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The philosophical enterprise of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) forcefully illustrates his own pronouncement: a philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing" (CM 132 -- OE 1350). Bergson’s own philosophical statement of "a single thing," of course, consists in his ever renewed and ever expansive articulations of the intuition of duration. Throughout his works, Bergson attempts to communicate his intuition of that at once interpenetrative unity and qualitatively heterogeneous continuity which, in his developing metaphysics, constitutes the experiential foundation of all agency, freedom, and creative innovation. This positive intuition of the durational actuality of consciousness constitutes the radically empirical basis of affirmation in Bergson’s metaphysics of integral experience.

Bergsonian philosophy thus consists in a bold attempt to justify metaphysical knowledge on an intuitional basis. Bergson fully realized that, in the wake of Kant’s critique, the claims of metaphysics could be reestablished only through an appeal to a broadened notion of experience. Sensistic, associationist epistemologies and psychologies -- theories of knowledge and consciousness such as those which stand at the base of the empiricism of J. S. Mill and the mechanistic evolutionism of Herbert Spencer -- proved hopelessly inadequate for the task which Bergson posed for himself:

To state the problem is to indicate a method and to inaugurate a program of inquiry. The problem is fundamentally that of transcending certain bifurcative contrasts -- contrasts which issue in the Cartesian dichotomies: subject-object, thought-extension, soul-body; and which culminate in the Kantian divisions: noumenal-phenomenal, moral freedom-physical determinism. The method consists in bringing these traditional conceptual dichotomies into a dialectical confrontation with the immediate and irreducible claims of durational experience. The program is that of developing a metaphysics wherein "no quality, no aspect of the real would be substituted for the rest ostensibly to explain it" (CM 134 = O 1370).

Critics, however, have recurrently focused upon a problem which, in their view, is intimately connected with the underlying thrust of Bergson’s program. The starting-point of Bergson’s projected metaphysics is inextricably linked with a psychological fact: In the dynamic immediacy of self-consciousness, it is claimed, one encounters a privileged instance of experience which evidences the durational character of fundamental reality. Critics, noting the psychological character of Bergson’s starting-point, tend to formulate the basic internal problem of Bergsonian metaphysics as follows: Inasmuch as this metaphysics has its starting-point in a privileged psychological fact, how does its author propose to extend this de facto psychological experience into a principle of general metaphysical validity and import? Can duration, first encountered as psychological fact, serve to ground a unified and coherent account of man’s integral experience of materiality, vitality, and consciousness? Having posed the problem in these terms, the critics then conclude that Bergson, in his efforts to avoid the subjectivistic and even solipsistic implications of his starting-point, formulated an incoherent ontological dualism, or at best vacillated indecisively between monism and dualism.

The force of this criticism -- a criticism which strikes at the very heart of the Bergsonian systematic -- is clearly exhibited in two relatively recent analyses.

(1) Albert William Levi, in his article "Bergson or Whitehead?", concludes that Bergson’s metaphysics is a thoroughgoing dualism (PD 139-59). Levi contends that the systematics of Bergson and Whitehead pose a contemporary metaphysical option which parallels, in pivotal respects, the focal seventeenth-century option: Cartesian dualism or Leibnizian pluralism? The dualistic facets of Bergson’s thought, Levi maintains, are "essentially Cartesian": "For Bergson (as for Descartes) there are selves and there are material objects. . . . Bergson’s dualism means that the two elements are recalcitrantly there, and their ultimate unification is impossible" (PD 157). Thus Bergson’s dualism, like Descartes’ before him, constitutes a bifucation of nature (PD 147). From the perspective of Whitehead’s systematic, this bifurcation comprises an instance of incoherence -- comprises an instance of "the arbitrary disconnection of first principles" (PR 9).

This incoherent bifurcation of nature, Levi claims, is a direct consequence of Bergson’s psychologistic and subjectivistic starting-point (PD 158). A pure metaphysical impulse -- the impulse to by-pass Kant’s strictures against the possibility of intellectual intuition -- animates Bergson’s thought. Bergson seeks to transcend the limiting categories of the analytic, scientific understanding, and to experience the self directly as a noumenal reality. In Bergson’s metaphysics, a psychological experience, the intuition of durational selfhood, stands as the paradigm of cognition and is said to evidence the durational character of reality.

Bergson thus attempts to reestablish the claims of metaphysics on a psychological base. Nevertheless, Bergson, from his psychological vantage point, cannot simply disregard the phenomena of matter, nor can he dismiss the successful advance of physical science. In Levi’s view, the oppositional contrast between the "inner" heterogeneous personal time of intuitional experience and an "outer" homogeneous physical time of scientific analysis constitutes the very cornerstone of the Bergsonian systematic. Levi concludes that "this duality of time indicates and symbolizes a duality of matter and life" (PD 146) -- a duality of spatial necessity and durational freedom, a duality of physical system and organic evolution. Inert matter and vital duration stand as mutually exclusive opposites.

In Levi’s account, then, Bergson’s intuition of duration is a psychological experience at the level of felt-immediacy -- an experience which may well evidence "vestiges of that same imagination which inspired mythical thought before it was expurgated by the scientific mentality" (PD 143). Experience at this primitive level, indeed, may inspire Bergson to poetic visions of the durational unity of life; nevertheless, such experience cannot ground a coherent account of the relation "between the ‘animated’ matter of evolutionary development and the ‘inert’ matter which defines a physical system" (PD 142). Bergson’s subjectivist starting-point, like Descartes’, ultimately issues in an unintelligible bifurcation of experience and nature.

(2) James D. Collins, writing from the Thomist perspective, has succinctly expressed the criticism that Bergson’s systematic must ever vacillate between monism and dualism (HMEP 819-21, 827-31). Collins contends that Bergson, because of his subjectivist starting-point and the resulting psychological tenor of his metaphysics, failed to develop "a coherent doctrine of the analogical unity and multiplicity of experience" (HMEP 830, cf. 818, 820). Instead, Bergson resorted to "a rapid oscillation between images conveying the unity of personal life and images suggesting its many phases" (HMEP 830). Bergson thus "alternates between a psychological monism (the oneness of the stream of duration or consciousness) and a functional dualism (the diversity of directions in which consciousness can move)" (HMEP 830).¹ Collins concludes that Bergson, in order to avoid the charge of solipsism, was forced to suppose "that durational reality is the same" (HMEP 831) wherever it is encountered, whether in the self, as an unavoidably psychologistic starting-point, or beyond the self in the material universe. Bergson, it seems, can effect "passage from the primary object of intuition (inner psychic duration) to its secondary object (duration as the principle of the material universe)" (HMEP 830f), only on the ad hoc supposition of the univocal continuity of duration. Although "Bergson’s alternation between psychological monism and functional dualism is precisely what he needs to avoid the charge of solipsism" (HMEP 830), nevertheless the alternation as such is self-perpetuating and cannot provide an intelligible account of the relation of subject to object.

