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The elaboration of that continuity was one of the principal aims of Process and Reality as well as the whole of Whitehead’s work. While the above-quoted passage is perhaps the clearest and most concise statement of that aim, it has numerous parallels in Process and Reality and in Modes of Thought -- passages insisting that the role of the body in perception must be done justice: passages criticizing Hume or Descartes for their ambivalence concerning the role of the body: passages insisting that sense must be made of the vector character of causality (PR 81/125, 87/ 133, 115-20/ 177-84, 121f./ 186, 174f./ 264f., 311f./ 474f., 325f./ 496f MT 166, 179-88, 217; cf. AI 274f.). Indeed one of the principal functions of the doctrine of actual occasions is to fill the gap between the last items in the analysis of the physiologist and physicist on the one side and the first items in the analysis of the philosopher on the other.

In the second place, I would argue that according to Whitehead it is the implicit or explicit misapprehension of the true status of presentational immediacy that has blocked the philosopher’s attempts to bridge the gap (PR 173f./ 263f.). Many philosophers from Kant to Hume regard presentational immediacy to be the primary, even sole, datum of perception; whereas, for Whitehead it is secondary. This thesis is not neatly and compactly stated in any one place. There are several important references to be considered. Later, in Part II, we shall apply our discussion to Richard Rorty’s analysis.

I

It is more or less clearly implied in this passage that to understand the continued use of the "wrong" categories one must examine and understand the status of "presentational immediacy." The full impact of this implicit assertion may, however, be realized only by careful gathering of pieces of Whitehead’s argument from many places (PR 77f./ 119f., 117/ 179, 113/173, 122f./ 186f., 162/ 246, 173f./ 263f., 61/ 95, 151f./ 229f., 170f./ 259, 315f./ 481; MT 99f., 43, 148; S 31; AI 159-67). Moreover, as vaguely hinted in the quoted passage, the misapprehension of presentational immediacy lies at the base of other notions quite prominent in Whitehead’s diagnosis of philosophy’s malady, e.g., quality inherent in substance (PR 28f./ 43).

In Whitehead’s view prephilosophical man misapprehended the true nature of immediately presented sensation when he assumed (tacitly, of course) that the objects of nature are as they appear. Philosophical man misapprehends when he supposes (usually explicitly) that immediately presented sensa are the primitive and primary data of experience. The misapprehension is a harmless and even necessary and beneficial error as regards the conduct of the ordinary business of life. It leads to serious difficulty only when metaphysical doctrines are based upon it. The philosopher is unlikely to discover the error until the progress of physics and physiology reaches a certain level of sophistication in the analysis of both the objects of perception and the perceptive process itself (PR 158f./ 240f., 167/ 253f., 113/173, 117/179). It is Whitehead’s contention that the "sensationalist principle" is nothing less than the misapprehension made explicit and respectable as adopted by the philosopher (PR 117f./ 179f., 173/ 263f., 175/266, 178/ 270).

From the perspective of Whitehead’s developed system the foregoing can be summed up as follows: Pragmatic considerations, not the least of which is survival, have dictated that our perceptive mechanisms evolve in such a way that integration, "transmutations" and syntheses of the incoming data take place below the level of consciousness thus veiling from us the true nature of both the objects of perception and of our immediate conscious sensations.

Whitehead was led to challenge the primacy of presentational immediacy by numerous considerations. First, granting the veracity of the physicist’s analysis of ordinary objects into a multitude of active subatomic particles, and the veracity of the combined account of the physicist and the physiologist in which pulses of electricity or neuronal firings are seen as the causes of sensations, it would seem that sensations must be complex integrations and syntheses of some sort of primitive experience rather than being themselves the primitive and primary elements.

In the second place, though, from the standpoint of clear and distinct conscious experience, sensations do appear to be primitive and/or primary, such experience carries with it vague accompaniments indicating otherwise: the vague feeling of derivation, the sense of the priority of a flash to a blink or of the sensation of brightness to the sensation of discomfort, etc. These aspects of experience are dealt with extensively in both Process and Reality and Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect and are what led to Whitehead’s invention and use of the phrase, "experience in the mode of causal efficacy."

In the third place, Whitehead assumes that various interpretive problems deriving from the assertion of the primacy of sensations constitute good grounds for challenging the assertion. According to him it leads to emphasis upon the superficial (MT 41-44, 184f.; AI, ch.11, par.12); inability to offer reasonable scientific explanations (MT 182-88, 210f.; PR 496f.); doing injustice to moral and emotional experience; assuming that "experience presupposes consciousness," which in turn makes it difficult to come up with a coherent theory of evolution from lower to higher forms (PR 176f./ 267f.; S 40f.; MT 217).

We come now to the question: in what sense are the substance/ quality framework and associated doctrines derivative from the misapprehension of presentational immediacy? The simplest and clearest way to get at this question is to assume the standpoint of Whitehead’s developed speculative hypothesis. Let us take the example of a cave man toward whom a large stone is hurtling through the air and examine his perception of that stone. The stone is analyzable into a vast multitude of actual occasions, each existing but a microscopic fragment of the time involved in the stone’s flight. The man’s perception of the stone involves a multitude of interactions of these individual actual occasions with: first, the man’s distant environment (entities in the space between the man and the stone); secondly, the percipient’s immediate environment (his animal body -- eye); and finally, the multitude of interactions occurring along nerve trains from eye to some central percipient occasion in the brain where the whole complex series is synthesized and integrated into the immediate conscious perception of incoming large gray stone.

This integration and synthesis is a highly complex process occurring within the concrescence of a single experient occasion. But for our purposes the most significant feature of this process is what Whitehead called transmutation. It is by means of transmutation that the staggering multitude of data deriving from the multitude of actual occasions making up the life histories of the stone, air, eye, and nerve trains are simplified so that for consciousness there is presented the single simple large stone with its most relevant properties. Now this is a gross oversimplification as anyone familiar with Whitehead’s discussion of the phases of concrescence, transmutation, societies, etc., will be aware. I believe, though, that it is sufficient for our purpose.

Our cave man thus reacts to the situation by ducking. If we asked him why, he would speak to us about the stone as though it were a single simple undifferentiatedly enduring bit of stuff (or substance) with properties of hardness, roundness, grayness, etc. (inhering qualities), all traveling with such speed as to constitute a lethal projectile. Thus the man’s attention is focused on the product of the complex perceptive process -- the presented sensa projected and imputed to a single substratum. Moreover, the product seems to be the primitive and primary data since the complex phases of reception, integration, and synthesis all take place below the level of consciousness. I, of course, do not wish to imply that the cave man was capable of any such analysis. Indeed Whitehead contended that philosophers had to await late developments in physics and physiology to be themselves capable of such an analysis (PR 113/ 173, 111/ 179).

The very way in which our cave man’s perceptive mechanism has functioned has on the one hand been necessary for his survival. Had the welter of incoming data been consciously presented and had the task of sorting, integrating, and synthesizing been a conscious process, he would have died before these tasks were off to a good start. On the other hand he has been led into a misapprehension of the true status of presentational immediacy. The presented sensations are indeed not the primitive and primary data of his experience, though from the standpoint of simple consciousness they seem to be. Moreover, in taking the immediate presented sensa to be qualities inhering in an undifferentiatedly enduring substratum or stuff he has misconstrued the ultimate nature of things. All this he does quite naturally, and he must do so if he is to survive (duck the incoming missile) so that in a sense he is not wrong. The misapprehension has tremendous pragmatic value (PR 167/ 253f., cf. PR 318/ 484f., 353f./ 387f., 179f./ 273; AI, ch. 14, sect. 4 if.; PNK, par. 24.7; CN 156).

Two comments are in order: (1) On this analysis the substance/ quality framework can hardly be the root of philosopher’s epistemological problems; it is the misapprehension of presentational immediacy. (2) That our cave man and his descendants do thus misapprehend should be obvious to the physicist and physiologist, for they are clearly aware of the complexity of the stone, of the data derived from it, and the various processes by which that data is gathered, transmitted, and made use of. This is clearly indicated by all the talk about atoms, photons, neurons, etc. The problem is mainly on the side of philosophy. According to Whitehead, philosophers have made the natural and necessary but implicit misapprehension of the cave man into an explicit dogma: the traditional doctrine of substance with all its corollaries, together with the sensationalist principle.

But what exactly is the problem from the philosopher’s side? An example will serve us well here, though it is one not used by Whitehead.¹According to Hobbes, everything can be analyzed in terms of bits of matter in motion. If indeed we do perceive or know anything external to ourselves, it is because the motions of bits of matter in the part of the plenum external to ourselves, cause motions of bits of matter in that part of the plenum we call ourselves. A frequent objection to Hobbes, simply put, is: "but sensations don’t seem to be anything like bits of matter in motion." (Note the implicit assertion of the primacy of presentational immediacy.) Now granted that from the standpoint of contemporary physics, Hobbes’s bits of matter in motion are simplistic, his basic thesis that we must know on the basis of internal reactions caused by external actions remains at the heart of any physical analysis of perception. Sophistication of this side of the analysis through advances into subatomic theories and through theories of neuronal firings still leaves us with the same problem: sensations don’t seem to be anything like subatomic particles or photons or neuronal firings or pulses of electricity, etc. A huge gap remains. So long as the philosopher insists on the primacy of presentational immediacy that gap will, according to Whitehead, remain.

If immediately presented sensations are taken to be the products of complex processes of reception, integration, and synthesis carried out by the percipient, then perhaps one can begin to understand why sensations do not appear to be like their fundamental data. Perhaps the gulf can be bridged. Perhaps the sensations can be subjected to an analysis similar to that to which the stone and the organs of the animal body have been subjected. However, one must attend carefully to the kind of bridge hoped for. For conscious sensations are essentially the brute primary data from the standpoint of clear distinct vivid consciousness.

This latter assertion is in no way to be taken as a disagreement with the many discussions of causal efficacy in Symbolism, Process and Reality, and elsewhere where Whitehead argues that there are vague traces of something else more primitive (causal efficacy) which cling to conscious perception. The point is that those traces remain vague. But if one takes seriously the work of physicist and physiologist and if one does attend to the clues that cling to consciousness and if one does attempt to build a bridge, then one must realize that the bridge can only be speculative. I take it that Whitehead never thought he (or anyone else for that matter) could do more or other than this.²

For Whitehead the solution was to invent a speculative hypothesis about the process whereby presented sensations come into being, proposing hypothetical entities (or occasions) and/or processes in terms of which both the end terms of the physical analysis and the philosopher’s sensations could be analyzed. A hypothetical bridge is not unreal any more than hypothetical electrons are unreal. What one must admit is that those entities in terms of which our clear and distinct perceptions are analyzed are not themselves capable of clear and distinct direct perception, as if we could somehow unplug our perceptive mechanisms and substitute different ones.

Looking at the matter from the other side, Hobbes’s bits of matter are at least implicitly bits of undifferentiatedly enduring stuff, a notion unchallenged until very recent times (cf. PR 78/ 121). Even analysis by physicists is flawed because the fundamental entities in their analysis are misconceived in terms of presentational immediacy. Now undifferentiatedly enduring bits of stuff inevitably partake of the character of Aristotelian primary substances and hence can neither be predicated of nor be present in another.³ Thus the philosopher cannot see how these enduring bits of stuff can be connected to the perceiver. Only the qualities of these bits of stuff could possibly be predicates of both the bits of stuff and the experient. But then why should they be predicates of both? Having lost the vector character of causation within the physical analysis, it is hopeless to attempt to find a flow of vector causality across the gap from bits of stuff to the mind of the perceiver (cf. PR 159-60/ 241-43. PR 11.1.5).

From Whitehead’s perspective this problem clings to the concept of undifferentiatedly enduring substance, but that concept is itself the outgrowth of the misapprehension of presentational immediacy. On this analysis the fundamental particles of physics are not undifferentiatedly enduring substances, but are historic routes of repetition. Undifferentiated endurance is appearance generated by transmutation.⁴ Repetition along historic routes is reality. Thus there is no false barrier erected between the entity perceived and the perceiver. Actual occasions are tailored to bridge the gap between the analysis of the physicist/physiologist and that of the philosopher, and one can cross the bridge beginning from either side.

Now let us assume that the Hobbsian bits of stuff are not only undifferentiatedly enduring substances, but also that they are Cartesian material subtances (vacuous actualities) while the perceiver is a bit of mental substance. The problem is now compounded -- another artificial barrier is placed between perceiver and object. Thus even if the bits of stuff (on the physical side) were unlike Aristotelian primary substances and could thus be predicated of one another, they could not be predicated of the mind of the perceiver. Even if we somehow restore vector flow on the physical side, there is no way to get that flow across the barrier erected by Cartesian dualism. No satisfactory solution has been found for the problem of interaction between extended physical entities and nonextended mental entities.

Once again actual occasions are tailored to solve the problem: to eliminate (at the ultimate metaphysical level) the distinction between material and mental substances or entities. So much has already been written and said about Whitehead’s break with dualism and the "bipolarity" of his actual occasions that I need add nothing except to note the importance of this move in the attempt to bridge the gap between science and philosophy.

II

In an early essay, "Matter and Event" (EWP), Richard M. Rorty very effectively argued that a problem posed by Aristotle was first solved by Whitehead. The problem is how a substance, i.e., an actuality in principle unrepeatable, can be concretely known by means of repeatables (i.e., universals). Whitehead’s solution depends upon taking time seriously, distinguishing between unrepeatable present concrescing occasions and repeatable past actualities. Then in "The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn" (WEP), Rorty turns right around and argues that this metaphysical solution has been rendered superfluous because the problem can be solved linguistically by Wilfred Sellars. While Whitehead may be able to solve the problem without recourse to the modes of experience, as evidenced by Rorty’s first essay, it is highly questionable whether any solution in terms of ordinary language can avoid them. Is not ordinary language based on presentational immediacy, implicitly assuming that it is our primary mode of experience, failing to appreciate its derivative status?

On the surface an attempt to solve the problem of repeatability directly without grappling with presentational immediacy would seem like treating a serious sinus infection with aspirin, relieving the symptoms, but leaving the bacteria free to continue their ugly work. Can one solve the repeatability problem linguistically? For Rorty the answer is yes, and he proposes such a solution (WEP 139f., 147f.). Whitehead believed the answer to be no. On my interpretation Whitehead reasons that language itself presupposes, and is in some sense based on, the natural misapprehension of the true status of presentational immediacy. This I tried to show in the cave man story, where his speech about the stone grew out of his taking the "presented nexus" to be exactly as it appeared in his conscious perception -- a single undifferentiatedly enduring entity with such and such inhering qualities. The point is made by Whitehead himself, more or less clearly, in several places (PR 167/ 253f., 77/ 120, 117/ 179, 173/ 263).

Let us, however, suppose that Whitehead is partially wrong and that there are language games that are free of the taint of the misapprehension of presentational immediacy, as Rorty supposes (WEP 147f.). And let us suppose further that one can to some degree solve the repeatability problem linguistically: will this solution also help us to build a bridge between the analysis of the physicist/physiologist on the one side and the analysis of the philosopher on the other? Again I have grave doubts. If indeed it can be done, I suspect that it would entail an alteration of the physicist/physiologist language game no less radical than that proposed by Whitehead. Perhaps the philosopher no less than the physicist needs hypothetical entities to explain sensations, his basic immediately perceivable data.

What should we do with the Cartesian criterion that none but "clear and distinct ideas" should be used in philosophical explanations? Such ideas are understood by Whitehead as immediately or ultimately derived front conscious sense perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. Thus giving primacy to this criterion presupposes adherence to the "sensationalist principle" which for Whitehead is simply a philosophical dogma based upon misunderstanding the true status of presentational immediacy. Moreover, Whitehead would argue that since clear and distinct elements are not the most basic factors of experience (PR 161f./ 245), it hardly seems reasonable to derive so basic a criterion therefrom. Rather, ignoring the nonbasic status of such experience has been fatal to the analysis of experient occasions. Indeed, "most of the difficulties of philosophy are produced by it" (PR 161f./ 24Sf.; cf. PR 173f./ 263f.; AI 225).

Thus from Whitehead’s perspective philosophers have erred in cojoining the Cartesian subjectivist turn with the criterion that ideas be clear and distinct. Whitehead therefore feels quite free and even bound to reject the criterion as traditionally understood and applied (PR 162/ 24Sf., 173f./ 263f; AI 225). But he insists that he entirely accepts the subjectivist bias (turn) of modern philosophy (PR 166f./ 253; cf. 160/243, 145/ 219; KPR 138).

Once again Rorty’s second article (WEP) is both provocative and frustrating. Rorty knows that Whitehead wants to take the subjectivist turn, that Whitehead plays fast and loose with the clear and distinct criterion, and that Whitehead is convinced that adherence to the criterion requiring clarity forces a reintroduction of the subject/ predicate language game thus making a solution of the repeatability problem impossible. Rorty wishes to retain the conjunction of the subjectivist turn and this criterion after reinterpreting the latter linguistically (WEP 142; cf. 146f.). But is it fair to accuse Whitehead of being unfaithful to the subjectivist turn because he rejects Descartes criterion as normally applied or as linguistically reinterpreted? Surely it is not unless the conjunction is a necessary one. I do not believe that Rorty or anyone has shown that it is.

Rorty’s continued adherence to Descartes’ criterion is predicated upon the conviction that there are language games that do not lead to the subject/predicate, repeatability problem. But yet, what sort of experience are these language games based on? Is it experience in the mode of presentational immediacy or some other sort of experience? If we claim that "we should, in offering explanations, use no terms but those which have a nonphilosophical use, and then we should use them in a nonphilosophical sense" (WEP 142), the question still remains: Is there really available to us an ordinary language game that is not tainted by the misapprehension of presentational immediacy, one that is not founded upon and shaped by the way in which we naturally perceive (by means of transmutation, etc.) and interpret immediately presented sensa?

I need to be convinced that there is such a language game. If such a language game does exist, then Rorty may very well have discovered (or invented) a way of dealing with the clear and distinct criterion that accomplishes part of what Whitehead was after. In that case I would still have the nagging question: Does this linguistic solution help me to bridge the gap between the last items in the analysis of the physicist/physiologist on the one side and the philosopher’s sensations on the other?

Whitehead saw no necessary connection between the subjectivist turn and the criterion requiring clear and distinct ideas as traditionally understood. Indeed from Whitehead’s perspective the clear and distinct criterion is one of those philosophical notions inconsistent with the Cartesian turn because it is "derived from another point of view" (PR 167/253). Whitehead thought that careful attention to the subjective experiences taken as primary data should lead to the repudiation of the inconsistent notions:

For Whitehead these are logical consequences of strict adherence to the subjectivist turn. Granting that he has pressed these consequences, he might well have claimed that he has been the one most faithful to the Cartesian turn! Such a claim is reinforced by Whitehead’s reformulation of the subjectivist turn as his reformed subjectivist principle, which states that "apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PR 167/254). The reformed subjectivist principle in turn is the ground of both his ontological principle and his principle of relativity (both come close to being simply alternative ways of expressing the reformed subjectivist principle) (PR 166f. 252f.).

Whitehead’s focus upon the misapprehension of presentational immediacy sheds light upon still another problem of interpretation. It seems that no settled agreement has yet been reached concerning what Whitehead meant by the "fallacy of simple location." It is perhaps agreed that simple location is an example of the broader fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in all its forms is based upon and grows out of the misapprehension of presentational immediacy. If, as argued above, immediately presented sensa are the complex products of integration and transmutation, and if this is the natural and normal mode of the functioning of organisms that have evolved as we have, then the immediate objects of clear and distinct perceptions may be simply located (properly so). But they are not concrete actualities. Thus simple location is proper and appropriate for perceptual objects, but one misunderstands their true status if one identifies them as concrete actualities, thus committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness in the specific form of the fallacy of simple location.

Now then, while the notion of simple location is useful and even necessary from the standpoint of the ordinary everyday world of perceptual objects, it is nevertheless, from the standpoint of metaphysics, sheer error. Similar statements made by Whitehead about substance and about undifferentiatedly enduring stuff and their application to physics apply to the concept of simple location (cf. PR 77-79/ 119-22). Elemental physical particles are no less involved in abstraction than the cave man’s stone (PR 77f./ 119f.) and both can and must be simply located. To do so is not simply wrong (SMW 59, 84f.). The fallacy is committed only if these simply located entities are taken to be either concrete actualities or metaphysically ultimate entities.

Thus I am in essential agreement with Lawrence: "For Whitehead there is nothing fallacious about saying that a bit of matter is simply located, provided that you recognize the limitation of not talking about something concrete (RoM 7:238; italics his). This remains true when one takes into account any changes in doctrine in Process and Reality (see Alston RoM 8/2). It seems to me that Alston is misguided in trying to find a replacement for simple location such as multiple or complex location or multiple ingression, etc. The term location is no more applicable to the actual entities (occasions) of Process and Reality than to the events of earlier works. Location is still a derivative notion applicable only to nexus and societies. The whole attempt in Process and Reality to derive geometry from strain feeling seems to me to be massive evidence that the very notion of location is for Whitehead always a derivative notion. (Indeed I suspect that, faithful to the notion that continuity pertains to potentiality and not to actuality, Whitehead understands the extensive continuum to be a derivative abstraction.) Thus I agree with Lawrence (RoM 7/2, 242, 243) in rejecting multiple location as a way of dealing with mutual immanence.

Rorty writes: "The relationship of prehending cannot for Whitehead be modeled on any relationship which holds among (what his system takes to be) abstracta; it therefore cannot be molded on any familiar relation holding between entities mentioned in ordinary language" (WEP 138).

This is one of his more provocative assertions about Whitehead and one with which I am in entire agreement. Frequently articles purporting to interpret, reinterpret, refine, or polish Whitehead’s doctrines of actual occasions and prehension forget this. All too often they ask that actual occasions behave or be modeled on the behavior of perceptual objects or other entities considered by Whitehead to be in some sense abstract. A good case in point is Charles Johnson’s "On Prehending the Past" (PS 6/4).

Johnson thinks that it is problematic that one actual entity can prehend another that is dead, gone, and past (PS 6:256f.). Now certainly if one were dealing with billiard balls, one would find it problematic in the extreme if someone were to claim that while watching a Cue ball move on a collision course with an Eight ball, the Cue ball disappeared an "instant" before touching the Eight ball but that the Eight ball nevertheless reacted as if it had been struck. As far as anyone knows no one has ever observed such behavior in billiard balls or in perceptual objects in general. Indeed the probability of such an occurrence seems to be beyond believing or explaining: it is inconceivable, if you please.

But is this reason to find it problematic that Whitehead’s actual occasions behave in that way? In doing so Johnson is tacitly asserting that the behavior of perceptual objects is the model in terms of which the behavior of Whitehead’s theoretical entities must be assessed. Worse still he is tacitly reasserting the primacy of presentational immediacy, for the behavior of perceptual objects in question is behavior as perceived in this model Whitehead would grant that it may be extremely counterintuitive to assert that what is past and gone can yet be causally efficacious, but the reason this seems so is that we falsely give primacy to the immediate deliverance of sense perception.

According to Whitehead’s thesis transmutations taking place below the level of conscious perception account for the apparent endurance, continuity, and copresence of causally interacting perceptual objects as they are finally presented to consciousness. Thus on his thesis the seeming copresence of cause and effect is apparent but not actual. Indeed his doctrines of nexus, societies, and transmutation offer an ingenious explanation why, judging on the basis of ordinary sense perception, we feel compelled to insist on the copresence of cause and effect, while at the same time explaining why the felt need is erroneous.

There are numerous precedents for not requiring theoretical entities to behave on the model of perceptual objects. We do believe the physicist when he informs us that billiard balls (which we do see move toward each other and collide with a click) are not really the hard solid objects they appear to be and that the click has to do with rapidly moving air molecules and not with touching of the balls. We do not protest when he tells us that the balls are really mostly empty space: really more like beehives of activity on the part of subatomic entities separated from each other by vast tracts of space. We accept his hypothesis of subatomic particles because we have come to appreciate the great explanatory power of the hypothesis and are grateful for the multitude of technological gadgets made possible by such theories with which our lives have been enriched. Strangely the hypothesis may not get most of us very far in understanding the seen behavior of billiard balls and indeed seems to complicate vastly what seemed so simple. But we do not therefore reject the hypothesis.

It is similarly the case with the quantum theory. According to that theory electrons behave in extremely strange ways. When energized they may jump from one orbital level to another, but only by gains of energy in discrete units and in so doing do not seem to pass through intermediate energy levels. Surely no person has ever witnessed any perceptual object behaving in that way nor has anyone even thought that such an object might be capable of doing so. But no one for that reason attempts to claim that the physicist’s hypothesis is all wrong or in need of revision: no one would try to persuade the physicist that his theoretical entities must behave as do perceptual objects. My point is simply this: It is reasonable to grant Whitehead’s theoretical entities similar liberties.

I have not dealt with the rather drastic revisions of Whitehead’s ideas which Johnson proposes (e.g., making the phases of concrescence into a succession of temporal instants in order to secure temporal overlap [PS 2:262f.]) because it seems to me, as I have tried to show, that the "problem" which necessitates these revisions is a pseudoproblem.

I do not in any sense think that I have more than scratched the surface as regards the importance of taking seriously either Whitehead’s aim at "bridge building" or his critique of the primacy of presentational immediacy. What I do think is that any careful exposition of Whitehead and any significant improvement of his ideas must be carried out in a manner consistent with the importance Whitehead assigns to these topics.

References

EWP -- Ford, Lewis S., and George L. Kline, eds., Exploration in Whitehead’s Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 1963. For Richard M. Rorty, "Matter and Event," pp. 68-103, reprinted from The Concept of Matter, ed. Ernan McMullin. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963, pp. 496-524.

IWE -- Lindsey, James E., Jr., An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Epistemology. Th.D. Dissertation, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1970, (c) 1975, available University Microfilms.

KPR -- Sherburne, Donald W., ed., A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966.

PS 6/2 -- Johnson, Charles Michael, "On Prehending the Past," Process Studies 6/2 (Winter, 1976), 255-59.

RoM 7/2 -- Lawrence, Nathaniel, "Single Location, Simple Location, and Misplaced Concreteness, Review of Metaphysics 7/2 (December, 1953), 227-47.

RoM 8/2 -- Alston, William, "Simple Location: Reply by William Alston to an Article by Nathaniel Lawrence, Review of Metaphysics 8/2 (December, 1954), 334-431.

WEP -- Kline, George L., ed., Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963. For Richard M. Rorty, "The Subjectivist Principle and The Linguistic Turn," pp. 134-57.

NOTES

1To the best of my knowledge, Whitehead never quotes or refers to Hobbes in any of his works.

2 Since the gulf is traceable in the first place to the misapprehension of presentational immediacy which is natural to and necessary for such organisms as ourselves and since we have evolved in such a way that our perceptive mechanisms thus function, such misapprehension can be overcome only by speculative hypothesis. This must in part have been understood by Whitehead when he wrote that if we assume the primacy of presentational immediacy, Hume has the last word.

3 This, apart from other problems, seriously hampers the physicist’s analysis because it renders the vector character of physical causation unintelligible.

