral than boys and men. The standard for judging moral development was developed from the experiences and reflections of the male investigators -- a perfectly good procedure, save that the masculine experience was not seen as a variable in the study, but a norm. What if women are not inferior morally, but simply perceive reality differently from men and develop moral vision accordingly? So long as masculinity is not viewed as a variable, this possibility would escape the observer. Gilligan began exploration of her thesis in what became a ten-year study culminating in her work, In A Different Voice.⁸ In this book some of the affinities between process and feminists become clear. Gilligan’s studies demonstrate that the sense of connectedness, not separation, is paramount in women’s experience from infancy onward. While men develop a morality based on individuation and impartial justice, women develop morality based on interdependence, mutual responsibility, and caring. Instead of viewing one model of morality as superior and the other as inferior, Gilligan advocates valuing both in mutual conversation -- thus, of course, embodying in her own conclusions the development she has traced in her studies of women.⁹ There is a remarkable accord between what Gilligan cites as women’s experience and the ontology of process philosophy. For my own part, the initial impact of process philosophy on me was to produce a cry of relief: at last, a philosopher saw the world the way I experienced it! Whitehead s powerful conceptuality has been for me since then my language for expressing the world.

Given these strands of feminist and process modes of thought, what kind of garment can be woven? Let me play with the metaphor by noting that garments come in sizes. Big, small, good fit, loose fit -- garments are not abstract, they are to be tried on, worn, worn out, mended, patched. The weavings of thought are like a garment, woven from experience, for experience. The garment will fit some, and not fit others; it can survive many wearings, and be adapted to new times, or it can wear out beyond patching in a relatively short time. Both process thought and feminist thought call attention to the garment-like nature of our views of the world and even ourselves; thought is relative to its context. If calling attention to the interdependence and inter-responsibility of existence is the first important result of the weaving of process and feminism together, a second important result is the very fact of calling attention to the garment-like nature of our modes of thinking.

Thus one of the challenges and contributions of the weaving is to note the relativity of our thought to our context. Feminist theology in particular notes that the hearing of women’s voices shows the perspectival masculinity which has colored and determined the garment called theology. Assumptions drawn from male privilege and pride have been projected onto God and society, and declared to be absolute. We have had pious pretensions, I think, that whereas other modes of thought -- physics, sociology, psychology -- certainly reflected limitations of viewpoint, somehow theology, incorporating divine revelation, escaped relativity of perspective. Theology, we may have thought, is more like mathematics, like a word from above, transcending our histories, breaking into our times, so that it speaks of God clearly. Theology has often been thought to mediate absolute truths. No, say feminists. There is a little sadness in the saying -- absolute truths are so clean-cut, so unambiguous, so pretty. The feminist critique unveils the implicit masculinity that has threaded its way throughout theological formulations, showing that theology, too, is bound by relativity of perspective. We may indeed see God in and through our theologies and texts, but only through the stuff of our own existence woven into the seeing. It is a garment we have produced, not a universal truth. The garment, like all garments, will fit some, and not fit others. Should garments be thrown out, then, because they do not fit everyone? Ah, then we should freeze in the winters of our loneliness! Better we should simply adjust the fit and see to helping others as they, too, weave their mantels.

To know the garment-like nature of thought is to receive a new kind of theological freedom. Again, let me illustrate from my own experience. Before I began the study of theology, I had the entire world figured out. I knew the divine mind and the divine plan and the whole scheme of things. My theology then was not like a garment, but like a thing of crystal which encased me -- rigid, ungiving. One day while pushing a baby carriage down the street I was contemplating the eternal verities and the population explosion, and it suddenly occurred to me that out of about four billion people in the world it was very odd, even ludicrous, that I out of all the billions should be right on so important a point as the fundamental nature of the universe. A crack appeared in the crystal. And one thing led to another, and soon I was leading a Bible study among my neighbors, good women, from many traditions -- Catholic, Protestant, and simply secular. These women provided a spectrum of some of the world’s problems. Vi’s baby had died when only eight months old; Anne, who was about to return to school for her longed-for masters, had just been told that she had multiple sclerosis; Mary’s grown son was institutionalized for a severe mental disorder, with no realistic hope of recovery. A neighbor boy had randomly dropped a plastic bag of water from the overpass on a nearby interstate, killing the random motorist. Ordinary problems, raising ordinary questions of evil, meaning, life, death. But my answers did not fit my neighbors’ questions. How could that be? And the sound of the crystal cracks increased. So I threw away my all-of-the-answers Bible Study Guide, and stayed only with the text. Even there I could not seem to see single answers. One dark night I woke from a terrible dream which was more than a dream, continuing into my waking. The crystal theology surrounding me, protecting me from the world, had cracked completely and crumbled, falling in tinkling shards to my feet. Now there was only darkness, and I was falling through it, only there was no place to fall. No walls, no bottom, no ceiling -- no God. God had crumbled with the crystal, and I no longer knew the divine mind nor the divine plan. This was all a long time ago -- certainly long before I became a feminist, or knew of process theology -- and if I had, I would have thought it heathen! But I still remember the agony of that night. And I remember its profoundly simple resolution. There came over my frightened spirit the sense that the darkness was God. I had fallen out of "faith" and into God. Or, to put it into more accurate theological language, I had moved from faith in my ideas about God to faith in God. Much later I read a famous little book’s concluding lines, "God is the God who appears when the God of theism disappears," and I recognized in Tillich’s words a commentary on that earlier, life-changing experience.

A feminist/process theology, speaking from the rootedness in interrelationship which permeates all our existence, threatens to put cracks in our cherished certainties concerning the absoluteness of our belief systems. That is a very uncomfortable experience. To unveil the deep-spread andromorphism in our God-talk and in all our theologies is to manifest the relative, conditioned nature of our theologies. Hearing from the black and third-world theologians of the cultural advantages and cultural oppressions wrought through our theologies underscores again the relativity of theological thought. Such recognition calls for a new strand to be woven into our theologies, the strand of humility. It calls for a critique of theological ideas not only from the stance of inner logic, or conformity to the norms of text and tradition, but a critique fashioned as well from the variety of voices on this planet so that we might better see the projections of ourselves which we have woven into our understanding of God. It calls for theology to lose its abstractness, and to view itself as the garment woven of our experience.

The freedom from the burden of absolute knowledge is the freedom to play with theological ideas, to experiment, to test, to listen to differences with interest rather than a sense of threat. In such freedom the circle of positive influences widens rather than narrows, and the very stuff of one’s thinking is enriched immeasurably. While such theology indeed speaks of God, God is not reduced to the theology -- and in fact is seen more to be the ground of faith which produces the very impulse and delight in that garment of theological vision.

What to do with a theology which is only a garment? Why, wear it, of course -- and in the wearing, to test it. It will require all the washings and mendings and maybe finally even quilting into the past which is appropriate to garments. And when our garment has been woven not only with our own stuff, but with strands given to us through the other’s experience (and in this relational world, such a situation is unavoidable; it is only a question of how we will weave that other’s experience into and with our own), then our garment might begin to reflect the richness of this world’s community. Properly clothed, we might find the energy to work for the richness of well-being of the whole planet, that others, too, might have the liberty, strength, and wherewithal to weave their own garments. In my own perspectival, relative way, I rather think that God intended us thus to wear our theologies all along.

Women, you see, are weavers. So we take thoughts fashioned out of the stuff of our own lives, out of the gifts of others, such as Whitehead, and weave them into a different wholeness. In the weaving is a vision of a world woven together in full community. Perhaps the weaving of our ideas and the weaving of our world are finally only two aspects of the same task.

Notes

1Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). Gyn/Ecologys The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).

2Dorothee Sölle, Political Theology, trans. John Shelley (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974).

3 Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her (New York: Crossroads Publishing Co., 1984).

4 Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).

5John B. Cobb, Jr., Process Theology as Political Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982).

6 Schubert M. Ogden, Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liberation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979).

7 Delwin Brown, To Set at Liberty: Christian Faith and Human Freedom (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1981).

8 Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

I. Introduction

The central concepts concerning consciousness that I shall try to defend in my part of this dialogue have already been presented in some detail (15; 16; 17; 18; 20; 21; 22). I shall accordingly review them only in brief outline, devoting the bulk of the discussion to various peripheral aspects and implications that have previously had less emphasis. At the outset let me make it clear that when I refer to consciousness what I mean is that kind of experience that is lost when one faints or sinks into a coma. It is the subjective experience that is lacking during dreamless sleep, that may be obliterated by a blow on the head, by anoxia, or by pressure on the inner walls of the third ventricle during brain surgery. On the positive side we can include as conscious events the various sensations elicitable by a local electric current applied to the unanesthetized brain, or the pain of a phantom amputated limb, as well as most of our waking subjective experience, including self-consciousness.

I want to emphasize, however, that I shall not be concerned particularly with self-consciousness any more than with the consciousness of other selves or with that of external objects, situations, and events. Self-consciousness is a separate story in itself. Neither shall I be trying to define different forms of consciousness, nor intermediate states between full awareness and the subconscious or the unconscious. My arguments can all be referred to some clearly accepted and preferably simple example of conscious experience: like seeing red, or hearing a musical tone, or feeling pain. The problem is difficult enough in its simplest and clearest formulation without introducing the confusion of borderline states. I assume that if we can find an answer to the mind/brain problem in its simplest form we shall then be able to apply the basic concepts to the more complex aspects.

For the sake of further clarification let me specify that I shall address myself throughout to the problem of the nature of consciousness and the mind/brain relation as it is present in other people’s brains primarily, rather than in my own brain. This hopefully avoids various logical entanglements that arise otherwise. This starting move is based on the assumption, of course, that other people’s brains do have consciousness much like my own. Those who are not willing to accept this assumption have, I suspect, a separate problem all their own. I am not trying to avoid entirely by this step questions concerning the privacy of conscious experience. A number of different approaches to this important privacy, or first-person, property of consciousness are recognized, and I will try to outline later in context the explanation to which my own position leads.

Perhaps the quickest way to center in on our current interpretation is to compare it broadly with others. We can start by saying that our does not belong among positions based on dualism, epiphenomenalism, or other parallelisms. We can bypass as well the radical behaviorist refusal to consider the problem and also various sophistries and epistemological gymnastics that would make it just a pseudoproblem or explain it away as unimportant or nonexistent. We can also bypass the traditional materialism of the hard-core reductionistic and dialectic varieties. Our position does not accord either with the interpretation of subjective experience as just an inner aspect of the one material brain process. It is further distinguishable from the so-called "identity theory," that version of materialism which stresses that mental phenomena are identical with the neural events (3). This view does not correlate consciousness with language particularly. Finally, it is in disagreement with the position known as panpsychism in which every individual entity in the universe is held to possess consciousness or psychic properties of some sort.

II. An Emergent Theory

On the positive side our present view can be classified broadly as an emergent theory of mind that needs to be distinguished from other emergent theories which have been advanced previously mainly by the Gestalt school in psychology. It differs from these latter in several respects. First, the phenomena of subjective experience are not thought to be derived from electrical field forces or volume conduction effects, or any metaneuronal by-product of cerebral activity. Our view relies on orthodox neural circuit and related physiological properties (9; 17). Second, there is no assumption of an isomorphic or topological correspondence between the events of perceptual experience and corresponding events in the brain. I have conceived the mental properties to be functional derivatives that get their meaning from the way in which the brain circuits and related processes operate and interact rather than in terms of isomorphic correlations (17; 19). Reference to spatiotemporal patterning" of brain activity is safe as far as it goes, but this term fails to connote the operational derivation of the conscious properties that I have tried to emphasize. Third, the conscious subjective properties in our present view are interpreted to have causal potency in regulating the course of brain events. The mental forces or properties, that is, exert a regulative control influence in brain physiology. The subjective conscious experience on these terms becomes an integral part of the brain process rather than a correlated phenomenon as conceived by Kohler (4) and others. The mental events are causes rather than correlates. In this respect our view can be said to involve a form of mental interactionism except that there is no implication of dualism or other parallelism in the traditional sense. The mental forces are direct causal emergents of the brain process.

When I initially stated this view in 1965, one had to search a long way in philosophy and especially in science to find anyone who would put into writing that mental forces or events are capable of causing physical changes in an organism’s behavior or its neurophysiology. With rare exceptions, writings in behavioral science dealing with perception, imagery, emotion, cognition, and various other mental phenomena were very cautiously phrased to conform with prevailing materialist-behaviorist doctrine. Care was taken, that is, to be sure that the subjective phenomena should not be implied to be more than passive correlates or inner aspects of brain events and especially to avoid any implication that the mental phenomena might interact causally with the physical brain process. Those few who did earlier subscribe to psychophysical interaction were such extreme dualists that little heed was paid to them in behavioral science. Once we could show how mental events can causally influence neural events in a compromise formulation that does not violate the principles of scientific explanation, the long-standing resistance to mental/physical interaction began to decline. It is only since then that mental imagery, for example, has been able to gain popular acceptance as an explanatory construct. Today it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate some of the closely related positions on these matters, and one must go back to the "pre-’65" versions in order to make clear distinctions.

The stand is taken here that wholes and their properties are real phenomena and that these and their causal potency are just as important as the properties of the parts to which the reductionist position likes to give prior, or even sole recognition. This is to say that the relationships of the parts to each other in time and space are of critical importance in causation and in determining the nature and properties of all entities. It is a pragmatic interpretation of what is real and meaningful. The properties of the parts are themselves in turn, of course, holistic properties of subsystems at a different level. The reductionist approach that would always explain the whole in terms of the parts leads to an infinite nihilistic regress in which eventually everything is held to be explainable in terms of essentially nothing.

III. A Simple Approach

The way in which mental phenomena are conceived to control the brain’s physiology can be understood very simply in terms of the chain of command in the brain’s hierarchy of causal controls (15). It is easy to see that the forces operating at subatomic and subnuclear levels within brain cells are molecule-bound and are superseded by the encompassing configurational properties of the brain molecules in which the subatomic elements are embedded. The nuclear and other subatomic elements, that is, are pushed and hauled about in chemical interactions by the enveloping molecular properties. In the same way the properties of the brain molecules are enveloped by the dynamics of cellular organization, and the properties of the brain cells are in turn superseded by the larger network properties of the circuit systems in which they are embedded.

At the apex of the brain’s organizational hierarchy are found the large cerebral processes that mediate mental activity. These large cerebral events as entities have their own dynamics and associated properties that causally determine their interactions. These top level systems’ properties supersede those of the various subsystems they embody.

Only some of the dynamic holistic properties that emerge in the higher levels of cerebral activity are conscious phenomena. Many others, however, are not, even though the unconscious activities may in some cases be equally or more complex. Complexity alone is not, in our scheme, the source of the conscious qualities (9). It is the operational function rather than the complexity of any given cerebral process that determines its conscious effect.

A mutual interdependence exists between the neural events and the emergent mental phenomena. In other words the brain physiology determines the mental effects, and the mental phenomena in turn have causal influence on the neurophysiology. The interjection of subjective mental experience into the causal sequence of decision-making on these terms brings a compromise, not only between materialism and mentalism, but also between the positions of determinism and free will. Determinism of this kind, in which subjective experience is included as a causal agent in brain function, allows degrees of freedom in any voluntary choice far above that envisaged in traditional materialist or atomistic determinism.

I have tried to tie these general principles to the example of subjective pain as it is referred to an amputated limb (15). For present purposes let us make it more specifically the pain of a phantom left foot that is produced by stimulation of a sore toe in the opposite hindfoot in one of our experimental "sensory nerve cross" rats. These are rats in which the right hindfoot has become reinnervated by foreign nerves that originally had supplied the left foot (11). The switch in nerve connections from left to right foot is brought about by surgical cross-union of the sciatic nerve and its branches from left to right leg in the fourth week after birth as a test of central nervous plasticity and the functional interchangeability of nerve connections. Occasionally the animals will "instinctively" chew off the denervated insensitive foot on the left, and there is also a tendency for cutaneous trophic sores to develop in the right foot while it is being reinnervated. Such a sore on the right foot heals very slowly despite antibiotics because these rats walk around on three legs, protectively holding up the wrong foot from which the pain seems to come and thereby puffing additional pressure and trauma on the sore right foot. Occasionally, as the result of an extra hard impact or abrasion to the right foot, the rat may yip or squeak and will turn to lick, not at the sore right foot, but at the uninjured left foot when it is there, or otherwise at the amputation stump.

I choose this example to emphasize among other things my assumption that conscious experience is not restricted to the human species. Self-consciousness is another matter, of course, and may well be limited mainly to man with some beginnings in the higher subhuman forms. The experimental rat’s false reference of pain to the amputated left foot persists throughout life, and this example thus serves also to reinforce the inference that the basic circuit properties responsible for conscious experience are genetically determined in large part. They may have evolved initially around sensory functions or/and around a primitive awareness with positive and negative reinforcement functions.

The main point to be brought out with this example is the contention that the animal’s responses in protectively holding up the wrong foot and in yipping and licking the wrong foot are caused directly in brain function by the subjective pain property itself rather than by the physiology of the nerve impulses, or by the chemical, atomistic, or other subunit features of the brain process. The pain sensation is considered to be a real emergent phenomenon in itself. Although built of neural events and possibly of glial events as well, the pain sensation as a larger whole is not itself the same as the constituent neural and glial events. Nor is the subjective pain to be viewed either as a mere parallel correlate of the brain process. Rather I look upon it as a real dynamic entity in the brain activity that has an important causal role as a phenomenon itself in the stimulus-response sequence. In other words, a full objective account of the whole stimulus-response process would not be complete without including the pain as such. Although our neurophysiology is not yet sufficiently advanced to give an adequate description of the neural composition of the pain phenomenon, or of other conscious events, one assumes that this probably will be possible eventually as our knowledge of brain mechanisms continues to advance.

IV. The Bisected Brain and Unity of Consciousness

Philosophy has been concerned with the "unity of consciousness" in connection with problems relating to the nature of the self, the person, and personal identity. In our "split-brain" studies of the past two decades (9; 10; 12; 13; 14; 20) the surgically separated hemispheres of animals and man have been shown to perceive, learn, and remember independently, each hemisphere evidently cut off from the conscious experience of the other. In man the language-dominant hemisphere further reports verbally that it is not consciously aware of the concomitant or immediately preceding mental performances of the disconnected partner hemisphere. These test performances of which the speaking hemisphere remains unaware obviously involve perception, comprehension, and in some cases nonverbal memory, reasoning, and concept formation of different kinds, depending on the nature of the test task. In these and in many other respects, the split brain animal and man behave as if the separated hemispheres had each a mind of its own.

This division by surgery of the normally unified realm of conscious awareness into two distinct domains of conscious experience that exist in parallel and in some cases have content that is mutually contradictory has been subject to several different philosophical interpretations. One line of reasoning concludes that each hemisphere of the brain must have a mind of its own, not only after surgery but also in the normal intact state as well. The normal individual, that is, is interpreted to be a compound of two persons, one based in each hemisphere (1; 8). A contrasting interpretation says that only one, the language-dominant hemisphere, remains conscious (2:73-80), and thus the unity of consciousness is preserved. It is inferred that the disconnected minor hemisphere operates like an automaton or complex computer. Another view holds that consciousness is not centered in either right or left hemisphere but in some unified metaorganizing system (5), presumably in the intact brain stem. There are additional variations on these main themes (6).

My own inclination is to see consciousness as being unified in the normal brain but largely divided in the bisected brain, depending on the depth and extent of the surgery and depending also on the nature and level of the particular conscious process in question. I would credit the neocommissures with a unifying role in conscious activity under normal conditions that in effect serves to tie the conscious function of each hemisphere together across the midline into a single unified process. The callosal activity thus becomes part of the conscious event. The fiber systems uniting right and left hemispheres are viewed as being not essentially different in their relation to consciousness from those uniting front and back or other areas within the same hemisphere. This interpretation does not exclude the possibility that the conscious processes in left and right hemispheres may function separately in the undivided brain under exceptional conditions and particularly where pathology tends to depress commissural function.

Surgical separation of the hemispheres, especially the deeper bisections we perform in animals, I have interpreted as resulting in the creation of two distinct domains of consciousness. This says nothing about self-consciousness. It remains to be determined how much, if any, self-consciousness is present in the disconnected minor hemisphere of man. However, preliminary findings from experiments in progress in collaboration with Zaidel support the conclusion that the disconnected minor hemisphere does in fact exhibit characteristic self-conscious reactions to pictures of itself, showing appropriate emotional displays in different contexts.

This interpretation does not preclude retention in the bisected brain of a right-left unity in some aspects and levels of conscious experience. This is assured in part by bilateral sensory representation in each hemisphere as in the case, for example, with facial sensibility. We presume, however, by extrapolation, that these unified "whole face" experiences in each hemisphere are cut off from their counterparts in the opposite hemisphere. The structure of the conscious cerebral process is inferred to be such that some aspects of conscious experience may be separated by commissurotomy, while others, united through bilateral representation and/or brain stem mechanisms, remain intact (13; 14; 15). In most of our work we have naturally emphasized the more interesting and striking aspects of consciousness that are separated by the surgery and which predominate in the kinds of test tasks we employ. However, I have also tried to stress the presence of many unifying factors. The possibility remains that some elemental components of consciousness stay unified in the split brain even in those tests where the bulk of the conscious content is clearly divided.

On these terms, neural activity transmitted through the corpus callosum becomes part of the conscious brain process. However, in order to properly comprehend the critical holistic properties of the conscious process one would have to include the associated activity on both sides. In the callosal fiber systems and these assorted cortical mechanisms on either side we probably come as close as anywhere in the brain to a direct grip on psychoneural relations. Consider, for example, the normally unified perception of the whole visual field and its division down the vertical midline that is produced by midline commissurotomy.

As knowledge of brain function and the mind/brain relation advances, one would anticipate that terms like "mind" and "person" will have to be redefined, or at least more precisely defined. Already it makes little sense, employing past definitions, to argue about how many "minds" or persons are present in the bisected brain. What is most needed is better understanding of the functional relationships between the neural mechanisms that are divided and those that are not, and their respective roles in the generation of conscious experience.

The neural mechanisms by which the mental effects in each hemisphere are generated may have common undivided brain stem and perhaps cerebral components that may or may not have any conscious properties m themselves but which are essential substructure constituents of the conscious experience. Particularly important among the undivided brain stem components are the neural mechanisms of attention. Thus if one were to diagram schematically the structure of mind after cerebral commisurotomy, it would be crudely Y-shaped, containing a common stem with left and right upper arms in each hemisphere. Each hemisphere contains the prepresentation of a bilateral body schema in which the ipsilateral limb extremities are present but fainter and more crudely depicted. The external surroundings also have bilateral representation. This is much better for the contralateral side, especially in vision, but the ipsilateral half of space is not absent. Thus each disconnected hemisphere contains the anatomical substrate for a unified self in a bilateral surround. Each hemispheric representation is based in and functionally dependent upon intact brain stem mechanisms that are in part bilateral and which, of course, remain intact in the human commissurotomy patients.

One can ask, what separates the conscious part of the brain process from its lower level nonconscious foundations? Also, for any given stimulus-response sequence, what separates the nonconscious sensory input on the one side and the motor output on the other from the more central conscious portion of the total activity? Similarly, among the higher cerebral functions, what kind of boundary or interface do we picture between processes that have conscious properties and those that do not? The answer is that we do not picture anything separating the conscious from the unconscious neural events -- aside from organizational coherence. No interface or other definite boundary is imagined to be interposed between the two.

Although the emergent properties are spoken of as encompassing or enveloping the constituent neural events, the implication is not that of an enveloping surface film or electrical potential difference or other interface, but only that of smaller neural events being caught up in the dynamics of larger neural events. A cerebral process acts as a conscious entity, not because it is spatially set apart from other cerebral activity, but because it functions organizationally as a unit. Presumably the conscious process may be interwoven with and may share active components with other brain processes that do not reach conscious awareness. The holistic properties are not to be conceived in simple spatial, volumetric, or dimensional terms but rather in terms of nerve network and cerebral circuit interactions, the emergent dynamics of which have yet to be elucidated, especially for the upper, conscious levels of brain function.

Normally, with the neocommissures intact, neural events in right and left upper arms of our schematized Y substrate of consciousness become merged into a unified conscious brain process. The criterion for unity is an operational one; that is, the right and left components, coalesced through commissural communication, function in brain dynamics as a unit. This is illustrated in the unified visual perception of a stimulus figure flashed tachistoscopically, half in the left and half in the right visual half fields. In the normal brain the right and left hemispheric components combine and function as a unit in the causal sequence of cerebral control. In the divided brain, on the other hand, each hemispheric component gets its own separate causal effect as a distinct entity.

V. Implications

Some of the main implications derive from the fact that conscious experience is given an operational causal role in cerebral function and hence a reason for being and for having been evolved. This is not true for prior materialistic or various parallelistic interpretations in which the brain would function just as well in terms of the neural events, whether or not these had subjective properties.

Although it is not difficult, as indicated (18), to stretch either the materialist or opposing mentalist approaches of ten years ago to incorporate these compromise psychophysical interaction concepts, it is important to recognize the various changes this involves. These changes have important consequences in other areas of philosophy that deal with determinism and free will (15; 21), with the concept of causation (7), and with the whole field of human values and the relation of scientific explanation to value judgment (22). Value theory has been rather neglected in philosophy of late, but could take on new importance on our present terms especially in view of the critical significance of human value priorities m the context of mounting global crises.

Introduction of mental phenomena into the causal sequence of brain function means, among other things, that values of all kinds, even aesthetic. spiritual, and irrational, must now be recognized as positive causal factors per Se in human decision-making. Our seemingly free choices remain causally determined, but at a mental rather than molecular or neuronal level of causation -- literally by what we wish and most value. Considered broadly, the present interpretation goes far to restore to the scientific view of human nature some of the freedom of choice, dignity, creativity, personal responsibility, and other humanistic attributes of which it has long been deprived.