Although the critiques of Levi and Collins vary considerably in detail, they unite in the claim that Bergson’s speculative philosophy is subjectivistic and psychologistic in its starting-point and tone. They also converge in the charges that Bergson, far from surmounting the bifurcative contrasts which have haunted the Western tradition since Descartes, ultimately found "the disjunction between spirit and matter absolute" (Levi, PD 154), or concluded that "matter and spirit are polar opposites within the embracing realm of duration" (Collins, HMEP 830). As noted earlier, the general line of criticism common to both Levi and Collins comes to focus in a pivotal question; Can Bergson’s doctrine of duration transcend the psychologistic character of his starting-point, admit of analogical elaboration, and thereby, as a truly metaphysical principle, ground a unified interpretation of our integral experience of the differentiated levels of existence? To this question, the critics respond: Duration, as a psychological principle, is too narrow a foundation for an adequate and coherent account of the entire range of experienced spirituality, vitality, and materiality.

The foregoing line of criticism constitutes the oppositional backdrop for the remaining considerations of this article. My inquiries focus upon Bergson’s first major work, Time and Free Will (1889), and are guided by the following questions: (1) What, in fact, constitutes Bergson’s speculative starting-point -- does it consist in a psychological experience at the level of felt-immediacy? (2) Is Bergson’s dualism characterized by oppositional contrasts which issue in a clear-cut bifurcation of nature? My investigations are limited in scope and do not constitute a point by point refutation of Bergson’s individual critics. These inquiries, nonetheless, are highly relevant to any assessment of the general interpretative stance exhibited in the critiques of Levi and Collins. Time and Free Will -- since it provides an elaborate account of Bergson’s starting-point and also stands as the most "Cartesian" expression of his thought -- admirably commends itself to inquiries which illuminate our central themes. Indeed, this early work provides us with a fine test case: If, in Time and Free Will, Bergson’s starting-point is not wholly psychological in its origin and import and if his dualism does not constitute a bifurcation of nature, then the validity of the above line of criticism is quite suspect, and it may be argued that Bergson’s metaphysics admits of a pluralistic interpretation.

I. Bergson’s Starting-Point in "Time And Free Will"

This section first focuses upon the implications of Bergson’s accounts of the genesis of his foundational insight, and then upon his initial characterization of his starting-point in Time and Free Will.

A. Convergent Interests and Influences: The Genesis of Bergson’s Metaphysical Starting-Point

Bergson’s career took its decisive turn when he noted that the instantaneities of mechanistic science and positivistic philosophies do not endure and that objective clock-time is an explanatory abstraction rather than a concrete, active principle. Fortunately, Bergson has provided us with several complementary accounts of the interests and influences which, in 1883-1884, converged in his philosophical reflection upon the tension between objective time and lived-duration.² Of his several accounts, none is more generally illuminating than that communicated to Charles Du Bos in the course of a conversation on February 22, 1922 (OE 1541-43). When asked to comment on J. Desaymard’s claim that he had first attained the intuition of duration while explaining Zeno’s paradoxes, Bergson provided Du Bos with a somewhat different and more elaborate account.

Bergson first stated that when he was completing his degree, two opposed factions dominated the philosophical life of the university. Those who maintained that Kant had stated the major problems in their definitive form constituted the far larger group. Kantianism, however, held little spontaneous attraction for the young Bergson; his own sympathies linked him with a second group which rallied around the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer. The concrete character of Spencer’s philosophy appealed to the young Bergson; indeed, Bergson informed Du Bos, Spencer’s "desire always to bring the mind back upon the terrain of facts" (OE 1541) remained influential in Bergson’s developing thought even after he had himself abandoned all of Spencer’s particular philosophic views.

Spencer’s treatment, in his First Principles, of the foundational notions of mathematics and mechanics commanded Bergson’s interest in 1883-1884. Analyses of the notion of time which functioned in mechanistic physics -- analyses of that time which, like space, is a homogeneous medium, containing juxtaposed parts, and consequently is amenable to precise mathematical description -- led Bergson to the vague and disquieting awareness that any attempt to identify experienced temporality with scientific time must issue in insurmountable difficulties. This awareness, although it did not generate any positive insight into the bases of these difficulties, did stimulate further investigations.

One day at Clermont-Ferrand, while explicating Zeno’s paradoxes for his students, Bergson began to see just what direction his inquiries should take. Further reflections on the notion of objective time exploded Bergson’s former ideas and led him to conclude that scientific time does not endure in any sense:

Spurred on by this conclusion, Bergson pursued the investigations which culminated, during the years 1884-1886, in the writing of the pivotal second and third chapters of Time and Free Will.

In light of the continued ascendancy of Kant in the philosophical circles of that day, Bergson found it necessary to modify his third chapter with a view to Kantian criticism. The introductory chapter, with its psychophysical considerations, was then inserted in hopes that its addition would render Bergson’s own views more accessible. In fact, this first chapter commanded the committee’s attention, and the central, second chapter, much to Bergson’s displeasure, received little positive notice. Bergson then recast the second chapter in a final attempt to communicate his own position.

Bergson concluded this phase of the conversation with thc remark that the scientific rather than the psychological notion of time served as his point of departure. He thereby distinguished his own doctrine from that of William James, who, he remarked, "was a born psychologist" (OE 1542). Bergson’s inquiries, it seems, took a psychological turn only in the face of the experienced tension between the objective time of scientific interpretation and the lived-duration of consciousness.

As this conversation clearly indicates, both Spencer and Zeno of Elea were pivotal influences in the emergence of Bergson’s speculative starting-point. Kantian thought is displayed as exercising an important negative and oppositional role in the development of Bergson’s distinctive stance.⁴ Bergson’s contrast between his own and William James’s starting-point also will prove significant. For the present, however, the positive influences of Spencer and Zeno demand further exploration.

(1) Spencer’s Influence. Bergson’s accounts of Spencer’s contribution to his developing interests, and to the advent of the tensional awareness which inaugurated his own distinctive inquiries, manifest marked continuity. In a 1908 letter to William James, for example, Bergson writes that in 1881 the philosophy of Spencer commanded his almost unreserved allegiance and that his primary interest was then directed to the "philosophy of sciences" -- particularly to the examination of fundamental scientific notions (EP II 294f). Indeed, Bergson first envisioned his own doctoral thesis as consisting in a continuation, consolidation, and completion of certain fundamental elements of Spencer’s philosophy.

Writing in 1922, Bergson elaborates upon his admiration for the concrete character of Spencer’s empiricism:

The young Bergson judged that Spencer’s thought, in its emphasis upon facts, stood in opposition to philosophical systems which, as vast assemblages of abstract concepts, might contain, in addition to the real, all that is possible and even impossible. Since such systems had abandoned the terrain of fact and sought their foundations in mere abstract, conceptual possibilities, their explanations were all too arbitrary -- they lacked justification in terms of "complete or mounting evidence."

Bergson’s admiration for Spencer’s attempted fidelity to facts remained constant; his projected completion of Spencer’s doctrine of the foundations of science, however, was soon abandoned. The young Bergson became increasingly aware that lived-time -- the time of development, growth, and emergent novelty -- the duration "which plays the leading part in any philosophy of evolution, eludes mathematical treatment" (CM 12=OE 1254). Real time, the essence of which is to flow, does not admit of the superposition "of one part on another with measurement in view" (CM 12 = OE 1254). as does the spatialized time of mechanics. Whereas real time is truly effectual in the sense that it retards and "hinders everything from being given at once," in Spencer’s mechanistic evolutionism "time served no purpose, did nothing" (CM 93 = OE 1333). Spencerian time, in its ineffectuality, could not serve as a "vehicle of creation and of choice" (CM 93 = OE 1333). As Bergson’s own investigations progressed, he became convinced that Spencer s empirical evolutionism," far from evidencing fidelity to the facts of the evolving, was thoroughly vitiated by its acceptance of evolved symbol as adequately accounting for evolving fact, with the result that "the usual device of the Spencerian method consists in reconstructing evolution with fragments of the evolved" (CE 396 = OE 802).