4 This should be no more startling than the assertion that in the cinema motion is appearance generated by the merging together of separate frames by the action of the

Some years ago Richard M. Rorty argued that in order "to understand the needs which Process and Reality was intended to satisfy, one must understand Whitehead’s diagnosis of the state of modem philosophy" (WEP 134). While this thesis is certainly correct, Rorty’s account of the needs Process and Reality was intended to satisfy requires reexamination. I intend to show that Rorty’s account of Whitehead’s diagnosis is incomplete, in part because some portions of the text of Process and Reality which Rorty quotes need editorial correction. These passages concern the terms "subjectivist bias," "subjectivist principle," and "reformed subjectivist principle." These terms are clearly defined and distinguished by Whitehead but, due to the state of the text, do not stand out as so distinguished.

Having stated his thesis that one must begin with Whitehead’s diagnosis, Rorty quotes him as follows: "The difficulties of all schools of modern philosophy lie in the fact that having accepted the subjectivist principle, they continue to use philosophical categories derived from another point of view" (PR 253; WEP 134; italics mine). In this passage Whitehead clearly intends one to understand "philosophical categories derived from another point of view" as referring to such categories as substance, property, universal, particular, etc. (Rorty also so understands Whitehead’s intent.) It is also clear that Whitehead wants to suggest that having accepted the subjectivist principle, it was not only unnecessary to continue to use those categories, but rather a mistake to do so. Now when one turns to Whitehead’s formal definition of the subjectivist principle and to his discussion of its derivation one finds him saying:

Here the subjectivist principle is seen to be inextricably connected to those "categories from another point of view." Clearly something is amiss; either subjectivist principle has two distinct and incompatible meanings or Whitehead intended some other term in one of these passages.

I suggest that Whitehead intended to say subjectivist bias in the first statement. It would then read as follows: "The difficulties of all schools of modern philosophy lie in the fact that having accepted the [subjectivist bias], they continue to use philosophical categories derived from another point of view" (PR 253). My contention is supported by the explicit diagnosis of the difficulties of Descartes and his followers in which the term subjectivist bias is used:

Whitehead also makes it explicitly clear in this context that the joint adoption of the subjectivist bias and of the substance-quality categories is inconsistent: "Yet if the enjoyment of experience be the constitutive subjective fact, these categories have lost all claim to any fundamental character in metaphysics" (PR 241; cf. 243). Still in the same context he declares that "Descartes modified traditional philosophy in two opposite ways"; e.g., emphasizing the substance-quality categories and introducing the subjectivist bias (PR 241; italics mine).

I think we have clear evidence that the two terms subjectivist principle and subjectivist bias must be clearly distinguished. According to Whitehead, the adoption of the subjectivist bias has no necessary connection with any retention of the substance-quality categories and should indeed result in their abandonment (which Whitehead himself did). It is also clear that, according to Whitehead, adopting the subjectivist principle implies the use of the substance-quality categories. Whitehead’s point in both passages (PR 253 and PR 241) is that Descartes, Locke, and Hume, etc., having adopted the subjectivist bias, inconsistently do what they should not do; namely, continue to interpret the datum in the act of experience using the substance-quality categories. In other words, they interpret the datum according to the subjectivist principle.

In the second place, these two notions must be clearly distinguished because Whitehead makes it abundantly clear that he accepts and affirms one -- the subjectivist bias -- while he rejects the other -- the subjectivist principle. The subjectivist bias has to do with what shall be the primary data of philosophy. On this Whitehead finds himself in full agreement with Descartes. He says of the subjectivist bias that it is the greatest discovery since Plato and Aristotle (PR 241). He further insists elsewhere that he "entirely accepts the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy" (PR 253; cf. 243, 123; italics mine). In an earlier passage in Process and Reality, prior to his having given Descartes’ discovery a name, but clearly having to do with the subjectivist bias, Whitehead said:

In spelling out the significance of this principle Whitehead goes on to make it clear that while he is at one with Descartes in identifying what are to be the primary data of philosophy, he differs from Descartes with regard to the how of understanding and interpreting that data -- which is what the subjectivist principle is all about by definition. Descartes continues to employ the traditional "subject-predicate form of proposition, and the philosophical tradition derived from it." Whitehead interprets the data in terms of his own metaphysical categories as "the self enjoyment of being one among many and of being one arising out of the composition of many" (PR 220).

When one carefully distinguishes between the subjectivist bias and the subjectivist principle, it becomes apparent that the subjectivist bias is, in and of itself, in no way the cause of modem philosophical difficulties. It is merely the occasion for the discovery of the difficulties inherent in the substance-quality mode of thought of which the subjectivist principle is but one expression. The subjectivist principle does not occur in either of Whitehead’s diagnostic statements, when amended as I have suggested (see above, PR 253, 241). Thus the focus of both Whitehead’s diagnostic statements, already quoted, is upon the substance-quality categories (or mode of thought) which makes these two texts consistent with one another and with a third such statement occurring earlier in Process and Reality: "All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal" (PR 78). Interestingly enough, Rorty is in basic agreement with this point. However, he overlooks or ignores those texts which explicitly define the subjective principle and uses the term as if it had the same meaning as the term subjectivist bias, which forty in turn confuses with the reformed subjectivist principle.

This focus upon the substance-quality mode of thought is extremely important. The subjectivist principle has as its premises only three of the doctrines belonging to the complex of notions included by Whitehead under the rubric of substance-quality categories. Cartesian dualism and the notion of "vacuous actuality" are also among the several other doctrines or notions included by Whitehead under this heading. They also constitute part of the problem of modern philosophy (PR 243, 253f. 187). Indeed when we come to discuss the reformed subjectivist principle connected with Whitehead’s proposed solution to the problem of modem philosophy, we shall see that it stands in direct contradiction to both Cartesian dualism and the notion of "vacuous actuality." This is one reason for hesitating about Rorty’s simplification of Whitehead’s diagnosis in terms of the problem of repeatability and unrepeatability. The core of Rorty’s account is as follows: Once the Cartesian Turn is taken and the experiences of subjects become the primary data of philosophy, one is immediately in difficulty as to the analysis of said experience. Its content can only be accounted for in terms of universals -- repeatables -- for no particulars or substances can possibly, being unrepeatables, be both themselves and components of experience (WEP 134 ff.). I simply do not see that the problem so cast takes into account the problems relating either to dualism or to the notion of "vacuous actuality." Be that as it may, there is a still more important aspect to the focus upon the whole substance-quality framework.

A careful reading of the many passages in which Whitehead criticizes the substance-quality mode of thought leads one inevitably to his thesis that it is derived (at least in part) from a "misapprehension" of the true status of "presentational immediacy" (PR 95f., 43, 119f., 253; AI, chapter 14 section IV and chapter 14 as a whole; see IWE 44-55). If we fail to see this, we miss what he took to be the fundamental, primitive, and primary root cause of the difficulties. Indeed the fact that he does not attempt to reform, improve, polish, or alter the various doctrines of the substance-quality mode of thought is in itself strong evidence that these doctrines are not themselves the root cause of the difficulty. Tinkering with them would only treat the symptoms. Whitehead is after cure, after getting at and removing the root cause.

While Whitehead certainly focuses attention upon the substance-quality mode of thought, his intent in doing so is to point out one of the more immediate causes of difficulties -- a cause which ultimately rests upon a more fundamental mistake, namely, the misapprehension of the status of presentational immediacy. However, the substance-quality categories are not his only concern. According to Whitehead, there are two principles whose joint application to the datum in the act of experience leads to modern epistemological difficulties: the subjectivist principle and the "sensationalist principle" (PR 238f.).

Comparing this definition with a more lengthy statement in Adventures of Ideas (chapter 11, paragraphs 6 and 7), we see that the sensationalist principle asserts that the datum in the act of experience is limited, so far as "direct" perception is concerned, to the bare sensa mediated by the sense organs.

How do these principles combine to create difficulties for one who assumes the subjectivist bias? The subjectivist bias limits the philosopher’s data to the experience of subjects. The sensationalist principle asserts that those data are bare sensa, and the subjectivist principle adequately accounts for those sensa as universals. This constitutes an untenable epistemological position in Whitehead’s view.

This focus upon the sensationalist principle concerns only an immediate cause, not the root cause. The sensationalist principle, like the substance-quality mode of thought, is derivative from a misapprehension of the status of presentational immediacy (PR 119 ff., 179, 240, 263-66, 383, 387-89; AI, chapter 14, section IV; see IWE, chapters 1 and 2). An accurate and complete account of Whitehead’s diagnosis of the difficulties of modem philosophy. must come to grips with this misapprehension of the status of presentational immediacy. If so, the reconstruction of philosophy undertaken by Whitehead in terms of the "needs Process and Reality was intended to meet" (WEP 134) was on a far more sweeping scale than the solution of the problem of repeatability and unrepeatability.

Indeed, Whitehead might well say that the problem of repeatability and unrepeatability is simply a rephrasing of aspects of the problem of using the substance-quality categories. The problem of repeatability and unrepeatability and the linguistic difficulties surrounding it are thus ultimately derivative from the misapprehension of presentational immediacy. Rorty never gets beyond a restatement of the immediate causes of philosophical difficulties. To speak metaphorically, he never gets beyond paraphrasing Whitehead’s description of some symptoms of modem philosophy’s malady.

We must now turn to the reformed subjectivist principle. After quoting the passage diagnosing Descartes’ difficulties (which uses the term subjectivist bias), Rorty adds:

The specific sentence quoted indeed begins "The subjectivist principle is that the whole universe (PR 252), but subjectivist principle is clearly not the correct term here. In the first place the subjectivist principle denies that the experience of subjects can include any other actualities. In the second place, this sentence occurs in a paragraph in which Whitehead is explaining the meaning of the reformed subjectivist principle and its relation to the fourth and ninth of his categories of explanation (the principles of relativity and process respectively). Rorty is less far off the mark in seeming to identify the idea that the "whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects" with the subjectivist bias.

The reformed subjectivist principle is, in spite of its name, not a revised or reformed version of the subjectivist principle. The only thing the two principles have in common is that they both have to do with how the datum of experience is to be interpreted. Whitehead repudiates all three premises of the subjectivist principle. But he accepts the subjectivist bias, and his own reformed subjectivist principle is an extension of that bias. Whitehead says, "The philosophy of organism extends the Cartesian subjectivism by affirming the ‘ontological’ principle and construing it as the definition of ‘actuality"’ (PR 123). The subjectivist bias limits the data of philosophy to the experiences of subjects. The reformed subjectivist principle limits actuality to the experiences of subjects (and/or to what is disclosed in the experiences of such subjects as essential to their constitution): "The reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PR 254). This one single statement makes clear the necessity for distinguishing the three terms we are considering. This statement, together with Whitehead’s discussion of the relation of the reformed subjectivist principle to the principles of relativity and of process (PR 252) also makes clear Whitehead’s repudiation of dualism and of the notion of "vacuous actuality." In other words, part of Whitehead’s cure for the ills of modern philosophy involves the repudiation of aspects of the substance-quality mode of thought that are not immediate premises of the subjectivist principle and are not necessarily connected with the problem of repeatability and unrepeatability.

References

WEP -- George L. Kline, ed., Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, Englewood Cliffs. NJ.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1963, for Richard Rorty, "The Subjectivist Principle and The Linguistic Turn."

IWE -- James E. Lindsey, Jr., An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Epistemology, ThD. Dissertation, Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, 1970, c. 1975, available University Microfilms, Inc. See Dissertation Abstracts, May 1975, p. 7351A. (The dissertation gives a fairly detailed account of Whitehead’s thesis that the substance-quality mode of thought derives from the misapprehension of the true status of presentational immediacy.)

Modern theologians, in keeping with recent biblical scholarship and an existential self-understanding, view revelation as a personal union in knowledge between God and a participating subject. The union is initiated by God but requires an individual response. They have difficulty, however, in relating such views to their metaphysical systems. This essay proposes a process model for revelation -- an approach in keeping with Whitehead’s extensive use of physical analogies in the formulation of his metaphysics.

In keeping with Whitehead’s premise to start from human experience in the world, I propose as a model for revelation an analogy with the physical phenomenon of resonance. Resonance is a physical phenomenon shown by a vibrating system which responds with maximum amplitude under the action of a force applied with a frequency that is a natural frequency of the vibrating body. Consider the often cited example of marching soldiers crossing a bridge. If the cadence is close to the natural frequency of the bridge, each step feeds energy into an oscillation of the bridge, and at the resonant frequency the entire bridge begins to vibrate with ever increasing amplitude. Resultant disasters have brought the standing order for marchers to break cadence when crossing a bridge. The phenomenon of resonance is present in all types of physical systems. We tune our radios by adjusting the oscillatory characteristics of electronic components to resonate at the frequency of the broadcast signal. The resonant circuit amplifies the desired signal. The signal is strongest when "tuned in" exactly at resonance.

Consider now the stages in the formation of a new occasion. In each occasion God provides a spectrum of possibilities or aims for his creature. These are graded according to value. He confronts each entity with the ideal possibility for self-actualization, an initial aim. But he does not determine the creature’s choice. The new occasion prehends this initial aim and the multiplicity of data in the universe, including its past occasions, which may be considered to contribute their aims for it (CNT 182), and through successive decisions orders itself to a final subjective aim (PR 342). Insofar as each creature’s final subjective aim is in accord with God’s aim there is a resonance in which the effect of God’s presence is maximized. This phenomenon, I suggest, may be consciously felt as God’s initiative. When one responds to it, an interpersonal communion is formed which we call revelation.

This model is consistent with suggestions of Whitehead himself and others. "Every event on its finer side introduces God into the world" (RM 155f). The finer side of every event is the free introduction by a creature of God’s aim into the world. In fact one can argue that once Whitehead postulates a quantum-like occasion in analogy with physical systems, a natural frequency and hence a resonance phenomenon is a necessary corollary. As John Cobb has noted, "Those who affirm the presence of God may so form their subjective aims that God’s causal efficacy for them may be maximized. It may even impinge upon consciousness, to confirm the belief that facilitates the impingement" (CNT 233).

The resonance model for revelation also fits the peak-experience data of man’s religious experience (RVPE; TPB 71-114). It is a universal human experience, for people at some occasions in life, to prehend, to feel, to sense, the presence of God and his love when their own aims, thoughts, talents, and potentialities are lined up with, or tuned in exactly with, the aims and love of God. The universal nature of such experiences has been well documented by William James and Rudolph Otto.

Maslow defines these experiences as an episode or a spurt in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly efficient and intensely enjoyable way. In these episodes man more truly actualizes his potentialities and becomes more truly himself (TPB 97). These phrases remind one of Whitehead’s contention that religious truth must be developed from knowledge acquired when our ordinary senses and intellectual operations are at their highest pitch of discipline (RM 123). And, indeed, Maslow has suggested that these experiences were the beginning of the higher religions. For each of the revealed religions, it has been the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer that provided the primal revelation that was later codified and dogmatized by his followers (RVPE 19f). The followers participated in the primal revelation and to the extent that it made life meaningful, to the extent that it explained their own depth experiences in life, they believed in the formulations of their community.

Revelation is a process, says Moran, which is now extending to all history and never to cease (TR 28). The resonance model safeguards the theologian’s insistence that the initiative lies with God but that the individual is sell-creating in forming the intersubjective communion that is revelation.

References

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

RVPE -- Abraham H. Maslow. Religions, Values and Peak Experiences. New York: Viking Press, 1970.

TPB -- Abraham H. Maslow. Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1968.

TR -- Gabriel Moran, F.S.C. Theology of Revelation. New York: Herder and Herder, 1966.

Considerable effort has been extended to demonstrate the inclusiveness of the Whiteheadian metaphysical stance. The appropriateness of this philosophical vision has been extensively explored within the domains of the natural sciences, mathematics, the social sciences (particularly. sociology and psychology), aesthetics and theology. Perhaps there is no primary dimension of human experience and reflection which has been as impervious to Whitehead’s categories and distinctions as has been the political life of the species. A faith that the system will exhibit its applications within politics remains largely unsubstantiated.

The few available attempts to link Whiteheadian metaphysics with political categories can be illustrated in the works of A. H. Johnson and Samuel Beer.¹ Essentially, they become exercises in identifying which existing political alternative -- liberal democracy, social-revolutionary democracy, fascism, etc. -- is most synonymous with Whitehead’s formulations. Johnson, for example, claims that Whitehead provides a philosophical foundation for liberal-democratic systems much as Hegel does for Marxian communism.

Samuel Beer’s The City of Reason is a rigorous philosophical investigation with numerous insights of genuine significance. Nevertheless, his central thesis and the central thesis of Johnson’s works are nearly identical: a philosophy of liberalism is to be articulated on the basis of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Beer argues that humanity is inwardly or personally free by virtue of its reason. The logical extension of this condition, he contends, is that persons also should be free outwardly or politically. It is the liberal vision in politics which seeks a society that will protect reason in both personal and public life.

Critical evaluations of Johnson’s work, undoubtedly, would center on his handling of Whitehead’s philosophy while similar evaluations of Beer’s argument would focus on his understanding of liberalism. Johnson, for example, avoids any effective differentiation between the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels of Whitehead’s analysis, assuming that they are mere duplications of one another. Beer ignores the fundamental sense in which it is liberalism in modern thought and experience which has totally trivialized reason by making it a mere calculative device for self-interest, passionally and habitually understood.

But Johnson’s and Beer’s technical problems aside, their approach to the question of relating Whitehead to politics remains a relatively unsatisfying one. In short, tracing out the political content of an organic metaphysical posture should not begin by placing an imprimatur upon the available historical option which most nearly or most easily "fits" the pattern. Rather, it would seem to be more appropriate to construct a novel political vision reflective of organic philosophy’s own paradigm. What would politics look like from within the organic model? Not, what would organic politics look like within the liberal model? What would be the distinctly "political" content of life from an organic view? Not, what would be the distinctly "liberal" content of life from an organic view? The foundational task, it would seem, is not to search for the least trouble-some available political category, but to construct a unique political response coherent with the metaphysical structure. The appropriateness of Whitehead’s philosophy for politics is tested by its ability to articulate a coherent and persuasive political vision and not by its adaptability to pre-cast political horizons.

Undoubtedly, part of the explanation for the absence of a genuine statement of political philosophy by organic philosophers is the seemingly apolitical character of Whitehead’s system. Both the dominant contemporary characteristics of politics and the prevailing interpretative perspectives on politics seem alien to the world as sketched by Whitehead. The conscious application and manipulation of authority, compulsion, rights, and artifices of all sorts are incongruous within a system of natural organic persuasion in which consciousness itself is but an echo of reality. Although we are looking for a distinctly Whiteheadian statement about politics, the difficulty in discovering Whitehead’s political applications may direct us to an external stimulus for help in initiating speech in this new tongue. It is my suggestion that the theoretical work of Karl Deutsch provides us with one of those external stimulants which may spark conversations conducive to the articulation of a Whiteheadian political philosophy.

Two assumptions have been dominant in my thinking. (1) There is a substantial degree of analytical similarity between Deutsch and Whitehead. (2) Although Whitehead’s broader philosophical framework aids in an analysis of Deutsch by providing a richer, supportive philosophical context for evaluation of the Deutschian response, it is, likewise, aided by Deutsch’s work. Deutsch offers a political vocabulary and context which, at a series of critical junctures, suggest prefigurations of organic philosophy’s own political theory. This paper is an attempt to state some of the analytical similarities between Deutsch and Whitehead in the hope that they will provide organic philosophy with a clearer sense of the terrain upon which it can discover the form and content of its own particular political speech. At most, this discussion is an experiment: an attempt to use Deutsch’s politically related notions as a catalyst for the fuller expression of Whiteheadian political concepts.

An initial disclaimer is both appropriate and necessary. I know of no evidence that Deutsch ever placed his theory within a Whiteheadian philosophical context. Furthermore, he offers no explicit references to any Whiteheadian intermediaries. Henry Nelson Wieman, for example, in The Issues of Life and Man’s Ultimate Commitment, discusses many specific political questions in a style and with substance quite similar to that offered by Deutsch, but Deutsch gives no clues to indicate any consciousness of Wieman’s work.

The purpose of this discussion, however, is not to create something "ex nihilo". Neither is it to plumb the depths of Deutsch’s "intentions" in order to discover the "true" sources of his thought. Nevertheless, we may discover a coincidence of related insights, assumptions, and analyses. If this does turn out to be the case, we will want to examine the possibility that the more comprehensive scope of Whitehead’s thought may serve an important interpretative and supporting role for Deutsch’s investigations of political life, which, in turn, may supply Whiteheadian studies with a focus for distinctly political problems.

This paper will not be a comprehensive, in-depth study of the Whitehead/Deutsch interrelationship of ideas, working through their contrasts and dissimilarities as well as their affinities. Frankly, Deutsch will be used solely for instrumental purposes -- as a device to re-enforce our expectation that the enterprise of delineating an organic political philosophy is worthy of vigorous effort and to stimulate our thinking about the substance of that enterprise. My procedure shall be to highlight a series of considerations prominently involved in the political view of Karl Deutsch and to attempt to relate them to the Whiteheadian philosophical stance. The range of Deutsch’s concerns will be reflected although many distinctions and important counterpoints will not be mirrored in these discussions.

I. Political Models

According to Deutsch, knowledge involves symbolizations which match, in significant respects, that which is symbolized. Symbols of particular things, events, or ideas (or sets thereof) and the organization of these symbols form a symbol system or "model." Consequently, what we know or will come to know about political phenomena reflects the operation of symbols within a symbol system or model. Since political knowledge is expressed though a symbol system, an important concern will be the adequacy of the model. Deutsch suggests six evaluative criteria which constitute the fullest statement of the standards he utilizes for the appraisal of such models. Political models should be: (1) relevant -- they should reflect the empirical system they attempt to symbolize; (2) economical -- they should simplify that which is being modeled; (3) rigorous -- they should apply the same operating rules and assumptions of the scheme at every level of the system; (4) combinatorially rich -- they should be able to generate webs of relationships or patterns throughout the system; (5) powerful organizers -- they should have relevance or correspondence to processes beyond the range of their initial concern; (6) original -- they should give insights beyond the highly probable visions of everyday language and experience.

In important respects, a superficial reading of Deutsch may suggest, erroneously, a fundamental hostility to Whitehead’s metaphysical approach. Deutsch casts aspersions on "becoming entangled in the metaphysics of any absolute causality concept" and ridicules "metaphysical convictions" (NC 13f). However, if Whitehead’s concept of speculative philosophy or metaphysics is properly understood, the gap between the two positions all but disappears. Although this is a characterization, it is with considerable justification that Whitehead’s "metaphysics" can be understood as model-building on a grand scale. As Whitehead says, metaphysics "is a method productive of important knowledge. [It] is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted" (PR 4). In short, it is the organization of symbols into systems productive of knowledge -- a model.

The evaluative criteria for models used by both Whitehead and Deutsch are nearly collapsible. (1) Relevance: Whitehead insists that the test for any imaginative metaphysical construction is its applicability to empirical reality. If a model does not agree with the facts, "a fundamental reorganization of theory is required either by way of limiting it or by way of the entire abandonment of its categories of thought" (PR 13). Life’s richness is to be discovered m the realities of life and not manufactured in isolated theories about life. (2) Economy: Whitehead says, "The useful function of philosophy is to promote the most general systematization of civilized thought" (PR 25f), suggesting that symbol systems will offer a coded shorthand for the variety of particularities within concrete settings without jeopardizing their intelligibility as unique occasions of being. (3) Rigor: Rigor is a concept closely related to Whitehead’s discussion of "coherence." The requirements of system coherence are met by including all obvious elements of experience and by integrating them consistently throughout the model, Perhaps Whitehead’s concern receives more definition as viewed from the negative side. Incoherence in a metaphysical system is the arbitrary disconnection of first principles. If rigor is lost, the relevance of the model for empirical reality is imperiled as well. (4) Combinatorial richness: Whitehead evidences a similar concern when he speaks of the expansive potential of metaphysical generalities throughout the entire scope of both the philosophical model and reality. "Metaphysics is nothing but the description of the generalities which apply to all the details of practice" (PR 19). (5) Organizing power: Closely related to the above, Whitehead insists upon the relevance of systematic analysis across the entire range of reality. The model must continually propose the general character of the universe in each of its characterizations of particular facts. (6) Originality: Whitehead issues the call for "speculative boldness" in the construction of the philosophical model (metaphysics). Yet he always warned that this must be balanced at all times "by complete humility before logic and before fact" (PR 25). The problem, he suggests, is that philosophers are neither humble nor bold. Instead, they tend to reflect and normalize the dominant trends of their more circumscribed environments. This is another version of what Deutsch calls "trite" models -- models lacking in both originality and basic relevance.

As a final effort to illustrate the similarity in methodological perspectives between these two men and to cut through some of the distastefulness associated with words such as "metaphysics" and "speculative philosophy," a brief word on dogmatism seems to be in order. It could be argued that Deutsch recoils at the thought of metaphysics because of its association with systems spawned through "a priori," dogmatic assumptions. Such systems have been abandoned and discredited and remain unreconciled one with the other. In terms of a test of dogmatism, Whitehead agrees with the chorus of criticism waiting for the metaphysical constructs of any latter-day absolutizers. However, if metaphysics is essentially model building, as I think it is in Whitehead’s system, the test becomes not certainty, but progress; not finality, but creative advance; not dogmatism, but symbolization. If you are convinced, as both Whitehead and Deutsch are, that all knowledge rests on a system of symbols -- acknowledged or unacknowledged -- then model building or metaphysics is an essential activity for human understandings. Whitehead summarizes this point well: "Metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly" (PR x, 12). Throughout this discussion of symbol systems, the central significance of a political model consistent with the organic paradigm has been underscored. A metaphysical structure is not a tool for dogmatic tyranny, but a basis for intelligibility in all arenas of experience, including humanity’s political life.

II. Communication

Substantively, Deutsch suggests that a political model should be organized in accordance with a theory of communications. Such a model focuses upon the processes and flows of the political system as the most relevant perspective for the understanding thereof. Communication is the transference of "a patterned relationship between events" (NC 82). As such, it is a process which cements organization. Quoting Norbert Wiener, Deutsch reinforces his own argument:

Deutsch argues that a process model -- such as his communications model -- offers the most significant theoretical analogue of political reality. That is, it is confirmed by the data it symbolizes and is productive of new insights about that data.

Deutsch’s substantive content for the political model is quite congenial with the analysis of Whitehead. For Whitehead, the basic fact of his model is "process." "Nature is a structure of evolving processes, The reality is the process" (SMW 70). Process involves movement from prehension to prehension (concrescence). The similarity of this perspective to communications theory is striking. Deutsch portrays communications theory as the transference of a patterned relationship between events. For Whitehead, prehensions are processes of unification of events into an integrated pattern and, thus, not merely pattern transferences but pattern creations as well. Nevertheless, both views stress process, ordering, interrelationship; in short, a related theory of communications. Prehensive unification is the process which "cements" many actual entities into the unity of one (satisfaction). This movement from diversity into greater unity is at the very heart of both communications theory in Deutsch’s model and process metaphysics in Whitehead’s model.

As the Wiener quotations suggests, this process of communication has relevance at both the macrocosmic level ("societies") and the microcosmic level ("actual entities"). Whitehead’s model explicitly illustrates this insight and its applicability to communications theory at both levels of analysis, although the microcosmic aspects are frequently undifferentiated, in Deutsch, from the macrocosmic ones. Whitehead reminds us, "In every grade of aggregation there is the necessity for expression" (MT 39). He gives this insight a dynamic dimension through a metaphysical structure built around the communications flow characteristics of the entire universe: from the concrescence of a single actual entity to the transmutation of the most complex societies.