Our current interpretation leads to a unifying concept of mind, brain, and man in nature and points to a "this world" framework for human values -- a framework within which science can function. Subjective values on our present terms become objective causal agents operating in the physical brain and though the brain onto the surrounding world. As the brain process comes to be understood objectively, all mental phenomena, including the generation of values, can be treated as objective causal agents in human decision-making. The origins, directive potency, and consequences of values all become amenable, in principle, to objective scientific investigation and analysis. This applies at all levels, from that of the pleasure-pain centers and other reinforcement systems of the brain, on up through the forces that mold priorities at the societal, national, and international plane. A science of values becomes theoretically feasible and a matter of top priority considering the critical role played by the human value factor in determining world crisis conditions.

References

1. Bogen, J. E., "The Other Side of the Brain (II. An Appositional Mind)," Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Society 34 (1969), 135-62.

2. Eccles, J. C. Facing Reality: Philosophical Adventures by a Brain Scientist. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1970.

3. Feigl, H. The Mental and the Physical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967.

4. Köhler, W., and R. Held, "The Cortical Correlate of Pattern Vision" Science 110 (1949), 414-19.

5. MacKay, D. M., "Discussion," Brain and Conscious Experience, ed. J. C. Eccles. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1966, pp. 312f, 422-44.

6. Nagel, T., "Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness," Synthese 22 (1971), 396-413.

7. Pols, Edward, "Power and Agency," International Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1971), 293-313.

8. Puccetti, R., "Brain bisection and personal identity," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (March, 1974).

9. Sperry, R. W., "Brain Bisection and Mechanisms of Consciousness," Brain and Conscious Experience, ed. J. C. Eccles. Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1966, pp. 298-313.

10. Sperry, R. W., "Cerebral Organization and Behavior," Science 133 (1961), 1749-57.

11. Sperry, R. W., "Functional Results of Crossing Sensory Nerves in the Rat," Journal of Comparative Neurology 78 (1943), 59-90.

12. Sperry, R. W., M. S. Gazzaniga and J. E. Bogen, "Interhemispheric Relationships: The Neocortical Commissures," Hand book of Clinical Neurology, ed. P. J. Vinken and C. W. Bruyn. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1969, vol. 4, pp. 273-90.

13. Sperry, R. W. Lateral Specialization in the Surgically Separated Hemispheres: The Neurosciences, Third Study Program, ed. F. 0. Schmitt and F. G. Worden. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974.

14. Sperry, R. W. Mental Unity Following Surgical Disconnection of the Cerebral Hemispheres. Harvey Lectures. New York: Academic Press, 1968.

15. Sperry, R. W., "Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values," New Views on the Nature of Man, ed. J. R. Platt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 71-92. Reprinted in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1966).

16. Sperry, R. W., "A Modified Concept of Consciousness," Psychological Review 76 (1969), 532-36.

17. Sperry, R. W., "Neurology and the Mind-Brain Problem," American Scientist 40 (1952), 291-312.

18. Sperry, R. W., "An Objective Approach to Subjective Experience: Further Explanation of a Hypothesis," Psychological Review 77 (1970), 585-90.

19. Sperry, R. W., and Nancy Miner, "Pattern Perception Following Insertion of Mica Plates into Visual Cortex," Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 48 (1955), 463-69.

20. Sperry, R. W., "Perception in the Absence of the Neocortical Commissures," Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases 48 (1970), 123-38.

21. Sperry, R. W., "Problems Outstanding in the Evolution of Brain Function." James Arthur Lecture. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1964.

22. Sperry, R. W., "Science and the Problem of Values," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (Fall, 1972). Reprinted in Zygon (1974).

In this essay the term "ethics" will be used in a broad sense, roughly equivalent to "the study of how best to act as a human being." The terms "morals" and "morality" will refer to a definite program of principles or directives enjoined as "the way to live." Thus a moral code is a species of answers to the question of ethics. There are, of course, many systems of morality. There are also a growing number of systems of ethical analysis or theory which seek to generalize beyond particular sets of moral prescriptions, to state how and under what conditions moral principles and directives can be formed and justified. They then set forth the nature of moral obligation in reference to the sets of moral prescriptions, thus laying the groundwork for the judging and improving of systems of moral prescriptions, or even for creating a special morality for each situation.

In Bernard Meland’s writings we find a more radical approach to ethics. He tends to portray morality itself as an inadequate or aborted answer to the ethical question, vastly overrated. "The folly of moral earnestness arises from a lack of proportion, which the sense of beauty would provide, and from the restricted conception of good, which it seeks to make sovereign in society" (HEHS 2). This rejection of morality as the sole, or even primary, content of ethics is prefigured in an early article published in the Personalist in 1942. He does not any longer subscribe to what he now calls the standpoint of "aestheticism" lying behind this statement of contrasts, but it will serve in a preliminary and rather startling way to introduce us to the contrasts to be found more carefully stated in the later position. In the article he distinguished "two paths to the good life: the one moving in the direction of moral perfection; the other leading to an aesthetic greatness of character" (1:53).

This contrast may be stated as the difference between the creative and the controlled way of life; between the good life sought though the ideal of art, and the goodness of life achieved through moral effort. Art is concerned with creating life; morality with controlling it. Art impels men to seek new orders of value and to synthesize them in an expression of unity; morality tends to preserve established orders of value and to resist possible new syntheses that threaten to impair existent values. Morality strives to make the world safe to live in. Art seeks to make it worth living in. Art is experimental. Morality is conservative. Art leads toward a creative and venturesome way of living; morality toward a controlled mode of existence. (1:53)

He closes by identifying himself with Whitehead in supporting the primacy of the aesthetic way of life. "The very character of the world, that is to say, makes the aesthetic measure of things primary and more final. And this is as true when applied to the conduct of life as when made the basis for understanding the nature of the world" (1:61).

In subsequent writings Meland converts this opposition into a contrast, an aesthetic ethic. But what is an aesthetic ethic? And how is it the outcome of Meland’s metaphysical and cultural analysis of the human situation?

I. A Typology of Ethical Systems

We will begin by noting a typology of ethical systems. These will then be related to a Whiteheadian aesthetic analysis of an occasion of choice. It will be discovered that the various types of ethical theory can be reconciled when they are adequately related to the aesthetic structure of choice. Then we will note the distorting effects upon each type when the essential reference to the aesthetic ground is ignored.

H. R. Niebuhr, in The Responsible Self, uses a typology which should help us in this project. He refers to three types of ethical theory: the teleological, the deontological, and the cathekontic:¹

Ethical obligation is dependent upon aesthetic obligation. It is a specialized form of the metaphysically general obligation which characterizes every actual thing, and thus every act of choosing. Since experience as it occurs concretely is always actually in process, it can best be understood in terms of the following three sets of relationships: the relationship to the past is its inheritance; the relationship to the future is its anticipation and the locus of its influence; and its internal set of relationships in the present constitutes its combined response to that particular inheritance and that particular anticipation whereby that particular occasion is something for itself. In other words, every occasion of experience (and there are for Whitehead no other actual things at all) is responsible to the givenness of its past, imposes its preferences on those other occasions into whose existence it subsequently merges, and creates itself in its own pattern of response to both of the other sets of relationships.

These sets of relationships constitutive of any occasion of experience express categories of obligation. Each set gives rise to a type of obligation; from these in turn are derived the types of ethical theory described in Niebuhr’s typology. The decision of the present moment of experience is obliged to the given structures of the past which constitute its inheritance. These structures causally define its basic character and limits and thus set its task, though this determination always leaves the present moment free with respect to how it will constructively carry out the imperatives in this situation. The fundamental obligation which the concrescence owes the past in the present is faithfulness to the richness of possibility given by the past, thus fulfilling it. The obligation is categorical precisely because it is the ineluctable presence of the past which constitutes the obligation. To be included is to require being taken account of, to present a claim (i.e., to obligate).

Likewise, that this present moment will be included in the future sets up an obligation toward the future. In this future which is coming into being, the imprint of the decision of the present moment of experience is indelible. It will require being taken account of, being completed. The creativity of the occasion becomes a creative influence on the future. The power to shape the future constitutes a claim against the present to consider the consequences of its choice. These consequences for the future are the causal impact of the present occasion upon the world which must receive it. Here, too, there is freedom toward the future as to how the present will exert its influence. But there is no freedom from the obligation of exerting some one particular influence.

Finally, the internal set of relationships which is the becoming of the present occasion is the response of that occasion to the totality of inheritance and the totality of anticipation which present themselves for decision. To become as a fully concrete participant in the creative passage means to respond to this totality in such a way as to emerge as something for oneself. Without unifying the multitude of claims presented by the givens and by the possibilities into one response, there can be no one actual occasion at all. But there are always more ways than one of settling these relationships to the universe as a whole. These various possible patterns of total response and contribution differ in the degree of their adequacy to the full reality of that total situation. Thus they also differ in depth and intensity. The universe in its total unity thus obligates the particular occasion in its total unity.

In other words, every act is constituted: (1) by the obligatory relation to the past, which in its determinacy demands of it relevance and continuity with the basic given structures; (2) by the obligatory relation to the future, which in its indeterminacy lures by visions of the control of the future through influential action taken in the present; and (3) by the obligatory unity of response to what is going on, which requires imaginative creativity with relevance and responsibility for consequences. Thus every occasion is a product, an influence, and a response. And every product, every influence, and every response requires normative decision.

Now it can be seen how these sets of relationships and their corresponding types of obligation suggest four kinds of ethical theory, three of which have been captured in Niebuhr’s typology.

The first interpretation sees the occasion of ethical decision essentially as a product with a general character determined by what is already settled. Its good will consist of accepting the obligation of conformity with the given basic structures, which are presented in the form of natural or other general laws. Some type of deontological ethical theory will result from this emphasis.

The second interpretation sees the occasion of ethical choice essentially as an influence with a future role as shaper, improver, controller. Its good will be to perfect future phases of the presently indeterminate future according to evaluations made in the present but having the character of an ideal. Some kind of teleological ethical theory will result from this emphasis.

The third interpretation sees the occasion of ethical choice essentially as a response to a universe composed of both givens and possibilities. Its good will consist of acting in the manner most fitting to the ultimate character of the situation which holds it in being. Some kind of cathekontic or situational ethic will result from this emphasis.

This would seem to exhaust the ethical alternatives. However, it is here that Meland makes his key suggestion. He pleads in many books and articles for seeing the occasion of ethical choice as essentially a moment in the creative adventure of a spirit in a community of other spirits. Its good consists of appreciating and serving the richest beauty,² in company with others whose love of beauty holds them all in common gratitude, working together, contending with each other in courageous devotion to the vision of beauty held by each, forgiving one another in trust, celebrating together their common devotion expressed in different ways, thus fed by, contributing to, and fighting for the increasing intensity and significance of their communal life. Meland struggles against the truncating and warping of human existence which occurs when it is understood as essentially a matter of individual solution to existence posed as a moral problem, regardless of whether that problem is seen as how to be faithful to the given structures of human life, or how to be faithful to the vision of the ideal human life, or how to be faithful to the specific facts of the total situation of the present.

The more specialized ethical emphases of obligation to the given past, to the perfectible future, and to the most inclusive reality are caught up and transformed in this aesthetic ethic of the final importance of devotion to beauty. The richest beauty justifies the continuity, orderliness, and fullest expression of the inherited structure stressed by deontological ethics. It also justifies the imaginative dedication to entering the future as a contributor to the kind and degree of beauty possible there. It also justifies discriminating within the matrix of internal relations the actual character of the inclusive meanings and making a fitting response to this character. Thus the key interpretation is the aesthetic one. "Beauty" is the answer we get when we ask the ultimate "why?" The more specialized ethical emphases are themselves fulfilled and interrelated from this standpoint.

The characteristic weaknesses of these other ethical theories are illuminated by considering them as the result of the fragmentation of the aesthetic whole. Each of the fragmented emphases tends to lack a full appreciation of the full nature of obligation. Deontological ethics tends toward the absolutizing of the apodictic authority of the given order. Teleological ethics is threatened with the abstract irrelevance of the ideal to the rich concrete givenness of the conditions. And cathekontic ethics lacks objective direction, lapsing into the unintended absolutizing of the set of conditions which happen to present themselves to that person at that moment as the ultimate character of the situation. Another way of putting this same point is to notice how ethics loses its dialectical character when the aesthetic unity is forgotten. Deontological and teleological ethics absolutize one or another kind of static perfection, given or to be achieved. Cathekontic ethics loses its reliability and prescriptive power because there can be no training in "fittingness," nor is there a stopping point in the analysis of the situation at which one has now discovered how it really is, so that his response may be appropriate. A successful attempt on the part of any one of these types to overcome its characteristic weaknesses will move in the direction of supplementation by the other types of obligation. But no amount of mere supplementation seems to add up to the reconception which is needed.

Since moral obligation is rooted in the aesthetic character of reality, it fragments into competing claims for ultimate ethical authority when divorced from this aesthetic ground. Claims which stress the obligation of the present to the past see moral obligation as imposed by given structures, and thus demand continuity with them (obedience). Those which stress the obligation of the present to the future see moral obligation as the claim of an ideal to direct sacrifice, improvement, and change, and thus demand discontinuity with the past and achievement of a new society. Those which stress the creative responsive role of the present moment see moral obligation as emerging new from each present context of givens and ideals, and thus demand an attitude of "love" indecisive "openness" as the permanent stance, loyalty to the Leader, or complete analysis of the factuality in each situation.

In all of these truncated interpretations the individual is set over against a reality which makes demands on him in the face of which his worth as a person depends upon his individual response. He must accomplish the goodness either by conformity or by achievement or by the fitting response, directed by the demand. He is constantly on trial morally, and every good thing in his life depends upon his sole adequacy in act. In addition, the goodness which is incumbent upon him must be that which he and his fellows can and do readily understand. He is not morally obligated by anything which he does not already accept as obligating him. Finally, the problematic moments of choice tend to be assimilated to the kinds of issues for which there are already principles, projects, and/or attitudes specifying kinds of response and action. Obligations individual are subsumed under obligations general, to which moral answers can be clearly given. Complicated, rich situations are trivialized and contorted into the mere material of the moral conflict and the weighing and reconciling of moral categories. The rich possibilities and actualities of living are reduced for the sake of the harmony that can be readily achieved. In this way moral demands are clearly identified and satisfied -- at the expense of the attenuation of significance.

II. The Formal Character of the Aesthetic Ethic

An aesthetic ethic is a matter of feelings. Its two basic virtues are openness to the universe of interrelated feelings and discrimination of quality. The good is quality of experience, or beauty. It does emerge into human existence, but it is not simply the product of human intention.

The infinite variety in the universe of feelings is graded in degrees of intensity and of harmonization. The actual world is a complex of structured feelings, internally linked into a bewildering maze of social orders, each of which endures by obligating its member entities to transmit its pattern. Also each such member entity of any such society is also a member in other respects of many other such societies. All past entities must be taken into account by present emerging experience in some fashion. (This is merely the recognition of the principle of causality.) And every society likewise presses its own claim. It is these claims of the past actualities and societies which constitute the first and basic aesthetic obligation. They are all felt, not merely as objects to be known, but as values which are of concern to the emerging individual occasion. From this arises the second aesthetic obligation, that of finding one response or act which will acknowledge these many claims in the way of greatest satisfaction. But, in order to receive the greatest satisfaction and participate in the greatest beauty, the future effects of this decision must be taken into account, and this is the third aesthetic obligation.

When this moment of self-constituting action resolving the claims and consequences of the whole universe is considered in all of its actual complexity, the pretense of moralistic ethics to judge by its handful of principles, or to take responsibility for control of the future of the universe in the name of its one ideal or single pattern of ideal perfection, or to identify the "reality" to which to make the relevant response, seems naively presumptuous, and at the same time a hopeless enterprise. There is mounting evidence that this typically Western mode of approaching the ordering of existence has had a direct bearing upon some of the most hideous injustices of our civilization and of the world. Action which is aware of its responsibility only to one authority -- whether this be a prescriptive principle or set of principles, or a reigning ideal of perfection, or even one God whose will is known -- disconnects action from the fullness of aesthetic reality, from minority claims, from emerging creative novelties, from the richness, ambiguity, and mystery of the present reality. In fact, this is what it is intended to do, for who can consciously weigh, or even become aware of, such a bewildering and disordered and discordant reality? The result of the dominance of this moral way of life tends to be the withering away of sensitivity and the brutalizing of the dominant powers of a given region.

III. Meland’s Form of the Aesthetic Ethic

The preeminent resource for the elaboration of an aesthetic ethic is Bernard Meland, who has for years protested vigorously against the brutalizing, desensitizing, and dehumanizing course of human affairs under the leadership of the moralistic and idealistic ethics of the West. Even Meland, however, is still learning the dimensions of this tragedy. There is an especially striking instance of this recorded in his Roger Williams Fellowship lecture on "Absurdity and Anxiety" in which he speaks of the aesthetic reality of the white man’s burden:

But in what way can an aesthetic ethic be not only aesthetically adequate to the fullness of actuality, but also ethical, i.e., a guide in some sense for living? The aesthetic ethic must indicate at least general directions for the adequate and selective response upon which it insists, or it is no ethic.

It is clear that an aesthetic ethic must presuppose an aesthetic metaphysic. The inadequacy of moralistic and rationalistic ethics, as we have seen, is intimately related to the inadequacy of the metaphysic presupposed. As the artists have known all along, the situations talked about by the professional moralists are constructed for that very purpose, and do not correspond to "the way things really are." Analyses of such constructions can be counted on to show just those factors which the advocated theory needs for its support. But decisions actually made m passage seem always to reflect the "undue" influence of factors that are not ordinarily thought of as moral at all (IC ch. 1).

The aesthetic ethic rests on an aesthetic metaphysic. This understanding of the ultimate structure of things allows for no sheer irrelevance. It distinguishes between the simplified edition of reality which is the context of conscious decisions and the actual causal efficacy with which in our actions we are actually dealing. There can be no "eternal" principles or ideals which unfailingly define for us the good in each situation. The crude approximations in terms of which conscious moral judgments must be made "have their day" and are refined or superseded as the shifting patterns of good and evil shape our viewpoint on the significance of our inheritance, the total situation, and the ultimacy of our goals. Each situation in its full concreteness has its own structure, not to be adequately judged simply by comparison with some general prescription nor with some perfect ideal; in fact not by any conscious assessment. The more adequate judgment must come from a more adequate sensitivity to the felt importance, beauty, and intensity actually resident in the moment of experience and likely to contribute an increase of such enhancement of life for the future.

Thus Meland has developed a. metaphysical description which grounds such an aesthetic ethic.

He begins with the connectedness of existence, relying here on the doctrine of internal relations as Whitehead has developed it:

This "realm of internal relations" contains everything. Whitehead refers to it as the "Receptacle." It constitutes for man the flow of experience of which he is a part, the inexhaustible river of feeling bearing him along. The metaphysical character of these relations is feeling and even "concern" (AI 226, 232). That is, the ultimate creativity is a matrix of concerns and feelings of valuation out of which grow coordinations of various levels of complex experiences.

Thus the flow of events of feeling is partially ordered and these orders are structures of value; i.e., they embody values which are the modes of synthesis of past values coordinated into fresh intensities, only to pass on themselves to future events for which they are given. Bare creativity ensures that the past will be inherited as an obligation in the present of the values of the past. The present arises as a necessary response to that past with its value, partly compatible and partly not, far too complex and mysterious for conscious sorting or understanding, yet with determinative power in the present. "Depths of actuality, inaccessible to conscious experience, will escape awareness and intelligibility, and thus be beyond demonstration of truth; yet be able to determine or destroy intelligibility itself" (EC 118).

The richness, the mystery, the complexity, the depth of the inheritance into which man is born is beyond comprehension. It is the universe in that moment, with all of its particularities of past events and their interconnections and their meanings and values and possibilities. It is at this point, perhaps, that the question arises as to the very possibility of an aesthetic ethic, for the sensitive awareness of this flux with its bewildering variety of claims would surely tend to incapacitate action altogether. How could there be ethical direction from an appreciative awareness open to this only partly coordinated flood of causal efficacy? It may be that what Fry refers to as "Establishment ethics" does fail to do justice to the "rationally unaccountable, ethically nonnormative, purely evanescent, absolutely local, hence crucial shape of circumstances," (IC 28) but can any ethic? Is it not necessary to posit even inadequate principles to contribute stability and direction, even though they can now be seen for the abstract and insensitive systems that they are? After all they do impose some order and direction. Openness would seem to guarantee only bewilderment.

IV. The Structure of Experience

Meland’s response to this crucial question of an aesthetic ethic is to point out that the past of a particular event is not all that chaotic. The individual is born into a particular tradition. His relationship to the total past is by way of an actual sequence of events within which there has emerged a certain general character. The person making moral choices shares along with the other members this same order of cultural inheritance. Meland’s term for this key concept is the "structure of experience."

When this notion becomes clear in reading Meland’s work, many other things fall into place. For it is the complex relationship between the individual and the depth of his own cultural and natural concrete accumulation that provides the basis for the meaningfulness of an aesthetic ethic. The structure of experience furnishes the definiteness in experience required for individual orientation for any decision. The massive inheritance out of which each individual comes and from which he derives the depths of his own present existence thus already has definite character. This character is the outcome of a long accumulation of former decisions. It gathers itself around a core of significant meanings, with formative images. These images bear the meanings from generation to generation. They also furnish the terms by reference to which modifications of insight can find their places in the living development of a structure of experience. In other words, the problem of making sense out of the bewildering variety of causal inheritance does not present itself in an ultimately disabling way because, as a matter of empirical fact, the past bears in itself the fundamental meanings out of which the individual makes sense of himself and his situation. The claims of the past and the future are already coordinated into mutually reinforcing societies, which are dominant and dominating accumulations of value.

This does not, however, mean that acquaintance with the cumulative environment calculates the single appropriate action to take in a particular moment. It might, but it very likely will not. It does mean that the individual, to the degree that he participates in the structure of experience which is his own depth, is given a general set of valuations which he inherits along with the situation itself, and which will flow into that situation and carry him along with them.

That is, every moment starts out equipped with an inherited general character already operative with the energies of the past valuations fashioned by past decisions into a fairly well-integrated pattern of valuation.

This inheritance of a basal character as a member of a culture, with its valuations as my valuations, and with my meaning fundamentally given to me, is one side of the structured freedom of the aesthetic ethic. Freedom is expressed by a structured reality; the richer the structure, the greater the possibilities for creative decision. But there is on the other hand the work of the critical intellect of the individual in deciding the role which this inheritance will play in the actual events of the course of his particular life. The passage of events compels the present moment to transmit the past through this particular existence, picking up its additional increments of qualitative meaning. Acts of conscious perception and apprehension, and critical intellection, involve decisions about the kind of effect which the inherited meanings and values will have in specific situations. The human consciousness abstracts from the fullness of meaning borne by the structure of experience. Its primary function is to select and heighten experience by emphasis. It can even become the means of actual dissociation of the conscious awareness from the structure of experience. One of the main warnings Meland makes everywhere in his writings is against the excessive reliance upon the abstractions of the moral and rational consciousness (cf. e.g., HEHS ch. 13). An overly moral and rational conscious world is separated from the depth of human existence and is therefore a poverty-stricken one, even involving demonic illusion.

However, consciousness in its various functions can also provide the structure of experience with appropriate focus and power. In so doing significance is heightened by attention to the objective goodness discovered in the values presented for choice in the immediate and future situation. This capacity for emphasis within the flow and the tension of the structure of experience modifies the inherited structure to some extent. However, the modification is never as simple and direct as moral and rational exhortations assume.

This power of discrimination for emphasis which is the power to affect the structure of experience and the institutions which arise from it in human civilization is the fateful power. It generates new forms of experience. These new forms are eventually absorbed into the accumulated experience, transforming it in significant (but not always better) ways.

The process of individuation, which centers a personal life through the particularity of his situation and exercises the powers of discriminatory response, enables the person to extend the intensity of his existence through the interplay of persons.

Interpersonal existence greatly enhances the intentional power of the individual through the development of symbolization in language. The conceptualizing power of language conveys comparatively greater freedom by widening the range of recognizable alternatives. At the same time, however, it makes more specific, and thus limits, the access of that person to the fullness of his own depths.

The deepening of life and the reaping of goodness are not, however, to be recovered by avoiding individuation, reducing human existence to the nonindividuated or nonrational "lethargic dependence upon the habitual routine judgments and valuations persisting as duration," for this, if possible at all, would be a "domesticated animality breathing the bovine contentment of the pastorale." (HEHS 3). Rather, human creativity and fulfillment depend upon combining disciplined inquiry and appreciative awareness. Disciplined inquiry acquaints one with the facts with precision; appreciative awareness is a heightened and disciplined sensitivity to the richness of concrete human existence. The effectiveness and honesty of human existence in its endeavors require precise factual knowledge. Wisdom and relevance require the openness and sensitivity of appreciative awareness. Appreciative awareness, because it encounters actual objective goodness at work in the depths of existence, discovers redemptive end, aim, and ultimate meaning for the lives that serve that goodness.

In this paper, I have chosen to introduce the concept of actual objective goodness at work blessing sensitive human endeavor rather abruptly as an empirical fact of human existence. Meland treats it as such, usually in the context of Christian interpretation. However, it is not only the Christian who participates in the goodness upon which our human fulfillment depends. This goodness he often describes empirically in general terms:

Meland’s approach to the analysis of ethics is similar to that of Richard Niebuhr: "The object of the inquiry is not, as in the case of Christian ethics, simply the Christian life but rather human moral life in general. . . . My concern here is with the understanding of our human. life from a Christian point of view" (RS 45). This statement serves to describe Meland’s aim, too. The description of human existence is a metaphysical one, and the affirmation of the goodness borne along by the structure of experience is empirical. The Christian faith is the myth which in fact conveys "the feeling tone of [Western] culture with regard to its ultimate dimensions" (FC 87). However, the aesthetic ethic itself, as an ethic, also calls for the education of the sensitivities so that there can be the reorientation of the way of life toward the goodness not our own, where the myth of the Christian faith does not, for whatever reason, perform this illumination. Sensitive persons in non-Christian cultures participate knowingly in this grace of the structures of goodness not of our own devising or controlling.