Thus, in Bergson’s developing philosophy "fidelity to facts" was to take on a sense quite foreign to Spencer’s original intent. Bergson soon recognized that "facts," within the context of Spencer’s sensistic, associationist psychology and phenomenalist epistemology, were all too tinged by what Whitehead was later to term "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" -- Spencer’s presentation of "fads" neglects the degree of abstraction involved when experience is viewed as exemplifying certain categories of thought (1:102-21). According to Bergson, "facts" or immediate data" -- far from being the percept-objects of simple acts of sensory apprehension or the conclusions of the surest mathematical demonstrations or the common subjects of universal agreement -- are established only with the greatest difficulty, through the convergence of diverse lines of inquiry, which lines of inquiry themselves presuppose many sustained efforts of analysis.⁵ Habits and symbols -- the instruments of vital need, social life, and practical utility -- very effectively veil "facts," rendering "immediate data" all but inaccessible to consciousness.

Spencer’s attempted fidelity to facts, nonetheless, must be viewed as a perduring, positive influence upon Bergson’s methodology both in his initial quest for the immediate data of consciousness and in his sustained elaboration of an evolutionary metaphysics founded upon the intuition of duration (1:102-21; OE xvii-xx). Bergson’s ideal of a philosophy which molds itself upon facts, follows the sinuosities of the real, and, like positive science, justifies itself by means of complete or mounting evidence also indicates a certain Spencerian inspiration. Finally, Spencer’s thought doubtlessly supported the young Bergson in his dissatisfaction with abstract, conceptual elaboration of all possible experience and fostered the hope that he might yet articulate the concrete, positive conditions of all real experience.

(2) The Influence of Zeno’s Paradoxes. Bergson’s conversation with Du Bos does not expressly indicate the manner in which reflection upon Zeno’s paradoxes contributed to the progress of his own thought. References to Zeno’s argumentation, however, are encountered throughout the Bergsonian corpus; indeed, their recurrence, as Henri Gouhier suggests, may well be likened to a Wagnerian leitmotiv (OE xv). The initial impact of Zeno’s paradoxes upon Bergson is evident in his first explicit consideration of the Eleatic’s argumentation -- a consideration which, significantly, occupies a central position in the pivotal, innovative second chapter of Time and Free Will.

This first reference to the paradoxes occurs within the context of Bergson’s account of the psychological process whereby heterogeneous, qualitative duration "assumes the illusory form of a homogeous medium" and thus becomes, as an interpretative category, "a fourth dimension of space" (TFW 109f = OE 73f). Bergson maintains that this process whereby lived-duration is transmuted into the homogeneous quantitative time of mechanistic science is strikingly exhibited through an analysis of the concept of motion. The concept of motion as dealt with in mechanics, Bergson claims, is, above all else, the symbol of a "seemingly homogeneous duration" -- the symbol of that time which, as interpretative category, is derived from the abstract concept of homogeneous space (TFW 110= GE 74).⁶

The concept of motion is grounded in the almost instinctive assumption that moving bodies are contained in an independent and immutable, homogeneous, spatial medium; indeed, this almost instinctive conviction is manifest in our habitual modes of symbolic representation, for instance, in the fact that "we generally say that a movement takes place in space" (TFW 110 = OE 74). Homogeneity is the primary attribute of this spatial medium, for

As a homogeneous medium, space consists in "a simultaneity of terms which, although identical in quality, are yet distinct from one another" (TFW 95 = OE 64). In virtue of its homogeneity, the concept of space is a necessary condition for quantitative differentiations; moreover, the concept of homogeneous space of itself admits of no privileged positions or directions. As a homogenous medium, space admits neither of absolute limits in the direction of the infinitely great, nor of absolute limits in the direction of the infinitesimally small. Homogeneous space, consequently, is unbounded and possesses that mathematical continuity which is more aptly described as the infinite divisibility of all spatial intervals.

As an instrument of social utility, Bergson claims, the human mind is directed to action, and action is rendered more efficient when directed to the stabilized terms of a process rather than to the dynamics of the process itself. Because of its pragmatic character, human intelligence tends to interpret the simple, indivisible continuity of an act in progress wholly in terms of the spatially sedimented object produced. Nevertheless, motion, as true passage, is an ongoing durational synthesis, an experienced qualitative progress, "a gradual organization of our successive sensations, a unity resembling that of a phrase in a melody" (TFW 111 = GE 74). When we suddenly perceive a shooting star, Bergson continues, we naturally and spontaneously separate the space traversed -- the objectively sedimented line of fire -- from the absolutely indivisible, simple continuity of the act in progress, namely, the sensation of motion. Similarly, when consciousness abstains from objectifying, spatial concerns, a "rapid gesture, made with one’s eyes shut, will assume . . . the form of a purely qualitative sensation" (TFW 112 = OE 75).

Thus, we must distinguish two aspects of motion: (1) the space traversed considered as an infinitely divisible, objectified, homogeneous quantity and (2) the act in progress experienced as an indivisibly continuous, heterogeneous quality. In our symbolical interpretations, however,

We thus tend to confuse act with object, to confuse the immediate experience of motion with its projective interpretation in terms of the concept of the space traversed. In virtue of its pragmatic efficacy, the concept of homogeneous space leads us: (1) to reduce heterogeneous duration to the concept of homogeneous time, (2) to interpret durational agency and emergent novelty solely in terms of static, objectifying concepts and precontained possibilities, and (3) to construct movement a priori out of static, objective spatiotemporal intervals and thereby to disregard its experienced durational significance (EP II 284f).

Bergson next notes that Zeno’s paradoxes are founded on this same confusion of motion with the space traversed. As homogeneous space, the interval separating any two points is infinitely divisible; hence, if motion is conceived as consisting of parts like those which compose the spatial interval, motion would possess only mathematical continuity, and no interval would ever be crossed. Achilles does in fact win his race with the tortoise, because each of his steps is a simple, indivisible act. The series of Achilles’ steps, "each of which is of a definite kind and indivisible" (TFW 113 = OE 75), cannot be identified with the homogeneous space which we conceive as subtending it. Achilles outstrips the tortoise because each of his steps and each step of the tortoise are, as movements, indivisible and are, as space, different magnitudes. As act and progress, motion does not consist of parts which are homogeneous and divisible; rather, each step is qualitatively heterogeneous and indivisible, with the result that Achilles soon overcomes his initial handicap. Zeno, aware that the homogeneous space admitted by his adversaries can be divided and reconstructed according to any law whatsoever, simply "reconstructs the movement of Achilles according to the same law as the movement of the tortoise" (TFW 113 = OE 75) and draws the conclusions which must necessarily follow if motion is regarded as wholly assimilable to homogeneous space.

The directional thrust which reflection upon Zeno’s paradoxes lent to Bergson’s foundational inquiries is now apparent. As Bergson later notes, Zeno’s paradoxes are manifest sophisms if one accepts them as attempting to demonstrate the impossibility of real motion; these arguments, however, take on great value when they are interpreted as demonstrating the impossibility of reconstructing motion, which as act-process is a primary fact of experience, on the basis of a priori, object-product, homogeneous, spatial concepts (EP II 284f). The qualitatively heterogeneous, durational reality is fundamental and irreducible, whereas our symbolical representations -- especially the interpretative categories of homogeneous space and time -- are derivative.