By placing Deutsch within the context of Whitehead, we can consider not only the relevancy of his model to the political phenomena it attempts to make intelligible, but we also can give thought to the organizing power of a communications model in terms of its coherence with the general character of the universe. It is only in terms of this broader context that a political theory’s substance can hope to attain insights of greater breadth and validity than those of the myopia of academic "departments" or of the arbitrariness of de facto power. Furthermore, the rediscovery of this link between theory and the general character of the universe is an invaluable advocacy for the reintroduction of nature into political philosophy’s conversations. It is, after all, only when nature has been lost in all but its most sentimental forms that political speculation can be satisfied merely by artifices of utility and instrumental efficiency.

Making communication the substantive core of a political model intends much more than a simple affirmation that politics involves message transfers. Obviously, if such pabulum exhausts our intentions, few persons would challenge the claim, and few persons would understand why it was pressed with such vigor. Viewing politics as communications, however, is an assertion that the specific content which should be most studied, described, and analyzed in order to understand politics is that of our political "conversations" -- overt and covert, symbolic and concrete. H. Mark Roelofs expresses this insight through his restatement of Plato’s and Aristotle’s notion of politics as speech: "Politics is talk" (LMP 19).

III. Quality

Both Whitehead and Deutsch wish to speak of "quality" and "value" and both wish to be, at the same time, rigorously empirical. Is this marriage of intentions an available option? A common assumption in modern philosophy and social science theory is that a rigorously empirical theory is, at best, indifferent to qualitative alternatives. By studying the operations of their models and the concrete systems they represent, both men suggest they can offer an understanding of the qualitative aspects of reality without compromising on the empirical character of the reality being symbolized by their models, and this, largely because of the immersion of their models in the empirical structures.

Deutsch says, "Quality is recognized by the matching of two structures" (NC 87). In other words, a correspondence between some part of a "recognizing system" and that which is recognized establishes a "quality." Whitehead also offers a relational concept of quality within his model, but does not mirror Deutsch’s "matching" explanation. Qualities, according to Whitehead, are particular facts of relatedness within and between the micro and macro levels of reality. As such, they are not imposed on acts or even through the matching of a recognizing system, but are disclosed or experienced in the transactions of interrelationships. They are, themselves, events rather than the mere ingredients of events or reflections upon events. This qualitative infusion in empirical particularity is commonly termed "ingression" by Whitehead and refers to the presence of universality in particularity or the modal amid the relational.

"There is reason to suspect that many of the qualitative problems in social and political science may turn out to be problems of matching in social communications" (NC 88). Whitehead gives this view of Deutsch a broader context which expands its suggestiveness. His view begins with concrete experience. This fact may be obscured because Whitehead says that these qualities are "universals." But they are not "spooks" derived from mystical visions or empty heads. These qualities are suggested by and implicit in all experience. William Christian summarizes Whitehead on this point most effectively:

Qualitative considerations in any area of human life, including humanity’s social and political life, entails the actualizing of possibilities through relationships communicated within a paradigm or model. This is an empirical problem, but it is more than the mere quantification or cataloguing of matching structures of actuality. To a meaningful extent, this suggests the task of metaphysical theory, or, more narrowly, metaphysical political theory. New visions of qualitative relatedness must be grasped and communicated through appropriate and comprehensive symbol systems. A metaphysical political theory is not confined to the wistfulness of castles in the air, the dustiness of history’s anteroom, or the adding and subtracting of quantitative relationships under a reigning paradigm. It can and must see the world anew, articulating a structure which makes these qualitative departures intelligible and available for public life.

IV. Values

Closely related to the discussion of quality is a consideration of values. More frequently than may be sometimes apparent, notions of value, like those of quality, slide into the form of either a transcendent reality or a despotic personal decree. Deutsch intends to challenge both of these alternatives. He characterizes values as priorities giving shape to qualities. No system can operate without preferences or priorities among its various relationships. This suggests that aggregation or quantification is, in a number of significant ways, a result of the priorities of valuations utilized in determining various matched structures or qualities. Deutsch says, "In its crudest and simplest form, a ‘value’ is a repetitive preference for a particular class of messages or data that is to be received, transmitted or acted upon in preference to others" (NG 178). Values serve an ordering function within such a model.

Whitehead has a somewhat parallel view. The "subjective form" of an actual entity is what it is because of the qualities that constitute it. That is, by matching itself with eternal objects (possibilities) a relationship is established (qualitative feelings) which constitutes an actual entity’s subjective form. Valuation is the prehension of an eternal object by an actual entity. This establishes preferential orderings through positive prehensions which incorporate their data in the syntheses and negative prehensions which exclude their data. In the former instance, that which is positively valued establishes the qualitative character of each respective concrescence. Whitehead’s discussion of the formative elements provides the potentiality in relation to which priorities are established within the framework of systemic processes.

Although the specific content of their responses is divergent, both Whitehead and Deutsch struggle to develop a model which is simultaneously relevant to that being represented and conceptually coherent. They tackle problems of quality and values and attempt to give these factors significance in terms of shared public processes symbolized by their models. From this perspective, questions of priorities are not abandoned to the whims of chance or to the inscrutability of otherworldly or psychic arbitrariness. In short, political priorities emerge, not from the cradle of private wish fulfillment nor from the isolation of a holy mount, but from the crucible of an empirical world, from the need for common purposes in and for that world, and from a metaphysical structure which makes these activities intelligible.

V. Power

Much of modern political science is absorbed in the various facets of power analysis. Power is often closely associated with acts of the "will" which are, in turn, understood as functions of consciousness. Quite possibly analyses such as offered by Whitehead and Deutsch which undercut the primacy of consciousness might have a rather unique perspective in regard to power (NG 98; PR 245, 408; AI 252). Deutsch begins his discussion by focusing upon the limitations of power rather than the efficiency or potentialities for power as is most frequently the case today. "Power cannot accomplish more than a succession of random impacts on the environment, unless there is some relatively fixed goal or purpose by which the application of power can be guided and directed" (NC 110).

Power which is not qualified by overarching goals or purposes is seen by Deutsch as the ability to resist growth. However, power which is coordinated with a more comprehensive scrutiny of intensity of support, morale, skills, resourcefulness, and goals is a "currency in the interchange between political systems and all other major sub-systems of the society" (NC 120). As such, power offers a kind of supplemental instrumentality.

Quite similarly, Whitehead places power within an instrumental construct. As with Deutsch, the autonomy of the constituent elements in process can, to some extent, resist the interrelated functioning of the system. To this extent, it is possible to speak of their "power" to resist growth. There is no compulsion for an actual entity to accept the lure of its subjective aim. Whitehead expresses this more in terms of the freedom of the entity in self-determination than of its "power" to resist growth. At best, power is instrumental as it is for Deutsch. "[Power] can protect; it cannot create" (AESP 135). Viewed from outside the organic model this is an essentially negative concept of power. More precisely, it is, as John Cobb argues, persuasive power (GW 90; PS 3:153).

To many, this seemingly negative or instrumental character given to power in the works of Deutsch and Whitehead is interpreted as a hostility to politics in their theories. Seldom is there any sensitivity that they may be pointing to the great irony at the very heart of all political relationships. Political power in its most positive and creative mode is not a thing, or a capacity or a property. It is a relationship. As such, it cannot be "had" unless it is simultaneously given. Both the receiving and giving of power is a by-product of persuasion, debate, empathy and negotiation; in short, of communications. Power, as suggested by Deutsch and Whitehead, is essentially a question of responsiveness in a context of mutuality and not control in a unidirectional process of extraction or coercion.

VI. Love and Justice

Whitehead and Deutsch suggest that the development of political life and the advancement of the universe is accomplished through persuasive power rather than coercive power. If reality is essentially summarized as a process of communication, this conclusion is hardly surprising. "Love," it might be argued, is another conceptual statement of this persuasive factor. Deutsch refers to it and amplifies its implications through discussions of faith, humility, sin of pride, evil, curiosity, grace, and spirit.

Whitehead’s model gives additional light to this discussion. Although he has almost no explicit references to "love" in any of his writings, it can be argued that the essence of Whitehead’s universe is love. That is, the universe is formed through the active involvement of unique entities with one another. This way of relating one actual entity to another actual entity is the essence of each entity’s relationship to every other actuality. The way one actual entity receives the feeling of another actual entity is an essential part of its final satisfaction. If the feeling is openly received, a transformation occurs within the recipient whereby there is a taking in of the quality which was given. This is the activity of love; a transformation whereby we take in that which is given to us and make it an integral part of ourselves.

Love is a persuasive "lure" or "urge." Does this emphasis upon a persuasive force imply a bartering universe? Or, more pointedly, are White-head’s creative processes so ineffectual that the best they can do is to "persuade"? Don’t the positive factors of the system have any compelling force? Whitehead insists that in persuasion there is a compelling power (although not coercion) and that this power is rooted in truth. Persuasion is the expression of love: it respects each actual entity’s freedom while compelling a response in relation to its truth. Force and coercion represent the absence of love and the irrelevancy of truth, Love is a compelling power which persuasively moves actual entities in their continuing processes of growth. Actual entities are susceptible to the persuasive power of love because the truth which lures them involves their own harmonization with the larger universe. At a macrocosmic level the same point could be expressed this way: love (persuasion) confirms the value of the objective world, which is a community, created through the interrelationships of component entities and necessary for the continued existence of these relationships and entities.

If we direct this discussion of love toward humanity’s political life, we may be led to some valuable insights. For example, every community of persons is a society, but not every society is fully communal. A society is a communications nexus for the sake of interactions and order and, eventually, requires justice and government. A community, on the other hand, is for the sake of friendship, presupposes love, and ultimately transcends overt authority. It is only in this latter setting that human beings are fully personal: spontaneously expressive in their interrelationships.

This is not, however, to suggest that society in its political form is to be despised or ignored. Society’s political content is not the antithesis of the communal form, but rather its proper preparation: the grounds upon which communal love can reach its fullest fruitions. Politics offers a preparatory environment, justice, which supplies the necessary conditions for the consequent possibilities of life, love. Expressed differently, persuasive, indirect, personal relationships (justice) make significant contributions to the establishment of a foundation for persuasive, direct, personal relationships (love). Justice, as love, is persuasive, but is a negative aspect of morality. It is "negative" not as morality’s antithesis, but as the necessary subordinate condition through which the positive content of morality can be accomplished in human relationships. Morality can only be fathomed in its positive mode -- benevolence, but can only be realized in history though its proper negative -- justice.

Justice is a persuasive lure which helps to fashion a concrete field of mutuality. Although it is hardly comprehensive of morality, without justice morality would be mere fantasy and sentimentality -- a simple appearance of morality. For example, to love without being just is, ultimately, to love at someone else’s expense. To some persons we are more than just, and to others we are less than just. The net result is that we are unjust to all. As Whitehead and Deutsch imply, the ultimate goal of a fully interpersonal life is love, but justice is the necessary prior condition for the mutuality of love. Without justice, "love" becomes just another technique for the twisting of interpersonal life.

Certainly Gerald Ford’s "pardoning" of Richard Nixon relates to many of the above themes. Few persons are unresponsive to the search for mercy and a renewing love. To be sure, simple justice could not have provided us with the fruits of love. But is it not equally true that simple love created more ruptures than healing in our national community, Ford’s intentions notwithstanding? While justice was not the end of our search, it had to be the beginning. Circumventing justice twisted our community life by offering a benevolence of mere fantasy and sentimentality and further jeopardized the remaining threads of concrete mutuality within our national community.

VII. Growth

Whether relative to politics, as with Deutsch, or to the character of the universe, as with Whitehead, a communications/process model built within a framework of interdependence (novelty and commonality) places a premium on growth -- if for no other reason than that growth enables the system to survive by adapting to the fluidity in its larger environment. As Deutsch says, "most environments may change very considerably, so that only self-changing and self-enhancing systems and organizations are apt to survive eventually, thanks to their ability to cope with many different environments and to increase their relative independence from any one of them" (NC 249). Deutsch recognizes the organic character of reality which gives his political model its vitality. He cites the interplay between the dimensions of growth and organization. This reality necessitates "integrative behavior" whereby the system will be able to "grow up." Politics, he suggests, must be seen as a major instrument which, through persuasion (justice and love), fosters learning and innovation. In short, within a process model, politics becomes an instrument essential for human survival and growth. Surely Deutsch’s concept of a politics of growth at the macro level is congenial to a universe in which, at every level, the most basic realities illustrate a similar process of self-causation, participation, and novel advancement.

This paper has suggested significant agreements in perspective between Deutsch’s communications model and Whitehead’s metaphysics for humanity’s political life in order to encourage the fashioning of an organic political philosophy. Both men construct a scheme of ideas reflective of empirical realities; explore reality in terms of their models; suggest that process is the essential characteristic of both their symbolizations and the reality being symbolized; and maintain that the interdependence of reality indicates that persuasion is more effective than coercion in guiding the maze of processes to survival though growth.

It appears quite possible that if the relationship between Deutsch and Whitehead is judged to be, in fact, substantial and significant, interesting and, perhaps, instructive analysis may result. For example, it places a political theory emphasizing process within a comprehensive and supportive philosophical framework of process analysis. This very well could lead to a revised evaluation of Deutsch’s political theory as well as provide for that theory a positive environment through which its implications and operations can be both refined and amplified. Conversely, it would open up process philosophy to the development of an appropriate political theory which, at present, is altogether absent in any explicit form. In a broader context, the possibility of operationalizing Whitehead’s metaphysics politically though the stimulation of Deutsch’s model can only serve to relate Whitehead’s abstract generalities more fully to the concrete world from which they spring.

Finally, the development of a Whiteheadian political philosophy may help to enrich and enliven the rather bland and feeble efforts of contemporary political science. The birth of an organic political philosophy could stimulate a transcendence into new political terrain. Its political model, rather than being trivialized by questions of technique, would aim to grasp empirical structures and relations, portraying them in a new way for the purposes of political intelligibility, Its vision would reaffirm the integrity of the personal in political life. Instead of a series of abstract and impersonal social, psychological, economic, or historical forces, this model posits an interpersonal process of communication by which a shared environment is created, preserved, and revised. Both politics and personality would be reinvested with a wholeness they have lost in countless ways: in Marx’s economic determinism, in Nietzsche’s nihilism, and in Dahl’s socioeconomic statistics. A new organic vision would raise political questions from the perspective of involvement or participation, not from that of isolation or mere passivity. An essentially affective, rather than narrowly cognitive, process would add other new and exciting possibilities to the political dialogue. Finally, the particular genius of the organic paradigm lies in its conviction that empirical facts are richer than philosophical or scientific models. Consequently, organic philosophy is conceptually well placed to conduct the unique task of a metaphysical political theorist: identifying and stating new options for humanity’s political life.

References

AESP -- Alfred North Whitehead, American Essays in Social Philosophy. Edited with an introduction by A. H. Johnson. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959.

GW -- John Cobb. God and the World. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969.

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

LMP -- H. Mark Roelofs. The Language of Modern Politics. Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1968.

NG -- Karl W. Deutsch. The Nerves of Government. New York: The Free Press, 1966.

Notes:

1 See A. H. Johnson, "The Social Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead," Journal of Philosophy, 40 (May 13, 1943); A. H. Johnson, "A Philosophic Foundation for Democracy," Ethics, 68 (July, 1958); Samuel H. Beer, The City of Reason (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).

2 Norbert Wiener, Communication with Deutsch, MIT, 1955.

This is a programmatic essay for a comprehensive comparative analysis of phenomenology and process philosophy.¹ The central concern of this project is the relationship between the major doctrines of these two philosophies: intentionality and prehension. In his "analytic phenomenology" Stephen A. Erickson has ably established a solid relationship between Heidegger’s version of intentionality and the later Wittgenstein’s (LB 109-11). My purpose is to show that If my efforts are successful, we then have before us the prospect of unifying the major thrusts of twentieth century philosophy (viz., analytic, process, and phenomenological) under the single theme of intentionality.

Central to the present work is the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Herbert Spiegelberg observes that

In her Knower and the Known Marjorie Grene makes this prediction:

The most fruitful results of this coalescence have been the articles of Hamrick and Gallagher which use the work of Merleau-Ponty as a basis for understanding what Whitehead proposed as psychological physiology.³

Several scholars have already made direct reference to a possible relationship between prehension and intentionality. The most notable is John H. Kultgen, who suggests this fundamental connection between phenomenology and process philosophy in his works (2; 3). My intention is to flesh out these suggestions in the following parallel analysis.

I

On the face of it, it seems as if I have a difficult case to prove. From all indications it is evident that there is no relationship between phenomenology and Whitehead in terms of direct historical influence. There is no evidence at all that Whitehead read any of the works of the major phenomenologists. If be did read them, or hear of them, there is no reference at all in his works. The same holds of the phenomenologists’ reference to Whitehead. Although most of the phenomenologists did know Bergson, they did not seem to know Whitehead. This mutual exclusion makes a great deal of sense considering the respective emphases of these two philosophies. There seems to be no "phenomenological reduction" in Whitehead, who appears to work from the so-called "natural attitude." Similarly, there are no cosmological interests in Husserl, mainly because of the phenomenological reduction and his doctrine of transcendental subjectivity.

Some intriguing historical facts bear out this apparent chasm between the interests of phenomenology and Whitehead. Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead’s foremost disciple, spent two years in Germany (1923-25) hearing lectures and participating in seminars with Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg and Nicolai Hartmann at Marburg. Coming back to Harvard in the fall of 1925, he fell under the spell of Pierce and Whitehead and "Husserl almost dropped out of my mind for years (PCC 90). On the other band, Dorion Cairns, an intimate and translator of Husserl, also spent two years in Germany (1924-26) working directly under Husserl at Freiburg. Cairns was a confirmed adherent of Husserlian phenomenology when he return to Harvard in the fall of 1926. Although he attended all of Whitehead’s lectures and participated in his seminars, he confided in a 1969 interview that "the phenomenological virus had bitten me so deeply that I must say that the philosophical influence of Whitehead on me was minimal" (PCC 8).

It would appear from the reactions of these two highly competent philosophers that Whitehead’s attempt to return to a pre-Kantian, even pre-Cartesian, mode of thought was obviously not compatible with Husserl’s desire to develop a fully consistent transcendental philosophy on the basis of Descartes and Kant. It must be emphasized at the outset that I do not intend to brush over the incontrovertible difference here, viz., the anthropocentrism of phenomenology and the pan-subjectivism of Whitehead and Hartshorne. I will, however, make some important qualifications on this point later on.

The foregoing comments should make the thesis of Ervin Laszlo’s book, Beyond Skepticism and Realism, all the more convincing. Laszlo contends that Whitehead is the best representative of metaphysical realism and Husserl of skepticism or idealism, the latter two being identical for Laszlo’s purposes. The "root axiom" for realism is being, whereas the root axiom for idealism is consciousness. Laszlo concedes that the philosophies of Whitehead and Husserl are not pure expressions of these unequivocal positions, i.e., pure realism versus pure idealism, which he wishes to establish. Laszlo argues that even though these two philosophers express the positions in an exemplary manner, both succumb to reductionism. Whitehead is guilty of "physical reductionism," i.e., "reinterpreting physical facts as epistemic ones," and Husserl is indicted for "epistemic reductionism," of "assessing . . . epistemic events as physical facts" (BSR 24). Laszlo maintains that a pure skepticism must bracket the physical world completely, using the phenomenological reduction in an even more radical manner than Husserl. Pure skepticism must concern itself solely with epistemic data, whereas pure realism must concern itself exclusively with "worldly" data. Laszlo claims that Whitehead compromises his metaphysical realism with his many references to psychological events.

The value of Laszlo’s book is the systematic thinking that goes beyond some of these highly questionable attributions to other philosophers. His characterization of Husserl is truer to form than his description of Whitehead. Husserl diverges from Laszlo’s rather antiseptic standards of a consistent skepticism far less than Whitehead diverges from the criteria for an unadulterated "objectivism," Laszlo’s other term for realism. (A better pair would have been Hume versus a scientific materialist or a Marxist.) Indeed, Whitehead’s use of psychological data is so pervasive and significant for his metaphysics that Laszlo’s portrayal of Whitehead as his type of realist is very misleading. Unlike a traditional realist, Whitehead cannot conceive of the world apart from prehending subjects and their subjective experiences. On this point, I contend, Whitehead and phenomenologists are in complete agreement.

Laszlo seems to forget that the doctrine of prehension emerges out of an analysis of the theory of perception of a great idealist philosopher, George Berkeley. Whitehead states: "For Berkeley’s mind, I substitute a process of prehensive unification" (SMW 102). Prehension, after all, is a cosmic form of perception extrapolated from the data of human experience and consciousness. Victor Lowe observes that the most obvious example of prehension is the human experience of self-identity (UW 344). Granted, the phenomenologists do not follow Whitehead and Hartshorne in their extension of intentional behavior beyond the human realm. (The single exception is Merleau-Ponty. More on this in section VI.) This difference should not prevent us from a favorable comparison of two types of subjects, viz., (1) the actual occasion as a prehensive unification in a field of objective data and (2) human consciousness as a unification of an intentional field. This correlation of the respective "subjects" of phenomenology and process philosophy must be kept in mind throughout the remainder of this analysis.

II

It is my contention that Whitehead is much closer to the phenomenological program than many have thought. Laszlo himself refers to some of the most obvious textual citations which show that Whitehead’s philosophical method is grounded in the data of human consciousness. But Laszlo certainly has Whitehead’s methodology reversed when he states that "not even Whitehead could refrain from interpreting his empirical results as furnishing an analysis of epistemic facts" (BSR 23).⁴ Whitehead does not interpret physical facts as epistemic ones. The references that Laszlo offers surely support my contention here. For example, let us begin with this one: "If you start from the immediate facts of our psychological experience, as surely an empiricist should begin, you are at once led to the organic conception of nature (SMW 107). Whitehead’s metaphysical conclusions are the result of an examination of epistemic data, not the data of the natural world. Charles W. Morris, in Six Theories of Mind, writes: "Whitehead’s course of procedure is to give a comprehensive description of human experience and then to take this description as a key to the nature of reality" (quoted in 1:51).

Further evidence abounds. In Science and the Modern World Whitehead claims that "I have started from our own psychological field, as it stands for our cognition. I take it for what it claims to be: the self-knowledge of our bodily event" (SMW 107). The point that brings Whitehead directly to the concerns of the phenomenological method is his affirmation of the "subjectivist principle": "The philosophy of organism entirely accepts the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy. It also accepts Hume’s doctrine that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience" (PR 253). Richard M. Zaner describes the "way of phenomenology" as the maintenance of a "critical attitude as regards everything not actually and evidently found in consciousness" (WP 130). Husserlian subjectivism and process pansubjectivism meet at this crucial point. But Whitehead would criticize Husserl’s method as too narrow and arbitrary, in that it makes an unnecessary distinction between the sentient and the insentient. For him phenomenology remains too psychological in its inability to conceive of all entities as intentional subjects.

Another methodological similarity is that Whitehead and the phenomenologists insist on descriptive analysis and reject both deduction and induction as proper philosophical methods (PR 15; PrP 67). John H. Kultgen maintains that Whitehead’s later theory of perception contains "a reflective phenomenological description of perceiving" (3:129). Kultgen notes Whitehead’s phenomenology of perception is compromised by the ontology of prehension. Though Husserl held that intentionality should not have any ontological significance because of the reduction, phenomenologists like Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty clearly ontologized intentionality. (I shall return to this point in section V.) One will recall that for Heidegger phenomenology is ontology, and many phenomenologists have followed Heidegger in this significant divergence from Husserl. Therefore, in both process thought and phenomenology descriptive analysis leads to speculative metaphysics. Indeed, it is evident in Merleau-Ponty that ontology, metaphysics, and even cosmology or a philosophy of nature are not incompatible with a revised phenomenological program.

I submit that the foregoing is sufficient to suggest that Whitehead is the adherent of a phenomenological method. Whitehead does the epoché in his systematic avoidance of the vivid sensa of presentational immediacy and the symbolic reference of the "common-sense" world. By avoiding the immediate sensation of presentational immediacy, Whitehead is able to draw on the insights of a more primordial form of perception: the vague, emotive mode of causal efficacy. This is, however, not similar to the Husserlian Wesenschau. Whitehead’s phenomenological analysis of perception is not as Husserl would have liked; indeed, Husserl would have charged Whitehead with gross indulgence in the natural attitude. But the fact is that Husserl also indicted Heidegger on the same count. The history of the phenomenological movement has shown us that the strict Husserlian method was not accepted by leading phenomenologists. These thinkers believed that the reductions were not possible in a strict sense, and they began to reformulate them in such a way as to preserve the integrity of the Lebenswelt and our perceptions within it. For both Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty pure essences are not discovered behind the veil of immediate sensa; rather, one finds an amorphous world of form and feeling.

Besides the methodological similarities outlined above, there is an indirect historical link between Whitehead and Husserl in the personage of William James. Husserl read the Principles of Psychology with enthusiasm and expressed his indebtedness to James. It is Spiegelberg’s opinion that Husserl owed more to James for the basic insights of intentionality than anyone else. Furthermore, there are scholars such as Bruce Wilshire, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schuetz who claim that there is a substantial link between Husserl and James.⁵ On the other side, there are a number of accounts by Whiteheadian scholars of James’s influence on Whitehead. For example, Victor Lowe maintains that Whitehead was influenced by Jamesian psychology: "Whitehead’s ‘nonsensuous perception’ [prehension] is what James later called "the ‘plain conjunctive experience,’ ‘feelings of relation,’ and ‘feelings of tendency"’ (UW 343). It is precisely this area, James’s theory of the "stream of experience," from which Husserl drew much of his insight about intentionality.

It is my contention that both the existential phenomenologists and Whitehead have gone "beyond skepticism and realism" in a much more satisfactory way than Laszlo with his "complementarity" theory, which, although brilliant, seems contrived and artificial in many respects.⁶ Laszlo believes that a complete phenomenological reduction can be carried out; he believes that intentional objects are discrete and therefore isolatable as pure essences. Later phenomenologists, especially Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the latter influenced by Gestalt psychology, firmly deny this. Not unlike Whitehead, these thinkers posit an embodied subject that is inextricably bound up with its data and its world, a world which is not transparent to pure noesis nor comprehensible in any formal way. For Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty there is an attempt to go beyond the "conceptual fixation" of the eidectic reduction to the concrete experience of the world. Existential phenomenology and Whitehead’s process philosophy are most assuredly what Merleau-Ponty called a "metaphysics of the concrete."

III

Let us now begin a more detailed analysis with some of the more apparent similarities between the two philosophies. Both Whitehead and the phenomenologists posit subjects in the mode of becoming; in other words, temporality and process are fundamental for them. In this respect phenomenology is certainly a type of process philosophy. For both philosophies the world is a system of temporal relations, not a system of discrete entities which philosophers have always found to be immune to a truly satisfactory temporal explanation.

Each seeks to overcome the epistemological impasse generated by a metaphysics of discrete entities, especially the Cartesian problem of res cogitans inexplicably knowing res extensa. Both prehension and intentionality describe the relationship of a subject and an object in such a way as to overcome this subject-object split. In the same way that intentionality is always "consciousness of an object," prehension is always "feeling of" some datum. This means that any prehensive unification or intentional act is codetermined by the respective data. Neither prehension nor intentionality describes the exclusive agency of a self-contained subject, nor the exclusive agency of an object as strict realists such as Brentano would have seen it. Intentionality does not mean, as it did for Brentano or the scholastics, the immanence of the object in a passive subject. We shall see, however, that objective immanence does play a role in Whitehead and the existential phenomenologists that it does not play in Husserl.