As an ethic, the aesthetic ethic requires faith in the goodness not our own and seems clearly to imply a creative Source of such goodness. However, it does not itself presuppose a particular religion as its ground. Meland uses many forms of neutral phrases to emphasize the empirical character of the experience of a source of goodness not our own: "the encounter with Spirit," "the matrix of sensitivity," "the realm of spirit" "stratum of sensitive meanings," "the creative activity which constantly presses [upon] the human organism," "the sensitive nature, structure of sensitivity," "transcendent life of spirit," "order of transcendent good," "matrix of sensitive relations," "order of sensitivity, sensitive, communal ground," "sensitive order of spirit," etc. The interpretation of the faith in objective Goodness can be various; but without this faith in some form there can be no aesthetic ethic. The interpretation of the faith is not, strictly speaking, a part of the ethic.

V. Summary

We have looked at four kinds of ethical theory: deontological, teleological, cathekontic, and aesthetic. The superiority of the aesthetic type of ethic lies in its adequacy to the peculiar concerns of each of the others, without collapsing into any or all of them. Each such special concern emerges in the aesthetic ethic as properly moral, but not the final ethic. The aesthetic ethic acknowledges the value, though limited, of the moral obligations of continuity and faithfulness to the inherited good from the structure of experience (deontological concern). But it does not need to insist upon any given unchanging structure not itself subject to critical inquiry (i.e., apodictic).

The aesthetic ethic acknowledges the legitimate but limited values of the moral obligations of influencing the future toward a better form of existence (teleological concern). But it does not find any final perfection which evaluates the elements of the given situation solely and ruthlessly in terms of its role in bringing this ideal to actualization. Therefore it does not tend to blind the devotee to other kinds and depths of goodness with which such an ideal may well be in severe tension. It can therefore recognize genuine tragedy in the human situation and be open to a real creative transcendence of any particular impasse.

The aesthetic ethic acknowledges the limited value of the moral obligations of loyalty to the reality of the present ultimate context. But it is not required to see itself as the focus of active solutions to this situation. The person whose way of life could be described as an aesthetic ethic searches first for the active, objective goodness which is there in the situation. He serves this active goodness in both its immediate and its general indications. This service is not mere obedience or dedicated viceregency, but creative, zestful contribution to the communal experience.

Beyond the virtue of including and transcending other kinds of ethical theory the aesthetic ethic encourages wonder, growth, appreciative awareness, imaginative understanding of emerging novelty, and the critical refining of the accepted moral regularities which do provide the minimum of cooperative order basic to the exercise of man’s spiritual calling -- devotion to beauty and goodness not our own.

References

FC -- Bernard Meland. Faith and Culture. New York: Oxford, 1953. Paperback: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1972.

HEHS -- Bernard Meland. Higher Education and the Human Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Paperback: Seminary Cooperative Bookstore, 1965.

IC -- John R. Fry. The Immobilized Christian. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963.

RF -- Bernard Meland. The Realities of Faith. New York: Oxford, 1962. Paperback: Seminary Cooperative Bookstore, 1970.

RS -- H. Richard Niebuhr. The Responsible Self. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

1. Bernard Meland, "Two Paths to the Good Life," Personalist, 23/1 (Winter, 1942), 53-61.

2. Bernard Meland, "Interpreting the Christian Faith within a Philosophical Framework," The Journal of Religion, 33/2 (April, 1953), 87-102.

3. Bernard Meland, "A Voice of Candor," Religion in Life, 33/1 (Winter, 1963-4), 19-27.

4. Bernard Meland, "Narrow Is the Way beyond Absurdity and Anxiety," Criterion, 5/2 (Winter, 1966) 3-9.

Notes

1A similar typology, or list of "motifs" ("deliberative," "prescriptive," and "relational"), is used by Edward Long, Jr., in A Survey of Christian Ethics (New York, Oxford 1967). Long compares his motifs with the typology of Niebuhr in an appreciative critique on pages 75f and 118-23.

2 The beauty which justifies ethical judgments for Meland is not to be confused with the aesthete’s "mere qualitative harmony" (AI 339). As we shall see, Meland has in mind that kind of beauty which Whitehead calls "truthful beauty" in part IV of Adventures of Ideas, and to which he refers in "The Human Soul" of the same book as "provocative of a noble discontent" and the "critical discontent which is the gadfly of civilization" (AI 12f).

The relationship between Whitehead’s concept of God and traditional religious and theological views has been much discussed, but the relationship between his account of God and his conception of the foundations of science has not. Briefly, Whitehead initially (in works published circa 1919-1924) objected to Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity on the grounds that for Einstein the geometry of the world was variable, its metric being a function of gravitational and electromagnetic field variables. But, Whitehead argued, this could not be so, since our knowledge of nature required the uniformity of the spatial-temporal continuum which he characterized as a continuum of overlapping events, some of which were indefinitely large. Nature, he said in these works, was that which was given to mind. He declined to consider any synthesis between mind and nature, calling such a synthesis a venture into metaphysics.

In Process and Reality, Whitehead gave up his account of the spatial-temporal as a continuum of overlapping events in favor of an account of atomic occasions which were distinct and which succeeded one another endlessly. In so doing, Whitehead felt a need to provide for the uniformity of the spatial-temporal in which he had earlier located the basis of that uniformity essential for our knowledge of nature. This ultimate ground of uniformity he found in the antecedent nature of God. In broad outlines, the development of this feature of Whitehead’s thought derived from his work on Principia Mathematica.

The dominant view of the nature of mathematics at the time of the writing of the Principia was (and still is) Formalism. According to this view, mathematical systems are deductions from arbitrarily asserted (postulated) axioms and definitions. In Principia Mathematica, on the other hand, beginning with a few primitive propositions, the authors undertook to show that all the inferences in mathematics could be made with the logical apparatus there developed. In arguing against the Formalist view, Russell once observed that postulating what could be deduced had all the advantages of theft over honest labor.

Further, while formal mathematical systems may or may not be interpreted, i.e., their expressions may or may not be correlated to the world, Principia Mathematica. was throughout an interpreted system. Indeed, numbers themselves were defined by reference to the world (cf. sum., sec. A, vol. 2). Three volumes of this work were published, and according to Russell, Whitehead had done some work on a fourth volume, the design of which was to extend the work of the previous volumes to geometry. In that volume, given the character of the Principia, one may assume that projective geometry would have been developed first, and then geometry as most people know it, involving propositions about comparative lengths and about congruence of various figures, would have been deduced. Geometry, so developed, would have provided the basis for measurement, and measurement, in turn, was the basis for physical science. Such at least are the main steps of the sketch Whitehead gives of this subject in part 4 of Process and Reality.

However, according to the theory of relativity, verified in 1919, the geometry of the world was a variable, being itself a function of gravitational and electromagnetic field variables. For Whitehead, the idea that measurements could lead physicists to a theory which required modification of the geometry which constituted the basis for these measurements seemed incoherent. Indeed, Whitehead contended, for measurements in different regions of the world to be meaningfully related, and for physical theory to be so verified, the geometry of the world had to be uniform. He wrote, "I cannot understand what meaning can be assigned to the distance of the sun from Sirius if the very nature of space depends upon causal intervening objects which we know nothing about" (R 58). Thus, in a series of works published in 1919 and the early 1920s, in opposition to relativity theory, Whitehead argued not only that the geometry of the world was uniform, but that "the properties of time and space express the basis of the uniformity in nature which is essential for our knowledge of nature as a coherent system" (R 8, 29).¹ Furthermore, he held that this uniformity was actually discerned there (H 14).

These views did attract attention and had an initial plausibility. As mathematical physicists well knew, in order to use such mathematical processes as differentiation, it is necessary to have a coordinate system. But if, as Einstein held, the metric of the world is variable, the question as to how to institute the requisite coordinates was clearly significant. One strategy was to develop the needed coordinate system by means of tangent flats. Since these flats presumably would be Euclidean in character, the view that an Euclidean, or at least a uniform space, did exist in which gravitational and electromagnetic fields did act seemed plausible. Also, Whitehead’s formulation was a kind of action-at-a-distance theory and so, congenial to traditionalists.

However, his reformulation of relativity was not accepted by physicists, no doubt because he was never able to show any confirmable difference between the predictions of observable fact derived from his theory and that of Einstein. Indeed, Eddington was able to show that Whitehead’s formula for the track of a particle in a gravitational field was exactly equal to that given by Einstein’s equations (Nature, 1924, p. 113). Given that there was no verifiable difference between the two theories, physicists normally prefer the way of discovery. In this case, the tendency to do so was reinforced by a conviction that Whitehead’s account was ad hoc, while Einstein’s account had a beauty and a natural development which carried conviction. While orthodox relativity theories did grant the need to use tangent flats, or an equivalent, in instituting coordinates into the variable space of relativity, they held that these flats were mere scaffolding and not a part of reality. Hence, Whitehead’s work did not deflect the development of modern physics.

Ironically, it was Whitehead’s own work which induced Russell, his co-author of Principia Mathematica, not to go along with him on these matters. As is well known, the method of Newton’s Philosopiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, after which Russell and Whitehead’s work was modeled, was to infer particular propositions from phenomena and then render these general by induction. According to Russell, it was Whitehead who persuaded him to substitute logical constructions composed of events for the smooth logical properties of mathematical physics, such as points of space, instants of time, and particles of matter. (Cf. Principles of Mathematics, Preface to the Second Edition, p. xi.) So successful was this approach that Russell, as well as the Positivists, perceived no problem in relating the observed properties of the world to any logically consistent physical theory. But Whitehead, more imbued with the Newtonian spirit of generalizing from primitives to a complete physical theory, considered that it was a mistake, indeed, it was incoherent, to begin with measurements based on a particular geometry and construct a theory of the world which required the adoption of a different geometry.

At this stage, Whitehead regarded himself as writing on physics, or rather natural philosophy, in the traditional sense of that latter phase. For example, he stated in the Concept of Nature, that Nature presented itself to the mind as a closed or a self-contained system. "We leave to metaphysics the synthesis of the knower and the known" (CN 28; cf. PNK vii). When Whitehead came to America, he took up the challenge of that synthesis.

In his writings in the earlier 1920s, Whitehead held that there was continuity of events such that every event contained other events and was itself a part of larger events (cf. e.g., CN 59 and 76). In Process and Reality, Whitehead gave up this account of overlapping events in favor of a cosmology in which all events as well as physical processes were not continuous but discrete. In his new account, he continued to insist that geometry and physics were distinct, but the geometry of the world was now contingently affected by physical processes in small steps. It was clear to Whitehead that these steps were so small that there would be no difference between any prediction. of the type of theory he earlier espoused when it was quantized and a corresponding prediction of Einstein’s equations. The orbit of an electron around a nucleus conceived as a route of occasions would not significantly differ from that orbit conceived as the route of the continuous motion of the electron.² Hence, Whitehead gave up his work on reformulating the equations of relativity theory, as well as any quest for ways in which his initial work would yield some confirmably different prediction from those of the equations of orthodox relativity theory.

However, in keeping with his insistence that geometry and physics were distinct, Whitehead maintained his opposition to the way in which relativity theory was understood. In particular, he continued his claim that the ideas of congruence and measurement as understood in the orthodox theories of relativity were not only wrong, but meaningless. Thus, in part 4 of Process and Reality, Whitehead shows that with some primitive ideas about region and about extensive connection, definitions of such entities as point, line, and straight line can be formulated by means of abstractive sets; he further shows that congruence relations can be defined and constructed, and how in terms of his account a theory of measurement can be constructed. Concerning Einstein’s account, he noted: "The modern procedure, introduced by Einstein, is a generalization of the method of ‘least action.’ It consists in considering any continuous line between any two points in the spatial-temporal continuum and seeking to express the physical properties of the field as an integral along it." However, . . . current physical theory presupposes a comparison of so-called lengths along segments, without any theory as to the basis on which this comparison is to be made" (PR 506f). Without that account, current theory contains undefined, and so meaningless, elements. Whitehead concludes: "For this reason, it would be better -- so far as explanation is concerned -- to abandon the term ‘distance’ for this integral, and to call it by some such name as ‘impetus’ suggestive of its physical import" (PR 507). In other words, the later Whitehead only reinterprets orthodox relativity theory and does not reformulate it.

In this reinterpretation, Whitehead preserved the separation between the geometrical and the physical on which he insisted in his earlier works. He characterized the cosmology of Process and Reality as one in which "the things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal" (PR 63). The temporal and the eternal are mediated by the divine, in whose primordial valuation . . . each eternal object has a definite effective relevance to each concrescent process. Apart from such orderings, there would be a complete disjunction of eternal objects unrealized in the temporal world. Novelty would be meaningless and inconceivable" (PR 64). Those eternal objects which constitute the geometrical Whitehead designates as eternal objects of the objective species. A member of this species can "never be an element in the definiteness of a subjective form" (PR 445f). It is these geometrical features of the world which make possible a coherent account of measurement and so a coherent account of nature. However, in the cosmology of Process and Reality, in which events do not overlap but succeed one another, this order is itself derived from elsewhere; namely, the antecedent nature of God. It is in this way that God is now seen as the ultimate source of order in the world -- that order which is essential for our knowledge of nature.³

Notes

1 In addition to his views about the physical features of the world, in these works Whitehead also developed the view that the very nature of entities referred to by such words as "red" and "green" depended on the uniformity of space-time. In the technical terminology of these works, Whitehead held that sense-awareness discloses facts within factors which are entities for thought. The separate distinction of an entity in thought is not a metaphysical assertion, but a method of procedure necessary for the finite expression of individual propositions. Apart from entities there could be no finite truths; they are the means by which the infinitude of irrelevance is kept out of thought. . . . Thus for thought ‘red’ is merely a definite entity, though for awareness ‘red’ has the content its individuality. The transition from ‘red’ of awareness to the ‘red’ of thought is accompanied by a definite loss of content, namely by the transition from the factor ‘red’ to the entity ‘red.’ This loss in the transition to thought is compensated by the fact that thought is communicable whereas sense-awareness is incommunicable" (CN 12f). In the Principle of Relativity, Whitehead went on to argue that one could refer to, and so know, factors such as red and green independently of other factors. He wrote: "You admit, it is said, that a factor is not itself apart from its relations to other factors. Accordingly to express any truth about one entity, you must take into account its relations to all entities. But this is beyond you" (R 22). To resolve this problem, Whitehead distinguished between contingent and essential relationships, which, he said, correspond closely to the traditional distinction between external and internal relations. But he added, "I hesitate to say how closely since a different philosophic outlook radically affects all meanings" (R 23). Green, he went on, might or might not be related to grass, but it was essentially related to the "passage of nature in the form of a structure of events" (R 25f). Since this structure was uniform, one could assert true propositions about a red spot here or on Jupiter, and for just the same reason that one could speak meaningfully about the distance from our sun to the star Sirius.

2 For a more detailed statement of this point see my "Whitehead and Relativity," Philosophy of Science, 1955, 222-46; also, "In Defense of Duhem," Phi1o~ophy of Science, 1965, 287-94.

3 In footnote 1, it was noted that the uniformity of the spatial-temporal was the ground whereby true assertions could be made about such data as a patch of color. In Process and Reality, Whitehead wrote: "A proposition can embody partial truth because it only demands a certain type of systematic environment, which is presupposed in its meaning. It does not refer to the universe in all its detail (PR 17). Of course, the ‘order’ of this presupposed systematic universe, like the ‘order’ of space-time is derived from God.

In his article "A Suggestion on ‘Consciousness’ in Process and Reality" (PS 3:41), John Bennett argues that there can be consciousness in the satisfaction of an actual entity, even though there cannot be consciousness of that satisfaction. In support of this claim, I suggest we may look to Jean-Paul Sartre for a partial answer to the question: What is this strange consciousness, and how shall we define it?

Bennett begins his article by quoting Whitehead and follows by stating the problem:

Bennett’s answer takes the form of distinguishing between two types of consciousness: "datal" and "adverbial." The first is an "awareness of," which is inappropriate to the satisfaction of an actual occasion, and the second is an "awareness with," which is appropriate to that satisfaction as part of the subjective form belonging to it. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre makes a similar distinction when he differentiates between the cogito as such (pour-soi as thetic consciousness of the world) and the prereflective cogito (pour-soi as nonthetic self-consciousness).¹

The cogito as such is datal: it posits (or intends) its object as a datum for positional (or intentional) awareness. In the datal mode, consciousness stands in a thetic, intentional relation to that of which it is conscious; and that of which it is conscious is transcendent to it as an object of awareness. On the other hand, the prereflective cogito is adverbial: it stands in a nonthetic, nonintentional relation to that of which it is conscious. That of which it is conscious is the cogito itself, not as a transcendent object of awareness, not as something separate and distinct, but as itself in the moment of its living experience.

The prereflective cogito is not something different from the cogito; it is the very heart of it. A consciousness which could reveal and intuit an object without being conscious of itself as doing so would be an unconscious consciousness, which (as Sartre points out) is absurd. Consciousness, to a be a consciousness of something, must be conscious (of) itself as such. (We put the second "of" in parentheses in order to signify its nonthetic character.²) For Sartre, every consciousness is also self-consciousness. "Every positional consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself" (BN lxiii).

What Bennett accomplishes with his distinction between "awareness with" and "awareness of" is precisely what Sartre accomplished when he distinguished between nonthetic and thetic awareness. The attention to language arises out of the need to distinguish between thetic consciousness of objects and nonthetic consciousness (of) that consciousness. Utilizing Sartre’s epistemological idiosyncrasies, we may agree with Whitehead’s statement that "no actual entity can be conscious of its own satisfaction," if the "of" here is taken as thetic, indicating phenomenological intentionality. What we want to argue, however, is that we may still assert that an actual entity can be conscious (of) its own satisfaction, where the "of" is taken as nonthetic, indicating an absence of the intentional structure of awareness. We are allowed this latter statement because, as Bennett says, "the consciousness in question is not the objectifying ‘awareness of’ by means of which we attend to data, but the ‘awareness with’ by which much of our experience is lived" (PS 3:42).

Now, whereas Whitehead would restrict consciousness to an awareness of what "has been," our interpretation allows us to have an awareness (of) what "is" in the present; that is to say, nonthetic self-awareness is immanent in the present moment of experience. But a distinction has to be made, not only between thetic and nonthetic modes of consciousness. but also between mere consciousness and knowledge. In the present moment of experience, there is no knowledge of the cogito, because awareness of the cogito is strictly prereflective and nonthetic. There is self-consciousness, but no self-knowledge. Knowledge is a later development of consciousness and occurs only when consciousness reflects on itself by turning back upon itself and positing a former moment of experience as an object of awareness. It is a consciousness of consciousness, a taking by the subject of its own past, now become objectified for present intuition. For Sartre knowledge arises only out of reflection.

According to the Sartrean scheme, therefore, Whitehead is correct in asserting that no actual entity can have a knowledge of its own satisfaction. But if we look closely at Whitehead’s own statement, we see that his denial of knowledge is also a denial of consciousness: "No actual entity can be conscious of its own satisfaction; for such knowledge would be a component in the process, and would thereby alter the satisfaction" (PR 130; italics mine). Whitehead here identifies knowledge with consciousness. But consciousness is as distinct from knowledge as causal efficacy is from presentational immediacy; in each case, it is the former which is the ground of tie latter. And while we agree that no actual entity can know its own satisfaction, we do not agree that this lack of self-knowledge is equivalent to a lack of self-consciousness. As Sartre says: "We must abandon the primacy of knowledge if we wish to establish that knowledge. Of course consciousness can know and know itself. But it is in itself something other than a knowledge turned back upon itself" (BN II). That is to say, consciousness is, first of all, a nonpositional consciousness of itself as positional consciousness of the world, in which there is no reference to reflection, i.e., to a turning back upon itself.

We must note, however, that the distinction between reflective and prereflective awareness is not equivalent to the distinction between thetic and nonthetic awareness. The prereflective cogito (nonthetic self-awareness) is involved as a necessary structure in both consciousness as mere revealing intuition (prereflective positional consciousness of the world) and consciousness as knowledge (reflective positional consciousness of the past self). In each case consciousness must be aware of itself as being what it is. Each case is, therefore, a positional consciousness with a non-positional consciousness of itself.

Hence we cannot distinguish between consciousness and knowledge simply in terms of the positional and nonpositional modalities. The difference lies in reflection. When consciousness becomes its own intentional object, that which is reflected upon and that which is doing the reflecting are not one and the same; the consciousness which is reflected upon is always in the past -- often the very immediate past, yet always a consciousness which has been. Knowledge is always of "what was," and here Sartre sounds very much like Whitehead. But nonthetic prereflective self-consciousness is the very condition for the possibility of that knowledge. In Sartre’s own words:

Sartre’s distinction between consciousness and knowledge, along with the distinction between nonthetic and thetic awareness, helps us to understand Bennett’s argument. What is agreed upon is that the self-consciousness involved in the satisfaction of an actual entity cannot have the status of knowledge (for knowledge refers us to reflection, and hence to an additional process), nor can it have the structure of intentionality (for intentional self-awareness fractures unity and leads to an infinite regress). And yet there is still room for a self-awareness which has the status of consciousness and a nonthetic structure.

There are, of course, problems. Sartre is talking about human poursoi, whereas Whitehead is talking about actual occasions. Moreover, from the Whiteheadian point of view, Sartre’s ontological mistake is in thinking that there is such a thing as en-soi. He is subject to the criticism which Whitehead levels at Cartesian dualism, of which Sartre is the twentieth century paradigm.

Yet Sartre is, in his own way, a process philosopher. To use his own language: consciousness is an event which happens to Being. And the world has intelligibility, purpose, meaning, and value only in virtue of that event, i.e., only in virtue of purposive process. We should not be surprised, therefore, if there are elements in Sartre’s philosophy which are applicable to the Whiteheadian cosmos. Certainly if Bennett is correct, as I think he is, then to talk about consciousness at all is to talk about self-consciousness, and any actual entity which has consciousness as a feature of the subjective form of some phase of its concrescence will have nonthetic self-awareness both in that phase and in the final satisfaction.

On the other hand, we must raise the question: Can we borrow the prereflective cogito without bringing the cogito as such along with it? For Sartre, nonthetic self-awareness is a function of intentional consciousness, and you cannot have one without the other. My description of the prereflective cogito as the sole form of consciousness in satisfaction is, consequently, at odds with the Sartrean scheme. Of course, Sartre’s model is thoroughly temporal, and part of the problem here involves envisaging just how the intentional consciousness in an earlier phase of concrescence might act as a sufficient ground for the nonthetic consciousness of self isolated in satisfaction; it is the temporal isolation of these different moments which seems untrue to the Whiteheadian model. Thus there are problems in both Sartre and Whitehead as I use them. The viability of Bennett’s argument -- and my supportive elaboration of that argument -- rests on the possibility of further solving these epistemological mysteries.

References

BN -- Jean-Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

Notes

1 See especially Sartre’s "Introduction" ("The Pursuit of Being"); also, part one, chapter two, sections one and thee ("Bad Faith and Falsehood" and "The ‘Faith’ of Bad Faith"). and part two, chapter one, section one ("Presence to Self’).

2 In French. there is no word for self-consciousness. There is only conscience de soi, consciousness of self. But there are two modes of consciousness of self: nonthetic prereflective self-awareness and the thetic reflective self-awareness, only the latter of which has the structure of intentionality. which occurs when consciousness reflects upon itself by turning back upon itself and positing a former moment of experience as an object of awareness. To distinguish between the two. Sate refers to the nonthetic (prereflective) mode as conscience (de) soi, and the thetic (reflective) mode as conscience de soi. Parentheses around the "of" however, are not normally used for nonthetic awareness if that awareness is already designated as such, for example, by use of the words "nonthetic" or "nonpositional," or if its meaning is contextually obvious.

Schubert Ogden’s proposal, that Bultmann’s demythologizing project be carried to its logical conclusion and applied to the Christology of the New Testament, has been attacked from several perspectives, among them Heideggerian existentialism and the process perspective Ogden himself shares. But the point of contention usually seems to be, in essence, the same: in reducing the claim regarding God’s once-for-all act in behalf of human salvation to a re-presentation of the "original possibility of authentic existence" (1:146), it is argued, Ogden quite simply subverts the plain meaning of the New Testament proclamation of redemption in and through Jesus Christ.¹

For his part, however, Ogden argues that the christocentrism of the New Testament is actually based upon and sanctioned by a consistent theocentrism and that "the only final condition for sharing in authentic life that the New Testament lays down is a condition that can be formulated in complete abstraction from the event Jesus of Nazareth and all that it specifically imports" (1:43). He readily admits the presence of a christological exclusivism in the various canonical writings but finds this emphasis contradictory to what he takes to be the genuine core of the witness: the proclamation of the action of a God who is ever gracious and to whom humanity is ever responsible -- a proclamation which necessarily entails the presupposition of the genuine possibility of authentic existence at all times and places.

But Ogden is equally adamant in asserting that the Christ-event is to be understood as a decisive disclosure of God’s everlasting nature as a just and loving God. Although it is in no sense qualitatively different from all other moments in history, it is in fact quantitatively different in that it is (according to the Christian witness) more expressive of God’s loving character than are ordinary moments, just as some human acts are more expressive of a person’s inner nature than are others, although all a person’s acts are in an obvious sense his or her own (2:164-87, esp. 180 ff.). And Ogden has recently clarified the implications of this line of thought. While God’s primordial self-disclosure guarantees the possibility of the existential realization of authentic existence in all moments in history, the fully reflective understanding of existence presupposes some special event -- i.e., some quantitatively more transparent event -- in which this understanding is made explicit (3:282-85).² Thus Ogden takes seriously the New Testament claim to an exclusive, or special, act of God but maintains that it must be divested of its mythological, or nonexistential, elements precisely because they contradict its basic intention, which is to speak of God’s primordial love.