Thus Bergson’s interest " philosophy of the sciences" -- an interest fostered by Spencer’s call to remain faithful to facts -- focused ever more acutely on the disparity between immediate experience and the foundational concepts of mechanistic science. Bergson’s awareness of this disparity, once drawn into the context of Zeno’s paradoxes, issued in a basic distinction which ordered his subsequent investigations: the distinction between the experiential act-process and the pragmatically instrumental object-product. Bergson, in virtue of this distinction, became increasingly aware that Spencer’s empiricism -- and indeed any account of experience which is grounded in a sensistic, associationist psychology and epistemology -- was vitiated by the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. A new, non-sensistic notion of experience and consciousness emerged, and Bergson’s interests converged in his investigation of lived-duration. Reflections upon Zeno’s argumentation, moreover, led Bergson to reformulate the distinction between the act-process and the object-product as an operant contrast between qualitative heterogeneity and quantitative homogeneity. We must now thoroughly analyze the manner in which this operant contrast provides the context for Bergson’s initial account of duration in Time and Free Will.

B. The Operant Contrast, Homogeneity-Heterogeneity, and Bergson’s Initial Account of Duration

In his initial statement of the durational character of consciousness, Bergson approaches duration by way of a contrast between quantitative homogeneity and qualitative heterogeneity -- between "the multiplicity of juxtaposition and that of interpenetration (TFW 75 = OE 51). This operant contrast involves a distinction between two modes of synthesis and between the two kinds of wholes in which these syntheses issue; thus, Bergson’s first statements concerning duration emerge in the course of a methodical analysis of two forms of relation.

The first form of relation, a quantitative multiplicity of juxtaposition. is intimately associated with the abstract concept of homogeneous space. In a quantitative multiplicity of juxtaposition, the terms of the relation are homogeneous, qualitatively equivalent, mutually substituent spatial parts. The principle whereby the terms are differentiated, homogeneous space as unbounded parts outside of parts, is a wholly external principle, a homogeneous container which remains absolutely indifferent to its content. A synthesis of the many terms into a mere sum total does not in itself result in any real unity: the equivalence of the univocal quantitative parts does not provide the basis for any intrinsic order -- the terms, in their inert passivity and absence of qualitative differentiation, possess only the vacuous actuality of simply located entities.

Whatever unity results from additive synthesis is at best a provisional unity, for the homogeneous space, which is the material principle of the synthesis, possesses only static, mathematical continuity -- a continuity which admits of infinite divisibility. Such mathematical continuity stands ever in potency to further acts of mental attention -- to those acts which constitute the formative principle of synthesis -- so that the provisional unity of the synthesis continually tends to expand, by way of subsequent additions, into the infinitely great and to contract, by further divisions, into the infinitesimally small. In spite of its apparent objective solidity, the numerical whole which is the product of additive synthesis remains arbitrary and unstable in the extreme -- it can be divided and reconstructed according to any law whatsoever. The unity of the numerical whole is provisional, that is, derived from a wholly external principle -- the attentive act of consciousness. Every synthesis of a quantitative whole presupposes a prior synthesis and invites subsequent syntheses.

Each member of a quantitative whole, in virtue of its mutually substituent homogeneity, can fulfill the function of any other member, and the whole will remain precisely what it is: the sum of its parts. The mode of additive synthesis thus proceeds from a many, each member of which, insofar as it is subject to synthesis, is devoid of internal qualitative differentiations, to a one which is simply a one from the many. Through additive synthesis, the character of the many is in no way enhanced; the parts are merely brought together, are merely externally related by force of sheer addition.

The second form of relation, a qualitative multiplicity of interpenetration, is linked with the experience of durational consciousness, and is particularly evident in our perception of melodic and rhythmic wholes. A qualitative multiplicity of interpenetration is grounded in the heterogeneity of its parts -- in their internal, qualitative differentiations. As effectual and qualitatively differentiated, the many parts, the phases of consciousness, which enter into synthesis by way of dynamic, qualitative progress, are truly capable of sustaining internal relations. Consequently, the one which issues from such a progressive synthesis is a dynamically ordered whole.⁷

Such a dynamically ordered whole does not consist merely in the parts, externally related, nor in the relation of each part to those other parts which are immediately prior or posterior to it; rather, a dynamically ordered whole consists in the interpenetrating, internal relations of all the parts. Such internal relatedness is the experienced interpenetration of part and whole; moreover, the very expressions "part" and "whole" bear a meaning markedly different from that borne with reference to a whole which is merely the sum of its parts. In the dynamically ordered whole there is mutual solidarity between part and part, each part and the whole, all parts and the whole. This mutual solidarity itself consists in the organic continuity of a progress, not in the static continuity of a product -- not in the infinitely divisible "continuity" of our mathematical, objectifying categories. In a dynamic, qualitative whole, all relations are internal, real relations, in the sense that any change in the parts is a modification of the whole, and any further synthesis of the whole is at the same time the modification of the parts. Indeed, whole-part terminology, and even the description of durational parts as moments or phases of consciousness distinguished with reference to an objectified past, present, and future, only belie the basic character of the durational whole, namely, its dynamic continuity of progress.

With regard to synthesis by mode of qualitative progress -- with regard to that mode of synthesis which is proper to durational consciousness -- all progress is growth. Each phase of durational development, in virtue of its qualitative heterogeneity, stands in a unique and ongoing continuity with all the other phases. Durational progress consists in the developmental enhancement of that dynamically ordered unity -- of that unity of continuity -- which is consciousness as an emergent organic whole. In virtue of the dynamism of the whole, in virtue of this synthesis by mode of qualitative progress, the mutual interpenetration of the parts, ever differentiating, nevertheless ever manifests qualitative continuity. Throughout the course of its developmental differentiations, each of the parts -- each phase of consciousness -- establishes and reestablishes its own proper identity through its ever renewed reference to the qualitative continuity of the whole. Hence, durational consciousness is experience in its dynamic and irreducibly analogical immediacy -- is the lived immediacy, the self-presence, of that agency which, ever differentiating, remains ever the same. Lived similarity-in-difference, continuity-in-process, tensional unity throughout the progressive assimilation of novelty -- such is durational consciousness.

Thus, in establishing his speculative starting-point Bergson notes that a tensional opposition between two modes of relatedness pervades the experience of reflective consciousness. One pole of this tension, the quantitative multiplicity of juxtaposition, is wholly grounded in the abstract concept of spatial homogeneity and issues in arbitrary systems of external relations. The second pole, that of the qualitative multiplicity of interpenetration, consists in real, dynamic, internal relations -- consists in that durational heterogeneity which characterizes the foundational immediacy of lived experience. The first pole is correlated with the spectator viewpoint and objectivist bias which dominated the modern period of Western thought from Descartes to Kant. The second pole takes on its full significance when consciousness adopts the agent-participant attitude.