Intentionality and prehension describe neither the subject alone nor the object alone. To do this would be to commit the fallacy of simple location and fall into a metaphysics of discrete entities externally related. As Emmanuel Levinas states: "Intentionality is not the way in which a subject tries to make contact with an object that exists beside it. Intentionality is what makes up the very subjectivity of subjects" (IHP 41). Both Whitehead and the phenomenologists locate the conditions of experience in subjectivity. Both posit a "monadology" in which the conditions for experience are subjective and radically plural. For example, Heidegger’s Being, which can be best explained in terms of Kant’s transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, is always the Being of an entity.

Husserl’s use of the term "monadology" and Whitehead’s own radical pluralism immediately bring to mind the philosophy of Leibniz, which I shall now use in a selective way to give a more substantial historical-philosophical basis to the present analysis. I certainly do not intend to establish any direct relationships, since neither Husserl nor Whitehead makes any explicit or extensive use of Leibniz. Indeed, in Process and Reality Whitehead generally has critical remarks about Leibniz, the main objections being Leibniz’s mentalism and doctrinaire rationalism. Despite these criticisms it is obvious that he has been deeply influenced by Leibniz, especially in his monadic view of reality and his pansubjectivism. In addition to the general comparative point of Leibniz’s radical pluralism, four other aspects of Leibniz’s philosophy have direct relevance: (1) Leibniz’s implicit rejection of substance metaphysics, (2) his doctrine of internal relations, (3) his theory of perception, and (4) the monad as an intentional field.

Both process philosophy and phenomenology reject traditional substance metaphysics. Many historians of philosophy, usually locating this significant turn in Hume, Kant, or Hegel, do not realize that Leibniz had already effectively overcome Aristotelian substance in his doctrine of the monad. Leibniz calls the monad a simple substance, but Leibniz means something radically different from his predecessors and contemporaries (Descartes, Spinoza, Locke). The monad is not a substratum, nor is it supported by a mental substance of the Cartesian variety. The monad is its perceptions of the world in the same way that Whitehead’s actual occasion is its prehensions of the world.

The phenomenological method has its prototype in the "First Meditation" of Descartes’ classic work. The "First Meditation" is essentially an examination of the phenomena of human consciousness, an examination repeated and refined by all phenomenologists and, as we have seen in section II, by Whitehead with his subjectivist principle. As Whitehead states: "‘prehensions’ are a generalization from Descartes’ mental ‘cogitations"’ (PR 29). In a highly significant article, Montgomery Furth argues that Leibniz’s monad is also the result of the Cartesian phenomenology of the "First Meditation."⁷ Modern phenomenologists, Whitehead, and Leibniz all agree on one essential point: since res cogitans does not appear among the contents of consciousness, it is therefore an illegitimate metaphysical construct. All that appears to us, as Hume was to bring home so forcefully, is a stream of perceptions -- not thinking things, extended things, or any other kind of substantive entities.

Criticisms of Leibniz’s monad have become staid cliches, and as a result, many philosophers have failed to see the strong phenomenological reasons behind some of Leibniz’s most eccentric conclusions. One of the most criticized aspects of the monad is that it has no "windows." On the face of it, this incredible conclusion seemed to be forced upon Leibniz because of his strict allegiance to the Aristotelian definition of substance as something completely self-contained and self-sufficient. But Leibniz does not explicitly give this as a reason for the monads’ lack of "windows." If Furth’s thesis about the origins of the Monadology is correct, then it is much more plausible to assume that the monads are solipsistic because solipsism, as Husserl held so tenaciously in the Cartesian Meditations, is a phenomenological given. Perception is always perspectival and is always from a specific and unique standpoint: my perceptions of the world are always mine and no one else’s. Since I cannot get outside of my perceptions, my perceptions constitute the world. My world is an intentional field in which I am inextricably bound up.

I contend that these general phenomenological considerations are at the basis of the monadic theories of consciousness and reality that are found in the participants in the present analysis. This is abundantly clear in Husserl, especially the Cartesian Meditations, where he claims that only a serious and thorough investigation of the full implications of solipsism can ever lead to the discovery of transcendental intersubjectivity. Heidegger’s concept of Jemeinigkeit is made more intelligible on this monadic interpretation of Dasein and its "world" (intentional field).

Whitehead is of course much closer to Leibniz because of the pansubjectivism which they share with few other philosophers. Both Whitehead and Leibniz generalize perception beyond the human realm to a noncognitive and unconscious "taking account" which Leibniz calls "perception" and Whitehead terms "prehension." At this point, most assuredly, both leave the phenomenological method and enter speculative metaphysics.

In his Monadology (section 11) Leibniz states that "the natural changes of the monads must result from an internal principle, since no external cause could influence their interior." Similarly, Whitehead states that the actual occasion can have no "external adventures . . . only the internal adventure of becoming" (PR 124). Both affirm the doctrine of internal relations, again with a sound phenomenological basis. The monad is a bundle of perceptions, the actual occasion is a prehensive unification, Dasein or Merleau-Ponty’s "existence" is an intentional field. All represent a field of experience internally related.

In both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty the relation between consciousness and things is an internal one. In Merleau-Ponty this relation is described as a dialectic: there is dialectical reciprocation between consciousness and the world. Consciousness is never simply there without content or an object; it is already and always wrapped up in a world. In Heidegger, internal relations are embodied in his theory of the hermeneutical circle. The terms, Dasein and world, are equiprimordial (gleichursprünglich). Dasein is its world. It makes no sense to ask: What came first? Dasein or its world? The question is improper because it is couched in a traditional notion of causality, that of antecedent cause and subsequent effect. The basic premise of all phenomenology is that consciousness is not a thing and that the relationship of consciousness and things is not a causal one.

An internal relation then is one in which the terms are interdependent; term A has no status without term B, and vice versa. An external relation (which really means no relation at all) is one in which term A is independent of term B, and vice versa. In other words, there is no "reason" for the terms to be linked. Contrary to Hume, who thought that the items of experience were all externally related, the participants in the present analysis believe that all experience, by virtue of its internal relations, has an inherent "sense" or "logic." In Ideas (section 9) Husserl speaks of the "logic of experience" and Merleau-Ponty posits the "logic of the perceived world" (PrP 10).

Bruce Wilshire points out that earlier theorists of intentionality, such as Brentano and the scholastics, missed the "logical force of the concept of intentionality" (WJP 159). Both prehension and intentionality reveal essential and necessary connections in the world. Whitehead affirms that each actual occasion has a "real internal constitution" which, in the words of Locke, may be called its "essence," i.e. an eidos (PR 37). For Husserl every actuality (Whitehead’s actual Occasion) is an expression of an essence (Whitehead’s eternal object); experience is composed of "individual instances of . . . essences" (Ideas 113). In this respect Whitehead’s philosophy is just as fully eidectic as Husserl’s, but in Whitehead, as in the existential phenomenologists, there is no eidectic reduction in the true Husserlian sense. As was observed in section II, there is no Wesenschau as such in Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty, or Heidegger. Every entity or item of experience is a unique expression of an essence which is nonreducible to any other expression of the same essence (cf. SMW chapter 10). No reduction is possible when confronted with the woolly red of a carpet, the red hue of autumn leaves, or the shiny red of a football uniform. It is clear then that Whitehead and the existential phenomenologists have taken the monadic view of reality more seriously than Husserl. The monad is essentially a perceptual standpoint, a unique "expression" (Leibniz’s own word) of the universe. The same is true for Whitehead’s actual occasion, Heidegger’s Dasein, and Merleau-Ponty’s "existence."

It must be stressed that the monadic view of reality that Whitehead and the phenomenologists share does not lead to nominalism, but what might be called a moderate realism. In both views a philosophy of substance is replaced by a philosophy of form (eidos) (cf. SB 133f). These forms are not the hypostatized eidé of Plato. Forms (eternal objects or essences) have no ontological status apart from their embodiment in experience. But, unlike conceptualist theory, these forms are inherent in experience itself and not merely conceptual. Phenomenologists maintain that experience is already pregnant with form, and this form is the meaning of things, not the meaning of a conceptual order (cf. PrP 12; PhP 24). I contend that Whitehead and the phenomenologists are in close agreement on this point. Both agree that meaning and form are "objective," but never in the sense of being apart from an intentional field or the prehensive unification of an actual occasion.

While both philosophies embrace this qualified essentialism, it is Whitehead that provides the necessary corrective on the problem of relations. He serves as a bridge between the doctrinaire acausalism of phenomenology and the hard determinism of classical science. With his doctrine of asymmetry, Whitehead is able to reconcile the traditional dichotomy between internal and external relations. Relations between the contemporary occasion and its past are both internal and external at once. The relation of the prehending subject A is internal to its intentional object B, but -the relation of B, which remains stubborn, contingent fact, is external. This means that the cause is external to the effect, but the effect is internal to its cause.⁸ On the doctrine of asymmetry, White-head resurrects concepts of efficient and final causation which he claims are immune from Humean attack. In this way Whiteheadian metaphysics represents a more adequate solution to the problems of meaning and consciousness, while at the same time providing a strong philosophical basis for the realism and causalism of science. In a personal communication, Lewis S. Ford summarized this achievement beautifully: "Rather than being simply identical with intentionality, prehension generalizes both intentionality and causality, thus unifying both phenomenology and science."

IV

Prehension and intentionality are also similar in that they both involve adumbration (Husserl’s Abschattung) of the initial data. That which we perceive is what Whitehead calls a "perspective" of the thing-in-itself (PR 353, 361). One of the essential aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is what he terms "perspectivism" (PhP 67). Without the perspectivism of intentionality/prehension, perception as we know it would not be possible. A nonadumbrated view of the world would be the privilege of an absolute mind.

I believe that this description of the intentional subject is significant for our comparison with Whitehead, because adumbration for him begins at the affective level in terms of negative and positive prehensions and is then transmuted to the level of sense perception in presentational immediacy. Furthermore, it is essential to note that negative prehensions are still feelings in the same way that intentionality still characterizes those aspects of reality which do not appear in any one perspective.

Husserl makes a distinction between the object which is intended (the "natural" object whose being is bracketed in the phenomenological reduction) and the object as it is intended. Let us call the first the real object and the second the intentional object. I propose that there is a similar distinction in Whitehead. The real object (that which is prehended) is the initial datum as it immediately impinges upon the becoming actual occasion. The intentional object (as it is prehended) is what Whitehead calls the objective datum, that which is prehended under the occasion’s subjective aim. The real object may comprise many different prehensions. Let us say that these prehensions are M, N, 0, etc., following the model in Donald W. Sherburne’s A Key to Process and Reality (KPR 15). By virtue of the becoming occasion’s subjective form, prehensions 0 and M of the real object may be negatively prehended, and prehension N positively prehended. For Whitehead the real object is thereby adumbrated: the intentional object is the real object under the aspect of prehension N in accordance with the subjective aim of the becoming occasion.

It is important to note that even if the real object is destroyed, the intentional objects can still be entertained. Indeed, a real object is not necessary for some intentional objects, such as our consciousness of a unicorn or other imaginary entities. Brentano and the scholastics were aware of this phenomenon with their notion of mental objects which did not necessitate a referent in extramental existence. Again there is a Whiteheadian parallel: the object of a propositional feeling may be a proposition which does not necessarily correspond to an actual combination of an actual entity and an eternal object. For Whitehead this is how novelty is introduced into the world and the reason why art and literature are possible and aesthetically valuable.

Therefore both prehension and intentionality involve a creative selection and synthesis of objective data. Spiegelberg observes that one of the essential differences between Brentano and Husserl is that Husserlian consciousness means a "creative achievement" and not the object’s immanence in a passive Aristotelian subject (PM I 115). Now, it is true that objective immanence does play a major role in Whitehead. The first phase of concrescence is the direct immanence of the initial datum in the becoming occasion. Unlike the Aristotelian subject, however, the actual occasion does not simply entertain the datum passively, but feels it with intensity and transforms it into a truly intentional object. Again Whitehead represents a middle position between Husserlian idealism and strict realism. Concrescence is a combination of passive conformation to the past and creative transformation of its initial data.

There is an important difference between Husserl and Whitehead on this notion of subjective aim which they both share. For Husserl intentionality constitutes the meaning of the real object; the intentional object, or noematic object, is meaning. Husserl’s doctrine of hyletic data, that consciousness freely imposes its meaning on a meaningless stuff, is rejected by many latter-day phenomenologists. Whitehead takes sides with the existential phenomenologists in a rejection of this doctrine. The initial datum is already constituted by virtue of its component prehensions. Therefore subjective aim is an unique appropriation of meaning already constituted. In Merleau-Ponty this is called "meaning discovery" rather than Husserl’s "meaning-bestowal" (Sinngebung). In Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of subject and object there is an appropriation of meaning that is quite similar to Whitehead’s. Remy Kwant phrases this dialectic aptly: "the meaning makes the subject be, and the subject constitutes the meaning" (PPMP 19). Translated into Whitehead’s terminology, this statement becomes: "the inherent meaning of the initial datum is appropriated by the becoming occasion in accordance with its subjective aim."

Another contrasting point can be drawn from the foregoing. For Husserl intentionality is characterized as being "directed towards" its object. Just as Whitehead maintains that prehension has a fundamental vector quality, Husserl speaks of the "glancing ray" of consciousness "directed upon" objects (Ideas 223). There is, however, a substantial difference between Whitehead and Husserl in this regard, a difference which shows again Whitehead’s implicit sympathy with the existential phenomenologists. For Husserl objective immanence can have no meaning, because, strictly speaking, outside of conscious intentionality there is only hyletic data. Since objective immanence does play the initial role in concrescence, the direction of the vector of prehension is the reverse of that for Husserl. To Whitehead prehension directs the objective data towards the concrescing occasion. In terms of final causation the actual occasion guides its own experience, but at the same time it is being guided by the past in terms of efficient causation. Prehension, therefore, is much more compatible with the concept of fungierende Intentionalität ("operative," or I prefer "primordial," intentionality), which is inherent in a Lebenswelt and which is the condition for all subjective experience. Therefore we have two expressions of intentionality which have counterparts in Whitehead: (1) intentionality as a specific and determined act (Akt-Intentionalität), which corresponds to Whitehead’s "subjective aim"; and (2) primordial intentionality, that implicit guide for the formation of experience, which is similar to Whitehead’s prehension.

V

The rejection of Husserlian hyletics (coupled with a denial of the transcendental ego) leads to a shift of emphasis in the doctrine of intentionality. The spotlight is now focused on the broader notion of intentionality. This notion was already present in Husserl in that he described intentionality as a "universal medium which in the last resort includes within itself all experiences, even those that are not characterized as intentional" (Ideas 226). As Joseph J. Kockelmans states:

In essence, "primordial" intentionality refers to a prepredicative experience, an experience before the subject-object split. For Merleau-Ponty it represents that "spontaneous organization" of experience that precedes the subject’s active synthesis (PrP 77). Husserl’s notion of meaningless hyletic data, however, seemed to preclude the idea that there is any sort of preobjective synthesis. As a consequence this meant that the only type of intentionality that Husserl emphasized was "act-intentionality." In other words, for Husserl each transcendental ego is the sole source of any order in the world, for the transcendental ego fully constitutes its intentional objects. If one rejects hyletic data and the transcendental ego, as Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty do, then consciousness takes on a somewhat different function: it does not constitute the meaning of the world; rather, it "presents" and appropriates a world already filled with meaning.

R. O. Elveton describes the concept of primordial intentionality in this fashion:

The "horizon" of "operative" intentionality is the Lebenswelt, and only in his final work did Husserl take up this subject in earnest. It is the later phenomenologists who use the broad doctrine of intentionality for a phenomenology of the Lebenswelt.

For example, there is a concept of spontaneous constitution in Heidegger’s theory of Being, that Being embodies a logos that Dasein appropriates. For Heidegger Being is intentionality as it is expressed in Dasein’s world of meaning. The later Heidegger phrases this notion poetically as Being "speaking" through Dasein. Stephen Erickson is more prosaic as he makes the same point: "Intentionality precedes man" (LB 157). This means that intentional objects have sense only in the context of a larger world-horizon which is not due to subjective constitution. In a personal communication, Marjorie Grene suggested that prehension seems to be a generalization of Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, i.e., Dasein’s being "thrown" into a prestructured world.

Merleau-Ponty’s use of primordial intentionality is embodied in this quotation from Phenomenology of Perception:

The doctrine of operative intentionality resolves the puzzling fact that continually confronts common sense: that consciousness finds itself always and already directed towards objects before any reflection or explicit instigation by the subject. As for Heidegger above, primordial intentionality is the Vorstruktur of a Lebenswelt; it represents a system of internal relations which is the basis for much human behavior.

Merleau-Ponty speaks freely of the phenomenological reduction, but it takes on quite a different character than Husserl’s strict "bracketing of being." Sartre and Merleau-Ponty agree on an existentialist conception of the reduction. John D. Scanlon states that Sartre’s "reduction, then, is a deliberate maintaining of a spontaneous, naive attitude, a non-personal, pre-reflective spontaneity" (4:342). Orthodox Husserlians, such as Scanlon, charge that the existential phenomenologists are returning to the natural attitude and thereby precluding any genuine phenomenological reflection. Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty disagree. For them the final goal of phenomenology is not a pure description of essences, but a description of the Lebenswelt, free of scientific and metaphysical preconceptions." Merleau-Ponty believes that this is far from naive naturalism, since it is a concerted effort to get at those primordial bonds which make up the web of our intentional lives. I contend that we would find Whitehead in essential agreement with these sentiments.

One final point shores up a firm, positive comparison: for the existential phenomenologists intentionality is ontologized. If there is no "bracketing of being," then phenomenology inevitably leads to an ontology. This was not admissable for Husserl. Merleau-Ponty explicitly states that intentionality is an ontological relation:

This quotation aptly sums up the main thrust of this section. Husserl’s theory of constitution and Sinngebung is still couched in the traditional epistemological terms of strictly cognitive relationships and the form-matter distinction. The existential phenomenologists and Whitehead reverse the modem priority of epistemology over ontology with the doctrine of primordial intentionality and prehension. With them we have "meaning-discovery" rather than Sinngebung; with them there is a world pregnant with form and meaning rather than meaningless hyletic data.

I conclude that the doctrine of primordial intentionality, in which the world as an antepredicative unity is already directing the subject, is equivalent to Whitehead’s doctrine of prehension. It is clear that Husserl’s emphasis on act-intentionality, a concept in which the subject directs, led him to the radical idealism of the transcendental ego and the theory of constitution. It is also evident that the concept of a fully active intentional subject would preclude the idea of objective immanence. Primordial intentionality allows objective immanence while at the same time insuring the spontaneity and freedom of individual subjects in a Lebenswelt.

VI

One point of disagreement should be discussed: Whitehead’s pansubjectivism. In Heidegger it is clear that only a human Dasein and only a Dasein-world can be the locus of intentional acts. For Heidegger there are no animal-Daseins, plant-Daseins, or atom-Daseins. Sartre follows suit on this point, but Merleau-Ponty does not. In the Structure of Behavior Merleau-Ponty uses the term "existence" as synonymous with intentionality. "Existence" applies not only to human behavior but to animal behavior as well (SB 126). This constitutes a definite and significant break with the strict anthropocentrism of previous phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s primordial intentionality is that system of relations that allows any intentional being to find its place in the world.

There are some strong indications that Merleau-Ponty may be willing to go beyond this. There is one passage in Phenomenology of Perception which speaks of primordial intentionality and its scope. Merleau-Ponty discusses the "horizon," the principal expression of primordial intentionality, as that which "guarantees the identity of the object through the exploration" (PhP 68). It has nothing to do with subjective constitution, or "distinct memory or explicit conjecture." And then comes this crucial passage:

It is difficult to say how literally Merleau-Ponty intends for us to take this example, one in which he is explicitly attributing a noncognitive perception (i.e., prehension) among things. A literal interpretation is supported by statements in The Structure of Behavior such as the one in which things are described as "dynamically knowing" each other (SB 143). There is also a significant programmatic statement, similar in intent with the analogy of organism, which proposes that matter, life, and mind are the "dominant characteristics" of the universe and each has universal applicability (SB 131). Here is the cosmological emphasis that is so predominant in process philosophy; furthermore, here is a philosophy of mind in which -- unlike Husserl and very much like Whitehead -- the conscious ego is not the initial datum, but just a higher unity of more basic intentional acts.

In summing up, we have seen that there are substantial parallels between Whitehead and existential phenomenology. Methodologically, both begin with descriptive analyses that lead to a metaphysics of the concrete. Both begin with the data of human consciousness and both perform phenomenological reductions, at least a version of the epoche in the case of Whitehead. As a result, Whitehead’s philosophy is a phenomenology as Merleau-Ponty defines it: "philosophy . . . becomes a phenomenology, that is, an inventory of consciousness as milieu of the universe (SB 199). In section III, I have argued that this use of the Cartesian starting point has many points in common with Leibniz’s interpretation of the "First Meditation," chief among them being a rejection of substance metaphysics, a doctrine of internal relations, and a monadic view of reality and consciousness.

I have also noted some differences, specifically the matter of relations and causality and the problem of Whitehead’s pansubjectivism. This latter difference is mitigated substantially if some form of sentience and intentionality is attributed to nonhuman entities, as it seems to be done in The Structure of Behavior. In the balance of the essay, I have proposed an equivalence between prehension and primordial intentionality on the one hand, and subjective aim and act intentionality on the other Finally, I have suggested that, if we are to take the proposals in The Structure of Behavior seriously, Merleau-Ponty -- along with the process philosophers -- has refused to bifurcate nature and is willing to make intentionality, like prehension, a truly "universal medium."

References

BSR -- Ervin Laszlo. Beyond Scepticism and Realism. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966.

Ideas -- Edmund Husserl. Ideas, trans. W. R. Gibson. New York: Collier Books, 1962.

IHP -- Emmanuel Levinas. The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. Andre Orianne. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

KPR -- Donald W. Sherburne. A Key to Whitehead’s PROCESS AND REALITY. New York: Macmillan, 1966.

LB -- Stephen A. Erickson. Language and Being. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

PCC -- F. Kersten and R. Zaner, ed. Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973.

PhH -- R. O. Elveton, ed. The Phenomenology of Husserl. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

Phn -- Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed. Phenomenology. New York: Anchor Books, 1967.

PhP -- Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.

PM -- Herbert Spiegelberg. The Phenomenological Movement. Two Vol-umes. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969.

PPMP -- Remy C. Kwant. The Phenomenological Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963.

PrP -- Merleau-Ponty. The Primacy of Perception, trans. John Wild. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

SB. -- Merleau-Ponty. The Structure of Behavior, trans. A. L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

SN -- Merleau-Ponty. Sense and Non-sense, trans. H. L. and P. A. Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967.

UW -- Victor Lowe. Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962.

WJP -- Bruce Wilshire. William James and Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.

WP -- Richard M. Zaner. The Way of Phenomenology. New York: Pegasus, 1970.

1. A. H. Johnson. "The Intelligibility of Whitehead’s Philosophy," Philosophy of Science 10/1 (January, 1943), 47-55.

2. John H. Kultgen. "Intentionality and the Publicity of the Perceptual World," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 33/4 (June, 1973), 503-13.

3. John H. Kultgen. "An Early Whiteheadian View of Perception," PS 2:126-36.

4 .John D. Scanlon. "Consciousness, the Streetcar, and the Ego: Pro Husserl, Contra Sartre." The Philosophical Forum 2/3 (Spring, 1971), 332-54.

Notes:

1 Specific articles on this subject have been offered by Charles Hartshorne, "Husserl and Whitehead on the Concrete," FCC 90-104; F. David Martin, "Heidegger’s Thinking Being and Whitehead’s Theory of Perception," Bucknell Review 17 (May, 1969). 79-102; Thomas Hanna, "The Living Body: Nexus of Process Philosophy and Existential Phenomenology," Soundings 52 (Fall, 1969), 323-33; Calvin Schrag, "Whitehead and Heidegger: Process Philosophy and Existential Philosophy," Dialectica 13 (1959), 42-56; also in Philosophy Today 4 (1960), 26-35; David R. Mason, "Time in Whitehead and Heidegger: Some Comparisons," PS 5:83-105.

2 Marjorie Grene, The Knower and the Known (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 244. In a letter to me, Professor Grene retracted her point about Polanyi’s tacit knowing, but still affirmed the connection between Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead.

3 William Gallagher, "Whitehead’s Philosophical Psychology: Another View," PS 4:263-74; William S. Hamrick, "Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty: Some Moral Implications," PS 4:235-51; see also Hamrick, "Body, Space and Time in the Philosophies of Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty," Vanderbilt University Ph.D. dissertation, 1971.

4 Here is a crucial quote which shows conclusively that Whitehead goes from psychology to physics, not vice versa: "If we substitute the term ‘energy’ for the concept of a quantitative emotional intensity, and the term ‘form of energy’ for the concept of a specific form of feeling,’. . . we see that this metaphysical description of the simplest elements in the constitution of actual entities agrees absolutely with the general principles according to which the notions of modern physics are framed" (PR 177). In other words, a metaphysics derived from a description of human emotional states is compatible with modem physics. Furthermore, feeling and emotional energy is basic; the energy of physics is an abstraction or derivation from this.

5 Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966); A. Schuetz, "William James’ Concept of the Stream of Thought Phenomenologically Interpreted," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (1941), 442-52.

6 For example, Laszlo maintains a strict, and I believe, artificial distinction between clear, non-emotive sense data and vague, emotive ones. Whitehead and existential phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty hold contrarily that all sense data are intrinsically emotive. Merleau-Ponty draws extensively on experimental psychology to make this point.

7 Montgomery Furth, "Monadology" in Leibniz, ed. Harry G. Frankfurt (N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1972), 99-136. Originally published in Philosophical Review 76 (1967). See also L. E. Scott’s article comparing the monad and Dasein in Heidegger in Europe and America, ed. E. C. Ballard and Scott (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).

8 In contrast to the "strong" analytic of the classical rationalists, Whitehead’s logic exhibits "weak" analycity. An example of a weak analytic statement is "a hungry man eats an apple." The hungry man internally related to the apple, the apple being a member of a class of edibles. There is a "reason" for this relation. But the apple is unaffected by the hungry man; it remains external, contingent, stubborn fact. This shows the asymmetry of Whiteheadian relations. I am indebted to one of my graduate students, Madeleine Keys, for this example.

9 It is important to note that for both philosophies this "perspective" is not a representation, but a direct apprehension of an aspect of the real object. Roth views attack the representationalism of earlier epistemology. As Merleau-Ponty states:"It is the thing itself which I reach in perception (SB 199).

10 William A. Luijpon, Phenomenology and Humanism (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966), 105. See also Merleau-Ponty, PrP 1416. Here he states that the "appearance" of something requires both a presence and an absence.