Now Ogden can quote numerous scriptural passages in support of his position (1:141 ff.). But the problematic nature of his exegetical claims may be illustrated by reference to the discussion between Herbert Braun and Ernst Käsemann concerning christology and anthropology in the New Testament. Braun argues that because a common anthropology is shared by Jesus, Paul, and John, while the various christological formulations of the New Testament differ widely, it is actually a particular human self-understanding that is the final reference of the text (4: passim). Such an argument obviously may be used to support Ogden’s view. Käsemann, however, finds in the New Testament hardly any explicit anthropology, contending that the clear intention of the text is to make a christological witness (5:44-46). The key to the discussion, it seems to me, lies in Käsemann’s qualifying term "explicit." The christological witness is, of course, dominant and represents in an obvious sense the "intention" of the various authors. But Braun’s point is also undeniable the character of salvation is consistent, but the christological formulations are not. So the problem is not the ambiguity of exegetical evidence but that of evaluating the evidence. Even the most cursory reading of the text reveals a christocentric emphasis. The subtler question is how this emphasis is to be weighed as over against the equally demonstrable theocentric emphasis in light of certain "universalistic" elements that are also present. The exegetical question, in other words, leads inevitably to that of hermeneutical method.

What I propose, then, is a brief investigation of christology and anthropology (i.e., soteriology in abstraction from christology) in a single New Testament book --.the gospel of Matthew -- that will be carried out in two stages: first, the attestation of a genuinely "universalistic" undercurrent that overextends the christological witness but buttresses the theocentric emphasis; second, an attempt to make use of a Whiteheadian understanding of the nature of language in developing an adequate hermeneutical perspective on the significance of this undercurrent. My basic contention is that such a perspective will place Ogden’s reading of the New Testament in a more favorable light than that in which it has sometimes been viewed.

The problem under consideration has been clarified considerably by Hendrikus Boers, who identifies several points in the New Testament at which christological exclusivism is clearly transcended: (1) the authentic teachings of Jesus, which "did not bring the love and forgiveness of God, but affirmed its presence . . . by articulating it" (6:23); (2) Paul’s treatment of the "faith of Abraham" in Rom. 4 which, in contrast to a related argument in Gal. 3, centers directly upon the "structure of faith as trust in God" (6:91) and, in effect, "pierces [Paul’s] own system of thought" (6:102) by allowing Abraham’s faith actually to define the content of Christian faith; (3) Mt. 25:31-46, the description of the last judgment, in which humanistic actions of a general nature actually "interpret what the Christian confession really means (6:73).

I believe Boers has presented a generally convincing exegetical case; of even greater significance, however, is the hermeneutical insight with which he treats the phenomena encountered: "Thus, ultimately, we must come to ask, not only what the author of a text intended, but what happened to him in the writing of the text" (6:ix). On the basis of this question he looks to the universalistic elements in the New Testament as the foundation for a theology "out of the ghetto." His hermeneutical perspective, then, provides the way for an advance beyond the impasse in the discussion between Braun and Käsemann.

At two points, however, my proposal differs from that of Boers. First, I believe there is a stronger universalistic element in Mt. 25:31-46, and in Matthew’s total theology, than even Boers recognizes. Second, I will try to give, through the use of a "process hermeneutic," a more explicit justification for interpreting the christological mainstream of the New Testament in light of the anthropological undercurrent.

I

There are two conflicting themes in Mt. 25:31-46, one expressive of Matthew’s mainstream of thought and the other of his undercurrent. That Matthew intends to use the passage as part of his christological witness is evident. The passage itself embodies a strongly christological thrust in the phrase "you did it to me," which makes Jesus in some sense the referent of all the deeds of mercy done in the world.³ More importantly, Matthew attaches the pericope to a series of exhortations obviously intended to encourage the Christian community to persevere until the final judgment;⁴ thus the deeds of mercy inculcated are direct responses to the Christian proclamation (7:794).

On the other hand, it is equally clear that the double climax of the passage (vv. 40, 45) stands in tension with the christological thrust. "When did we see you . . . ?" ask both the righteous and the unrighteous, revealing that their actions -- good and bad -- were done unknowingly. Thus the commendation/condemnation seems to be based upon the fact that the deeds were done spontaneously, out of an inner disposition (cf. Mt. 15:1-20!), and therefore without expectation of a reward. So the theme of the "great surprise," far from a rhetorical device as Stendahl terms it (7:794), is in fact the point of the passage: the righteous are commended precisely because they acted humanely without knowledge of Jesus’ presence and therefore without the calculating attitude Matthew attributes to the Pharisees.

On the basis of an argument that partially parallels my own up to this point, Boers concludes that in this passage "acts that are as such non-Christian, even though performed by Christians -- they were not done in the name of Christ -- are used to interpret the meaning of the confession of Christ" (6:72). This much, I believe, is clear. But even more can be said, despite Boers’ objections, on the basis of the passage. I would agree that Matthew probably does not have the question of the fate. of nonbelievers specifically in view in the sense that "the passage does not polemicize against the confession of Christ, neither in the original description, nor in Matthew’s application of it" (6:71). But there is reason to believe that Matthew tacitly assumes, without explicitly (or perhaps even consciously) acknowledging, that the standard of salvation he applies to Christians is simply that which obtains in the world at large.

To begin with, the opening verses clearly describe a universalistic context in that it is "all the nations" that are gathered for judgment. Thus when the people are divided simply upon the basis of humanitarian deeds the undeniable implication is that the categories of good and evil cut across church and world at large.⁵ If it is true, as Boers argues (6:68). that the introductory verses are not part of the original passage but are simply used by Matthew as an introduction, there is all the less reason to say that the evangelist intended no universalistic reference at all. Beyond this, there is actually another passage which, by implication, makes precisely the same point: Mt. 13:36-43, the explanation of the parable of the tares. Here, once again, the context reveals an ecclesiastical reference. Matthew is emphasizing that Christians, too, stand under judgment. But it is equally clear that he is, once again, applying to the Church a standard that obtains in the world at large. For it is explicitly said that the "field" into which the Son of Man sows seed is "the world" (v. 38). Thus when the Son of Man gathers evildoers out of his "kingdom" the reference can only be to the world at large, upon which the eschatological kingdom has been superimposed (8:187, n. 3).⁶ As Anton Vögtle observes, then, although Matthew uses this passage for an ecclesiastical exhortation, what he actually emphasizes is simply the fact of a general judgment (9:286 ff.). And Strecker’s radical conclusion, if it is not taken to indicate an explicit and programmatic universalism on Matthew’s part, seems justified:

A further consideration indicates just how seriously Matthews universalistic undercurrent should be taken: to the divorce-saying at 19:8b Matthew has added the phrase "from the beginning it was not so!" Not only is this an appeal to experience in general but it explicitly denies that Jesus’ interpretations of the Law add new content. They are, to the contrary, based upon a direct intuition of God’s primordial will which appears "to interpret the meaning" of the Torah itself. In representing the Torah, then, Jesus in no way creates a new possibility for human obedience; he points, rather, to God’s primordial will -- ever perceptible in human experience -- for which humanity has always been responsible. The passages already considered (Mt. 25:31-46; 13:36-43) suggest that it is indeed all people who are thus responsible, and Matthew’s redaction of Mark’s saying on the purpose of parables (Mark 4:10-12/ /Mt. 13:10-15) confirms the former’s explicit interest in the question of responsibility.

The import of Matthew’s undercurrent appears even more clearly when this incipient universalism is considered in light of his subtle theology of "grace." At 11:25-30, Jesus promises "rest" to those who take up his "yoke" -- i.e., the Torah as he presents it. The logion is preceded by accounts of Jesus’ rejection and followed by examples of the wrong attitude of the Pharisees -- specifically, their overemphasis upon Sabbath regulations to the point that human need is ignored (Mt. 12:1-14). Rather clearly, then, we have a reiteration of the call at 5:20 to a righteousness that "exceeds" that of the scribes and Pharisees. But the call to a "higher righteousness" is nevertheless spoken of as easy. "Because," Strecker comments,

This interpretation is, moreover, strengthened by a comparison of the passage with Mt. 25:31-48 and 28:16-20. In the former passage, a surrogate of the love-commandment functions as the eschatological criterion of salvation; at 11:25-30 the human insensitivity of the pharisaic attitude is implicitly contrasted with the "easy yoke." In effect, then, the call to Jesus’ yoke is a call to imitate the action of the righteous in the judgment-pericope, Mt. 25:31-46 (11:24). And that action is commended precisely because it is noncalculating, spontaneous concern for the neighbor. So the yoke of Jesus is presented as the alternative to a reward-seeking, "legalistic" adherence to the letter of the Law -- a point that Mt. 23:23 ff. makes with bitter explicitness. Again at Mt. 28:16-20 we have a union of grace and demand within Jesus’ command, since the imperative to teach new converts to obey all Jesus has taught is accompanied by his promise to be "with" them. And Jesus’ presence, far from some kind of mystical indwelling, is most naturally interpreted in light of Matthew’s consistent Torah-centered approach: Jesus is "with" the disciples precisely as the one who issues the love-commandment and thereby facilitates the obedience that leads to salvation -- just as, in a similar way, Mt.18:18 implies that his presence in the gathered community is for the express purpose of enabling right legal decisions. Rather clearly, then, Matthew has united his consistently ethical concept of salvation with a surrogate of Paul’s notion of atoning grace. But in this case grace is connected not with Jesus’ atoning death but rather with the command he gives.

Now my investigation may have in one sense added little to Boers’ contention that at Mt. 25:31-46 the Christian confession is "confronted and interpreted by worldly acts" (6:73). But it has hopefully strengthened his point and added this dimension to it: there can be little doubt that this "confrontation" between the Christian confession and humanistic acts of a general nature is, if not a programmatic Matthean theme, nevertheless based upon a tacit assumption which is quite integral to Matthew’s total theological program. Moreover, the hermeneutical question should now appear in even sharper focus. If it is true that Matthew’s legal approach to salvation contains a surrogate of the Pauline concept of grace, then we are faced with a soteriology which in a sense circumvents the christological witness but nevertheless creates an effective union of radical grace and radical demand similar to that which Braun finds in the teachings of Jesus, the epistles of Paul, and the gospel of John. Matthew’s anthropological undercurrent, in other words, presents on its own -- in abstraction from the christological context in which it is set -- precisely that vision of human existence that is generally associated with christology.

To be sure, Matthew does bracket his anthropology with a strong christological witness. And that witness is indeed the mainstream of his thought. Even at Mt. 25:31-46, as noted earlier, there is a final reference of all humanistic deeds to Jesus. But if my exegesis is sound, Matthew’s soteriology does not rest functionally on christology but rather on Law. That is to say, salvation depends finally upon right human action in response to God’s gracious Torah, and Jesus’ function is simply to re-present that Law as it exists primordially in the mind of God -- not to create a new possibility for human existence. The question, then, is how we are to weigh the relative importance of christology and anthropology. And at this point the hermeneutical problem comes to the surface.

II

The primary contribution of a "process hermeneutic" to Biblical studies, in my estimation, will be a recognition of a basic duality in the nature of human speech in general and in religious language specifically. Because all language involves a process of abstracting certain elements in experience out of the total complex in which they occur, it is necessarily analogical and therefore imprecise: a word never refers to an absolutely discrete entity. Speech is therefore subjective and valuational, for its meaning always depends upon what Lyman Lundeen terms "non-linguistic factors," factors relating to the subjective situations of the speaker and the hearer (12:48, 71, 77, 103). But if the abstractive nature of speech formation is recognized, then it must be seen also that the abstract term always implies more than itself; it always brings with it the presupposition of the total context from which it is drawn (12:84).⁶ All speech, in other words, implies a metaphysical background against which it must be interpreted for its significance to be grasped (PR 16-20; 12:46).

Since for Whitehead language is necessarily "incomplete and fragmentary" (AI 291), no linguistic formulation ever fully expresses that which lies behind it -- a proposition (Or propositions), which is defined as the possibility of some pure potentiality (eternal object, the predicate of the proposition) to be realized in some actuality (actual entity, the logical subject of the proposition) (PR 393f). Moreover, the function of a proposition is primarily that of a lure toward feeling.

Now the "feelings" toward which the "prehending subject of the proposition" is drawn are not simply affective in the narrow sense. They are precisely those encounters with actualities and potentialities that form the basis of all experience. But the point is, nevertheless, that Whitehead explicitly contrasts the role of "lure toward feeling" with that of a conveyor of truth or logical precision:

Of course propositions do call for truth-judgments (PR 392), and these too are feelings. But the truth-judgment is but one among many types of feeling elicited by propositions (PR 396). "Immediacy of enjoyment and purpose" are broader categories; the basal encounter with the subject and predicate of the proposition is the real focus of interest. According to Whitehead, then, "it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest" (PR 396). Thus the actual function of language cannot be reduced to univocal significations that can be pronounced true or false.

Now Whitehead’s recognition of the fragmentary or imprecise character of speech parallels an insight shared by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and their theological disciples -- i.e., the practitioners of the new hermeneutic. But important differences must be noted. What they attribute to religious language Whitehead attributes to all language. Thus his vision of religious language is not utterly different from his understanding of the language of the everyday. So from a Whiteheadian perspective, understanding of a religious text does not rest so heavily upon existential appropriation of its message as the Heideggerians claim. In this sense a process hermeneutic will be more fully "secular" than the new hermeneutic, since it will recognize that all beings, in all times and places, who can in the full sense be named human persons, are -- simply by virtue of their humanity -- capable of grasping (and being grasped by) the message of the text.

For Whitehead, religious language is a legitimate mode of discourse precisely because it points to the metaphysical background implicit in ordinary speech and experience. It is distorted, however, when it is taken univocally -- when the abstractive process upon which it rests is ignored. When this happens, religious propositions are taken as dogmas and religious insight atrophies (RM 144f). Religious statements therefore stand in need of metaphysical clarification (RM 78).

Here, then, is my proposal for a "process hermeneutic." On the one hand, because the language of the text is imprecise and analogical, the interpreter must work through the discursive implications of the text back toward the complex of basal feelings toward which it lures the reader. To this extent a process hermeneutic will parallel Bultmann’s demythologizing project and, with important qualifications, the new hermeneutic as well. But a recognition of the metaphysical reference of all language -- and of religious language more particularly -- means that the interpretive process does not end at this point. The interpreter is also bound to take account of the most far-reaching presuppositions of the text. This does not mean that the interpreter must become a metaphysician in the sense of making metaphysical judgments -- although, at some point these become unavoidable and are in fact implicitly at work from the beginning, as in all thought -- but rather that he or she is responsible for recognizing the metaphysical question which the thrust of the text implies.

How, then, will this methodology help us evaluate the tension between Matthew’s christology and his soteriology? This tension, it seems to me, will appear as an invitation to metaphysical clarification.

There is no question but that Matthew’s gospel intends to lure the readers toward Jesus as a specific object of faith. That is clear even in the passages that reveal universalistic presuppositions. The question is whether this lure is best served by a univocal understanding of the language that embodies it. Clearly, the text calls for faith in Jesus as the eschatological judge; the question is whether it actually demands a formalization of the faith-response in a specific conceptualization of Jesus’ status -- one of a doctrinal character that demands assent.

Of course doctrinal implications are at work here and operative in the gospel as a whole -- just as in the entire early Christian witness. But the basic lure of the text is to a faith-response in relation to a particular object, not to any particular conceptualization of that object. Thus when we discover, parallel to the exclusivistic elements in the text, the tacit assumption of a broader principle by which these elements are in fact interpreted, it seems to me that we have the right to speak of a subtle lure toward the recognition of a metaphysical framework within which the call to faith is set. Language betrays, sometimes against its immediate "purpose," its ultimate ground and reference.

The point is that there are two levels of interpretation. On one level interpreters must recognize the right of the text to maintain whatever tensions, contradictions, absurdities that it will. On the other hand, if they are to treat it with full seriousness they must also trace home its metaphysical leadings and ask what final sense can be made of the witness. They must thus seek to understand the plain meaning of the text, but that meaning cannot be fully grasped apart from metaphysical clarification. And this clarification, of course, inevitably involves the interpreters own perspectives. Thus interpretation is the means by which the text wends its way into the future.

Interpreters, then, are not bound to the immediate doctrinal consequences of the text, but are free, and even obligated, to read the more immediate lures in light of the metaphysical implications and assumptions toward which the language of the text points. Elements that appear problematic in light of the metaphysical reference will not of course be excised from the text but rather interpreted -- i.e., recognized as highly analogical or symbolic elements.

Now if my reading of Mt. 25:31-46 is essentially correct, it should be apparent that the basic, overall thrust of the passage can be defined as a lure toward a feeling of compassion, or love, toward the needy. Christians are, in an immediate sense, enjoined to care for the less fortunate within their community. In that this exhortation to deeds of love is sanctioned by an appeal to the eschatological judgment, at which Jesus appears as Son of Man and judge, however, the lure toward love is bracketed by an implicit recognition of its confessional context. There is thus an additional lure toward commitment -- or, really, recommitment -- of one’s life to the Jesus who will appear as judge. But Jesus serves as God’s agent. So the call to recommitment to him actually opens into a lure toward apprehension of and recommitment to the God whom he represents.

These three basic lures are inextricably bound up with one another. Service to the neighbor is considered service to Jesus; service to Jesus is considered service to God; service to God is defined as service to the neighbor. This picture is complicated, however, by the presence of a subtler lure which appears in Matthew’s tacit assumption of the universality of the eschatological love-standard: the implied lure toward the apprehension of this standard as a metaphysical principle -- i.e., as expressing something about God’s being per se, apart from any special manifestation of it. Christians are told, in effect, that they will be judged on the basis of the love-standard precisely because that is the way all human beings will be judged -- i.e., in accordance with God’s primordial will. The necessary assumptions are that the standard is in fact universal and that adherence to it is a universal possibility. So the result is that Jesus, the focal point of a particularistic confession, enforces a standard that is universal, reaching beyond the very confessional tradition that proclaims him to be God’s eschatological agent.

Now there is nothing self-contradictory about the notion of a particularistic application of a universal standard. But the notion of the exclusive representative of a universal standard is problematic. If the standard is in fact universal, and if the corollary assumption of the universal possibility of adherence is accepted, then the real possibility of other representative disclosures cannot logically be denied. To the extent, then, that the particularistic lure toward confession of Jesus is understood as the proclamation of his exclusive status as representative of God’s will, it must be seen as competing with the metaphysical lure that stands in the background of the text. Our question, then, is whether the particularistic lure toward confession of Jesus as God’s eschatological agent must be understood as an assertion of his exclusive status as such.

The concept of "confession," it must be recognized, is highly ambiguous. It can refer to a preintellectual experience of ultimate commitment, or it can mean the discursive expression of that commitment. No linguistic formulation can be free of all discursive content; the question, though, is precisely which nuance, from among all the various connotations any formulation necessarily suggests, is to be seen as determinative. The lure toward confession of Jesus as the Son of Man necessarily entails some kind of discursive explication of his role. But there are two fundamentally different ways of approaching such an explication, and they are correlative with the two primary ways of understanding the language in which the confessional statement is made: the univocal, which takes the language as rigidly discursive, and the imagistic, which sees it as highly analogical or symbolic.

In either case, confession of Jesus means recognition of his objective role as a disclosure of God’s eschatological standard. But a univocal explication entails exclusivity, while an imagistic explication does not. The reason is that a univocal reading gives place to certain negative corollaries entailed in a strict adherence to the logic of the confessional statement. If Jesus is the eschatological judge, then no other can stand in his place; if he is the revealer of God’s primordial will, then no other can perform that function; if he appears at the apex of God’s history of salvation, then no other can occupy that position. His status -- although not necessarily the salvation he brings -- is thus utterly unique and therefore exclusive. Univocally understood, then, Matthew’s confession of Jesus proclaims him the exclusive representative of a standard that Matthew tacitly acknowledges as universal. An imagistic valuation of the confession, on the other hand, connotes only this as a minimum discursive affirmation demanding assent: that Jesus, in fact, represents Cod’s eschatological standard.

Clearly, Matthew himself interprets his confession univocally in the development of the mainstream of his thought. His salvation-history leaves no doubt that Jesus is the culmination of a series of events in which God has been uniquely active. This history, and this history alone, is the divinely-initiated history of salvation. But the salvation that is the goal of this exclusive history is nevertheless defined, through the undercurrent in Matthew’s thought, in a way that transcends this special history that achieves it. So the exclusivist corollaries of Matthew’s confession stand in tension with his metaphysical assumption. Thus if, in keeping with a process analysis of language-function, both the confession and the metaphysical assumption are to be taken with full seriousness, the meaning or point of the confessional element must be sought on the imagistic, rather than the univocal, level. This, in my estimation, is the primary contribution of a process hermeneutic: that it draws our attention to the functional significance of the metaphysical lure while freeing interpretation from the strict logic of proximate lures.

While the appearance of Jesus as eschatological judge and the reference of all deeds of mercy to Jesus imply the exclusiveness of Jesus’ role, the truth-judgment regarding this exclusivity runs counter to the metaphysical lure that grounds the confession itself by providing a universal sanction for Jesus’ decisions. So the exclusivist aspects of the christological formulation give way, functionally, to the imagistic. The christological witness forfeits its self-reference by pointing beyond itself -- i.e., by acting as a kind of confessional hyperbole the function of which is to lure readers to a new self-understanding before God, rather than to elicit a truth-judgment about Jesus’ unique status.

It is important to emphasize that the text’s power to assert is by no means curtailed by such a reading. Whereas the exclusive dimension of the christological confession is an obstruction to Matthew’s tacit assumption of the universality of God’s love-standard, the lures toward that standard and toward God himself form the foundation of the entire witness of the gospel. The truth-judgment becomes a functional necessity at the level of the metaphysical assumption, for the entire witness is futile if one does not believe that God is and that God is the one who bestows, commands, and enables love. It is to this affirmation, not the christological confession, that the text ultimately leads its readers. But the intellectual affirmation, of course, is made secondary to the existential appropriation of its meaning: the eschatological requirement is the deed of mercy.

There is, moreover, an aspect of the confession of Jesus that remains functional. Precisely in acknowledging God’s primordial will as represented by Jesus, one necessarily pronounces a truth-judgment about Jesus’ revelatory function -- or, to use the traditional term, office. But if the christological formulation is understood as confessional hyperbole, the truth-judgment no longer entails the exclusivism of a negative corollary.

A process perspective on the language through which Matthew brings his christological witness to expression thus in my estimation lends support to Ogden’s contention that the message of the New Testament is one that "can be formulated in complete abstraction from the event Jesus of Nazareth and all that it specifically imports." Such a reading discloses a consistent theocentrism that brackets and actually encroaches upon the apparent christocentrism of the New Testament. The ultimate reference of the text is dual -- to Cod, to a particular vision of authentic human existence. But what it has to say about each is expressed in the (for the Christian) indispensable metaphor of its witness to Jesus as the Christ. Interpreting the metaphor, then, I can agree with Ogden that the meaning of the witness of the New Testament to Jesus of Nazareth as a unique and unrepeatable act of God in behalf of human salvation is that

References

1. Schubert M. Ogden, Christ Without Myth: A Study Based on the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961.

2. Schubert M. Ogden, The Reality of God and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

3. Schubert M. Ogden, "On Revelation," in John Deschner, et al., eds., Our Common History as Christians: Essays in Honor of Albert C. Outler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

4. Herbert Braun, "Der Sinn der neutestamentlichen Christologie, Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche, 54 (1957), 341-77.

5. Ernst Käsemann, Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen, Bd. II. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1964.

6. Hendrikus Boers, Theology out of the Ghetto: A New Testament Exegetical Study Concerning Religious Exclusiveness. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971.

7. Krister Stendahl, "Matthew," in Matthew Black and H. H. Rowley, eds., Peake’s Commentary on the Bible. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962.

8. Rudolph Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition. Trans. John Marsh. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

9. Anton Vögtle, "Mt. 28, 18-20," in F. L. Cross, ed., Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literature, Bd. 87. Berlin: Alcademie-Verlag, 1964.

10. Georg Strecker, Der Weg der Gerechtigkeit. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1960.

11. Hans-Dieter Betz, "The Logion of the Easy Yoke and of Rest," Journal of Biblical Literature, 86, 1967.

12. Lyman T. Lundeen, Risk and Rhetoric in Religion: Whitehead’s Theory of Language and the Discourse of Faith. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972.

13. Schubert M. Ogden, "The Significance of Rudolf Bultmann," The Perkins School of Theology Journal, 15 (Winter, 1962), 5-17.

Notes

1There are, of course, degrees of subtlety with which this criterion is stated. But it would seem that even the highly sophisticated critiques of Funk and Griffin are finally based upon just such a stance. Thus Funk (Robert W. Funk, Language, Hemeneneutic, and Word of God: The Problem of Language in the New Testament and Contemporary Theology. [New York: Harper and Row, 1966]) asserts that Ogden’s proposal contains "no counterweight to man’s freedom." And "if," he continues "Ogden now replies that his counterweight to the absolute freedom of man is die primordial love of God, everywhere effectively present, we can only conclude that God also appears to be placed at the disposal of man" (p.96). The assumption seems to be that only conceivable counterweight to human freedom is some kind of "special’ event which mediates a possibility not actually present in the past. Thus even if Funk goes on to criticize Ogden’s metaphysical bent on the basis of a Heideggerian understanding of language, he has nevertheless linked his critique to a rather traditional understanding of the sense of New Testament christology. Similarly, Griffin (David R. Griffin, A Process Christology [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973]) seems to assume without question that the faith of the New Testament is inextricably bound to the assertion of an act of God qualitatively different from his general activity. Witness, e.g., the following: (1) "Likewise, in speaking of a special act of God, the specialness of this act must be attributed at least partly to God. Ogden has said that there is no reason to affirm ‘that God has acted in Christ in any way different from the way in which he primordially acts in every other event.’ It is really impossible to affirm this totally and also to do full justice to the notion of a special act of God" (p. 219f). (2) "Something is said not only about men’s reception of him; something is also implied about Jesus himself. Only if there was something special about his relation to God is it appropriate to apprehend him as God’s decisive revelation. More specifically, it is implied that he was God’s. supreme act of self-expression. Only if this were the case is it appropriate to receive him as Cod’s decisive revelation’ (p. 221).