Durational consciousness manifests ilseif in the irreducible fact of lived agency -- in that lived agency which stands as the perduring basis for real dynamic relations. Immediate experience evidences a fundamental qualitative continuity -- evidences that continuity whereby the past remains influential in its vital presence and whereby the creative present ever opens upon a novel future with its prospects of further qualitative enhancement. La durée réelle, as a process of active self-differentiation and creative advance, is not exhaustively assimilable to the static grid-work of homogeneous space-time. Durational consciousness, Bergson insists, cannot be integrally interpreted in terms of spatialized time -- in terms of an abstract quantitative medium wherein homogeneous parts are, at will, juxtaposed and superimposed with a view toward mathematical description and scientific prediction.

Once he has articulated the tensional polarizations of experience, Bergson then indicates that the quantitative pole is derived, by way of abstraction, from the foundational level of qualitative experience. Bergson insists that "it is through the quality of quantity that we form the idea of quantity without quality" (TFW 123 = OE 82). It is though our qualitative and durational experience of an extensive perceptual field -- through experiences such as those of shape or figure and of change of direction -- that the concept of homogeneous space arises. The perception of a qualitatively differentiated extensive field and the durational continuity of consciousness both antedate our subsequent acts of quantitative synthesis.

The doctrine of Time and Free Will thus substantiates Bergson’s frequent claims that his metaphysics is not founded solely upon the psychological experience of lived duration: ". . . the metaphysics propounded in my various works . . . has as its basis the experience of duration, along with the constatation of a certain connection between this duration and the space employed to measure it" (CM 301n5 = OE 1280n1). In a similar vein, Bergson never fails to distinguish between the psychological origin and function of William James’s "stream of consciousness" and the critically epistemological and metaphysical character of his own starting-point. In a 1915 response to H. M. Kallen, Bergson notes that whereas James arrived at his "stream of consciousness" purely by way of psychological considerations, he himself was led to the doctrine of "real duration" by way of a critique of the mathematical and physical conception of time, together with "the comparison of this idea with reality" (EP III 443).

These textual considerations clearly oppose the contention that Bergson’s starting-point is wholly subjectivistic and psychologistic in its origin and import.

Bergson’s starting-point, then, does not consist in the introspective, psychological immediacy of the stream of consciousness. To be sure, the intuition of the enduring self is a necessary and irreducible foundational principle of Bergsonian metaphysics; nevertheless, the intuition of duration, when unreflectively proposed as a psychological fact, presented at the level of some nebulous felt-immediacy, does not possess metaphysical import. Bergson’s works, in a sense, may display "the vestiges of that same imagination which inspired mythical thought before it was expurgated by the scientific mentality" (PD 143). Whatever vestiges they exhibit, however, do not occur in isolation from the dialectical influence of developed scientific consciousness. Indeed, as Bergson insists, it was neither historically possible, nor even desirable, that a systematic knowledge of enduring consciousness -- that a science which would have its starting-point in the vital grasp of the mind by the mind -- develop in independence of intelligence’s efforts to construct a quantitative science of matter:

These words are hardly those of a man who would establish his metaphysics simply on the basis of some vague awareness at the level of felt-immediacy. Rather, they evidence Bergson’s conviction that, from the standpoint of developed consciousness, the precision which characterizes conceptual intelligence, and the sense of durational agency presented in the immediacy of intuition, interpenetrate and complement one another.

Bergson’s starting-point is radically empirical in that it arises out of durational man’s awareness of the lived tension between his qualitative experience and his quantitative interpretations; moreover, accounts of this starting-point, from Time and Free Will onward, develop not only in terms of an oppositional contrast between the qualitative heterogeneity of duration and the quantitative homogeneity of spatial concepts, but also in terms of the endosmotic tension whereby one pole of experience stands in dialectical relation to the other. Intuition, as Bergson insists, is a reflective activity (CM 87f = OE 1328).⁹ In elaborating this theme, Ian Alexander has aptly remarked:

Thus, Bergsonian philosophy never emphasizes the subjective-psychological pole of experience to the exclusion of the objective-material pole of that same experience. In this metaphysics of integral experience, the subject as durational agent can in no sense be wholly isolated from the world as the environing context of that agency.

II. Bergson’s Dualism in "Time and Free Will"

The preceding considerations notwithstanding, it must be granted that Time and Free Will invites interpretation in terms of a dualistic bifurcation of experience and reality. On first reading, at any rate, this work seems to assert that real duration is encountered as a psychological fact, and that, once this fact is acknowledged, nature fragments into the immanent realm of durational consciousness and freedom, on the one hand, and, on the other, into an irreconcilable, ever transcendent domain of spatial matter and determinism:

Here, the contrast between inner duration and outer simultaneity appears as an absolute opposition between enduring consciousness and nondurational, perpetually perishing materiality.

Numerous passages reinforce this sense of bifurcative opposition. We are repeatedly informed that material things do not endure as does vital consciousness.¹⁰ The moments of the external world are "equivalent to one another" (TFW 230 = OE 150), whereas thc qualitatively heterogeneous duration lived by consciousness admits of no equivalent moments, and thus is not to be confused with physical time, the variable "t" of mechanistic formulae, "which glides over the inert atoms without penetrating and altering them" (TFW 154 = OE 102). Inert matter "does not bear the mark of the time that has elapsed" (TFW 200 = OE 131); consequently, the physicist encounters repetitive, elementary conditions. Duration, however, "is something real for the consciousness which preserves the trace of it, and we cannot here speak of identical conditions, because the same moment does not occur twice" (TFW 200=131). Such passages stress, in an almost Cartesian fashion, the mutually exclusive characteristics of inner, durational consciousness and outer, spatial materiality.¹¹

Other passages, however, attest to the qualified and provisional character of Bergson’s dualistic contrasts: "Inert matter does not seem to endure or to preserve any trace of past time" (TFW 153 = OE 101)," and "things considered apart from our perception do not seem to endure" (TFW 209 = OE 137)." In a particularly significant passage Bergson notes:

Clearly, such passages express some dissatisfaction with any radical denial of the durational character of material entities, and with an absolute dichotomization of experience in terms of a durational "inner" sphere and a nondurational "outer" sphere.

Time and Free Will, moreover, provides us with the basis for drawing two distinctions which further evidence the qualified and provisional character of Bergson’s dualistic oppositions: (1) the distinction between the abstract concept of homogeneous space and the concrete perception of heterogeneous extensity; (2) the implicit distinction between "material entity" and "object-construct of mechanistic physics."

(1) In Bergson’s view, the abstract concept of homogeneous space -- the foundational notion for any abstract, quantitative multiplicity of juxtaposition -- stands in polar tension with the concrete experience of durational selfhood -- a lived, qualitative multiplicity of interpenetration.

Bergson maintains that the concept of homogeneous space, together with its extension in the concept of homogeneous time, constitute two of man’s most powerful, pragmatic conceptual tools. Spatial homogeneity constitutes the very foundation of the corpuscular kinetic view of nature which, in 1889, seemed to guarantee man’s total mastery of matter. This concept of space is man’s primary tool of analysis and classification. As a homogeneous medium, Bergsen notes, abstract space admits "of a simultaneity of terms which, although identical in quality, are yet distinct from one another" (TFW 95 = OE 64). The concept of space thus "enables us to distinguish a number of identical and simultaneous sensations from one another," and, as such, is "a principle of differentiation other than that of qualitative differentiation" (TFW 95 = OE 64).