11 It is doubtful whether the existential phenomenologists would have approved Whitehead’s extensive use of the conceptual models of modem physics. Even with the existentialist view of the phenomenological reduction, such influences should he p urged from a description of the lived world. On this point it is instructive to note that Merleau-Ponty refuses to accept Einstein’s denial of contemporaneity which Whitehead applies to the conscrescence of actual occasions. Merleau-Ponty claims that our incontrovertible experience of contemporaneity must take precedence over any scientific theory of time. I regret that I have lost this particular reference in Merleau-Ponty’s works.

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." The initial words of the Apostles’ Creed testify to the prominence of divine power in Christian theology. Placing omnipotence first, even before divine goodness and wisdom, is the preference not only of Christianity but also of Judaism and Islam. Anna Case-Winters observes that in Judaism "power becomes a paraphrase of the divine names, a kind of euphemism for God" (GP 27). In these Western religions, more so than in the East, divine power has been conceived in terms of political power. In Islam, Judaism, and Christianity God is seen as a cosmic king, exerting absolute and uncontested rule over the universe and everything in it. Political terms such as "pantokrator" ("all-ruling"), "sovereignty," and "kingship" dominate western descriptions of God. In his book, Kingship of God, Martin Buber argues that Yahweh is different from the other middle eastern gods in that he demanded control in all areas of human life, not just the religious.

The epigraph from Whitehead suggests that our views of the divine nature are a reflection of our social and political systems. A widely accepted view of omnipotence, explained below, appears to be an uneasy mixture of ancient authoritarianism and classical liberalism. This view, I maintain, is an unsuccessful synthesis of power monopoly and power sharing. I contend that process and feminist theologians are correct in their exclusive commitment to the power-sharing model. They agree with John Fowles that God must be a "freedom that allows other freedoms to exist."

In Section I, I lay out three types of divine power. I reject the view of divine omnicausality because of its denial of free-will and its imputation of evil to God. I then use Kant’s moral theory to criticize the second view of divine power, the contemporary favorite among philosophers and theologians. In Section II, I assess Nelson Pike’s attempt to make divine power-sharing intelligible without giving up God’s ultimate control. I argue that Pike fails, and that the first two divine powers essentially collapse into one another. In Section III, I argue that David Basinger’s reformulation of divine power is incompatible with the Christian orthodoxy he firmly defends. I conclude that these two philosophers have not demonstrated a way in which God can share power and yet retain the control that tradition demands.

I

In the history of Christian theology, at least three views of divine power can be discerned. First, there is the belief in divine omnicausality (I abbreviate it DP₁), which holds that God is the only subject of power -- the active, immediate, and originative cause of all things and events. William of Ockham, Martin Luther, John Calvin, neoorthox theologians, and contemporary evangelical Carl Henry believe that this is the correct view of divine power. Let Luther speak for them all:

Luther would be dismayed to learn that the option that he rejects – "the potentiality by which he could do many things which he does not" -- has become the most prevalent conception of divine power in contemporary theology and philosophy of religion. Although God could exercise all power, God instead chooses to delegate power to a self-regulating nature and self-determining moral agents. (This type of divine power, attributed historically to Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Arminius, Leibniz, and Kant is abbreviated DP₂.)³ In the current literature, this God is described as having the power, if he chooses to use it, to bring about any logically possible state of affairs. In traditional theology this delegation of power is sometimes called God’s "permissive" will. In addition, this deity possesses what Nelson Pike calls "over-power" -- "veto" power, I call it -- or the coercive power of traditional theology. This is a direct power (as in DP₁) for God to perform miracles, to "harden hearts," to make himself a man, and ultimately, to bring nature and history to an end, and to judge the righteous and the damned.

Evangelical Carl Henry believes that DP₂ is too speculative, too philosophical, and too humanistic. It is unbiblical, because it is incompatible with God’s absolute sovereignty. Henry contends that the biblical God does not act through secondary causes (but, for example, sends down hail directly from heaven), and he does not appear to share power with any creature. Alvin Plantinga ‘s proposal that God ponders alternative universes is, according to Henry, a most alien philosophical invention. Following Calvin, Henry’s God is not an abstract potentia absoluta but a real porentia ordinata. Furthermore, God cannot share or delegate power because, Henry uses Barth approvingly, God is the only subject of power. Henry also praises Barth for returning divine omnipotence to its proper, preeminent place in Christian dogmatics. Finally, Henry rejects the assumption of DP₂ that God is limited by the laws of logic. He states that logic does "not set limits to which God must conform; God himself wills the law of contradiction as integral to both divine and human meaning" (GRA 5:325). Although Henry can find support in Augustine, Calvin, and even Descartes for this idea, most philosophers would be very uneasy about making the laws of logic dependent on any will, even the divine will.

Henry would have no sympathy at all for the position advanced by the process theologians and accepted by feminists and Alvin Plantmga,⁴ who insist that genuine freedom requires complete immunity from divine control. (This view is abbreviated DP₃) J. L. Mackie has described a crucial aspect of this position: "If men’s wills are really free, this must mean that even God cannot control them. . . ."⁵ If one takes seriously that idea of a universe composed of actual things in real relations with other actualities, then the idea that all power is concentrated in one actuality is nonsensical. As David Griffin states: "If the world is an actual creation, and not simply a complex idea in the divine mind, or simply aspects of modes’ of God, then all-powerful cannot mean having all the power" (GPE 269-70). Feminist Sheila Davaney says that "in an interdependent universe, power . . . must be seen as social in character, entailing both the capacity to influence and the ability to receive the influence of others."⁶ In such a universe God can be the preeminent cosmic agent, but not the all-controlling power.

The process theists believe that the only way to solve the problem of evil is to assume that human wills and nature as a whole have their own autonomy. This view entails a complete dismantling of traditional Christian doctrine, including: creation out of nothing, the finite duration of history and nature, miracles as direct divine acts, and the final triumph of good over evil. In process theology, God is intimately related to the world, but his power is always persuasive, never coercive. Process theists believe that both DP₁ and DP₂ are simply projections of the absolute power once invested in, but no longer given to, patriarchs and kings.

The three types of divine power can be expressed nicely by an analogy with driving a car. This analogy does not come out very well for DP₁. Here God is the driver and each of us passengers have kiddy seats with plastic steering wheels, clutches, brakes, and accelerator pedals. We are all going through the motions of heading in our own directions, but God obviously is still in complete and direct charge of our destination. In DP₂ the vehicle is a driver training car equipped with dual controls. I am at my wheel and God is letting me drive, but he can intervene and take control of the car at any time. In DP₃ I have an ordinary car and God is a very persuasive "back seat" driver; or, as one of my students suggested: God is in the trunk and her⁷ suggestions are barely audible. My student’s quip embodies a common criticism of the process God: that it is a godling who has been marginalized and made insignificant. If the God of DP₃ is a tyrant, then the God of DP₃ is a wimp. I will attempt to defend the process God against this charge.

II

If we are committed to the freedom of the will and the concept of individual moral responsibility, I believe we must reject divine omnicausalism outright. DP₁ is not mentioned in contemporary discussions in philosophy of religion, but I believe that it is important to include this alternative. It is after all the position of the Reformers, their neoorthodox followers, and a major evangelical theologian. Many Christians rightly contest their claim that this is the biblical view of divine power, for the Bible has no monolithic view on most all theological issues. As Erasmus pointed out in his debate with Luther, God would not have called us to choose him if Luther’s position were correct. One would have to agree, however, that divine omnicausality certainly dominates in many biblical narratives.

I will now focus our attention on what I believe to be major shortcomings of DPI. My argument in part will be based on Immanuel Kant’s moral theory. Kant’s second form of the categorical imperative states that we should always treat persons as ends in themselves never merely as means to our ends. I propose, then, that the existence and ultimate use of divine "veto" power in DP₂ constitute a violation of this form of the categorical imperative. I am assuming that we can appropriate this principle from Kant’s moral theory without assuming the rest of it as true, including his restricted view of what a person is. In addition, a process view of self-determination, for example, will be quite different from Kantian doctrine.

My argument has its best chance if Augustine and Aquinas were right about the reasons for creation. They both believed that God created the world to glorify himself. If this is true, then one could conclude that God does use nature and creaturely wills as simply means to his own ends. William T. Jones phrases Augustine’s position aptly: "It was a greater demonstration of God’s power and glory to create a sinful man and then to use this creature as an instrument of his larger purpose than it would have been to create a sinless man."⁸ The categorical imperative obviously allows us to use other people for our own ends, but only if there is sufficient respect for persons. But if Gods real intention for creation is self-glorification by using his creatures, then it is difficult to see how this condition can be met.

The best biblical support for this argument is the story of Job. Even the evangelical New Bible Dictionary has to admit that Yahweh does not give a moral justification for his actions against job.⁹ Yahweh’s answer out of the whirlwind is essentially an expression of raw cosmic power, not a compassionate response to Job’s legitimate concerns. In effect, Yahweh has used Job as means to win a wager with Satan. In the end Job’s fortunes are restored twofold, but his original children were lost to him forever. Using Kantian terminology once again, a price could be placed on his livestock, but his children had dignity as persons and were irreplaceable. They, too, were sacrificed for Yahweh’s own ends.

There is, however, a neo-Platonic justification for divine creation: God created the world out of unbounded love for creatures themselves. Catherine of Siena is especially eloquent on this point: "So it was love that made you create us and give us being, just so that we might taste your supreme eternal good."¹⁰ The claim of divine self-glorification contrasts sharply with Catherine’s emphasis on God’s humbling himself in the Creation and the Incarnation. "In name of this unspeakable love," God emptied himself of his glory and became a human being. I cannot imagine a traditional theist who would not choose Catherine over Augustine-Aquinas on this point. If Catherine is correct, then there does seem to be sufficient respect for persons in God’s plan for creation.

The primary difference between DP₂ and DP₃ is that the classical God has the freedom to intervene or not, while the process God cannot intervene, even if she wanted to. Proponents of DP₂ can then draw some moral implications from their view, which initially seem quite attractive. The God of DP₂ can exercise power in all things and events, but, for the most part, chooses not to. Using my own argument to their advantage, my critics would say that God does this primarily because he has a Kantian respect for persons. This God, then, is like mature, loving parents who allow their children to choose freely and allow them to make their own mistakes. One could say that this requires enormous restraint on God’s part, as well as, of course, allowing the development of virtue in human beings. Furthermore, the traditional God can insure the final triumph of the good and the defeat of evil. Process theologians openly admit that their God, while totally committed to goodness, truth, and beauty, cannot bring about the perfection of these values unilaterally.

In traditional theism nature has no intrinsic value, so the fact that it exists merely for God’s purposes and is then destroyed is of no moral consequence. Under DP₂ God has created a self-regulating nature as a predictable framework in which we can freely choose our destinies. But in the end, according to traditional beliefs, nature will have only instrumental value and will ultimately be discarded. Again the Platonic view appears more acceptable. In the Timaeus Plato assures us that the world is everlasting and contends that only an evil being would ‘undo that which is harmonious and happy" (36e;41b).

In the medieval period, God’s absolute dominion was expressed in the concept of private property as the right to create and destroy -- to use and abuse -- the fruits of the earth. This is a philosophy of property that, unfortunately, is still being practiced today. In a world in which Earth Day has become a major world holiday, such a theology of nature is simply no longer acceptable. A process theology of nature, in which every occasion of experience has some power of self-determination, is one of the best options for environmental ethics today. It requires that we not only give up the notion of divine ownership of the earth, but also divine ownership of our souls as well.

Proponents of DP₂ might respond by quite gladly giving up the view that nature has just instrumental value. This is a definite possibility, but the full implications of DP₂ may force them to give up far more than that. The main reason that nature lacks intrinsic value is necessarily linked to the orthodox idea of creatio ex nihilo, a view that essentially makes all created things completely contingent upon divine power. Staying within a religious view of the world, there are at least two ways to conceive of nature having intrinsic value. First, pantheists believe that the being of the world is divine, so it would obviously be absurd for God to destroy it. Second, there is the Aristotelian-Whiteheadian view that God and nature are equiprimordial. One might say that Moses Maimonides escapes my critique, because, as he says: "We do not consider it a principle of our faith that the universe will again be reduced to nothing."¹¹ But Moses’ cosmos still lacks intrinsic value, because it is completely contingent upon God’s sustaining power. I believe that self-determination and value are necessarily related, so it is only the Aristotelian-Whiteheadian view, coupled with DP₃ that can ground individual inherent value. More argument on this issue is obviously needed, but we can provisionally conclude that an acceptable theology of nature must reject creatio ex nihilo. It is safe to say that giving up this doctrine is tantamount to giving up classical theism.

The initial superiority of traditional theism over process theism erodes even more quickly when we look at the problem of evil. The implications for DP, for the origins of evil are clearest in Luther’s claim that Satan is a "mask" of God. This provocative view is expressed in many biblical passages where God is cited as the direct cause of evil (Ex. 5:22, 32:12; Jer. 18:11; Amos 3:6; Micah 1:12, 2:3; 1 Kgs. 22:20-22; Job 42:11). The theology of these accounts is summed up in Second Isaiah: "I form light, and I create darkness: I produce well-being, and I create evil, I Yahweh do all these things" (45:7, Anchor Bible). When confronted with this verse, most Christians try to mitigate its prima facie meaning.’² But Carl Henry criticizes those who wish to soften its meaning and reasserts his Calvinist view of absolute divine sovereignty and the implication that all evil is by divine commission rather than permission (GRA 6:293-94).

Returning to Job, the traditional reading of this story assumes that God delegates power to Satan and allows him to persecute Job by divine permission. However, if one reads the story carefully, Job, his wife, and his friends all clearly acknowledge God as the source of Job’s woes. They seem to be unaware of both the existence of Satan and the wager he and God have made. At the end of the story the author explicitly speaks of "all the evil that the Lord had brought upon [Job]" (42:11). Whether this is DP₁ or DP₂, evil by commission or permission, clearly, both views imply that God is responsible for evil.

Let us look at our driving analogy again. (This particular example is derived from Nelson Pike.) Let us say there is a car with dual controls and Arthur is the driving instructor and Bailey is the student driver. Let us imagine that Bailey is approaching an intersection at which he is required to stop. Out of inattention, Bailey fails to stop, and is just about to run into a school bus loaded with children. Arthur quickly takes over the controls, stops the vehicle, and averts the impending disaster. If Arthur had not done this, we would have condemned him for his inaction and would have held him jointly responsible for the great loss of life.

Pike’s scenario is obviously designed to show the mechanics of DP₂ -- i.e., the delegation of power to free creatures -- but also the direct complicity of God in the evil these agents do. (Pike’s attempt to resolve this by an appeal to Augustine’s view that there is ultimately no real evil is unconvincing.) Responsible earthlings, such as Arthur, do attempt to intervene when they are able, and within reason, to prevent harm to others. Even though the traditional God has the power to extend aid in an eminent way, it appears as if he has not and will not intervene to prevent unnecessary evil. Why does not the traditional God do much more? Why doesn’t God do what Arthur could do in our example, or others in similar positions do everyday? This is the principal moral challenge to the God of DP₁ or DP₂. Friedrich Nietzsche expressed the point most provocatively: "As a father, God does not care enough about his children: human fathers do this better."¹³ We can blame the classical God because, according to DP₂, God can intervene if he chooses to. But we cannot blame the process God because she cannot intervene. Initially, the classical God’s option of unilateral action appeared to be a virtue, but now it is looking more like a deficiency.

All of us know the evocative phrases of the Lord’s Prayer very well: "Our Father who art in Heaven/Hallowed be Thy Name/ Thy Kingdom come/ Thy will be done/ On earth as it is in Heaven. . . (Matt. 6:9-10). Viewed in the traditional apocalyptic way, this prayer appears to be a request for God to discontinue the system of DP₂ (the implication of the permissive will is clear), and replace it with a DP₁ regime. It is also a recognition that the latter is the preferred state, and that the former is simply a means to the full exercise of God’s sovereign power. The Lord’s Prayer is a request for God to substitute his direct power for his permissive power. It is a petition for God to use his "over-power" all the time, rather than just some of the time. If we phrase the preceding conclusion in Kantian terms, we realize that the Lord’s prayer is a request that our lives be fully heteronomous, not autonomous. To put it more provocatively: we are praying that our autonomy, the noble badge of Kantian morality and the grounds for the value of persons, be taken away from us.

Our return to Kant at this point reveals a troublesome inconsistency in his moral theory, one that I intend to pursue in a separate study. Kant’s moral argument for the existence of God requires divine "over-power" to make our souls immortal and to actualize the fulfillment of justice. Here his conception of the Kingdom of God appears to be thoroughly orthodox. On the other hand, the third form of the categorical imperative requires full autonomy to join the Kingdom of Ends. Kant’s moral argument for God demands a deity who exercises power in the traditional manner, but his principal moral theory requires that he become a process theist on the question of divine power.

Another analogy suggests itself at this juncture. Let us imagine a child learning how to ride a bike. In my own case, I held my daughter’s bike while she got a feel for the right balance. Within a couple of weeks she was happily riding on her own, so free in fact that she had an accident and got a big bump on her head. According to traditional theology, God will ultimately take full control of our bike-wills. This biking analogy is especially apt for Erasmus’ view of divine power. In his famous debate with Luther he proposes a

Erasmus’ view is very elegant, but it simply does not conform to our strong preferences for autonomy over heteronomy. This is especially true if I think of the advisability of intervening in my teenage daughter’s "biking" now or later on in her adult life. My intervention seems not only inappropriate but also immoral. As John Cobb and David Griffin have so eloquently said: "If we truly love others, we do not seek to control them" (PT 53). One could argue that, paradoxically, we ultimately have more power by gentle persuasion than by overbearing coercion.

You may have noticed that at this point I have ceased distinguishing between DP₁ and DP₂. Both views preserve God’s essential monopoly of power, and, in the end, according to the implications I have drawn from traditional doctrine, DP₂ collapses into DP₁. Divine over-power is the preferred state of affairs. If lam correct, then we should reject both of them for the same reasons. First, in these views nature has only instrumental value and this conflicts with the strong moral intuitions that we now hold from environmental ethics. Second, the logic of divine over-power makes God responsible for all unnecessary evil in the world. Third, the ultimate value of individual wills has also been undermined. I believe that we must agree with Mackie that the only will worth having is one that is immune from external control. Free-will does require an originative power -- an "uncontrollable. . . freedom," as John Hick says, that secures "a degree of freedom and independence over against [God]" (EGL 302, 31l).¹⁵

One might say that the foregoing argument hinges too much on the assumption of a traditional Last Judgment. Classical theists might hold instead that God brings about the triumph of good without punishing the wicked and destroying nature. But this "kinder and gentler" view of divine justice would still require a substantial reordering of both human wills and nature. Some classical theists are now saying that natural evils -- such as famines, floods, and earthquakes -- are due to the constraints of any created world, not to acts of divine intervention. On this view such events might be called "necessary" evils. David Basinger and Bruce Reichenbach contend that God could not have, for example, created water to quench thirst and clean without it also drowning mammals and eroding the foundations of buildings (DP 65, IPQ 179-98). But if Basinger and Reichenbach believe that God can unilaterally cause the defeat of evil, then their God will have to use his "veto" power not only to restrain evil wills, but also to eradicate natural evils as well. David Griffin has made the keen observation that creating a liquid that quenches thirst and cleans but does not have negative consequences is a logically possible state of affairs (ER 91). The classical God, while being prevented from creating a round square, would have no trouble creating completely "good" water.

III

In an article "Over-Power and God’s Responsibility for Sin,"¹⁶ Nelson Pike has produced the most innovative defense of DP₂. Using ingenious analogies from electrical circuitry, Pike attempts to make divine power sharing intelligible and compatible with divine "veto" power. The first circuit is one in which Arthur (A) has complete control over the light bulb. Bailey (B) can use his switch all he wants, but he does not have any control over the light. Pike says that this circuit models the way Calvin views divine power and it obviously represents DP₁. The

second diagram represents a circuit in which Bailey has the possibility to light the bulb. If Arthur leaves A, open but closes A₂. then Bailey is now able to light the bulb. At the same time, Arthur has not lost any power, or possibility of acting, by sharing power with Bailey. Indeed, by closing A,, Arthur can assume full control in the operation of the light. Clearly Pike wants us to assume that Arthur is playing the role of God in these circuits. Therefore, it seems as if Pike has successfully explained a previously unclear aspect of DP₂, the idea of divine power sharing. If God distributes power as we distribute electricity, then we can see how he could delegate power without losing any of it, and still maintain the control that orthodox theology demands.

There is, however, a fatal weakness in both the electrical and driving analogies. They essentially beg the question about the source of power in both the circuits and the cars. We must also ask how the agents themselves are empowered to operate the switches. To complete the electrical diagrams above, a central power source must be attached to the lead wires at the left; furthermore, additional wires must lead from this source directly to all agents and their switches. God’s veto power is maintained by direct lines to each agent. Using a main switch for all of creation would not allow God specific discretionary power -- e.g., to control the will of Judas, but not John and the other disciples. Finally, in my expanded circuitry there is no main switch; or if there is one, it would be closed all the time. Without this provision the universe, by analogy, would fall into nothingness. The result is that Pike’s attempt to salvage DP₂ actually collapses into a form of DP₁. Another way to see this collapse is to imagine God, as he would during and after the Last Judgment, permanently closing switch A, and leaving A₂ open forever. The second circuit would then be essentially the same as the first Calvinist one.

Following my lead, Pike’s diagrams naturally lead one to think of God as a power plant, upon which many autonomous systems draw their current. In such a system, it would be absurd, for example, to blame the power plant for a disastrous fire caused by a short circuit in one of the appliances. But the notion that God is some passive source of power is totally alien to all revealed religion as well as most natural religion. If one adds the divine attributes of active will, intelligence, beneficence, providence, and foreknowledge to the source of power, then our conclusion about the hypothetical fire is a very different one. Our power plant God with these attributes, just like the driving teacher above, would not allow such a disaster to take place. Furthermore, if such an agent was also the creator of the appliances, then it would also be responsible for the defect that caused the fire. The complicity of the classical God in evil is now even more fundamental than before. Not only can such a deity be blamed for not intervening, but also held responsible, by virtue of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, for natural defects as well as deficient wills.¹⁷

IV

Next, I consider David Basinger’s critique of DP₃ in his book, Divine Power and Process Theism. Basinger believes that he can have all the advantages of DP₃ without giving up the concept of God’s unilateral control. Basinger believes that process theists, and by implication many traditional theists, have misconstrued how God is able to coerce. God does not veto our decisions by making us completely impotent (coercion.); rather, God simply makes it impossible for us to fulfill our self-determined desires (coercion_b).¹⁸ In the terminology of the free-will debate, God can prevent us from acting freely by obstructing our open alternatives, but he cannot disempower us from making the choices in the first place. Basinger believes that he is endorsing a type of DP₃, but he is actually still within the framework of DP₂. His two types of coercion lead me to distinguish between two subtypes of DP₂ -- DP_2a and DP_2b -- with the latter not collapsing into DP₁.

Basinger implies that coercion_b is easy to comprehend because it is analogous to the ways in which we can physically restrain others without determining their desires in any way. Indeed, Basinger appears to expose process theists to an embarrassing inconsistency: we can exercise the power of coercion_b, but the process God is impotent in this regard. David Griffin, however, has explained away this oddity in a compelling response (ER 108ff.). We humans can coerce_b primarily because we can use our bodies (or technological extensions thereof) to restrain the actions of others. The process God is fully embodied in the universe and is obviously unable to exercise power in this way. The classical God is not embodied at all, so it is exceedingly difficult to imagine how this God could use coercion_b either.

Not only is Basinger unable to make divine coercion_b intelligible, he also appears to be wrong in implying that the traditional God does not exercise coercion in the strong sense of unilateral determination. If we understand creatio ex nihilo, the Incarnation, miracles, and the Last Judgment in orthodox ways, then these doctrines seem to require divine coercion.. Creating the universe from nothing, forging a union of human and divine natures, and causing the defeat of evil -- each of these events would involve full ontological determination by God. (I have already argued that conceiving of divine justice in less traditional ways does not alleviate the need for divine over-power.) God could restrain the Pharaoh from jumping into the Nile after he had freely formed the desire to do so (coercionb), but he could also harden the Pharaoh’s heart so that he could not form a desire to free the Hebrews (coercion_a). Clearly, orthodox Christians want to support the possibility of both types of divine action.

Concerning miracles, one might say that one kind, such as restraining a person from falling off a cliff, requires only coercion_b. But if we look at the major type of miracles found in the Bible and claimed by popular piety, we are dealing, for the most part, with unilateral divine action. Furthermore, there are at least two problems with the first type of miracles. (1) It is virtually impossible to tell whether these are really miracles. Divine acts of this sort could be happening all the time without our ever knowing it. (2) It is difficult to conceive, as we have seen above, of the mechanisms by which God could exercise power in this way. How, for example, did God make the earth stand still so that Joshua could finish his battle? Did he physically hold it in place (coercionb) or did he fail to give it impetus (coercion.). If such a God exists, it seems eminently more reasonable to assume the latter. (If God made other heavenly bodies hold the earth still, then that also required an act of divine over-power.) Attributing coercionb to God would be making him into the deus ex machina that has long been rejected in philosophical theology. As David Griffin observes: "Although traditional theism insisted verbally that God is incorporeal, it in effect regarded God as a ubiquitous Superman" (ER 104). The superman deity uses Basinger’s coercion_b, and he must realize that the disembodied God of classical theism can, if he is actually able, only coerce in the strong sense (coercion.).

Returning now to Pike, we can see that there is yet another problem with his driving analogy, as well as his other example of a government commission with a veto power analogous to divine over-power. He says that the driving instructor is different from God because unlike God, Arthur cannot control the desires of his students. (Similarly, I could force my daughter to get on her bike, but I could not force her to form the desire to do so.) Arthur can only prevent his students from acting on the driving decisions they have freely made. Pike has to acknowledge that both the instructor and the commission have the power to coerce in the weak sense only, while clearly the traditional God must have the power to coerce in the strong sense. Therefore, we must conclude that both Pike and Basinger have failed to make intelligible a view in which God can share power and at the same time maintain the over-power that orthodoxy demands. Power sharing must be conceived in John Fowles’ new theological image: "with freedom our first principle, not authority."

References

DP -- David Basinger. Divine Power in Process Theism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.

EGL -- John Hick. Evil and the God of Love. London: Macmillan, 1966.

ER -- David Ray Griffin. Evil Revisited Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

GP -- Anna Case-Winters. God’s Power: Traditional Understandings and Contemporary Challenges. Louisville, KY: Westminster / John Knox Press, 1990.

GPE -- David Ray Griffin. God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy Lanham: University Press of America, 1990.

GRA -- Carl F. H. Henry. God, Revelation, and Authority. Six Volumes. Waco: Word Books, 1976-1983.

HCG -- Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God Ed. Santiago Sia. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990.

IPQ -- Bruce Richenbach. "Natural Evils and Natural Laws: A Theodicy of Natural Evils." International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (June, 1976): 179-98.

PT -- John B. Cobb, Jr. and David R. Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976.

Notes

1John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 82.

2Luther’s Works, eds. N. Pelikan and H. T. Lehman (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955-76), Vol. 33, p. 189. I certainly am not implying that there are not differences among the theologians listed in this group. Anna Case-Winters has done the best job of sorting out the nuances (GP 22-24). For example, Ockham is alone on this list in holding to the distinction between a potentia absoluta and a potentia ordinata.