2 Ogden’s assertion of the necessity of the Christian revelation to a fully reflective understanding of existence might be taken as a sign of a subtle shift of position -- in effect, an admission that there is, after all, some sense in which this event is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from ordinary events. I do not, however, think that such a reading is warranted. To say that the Christian revelation is "necessary" in this sense is not necessarily to say that the particular historical event in which the Christian understanding had its genesis is the only event in all history -- past, present, or future -- which could mediate such an understanding. The necessity, in other words, might well lie with the understanding itself and not with the particularity of the event in which it did in fact emerge in human history. Such an interpretation would seem more consonant with Ogden’s earlier work. And what he seems concerned to emphasize in this recent article is that (assuming the truth of the Christian understanding of existence) the Christian revelation embodies a view of life that objectively represents the meaning of human existence, so that if a person is indeed to grasp in a reflective way what the meaning of life in fact is he or she must understand it precisely in the way represented by the Christian witness. But whether this same self-understanding might be embodied in the reflection of some other group historically unrelated to the Christian movement would, I think, remain a matter of phenomenological investigation rather than one of theological pronouncement.

3 This recognition necessitates a qualification of Boers’s claim that here Christian deeds are interpreted by humanistic ones. This is true enough in one sense but must not be taken to indicate that the latter constitute a known quantity which illumines the Christian confession. The presence of Jesus as eschatological judge connotes the opposite: the Christian confession illumines the universal standard to which it, however, refers.

4The fifth discourse may be divided into three sub-units each of which possesses internal thematic unity. In chapter 23 the theme is condemnation of the scribes and pharisees. The second piece 24:1-36 constitutes a prophecy of the climactic esehatological events. The unifying thread in 24:37-25:46 is the note of w - Jesus admonishes his followers, in various ways, that they too will have to face final judgment and thus encourages them to steadfast obedience. For this reason I must reject the attempt of Lamar Cope ("Matthew XXV: 31-46 ‘The Sheep and the Coats’ Reinterpreted," Novum Testamentum 11 [19691, 32-44) to see the passage as a statement of how Gentiles only will be judged -- i.e., in accordance with their treatment of Christian missionaries.

5 I must reject the various attempts (e.g., Victor P. Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972], p. 82) to assimilate completely church and world in this passage on the basis of Mt. 28:19, which indicates that the end will not come until the completion of the world-mission. Granted that Matthew envisions the completion of the mission, I find it difficult to imagine that he actually believes that every single human being in the world will have been personally confronted with the word. I find it more likely either that he thinks of the mission to "the nations" in a representative sense (i.e., each nation, but not necessarily each human being will have been confronted) or that he is simply not thinking in such literal terms but rather wants to make the general point that the mission will be completed so that the salvation-history can come to a p roper end.

6 One may fairly ask, of course, whether the good seed are not products of the Christian mission, since they are sown by the Son of Man. There is no question that Matthew thinks primarily in these terms. But the good seed cannot be identified with Christians in a simplistic way, since the bad seed, quite obviously, cannot simply be identified with non-Christians. Jack D. Kingsbury (The Parables of Jesus in Matthew 13 A Study in Redaction Criticism [Richmond Virginia: John Knox Press, 1969)) solves the problem by making the good seed the product of the Church’s mission and the bad seed the product of Satan’s activity against the progress of the Church -- i.e., the corruption of actual and potential converts. But this view entails the attribution of all evil in the entire world to the effort of Satan against the Church. Mid such a notion is credible only on the assumption -- which Kingsbury seems to accept -- that by the time of the final judgment every single human being in the world will have been personally confronted with the gospel. Only in this way can all evil be defined in terms of reaction to the Church’s mission. In light of the difficulties of such an assumption (see above, n. 5), it seems best to imagine that Matthew simply does not intend the logic of the passage to be pushed to this degree. He wants only to make the general point that at the eschaton two kinds of people will appear before the judge: those who do good and those who do evil. When he encourages the Church members to make certain they are among the good, he tacitly assumes a universal standard of righteousness.

Kant maintained that the only thing which was good without qualification was a good will -- one that acted Out of pure duty. Thus, the only perfect will for him was the divine will, for in all finite wills duty and inclination would be bound to fall apart at certain points. At first reading, Kant’s deontological ethics contrasts markedly with Whitehead’s aesthetic approach where all actual occasions seek to achieve maximum value experience. Depending on which sense of the word "moral" one chooses, it can be argued that Whitehead’s God is moral, immoral or amoral. Since it has always been a main contention of orthodox religion that God represents the very standard and meaning of morality, it comes as a shock to confront a view in which God and morals seem to fail apart and to be separate. If one accepts anything like a Kantian approach to ethics, Whitehead’s God would seem, at first, amoral in the sense that moral predicates simply do not apply -- at least if one takes morality in a Kantian sense. Indeed this is a major criticism which has been made of Whitehead’s philosophy. We must examine the extent to which this criticism of Whitehead is just.

From a Kantian perspective a difficulty centers around Whitehead’s aesthetic model of value. The object of creative activity lies in the enhancement of value experience. God, in the Whiteheadian view, intends that all occasions and societies of occasions achieve maximum value; Whitehead sees clearly that in the achieving of value much sacrifice, tragedy, and loss occur. Not all values can be actualized at the same time; value in one area is frequently purchased at the expense of value somewhere else. Eating destroys life, and the value experience of what is being eaten (cf. PR 160). In human relations satisfaction is frequently derived by the denial of satisfaction to others. For Kant this is precisely where the moral issue arises -- inclination often decrees that I achieve maximum enjoyment for myself, yet duty at times stresses the need to curb inclination. Whereas Whitehead gives primary importance to the maximum aesthetic achievement, Kant regards morality as best illustrated in those situations in which duty may judge such aesthetic values to be immoral. Whitehead does recognize that there are tragic conflicts of value, but in his concern for the metaphysics of creation he does not seem sufficiently "under the weight" of the moral issue of duty which Kant pointed up so clearly. In fact, some critics have argued that White-head has no moral philosophy at all and that the problems of ethics were not of great interest to him (RAWG).

Whitehead, however, does argue that the higher morality is to aim at the enhancement of value for the larger community. More intensity of experience is involved in the enjoyment of the community at large than can be derived from the enjoyment of a single occasion or particular society of occasions. Hence, Whitehead seems to have a moral argument against excessive private pleasure at the expense of others. It would indeed seem strange if one of the major religious philosophers of our time were insensitive to moral issues or were. unaware or unappreciative of the Kantian thrust. While there are major differences between the two approaches which cannot be overlooked, these two points of view can be brought closer together than they appear to be at first glance.

Ethics primarily involves the relations of human beings to each other. The key Kantian notion is ,respect for persons as persons embodied in the form of the categoreal imperative which commands us to treat men as ends in themselves. The essence of personhood comes from according others dignity and respect and demanding it for ourselves. In addition we would also like to have pleasurable experiences, but, if a choice must be made, respect seems the more crucial to human person-hood. Many have sacrificed dignity and respect for happiness, but then begin to destroy themselves as persons. History is replete with examples to illustrate this situation.

Kant’s ethic has often been viewed as unduly severe, as purely formal and lacking emotional warmth, but to see it in these terms is to miss his main point. It is not that happiness and realized value are bad; any rational person would naturally pursue such inclinations, but they are irrelevant for Kant in estimating the moral worth of an action. It is in the pursuit of dignity and respect that we most truly exercise our personhood and that morality manifests itself. The twentieth century has brought this lesson home to us in ways never dreamed of in the optimistic eighteenth century. The whole current awakening to the evils of war and racism is a dramatic illustration of the profundity of Kant’s insight. Nothing in this view implies that happiness and the pursuit of satisfaction are evil per se -- on the contrary, they are major contributory factors to the good life. There are times and places, however, in which the moral concern requires that enjoyable experiences must, temporarily at least, give way to duty. It is hard to see anything unduly cold or formalistic about this.

The concept of duty is crucial in indicating situations where one ought to inhibit a potential enriching experience in the interest of doing the right thing. Here Kant differs most noticeably from Whitehead. A rational and, one might add, moral being, cannot accept as his categorical imperative that all possible value be experienced without some qualification as to the kinds of values involved. What about the pleasure derived from sadism and brutality? Are these to be maximized as much as possible? Indeed, even if they are, it does not follow that they ought to be. Kant’s divorce of the "ought" from the "is" stands as one of the most profound insights in moral philosophy.

A crucial issue for Whitehead’s philosophy is the apparent amorality of God. If God seeks maximum enhancement of value within the realm of finite occasions, then he would not seem to favor some value realizations over others. Furthermore, as the "lure" for feeling in presenting possibilities to occasions, God would seem to be indirectly implicated in the choices these occasions and societies of occasions make. Although Whitehead has successfully avoided the traditional problem of evil by his dipolar doctrine of God, he seems to have presented us with another problem of evil in the sense that God is not only unavoidably implicated in the actions of finite occasions, but to the extent that pleasure is realized by occasions God derives enjoyment in his consequent nature also. God seems beyond moral categories in the sense that he derives pleasure from the enjoyment felt by Hitler in the mass extermination of Jews as well as from the enjoyment found in the performance of a string quartet.

Some critics argue that God’s apparent desire to maximize both values is not only amoral but immoral as well. But God does not simply desire to maximize these values in isolation; he seeks the maximization of the conjoint value for all concerned. To answer the critic we must hold that God values for me things that I may not value for myself. God experiences any value that I may experience, but it does not follow that he would not prefer a greater experience for me than the one I chose and thus derivatively a greater experience for himself. What remains intuitively implausible to some critics is that God could experience any value from an immoral situation in which finite creatures found some value.

I have stated the criticism in its starkest form because it indicates a real weakness in the position and shows that more needs to be done on a Whiteheadian moral philosophy. In short, the primary emphasis on the aesthetic factor needs to be balanced with the moral. Moral experience is such a crucial part of human experience that it would seem very strange if God were insensitive to its distinctions. Many see man’s finest hour in the surmounting of moral obstacles and in the triumph of obligation over inclination.

We must combine the moral insight of Kant with the metaphysical insights of Whitehead. Good and bad often do reflect human prejudices and inclinations, and we must beware of attributing our own particular moral judgments to God. As Kierkegaard showed so dramatically, we are only too prone to assume that God’s moral judgments must be the same as ours. Given the prideful and finite nature of human judgment it would be gross to attribute any particular human moral judgment to God. It need not follow, however, that God is above and beyond all forms of moral predication. The particular decision that a finite creature makes may turn out to be erroneous or unwise, but what is to prevent God from presenting lures towards decisions which will enhance human dignity and respect? God may gently lure all men to treat others as ends, though we may accept or reject this lure in making our particular decisions. Since God is the lure for all choices, he is the lure for a moral choice as well.

The critic might point out that such a God is still implicated in evil, for although he presents a possibility for moral choice, he also presents the possibilities for immoral choice. God does more than provide only one opportunity from which to choose; he presents as lures all the real options that the human being has before him. The possibility to torture as well as the possibility to rescue both come equally from God.

Thus, we must go further in our analysis if we are to free a Whiteheadian God from implication in evil. God’s approach to moral choice has a number of unique aspects about it. God has a moral nature, but its manifestation will be markedly different from man’s moral nature. Morality for us is primarily, if not exclusively, a matter of dealing with other persons. This may be a shortsighted error on our part, but, with the exception of a few saintly souls, human beings generally have not thought of themselves as having any obligations to nonhuman nature. Following the biblical injunction, we have felt that we have dominion over all other creatures and indeed that the whole created universe exists simply to serve our own needs. It is only in the present day that the full implications of this view are coming home to us. Deeper religious insight makes it doubtful that God simply intended us to "lord it" over the whole creation. If we can say anything at all about God with any degree of assurance, it surely would be that he is lovingly concerned with the totality of his creation, no matter how different and opposed the other parts may be to us and to our interests.

Whitehead’s statement that God seeks the maximization of values need not be taken as a blanket moral endorsement of everything that occurs. What does follow is that in some sense God relishes the realization of value by all finite occasions and societies of occasions and the maximization of value for the whole world community. I do not think one can avoid the implication in Whitehead’s aesthetic metaphysics that any realization of value is in some sense desirable and coherent with the nature of God. If sadism provides pleasure, and surely it provides some to the sadist, in some way it enhances the nature of God and increases the divine enjoyment as well. This implication of Whitehead’s view must be fully faced and accepted, and it is this kind of situation which poses the moral dilemma for God. It must be kept in mind, however, that if the sadist is pleased and God receives this pleasure as objectified in his consequent nature, God also experiences, in the same way, the suffering of the sadist’s victim. All is contributed to God -- both suffering and enjoyment.

Whitehead diverges from orthodoxy on certain crucial points -- one of these being that any realization of value at any level is, in some sense, a source of enjoyment to God. But we must remember that this enjoyment does not automatically imply moral approval.

While God may derive value from the pleasure of the sadist, God also experiences the pain of the sadist’s victim and in Whitehead’s View, God would derive greater enjoyment if the sadist and the victim both had their own value experiences enhanced rather than that the sadist achieve his pleasure at the expense of the victim. Thus while God derives value from all finite sources of pleasure, it would seem as though God could still "morally disapprove" in situations where sacrifice of value is involved. Whitehead would speak about this more on the level of feeling than in terms of rational morality, but the result might well be the same. In Whiteheadian terms, God suffers by the sadist’s acts even as he receives the enjoyment of the sadist. God presumably undergoes suffering whenever a sacrifice of value occurs, and as Whitehead was well aware, God feels tragedy all the time. In the conflict of values much suffering is unavoidable, and much of it has no moral significance in Kant’s sense. However, where persons perpetrate suffering on other persons immorally in Kant’s sense (treating others as means rather than as ends), then presumably God’s suffering is increased by his awareness that moral "wickedness" has been perpetrated. Thus one can say that in a Whiteheadian view God must be morally sensitive too. When a sadist commits an immoral act, God suffers from an awareness that the sadist presumably has potentially much greater sources of pleasure which would enhance him, his victim, and the entire community. Hence God could morally disapprove of the sadist’s act while deriving limited value from it.

At the human level we frequently enjoy things of which we do not approve. We cannot help feeling many of the things we feel, but we do have a choice as to whether to give this feeling our moral approbation or not. Given the metaphysical situation which Whitehead depicts, God would not be God if he did not seek the enhancement of value at all levels and did not feel in his consequent nature the values prehended at all levels. It does not follow that God would not desire greater moral sensitivity in his creatures and by the method of persuasive possibilities present moral possibilities to creatures who through time could slowly become more morally aware. Greater moral sensitivity would eventually enhance value in the community and thus enhance God’s enjoyment too. In our cosmic epoch, as far as we know, human beings are the only creatures aware of a moral dimension to reality.

Hartshorne never tires of pointing out that God is infinitely open and responsive to all creatures. At the level of feeling God must enter sympathetically into the experience of all occasions and societies of occasions. Finite creatures are simply unable to do this -- all of which makes it easier for us to make dogmatic moral pronouncements about others. It is much easier to become morally incensed about another’s apparent wrongdoing if one has no feeling for the other person’s suffering. Moral maturity, at the human level, arises when one can emotionally sympathize, perhaps even suffer, with another and still make an independent moral judgment of him. This suggests that what exceptionally mature persons can accomplish on a limited level is possibly fully realized on the divine level. God may be open and sympathetic to all without thereby morally endorsing all. This lack of moral endorsement is easier to understand if one were to maintain Kant’s distinction that morality is a matter of reason rather than of feeling even for God. Just how this might occur in the divine nature remains incredibly obscure -- God’s ways are in many respects not our ways. All I want to suggest is how a Whiteheadian God might be absolved of the charge of immorality or of implication in evil.

On the human level, morality is a matter of reason rather than feeling, but this need not apply to God. Human beings, because they are partial and limited, are unable to embrace the feelings and concerns of others adequately. Thus, for us, a rational concept of duty must fill the gap where our feelings for others breaks down, as it always does sooner or later. Thus duty is necessary for man. But for God, no such necessity for duty exists, since God’s interests are not partial. God is infinitely open to all creatures with tender feeling and concern. Thus the moral dimension can never arise as an abstract requirement of reason for God since it is immediately embraced in God’s feeling. However, at the human level the moral law must intervene because we are incapable of impartial feeling and concern (DR 125-32).

It is clear that moral judgment and censure come easier to us if we do not have great breadth of feeling. People with broad human sympathies and deep feelings are often reluctant to make moral judgments about others and often feel that morality is a cold and heartless business. It is unfortunate and erroneous that morality should become associated with lack of feeling and warmth. Kant has often been unjustly criticized on this score; but Kant himself maintains that in the aesthetic dimension the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good (CJ §59). Morality does not rule out feeling -- on a human level moral judgment is simply logically in a different category than ordinary feeling. Morally I have obligations to other human beings regardless of how I may feel about them. Even if I hate another person, I am not relieved of my moral obligations to him. I cannot be commanded to love him, but I can be commanded to respect him and accord him dignity as a human being. This is why Kant indicates that the true perception of the moral dimension occurs where duty and inclination fall apart. When they converge one may be a saint, but it is difficult to distinguish the moral component just as it is difficult to see the stars when the sun is out. It is precisely this complete convergence in the divine nature which may make it appear that God is amoral; consequently, God is never confronted with a moral problem. In the broader sense God’s moral outreach is pervasive of all, for, according to Whitehead, he wants and encourages creative realization of value everywhere.

We might say that two different senses of "moral" are involved -- one when the predicate is applied to man and another when applied to God. In any sophisticated concept of divinity it would be nonsense to find a discrepancy between duty and inclination in God, but for humans duty and inclination frequently conflict. Morality at the human level arises through a sensitivity of a lack. The sense of ought arises in the discrepancy between what we want to do and what we feel we should do. The notion of ought never applies to God because he has sympathy for all creatures and therefore does not have to make up for the lack of it by doing his duty.

Let us look for a moment at clear cases of mass genocide such as Hitler carried out or cases of mass bombings which were carried out by both sides in the second world war and by the Americans in Vietnam. In the Whiteheadian view, God’s experience would be radically distinct from ours in two crucial ways. To the extent that someone found value in these situations, then God finds value in these situations no matter how strange this may sound. Any enjoyment that Hitler experienced in genocide was experienced by God too, but it does not follow from this that God wills genocide. Hitler willed it. Of course God presents it as one of a number of possible choices, but the choice was Hitler’s and partially made on the basis of Hitler’s earlier choices. It would be more appropriate to say that God wills the maximization of values for all his creatures, and this would certainly not include genocide. But God experiences any value at all that arises out of human choices. God presumably wills much that we do not will, but he cannot force our will and hence must enjoy and suffer what we enjoy and suffer on the basis of our limited and faulty willing. God’s frustrating and tragic task is to lure us to will better than we do, so that his enjoyment and ours may be more greatly enhanced. To the extent that we receive value God receives value. To the extent that suffering occurs there is disvalue, and this too is passed on to God’s consequent nature through the mode of objective immortality.

In a human being such schizoid experiences would destroy the personality completely. The mass of suffering alone experienced by God derivatively appalls and staggers the human imagination. The integration of human personality is saved because we can experience so little. If we experienced too much of other’s suffering, even derivatively, we would be driven mad as many are. From our perspective the welter of God’s conflicting experiences is inconceivable. If Whitehead and orthodox religious thinkers are right, God can absorb all of this experience into the unity of his own personality. Because God enters sympathetically into the experience of all his creatures, it does not follow that he would not prefer and indeed entice his creatures to richer kinds of experiences, including an awareness of the moral dimension. It must be remembered that Whitehead’s God is limited in certain crucial respects. He cannot force creatures to do anything -- creation at all levels is genuine and free. God can and does gently persuade, and his persuasion operates on all creatures. He cannot force the mass murderer to seek value in other ways, but he can and may lead mankind to come gradually to abhor such behavior and to condemn it as immoral. Literal human ownership of other human beings in the form of slavery used to be widely accepted and practiced in the civilized world. Now it is not, but its demise did not come suddenly or without great cost and bloodshed.

What might have been the origin of human sensitivity to the evils of slavery? For Whitehead, and indeed for many others, it might well have come from God -- as a possibility gently presented. God could not eliminate slavery -- only human beings could -- but the idea that it was monstrous to own persons arose, if Whitehead is correct in his general metaphysical position, as a possibility presented by God. In our own times the increasing revulsion against war is also presented as a lure by God. Unfortunately, people must be ready to follow these lures, and this takes time; in the interim fantastic suffering occurs. This is God’s tragedy as well as ours, and the symbolism of God’s suffering on the cross makes this only too clear. In the profoundest sense it would be strange to consider God amoral if the moral dimension in human experience is itself derived from God. Its implementation, however, must be by finite human creatures. To change the example for a moment, to be Socrates dissatisfied may be preferable to being a pig satisfied. The pig’s satisfaction is perfectly genuine and real as far as it goes, but the Socratic dissatisfaction may be a stepping stone toward a much more profound kind of satisfaction. Thus, moral sensitivity, though primarily a rational insight for man, may lead gradually to a more profound overall satisfaction at both the human and divine level.

Given the aesthetic "root metaphor" of Whitehead’s metaphysics, the main thrust of his position is teleological rather than deontological with respect to ethics. May we not say, however, that moral insight and sensitivity are also intrinsically valuable though valuable in a very special and peculiar way? Here we might push the Kantian approach one step further. While moral insight is primarily a rational insight into the rightness and wrongness of things, the dignity and respect that persons receive from moral behavior produces an especially sublime kind of enjoyment at the level of feeling. Feelings and enjoyments are not all of one cloth as Mill, Dewey, and others have indicated. The moral dimension adds a qualitative character to the life of feeling that cannot be met m any other way. At the same time this moral dimension is essential to human personhood; it comes from God as "lure" and thus enhances our life of feeling. Surely this approach is preferable to regarding God as having specific moral judgments completely congruent with our own. There is, as Kierkegaard pointed out, a teleological suspension of the ethical at the divine level, but maybe it is simply a suspension of what we take the ethical to be in specific situations -- for the moral dimension itself is, as we have seen, presented by God. There is much that is unclear and mysterious here, but who ever claimed that we don’t see through a glass darkly in these matters? It would seem that a reasonably coherent moral philosophy could be developed along Whiteheadian lines.

Although Kant did make an important distinction between duty and inclination, he overstressed a dualism at the psychological level. Kant makes it clear that one cannot logically derive what one ought to do from what is the case. Logically he is also correct in maintaining that we have obligations to others that hold independently of how we happen to feel. Nevertheless, there is a tendency to make too rigid a separation between the moral will and feeling, as though at the psychological level moral choice is exclusively a decision of the pure practical reason. Kant himself softens this dualism somewhat in the third Critique where he draws the moral and the aesthetic dimensions closer together.

Obviously, at the psychological level feelings are as much involved in moral choice as in any other kind of choice; one derives a peculiar type of satisfaction from moral behavior just as one feels a peculiar kind of guilt from immoral behavior. Psychologically we may never act out of pure reason, and we would be something less than human if we did. At the psychological level we may basically be talking about feelings -- moral and nonmoral feelings. What makes moral feelings peculiar is the logical point behind Kant’s thrust -- we owe dignity and respect to other persons as persons regardless of our other feelings about them, and in a moral crisis we may feel urgently the not always so gentle persuasion of God in the form of conscience. This would certainly be consistent with the divine persuasion of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Thus God would not seem to be devoid of deep moral concern as a source of satisfaction in human development.

Kant saw that we are bound in a human moral community with each other. Whitehead saw that we are bound together in a larger community and his metaphysics is a description of such a community. What he did not stress as clearly, but what is implied by his metaphysics, is that this community is also a moral community in a larger sense, and although this dimension is only apprehended by human beings, it still binds them morally into community with the nonhuman as well as the human.

References

CJ -- I. Kant, Critique of Judgment. Hafner Library of Classics, 1951

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

RAWG -- Stephen Lee Ely, The Religious Availability of Whitehead’s God. Madison, Wisconsin, 1942.

Among the increasing number of persons who are persuaded of the importance of the thought of either Whitehead or Martin Heidegger few have tried to appropriate the thought of both. Only in the rarest instances have scholars seen fit to explore the possibility of a fruitful interchange between the fundamental ideas of these two seminal thinkers.¹ This paucity of comparative scholarship is, perhaps, a function of the assumption that their modes of philosophizing are so different as to render the thought of the one completely irrelevant to that of the other. Also, so far as Heideggerians are concerned, the assumption may be reinforced by the belief that Whitehead is a part of the metaphysical tradition which Heidegger seeks to "dismantle"² and thus to overcome. Even if this were the case, it would not be unprofitable to make comparisons, since Heidegger saw the tradition as including "positive possibilities" (SZ 22). Of course, such a comparison would disclose Heidegger’s conception of "Being" and of "time" as radically other than Whitehead’s. It is my conviction that this is not the case. But since it seems to be a genuine obstacle to further commerce, it should be removed at the outset. A careful examination of what Heidegger actually says about Being, time, and the need to dismantle the metaphysical tradition, combined with a clear grasp of Whitehead’s idea of the Being of actual entities and the nature of time that stems will aid considerably in that removal.

I. The Legitimacy of a Comparison

To understand Heidegger’s position we need first to read closely the Introduction to Being and Time, especially sections five and six: "The Ontological Analytic of Dasein as Laying Bare the Horizon for an Interpretation of the Meaning of Being in General," and "The Task of a Dismantling of the History of Ontology." Here Heidegger makes several important points which should be kept constantly in mind when reading Being and Time, and which, I believe, give legitimacy to the present enterprise.