This conceived space constitutes the very foundation of science as a public, objective enterprise. Mechanistic physics successfully pursues its goal of measuring and forecasting only on the condition that qualitative matter -- matter as perceived -- be assimilated to the grid-work of homogeneous space-time. Material objects and their properties are amenable to the system of mathematical physics only in virtue of their identification with, or derivation from, the homogeneous medium which subtends and defines them. For Bergson, the very clarity, precision, and impersonal objectivity of scientific understanding are all deeply rooted in spatial homogeneity.

This spatial concept, however, does not exhaust man’s experience of the extensive. Living organisms also possess a concrete perception of a qualitative, spatial field (TFW 96f = OE 64-66). This perception of extensity is manifest in the natural feeling whereby we distinguish our right from our left, for example, or in the homing instincts of certain animal species. This perceived space, as opposed to abstract, conceived space, is similar to durational consciousness. Like durational consciousness, the perception of extensity is an active affair of qualitative differentiations. When compared with the perception of extensity, the conception of space manifests itself as:

This concept of space is the foundational principle for a specifically human mode of experience. In this experiential modality, the human mind "perceives under the form of extensive homogeneity what is given it as qualitative heterogeneity" (TFW 97 = OE 65f). Qualitative extensity is the fundamental perceptual datum; nevertheless, this qualitative field is habitually interpreted in terms of an alien quantitative homogeneity -- is habitually interpreted as if the concept were the more fundamental reality. Mankind’s habitual interpretations in terms of spatializing categories -- interpretations born of utility and reinforced through their survival value -- if they are extended beyond the range of their pragmatic applicability, redound in fallacies of misplaced concreteness. A lived qualitative heterogeneity, however, pervades that extensity which is perceived rather than projected as an interpretative category. The perception of extensity -- space as lived -- is best characterized as the vital involvement of the organism with its qualitatively differentiated environment. This perceived space comprises that qualitative immediacy which links the situated durational agent with the diverse poles of his action. As such, perceived space is an irreducible datum which grounds any developed account of man’s durational embodiment.

Time and Free Will thus articulates a doctrine which is of pivotal Importance for any assessment of Bergson’s dualism. The perception of extensity mediates the tensional polarization of human experience. Between the inner immediacy of duration experienced as qualitative continuity, on the one hand, and that externalized projection of experience which employs spatial homogeneity as its interpretative principle, on the other, we encounter, in the perception of extensity, the situated agency of consciousness -- we experience vital consciousness embodied as a center of action in communion with other centers of action. As a consequence, the universe of lived experience does not simply bifurcate into the durational "inner" and the nondurational "Outer." That qualitative heterogeneity which is the very ground of our experience is present to us in a mode of perception which consists in immediate, vital involvement and which evidences the real interrelatedness of self and the durational otherness of material entities.

(2) Bergson’s explicit distinction between the concept of space and the perception of extensity permits us to draw a further distinction: the distinction between "material entity" and "object-construct of mechanistic physics." The passages in which Bergson seems to deny that external objects have durational characteristics occur, without exception, in contexts wherein the term "external object" is convertible with "object-construct of mechanistic physics." All such denials occur within the context of Bergson’s critiques of physical determinatism, of the phenomenalistic account of causality, and of the corpuscular-kinetic model of conservative system.

In the context of these critiques, Bergson maintains that the object-constructs of mechanistic physics are characterized by a wholly non-durational, abstract simultaneity. Consequently, material entities, insofar as they are successfully interpretable in terms of the corpuscular-kinetic vision of matter, cannot be said to endure as we ourselves do. Nevertheless, we cannot simply maintain that material entities which, unlike the object-constructs of physics, are present to us in our perception of the qualitatively differentiated extensive field, have no durational characteristics whatsoever. Rather, we must note that for "some inexpressible reason" (TFW 227 = OE 148) we cannot examine material entities at successive moments of lived-duration without observing that they, in their turn, succeed one another.

Material entities, although they do not endure as we ourselves do, nonetheless are encountered in the qualitative immediacy of concrete perception. Material entities, inasmuch as they change with the qualitative advance of duration, manifest an analogical kinship with durational consciousness. As qualitative presences, material entities evidence a dynamic affinity with durational consciousness in its character as act-process.

Idealized object-constructs, by way of contrast, are nondurational through and through. The universe of mechanistic physics is the interpretative product of man’s employment of his habitual spatializing categories. As an object-product, the universe depicted in mechanistic physics constitutes an abstract realm of perpetually perishing simultaneities. This realm, as object-product, must be sharply distinguished from the immediate, durational matrix of concrete experience as act-process. Bergson’s early efforts at demarcating this distinction may appear in the guise of a bifurcation between the inner-sphere of consciousness and the outer-sphere of spatial materiality; these bifurcative statements, however, are best viewed as articulating the opposition between the underived immediacy of all durational facets of experience, and the derivative character of the object-constructs of classical physics.

Such an interpretation is borne out by a comment which Bergson made in 1928. When asked about the relation between his early doctrine of duration, with its bifurcative implications, and his later doctrine, which is clearly articulated with a view toward by-passing traditional dualistic oppositions, Bergson responded that his later doctrine in no way contradicted what he had written in Time and Free Will. He then added:

Clearly, Bergson, even from the period of his early reflections, was grappling with the problem of the analogical extension of durational predicates to material entities.

The distinctions which are explicitly and implicitly present in Time and Free Will are elaborated in Matter and Memory (189e), with the express purpose of mitigating the bifurcative character of the traditional Cartesian oppositions. In this later work, Bergson articulates his own mitigated dualism in terms of three central notions: (1) situated agency, the durational category which integrates Bergson’s doctrine of "my body" as "center of action," with his doctrine of the durational mobility which is inherent to the universe of material images; (2) qualitative durational continuity, the category which is operative in developing his doctrine of pure memory, both as retentive synthesis and unique agency of consciousness; (3) qualitative extensive continuity, the durational category which results from Bergson’s explicated notions of perception, motion, and materiality.¹⁶ In Time and Free Will, Bergson stresses that outer things do not endure as does human consciousness; yet he also grants a certain continuity linking material entities with durational consciousness. Insofar as the oppositional aspects of the tension between qualitative heterogeneity and quantitative homogeneity dominate the thematic of his first major work, Bergson tends to deny that durational predicates are applicable to outer things. In Matter and Memory, however, focus shifts to the endosmotic aspects of Bergson’s tensional starting-point; as a consequence, in his second work Bergson emphasizes the derivative character both of the concept of homogeneous space and of the corpuscular-kinetic model of matter which is grounded in that concept. Elements of this later focus, however, are clearly prefigured in Time and Free Will.

The doctrine of Time and Free Will, then, does not constitute a clear-cut bifurcation of nature. Indeed, Bergson’s statements concerning the perception of extensity have far-reaching implications for any consideration of durational consciousness in its situated agency, and demand exploration in terms of an acknowledged plurality of centers of action.

III. Conclusions

The character of Bergson’s dualism is intimately linked with that of his starting-point. Bergson’s operant contrast, homogeneity-heterogeneity, issues in a sustained reflection upon two distinct modes of relatedness whereby experienced diversity is brought to cognitive unity: (1) the abstract, external relatedness of a multiplicity of juxtaposition; and, (2) the real, internal relatedness of a multiplicity of interpenetration. This reflection is the true starting-point of Bergsonian metaphysics as a systematic, cognitive endeavor. Analysis of Bergson’s reflection reveals that he anticipated, to a marked degree, Whitehead’s critiques of the vacuous actuality of simply-located entities and of those fallacies of misplaced concreteness which have pervaded much of Western thought.