3David Griffin would object to my placing Augustine and Aquinas in this category. See his God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (GPE), chapters 6 & 7. The following passage from Augustine is especially telling: "Since no one can will unless urged on and called. . . . it follows that God produces in us even the willing itself" (Eighty-three Different Questions, question 68, in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 70, p. 164). For a defense of Aquinas holding DP₂ see W. Norris Clarke, "Charles Hartshorne’s Philosophy of God: A Thomistic Critique" (HCG 106-8); and also Matthew Lamb, "Liberation Theology and Social Justice," Process Studies 14 (Summer, 1985), Pp. 122-3, fn 25. Interestingly enough, John Locke appears to support DP, when he insists that there can be no passive power in God. See his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, chap. 21.

4See Plantinga’s firm rejection of DP₂ in "Reply to the Basingers on Divine Omnipotence," Process Studies 11/1 (Spring, 1981), p. 25. David Griffin points out that while Plantinga is indeed an incompatibilist with regard to divine control and human freedom, he remains a compatibilist with regard to omniscience and freedom (ER 82). Because process theists believe that every actual entity is self-determining, they are the only proponents of DP₂ who can avoid the inconsistency of God using DP₂ to empower parts of nature that are externally determined.

5J. L. Mackie, "Evil and Omnipotence," Mind, vol. 64 (1955); reprinted in Baruch A. Brody. ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 165.

6Sheila Greeve Davaney, "God, Power, and the Struggle for Liberation" (HCG 64).

71n what follows the orthodox God will be referred to as "he," and the process God will be referred as "she." Most preferable, I believe, would be the pronoun "it," but this leads to some very awkward locutions, awkward only because we are so ingrained in thinking of God as having gender. Most classical theologians do not object to the characterization of God as a divine male, but most process theologians, as well as all feminists firmly reject this characterization.

8As Aquinas states: ‘Now God wills and loves His essence for its own sake: and it cannot be increased or multiplied in itself, as it appears from what has been said: and can only be multiplied in itself, as it appears from what has been said: and can only be multiplied in respect of its likeness which is shared by many. Therefore, God wishes things to be multiplied, because He wills and loves His essence and perfection" (Summa Contra Gentiles I, 25; as quoted in William T. Jones. A History of Western Philosophy: The Medieval Mind, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969], p. 107).

9The New Bible Dictionary, ed. 5. D. Douglas (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2nd ed., 1982), p. 637.

10Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. Suzanne Noffke, O. P. in The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 49.

11Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (New York: Dover Publications, 2nd ed., 1940), p. 201.

12The most successful attempt has been made by Dwight van Winkle of Seattle Pacific University in a paper entitled "Isaiah 45:7: Yahweh, the Creator of Darkness and Evil," presented at the Pacific Northwest American Academy of Religion meeting, April, 1987.

13Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954), pp. 293-94.

14Desiderius Erasmus, "On Free Will," trans. Mary M. McLaughlin in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. James B. Ross and Mary M. McLaughlin (New York: Penguin Books), p. 686.

15I have deleted "gift of" from "uncontrollable gift of freedom" to eliminate Hick’s implication that free-will is derivative rather than originative. Because of this and other elements of Hick’s theology, it is doubtful whether Hick has a consistent commitment to DP₃. For example, he refers to God as "the Source and Lord of [our] life and Determiner of [our] destiny" (EGL 300).

16Nelson Pike, "Over-Power and God’s Responsibility for Sin" in God and Temporality, eds. Eugene Long and Bowman Clark (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1984).

171n The City of God (XIV, 13) Augustine states that Adam and Eve were already secretly corrupted in the Garden. Initially, it appears that they were already evil because of their pride, but a more fundamental reason reveals itself in Augustine’s discussion: "Now, nature could not have been depraved by vice had it not been made out of nothing."

18These two types of coercion correspond exactly to Basinger’s own options 1a and l b (DP 36).

Process thought clearly rejects Cartesian matter-mind dualism and thereby rejects the monistic alternatives of materialism and idealism which depend upon Cartesian concepts of matter and mind. There is neither any unknowable material or mental substances to which the experienceable properties of things belong and which give absolute self-identity through time, nor any enduring essences of mindless spatiality or spaceless mentality. In process thought, all actual occasions are active centers of experience and are spatially as well as temporally extended. Peirce first formulated the process concept of mental spatiality when he wrote that "feeling has a subjective, or substantial, spatial extension. . . . This is no doubt, a difficult idea to seize, for the reason that it is a subjective, not an objective, extension. It is not that we have a feeling of bigness; though Professor James, perhaps rightly, teaches that we have. It is that the feeling, as a subject of inhesion, is big" (PWP 345).

Of course, Descartes was on to something important. Though it has been done, it is philosophical stupidity to deny either that we experience spatially extended objects or that we experience ourselves as active conscious centers of feeling, experience, thought, intention, attention, volition, desire, emotion, satisfaction, etc. Descartes wanted to account for both of these prominent features of experience. He insisted that material substances are essentially spatially extended and that mental substances are essentially non-extended. We may doubt this metaphysics without denying the experiences themselves. Process thought shows us how to do this, but within the framework of a quite different metaphysics that does not suffer from the obvious defects of Cartesianism.

The Mentality of Magnitude

In process thought the human body is spatially extended; but it is not composed of Cartesian/Newtonian matter. Whitehead realized by the time he wrote the later parts of Science and the Modern Work) (1925) that modern science has no use for matter in the traditional sense. On the traditional account, material particles are not only experienced externally as spatially extended; they are also internally inert and vacuous. Whitehead advanced the heresy that something might be going on inside atoms and electrons, that internally they are spatiotemporally active centers of creative energy and experience (though unconscious). Traditionally, material particles have absolute position in Newtonian absolute space and time, but Whitehead relocated them in the relativistic space/time of modem astrophysics. Traditionally, time is totally irrelevant to the nature of material objects, since a material particle is entirely itself at every infinitesimally thin instant of time. Whitehead insisted that there are no real temporal infinitesimal, that all spatially extended objects require some minimal temporal duration in order to be anything at all. Traditionally, material objects are internally unaltered through time and change only externally with respect to place. Whitehead and modern physics have found them to be composed of chains of fleeting discontinuous pulsations of energy.

Traditionally, every moment of a spatial object’s existence is causally independent of every other moment, thus absolutizing Hume’s insistence upon the intrinsic causal disconnectedness of every material entity with its own past and with the past of the universe. Whitehead proposed that extended objects are in part what they are by virtue of their intrinsic causal connections with the antecedent world. Traditionally, and paradoxically, the behavior of matter is subject to rigid external mechanistic explanation even though it has no intrinsic causal connections with the antecedent world. Whitehead found that the antecedent world lays some causal constraints upon present actualities while leaving some room for freedom and self-creativity. Traditionally, matter has no significance for itself, and an infinite gulf exists between matter (fact) and value; but in process thought all spatially extended actualities are partly self-creative, and in at least that minimal sense have value significance. Matter traditionally has no organic relation with its environment, but in process thought the organic wholes (e.g. living bodies) within which spatially extended actualities exist can both influence them and be influenced by them.

Thus, human (and animal) bodies are spatially extended without being material in the traditional Cartesian/Newtonian sense. If we choose to call their mode of existence "materiality" on the grounds that "all bodies are (spatially) extended," it can only be with the large qualification that even "matter" isn’t what it used to be anymore. The "material" components of human embodiment are indeed spatially extended, as Descartes insisted. There the resemblance ends, for these components are all internally active centers of creative experience existing in a relativistic universe. They are nothing apart from the minimal temporal durations required for their realization, so time is essential to their being. They consist of fleeting discontinuous pulsations of energy which are what they are in part because of real causal influence from the past, while also being organic wholes that are partly free and self-creative. They have at least some minimal experiential and valuational significance, and exist within more extended and complex organic wholes that can have even greater valuational significance. Descartes’ material substances never had it so good.

The primary focus of our present concern is not upon the foregoing modification of "matter" in process thought. Rather, it is upon parallel modifications of "mind." Process thought agrees with Descartes that we are indeed active centers of thought in the broad Cartesian sense which involves activities and feelings of sensation and causal derivation, cognitions, volitions, emotions, etc. Yet, it gives a very different account of their metaphysical status. The existence of the human "stream of consciousness" to which these belong is not denied, as it is by those monistic behaviorisms and materialisms which attempt to avoid Cartesian dualism while still not questioning Cartesian metaphysical analyses of "matter" and "mind." In process thought, the human "stream of consciousness" is just as real as we ordinarily know it to be when we have not thrown metaphysical dust into our own eyes and then complained that we cannot see. The stream of conscious experience and synthetic activity is the dominant society of actual occasions in human (and animal) bodies, being influenced by subordinate organic processes in those bodies, then influencing them in turn in an ongoing dialectic of causality and creativity.

Whitehead was determined to give a plausible explanation of the unity of mind and body, an account of why "No one ever says, Here I am, and I have brought my body with me" (MT 114). The stream of human conscious experience and creative activity (the human mind or soul) has one vitally important property in process thought that it does not have in Cartesian metaphysics: it is spatially (as well as temporally) extended. This does not mean that process thought offers a materialistic theory of mind -- for matter (in the traditional sense) does not even exist, as we have seen. Yet the process alternative resembles materialistic theories of mind, and represents what they might become if they abandoned the now-outmoded Cartesian/Newtonian concept of matter.

The spaciness of mind in process thought is not without its problems, however, and some of these need to be explored. In particular, how big is an occasion (or the society of occasions) of human consciousness? Could we ever perceive it in sensory experience, either directly or with the aid of instruments? How could we know that anything experienced externally is identical with the stream of consciousness as experienced internally?

The Magnitude of Mentality

Whitehead held that all actual occasions have spatial as well as temporal volume or magnitude; and since all do, it follows that those comprising human experience do. He wrote that "every actual entity in the temporal world is to be credited with a spatial volume for its perspective standpoint," (PR 68/105) and that "The actual entity is the enjoyment of a certain quantum of physical time. . . . There is a spatial element in the quantum as well as a temporal element" (PR 283/434). More specifically, with respect to mentality, he wrote that "though mentality is non-spatial, mentality is always a reaction from, and integration with, physical experience which is spatial" (PR 108/165). Thus he clearly held that there is no disembodied mentality, and that even the dominant society of occasions in the human body having the subjective form of consciousness is spatially as well as temporally extended.

If the occasions of the dominant society of human consciousness are spatially extended, we might wonder both where they are and how big they are. Whitehead had answers, though they have not met with universal approval. To say that they are in the brain is obvious enough but not very helpful, for we want to know where they are in the brain. Whitehead’s answer is that they are in the "interstices" of the brain, i.e., in the empty spaces between the brain cells. He wrote:

Needless to say, if the dominant society of human consciousness is small enough to flit through the empty spaces between the brain cells, it must be very small indeed -- too small certainly to be seen by the naked eye. John Cobb has indicated that "Whitehead may have conceived of all actual occasions as microscopic in size" (CNT 818), including those of the dominant occasion(s) (CNT 87). Cobb found Whitehead’s own account of the spaciness of mind to be quite implausible for several reasons, the most convincing being that

Cobb believed that this problem could best be solved by assigning to the dominant occasions of human awareness a much larger spatial volume that would put them in touch with all those diverse portions of the brain from which they seem to be receiving data at any given moment. His view also allows that occasions may include the spatiotemporal regions of subordinate occasions within themselves.

Hartshorne also rejected Whitehead’s account of the magnitude of the occasions of human experience for much the same reasons as Cobb. One of the best expressions of his views on the spaciness of mind is to be found in Reality as Social Process.

Of course, there are difficulties with such a view. If human awareness is of the magnitude of substantial portions of the brain, the question arises as to whether we could ever see it externally or otherwise detect it through scientific instruments. Some things, like atoms and molecules, cannot be seen because they are too small to be seen; but we can perceive them indirectly through electron microscopes and other such instruments. But an extended entity as large as much of the human brain is also large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Could we ever look into a human brain and see the stream of human consciousness residing therein?

When I was a graduate student at Emory University about 29 years ago (Winter, 1961) studying metaphysics with Hartshorne, I put the foregoing question to Hartshorne himself. His answer was negative, much to my surprise. I then asked him if we could ever use any scientific instruments to detect the presence of the stream of human consciousness. Much to my surprise and disappointment, the answer again was negative. We will soon see that more recently he gave a negative answer to the first of these questions in Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. However, his answer seems implausible and evasive once the claim has been advanced that experiencing is macroscopically spacy. Without exception, all the other spatially extended entities in whose existence we are entitled to believe are either directly detectable in sense experience or through instrumental extensions of sense experience. Why should the dominant stream of conscious occasions be the only exception? We seem to be perilously close to Descartes once more! What is the difference between a spatially extended mind as large as a brain that cannot be detected externally and a mind that is not spatially extended at all?

To the foregoing challenge, Whiteheadians might try to reply (1) that in process thought there is another criterion for being perceptible that I have ignored (reiteration of a common characteristic); (2) that the occasions of the personally ordered society of human consciousness are only privately objectifiable solely for later members of that society; and (3) that there are exceptions in process thought to my claim that all the spatially extended entities in which we are entitled to believe are externally perceptible, either directly or indirectly through the use of instruments (more specifically, (a) occasions in "empty space," (b) living occasions, and (c) God).

(1) However, the reiteration of a common characteristic (combined with spaciness) will not successfully differentiate perceptible objects from the stream of human conscious occasions. Consciousness as well as carnality reiterates common characteristics. Both are enduring objects. Whitehead wrote that "We -- as enduring objects with personal order -- objectify the occasions of our own past with peculiar completeness in our immediate present" (PR 161/244). We have desires, thoughts, memories, intentions, emotions, subjective aims, subjective forms, etc. which persist through time and are reiterated in long streams of occasions of conscious selfhood. This is the very essence of the idea of our limited self-identity through time in process thought (see the final paragraph in MT 161). If reiteration of common traits makes spatially extended entities perceptible, then the stream of conscious human experience should be perceptible if it is spatially extended. The criterion of repetition of common characteristics does not imply that subjectivity should be objectified, but together with the claim that conscious occasions are spacy it implies that individual conscious occasions must be objectified so they can be prehended by successor occasions. After all, our conscious thoughts, desires, emotions, etc. do endure through many epochal occasions of experience.

(2) Some Whiteheadians may assume that earlier conscious personal occasions are privately objectified only for later occasions within the same personally ordered society, and not for other occasions in other societies. However, process thought seems to allow no place for such privileged objectification because if an occasion is objectified for one, it is objectified for all (see the Principle of Relativity, PR 22/33). Whitehead’s tiny occasions of human consciousness would have been imperceptible, but not because they were not publicly objectifiable. Rather, they were simply too minute to register; but the brain-sized occasions postulated by Hartshorne. Cobb and Ford could not be imperceptible for this reason. Also, such macroscoptic occasions could not be imperceptible because they are only privately objectified, or because they fail to exemplify common characteristics which are causally transmitted from one occasion to another.

(3) Nevertheless, it may seem that in process thought there are other types of extended but externally undetectable entities; and this may save the day for the spacy but imperceptible occasions of human consciousness.

(a) Whitehead seemed to believe that events in "empty space" were real but imperceptible. He defined such events as "devoid of electrons, or protons, or of any other form of electric charge" (SMW 214). They are too primitive to be waves, much less particles (SMW 214). Indeed, they seem to be mere possibilities, not actualities; for "In this replacement of possibility by actuality, we obtain the distinction between empty and occupied events" (SMW 214). Now, if events in empty space are mere possibilities, they are not only not perceptible; they are not spatially extended; they are not anything. Events in the stream of human consciousness which are actual and supposedly spacy find no support here by analogy for their imperceptibility.

If perchance there is a degree of actuality and spaciness about imperceptible events in empty space after all, then there is another more serious difficulty. The claim that such events exist is not a conceptually necessary truth, and it lacks all empirical status whatsoever. Empirically, it is vacuous, neither verifiable nor falsifiable, meaningless. Why would persons in their right minds want to believe in the existence of such quasi-existents, or non-existents? Surely we cannot believe that spacy but imperceptible events exist in empty space merely because Whitehead said so. If the argument is that events in empty space are required by the metaphysical doctrine of a plenum of events, the plenum doctrine itself is meaningless, neither a necessary truth, nor falsifiable, nor verifiable.

(b) What about living occasions, something closely related to the "empty space, and vulnerable to the foregoing objections to it, since "life is a characteristic of ‘empty space’ and not of space ‘occupied’ by any corpuscular society" (PR 105/161)? The crucial thing about living occasions is that they make possible "the origination of conceptual novelty -- novelty of appetition" (PR 102/156). If White-head regarded living occasions as imperceptible because of their creativity, he should not have done so in light of his claim that creativity is a universal metaphysical category exemplified by every occasion, and his admission that "there is no absolute gap between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ societies" (PR 102/156), that the difference is merely one of degree, not of kind.

Whiteheadians might think that living occasions are spacy but imperceptible because they are too novel, because they fail to exemplify a pattern which persists from moment to moment. However, this is not a satisfactory resolution to the problem. First, it is true that precious peak experiences of maximal creativity are sporadic and unpredictable; but we should remember that in process thought, creativity is a universal metaphysical category exemplified to some degree by all events. If the actualization of novelty accounts for the imperceptibility of mind, all events should be imperceptible.

Next, even peak experiences of maximal creativity have greater duration than this view would allow. Patterns of creativity do persist from moment to moment, else good books and articles would never get written. Working out the implications of a brilliant creative insight requires further creative insights. It takes time to write a good article, and the creativity involved in doing so cannot be so sporadic that it manifests itself for only a tenth of a second every hour or so. Creativity fuses with persisting pattern to get things done in the world. Most important of all, we must remember that our objective is to account metaphysically for the enduring stream of human conscious occasions, not merely for peak periods of creativity. Patterns of consciousness do persist from moment to moment, even if relatively uncreative. I am awake for many hours each day. The sporadic nature of novelty will not explain this; nor will it explain why consciousness is spacy but not externally detectable.

(c) As for God, Whitehead himself probably regarded divinity as both non-spacy and imperceptible (IWM 394-96), an analogy which is immediately and obviously irrelevant for explaining why mind, which is purportedly spacy, is also imperceptible. Most other process theologians have regarded God as spacy, however. Hartshorne (MVG 175-185), Cobb (CNT 192-196) and others have accepted the ideas that the universe is the body of God, and that God’s omnipresence is omnispatiality. If this is the case, then there is a sense in which God is both extended and perceptible. God is perceptible to the extent that the universe is perceptible. Yet, as Hartshorne indicated, the universe as a whole is not given to us "in any clear way" (MVG 175). We see only in part, and God is perceptible only in part if the world is the body of God.

Though incidental to the present topic, I cannot resist the temptation to comment that if the universe is the body of God, this is the best of reasons for believing that though God is spatially extended, he could not be literally (physically) either male or female. The universe, the body of God, though spatial, has no genitals. Enough said! One might still wonder, however, whether God might not be psychologically male, by some metaphorical extension of our cultural stereotype of mental masculinity. According to this stereotype, males are active (God as Actus Purus), females (the world) totally passive. Males are powerful (Omnipotence), females (the world) powerless. Males are rational, knowledgeable (Omniscience); females irrational, emotional. Males are stable, dependable (Divine Unchangeableness); females changeable, fickle. Males are unemotional, insensitive, and "big boys don’t cry" (Divine Impassability); females are emotional, sensitive. Males are independent (Divine Total Self-sufficiency), females dependent. In fact, the God of classical theology is the ultimate male chauvinist beyond the sky! By contrast, the perfection of the androgynous God of process thought consists in an ideal balance of these contrasting traits, not in the total exclusion of the traits this culture traditionally views as feminine, thus luring both human males and females to strive to create themselves in the divine image.

To return to the topic of the spaciness of mind, I suggest that process thought must either give an account of the magnitude, locus, and external detectability of the stream of human consciousness, revert to Cartesianism, or cease believing in consciousness altogether. I hope that the last two alternatives can be avoided. The first cannot, but process thinkers constantly ignore problems about the spaciness of mind. For example, David Griffin has recently written: "And what if the enduring mind is not an unbroken stream of experience but a series of momentary experiental events, each of which occupies (or constitutes) a region that is spatial as well as temporal? Then the chasm between mind and molecules is partially closed" (RS 151). Obviously, Griffin does not tell us which regions mind occupies, how large the regions are, or whether they are externally identifiable. By contrast, Lewis Ford maintains that mind-occasions "pervade the entire region of the brain"; yet he insists that they are imperceptible (PIC 132). I will explore one proposal concerning the spatiality of mind that would address these issues.

If the human stream of occasions of dominating awareness is to be influenced by many regions of the brain at once, and is in turn to exercise control over many such regions, it must be directly in touch (both spatially and temporally) with large portions of the brain. Thus, its extension must be macroscopic and not microscopic. It must be as large as those regions of the brain from which it receives data and over which it exerts an influence. Its size and locus might vary from moment to moment as these requirements are fulfilled. Furthermore, it would be externally detectable if its occasions are identical with the internal synthetic unity of the whole pattern of those externally identifiable patterns of brain wave activity that are known to be associated with consciousness. Such brain wave activity is not visible to the naked eye, but instrumentation can detect it. Some spatially extended things are only indirectly detectable through sophisticated instrumentation.

Of course, there is brain wave activity even when we are asleep. but wakeful (conscious) activity is demonstrably different, as electroencephalographs and scanning devices reveal. The stream of conscious human occasions could be identified only with the latter and not with the former, thus not with all brain wave activity whatsoever. Brain wave activity is both spatial and temporal in nature, and though not directly sensible it is externally detectable by instruments developed and used in physiological psychology. Unlike the brain cells themselves, which are there through thick and thin as supporting environment, those brain wave activities which can be correlated with consciousness are present only when the latter is present and absent when the latter is absent.

If the identification of the stream of conscious human occasions with the synthetic unity of those brain waves known to be correlated with human wakeful awareness is correct, there will be two ways to know it -- a direct and immediate way, and an external way. Whitehead wrote of the direct and immediate way when he affirmed that "in the case of the higher animals there is central direction, which suggests that in their case each animal body harbors a living person, or living persons. Our own self-consciousness is direct awareness of ourselves as such persons" (PR 107/164).

Indirectly, other persons could (literally) find us with electroencephalographs and scanning devices if the whole pattern of brain wave activity is the external manifestation of consciousness. On this view, direct self-consciousness is what consciousness-indicative brain wave activity looks like from the inside. The latter is what the former looks like from an external perspective.

Objections to the foregoing proposal may take many forms. I will take note of three of the most serious difficulties. (1) First, it may be objected that brain wave activity is constituted by a vast plurality of electromagnetic events, whereas consciousness is an organic unity. (2) Next, since Whitehead denied that the spatiotemporal region of one occasion could include that of another, this would seem to exclude the possibility that the total pattern of brain waves is itself a unified series of events that includes the subordinate electromagnetic occurrences in the waves themselves. (3) Finally, even if there is a one-to-one correlation between the presence of consciousness and the presence of certain brain wave patterns, this establishes at most a one-to-one correlation, not an identity.

(1) The unity/plurality problem doubtless underlies Hartshorne’s refusal to equate consciousness with external detectability. All perceptual objects are divisible into pluralities of cellular and/or atomic and sub-atomic structures, but the occasions of consciousness have synthetic unity. Hartshorne insists repeatedly that the stream of consciousness cannot be identical with brain cells (or their multifarious firings, presumably), because there are billions of these, whereas consciousness is one. For example, he argues that

Thus, the objection is that a conscious occasion could not be identical with brain cells since it is one and they are many. It also could not be identical with brain waves for the same reason.

There may be no good reply to this objection. It is possible, however, that things which appear externally as pluralities could appear internally to themselves as unities, or that a whole region that includes lesser pluralities is itself a unity. The two modes of spatial extension discussed by Hartshorne as follows may be nothing more than two (external and internal) perspectives on one mode.

Hartshorne thus maintains that all objects given to us in sensation are pluralities that are composed of spacy but imperceptible unities. Some such unities, our present selves, may be directly experienced; and these experiences include a sense of our own spaciness. However, Hartshorne’s view that no spatially extended mental unities as such could appear externally to others in any way, much less as a unity, is highly implausible because it looks suspiciously like either Cartesianism or privileged objectification in disguise. If, contrary to Hartshorne, a spatially extended entity which appears externally as including a plurality can both be and appear to itself as a unity, this does not commit us to the view that all pluralities are really unities. Hartshorne’s distinction between aggregates which lack coordinated function and individuals which exemplify it is valid, but not because the former are externally perceptible and the latter are not. Rather, individuals directly experience their unity and manifest it to others in a variety of ways. whereas aggregates (trees, rocks) do not do either. Both might occupy spatially divisible and thus plural volumes.

(2) Our second difficulty is that Whitehead’s denial of the regional inclusion of small events by large events seems to exclude the possibility that the pattern of brain waves as a whole identifies mind-events that include the subordinate electromagnetic occurrences in the waves themselves. We have seen that Cobb found it necessary to reject Whitehead’s view in favor of a theory of regional inclusion if mind events are to interact with broad areas of the brain. Lewis Ford, taking account of the doctrine that contemporaries cannot interact, further develops the view that "there might be a succession of temporally diverse occasions within a single inclusive occasion" (PIC 130), with lesser occasions "prehending their immediate predecessors within the inclusive occasion," while being included within the becoming of the more inclusive occasion (PIC 131). Now, my problem is whether the pattern of brain waves as a whole could consist of more inclusive occasions including lesser occasions. It seems to me that it could, and if so it would be both spacy and in principle perceptible indirectly through instruments.

(3) Establishing metaphysical identity, rather than mere correlation, is a problem for any position which attempts to analyze experience from both an internal and an external perspective. Perhaps there is no final solution to this problem other than fiat, but one is entitled to hypothesize identity if problems may thereby be solved which otherwise have no solution. A plausible theory of the identity of the stream of conscious human occasions with something having spatial extension must satisfy the following conditions, which are satisfied by the postulate of the identity of the stream of consciousness with certain brain wave processes.

Even if brain waves do not adequately fulfill these six conditions, process thinkers are hereby challenged to do better if they can, for something should fulfill these conditions. No philosopher not thoroughly imbued in process thought will ever believe the process claim that a prolonged series of conscious brain-sized occasions exists but that it could never be detected by perception or instruments. I have tried to show that such a belief is indefensible even on process grounds. Process philosophers must either become Cartesians and reject the doctrine of the spaciness of mind, or find an effective way of reinterpreting the epochal theory to permit longer-lasting conscious occasions, or they must reject the doctrine of the external imperceptibility of mind. I hope they will do the latter.

References

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1970.

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

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

MVG -- Charles Hartshorne. Mans Vision of God. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964.

PIC -- Process in Context: Essays in Post -- Whiteheadian Perspectives. Ed. Ernest Wolf-Gazo. Bern/Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 1988.

PWP -- Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover Publications, 1955.

RS -- The Reenchantment of Science. Ed. David Ray Griffin. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988.

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

In reading Elizabeth M. Kraus’s The Metaphysics of Experience, A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, I was particularly disappointed by her concluding chapter on "God and the World," for there it becomes apparent that she has been reading Whitehead’s remarks on theological topics through the jaundiced eyes of Boethius, St. Thomas Aquinas, and classical theology. After rejecting Hartshorne’s temporalistic modification of Whitehead’s theology, for reasons we shall soon examine, Kraus states her own position on God’s relation to temporality as follows:

By what strange logic does Kraus manage to make Whitehead come out sounding like Boethius? Her position is that even in his consequent nature, God coexists simultaneously and changelessly with the entire past, present, and future of every occasion in every cosmic epoch. Her rationale for such a view seems to rest upon (1) a highly questionable interpretation of one text in Process an Reality and the claims (2) that only such a view is compatible with human freedom and (3) that only such a view is compatible with human faith. I think that she is mistaken on all three counts.