First, Heidegger repeatedly asserts that the goal of his treatise is to work out the question of the meaning of Being in general -- the "Being of entities" (SZ 1, 5, 6, 11, 27). Secondly, he points to Dasein, the entity "which we ourselves are at all times," (SZ 7) as the entity by which we are to gain access to the meaning of Being. That is to say that by fully interpreting the entity which is ontically distinguished by the fact that "in its own Being [it] is occupied with this Being itself" (SZ 12), we are enabled to formulate the question of the meaning of Being most adequately. Having established the thesis that there is an essential relation between the ontological analytic of Dasein and the working out of the meaning of Being in general, Heidegger says: "We shall point to temporality as the meaning of the Being of the entity which we call Dasein" (SZ 17). Thus "temporality" (Zeitlichkeit), which is disclosed as the meaning of the Being of Dasein, becomes the guide to "time" (Zeit) as the horizon for any understanding of Being. He writes:

Having made this point -- that the question of the meaning of Being must be understood in terms of time which can only genuinely be conceived in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein -- Heidegger further reveals the need for loosening up a tradition which has hardened and which, therefore, blocks our access to the determination of Being (SZ 21, 22). He notes that in following the insight that the temporality of Dasein provides the clue to the meaning of Being we must take care to distinguish this idea of temporality from the traditional concept of time which, he believes, has persisted from Aristotle through Bergson. Reflecting on the fact that "time" has often functioned as an "ontical criterion" for distinguishing "realms of Being," he notes that, as thus conceived, the idea inevitably conveys the notion of being "in time" in contrast with the eternal which is "supratemporal" (SZ 18). Therefore, despite the fact that the idea of time has remained obscure or unanalyzed with respect to its ontological function, it has played a decisive role in traditional metaphysics as well as in forming ordinary concepts. Contrary to this haphazard treatment of so important a matter, Heidegger aims to "show that the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in a right way of seeing and explaining the phenomenon of time, and how this is to be done" (SZ 18). If Being itself, and not merely entities "in time," is to be conceived in relation to time, then, clearly, any so-called "nontemporal" or "supratemporal" entities must be understood as temporal in their very Being. Also, the temporality which is the primordial meaning of Being, must be understood as something positive and not as a privation. To be sure, Heidegger does not at this point indicate precisely what constitutes the positive element of temporality, but he establishes the imperative to treat temporality as coextensive with Being as such and to try to work out the idea concretely and thoroughly as an ontological category:

It is clear to Heidegger that in the history of ontology the question of Being has never been critically formulated and interpreted with temporality as its fundamental problematic. In fact, he says that the only philosopher to have investigated the phenomenon of temporality extensively was Kant, who both neglected the problem of Being and took over the ordinary concept of time (SZ 23f). Even Greek ontology, which did interpret Being in the light of the problematic of temporality, failed to follow through with this insight. For Greek thinkers, by taking their clue from Dasein’s awareness of entities as "present-at-hand," understood time as "a pure ‘making-present’ of something" so that "time itself was taken as one entity among other entities" rather than as the meaning of Being in general (SZ 26). This entity, then, functioned primarily to distinguish ens finitum from ens infinitum. The Greek conception was given its most detailed expression in Aristotle’s Physics, which Heidegger believes to have "essentially determined all subsequent conceptions of time including Bergson’s" (SZ 26). Thus the whole metaphysical tradition needs to be loosened up or taken apart and examined until we arrive at the primordial "sources" of all conceptions of Being: "We understand this task as that which, by taking the question of Being as a guide, carries Out the dismantling of the transmitted stock of ancient ontology down to the primordial experiences in which the first, and subsequently the governing, determinations of Being were produced" (SZ 22). The positive aim of this dismantling process is achieved only by taking temporality as the clue to the meaning of Being and by endeavoring to work it out thematically.

Some of this language will be strange to Whiteheadians, but surely the guiding insight, namely, that Being in general is fundamentally temporal, will not. Whitehead neither divorces the question of the meaning of Being in general (the Being of entities) from the problematic of temporality, nor does time function, for him, as an entity which distinguishes realms of Being. To be sure, Whitehead distinguishes finite and infinite aspects of temporality, as does Heidegger, but neither man excludes temporality from any possible realm of Being. Of course, considerable exposition is required to clarify the precise sense in which each thinker understands the temporal constitution of any entity whatsoever and, thus, the sense in which time is said to derive from the meaning of the Being of entities. Yet it may be asserted intelligibly at the outset that the "concrescence of an actual entity, its act of becoming which constitutes its Being and which is the basis of physical time, is the Whiteheadian equivalent of "primordial temporality." When Whitehead remarks: "How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is... Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’" (PR 34f), he is not only establishing the basis for distinguishing the peculiar characteristics attaching to any entity; he is also, implicitly, declaring the general truth that any being is constituted by some kind of becoming.

Perhaps my remarks on the relation of Being, time, and Dasein have not penetrated to the heart of Heidegger’s position. Also, the very brief statement of Whitehead’s idea of the fundamentally temporal character of the Being of entities may fail to convince the Heideggerian that Whitehead has attained the radical reconception of Being and of time that is required. Nevertheless, I hope that the forgoing will have lent plausibility to the project which can only be fully justified by elaborating the several important ways in which, I believe, their concepts are comparable.

II. Some General Similarities

We may begin the comparison by noting several loosely connected general convictions about time which Whitehead and Heidegger share and which they view as distinguishing their concepts from more traditional ones. In the first place both men reject the belief that time can be taken to distinguish realms of Being. This means, at least, that no distinction between what is temporal and what is nontemporal or eternal can be regarded as absolute. We noted Heidegger’s repudiation of this use of "temporality."³ It is well known that the refusal to exclude temporality from any realm of Being applies equally to Whitehead, who in his developed metaphysics introduced the concept of God as not only "primordial" (in the sense of being "complete" and "eternal"), but also "consequent upon the creative advance of the world" (PR 524).

In addition to this point on which our principals agree in departing from the tradition, both men repudiate any notion which treats time as having its status independent of the fundamental, temporal entities. For Heidegger, the chief spokesman for the ordinary view is Aristotle who regards time as "present equally everywhere and with all things" (Physics 218b). Aristotle further defines time as the "number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after,’" which is measured by the "now" which both divides the "before" from the "after," and yet makes them "continuous" (Physics 219b). Although time here is regarded as a function of motion, it is, nonetheless, conceived as independent of entities, especially the primordially temporal entity, Dasein. It is conceived as a continuum within which entities "in time" come into being and perish. Accordingly, it is designated by Heidegger, "within-timeness." But far from having any genuinely independent status, Heidegger says that "time as within-timeness arises from an essential kind of temporalizing of primordial temporality" (SZ 333).

Whitehead’s adversary in this respect is Newton who is even more explicit in asserting the independence of time from things "in time":

"Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external" (NPN 17). Whitehead cites the Newtonian "receptacle theory" as illustrative of a common view that bits of matter occupy space and time, in contrast to his own view that time, together with space, matter, and causality, "ultimately refer to actual entities" (PR 111; cf. CN 66: "There is time because there are happenings and apart from happenings there is nothing").

A corollary of this idea is the insistence that "instants" or "nows" are not to be treated as concrete facts. Whitehead urges this point in all of his writings from the earliest Aristotelian Society paper of 1916, through Modes of Thought published in 1938. For example, in 1919 he writes:

He adds the immediate qualifier that the point of this polemic is not to banish entirely the notion of points and instants, but "to express the essential scientific concepts of time, space and material as issuing from fundamental relations between events and from recognitions of the characters of events" (PNK 8). As his thought develops and expands, it becomes clear that "the content of the specious present" is the ultimate datum, not only for science, but for metaphysics as well. This means that all final facts are unified occasions of experience and that it is from the ordering of these entities that points and instants" are derived.

Similarly, for Heidegger, the "now" is not to be confused with Dasein’s authentic present, called "the moment." The "now" belongs essentially to "time as within-timeness" (SZ 338) which, as we have seen, is a derivation from primordial temporality. Thus he says that the ordinary understanding, based on the notion of an independent time "in which" entities within the world occur, conceives time as "a series of nows which are constantly ‘present-at-hand’ slipping by and arriving instantaneously" (SZ 422). Heidegger also points out that such a "series of nows is continuous and without gaps. No matter how ‘far’ we press on in ‘the division’ of the now, it is always now" (SZ 423). This insight is reminiscent of Whitehead’s use of the Zenonian argument against continuous becoming (PR 105-07): both see that no concrete reality can be generated by the continuous succession of nonconcrete points and that there can be nothing distinctively temporal in such a conception. Nevertheless, both agree that there is validity in thus conceiving time as a derivative notion. On this point Heidegger writes: "The ordinary characterization of time as an endless, passing, irreversible series of nows originates from the temporality of fallen Dasein. The ordinary representation of time has its natural justification" (SZ 426). The justification is to be found in the ordering of public events and entities within the world.

The main point in the polemic of both thinkers, however, is that unless we reject the notion of "instants" or ‘nows" as primitive entities, we will seriously misconceive the entire notion of time.

III. The Primitive Entities as the Source of Derived Time

In view of these general similarities, at least with respect to what they reject, it seems that our efforts would be repaid by a closer inspection of their doctrines. Clearly, if time is said to be a function of the Being of the primary entities, we should analyze and compare the entities which each regards as primitive, the kinds of experience which are typical of the entities and which reveal their basic constitution, and their relations to the larger world.

For Whitehead the "final real things of which the world is made up" are "actual entities" which are "drops of experience, complex and interdependent" (PR 27f). Accordingly, they are also variously termed "events" (SMW and earlier), "concrete facts," "actualities," and "occasions of experience" (AI). They embody the intuition that reality is essentially a creative process rhythmically alternating between the "microscopic process" which constitutes the Being of any such entity ("concrescence") and the "macroscopic process" which is the supersession of these entities ("transition"). This intuition is summed up in the dictim: "The many become one, and are increased by one" (PR 32).

Although, when studying Whitehead, it is imperative to distinguish between the two types of process and the analysis pertaining to each of them, there is an essential connection between the two which may be viewed as a relation of dependence or derivation. There is an important sense in which any given entity depends on transitions from the actual world constituting its past. But that actual world is made up of actual entities which cast themselves forth. Thus, when analyzing the relationship of the two processes, it will be seen that the process of transition or the supersession of actual entities depends on and derives from the "genetic process" which is the concrescence of the entity and which constitutes its Being.

Some brief, but essential, remarks about the entity as an act of becoming may elucidate this claim. The entity is experienced as a creative synthesis and can be analyzed as a process. It derives, in part, from the objectified data of its past which it prehends and synthesizes in accordance with its "subjective aim." This is a unified process in which "the many become one." But even as a unified subject the entity essentially also refers beyond itself; it "perishes"⁴ with respect to its "subjective immediacy" into the status of an object for succeeding entities, and thereby, "the many are increased by one." Thus one "half" of the general process is "transition." This is creativity as "the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact" (AI 227). But this aspect of the process is dependent upon the other "half," the creative synthesis which constitutes the subjectivity of the actual entity.⁵

Physical time, as Whitehead conceives it, is the temporal order of the supersession of entities; it "makes its appearance in the ‘coordinate analysis,’ " namely, that pertaining to the relationship among entities. But time is not the measure of the synthetic process which constitutes the subjective immediacy of an actual entity; it derives from this, for, as Whitehead says, "physical time expresses some features of the growth, but not the growth of the features" (PR 434). Since time does not express the "growth of the features," i.e., the "genetic passage from phase to phase" (PR 434), the expression, "some features of the growth," must be meant to refer to features of the completed entity, that which has attained "satisfaction." Thus time -- or "physical time" -- refers to a certain ordering of the completed entity, which is an outcome of the "growth of the features."

Now let us turn to Heidegger. His primitive entity is "Dasein," which is the human mode of Being and is that entity by which we gain access to the meaning of Being in general. We have noted that "temporality" -- or "primordial temporality" as it is frequently termed to distinguish it from ordinary time -- is the meaning of the Being of Dasein and is the guide for any genuine understanding of Being itself. But how does Heidegger arrive at this understanding of the meaning of the Being of Dasein? His analysis of Dasein begins with the observation that the first and most general characterization is that it is "Being-in-the-world" (SZ 53). This is its basic state and, as such, is indicative of a unitary phenomenon. Nevertheless, on analysis, it is found to be a complex unity. For "Being-in-the-world" is shown to be constituted by three modes, namely, "disposition," "understanding," and "fallenness." Moreover, these constitutive modes of Being of Dasein disclose it as fundamentally factical or thrown, as existential or projecting forward into its possibilities, and as present-with entities within-the-world. These three structural modes, as a unity, constitute Dasein’s Being as "care" (SZ 192). They also disclose the Being of Dasein as fundamentally temporal, that is, as a unity of Being-ahead-of-itself, Being-already-in, and Being-alongside. The "Being-ahead-of-itself" is the basis of Dasein’s futurity; the "Being-already-in" is the basis of Dasein’s "having-been." And out of the dynamic unity of the future and the past, the "thrown-projection" of Dasein’s Being, the present is generated: "We call this phenomenon which is unified as a future which makes present in the process of having-been, temporality. . . . Temporality is disclosed as the meaning of authentic care" (SZ 326).

This passage is taken from the focal section of Being and Time: "Temporality as the Ontological Meaning of Care" (SZ 323-31). It is the understanding of Dasein towards which the entire preparatory analytic has pointed, and it is on the basis of this interpretation of Dasein that other forms of temporality (e.g., the temporality of circumspective concern, Dasein’s historicity, the ordinary concept of time) get worked out. The point to be emphasized here is that Heidegger, like Whitehead, regards the entity which he interrogates as disclosive of the meaning of Being in general, and as primordially temporal, as the source of derived time.’ This does not mean that "Dasein" and "actual entities" are to be confused or regarded as interchangeable. Clearly, they are different-type entities representing different ways of approaching the task of uncovering the meaning of Being. We will defer until the end of the paper the problem of accounting for the differences. Still, the more we unpack their ideas the more we see that the two philosophers’ fundamental intuitions about the dynamic essence of Being converge and are reflected in the similar analysis which each makes of the entity he takes to be primitive. Also, to reiterate, each sees "ordinary" or "physical" time as having a derivative status, depending on the "temporality" or the "creative synthesis" which lies at the heart of the primitive entity.

Additional important similarities are revealed by considering the analysis which each thinker makes of "immediate experience" as the source of our knowledge of temporality. It is apparent that there is a significant -- although perhaps not irreconcilable -- difference in what constitutes "immediate experience" for each man. This difference, too, will be treated below. For the present let us consider the similarities. Both reject the idea that the perception of ordinary objects or of "sense-data" is the most fundamental fact involved in immediate experience. These modes of experiencing the outer world are not thought to be illusory. They are, however, seen as derivative modes of experience and, when taken as primordial, are productive of inadequate and misleading views of time, of human Being, and of Being in general.

In this vein Heidegger maintains that although it is the case that "Being-in-the-world" is the fundamental state of Dasein, if we interpret our immediate experience primarily in terms appropriate to entities within-the-world by "falling prey" to the world of things, we misinterpret that experience. To experience ourselves as objects, which are primarily entities "present-at-hand," or even as tools, which are "ready-to-hand," is to falsify our fundamental mode of existence. The time which is appropriate to the mode of existence of "presence-at-hand" is derived "public time," which is characterized by a sequence of instantaneous "nows" and is, as such, measurable (SZ 411-20).

On the other hand, primordial temporality, as the meaning of Dasein’s Being, is disclosed in the immediate experience of such concrete phenomena as "anxiety," "guilt," and "conscience." We may neglect Heidegger’s analysis of "guilt" and "conscience," which merely corroborates the main point. But we should concern ourselves with "anxiety," which is, for Heidegger, a distinctive phenomenon in that it is a fundamental disposition which embodies and discloses all three horizons of existence (SZ 182). That "in the face of which" Dasein finds itself anxious is its facticity, its sheer thrownness. But more than this Dasein is anxious about its existence, its potentiality-for-Being. Existence, when thought through to the end, means Dasein’s own most particular "Being-towards-death." And by fleeing into the world of things Dasein attempts to evade itself in its most extreme possibility. Thus Dasein experiences itself as anxious about itself (SZ 187-88).

The experience of the various concrete, psychological phenomena reveals to Dasein its ontological nature as something like "resoluteness running-forward" (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit) (SZ 305). With this term Heidegger endeavors to summarize two distinguishable, but inseparable, possibilities of Being, namely, "wholeness" and "authenticity." By considering Dasein as a whole being, we are forced to see it, ultimately, as "Being-towards-death" as one’s most extreme possibility. Thus Dasein must be characterized as "running-forward to this possibility" (SZ 262). But also, to take over and make the most of one’s whole Being in terms of concrete facts and possibilities is to actualize that Being authentically or with "resoluteness" (SZ 306). Now, it is the experience of oneself as "resoluteness running-forward" which discloses to Dasein that it is temporal in its innermost Being. It is not something intrinsically other than itself that Dasein experiences immediately; it is its "Being-towards its own most distinctive potentiality-for-Being" (SZ 325). This experience, therefore, discloses Dasein as primarily futural, as "letting itself come toward itself." But it is always futural as "in the process of having-been" and, as such, generating the present (SZ 326). Resoluteness running-forward reveals Dasein in this way as fully temporal.

For Whitehead the immediate experience disclosed in the world of human Being is the experience of our present bodily state conforming to its immediate past, and to the vague world beyond, and anticipating its immediate future. Whitehead also recognizes that there is immediate perception of discrete "sense impressions" or "sense-data." But this mode of perception, called "presentational immediacy," merely surveys the contemporary scene; it "gives no information as to the past or the future" (PR 255). Thus when this mode of perception is assumed to be the sole -- or even the primary -- mode of experiencing the world, there can be no sense of time; we are caught in "the solipsism of the present moment." It is one of Whitehead’s great achievements to have insisted on the primitive character of the experience of "causal efficacy" (PR 125) and to have generalized this experience so that it is seen as a fundamental mode of experience attaching to all final individual actualities (PR 170-82, 252-54). Whitehead describes the immediate subjective experience as follows:

It is this immediate experience which, for Whitehead, reveals temporality to us. Indeed, this experience is not only the basis for our knowledge of temporality; the experience is temporal in the sense disclosed above, namely, that the present experience for any entity is of a creative synthesis of the given data of its past and the anticipation of being an object for subsequent entities. The immediate experience is of active passage. It is the basis for the metaphysical doctrine of "prehensions" or "vector feelings." Any such feeling is "from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to a beyond which is to be determined. But the feeling is subjectively rooted in the immediacy of the present occasion: it is what the occasion feels for itself as derived from the past and as merging into the future" (PR 247). Thus it is from this "temporal" experience that time is derived.

The investigation of the temporal character of immediate experience unveils another feature about which the analyses of the two men are remarkably close. They understand that the world is not merely in flux. Rather, a close inspection reveals an "intentional structure of experience."⁷ Neither man regards the intentionality manifested in existence as necessarily always explicit or cognitive.⁸ Nevertheless, they do find that the analysis of immediate experience reveals a definite aim at value (Whitehead) or meaning (Heidegger).

Dasein’s intentional activity as Being-in-the-world is first disclosed in its "circumspective concern" for entities within-the-world. That is to say that Dasein first encounters these entities not merely as present-at-hand, but as ready-to-hand or as having a function. Dasein thus engages its world with a purposive, or what Heidegger calls an "in-order-to," character (SZ 352-55). The purposiveness which is manifested at the level of Dasein’s ontic relations with other entities is also reflected at the ontological level, where, as we have insisted, primordial temporality is said to be the meaning of Dasein’s Being. And "meaning" is, for Heidegger, a teleological concept.⁹ An entity does not receive its meaning from intellectual concepts or from ostensive referents within-the-world. The meaning of an entity lies within it, but signifies its "Whereunto. (SZ 324). This is what is primarily at issue in the contention that, although the temporal ecstasies are equiprimordial, the future has preeminence (SZ 329). The running-forward, even toward my own most particular and most extreme possibility, is neither "free-floating" nor is it sheer recklessness. It is the aim at authentic and whole existence. My death, of course, is the ultimate Whereunto which gives my Dasein meaning in every moment of its factical existence.

For Whitehead the fundamentally intentional character of immediate experience is expressed in the doctrine of the vector character of prehensions; they "feel what is there and transform it into what is here" (PR 133). It should be noted, by way of elaboration, that there is a subject of the prehensions, namely, the present concrescing occasion, which has a "subjective aim" at value. Also, there is intensity of value-attained in the "one complex fully determinate feeling . . . termed the ‘satisfaction"’ (PR 38). Hence, the process which constitutes the act of becoming is characterized as "teleological": "An occasion arises as an effect facing its past, and ends as a cause facing its future. In between there lies the teleology of the Universe" (AI 249). For Whitehead, then, it is clear that the primary meaning of intentionality is the aim at value in each actual entity, or, as he sometimes says, the aim at "intrinsic importance for itself" (MT 159). But just as his strong doctrine of "final causation" as residing in the subjective immediacy of an entity is balanced by a doctrine of "efficient causation" between entities, so there is a further dimension to intentionality. For every entity embodies the necessity that it be significant beyond its present immediacy. Thus the intentional character of the general process, the fact that it is creative advance rather than mere passage, is disclosed in the alternation between the final causation within each entity and the efficient causation between entities. Moreover, it is inconceivable to Whitehead that the process merely dissipates. The value attained in the process accrues and is retained in the ever-expanding totality, namely, the "consequent nature of God" (PR 523-33). But such retention of attained value does not add to the particular value-experience. Thus, for Whitehead, the notion of "teleology" refers, primarily, to the subjective immediacy of each actual entity, and only secondarily to the process as a whole.

In the thought of both men, then, the understanding of the primary entity under consideration requires reference to other entities in its world -- objects for it. Yet its ultimate meaning is discerned in terms of its living towards its own most particular end, which is, ultimately, the achievement of itself for itself. This double reference of intentionality may better be grasped with the elaboration of the ideas which White-head and Heidegger work out in respect to uniqueness and internal relatedness.

V. The Temporal Uniqueness of the Primitive Entities

An essential element in the concept of time as developed in the thought of both philosophers is that the fundamental entities from which time is derived retain a specific kind of temporal uniqueness. For Heidegger this is expressed powerfully in the notion of "Being-towards-death" as my own most distinctive potentiality-for-Being. The distinctive character of death is grasped not in the fact that "all men are mortal" or even that "one day I too must die." Rather, the distinctive quality of death is that it radically individualizes Dasein. It is not an end at which Dasein ceases, but "a way of Being in which Dasein is towards death" (SZ 247). Moreover, "Death is, insofar as it ‘is,’ essentially always mine. Indeed it signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in which the Being of one’s own Dasein is at stake" (SZ 240). Heidegger acknowledges that one is anxious in the face of his own particular death and so "flees" from it by generalizing death or even by pretending that ‘The deceased has passed on." But we cannot completely eradicate the "absolute, certain and insurpassable" possibility of my Dasein, the death which pervades my Being. Death "stalks" us all the more (SZ 258-59). Thus our efforts should be directed towards the attempt to authenticate our existence by constantly "running-forward" to our own particular death. In thus facing squarely this most extreme possibility of my Being, I have "freedom-towards-death" (SZ 266). In either case, however -- whether I am existing authentically or inauthentically -- death is inevitably mine and, as such, discloses my uniqueness.

Whitehead’s way of expressing the uniqueness of each actual entity does not call forth in us the same kind of intense emotional response as does Heidegger’s discussion of Being-towards-my-own-death. But formally it is very similar. In fact, the doctrine is enunciated in connection with the notion of the "perishing" of occasions, and it is in terms of "perishing" that we shall try to understand it. What Whitehead intends by perishing" is not unambiguous and has occasioned a vigorous debate among his interpreters.¹⁰ Yet it is fundamental to his thought. Therefore, we shall attempt a clarification. Two essential characteristics of actual occasions should be kept in mind in efforts to determine the meaning of perishing, namely. "attainment" and "significance."

By insisting on the significance of perished occasions Whitehead intends to affirm that the past is not lost; it remains "stubborn fact" conditioning present occasions. He reminds us that "‘perishing’ is the assumption of a role in a transcendent future. . . [It] is the initiation of becoming. How the past perishes is how the future becomes" (AI 305). Thus the notion of perishing should be construed, first, in its essentially relative sense as perishing "into the status of an object for other occasions" (AI 227; my emphasis). A "past" entity is not a nonentity; it lives as objectified in the present and so retains "objective immortality" (PR 44, 71, 125). This aspect of the perishing of occasions is necessary for there to be causation and memory (PR 365, AI 227). On the other hand, there is what might be called the "essentially absolute" sense of perishing: the "perishing of immediacy" with the attainment of a determinate and completely unique status by each actual occasion. Without this aspect the process might be construed as a sheer, characterless flow, a continuous becoming, rather than a creative advance. The entire process comprises the rhythmic alternation between the microscopic process (concrescence), which constitutes the subjective immediacy of each occasion, and the macroscopic process (transition), by which that occasion becomes an element in the concrescence of subsequent occasions (PR 326). Thus Whitehead writes: "The process of concrescence terminates with. the attainment of a fully determinate ‘satisfaction’. . . Completion is the perishing of immediacy" (PR 130). Clearly, if the discussion of "significance" is to the point, the "perishing of immediacy" cannot mean that the past is lost. Therefore, it must mean that in attaining determinate status the subjectivity of that entity cannot be added to: "No subject experiences twice," Whitehead says in this vein (PR 43). Thus it is in the present immediacy, the becoming of an actual occasion, that its uniqueness resides. He also says that "actual entities perish, but do not change; they are what they are" (PR 52). Obviously, then, as each entity perishes with respect to its subjective immediacy, adding itself to the transcendent world, its own uniqueness is established; nothing more can be added to it.