Bergson’s starting-point, then, consists in a reflection upon integral man’s experience of the tension between two aspects of developed consciousness -- the tension between duration as an active continuity of qualitative self-differentiation and the abstract concept of homogeneous space as an objectifying, stabilizing, quantitative principle. Reflection upon this endosmotic tension attests both to the underived, qualitative immediacy of lived-duration as act-process and to the derivative, pragmatic instrumentality of our various object-product notions. Bergson’s metaphysics, in its fidelity to integral experience, has its starting-point in the dialectical, analogical character of that same experience. This starting-point, although it involves confrontation with duration as an experiential, nonformal principle, does not consist in a simple intuitive act at the level of felt-immediacy. The intuition of duration takes on metaphysical import because Bergson’s starting-point remains faithful to the integral experience of the whole durational man taken in his spontaneity and reflexivity, in his character as actor and spectator, in his intuitional immediacy and conceptual distance. As a consequence, the dualistic stance which evolves from this tensional starting-point -- first in the implicit and provisional formulations of Time and Free Will, later in the developed articulations of Matter and Memory -- bears a much greater affinity to Whitehead’s doctrine of the dipolarity of actual entities than to Descartes’ bifurcation of nature.

Duration, as experienced continuity of progress throughout qualitatively distinct phases of active self-differentiation, is interpretable only by means of analogical notions and terms. The analogical character of duration is evident both in Bergson’s analysis of the multiplicity of interpenetration and in his negative judgment that duration, as active and lived, does not admit of adequate interpretation by means of reduction to univocal spatiotemporal concepts. This consideration suggests others which counter Collins’ claim that Bergson failed "to resolve the question of the analogical predication of existence and essence, as well as of experience and duration" (HMEP 820), and therefore vacillated between monism and dualism.

Although Bergson does not employ the term "analogy" in a technical sense, nevertheless, in Time and Free Will it is evident that he views durational experience as analogous: the identity of the self is a dynamic identity-in-difference, and is not to be confused with any static, univocal conceptual identity. Clearly, the self-differentiating sell is neither univocally self-identical throughout its progress, nor does it dissociate into unrelated and equivocal states. If it can be maintained that St. Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the analogy of being is founded in "the irreducible diversity of the real order, which cannot be enclosed by man within the limits of a clear concept," and leads to a rejection of "the logical demand for clarity and definability" which can be met only in univocal concepts, then Bergson has much in common with St. Thomas."

I have indicated that the doctrine of Time and Free Will, insofar as it touches upon the question of the analogical elaboration and extension of durational notions to entities other than the self, is implicit and provisional. The Time and Free Will account, nonetheless, does distinguish two facets of qualitative immediacy and the multiplicity of interpretation: (1) durational consciousness as a qualitatively self-differentiating agency; and, (2) the perception of extensity as a qualitatively differentiated, mobile continuum. The primary weakness of Time and Free Will consists in Bergson’s failure to provide a detailed account of the interrelations of these two facets of experiential immediacy. Bergson, however, gives no indication that the perception of extensity, as the object-pole of lived experience, can be wholly derived from durational consciousness as the subject-pole of experience. Moreover, both the durational character of consciousness and the object-oriented perception of extensity are irreducibly relevant to his account of why real motion -- whether in the experience of perceiving a shooting star or in that of lifting one’s arm -- cannot be reduced to the objectifying, subtending space traversed (TFW 110 ff. = OE 73 ff.). In short, there is no suggestion that the qualitative object-pole of lived experience admits of reduction to the subject-pole, nor that these two experiential aspects of qualitative immediacy are wholly discontinuous.

I suggest that Bergson’s further reflections upon these two tendentially distinct yet experientially interdependent facets of qualitative immediacy led him, in Matter and Memory, to extend analogical durational predicates to the entire range of experienced being. "Duration," then, much like the Thomists’ "esse," designates nonformal, existential act. Bergson’s analogical expansion of his doctrine of duration occurs within the context of an acknowledged pluralism of centers of action and develops in terms of two important analogical notions: "tensions of consciousness" and "rhythms of duration." Further exploration of these issues transcends the limits of this article, but the foregoing considerations warrant two conclusions. (1) The accounts of duration and Bergsonian dualism in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory evidence far greater continuity than is generally admitted. (2) Although Bergson develops and elaborates his analogical notions without utilizing a technical vocabulary which focuses upon the word "analogy," his analyses, nonetheless, provide a wide range of experiential content and dialectical argumentation which both illuminates the significance and justifies the use of analogical, judgmental notions in metaphysics.

One article cannot resolve all the problems which have been raised concerning monistic, dualistic, and pluralistic aspects of Bergson’s thought. I have raised issues, however, which to my mind thoroughly counter Levi’s contention that Bergson’s dualism, like that of Descartes, constitutes a bifurcation of nature. Levi’s parallel between Cartesian and Bergsonian dualism, in fact, seriously distorts Bergson’s position in the history of ideas. Bergson’s doctrine, even as early as Time and Free Will with its notion of the concrete perception of extensity, clearly notes the situated, embodied character of durational agency. In this focus, Bergsonian philosophy foreshadows more recent efforts which, like those of Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, seek to reinterpret the subject-object relation in terms of tensional polarization rather than dualistic opposition. Bergson’s attempts in this regard, like subsequent efforts, involve the adoption of the agent-participant attitude and an abandonment of the predominantly passive, spectator viewpoint which dominated the modern period of Western thought.

In the explicit formulations of Matter and Memory, Bergson’s reinterpretation of the subject-object relation is experientially grounded in the lived awareness of "my body" as "center of action." In this account which is dialectically continuous with that of Time and Free Will, "my body" -- durational consciousness as situated agency -- manifests itself as that matrix of concrete human existence which is at once my durational presence to the world and the world’s dynamic presence to me. This current of Bergson’s thought is professedly anti-Cartesian. Bergson’s doctrine of durational embodiment constitutes, in fact, an early and highly original chapter in the effort to by-pass the nineteenth-century stalemate between intellectualistic-idealism and objectivistic-empiricism. Bergsonian metaphysics thus consists in a sustained effort to provide a durational account of those experiential continuities which undercut supposedly irreconcilable conceptual oppositions. As an experiential and dialectical enterprise, the Bergsonian systematic comprises a search for new modes of cognition and interpretation. in its root tendency, this metaphysics of durational embodiment rejects any bifurcation of reality and seeks both to reintegrate man and nature and to rekindle mankind’s spirit of solidarity in the face of creative adventure.

References

BPR -- Ian W. Alexander. Bergson: Philosopher of Reflection. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1957.

CE -- Henri Bergson. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: The Modem Library, 1944.

CM -- Henri Bergson. Creative Mind. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. Totowa, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams and Company, 1965.

EP -- Henri Bergson. Ecrits et paroles, textes rassembles par R.-M. Mossé-Bastide. Paris: Presses Universitares de France, 1959.

HMEP -- James D. Collins. A History of Modern European Philosophy. Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1954.

ME -- Henri Bergson. Mind-Energy. Trans. H. W. Carr. London: Macmillan, 1920.

OE -- Henri Bergson. Oeuvres. Ed. André Robinet. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. (The definitive one-volume centenary edition of Bergson’s major writings.)

PD -- William L. Reese and Eugene Freeman, eds. Process and Divinity. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1964.