(1) On page 163, in discussing the scope of the divine actual world, Kraus tells us that "some Whiteheadian scholars, notably Charles Hartshorne, have rejected Whitehead’s assertion that God is ‘always in concrescence and never in the past’ (PR 47) and replaced it with an interpretation of God as a personal order of divine occasions." On page 169 she paraphrases this text to mean "the divine concrescence is never in the past of any occasion," which in turn is construed to mean that all times are copresent in the divine consequent nature. This excludes all real process or succession in the divine experience. The greatest difficulty with this construction is that it is clearly incompatible with the many passages in which Whitehead clearly affirms such process and "novel advance" in the consequent nature. For example, God’s consequent nature "evolves in its relationship to the evolving world without derogation to the eternal completion of its primordial conceptual nature" (PR 19) and "is always immediate, always many, always one, always with novel advance, moving onward and never perishing" (PR 525 -- italics mine). Whitehead insisted that "this final phase of passage in God’s nature is ever enlarging itself" (PR 530 -- italics mine), that it is "an unresting advance beyond itself" (PR 531 -- italics mine), that "the actuality of God must also be understood as a multiplicity of actual components in process of creation (PR 531 -- italics mine) and that "in every respect God and the World move conversely to each other in respect to their process" (PR 529 -- italics mine).

Such affirmations of endless development in the divine consequent nature cannot be reconciled with Kraus’s interpretation of God as eternally complete in every respect, and another interpretation of God’s being always in concrescence and never in the past" is called for. Instead of meaning that all times are copresent with God, if Whitehead’s consistency is to be preserved, this must mean simply that God absorbs past events of the world and all elements of his own antecedent activity and experience into his consequent nature without losing anything of them. Even after the events of the world perish for themselves, they do not perish for God. To be "past" in physical time is to have perished, but neither the world as objectively immortalized in God nor anything else in the divine nature and experience is ever "in the past" in this sense. "Why should there not be novelty without loss of this direct unison of immediacy among things? In the temporal world, it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction. But there is no reason, of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this should be the whole story" (PR 517). God’s relation to the world is one in which "succession does not mean loss of immediate unison" (PR 531). This clearly affirms succession in God but denies loss and perishing. God is "never in the past" in the sense in which being in the past involves loss and perishing, but there is real process in God, nevertheless, which enables Whitehead to affirm with perfect consistency that "neither God, nor the World, reaches static completion" (PR 529).

That there is real succession in God is compatible with there being no loss, but unending novel advance in God is precisely what classical theology has denied in conceiving of God’s eternity as the simultaneity of the past, present, and future of all epochal universes all at once in God. The classical position has always had the net effect of making time a human illusion, something which adequate knowledge would transcend and overcome. Kraus herself makes just such a move, as she writes:

The view that the future is incomplete and indeterminate only from our finite perspective whereas it is complete and determinate from the divine perspective is just the view which process theology rejects rather than affirms, though there may be more than one way of developing an alternative metaphysic available to process thinkers. Process thinkers should not at any rate be trapped into denying the reality of time from any actual point of view, for as that great process thinker Benjamin Franklin once pointed out, time is "the stuff life is made of."

(2) Amazingly enough, Kraus maintains that only the "tota simul" in God is compatible with human freedom. Needless to say, the mainstream of process thought has insisted instead that it is the "block universe" of classical theology which is irreconcilable with human freedom. Kraus supports her view by producing an argument against what she apparently takes to be the only alternative position open to Whiteheadians, the "interpretation of God as a personal order of divine occasions" of Charles Hartshorne (p. 163). Her argument against this position, as best I can discern and summarize it, is that each new divine occasion would in turn be irresistibly objectified or "superjected" (she uses this as a verb) back into the world, which would "bind the present irrevocably to the past, to sacrifice spontaneity and autonomy at the altar of necessity" (p. 164). This deterministic outcome of Hartshorne’s theology is supposedly entailed by "the principle of relativity" (p. 163). I must confess that I have never seen such an abuse of the principle of relativity! This principle, according to which "it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’" (PR 33), is never allowed by Whitehead to have deterministic implications precisely because there are all sorts of degrees of relevance of one actual occasion to another. Whitehead pointed out in discussing the principle of relativity that "according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity" (PR 79). Kraus’s argument simply fails to allow for degrees of relevance and for negligible relevance.

(3) Kraus also insists that only a "tota simul" in God is compatible with faith, arguing much as she did above that the Hartshornean alternative is by the principle of relativity irreconcilable with faith as well as freedom -- with free faith, that is. (Calvinists would tremble at the very thought of such.) Her discussion here is complicated by its relation to a view of how God redeems the world: "To be actual, God must take on a ‘body’ and in so doing, redeem: i.e. he must have physical feelings of the totality of each and all finite achievements, integrating them into the ongoing unity of his consequent nature" (p. 163). Kraus’s complaint about Hartshornean theology is that on this view "God would be compelled to perform successive redemptive acts" (p. 163) which would in turn be objectified back into the world.

Aside from the fact that the principle of relativity entails no such conclusions, it should also be observed that Kraus’s position here entails a strange conflation of divine and human subjectivities. If our lives are objectively immortal in God, as they are on Whitehead’s view, we really don’t have the slightest bit of choice about the matter. There we are, embalmed forever, whether we like it or not. Even if we did make a choice about it, that choice would itself be objectively immortal in the divine subjectivity is not a choice open to human subjectivity. Believing that, having faith that, or accepting that we are so immortal is within our province, however. There is no causal or logical connection, thanks to degrees of relativity, between being objectively immortal and believing or accepting that we are so. If there were, we would all accept and believe it, whereas the only people in the world that I have ever met who actually do believe it are a handful of process theologians!

I conclude therefore that Kraus is quite unjustified when she writes that

Her position is totally irreconcilable with the many texts in which Whitehead suggests that there is real succession and process in God himself. This is most obvious in her own discussion of the text "God is fluent" (PR 528), which she interprets to mean that "the divine consequent nature acquires fluency as it ever expands in its ongoing absorption of finite achievement" (p. 170). No meaning can possibly be given to "ever expands" and "ongoing" if the consequent nature is understood to be a "tota simul." She recognizes the "paradox" involved in the thought that something is "always complete yet always growing" (p. 170), which she claims "results from the incapacity of the human mind to conceive non-temporal sequence" (p. 170). This is like saying that although there are round squares, the "paradox" involved in the thought that "something is a round square" results from the incapacity of the human mind to conceive round squareness! We just can’t let her get away with that. One of the greatest virtues of process theology has been its intense effort to eliminate such blatant self-contradiction in theology, and it is much less than helpful to start playing the same old fun and games all over again.

Having had both Charles Hartshorne and John B. Cobb, Jr. as teachers at Emory University, I have been for many years intrigued and even convinced by the Whitehead-Hartshorne-Cobb thesis that the human "soul" is the dominant society of actual occasions in the human body. However, I have finally come to share the discontent expressed by such critics of this theory as Edward Pols (WM), Frank Kirkpatrick (PS 3:15-26), Peter Bertocci (PS 2:216-21), and others. I wish in this essay to give expression to my discontent in a slightly different way from the way in which they have formulated theirs.

The problem which I wish to explore may be stated as follows: Is the human self, i.e., the stream of human awareness of consciousness, an actual entity, or is it a society of actual occasions? Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Cobb doubtless conceive of it as a society of actual occasions. However, Whitehead and William Christian both seem to believe in the existence of at least one self, having a temporal or consequent nature -- that of God, which is an actual entity, but which is not just one actual occasion or even one society of actual occasions having an infinite number of members. My problem is, could there be more than one temporal actual entity in existence which is neither an actual occasion or a society of actual occasions, or is God the only one? This question cannot be answered very well until we explore further what Whitehead and Christian might have had in mind in insisting that God is an actual entity.

Whitehead’s insistence that God is not to be treated as an exception to (at least some of) our metaphysical categories or principles has never meant for him or his interpreters that there were no important differences between God and other created actual entities. Yet, most of the obvious differences between God and created entities in the world are not relevant to understanding what is meant in claiming that God is an actual entity rather than a society of actual occasions, on the supposed analogy with human souls. Most of the differences, between human and divine souls which might be cited fail to explain why God cannot be thought of as a society of actual occasions rather than an actual entity. For example, human souls come into existence and pass away (are born and die), whereas God is everlasting and does not perish. But this does not explain why God is not a society of actual occasions, for he could be a society with an inexhaustably infinite, rather than a finite, number of members. Again, it may be true that human experience originates with the physical pole, whereas the divine experience originates with the primordial mental pole, but this in itself does nothing to require us to believe that our experience of real change is atomized into a succession of distinct but causally connected occasions, whereas God’s experience is not so atomized. Again, God has a nonderivative subjective aim, whereas every other actual entity has a subjective aim which is derived from God. Yet, this in itself does nothing to explain why God’s experience is not atomized into actual occasions, each of which necessarily reiterates the divine subjective aim at harmonious intensifications of experience. Actually, none of these important differences between God and the world are really incompatible with his being a society of actual occasions or require that he be an actual entity. Then what important difference between God and other actual entities is required?

The main point of thinking about God as an actual entity instead of a society of actual occasions is that the epochal theory of time just does not apply to God at all. I am raising the question whether it fails to apply to man as well. God is an actual entity and not a society of actual occasions because his temporal experience is not atomized into occasions at all, and I am wondering if human experience is really so atomized.

Before discussing human experience in any detail, we must first explore further the claims that the epochal theory of time does not apply to God at all. We must be clear first of all that this claim does not entail the consequence that some notion of temporality as involving sequential change or development does not apply to God at all. Whitehead held that the primordial nature of God is nontemporal but that the consequent nature is temporal in some sense. In the second place, we must be clear that the notion of God’s temporality as nonepochal does not entail the classical supernaturalistic view that God prehends the whole of time, past, present, and future, "all at once" in a single totum simul. God prehends the world only as it develops, but not in advance. Whitehead tells us that God’s consequent nature "evolves in its relationship to the evolving world" (PR 19). God’s "tenderness is directed towards each actual occasion, as it arises" (PR 161). He "shares with every new creation its actual world" (PR 523). It is true that the world is fluent, but it is equally true to say that "God is fluent" (PR 528). Temporality, in the sense of sequential change, is of the very essence of God’s consequent nature, for "his derivative nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world" (PR 523).

William Christian never takes the doctrine that God is an actual entity to mean that there is no sequential change in God’s consequent nature. What it does mean is that in Cod’s consequent nature concrescence is continuous rather than discontinuous. The idea of continuous concrescense in the divine consequent nature is expressed in the following passages from Christian’s An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics:

Whitehead himself seemed to express a doctrine of divine continuous concrescence when he wrote that God is "always in concrescence and never in the past" (PR 47) and that in God’s nature "succession does not mean loss of immediate unison" (PR 531). What exactly is the difference between the continuous concrescence which Whitehead and Christian seem to attribute to God and the discontinuous concrescence which they attribute to entities within the world? To answer this question adequately, we must recall that the epochal or atomic theory of time had its origin in Whitehead’s reflections on the phenomena of quantum physics (SMW 219f.) and that by some process of "descriptive generalization" it was extended to cover the "human soul" as well as photons, electrons, protons, etc. Microscopic pulsations of energy which constitute the subject matter of quantum physics do seem to exist discontinuously, but to say this is to acknowledge that between any two successive occasions at this microscopic level there is a gap during which nothing exists. The occasions do not touch or overlap. The real difference between an actual entity which concresces continuously and a society of actual entities which concresce discontinuously is that the experiences and activities of the former are not interrupted, whereas the experiences and activities of the latter are interrupted. There are short intervals or gaps during which the latter does not exist. Whitehead calls attention to the gaps between microscopic quantum events when he writes:

If real temporal change at the microscopic level of quantum phenomena does occur discontinuously, does it follow inevitably that real temporal change at every level of existence is also atomic in its structure? Whitehead generalized, perhaps over-hastily, that all temporal change within the created world has this structure, including changes within the stream of human experience and activity. It is very significant, however, that he did not extend his generalization of the atomic structure of time all the way to God. How then did Whitehead himself view his atomic theory of time? Did he view it as a cosmological theory of time, or as a metaphysical theory of time? If we accept Hartshorne’s distinction between cosmological and metaphysical theories, the former applying only to entities in our (or at least some) given cosmic epoch and the latter applying to entities in all possible worlds, then it seems that the most that can be claimed for the epochal theory of time is that it is a cosmological theory, not a metaphysical theory. Whitehead applies it to all actual entities in our cosmic epoch, but not to all actual entities whatsoever, i.e., not to God. Furthermore, when he presented the theory at the end of his chapter on "The Quantum Theory" in Science and the Modern World, he clearly offered it as an empirical theory, subject to confirmation or disconfirmation by experience. He wrote:

There is no evidence that Whitehead later revised his views on this question and came to regard the epochal theory of time as a metaphysical theory, for even in Process and Reality he clearly exempts God from its application. There are no gaps in God’s existence. He does not discontinuously flash in and out of existence, as do objects composed of societies of actual occasions. God is always there continuously assimilating data coming to him from the world and continuously acting upon the world. God does not exist in spurts, flashes, squirts, drops, or buds. He is a continuously concrescing actual entity. There are no gaps, however small, during which God does not exist.

Once we realize that even for Whitehead himself, the epochal theory of time was not a metaphysically necessary theory of time, being at best true for entities within our given cosmic epoch or other epochs like ours in this contingent respect, the door is wide open for a reexamination of the question of whether it applies to all entities within our own epoch or merely to some of them. The epochal theory of time may not be even a cosmological theory applicable to all entities within our epoch. It may be merely a limited scientific theory applicable only to a limited number of entities within our epoch. It does seem to apply to the phenomena of quantum physics, but does it really apply to the stream of human experience and activity? Does the analogy with quantum phenomena hold here, or is it more appropriate to conceive of the human "soul" as a continuously concrescing actual entity, by analogy with God?

First of all, we must clearly understand that Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb, and even Christian have accepted the claim that the analogy with physics instead of theology does hold. To quote Christian, as one example,

I wish to suggest that the theory of human soulhood accepted by Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb, and Christian is mistaken. It is my belief that human personality differs from electrons, but not from God, "not in degree but in kind." Without denying any of the significant differences between God and the human soul which were sketched in the third paragraph of this article, it nevertheless seems to me that it is more in accord with the "brute facts," and less of an instance of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," to think of the stream of human experience and activity on the model of continuous concrescence rather than on the model of discontinuous pulsations. Now let me further explain and defend this radical departure from the Whiteheadian theory of the human soul.

Granted that there are many important differences between God and the human soul, there are nevertheless many important similarities. For present purposes, let us note that a continuously concrescing actual entity nevertheless shares all the generic defining characteristics of an actual entity. Whitehead recognizes two species of actual entities, God and actual occasions. The latter exist discontinuously, the former continuously; but they both exemplify and are not exceptions to the generic characteristics of an actual entity. In God’s case at least, we see that it is possible for a continuously concrescing actual entity to be an actual entity, to have continuous immediacy of self-enjoyment, to have continuous significance for itself, to have continuous subjective aims, continuous subjective forms, and continuous satisfactions, to synthesize data continuously (concresce), to be continuously causa sui or self-creative (at least in part), and so on -- without sputtering in and out of existence every fraction of a second. My suggestion is that the human soul also is an actual entity in precisely the same sense. Human experience and self-activity is the self-experience of a continuously existing acting entity with continuous immediacy of self enjoyment, significance for itself, subjective aims, subjective forms, satisfactions, synthetic experiencing, and self-creativity. We exist and do our thing without sputtering in and out of existence every fraction of a second.

In dealing with the stream of human experience and activity, a distinction is called for which is roughly analogous to the distinction between the primordial and consequent natures of God. Unlike God, our primordial self "slumbers and sleeps" and is not necessary, eternal, or nontemporal. Nevertheless, it seems to exist and to consist of certain continuously enduring powers to act and the continuously enduring exercise of those powers during our wakeful moments. This "agency" aspect of selfhood consists of those powers to think, feel, choose, synthesize multifarious causal and sensory data into unified experience, etc. This self as primordial agent is not a Cartesian thinking substance or a Kantian noumenal ego outside of all space and time which underlies such continuing activities. The difference from Whitehead is that they continue rather than are recreated every tenth of a second or so. Somewhere between Kant and Whitehead, a viable theory of human selfhood must be found. The primordial human self is in space-time, contrary to Descartes and Kant; but it also has a continuous existence, contrary to Whitehead. As human agency persists, the self is one, but there is also a sense in which the self is many and consequent. The consequent self consists of the specific thoughts, emotions, feelings, choices, sensations, and experiences entertained by the enduring self from moment to moment. It is the concrete totality of the activities plus their objects at any given moment or during any given period of time. Any given duration which is to count as such a moment is an abstraction from the continuous flow, however.

It seems to me that this theory of human selfhood is the one which is best confirmed by experience and philosophical reflection and that the theory of discontinuous human experience is the one which really confronts us with "high abstractions." The brand new, atomically existing, subjects or selves appearing every tenth of a second or so with which the orthodox Whiteheadians’ confront us are the empty abstractions from the continuous flow of human experience and activity. They are the ones who commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." Some of them come very close to conceding that concrete human experience fails to confirm the theory that we flash in and out of existence every fraction of a second. Hartshorne, for example, first acknowledges that it is possible to be a "process philosopher" who "takes time seriously" without subscribing to the epochal theory of time. He then further acknowledges that such process thinkers as Peirce, Bergson, Dewey, and others are convinced that experience confirms the theory of the continuity of human experience. In reply to the view that any assignment of number to human events during a certain period of time is arbitrary, he explains:

Hartshorne’s "non-empirical case" against the view of the continuity of time as humanly experienced consists in the following. First of all, he points out quite correctly that Bergson’s claim that events "interpenetrate" is much too simple minded -- "[p]ast states may penetrate into present ones, but never present ones into past" (CSPM 192). Next, in reply to the refinement that this one way penetration is incompatible with discreteness, Hartshorne points out, again correctly, that continuity in the sense of "intrinsic connectedness" is not the same thing as a mathematical continuum. He then argues that the infinity of mathematical continuity applies only to what is possible, never to what is actual (CSPM 193). Actual time, as Whitehead maintained, is atomized -- only the potential subdivisions of time are infinite. This issue does need more examination. It is not strictly true for Whitehead or for Hartshorne that "[c] ontinuity concerns what is potential; whereas actuality is incurably atomic" (PR 95). For Whitehead, God’s actualized consequent nature exists continuously, and it is simply false to make the unrestricted claim that "actuality is incurably atomic." God is not a society of atomic (i.e., discontinuous) actual occasions. For Hartshorne, the infinite does not apply merely to the potential. Infinity applies to the actuality of God, who has not been merely finitely creative, but who has been infinitely creative through an infinity of past eons of time. Hartshorne acknowledges that this is a serious problem which he does not know how to solve (CSPM 63, 65, 125, 235). I suggest that solving it requires abandoning the view that the concepts of continuity and infinity apply only to the realm of the potential and not to the actual. But if this move is made, Hartshorne loses one significant "non-empirical" objection to the theory of humanly experienced time as a continuum. Even the theory that God is a society of actual occasions will not help Hartshorne avoid the doctrine of an actualized infinity. If the past is infinite, and if God’s present occasion perfectly prehends the past, then God’s present occasion will be an actualized infinity; and furthermore, there will actually be an infinite number of such infinitely rich members of God’s society of actual occasions.

When he finally confronts the empirical question of the continuity of human experience, Hartshorne argues that human experience is vague and that for this reason it cannot discriminate the atoms of which it is composed. Human experience is not really given as continuous -- it is merely not given as discrete (CSPM 194). The problem here is, does not this admission concede far too much, especially when conjoined with the consideration that it is also possible to make a strong "non-empirical case" against the epochal theory of time? I shall not attempt to develop this case here in detail, but I would like to end my discussion by outlining what I believe to be some of the important elements of this case. All of this put together, I think, adds up to the view that we don’t notice the gaps because they just are not there to be noticed.

(1) First, the epochal theory of time must be given up because the doctrine of the successive. i.e., "earlier" and ‘later," but nevertheless coexisting, phases in the internal development of an actual occasion is utterly unintelligible, and even perhaps outright self-contradictory. There are passages in Whitehead in which the priority and posteriority of these phases to others involves succession and clearly has a temporal import (PR 108, 227f, 323, 335, 433f) and other passages in which such succession and temporal import is denied (PR 107, 434). These passages contradict one another. If the denial of temporal import for the "first, middle, and final" phases of the becoming of an actual occasion is accepted, we are confronted with the dubious notion of a becoming in which everything happens all at once. And this notion of becoming is not made more intelligible by labeling it "genetic" succession as opposed to "temporal" or "logical" succession, as Whitehead, Christian, and Cobb try to do.

(2) Experience fails to confirm the doctrine of the "phases" in the development of an actual occasion. Talk about a primary phase in which data and subjective aims are received, a later (but not temporally later) phase in which self-creative assimilation of data and selection among possibilities occurs, and a final phase in which absolute completeness of attainment is achieved before perishing is itself a "high abstraction" which commits the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" for the simple reason that nothing in concrete human experience corresponds to all this. This becomes patently obvious when we realize that these "phases" all are supposed to occur together all at once rather than sequentially and that the whole process is supposed to repeat itself many times each second.

(3) The "orthodox" Whiteheadians all seem to accept the suggestion that the human actual occasion enjoys a "specious present" which lasts for about a tenth of a second (by clock time). They have never addressed themselves to the question of how long the gap is between occasions. To say that events A and B exist discontinuously is to say that there is a short interval between them during which nothing exists. How long between occasions are we not in existence? And how do we test the answer which we give to this question? Without an answer, the theory is at best incomplete and the evidence for it inconclusive.

(4) The dilemma is, either there is a gap between occasions, or there is not. If there is a gap between occasions, if occasions are "divided from each other" (PR 96), then it would appear that a completely perished Occasion could not function causally to present data to its successor. Such a difficulty has prompted Christian to develop the theory that Cod is the ground of the givenness of the past since he continuously exists to bridge all such gaps. Donald Sherburne has correctly argued that this will not work, since there is no divine prehension of contemporaries and since the same gap exists between an occasion in the world and God as between two occasions within the world. The epochal theory of time actually seems to make it impossible for Cod to know the world and thus creates more problems for theology than it solves. Better in my opinion to give up the epochal theory of time than to give up God! Better God without Whitehead than Whitehead without God!

On the other hand, if there are no gaps between occasions, if occasions do partly overlap, then the atomic theory of time has been abandoned. There are no discrete events. Time is a continuous flow. When Donald Sherburne offers the theory that "the past contiguous occasion is still actual, is still its own ground, as the concrescing occasion initiates its primary phase" (PPCT 322), he should be fully aware of the fact that he is abandoning the epochal theory of time and opting for time as a continuous flow. At the same time he is also opting for the prehension of contemporaries (i.e., coexisting events), since occasion A still exists when it is prehended by occasion B.³ There are no gaps to be bridged between occasions, and an occasion does not perish before it presents its data to its successor.

(5) It seems to me that the Hartshorne-Cobb doctrine that God is a society of actual occasions can be collapsed into the doctrine that God is a continuously concrescing actual entity in the following way. If the human specious present is about a tenth of a second long, then how long is the divine specious present? Hartshorne and Cobb have agreed that the divine specious present must be much shorter than ours, if God is to be present at the beginning of each worldly occasion to present it with a subjective aim and at the end of each worldly occasion to receive it as objectively immortal into himself. The problem is, how short? (Also, how long are the intervals between divine occasions)? John R. Baker has recently shown that in a universe containing entities with twenty-four different specious presents, God would have to have "2,042,042 occasions of experience per second" (PS 2:207). We may project that in a much more complex universe (such as ours?) God’s actual occasions would have to be infinitely dense! But an entity with infinitely dense actual occasions is a continuum! Such a God would simply be a continuously concrescing actual entity!

I am sure that there are other important objections to the epochal theory of time, but this will do for now. Let me say that I fully realize that all this involves a radical departure from orthodox Whiteheadianism, but I do not regard that as an objection, since I am offering the proposal that such a radical departure is precisely what is called for.

References

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. La Salle: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1970.

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

PPCT -- Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves, eds. Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1971.

WM -- Edward Pols. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1907.

Notes:

1 It is not my purpose here to discuss Christian’s doctrine that God is the ground of the givenness of the past, which was paramount for him as he wrote this paragraph. My point is that a doctrine of continuous concrescence is also developed here.

2 I regard myself as an unorthodox Whiteheadian.

3 I am indebted to my student, Mrs. Sharon Carter, for pointing this out to me.

In "A Whiteheadian Christology" John Cobb suggests that the classical problem for Christian theology remains "to explain how we can intelligibly affirm the unique presence of God in Jesus in such a way as to avoid detracting from his humanity and yet explain his strange authority" (PPCT 383). Our concern will be whether we can intelligibly affirm Cobb’s Whiteheadian Christology to be a satisfactory resolution of this classical problem by examining critically what of our own humanity and the humanity of Jesus is allegedly opened by Cobb in his attempt to achieve that end.

Cobb fashions what he views as two distinct though related problems. First, there is the general problem of accounting for God’s presence in any person without displacing some aspect of that person’s humanity. Secondly, there is the special problem of accounting for God’s unique presence in Jesus (PPCT 383, 385). He works toward the resolution of these two problems through an amplification of the Whiteheadian notion that the presence within a presently concrescing actual occasion of a contiguously related occasion in its past does not necessarily conflict with the self-determination of the newly concrescing occasion. His task, therefore, is twofold: (1) to show how this mode of presence of a contiguously related past actual occasion within a presently concrescing occasion is applicable to the relation between God and man and (2) to show how on this basis one can proceed to explain the possibility of God’s differing presence from person to person so as to account satisfactorily for his unique presence in Jesus (PPCT 385).

I

In "A Whiteheadian Christology," as in his other publications, Cobb suggests that we achieve

Since "the mode of presence of one occasion in another is as prehended datum" and since God too is best understood as a prehended datum, God is therefore present in actual occasions in the way in which prehended data generally are present" (PPCT 385).

Elsewhere Cobb is careful to specify that both God and man are best characterized as living persons consisting respectively of societies of actual occasions (CNT 188, 192).¹ In the present context, consequently, it is clear that we are to understand God to be present in man in the same manner in which one actual occasion is present within another and that this presence concerns the aims at the fulfillment of a concrescing occasion in a living person by the occasions or "prehended data" in its past.