The doctrine can, perhaps, be elucidated by contrasting Whitehead’s system with that of a static world lacking any essential newness. We may readily conceive such a system in which each atomic entity is unique, but in which molecular "differences" are attained only by rearranging the atomic entities, which themselves neither become nor perish; they simply are. In Whitehead’s formulation, however, the uniqueness of each entity or occasion is essentially linked with its genuine novelty. Each occasion embodies creativity: it conforms to its past, but in synthesizing its given world and the relevant possibilities presented to it, it forms a new creation. Finally, in attaining determinate satisfaction, it adds itself to the creative advance. Again, we have an example of the intuition that "the many become one, and are increased by one." Also, the combination of uniqueness and novelty in each entity is the basis, in Whitehead’s thought, for the essential "irreversibility of time" (IS 244).

Now this point invites comparison with Heidegger since he has linked the irreversible character of time to the ordinary concept of time as a series of nows" endlessly passing by (SZ 426). Despite this clear connection, it does not mean that time is not essentially irreversible, or that Dasein’s temporality is not essentially unidirectional. Primordial temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future. To be sure, Dasein is said to extend itself into its past in the sense that it takes over its fate, but it always does so only in terms of its potentiality. One’s facticity can always be understood anew in the light of the Whereunto which gives meaning to one’s own Dasein -- a notion that is not unlike the Pragmatic way of defining an event in terms of its results -- but we can never change the past. Heidegger is clear on this point. He observes that if the "series of nows" were primordially infinite there would be no basis for the conviction that time is irreversible. But the conviction does have a firm basis in that it is a faint reflection of primordial temporality: "The impossibility of this reversal has its basis in the derivation of public time from the temporality whose temporalizing is primarily futural and which ‘goes’ ecstatically towards its end such that it already ‘is’ towards its end" (SZ 426). Thus, implicitly at least, Heidegger sees time’s irreversibility as an expression of the way he conceives the uniqueness of the fundamental entity.

Another objection to the comparison of the two ways of conceiving uniqueness may stem from the realization that whereas Whitehead treats the "novelty" of an entity as fundamental, signaling a kind of "authenticity," Heidegger views "novelty" or "the new" as an attraction for "curiosity" which is an inauthentic mode of understanding (SZ 172). Thus, far from establishing one’s own most particular identity, the quest for novelty reinforces the habit of living in terms of the "they" which can never die, a mode of Being which is based on being present-with entities within-the-world. This is not a very serious objection, however, since its strength derives from playing off one man’s use of a word (novelty) against the other’s, rather than from comparing their ideas. Clearly, both Whitehead and Heidegger ascribe a kind of temporal uniqueness to their fundamental entities.

A more serious objection might be that it seems wholly inappropriate to speak of "perishing" as the "initiation of becoming" in the same context with the radical finitude of Heidegger’s "Being-towards-death." It is agreed that the two notions evoke wholly different emotions in us, particularly since Heidegger’s insistence on finitude seems to preclude an entity from passing beyond itself, whereas for Whitehead the past is saved as it becomes "objectively immortal." However, there is less substantial difference here than seems at first to be the case. The ultimacy of the finitude depends on whether one is "on the inside," as it were, or on the outside" of the entity in question. That is to say, Whitehead ascribes radical finitude to the process constituting the subjective immediacy of an entity, and Heidegger, on the other hand, acknowledges that in any instance my own most particular Dasein is superseded. In fact, in the very context of affirming that primordial temporality is finite, Heidegger raises the question: "In spite of my own no-more-Dasein ‘does not time go on?’ And cannot an unlimited number of things lie ‘in the future’ and come forth out of it?" To these questions he responds: "The questions are to be answered affirmatively. Despite this they contain no objection to the finitude of primordial temporality" (SZ 330; my emphasis). It becomes clear from this statement that the finitude of primordial temporality does not preclude the unlimited character of the future or of the significance of any instance of finite Dasein beyond itself. Indeed, the clear implication of Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein’s "fate," as the resolute taking-over of possibilities handed down to it, is that finite Dasein is not lost but becomes the ground of the fate of a subsequent case of Dasein (SZ 383-85).

Thus it is apparent that for both philosophers, uniqueness and an authentic form of novelty are affirmed together with ongoingness. In different ways, with differing emphases, continuity and atomicity are held together in a dynamic tension. The continuity is that of relatedness.

VI. A Modified Doctrine of Internal Relations

We must now draw out the comparison further by showing that and how the thought of both men requires that the individuality of each concrete entity always be understood within the framework of what we may call a modified doctrine of internal relations. To be sure, neither thinker asserts that entities have only internal relations to other entities, or, what this comes to, that all entities are mutually and symmetrically interdependent. The latter view entails sheer monism so that the universe is tantamount, m Hartshorne’s phrase, to "a vast tautology" (CSPM 82). But this has already been excluded by the view of time as irreversible and the notion that potentiality essentially enters into the constitution of each new entity; on this view entities can never be wholly dependent upon their given world for the determination of their unique status. Nevertheless, the opposite error of supposing that all entities are mutually independent is positively excluded. The belief that an entity s relations are purely "external" or "accidental" to it presupposes a theory of subjects as enduring substances which both men have rejected and replaced (cf. PR, part II, chapter VII, and SZ, division one, chapter 3). Thus both Whitehead and Heidegger insist that an entity’s relations to its world enter into, and partially determine, the nature or determinate status of that particular entity.

Whitehead expresses this conviction most obviously in that he calls his mature thought the "Philosophy of Organism" (PR v). This title is meant to indicate not only that the actual entities themselves are organisms, but that "the community of actual things is an organism" (PR 327). The general term Whitehead uses for this community is "nexus," which is defined as "a set of actual entities in the unity of the relatedness constituted by their prehensions of each other, or -- what is the same thing conversely expressed -- constituted by their objectifications in each other" (PR 35). Some care is required in reading this. As we mentioned, there is not an absolute symmetry of relations among actual entities because of the continuous emergence of new entities. Thus the predominant mode of relatedness is that of present to past or the objectification of past entities in the present entity. There are extensive relations with contemporary entities, but these relations are not internal in the sense of being causally efficacious. Likewise, an entity is related to its future "entities" in the sense that there must be supervening entities which must conform to it. But neither present nor future entities enter into a given entity conditioning its particular nature the way past entities do. Of course, each entity is also partially self caused. But, although every entity gives its own constitution the stamp of individuality, no entity can exist in isolation (PR 42, RM 104, MT 151).

Heidegger’s commitment to this point also requires some elaboration. The most immediately obvious fact about Dasein, he maintains, is that the "fundamental constitution" or "ground-state" (Grundverfassung) from which the entire analysis of Dasein takes its rise is "Being-in-the-world" (SZ 52f). Since this is a "unitary phenomenon," but one with several constitutive elements, it follows that "the world" is understood somehow as an ingredient in the Being of Dasein.

In order to better understand that and how Heidegger conceives Dasein as constituted by its relations, therefore, we should try to unpack his notion of "the world." The first, most important point to make is that "the world" is not essentially something other than Dasein: "It is a character of Dasein itself" (SZ 64). When Heidegger speaks of the world as "that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein ‘lives’ as Dasein," he specifically rules out the possibility that the "wherein" is to be understood simply as the complex of those mere "things" or entities present-at-hand which surround Dasein, but which are not Dasein (SZ 65). Thus, in analyzing "worldhood" as a function of Dasein’s primordial temporality, he says: "The world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but rather temporalizes itself in temporality. It ‘is’ ‘there’ with the outside-itself of. the ecstasies. If no Dasein exists, no world is ‘there’ either" (SZ 365). As the "Da" (there) of Dasein, then, the world is inextricably bound up with the temporal dimensions of Dasein; it constitutes the temporal horizons (future, past, present) into which Dasein essentially exists.

Once this point is grasped, however, it should be balanced by the contrasting point, namely, that "the world" is not to be construed as the mere "projection" of an essentially "worldless subject," thus having no reference to the entities within-the-world. "The world," here conceived as a dimension of Dasein’s Being into which it projects itself, includes all of Dasein’s relations with entities both present-at-hand and ready-to-hand. Dasein is not exhausted by these relations, but is essentially inclusive of them. Richardson points out that it is the encounter with "things" and "instruments" on the ontic level that discloses to Dasein that it is already ontologically oriented towards a "world." Thus, he says, the world "is the existential dimension of There-being (Dasein) by reason of which is pre-disclosed the matrix of relations which constitute Total Meaningfulness, within which There-being may encounter beings under the guise of purposeful instruments" (HPT 58). This way of putting the matter has the merit of making it clear that the "matrix of relations which constitute Total Meaningfulness" for Dasein is thus essential to its Being, but not wholly determinative of it.

VII. The Treatment of the Present

Finally, in this comparison it is well to note that in both philosophers’ concepts of time the genuine present must be grasped as a unified "specious present" which is inclusive of a causal past and an open future. This point may be seen to follow from the fact that time is understood to derive from concrete entities, together with the correlative point that instants or nows must be rejected as concrete entities. Since, however, their concepts of time diverge so radically from the ordinary concepts, this point should be elaborated.

The notion of the present as a "specious present" is at the heart of Whitehead’s reflections on the nature of time from its earliest formulations onwards. For example, in The Concept of Nature, in the course of his criticism of the theory of time as "a moving knife-edge, exhibiting a present fact without temporal extension," he insists that the immediate present discloses "no sharp distinction either between memory and the present immediacy or between the present immediacy and anticipation. The present is a wavering breadth of boundary between the two extremes" (CN 68f). In the development of his thought the idea of the extended present, as having continuous relations with its past and its immediate future, is retained, but greater precision is applied to the notion of the atomic character of the specious present. This work issues in the epochal theory of time (SMW 181-86, "Time" in IS 246, PR 53, 105-07, 434-35) ,¹¹ in which Whitehead maintains the atomicity of the present occasion -- the discontinuity of its process of concrescence from that constituting the subjective immediacy of other occasions -- together with the continuity of its "extensive relations" -- those of the occasion as a concrete, determinate entity to other entities. In the developed theory the present immediacy is a concrescence of many data, both of past entities and of possibilities, but it is not to be conceived merely as a function of these data -- a sheer product or a reordering of determinate data (Pols 113f). It is a unified subject which modifies its data. This synthesizing activity constitutes the "subjective immediacy" of the occasion, and each subject embodies a unique perspective. Therefore, while the present, is "momentous" or temporally all-at-once, it is not "instantaneous, which would entail its non-actuality. As Whitehead says: "This immediacy is its moment of sheer individuality bounded on either side by essential relativity. The occasion arises from relevant objects, and perishes into the status of an object for other occasions. But it enjoys its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment as emotional unity" (AI 227). The present, therefore, is the entity in its role as subject; it is comprised of the relevant data from its causal past and the possibilities constituting its future, but it is not exhausted by these "objective" factors. The decisive factor which yields the uniqueness of every present is the free, self-determining activity of the subject itself.

In Heidegger’s major work the elucidation of the character of the present is obscured somewhat by the emphasis given the primacy of the future.¹² Moreover, most of his attention in regard to the present is given to explicating the inauthentic present, the fleeing from one’s potentiality-for-Being into the presence of entities merely present-at-hand. As Being-present-with entities, Dasein constantly moves from one thing to another, and so is "abodeless." It has a home neither with itself, in its throwness and projection, nor with the entities within the world. But, as Heidegger says, "this mode of the present is the most extreme contrary phenomenon to the moment. In the former case Dasein is everywhere and nowhere. The moment brings existence into the situation and discloses the authentic ‘there’" (SZ 347).

The present, in general for Heidegger, arises from an interplay of the future and the past. Thus he writes: "Coming back to itself futurally, resoluteness brings itself into the situation by making-present. Having-been arises from the future, indeed such that the future, which has been (better, is in the process of having-been), releases from itself the present" (SZ 326) This seemingly obscure statement intends to reveal the essential connection that obtains between one’s future and one’s past, as generating one’s present; the relation that is maintained between the genuine openness to potentiality and the acceptance of one’s given condition, which is the authentic present. This connection is intrinsic to Dasein’s Being. Dasein can, to be sure, attempt to escape the risks entailed by this Being by dispersing itself into the "they-self" of the masses or, as we noted above, by affirming its presence only by being present-with the merely objective entities. However, Dasein also always has the power to call itself back to its own Being, its true temporality, and so to realize its authentic present by holding its future and past in a unity. Heidegger writes: "In resoluteness the present is not only brought back from the diversions with the things of its closest concern, but is held in the future and having-been. That which is held in authentic temporality, hence the authentic present we call the moment (SZ 338). The moment, thus, is no illusion, nor is it the ever more precise ideal of an instantaneous now; it is in no way understood as a "moving knife-edge" between the past and the future having no reality of its own. Rather, the moment is described as Dasein being "pregnant" with the future (SZ 427), or, as Heidegger also says, it is a "rapture held in resoluteness towards those circumstances encountered in the situation of concernful possibilities" (SZ 338).

From these statements it becomes increasingly apparent that the authentic present is conceived by Heidegger as a unified whole comprising the totality of Dasein’s factical existence at each moment. It is unified and yet it is dynamic. Arising out of the polarity of having-been and the future, the present, of necessity, is a specious present which drives beyond itself. Therefore, just as the present cannot be clarified in terms of the instantaneous now, neither can it be equated with "eternity" as a "standing now" (SZ 338, n.1; 427, n.1).

The concept of the dynamic unity of the present Dasein is elaborated in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s historicity. Dasein’s Being as historical is called its "happening." The idea of Dasein as "happening" indicates that it "stretches itself" between birth and death as a unified self. But "birth" is no more to be understood as something no-longer present than is "death" to be understood as something not-yet-present. Rather, as a factically-existing entity, Dasein exists such that both "ends" enter into, and provide structural meaning for, the present entity: "In the unity of throwness and Being-towards-death, which one flees or runs-forward to, birth and death ‘cohere’ according to Dasein’s nature. As care, Dasein is the ‘between’" (SZ 374).

These remarks lead us to the view that Heidegger, as well as Whitehead, understands the present as a coalescence of past and future such that it is a "specious present" and that he conceives the authentic present as a unified whole with the integrity of its own subjectivity.

VIII. Their Differences Evaluated Especially in the Light of the ‘Reformed’ Subjectivist Principle

Throughout this comparison we have noted several points of doctrine essential to their concepts of time on which Whitehead and Heidegger show remarkable agreement: their rejection of traditional concepts of time; their insistence on the derivation of time from the nature and relations of the fundamental entities, which themselves are construed as essentially active or primordially temporal in their Being; their clarity about the correlative idea that nows or instants are not to be treated as primary natural entities, but are abstractions appropriate to the derived time; their analysis of immediate experience as the source of the disclosure of the fundamentally temporal character of Being; their working out of a specific kind of temporal uniqueness ascribed to the primary entities; their requirement of a modified doctrine of internal relations; their understanding of the present as a kind of specious present.

This comparison does not, by any means, exhaust their theories. But it does reveal considerable agreement despite their divergences in background and in the modes of philosophizing. I believe that on all of the above points the thought of each complements and reinforces that of the other. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that some genuine differences of substance and method have been uncovered and that these differences may point to a deeper and more fundamental difference between the way each philosopher conceives the question of Being. We cannot ignore these differences. We can, however, endeavor to understand just what they are and what they entail and so see them as less than fatal to any projected dialogue between the two modes of thought.

In the first place we noted the obvious difference between an actual entity" and the human entity, "Dasein." Actual entities, as occasions of experience, are not confined to the human mode of Being. Rather, they are the building blocks of the entire universe: "Actual entities . . . are the final real things of which the world is made up . . . drops of experience, complex and interdependent" (PR 27f). "Dasein," on the other hand, is that Being which "we ourselves always are," and which Heidegger radically distinguishes from entities merely present-at-hand or those ready-to-hand (SZ 41f, 68-71). Secondly, this difference is heightened by noting the different kinds of immediate experience to which each thinker appeals as the source of our knowledge of temporality. The experiences on which Heidegger focuses as disclosive of primordial temporality are ones which are distinctively human and psychological. The experiences to which Whitehead points as revelatory of the temporality of occasions of experience, although "non-sensuous," are inevitably bodily experiences. A third difference, which is intimately related to the first two, is the apparently wide divergence which we noted between the notions of "perishing" and "Being-toward-death."

Finally, we must ask again whether or not these differences of substance and method point to a deeper and more fundamental difference between each man’s vision of reality, and thus of what each takes to be the basic task of philosophy. The issue can be framed in terms of a Heideggerian question: "Is not Whitehead’s metaphysics initiated from an analysis of entities which are ‘present-at-hand’ and thus a part of the tradition which Heidegger considers his task to overcome?" The initial treatment of Heidegger’s position vis-à-vis the tradition was an attempt to put the issue in the proper perspective. And the subsequent analysis should have lessened the force of the question. But if we cannot satisfactorily account for the remaining differences, the nagging suspicion that their concepts are not comparable will remain.

We may endeavor to meet the challenge implied by these differences by taking them in the order of their difficulty, beginning with the least difficult. The second and third differences which we listed, those between the kinds of phenomena appealed to and between "perishing" and "Being-towards-death," seem not to be as decisive as they initially appear. Thus, while Heidegger appeals to such phenomena as anxiety, guilt, and conscience to disclose Dasein as "resoluteness running-forward," there is no cogent reason for believing that these psychological phenomena must be divorced from Dasein’s physiology." Certainly one’s resolute running-forward is distinctively mine, which includes the particularities of one’s special physiological traits. More importantly, Heidegger’s treatment of the "self" as grounded in the "care-structure" of Dasein, rather than as an isolated "I" or a "worldless subject," implies that the self is a "child of the world."¹⁴ Similarly, it is clear that Whitehead’s essentially physiological experience is never devoid of "mentality" and so of psychological implications in the human percipient.

In discussing the uniqueness of the fundamental entities we saw that the apparently divergent notions of "perishing" and "Being-toward-death" are not as unlike as they seem. For while Heidegger insists on the radical finitude of primordial temporality, he acknowledges the infinitude of time which is generated by primordial temporality. On the other hand, while Whitehead seems to emphasize the essentially relative aspects of perishing -- the role of the objectified entity in the transcendent future -- still he does insist on the finitude of every act of becoming; there is a determinate outcome, a completion. Thus the two philosophers seem to emphasize differing aspects of the same complex phenomenon.

Despite having weakened the strength of these apparent differences we cannot escape the important difference that springs from the choice of different fundamental entities. Since for Whitehead all final individuals are subjects -- and apart from subjects there is nothing -- then the creative synthesis, which is the basis for physical time, is essential to the constitution of all actual entities. The "reformed subjectivist principle" and the move from human percipient occasions to all final individuals is fundamental to Whitehead’s whole enterprise. But for Heidegger entities within-the-world are usually treated as temporal only in a secondary and derived sense. Dasein is primordially temporal, and so, it seems, is Being. Thus it would seem improper to distinguish various realms of Being by reference to "time" which is the "first name of the truth of Being" (EDS 215). Heidegger seems unwilling or incapable of adhering consistently to his greatest intuition: that Being is fundamentally temporal; that Being makes the approach to entities; that Dasein is a distinctive entity in that it discloses Being, but does not posit Being. Therefore Heidegger’s principles do not preclude the Being of entities other than Dasein as primordially temporal. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that he treats them as only secondarily temporal. He is, for example, curiously reticent about the human body despite our contention that there is no reason, in principle, for separating psychology from physiology. Moreover, it is clear that he thinks of "nature" as temporal only in the sense in which "tools" and "the natural environment are the "soil of history" (SZ 381). That is to say that entities ready-to-hand and present-at-hand are considered temporal only insofar as they form a part of Dasein’s world. We do not have to reject the wonderfully rich analysis of the temporality of circumspective concern and the derivation of "within-timeness" as the source of the ordinary concept of time in order to reject the unwarranted conclusion that these entities can only be temporal in a secondary sense. It would seem proper to claim that insofar as entities function as the "world" of Dasein they can be conceived as secondarily temporal, but that no entity can ever be conceived as exclusively a function of Dasein and, thus, as only secondarily temporal.¹⁵ Therefore we should not allow what seems to be a failure on Heidegger’s part to follow consistently his own deep insight concerning the fundamentally temporal character of Being to keep us from his amazingly fruitful analysis of primordial temporality. We may say, then, that the whole of reality is fundamentally temporal, that every actual entity is primordially temporal, but that the human reality, as more complex, more fully integrated, and more readily accessible to our inspection, is particularly revelatory of the full structure of the temporality of Being.

Perhaps this attempt to bring together Heidegger’s fundamental insight and Whitehead’s "reformed subjectivist principle" has taken us some distance in answering the question about the validity of comparing the two philosophers at all: Is not Whitehead a part of the metaphysical tradition which Heidegger seeks to dismantle? Our answer to this question, then, is, no. The account given at the outset of Heidegger’s understanding of the tradition and of his task should have prepared the way for this conclusion. Also, the account given of Whitehead’s analysis of actual entities should disabuse us of the idea that he begins his analysis of Being from entities which are present-at-hand. And if the argument that the "reformed subjectivist principle" is to be considered basic has cogency, then it would seem that Whitehead has achieved Heidegger’s stated aim, namely: "The concrete working out of the question of the meaning of Being" with the provisional goal of "the interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding of Being at all . . ." (SZ1).

Of course, the possibility remains that I have misunderstood and misrepresented Heidegger’s position. If that is the case, the appeal for this project must be to Heidegger himself, who defended his interpretation of Kant as a "thoughtful dialogue between thinkers" which is "bound by other laws" than those of historical inquiry (KPM xxv). Thus the criticism of Heidegger in the last several paragraphs has been a kind of dismantling of his thought from the insight of the reformed subjectivist principle. Heidegger’s own vision of the temporal character of Being remains strong. There is, however, more of Kant in the exposition than he knows or than his insight allows for.

References

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1970.

EDS -- Walter Kaufmann, ed. Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre. Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1956. For Martin Heidegger, "The Way Back Into the Ground of Metaphysics."

HPT -- William J. Richardson, S.J. Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, with a Preface by Martin Heidegger. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967.

KP -- Martin Heidegger. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by James S. Churchill, with forward by Thomas Langan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.

NPN -- Isaac Newton. Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer, with Introduction by J. N. Randall, Jr. New York: Hafner, 1965.

Physics -- Aristotle. "Physics," The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941.

Pols -- Edward Pols. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967.

SZ -- Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. 11th Edition. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967. English translations are the author’s own.

Notes:

1 The only clear published exception to this lacuna that I know of is Calvin O. Schrag, "Whitehead and Heidegger: Process Philosophy and Existential Philosophy." Dialectica 13/1, 42-56. Several recent doctoral dissertations have attempted to bring the two thinkers into dialogue: W. K. Teo, "Heidegger on Dasein and Whitehead on Actual Entities," Southern Illinois 1969; D. F. Lewis, "The Notion of Time in the Cosmology of A. N. Whitehead," Southern Illinois, 1970; David R. Mason, "A Study of Time in the Philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Martin Heidegger With Implications for a Doctrine of Providence." Chicago, 1973.

2 This is Robinson’s translation of "Destruktion." It seems clear in the context that Heidegger saw his task as that of "shaking down" and getting to forgotten roots of western thought -- to our "primordial experiences" -- rather than "destroying" all that has gone before. See James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb. Jr., eds. The Later Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 9.

3 Cf. Schubert M. Ogden. "The Temporality of God," The Reality of God and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). pp. 143-63.

4 See the discussion of the temporal uniqueness of entities below.

5 The question about the nature of "genetic successiveness" and the relation of the "genetic process" to the "process of transition," which constitutes physical time, is currently the subject of considerable debate. The major positions are set forth in articles by John B. Cobb, Jr., Edward Pols, and Lewis S. Ford in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 7/4 (Winter. 1969-70), 409-25, and by Robert Neville and Lewis S. Ford in PS 1:194-209.

6 It should be clear that the phrases "disclosive of Being in general" and "source of derived time" do not mean that Dasein posits either "Being" or "time" as if these were something like mind-dependent concepts. Rather, the meaning is, in the first instance, that Dasein is the entity which is distinctive among all entities precisely in that it is essentially concerned with the question of its own Being, and that question, thought through, raises the question of the meaning of Being. Thus the interpretation of the meaning of Being is to be worked out through the Fundamental Ontology, the "existential analytic of Dasein" (SZ 12-15). In the second instance the meaning is that, as the meaning of the Being of Dasein, primordial temporality is seen to be the basis for understanding all other modes of temporality and is, in fact, the ontological ground of other modes of temporality or concepts of time.

That "primordial temporality," as the meaning of the Being of Dasein, is to be sped as the obvious key to the meaning of Being in general is not clearly affirmed, but is, rather, suggested in the brief section which concludes the published part of Being and Time. Although Heidegger is hesitant to conclude positively that he has taken the only way which lays bare the meaning of Being, he does assert that he has sought a way to clarify the fundamental ontological question and has gone some distance along that way. Moreover, the final sentences of the work, framed as questions, suggest that Heidegger believes that the interpretation of primordial temporality as the meaning of the Being of Dasein leads to time as the meaning of Being. I believe that the now published "Zeit und Sein" bears strong evidence that, with some obvious modifications, the "time" which is here spoken of as the "heart-of-the-matter" (Sachverhalt) of Being is modeled on Dasein’s primordial temporality. See Martin Heidegger, "Zeit und Sein," Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969); English translation by Joan Stambaugh: Martin Hcidegger, On Time and Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).

7Calvin O. Schrag, Experience and Being: Prolegomena to a Future Ontology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1969). chapter 3. This work shows some affinity with the thought of both men.

8 This is obviously true for Whitehead (cf. PR 243-46). While it is less obviously true for Heidegger, it is clearly the case that the "understanding of Being" or the "pre-ontological understanding of Being" which is the ontically distinctive characteristic of Dasein is not always "explicit" or "thematic." Thus Heidegger says that it is out of "the understanding of Being" in which Dasein always comports itself "that the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency towards its conceptualization arises" (SZ 5, my emphasis; also, cf. SZ 12, 15, 143 ff).

9 The inability to understand Heidegger’s concept of "meaning as a function of its "primordial temporality," and, specifically, to connect it with the notion of Dasein’s "Whereunto," is one of several reasons why Richard Schmitt’s Martin Heidegger on Being Human: An Introduction to Sein und Zeit (New York: Random House, 1909) must be judged a failure. Schmitt endeavors to force Heidegger’s thought into a Husserlian mold and so to conceive "meaning" in terms of language, explication, reference, and functioning (73-102). However, he neglects the two key passages (SZ 151, 324f) in which Heidegger specifically explicates his concept of meaning.

10 For Whitehead’s own assessment of the importance of this idea see his "Response" to remarks at his 70th birthday: "Almost all of Process and Reality can be read as an attempt to analyze perishing on the same level as Aristotle’s analysis of becoming. The notion of the prehension of the past means that the past is an element which perishes and thereby remains an element in the state beyond, and thus is objectified. That is the whole notion." (IS 218). For differing interpretations of "perishing" see: (a) William A. Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 319f. Christian seems to regard "perishing" literally so that past occasions are no longer "actual," and so cannot serve as "reasons" for their givenness for a particular concrescing occasion. Also. Donald W. Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 190, says that occasions which have perished are "no longer actual, being instead, objectively immortal, drained of actuality." (b) On the other hand, Charles Hartshorne, "Whitehead’s Novel Intuition," Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on his Philosophy, ed. by George L. Kline (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 22, believes that "perishing" is an "unfortunate" metaphor, "implying that the entity is dead" which contradicts the final metaphysical insight that in God "there is no loss, no obstruction" (PR 524). Thus, for Harts-horne, if "perishing" is to be used at all, it cannot be used to indicate a loss of actuality or a diminution of what has been attained. "Actuality" is an increasing whole, inclusive of past and present.

11 Two important recent articles concerning the epochal theory are: V. C. Chapell, "Whitehead’s Theory of Becoming," Kline (ed.) op. cit., pp. 70-80, and a rebuttal of Chapell by David A. Sipfle, "On the Intelligibility of the Epochal Theory of Time," The Monist 53/3 (July, 1969), 505-18. Also, the articles by Cobb, Pols, Ford, and Neville cited in note 5 above extend the debate considerably.

12 However, in the later works the notion of Being as "presence" is stressed. "Presence" (Anwesen) here is not construed as an instantaneous present, such as would characterize the "nows" of ordinary time and which is used as a quantitative measure for the entities present-at-hand. It is, rather, an interplay and a dynamic unity of the three temporal dimensions. As such it is called a "fourth dimension. See Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 16. For a particularly helpful elucidation of "Zeit und Sein," its relation to Being and Time, and especially the notion of "Presence," see Joseph J. Kockelmans, "Heidegger on Time and Being," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 8/4 (Winter, 1970), 319-340, esp. 334f.

13 Although I find myself in accord with much of Hans Jonas’s criticism of Heidegger’s thought, particularly the later thought, I would rather contend that "no philosophy of nature does issue from Heidegger’s thought" than, as Jonas puts it, no philosophy of nature can issue from Heidegger’s thought." Cf. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), Tenth Essay, "Heidegger and Theology," p. 253, note 16. The main reason for this judgment is given in the last few pages of this essay.

14 In arguing that Kant had not fully overcome the Cartesian ontology, Heidegger writes: "For even the starting-point (I think ‘something’) is ontologically vague, because the ‘something’ remains indefinite. If we understand, here, an entity within-the-world, then there is the tacit presupposition of the world; this phenomenon precisely co-determines the state-of-Being of the ‘I’ if indeed it is able to be something like an ‘I think something.’ In saying ‘I’ Dasein expresses itself as ‘Being-in-the-world’" (SZ 321).

15 In this connection it is instructive to note Heidegger’s charge that Hegel’s concept of time is guided by its "systematic locus," namely, in the "philosophy of nature." Thus, he says, the concept of time is bound to be guided by the traditional notion of time as a series of "nows" (SZ 428f). This argument could be turned against Heidegger. Since his analysis of temporality is guided by the temporality of Dasein, there could be, despite his insistence to the contrary, a "subjective bias" by which he distinguishes realms of Being. My contention is that the "systematic locus" of the discussion of temporality need not guide or limit the concept if one’s principles allow him to generalize his fundamental concepts.

If "derived time" follows from something more primordial (for Whitehead, creative advance as constituted in the subjective immediacy of concrescing actual entities; for Heidegger, the truth of Being as disclosed in the ‘openness’ which pervades Dasein on the basis of its ecstatic-horizontal temporality), that something must not itself be time-like, or talk of "derivation" is otiose. What David Mason says about the concrescence of the Whiteheadian "primitive entity," the actual entity in subjective immediacy, convinces me that for Whitehead time is not derived at all but only presupposed with unique thoroughness.

But I cannot assess Mason’s presentation of Whitehead in itself; my concern is with the fact that by interpreting Heidegger in the image of his reading of Whitehead, he produces an account of the temporal problematic of Sein und Zeit that seems fundamentally mistaken at key points. In particular, Mason’s notion of ‘temporality,’ taken from his claim that is parallel to Whitehead’s ‘concrescence’ (p. 85f), is simply that of time and misses the force of Heidegger’s careful distinction between temporality and time. This coheres with a subjectivized reading of the phenomenology of Dasein which is far from being sufficiently ‘reformed,’ that is, in relation to the real target of Heidegger’s dismantling of the tradition.

I shall treat each of these general areas of concern in the two short essays that follow.

I. Temporality and Time

To be ‘temporal’ seems to mean for Mason to "become" (p. 85f), to be "essentially active" (p. 100), to be "dynamic" (p. 89f). Concrescence, for example, takes place in a series of phases (p. 89); it involves sensed passage" (p. 91); it is the droplet of a reality which is "a creative process rhythmically alternating (p. 88). The concepts of becoming, activity, phase-series, passage, process, rhythm, and alternation all seem to be time-sensed, i.e. to involve the distinction ‘before/after.’ Ordinary usage would allow us to say that they are all ‘temporal,’ but it is just such use of ‘temporal’ that Heidegger excludes in Sein und Zeit -- coining instead the term ‘innerzeitig’ for that purpose. To be temporal in Heidegger’s sense is to have a complex unity disclosed against the background and in the pattern of unity of the three temporal horizons, past, present, and future.¹ It is essential to his whole argument to realize that temporal unities are not time-like nor defined in relation to time, or to put it another way, that past, present, and future are neither ‘times’ nor ‘parts of time.’

None of the past, the present, or the future come ‘before’ or ‘after’ any of the others, nor does time ‘flow’ -- if this metaphor makes sense in any context² -- from one of them to another. We sometimes identify time with the present and talk of the present as flowing, yet are stymied if asked whether it flows from the past forward into the future or from the future back into the past. In fact it does neither. The present stays, not moves; and in just the same way the past and the future stay, so that there is constantly and abidingly a full past/present/future structure to the disclosedness of the world. To be sure the ‘content’ of the time which is discovered (in different ways) in each of past, present, and future varies; but the fact that there is a temporal structure to all disclosed being-in-time does not. It doesn’t ‘take time’ for there to be a past, for example. I don’t have to wait several days before I have a past; nor does the future start tomorrow, a week from Tuesday, etc.

For Heidegger, past, present, and future are first of all horizons, a term he accepts from formal phenomenology and uses to name structures of disclosedness. Mason somewhat artificially narrows "the ordinary concept (or interpretation) of time" against which ecstatic-horizonal temporality is counterposed to the point-set interpretation of the time-continuum required by Newtonian mathematical mechanics. What is troublesome ontologically about this interpretation is the ‘vanishing’ magnitude of the ‘now,’ which would suggest that physical being were infinitesimally ‘thin’ along one of its axes of extension; it is surely correct to rejoin, as Whitehead does, that such a ‘now’ is abstract and ideal and that what is ‘concrete’ about time involves "perception through a duration" (PNK 8), so that only the "specious present is a primitive entity" (p. 87). But the ordinary interpretation of time supposes also -- and here makes an ontological commitment in which Mason clearly joins -- that however the ‘analytic geometry’ of the now is construed, it is only now, i.e., in the physically present, that being is. On this properly ontological level of this originally Aristotelian treatment, which Mason does not seem to put in question, Heidegger would point out a naive and inexplicit" commitment to disclosedness against the horizon of ecstatic-temporal presence (Anwesenheit, parousia) -- which is something very different from believing in the ‘instantaneous now.’³

Heidegger’s characteristic claim in Sein und Zeit is that there are always three horizons of the disclosure space called temporality which could have this kind of fundamental role in determining what to mean by ‘be’. The Fundamentalontologie of Sein und Zeit ‘goes deeper’ than existing ontology (if it does) precisely by restoring to the traditional role of temporal presence the larger context of the problem of the unity of all three horizons.⁴

One way to illustrate the full scope of this problem would be to look more closely at the horizonal character of the ecstatic past in contrast with the past of the ordinary interpretation of time, which is only understood by negative contrast with the present.⁵ Here Mason, apparently following Whitehead, allows us to make a particularly striking contrast: we can never change the past" he says (p. 95), meaning to evoke what Heidegger calls Dasein’s ‘facticity’ and to compare it with the objectivity with which perished actual occasions confront the concrescing actual entity in Whitehead. But there is a sense in which ‘change the past’ is just what Dasein does and must do if it is to sustain an authentic self-disclosure.

Dasein ‘has a past’ not by being located at the expanding edge of a field of ‘facts’ with which it entertains ‘relations’ (prehensions), which makes the past external and the present related to it in a time-like way (i.e., as ‘coming after’ it, in sequence with it), but by itself ecstatically opening the very ‘having-been-ness’ (Gewesenheit. corresponding to Anwesenheit) in which such things as ‘distance in time’ and ‘past facts’ are discoverable. Dasein is its own having-been-ness, which Heidegger tries to bring out with his treatment of ‘repetition.’ As ‘having a past, Dasein comes ecstatically vor ihm selbst, ‘before itself’ in the double sense of ‘face to face with itself’ and ‘already there.’ In line with Sein und Zeit’s general thesis, it is only as possible that so-called ‘past facts’ enter into an authentic disclosedness of Dasein, for Dasein is in general a possibility of itself. Hence it is wholly consistent of Heidegger to propose as authentic interpretations of, say, Presocratic philosophy what seem at first to be wholly novel assertions.⁶ The seeming voluntarism, not to say willfulness of Heidegger’s treatment of history may not commend his philosophy to our objectivist-empiricist temper, but it is clearly reflected in his analysis in principle of Dasein’s authentic having-been-ness and makes a resounding contrast with Mason/Whitehead.

Common sense thinks that ‘there is’ first time, ‘then’ location in time, and only then a looking-forward and backward (and ‘at’ the location itself) from which future, past, and present arise. As an ordered set of such quasi-places, time comprises a field of peculiarly unbridgeable distances, and the account I have just given of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s ‘free past’ will seem to require a metaphysically preposterous ‘action at a distance.’ But Heidegger denies that Dasein has ‘location’ in time, denies that its having a past, present, and future is consequent upon such location, and above all denies that the structure of Dasein’s unity is time-sensed even, when that unity is projected on time by the ecstatic stretching along’ of its ‘historic taking place (Geschehen).’

Whiteheadians seem able to imagine such ecstatically spanned unities-across-time on the so-called ‘microscopic’ scale of the ‘specious present,’ but give up on the idea as the scope of the temporal disclosure space is widened to the scale of human lifetime and of generations.⁷ But worse than this from the point of view of Heidegger’s temporal problematic, by submitting the ecstatic unities of their ‘specious presents’ to the before/after ordering and metric properties of linear time, at least in terms of their mutually external relations and arrangements, they give back ontologically every advantage they gained from the use of an cc-static-temporal disclosure horizon in the first place, even though it was only the single horizon of presence.

Authentic Dasein’s temporal disclosedness is never ‘in sequence’ with itself, or with anything else. "Nur solange Dasein ist, ‘gibt es’ Sein" (SZ 212=BT 255). The inner finality of the temporal disclosure space gives the problem of the ‘finitude’ and ‘end’ of Dasein a dimension Mason never sees -- and which seems to have no proper parallel in Whitehead. We will return to the problem after the next section.

II. Metaphysics and the Subject

Mason is exactly right in identifying as a key question in a reciprocal Whitehead/Heidegger interpretation the problem whether Whitehead "is a part of the metaphysical tradition which Heidegger seeks to dismantle" (p. 83). Mason thinks not, assuming that the trouble with metaphysics is its "theory of subjects as enduring substances" which "both men have rejected and replaced" (p. 96).

Unhappily it seems that Mason has in mind a ‘replacement’ that can be formulated as a theory of subjects "as essentially active or primordially temporal in their Being" (p. 100). By thus counterposing an active, ‘dynamic’ (which is what he means by ‘temporal’) subject to the static, substantial’ subject of recent metaphysical tradition, Mason may have taken care of real concerns, but not those that trouble Heidegger. Far from overthrowing metaphysics, Whitehead as Mason pictures him capitulates wholly and explicitly to its temporal presuppositions -- which have to do not with the contrast between ‘enduring substances’ and ‘dynamic processes’ but rather with the insistence on subjectivity and the horizonal schema of temporal presence. A ‘dynamic subject’ is no less a subject (hupokeimenon) than a static one, if to its ‘underlying’ absolute presence phenomenal multiplicities are referred for their unity, as to a synthesizing agent.

Not just verbally but systematically, it would be difficult to find a closer English definition of Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit than this discussion of ‘present (Or subjective) immediacy.’ If giving an account of how all multiplicities of behavior, appearance, or relationship find their unity in the presence of an underlying unity is equated with portraying the ‘primitive entity’ in its Being, then it is just immaterial to Heidegger’s questions whether the prime instance of such Vorhandenheit is seen in the static structure of extended things or in the dynamism of ‘occasions of experience.’ For in either case the same temporal-horizonal choice has been made, on the basis of the same dire presuppositions about the phenomenology of Dasein.

Indeed Mason’s presentation of the phenomenology of Dasein is everywhere dishearteningly ‘subjectivized’ and ‘psychologized,’ to the point of producing the circular critical procedure where a key objection -- that Heidegger focuses one-sidedly on "psychological phenomena" (p. 101) -- is actually read into analyses which are themselves deliberately non-psychological and even non-anthropological (see SZ 42-52=BT 71-77; also SZ 114-17=BT 150-53).

Despite Heidegger’s urgent insistence to the contrary, Mason seems actively determined to identify Dasein with the epistemological subject, which is to say with the human individual in the subjectivity of his ‘me, here, now.’ Because he believes in the generosity of the ‘reformed subjectivist principle,’ which would not restrict the immediacy of selfhood to human subjects alone, he criticizes Heidegger for unduly restricting human subjectivity to its ‘psychological’ side only, neglecting the ‘physiological’ side 2nd the doorway it provides into a subjectivizing of the physical in general.

Something of the artificiality of this critique can be seen in Mason’s response to the feature of Heidegger’s temporal problematic that least rewards a picture of Dasein as the subjective immediacy of the ‘specious present’: the notion namely that Dasein is essentially futural. essentially ‘ahead of itself,’ essentially possible. "In Heidegger’s major work," Mason writes, "the elucidation of the character of the present is obscured somewhat by the emphasis given the primacy of the future" (p. 99). One has to rejoin that, in Mason’s reading, the elucidation of the character of the future (and with it the whole of Dasein’s temporality) is obscured by a perniciously metaphysical/subjectivizing emphasis on the present and its ‘psychological’ reality.

But what about ‘Jemeinigkeit’? What about the ‘individuation’ of Dasein brought about by the finitude of Being-toward-death, where death is ‘uniquely mine’; and what about the whole business of being recalled to ‘authentic self-being’ from dispersion into the anonymity and publicity of everyday affairs? Isn’t ‘authentic Dasein’ just an undistracted and courageous acceptance of being ‘me’?

What Mason reports as an ‘emotional response’ to the treatment of Being-toward-death in Sein und Zeit is one source of the assumption that authentic Dasein is a possible ‘me,’ for emotions, in distinction from Befindlichkeiten or ‘dispositions’ as Heidegger treats them, are certainly subjective. But if, as I would insist, authenticity is not a psychological state of the subject, some other positive account must be given of all the talk about Jemeinigkeit -- and, indeed, of Heidegger’s fundamental ‘definition of Dasein’: "dos Seiende, das wir selbst je sind, the being which we ourselves ever/always are" (SZ 7=BT 27).

It is always true of Dasein that ‘I am it’; but in a discussion where what ‘be’ means is precisely what is under question -- above all when made grammatically finite in the first person (see SZ 24=BT 46) -- this tells us much less than we might think. It surely does not mean that Dasein is a formal name for ‘me,’ though it does suggest that the encounter with self, for each of us who say of ourselves ‘I am,’ is somehow bound up with disclosure of Dasein, or made possible by it. It would take us far beyond the limits of this brief essay to provide a full exegesis of the problematic tied up with Heidegger’s talk of individuation and Jemeinigkeit, but perhaps the non-subjectivist and non-personalist direction can he suggested through some (more or less) parallel classical examples.

The doctrine of psyche in Neoplatonism bears some striking resemblances to the phenomenology of Dasein. Psyche is both the introspectively available life-form of the human individual and the disclosure space of the total natural cosmos (the notion of the ‘world-soul’); the former could be called ‘inauthentic’ or ‘fallen’ psyche, the latter authentic’ or ‘true’ psyche. There is no way to get at original, true psyche except though the doorway of individuated psyche, a movement of thought which the Christian Augustine fatefully enough called the ‘turn within.’

Yet what remains striking even in Augustine is that the ‘in’ of ‘inwardness’ is bigger than ‘me’ even though its entry is the ‘in me.’ "For they endeavor to find a path outwardly, and forsake their own inward things, within which is God" (DT VIII, 7, 11). There is for Augustine an ‘in’ further in than ‘my own inwardness,’ which embraces and comprehends in divine freedom everything which prior to the ‘turn within’ seemed only ‘outward.’ ‘God within my inward things’ is not equivalent to ‘God in me’ for Augustine, for God is always first of all creator of the whole world and Lord of all history.

Kierkegaard is often made the source of Heidegger’s alleged individualism and introspective psychologism. But in the treatise which demonstrably had most influence on Heidegger, The Concept of Dread,’ Kierkegaard makes clear that he recognizes only two ‘individuals,’ Adam and Christ, showing that the concept is hardly individualistic in any obvious sense. And he further commends as "the essential characteristic of human existence . . . ‘that man is an individual and as such is at once himself and the whole race, in such wise that the whole race has part in the individual, and the individual has part in the whole race" (CD 26). A review of Kierkegaard’s treatment of the temporal ‘moment of vision’ or ‘instant’ (Augenblick) in this work is probably the best insulation against supposing too quickly that what Heidegger means to bring out about Dasein by insisting that in each case we ‘are’ it is the simple subjective immediacy of psychic life.

Conclusion: The Fruits of Comparison

While introducing his project of comparing Whitehead and Heidegger on time, Mason suggests that the paucity of previous efforts is "a function of the assumption that their modes of philosophizing are so different as to render the thought of the one completely irrelevant to that of the other" (p. 83). Though I have argued that the differences in the systematic role of their theories of time are greater than Mason grants, the two philosophical positions are clearly not irrelevant to one another. Mason’s charge that Heidegger is too ‘psychological’ has an instructive aspect, misleading as it may be if taken strictly. If for the distinction between psychology and physiology we substitute that between history and nature, his critique brings out clearly what I would agree is the deepest theoretical gulf between Whitehead and Heidegger. Whitehead, it seems to me, denies any ontological distinction between nature and history. I understand the ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ as both naturalizing the human/historical and humanizing the natural -- or perhaps better, as seeking an ontological system midway between them and able to account for both.

Heidegger by contrast holds for a radical priority of the historical over the natural, to the point that it sometimes seems that the discovery of nature and the entertaining of theoretical relationships to it are the essence of "fallenness." The categories suited to the interpretation of nature are treated in Sein und Zeit as restrictive and devolved forms of the existentials of Dasein, and in general it is denied that nature has any Being outside of the ecstatic-horizonal disclosure space of human historicality. With respect to the problem of natural time, we have already cited Heidegger’s affirmation that "only so long as Dasein is, ‘is there’ Being." If we should try to escape the force of this by saying that perhaps there could ‘be’ time ‘before Dasein,’ only it would not be disclosed, Heidegger would rejoin that Being is intrinsically disclosed and that Dasein has a privileged role in that disclosure.

The immediate background of Heidegger’s elevation of history above nature is of course German historicism, notably Dilthey and Hegel. In my own judgment, an even stronger role is to be attributed to Christian anthropology as Heidegger knows it from Kierkegaard and Augustine. Indeed the only claim of priority for man in the disclosure of universal Being I know of that is as far-reaching as Heidegger’s is the Augustinian treatment of man as imago Dei, which explicitly holds that among all created natures mans is the most embracing and intimate reflection of divine freedom and that all other natures must be referred to God in the light of that reflection.

Heidegger himself of course resolutely denies anthropological intentions and refuses to let his work be interpreted in relation to Christian theological problems. His account of the precedence of temporality over time must therefore satisfy direct phenomenological probing and prove intelligible to philosophers with a sophisticated grasp of the role of time in traditional metaphysics. No group is better prepared to bring such challenges than students of Whitehead, and if the scale of the contrast is greater than Mason would admit, the fruits of continued pursuit of his project are correspondingly more important

References

BT -- Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by E. Robinson and J. Macquarrie. New York: Harper and How, 1962.

CD -- Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton University Press, second edition, 1957.

DT -- Augustine, De trinitate libri XV.

SZ -- Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927) 12te unveränderte Auflage, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 1972.

Notes:

1There is some uncertainty in Heidegger’s use of the terms ‘time’ (Zeit) and ‘temporality’ (Zeittichkeit) in SZ, and I am enforcing the distinction as it is drawn consistently throughout the second division, "Dasein and Temporality." In the introduction, however, he refers to "time . . . as the horizon for all understanding of Being" (SZ 17 = BT 39) where later he would take care to qualify this as ‘primordial time’ (die ursprüngliche Zeit), which in turn is most frequently called ‘temporality’ pure and simple (cf. SZ 329=BT 377; also SZ 405=BT 457). Again, p riot to his full commitment to the specialized sense of ‘temporality,’ Heidegger in the introduction sometimes resorts to the Latinisn,s temporale and Temporalitat (cf. SZ 19 BT 40) to carry the ‘primordial’ force, adding to the confusion. (After Zeitlichkeit has taken on its full technical force, the locution ‘primordial temporality’ which Mason uses becomes redundant and occurs very infrequently.)

2 The most provocative phenomenological attack on the ‘flowing’ metaphor can be found in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (translated by Collin Smith, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 410-14 and ff.

3 On Heidegger’s suggestion that the metaphysical concept of ousia has the temporal-horizontal sense of parousia but only "naively and inexplicitly," see SZ 26= BT 48; also What Is Called Thinking? (translated by Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, New York: Harper and Row, 1968). Lecture X, pp. 100-10; and further, The End of Philosophy (translated by Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1973), "Metaphysics as History of Being," pp. 4-10 and ff. The ‘presence’ that provides the metaphysical tradition with its clue to Being must be distinguished from the fully temporal ‘presence’ that Heidegger discusses in, for example, On Time and Being, which "plays" as a "fourth dimension" of authentic temporality among all three of the horizons of past, present, future (translated by Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 1-15 and ff. The cognate of this presence in SZ is ‘disclosedness,’ or perhaps the ‘lighting’ (Lichtung) of Dasein’s ‘da.’

4 Restoration of this sense of ‘equiprimordiality’ is one of the core themes of the temporal interpretation of Dasein. "The phenomenon of the equiprimordiality of constitutive items has often been disregarded in ontology, because of a methodologically unrestrained tendency to derive everything and anything from some simple primal ground"’ (SZ 131=BT 170).

5 The past is taken as made up of things and events which ‘are no longer now, ‘.e., are deprived of ‘nowness’ and in that fact alone deprived of ‘being.’

6 His Presocratic interpretations are perhaps the most controversial; in addition to SZ second division, chapter 5 passim, the general principle of his approach to the history of philosophy is implied in his preface to the second edition of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: In contrast with the methods of historical philology, which has its own problems, a dialogue between thinkers is bound by other laws" (translated by Tames Churchill, Indiana University Press, 1962), p. xxv. It is also stated forthrightly in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit (Bern: A. Francke, 1947), p. 5, "Die ‘Lehre’ eines Denkers ist des in seinem Sagen Ungesagte, . . ." -- "the ‘doctrine’ of a thinker is what is unsaid in his sayings, . . .

7 On the microscopic scale, there seem to be Whiteheadian equivalents to horizonal having-been and horizonal advent/future. If it would make sense to speak of ‘empty’ prehension, considered as formally continual apart from any given content, this might be set in parallel with Dasein’s ecstatic having-been. In the same way the sheer capacity to be teleologically ‘lured’ -- which involves anticipated satisfaction and perishing -- might serve as a cognate of Dasein’s ecstatic futurity and anticipatory completeness. The superimposition of the ‘macroscopic’ scale ruins all these parallels, however, by intruding ‘past’ and ‘future’ being outside of the temporal disclosure space.

8 Three separate footnotes mention it; the most important (SZ 235 = BT 494) is a note attached to section 45, the prospectus for the entire second division, and makes it clear that the temporal interpretation of Dasein is directly in continuation of Kierkegaard’s problematic of existence. CD also figures large in the note to SZ 190 (BT 492); and some of the technical parallels are discussed in the note to SZ 338 (BT 497). It would probably overstate the point only minimally to say that SZ in its entirety is an extended meditation on Kierkegaard s discussion of time and eternity in that treatise (CD 73-83).