In the case of a newly concrescing actual occasion in a living person the aims at its fulfillment from occasions in its past are received through four possible routes of inheritance: (1) from occasions residing in the same living person; (2) from occasions residing in some other living person; (3) from occasions residing in the same body in which it presently is the predominant or chief participant; and (4) from God’s special aims for that occasion (CNT 234). These routes of inheritance, however, often present conflicting aims for a newly concrescing occasion. Cobb simplifies this conflict in suggesting that the inheritance received from God is far and away the most significant. Indeed, it outranks the possibilities received through all the other routes of inheritance in at least two respects: (1) the particular region to be inhabited by a newly concrescing occasion in a living person and the sort of satisfaction at which it is aimed initially are granted exclusively through the route of inheritance from God (CNT 153f., 183; PPCT 387)² and (2) the aim from God is by far the most ideal and relevant of all the aims received by a newly concrescing occasion (CNT 154). For Cobb, therefore, the conflict among these respective aims for a newly concrescing occasion is reducible finally to a conflict between the aim from God and the aims from all the other actual occasions in its past. Thus, should a person adapt the possibilities granted him in such a way as to make the aim at his fulfillment from God dominant, the significance of all the remaining aims must be reduced correspondingly. Similarly, should a person adapt the possibilities granted him in such a way as to make these other aims dominant, the significance of the aim from God must be reduced correspondingly (CNT 234, 248). We will return to this matter momentarily.

II

God, consequently, is but one of a number of prehended data available to a concrescing occasion and is present within such occasions in living persons in generally the same way in which all other prehended data are present. This similarity between God and the other prehended data, however, is not thoroughgoing and resembles the relations between actual occasions, we must recall, only "in most respects" (PPCT 385). Indeed, because God outstrips in importance all other prehended data available to a newly concrescing occasion, it is not enough merely to affirm that God’s presence can be satisfactorily explained as generally the same as the presence of other prehended data. This very exception which, as Cobb acknowledges, distinguishes God from all other prehended data requires additional consideration of how God can be present in persons so influentially without displacing any aspect of their humanity or freedom and independence as self-determining subjects. There is also, of course, the related question of how God is able to vary his presence from person to person so as to account satisfactorily for his unique presence in Jesus.

Cobb takes up these matters with the suggestion that within the relationship between two contiguously related actual occasions and, correspondingly, within a relationship between persons, there are two variables which together explain how God can be present in persons without jeopardizing their freedom and independence as self-determining subjects. In the case of two contiguously related actual occasions, one variable concerns the aim which the past occasion entertains for the fulfillment of the presently concrescing occasion. This aim at the fulfillment of the new occasion is highly variable in that it is always tailored to the unique possibilities which the past occasion poses for the new occasion within the framework of this specific relationship. The other variable has to do with the response of the concrescing occasion to this aim at its satisfaction by the occasion in its immediate past. This response is also highly variable, and because it can be either minimized or maximized it in turn is always tailored to the unique possibilities which the concrescing occasion entertains for its own self-actualization (PPCT 386-88).³

It is no different in a relationship between living persons, and in this regard we are concerned with what transpires in the relationship between God and man. Consequently, just as an actual occasion in the immediate past influences a newly concrescing occasion through its aim at fulfillment for it, God likewise influences individual persons through the particular propositions or aims at fulfillment which he entertains for them in each moment of experience (PPCT 386f.). It also follows that because there are no two persons whose life situations are identical, God’s presence in different persons is infinitely variable. The ideal aim which he entertains for the initial aim of each actual occasion in a living person accounts for the varying determination of his initiative or presence from person to person, and it is always uniquely tailored to the most relevant possibilities at work within the life situation of each individual person (CNT 154; PPCT 388).

Similarly, just as the newly concrescing occasion is able either to maximize or to minimize the influence of past occasions upon it, man is able either to maximize or to minimize God’s influence upon him. This means, of course, that the extent to which any individual person actually achieves God’s ideal aim for him varies considerably. Man’s response to God’s initiative on his behalf, therefore, is characterized by just as much variation as is the presence of that initiative within him in the first place, for he is constantly accommodating the divine initiative to the specific possibilities which he entertains finally for his own self-actualization (PPCT 388).

In this manner, Cobb suggests, God is able to be present within individual persons without displacing any aspect of their humanity. While God and man can be characterized respectively by postures of mutual interdependence, both are likewise characterized as retaining throughout their respective independence and autonomy as self-determining subjects. If we are to evaluate the adequacy of Cobb’s concept of the differences accounting for God’s varying and unique presence in individual persons generally and his unparalleled presence in Jesus more specifically, however, we must examine more carefully his understanding of the manner in which persons are able to minimize and/or maximize God’s influence upon them and determine how this applies to Jesus as a special case.

III

We have seen that there are two conflicting aims at the fulfillment of a concrescing occasion in a living person. These are: (1) the ideal aim at one’s fulfillment from God and (2) all the other aims at one’s fulfillment that have been entertained in the past. It is this conflict, Cobb contends, which enables persons either to minimize or to maximize God’s influence upon them. For most of us this conflict is resolved by a compromise between the two which determines finally the particular complexion of one’s aim at his own self-actualization (CNT 226, 248). Theoretically, the result of such compromise might be to minimize, even to the point of triviality, God’s influence upon us. In such instances both the final priorities reflected in one’s subjective aim and the particular satisfaction actually achieved would be at considerable variance with the ideal aim received from God within that moment of experience (CNT 233).

But what specifically is unique about God’s presence in Jesus? According to Cobb, God’s presence in this instance involved, as with other men, the specific ideal aim which he entertained for Jesus and Jesus’ response to that initiative as influenced by his own structure of belief. What distinguished God’s ideal aim for Jesus was that the main content of it was the clearest possible perception by Jesus of the unmitigated presence of God within him. Here is a case, we are told "in which God does aim to be the main content of that which is re-enacted or incarnated from the past, so that an occasion of human experience would not so much re-enact its own human past as some important aspect of the divine actuality" (1:146). This means that God’s ideal aim for Jesus was that he be prehended in such a way as to maximize the importance for Jesus’ subjective aim of the fact that it was God whom he was prehending, i.e., to maximize God’s influence upon Jesus beyond the initial phase of his subjective aim. For Cobb, this enabled Jesus to "prehend God in terms of that which constitutes him as God -- his leadership, his love, and his incomparable superiority of being and value" (PPCT 393) -- and to reenact within his own life situation the very features of the divine reality which were shared with him in the ideal aim from God. What is unique about this ideal aim for Jesus is that God’s intention to be present in him in such high visibility is hardly displayed with such prominence in his ideal aims for other men (PPCT 393f.).

The opportunity afforded Jesus in the ideal aim from God was unique, and apart from this unparalleled initiative on his behalf he certainly could not have achieved the degree of awareness of the presence of God within him which Cobb considers him to have possessed. We are cautioned, however, not to conclude that Jesus’ response to this ideal aim was coerced. Not even God, Cobb maintains, is able to determine how his ideal aim at the fulfillment of individual persons will be accommodated finally to the overall complexion of what these persons actually achieve. Consequently, we are to think of the relationship between God and Jesus as having had the same balance that characterizes all relationships between God and man. God offered Jesus a unique opportunity, and Jesus’ response to this divine initiative, while unprecedented, was his own free and independent determination of the proportions which it was to assume beyond the initial impetus of the ideal aim from God (PPCT 393f).

The response of all men to the divine initiative within them is in each case unique. What distinguishes the response of Jesus is that for him there was no conflict between the ideal aim from God and all the other aims at his fulfillment out of the past. His response so maximized the prehensive objectification of God beyond the presence of his ideal aim that all the other aims at his fulfillment were reduced correspondingly to complete conformity to the ideal aim from God. Jesus’ belief in God, therefore, was not as some superior force to be set over against the phenomenal world. On the contrary, his perception of both God and the world was so utterly harmonious that he was able to describe each from a vantage point which cannot be surpassed. Because there was no conflict finally between these two dominant strains at his self-fulfillment, Jesus was able to achieve through his relationship with God a perspective upon the relationship between God and man generally so true that it was and is in need of no additional transcendence (PPCT 395f.).

IV

Although no other person has been provided with the same ideal aim and thus the same opportunity as Jesus, there is no reason, Cobb suggests, why others cannot imitate Jesus’ complete obedience to God in responding to the ideal aims with which they too have been provided. Such imitation, however, is not nearly so simple as it might seem, for what Cobb asks of the individual believer in our own generation is to relate effectively to the example of one from whom we are distanced in virtually countless ways. In "A Whiteheadian Christology" Cobb deals with this problem of our remoteness from Jesus by rephrasing the problem. He prefers to speak of the differing "structures of existence" (PPCT 397) which have preceded us historically and of the translation of the quality of life achieved within the structure of existence in one situation into newer and even radically different situations. In this light the particular problem for the twentieth century Christian as viewed by Cobb is that the structure of existence assumed by Jesus in his day bears little resemblance to the structure of existence which characterizes us, so that the translation of the quality of life achieved by Jesus into a context with which we can identify more immediately is no less radical than the contrast between his situation and ours (PPCT 397).

What distinguishes the structure of existence in Jesus’ situation from that of the contemporary Christian can best be broached, Cobb suggests, through an analysis of the pronoun "I." This "I," we are told, is to be identified with both reason and the passions as the two dominant modes which have always characterized human psychic activity. What the "I" represents, however, also exceeds such characterization, for it differs from levels of achievement within more primitive structures of existence in transcending the conflict between these two modes of human psychic activity and in opening up what Cobb describes as an "element of self-identity through time" (PPCT 391). The "I," consequently, is an emerging center within human experience lending organization or structure to that experience. It is, in fact, the center around which that experience comes to be organized for the first time (PPCT 391). The "I" represents the quality of life achieved within a particular structure of existence as shaped by the way in which a person assumes responsibility for himself within the context of the possibilities open to him.⁴

Cobb understands there to have been an identification of the individual "I" of Jesus with Jesus’ prehension of God which enabled Jesus to assume God’s authority as his own (PPCT 392) and on this basis to have introduced into the world "a final and unsurpassable structure of existence" (PPCT 398) in which all individual believers are able to participate. Cobb’s view of the matter is advanced as follows:

One problem with this passage is that although Cobb clearly asserts that persons who respond to Jesus are able to share in the "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" which he opens up for them, nowhere does he expand upon what might constitute the criteria for a response sufficiently satisfactory to assure participation for these persons within the structure of existence introduced by Jesus. The problem remains of how the quality of life achieved by Jesus within the structure of existence in his situation is to be translated into the "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" opened up by Jesus for the Christian in his radically different situation. Indeed, if anything, Cobb merely compounds this problem, for now we are confronted with the additional problem of somehow resolving how Jesus could possibly have opened up a "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" different from the structure of existence in his own situation.

Elsewhere in "A Whiteheadian Christology" Cobb attributes to Jesus a perspective on the world "truer than our own and itself not subject to further transcending" (PPCT 396). Does this not imply that we might regard the structure of existence in Jesus’ situation as final and unsurpassable? Otherwise, how is he to have achieved a perspective on the world both "truer than our own and "not subject to further transcending"? And even if we were to assent to the view that the new structure of existence introduced on our behalf by Jesus is superior to Jesus’ own structure of existence, would not Cobb still have to resolve how Jesus could have attained a perspective on the world both "truer than our own" and "not subject to further transcending" while being within a structure of existence that has been surpassed? Indeed, with what are we to identify the ideal for humanity in such an instance: with the ideal limit embodied by Jesus within a structure of existence that has been surpassed, or the ideal limit associated with a "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" inhabited by persons unable to surpass Jesus’ perspective on the world?

A related problem is that Cobb no sooner suggests that Jesus has introduced a "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" than he qualifies this statement by adding that the new structure of existence poses not only "new possibilities of health" but also "new possibilities of sickness and fragmentation" (PPCT 398). Isn’t that contradictory? How is it possible for what is allegedly a "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" to pose "new possibilities of sickness and fragmentation"? So long as this is the case, does it not follow that there must be some other structure of existence which could surpass our supposedly "final and unsurpassable structure of existence"?

V

We have yet to resolve, of course, the problem of how we are to translate the quality of life achieved by Jesus within the structure of existence in his situation into the "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" introduced by him for us in our radically different situation. Cobb does indicate that we are able to secure our fullest participation in the structure of existence introduced by Jesus only as we respond to him (PPCT 398). But how are we to respond to one from whom we are so remote historically? To be sure, we are at so remote a distance from Jesus as to make it appear that the achievement of a satisfactory relationship with him can hardly be analogous to the co-determinative fashion in which Cobb views two contiguous actual occasions as being related to one another. Although the relation between two such actual occasions might help to explain how eyewitnesses in Jesus’ lifetime might have been able to relate to the quality of life embodied by him, it does not explain how we in our era are to bridge all of what has come to separate us from him. How would Cobb resolve this problem?

Elsewhere Cobb suggests that what resolves the problem of the historical distance between Jesus and believers in our own era is that a presently concrescing actual occasion is capable of "unmediated prehensions" of past actual occasions (1:148). What he is concerned to show Is that since an actual occasion in even the immediate past of a concrescing occasion which it has influenced has already arrived at its term or satisfaction, and hence is no longer concrescing, in principle it makes no difference whether its prehensive objectification in the newly concrescing occasion originates in the immediate or the remote past. The past actual occasion in either case is presently nonexistent (1 150). For an elderly person who recollects an experience from childhood, for example, we have reference to an event in the remote past which is still able to exert influence upon this person’s present experience (1:151). What Cobb concludes, consequently, is that while all past actual occasions are technically nonexistent or no longer concrescing, theirs is most properly characterized nonetheless as a causally efficacious nonexistence (1:150). A case of even the very earliest childhood experience now recollected by the oldest person among us, however, involves past occasions of experience from within the same living person and not occasions from another person in the remote past. It is not clear, therefore, why this example should necessarily apply to the relationship between Jesus and the individual believer in our own era. Indeed, why should Cobb rely upon unmediated prehensions of past actual occasions at all to explain the relationship between Jesus and believers in our era? Could not intervening occasions, for example, serve to mediate satisfactorily the distance between him and us?

But even were we to resolve the problem of our remoteness from Jesus historically, has not Cobb created a possible conflict between our prehensions of Jesus and our prehensions of God? As we have seen, Cobb contends that there is typically a conflict in all persons (except Jesus) between the ideal aim from God and all the other aims received from one’s past. Among these other aims at one’s fulfillment, we will recall, is the inheritance from past actual occasions in some other living person. Since Cobb is not concerned whether this inheritance is from the immediate or the remote past, this would appear to include the route of inheritance through which we receive the aim at our fulfillment from Jesus. If this is so, what is there to prevent a conflict between the aim at our fulfillment from Jesus and the ideal aim from God?

According to Cobb, a person maximizes God’s presence within him beyond his ideal aim only as he devalues all the other aims at his fulfillment out of the past correspondingly. Cobb takes great care, moreover, in assuring us that Jesus was not God. The relationship between the two, we are told, was an experience of communion and not union (CNT 233-35). In addition, Cobb is concerned that we not view Jesus as having had direct access to God’s divine knowledge (PPGT 393) or as having been peculiarly gifted with inordinate conceptual abilities or infallibility (PPCT 395). To accede to any one of these possibilities would be to replace Jesus’ freedom and independence as a self-determining subject with an overbearing presence within him by God. How, therefore, since our inheritance from Jesus is to be included among all the other aims at our fulfillment out of the past, and not with the ideal aim from God, are we to avoid the conclusion that we must either devalue Jesus’ aim at our fulfillment in maximizing the route of inheritance from God or devalue the ideal aim from God should we choose to maximize what Jesus would afford us?

What is especially troublesome about the relationship between God and Jesus as portrayed by Cobb is that our two different routes of inheritance from them indicate either a conflict between these two figures or redundancy on the part of Cobb. This is a serious problem, as we shall see, for it places in doubt the very need for a Whiteheadian Christology at all. In "A Whiteheadian Christology," for example, Cobb specifies that Jesus is both the ground of the "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" which he introduces on our behalf and the "one in relation to whom the health of that structure can be attained" (PPCT 398). While this twofold claim is in accord with Cobb’s interest in arguing for Jesus’ "causally efficacious nonexistence," or the "unmediated prehension by a presently concrescing actual occasion of occasions in the remote past," it is not in accord with his remarks concerning the providential guidance of God.

We have seen that Cobb views God alone as entertaining for each of us the ideal aim most relevant to what we might achieve within any moment of experience. The ideal aim from God, however, is "ideal" not only because it is the most relevant for a specific life situation, but also because each of these ideal aims fits harmoniously with all the others into a larger whole, which Cobb describes as "Cod’s aim at universal intensity of satisfaction" (CNT 180). Consequently, each ideal aim represents God’s constant adaptation of specific situations to all of what is at work in the universe, and all these together are entertained within the larger context of what we might call his "universal aim" (CNT 180f). In short, the ideal aims entertained by God are the means by which the universe and all the actual occasions in it are guided by God to "the ideal strength of beauty" (CNT 180) which he envisions for them all as a harmonious whole.

In A Christian Natural Theology Cobb specifies quite unequivocally that only God is to be identified with this "aim at universal intensity of satisfaction" or principle of guidance in the universe (CNT 180f, 251). He alone is "the ground of being, the ground of purpose, and the ground of order" (CNT 226f) which makes possible and sustains the ongoing existence of each of us within the context of the larger purposes which all of our existences together ultimately are to serve and to which they must constantly be redirected (CNT 227, 251). Moreover, Cobb is no less unequivocal in specifying that the same dynamic applies to the relation between God and Jesus as between God and any other person. The initiative in that relationship, we will recall, was God’s, and Jesus merely responded to the opportunity posed for him within it. What was unique is not that Jesus became or in any sense was God but the particular combination of the ideal aim entertained by God and Jesus’ maximal receptivity to and fulfillment of that aim.

In light of his views concerning the providential guidance of God and the dynamics of the relationship between God and Jesus it would appear that Cobb’s contention in "A Whiteheadian Christology" that Jesus is both the ground of the "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" which he introduced and "the one in relation to whom the health of that structure can be attained" (PPCT 398) is a case either of unnecessary duplication or of outright conflict between Jesus and God which attributes to Jesus a role elsewhere assigned by Cobb exclusively to God. A more logical approach, for example, would be to contend that God is the sole ground of this "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" and that its finality and unsurpassability are due to Jesus’ having fulfilled so maximally the ideal aim entertained for him by God. Indeed, if the role assigned by Cobb to Jesus is to be in keeping with both his own remarks concerning the providential guidance of God and the Whiteheadian principles upon which he acknowledges his work to be based, it seems that God should be both the ground of the "final and unsurpassable structure of existence" introduced by Jesus and "the one in relation to whom the health of that structure can be attained."

Such duplication and/or conflict poses the question of why Cobb should bother with a Whiteheadian christology at all? While he indicates that his is an attempt to resolve the classical problem for theology of how to account for God’s unique presence in Jesus without displacing any aspect of Jesus’ humanity, in the course of that attempt he generates so many additional problems that he appears to have succeeded at little more than compounding and thus falling prey to the very problem which he seeks to resolve.

VI

We have been considering Cobb’s view of the providential guidance of God within the special context of problems associated with his estimate of what transpired in the relationship between God and Jesus. We turn now to the larger context of the consequences of this providential guidance for persons other than Jesus. The specific issue is whether in light of Cobb’s general understanding of God’s providential guidance we can view him as indeed present within individual persons without displacing their freedom and independence as self-determining subjects.

Theoretically, the answer is yes. Whereas man is undeniably influenced by the ideal aim which God entertains for him, beyond that ideal aim he can either maximize or minimize God’s causal efficacy for him. Upon closer examination, however, it appears that there is a definite preponderance in the relationship between man and God which tips decisively to the side of God. The reason for this is Cobb’s having made of God such a blatant exception. Only God, we will recall, is viewed by Cobb as being present within all other actual occasions, as entertaining the ideal aim for each newly concrescing actual occasion, as "the ground of being, the ground of purpose, and the ground of order" (CNT 227), as the principle of guidance, and as the one whose universal aim for the "ideal strength of beauty" (CNT 180) of the universe is never finally defeated. What is important about these exceptions is that there are, indeed can be, no analogues in the case of man.

It is hardly the case, of course, that Cobb would agree with this conclusion. His belief that man’s subjecthood is distinguished by constant freedom for his own self-determination and his commitment to the Whiteheadian principle that God and man are mutually dependent upon and independent of one another might even suggest that Cobb has allowed what we now contend he has denied man. This denial, however, is a consequence of inconsistencies in Cobb’s own understanding of the relationship between God and man. They result in his having effectively denied, albeit unknowingly, what he otherwise might appear to have achieved quite satisfactorily.

What is at issue is the possibility of relative freedom or freedom within certain limits for both man and God, and it would appear that Cobb has maximized the occasion for such freedom in God while severely minimizing it for man. Whether or not man is cooperative, Cobb anticipates that we will arrive eventually at the goal of the full humanity which God envisions for us (GW 82). Because his universal aim is eternal and his providential guidance everlasting, God has merely to readjust his ideal aims for us "to the partial successes and partial failures of the past so that some new possibility of achievement always lies ahead" (CNT 251). Cobb deprives us finally even of such relative freedom as might be ours by excluding us from a principle of guidance which, while allegedly operative on our behalf, is wholly beyond both our own understanding and any hand which we might actively lend to the shape of our ultimate destiny. It is just as he at one point suggests: "men are instruments of purposes they do not comprehend" (CNT 251).

Whether or not the possibility of a proportionate balance of relations between God and man is technically permitted by Cobb, nowhere is it employed. It is no mistake that the initiative in the relationship is characterized as being associated primarily, if not exclusively, with God, while man is held to a minimization or maximization of what is activated within him by God. Where is there such corresponding initiative for man? Is his response to the initiative of another advanced to him from outside himself the sole basis for speaking of human initiative and subjecthood? If the relationship between God and man is indeed analogous to the relation between two contiguous actual occasions, why must man always be characterized as the analogue to the presently concrescing actual occasion? Why is it that only God is portrayed as vitally present in all other actual occasions? What of man’s presence in God? Given that Cobb understands man as influencing God, how fully can such influence be minimized by God? Are the aims which man entertains for God ever totally defeated? If not, since even God’s prehensions of other actual occasions must be positive (CNT 240), then why does man not have a more active hand in the ultimate resolution of the aim at "universal intensity of satisfaction" (CNT 180) which Cobb assigns exclusively to God? Why, moreover, when we think of God as radically absent must we necessarily be thinking of nothing at all? Does the reverse apply, so that should God ever entertain the possibility of man as radically absent he too would necessarily be thinking of nothing at all?

There is little reason finally to accept Cobb’s view of human subjecthood unless we are in agreement with the exceptions he makes in distinguishing the role and properties to be associated exclusively with God. And it would appear to be only in light of these exceptions that Cobb is interested in speaking of the human condition at all. He treats our human subjecthood restrictively in light of our defiance of or obedience to what he believes to be the presence of the divine initiative within us. Are there no other levels for a process theologian where human subjecthood might be examined just as fruitfully? If not, how are we to explain, for example, our flagrant and continuing abuse both of ourselves and of our environment? Must such activity always necessarily be in at least partial accord with God’s larger purposes for the universe? Should the earth and all its resident populations be devoured this evening by a chain reaction of nuclear holocausts, must that too be in at least partial accord with God’s aim at "universal intensity of satisfaction?" Why should that possibility be viewed as anything other than the makings for a creation, once again, out of nothing in total violation of what God anticipates ideally for the universe?

Cobb’s is an argument for how we might understand God to be present within us without displacing any aspect of our humanity or freedom and independence as self-determining subjects. Nowhere, however, does he disarm the alternative that perhaps we need not understand God as being present within us at all. The radical absence of God within and among us, and of us in turn within him, might be the occasion for utter randomness which Cobb would surely anticipate. But what of the possibility that the universe does indeed function more randomly and less purposefully than Cobb would prefer? Or what of the possibility that "the ground of being, the ground of purpose, and the ground of order" in the universe need not be associated exclusively with God or even with God at all? And what of the possibility that the God whom Cobb portrays is exceptional only in that he is the avowed instrument of purposes which we humans divine to be at work in the universe but which we cannot presently fathom? While Cobb attempts to account for how God can be present in man without displacing his freedom and independence as a self-determining subject, it would appear that he accomplishes the reverse. What he offers, finally, is a way of presenting man to God without displacing God’s ongoing independence as a subject eternally free both for his own self-determination and the ultimate determination of all else in the universe.

Cobb, we will recall, sets out to achieve two goals in "A Whiteheadian Christology." The first is to show how the mode of presence of a contiguously related past actual occasion within a newly concrescing actual occasion applies to the relationship between God and man. The second is to show how on this basis one can proceed to explain the possibility of God’s differing presence from person to person so as to account satisfactorily for his unique presence in Jesus. He falls short of the second goal because he fails to achieve what he seeks to establish in the case of the first and because of unnecessary duplication and/or conflict which he poses in the relationship between God and Jesus. He fails to achieve the first goal because he makes of God an exception which does not permit the relationship between God and man to be analogous to the relationship between two contiguous actual occasions and because his overwhelming commitment to what he regards as exceptional in God severely restricts man’s independence from God as a subject free for his own self-determination.

References

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

GW -- John B. Cobb. God and the World. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969.

PPCT -- Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, and Gene Reeves, eds. Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1971.

SCE -- John B. Cobb, Jr. The Structure of Christian Existence. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967,

1. John B. Cobb, Jr., "The Finality of Christ in a Whiteheadian Perspective" in The Finality of Christ, ed. Dow Kirkpatrick. New York: Abingdon Press, 1966, pp. 132-54.

Notes

1 Cobb’s view of God as a living person places him at some variance with Whitehead, since Whitehead prefers to treat God as an actual entity and nowhere refers to him as a living person. Cobb’s reason for going beyond Whitehead in this regard is that he believes the treatment of God as a living person to be far more harmonious with Whitehead’s own metaphysical assumptions throughout Process and Reality. Otherwise, Cobb advises, the four basic principles of Whitehead’s own system as projected in that volume (i.e., actual occasions, God, eternal objects, and creativity) are left with the most arbitrary and unsatisfactory relations with one another. Cobb views Whitehead’s failure to identify God as a living person as an oversight exposing a weakness in his own system which Cobb now proposes to correct (CNT 176f.).

2 Cobb understands all actual occasions to inhabit a particular region or spatiotemporal locus within a larger world. These regions, however, are divisible and. on that account, open to literally infinite variation. This presents us with the immediate problem, consequently, of why a presently concrescing actual occasion should be described by some particular atomization of its region rather than another. This atomization cannot be determined exclusively by the influence of the occasions in its own past, for occasions which have already arrived at their respective satisfachons are not able to legislate what specific bo,mds finally inform the loci or regions of succeeding occasions. Nor can the atomization be legislated exclusively by an actual occasion’s freedom for its own self-determination, since such freedom occurs, we are advised, only within a context whose possibilities have already been prescribed (CNT 153).

The particular atomization of the concrescing occasion’s region is provided for, Cobb maintains, in the initial aim from God. Here is the determination of its relation to all other actual occasions, as well as the determination of what sort of satisfaction it is aimed at. This allows, in turn, the composition of the subjective aim of the concrescing occasion at its own self-actualization being determined finally by its own modification or shaping of the various possibilities granted it through the aims at fulfillment for it of all the actual occasions in its past (CNT 96).

3 Technically, the extent to which the influence of the immediate past actual occasion upon the newly concrescing occasion is variable depends on whether we are dealing with "pure physical feelings" or "hybrid physical feelings." Cobb’s own interest is in the latter, by fax the more complex of the two (PPCT 386, CNT 183).

4 For a more extensive treatment of the Christian structure of existence, but not having to do expressly with the problems about to be raised concerning Cobb’s approach m’"A Whiteheadian Christology," see his book The Structure of Christian Existence (SCE).