TFW -- Henri Bergson. Time and Free Will, authorized translation from the French Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience by F. L. Pogson, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.

1. Pierre d’Aurec, "De Bergson Spencerian au Bergson de l’Essai," Archives de philosophie 17 (1947), 102-21.

2. Nann Clark Barr, "The Dualism of Bergson," The Philosophical Review 22 (1913), 639-52.

Notes

1 Collins. in support of this view, cites 2:639-52; pp. 649-52 are particularly pertinent to Collins’ claim.

2 Cf. OE xiv-xx, 1541-43; CM 11-17, 26-29, 91-95 = OE 1253-59, 1268-70, 1331-35; EP I 204, II 238-40, 294-95, and III 456.

3 Lettre à W. James (9 mai 1908): "Ce fut l’analyse de la notion de temps, telle qu’elle intervient en mécanique ou en physique, que bouleversa toutes mes idées. Je m’aperçus, à mon grand étonnement, que le temps scientifique no dure pas, qu’il n’y aurait rien à changer à notre connaissance scientifique des choses si la totalité du réel était déployée tout d’un coup dans l’instantané, et que la science positive consiste essentiellement dans l’élimination de la durée." Translation mine.

4 Although it remained a negative and oppositional influence, the impact of Kantianism upon Bergson’s own reflections must not be underestimated. Some measure of the extent and continuity of Kant’s influence may be gauged from the fact that in the centenary edition of Bergson’s Oeuvres more entries follow the heading "Kant" than any other heading of the "Index des personnes citées,"

5 The nature of a Bergsonian "fact" or "immediate datum" is well depicted in Jacques Chevalier’s class notes of 1901: "Les faits, nous disait Bergson, sont notre grande lumière; ce sont eux qui départagent los théories adverses; mais il no faut pas croiro, nous disait-il, qu’il suffise d’ouvrir los yeux pour los voft: il faut, au contraire, los regarder attentivement, et non n'est plus difficile à établier qu’un fait, qu’une donnée immédiate." Jacques Chevalier, Entretiens avec Bergson (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1959), p. 4.

6 For a succinct and illuminating analysis of the concepts of space and time which are operative in the corpuscular-kinetic world-view of classical mechanics -- an account which reflects Bergson’s focus upon homogeneity as the fundamental attribute of both concepts -- see Milic Capec, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (Princeton, New Jersey: D. van Nostrand and Company, 1961), pp. 7-53.

7 For an interesting treatment of the character of ordered wholes, see Stephen Strasser. The Soul m Metaphysical and Empirical Psychology, trans. Henry J. Koren (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 1957), pp. 117-26.

8 "Cette différence d’origine explique la différence de fonction, de la ‘durée’ et du ‘stream’. Le ‘stream of thought’ a surtout une puissance d’explication psychologique, tandis quo la ‘durée’ a principalement une puissance d’explication épistémologique ou, si vous voulez, métaphysique." Translation mine.

9 "I recommend a certain manner of thinking which courts difficulty; I value effort above everything. How could certain people have mistaken my meaning? To say nothing of the kind of person who would insist that my ‘intuition’ was instinct or feeling. Not one line of what I have written could lend itself to such an interpretation. And in everything I have written there is assurance to the contrary: my intuition is reflection."

This claim is directed to those critics who, with Bertrand Russell, would insist that: "Intuition is an aspect and development of instinct, and like all instinct, is admirable in those customary surroundings which have molded the habits of the animal in question, but totally incompetent as soon as the surroundings are changed in a way which demands some non-habitual mode of action. . . . [Intuition lacks] largeness of contemplation, impersonal disinterestedness, freedom from practical preoccupations," Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1957), pp. 16f.

10 TFW 153f, 200, 209f, 215, 227f, 230 = OE 102, 131, 137f, 141, 148f, 150.

11 The collective force of such passages led an early twentieth-century commentator to conclude: "Time and Free Will develops the antithesis between inner and outer states, represented by time and space, quality and quantity, freedom and determinism. The opposition is absolute. Though both members are factors of our mental life, they do not interpenetrate: they are present as solidified crust and deep flowing reality. Time and Free Will leaves us with this separation and gives us no hint of a possible reconciliation" (2:640). Bergson, as shall be shown, does "hint" at a reconciliation precisely in terms of the interpenetration of the two facets of experience.

12 [L) a matière inerte no parait pas durer, ou du moins no conserve aucune trace du temps ecoulé," Emphasis mine.

13"[L)es choses, considérées en dehors de notre perception, ne nous paraissent pas durer Emphasis mine.

14 "Nous sentons bien, il est vrai, que si les choses ne durent pas comme non,, il dolt néanmoins y avoir en elles quelque incompréhensible raison qui fasse que les phénomènes paraissent se succéder, et non pas se déployer tous à la fois." Emphasis mine.

15 A ce moment, j’ai découvert la durée, en découvrant la vie intérieure, . . .c’est pourquoi, appelant ‘durée’ ce que je saisissais en moi, j’ai refusé aux choses extérioures ‘a ‘durée’ -- je veux dire cette durée -- parce qu’ello n’était pas en dies la même qu’en moi. Tout ce quo je constatais dans les choses, c’étaient des battements coincidant avec certains moments de ma vie intérieure, et correspondant sans doute à quelque chose de qualitativement distinct," Jacques Chevalier,.Eutretiens avec Bergson (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1959), p. 95.

16 The terms I use to designate these categories are not Bergson’s, but they faithfully express his doctrine.

17 George P. Klubertanz, S. J., St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960), p. 26. In Time and Free Will, Bergson acknowledges in the immediate process-progress character of durational self-consciousness, that kind of relation which Klubertanz terms ‘the analogy of participation in a totality": "a three-term analogy, whore the one is the whole in which the members share unequally or in a certain order" (p. 128).

I. Values as Ideas

In developing a Whiteheadian theory of moral responsibility as derived from his complex metaphysics and his particular notion of the self (its identity, function etc.), it is necessary first to discuss the meaning of value in that metaphysics. In this effort I shall be obliged to refer both to the infinite world of possible values (named "eternal objects") and to the finite world (composed of "actual entities")’ for it is Whitehead’s conviction that any description of the finite actualized world requires reference to both worlds, there being a relational activity between them. Explaining the relevance of the two worlds to each other is a major task and obligation for Whitehead for the stated and important reason that "each World is futile except in its function of embodying the other" (ESP 90). Interestingly, Whitehead holds that this claim is a summary of his endeavor "to avoid the feeble Platonic doctrine of ‘imitation’ and the feebler modern pragmatic dismissal of ‘immortality"’ (ESP 89).

The importance of this novel recommendation for ethics lies in its characteristic ability to moderate between extreme positions: although, against the pragmatists, values are held as eternal, they are not, against the Platonists, degraded by their relation with the finite world. And on the higher levels of experience eternal objects can provide this world with ideal exemplars: "The vagueness of practice is energized by the clarity of ideal experience" (ESP 112).

To support the notion that the actual world of process in fact requires a reference to ideals, Whitehead would appeal to the only evidence that is philosophically compelling to him, namely individual human experience. To critics such as John Goheen, such an appeal suggests that Whitehead’s ethics would be similar to the sort that Hume endorses, wherein the meanings of "good" and "evil" are determined, respectively, by the likes and dislikes of men (PANW 437-59). This is, however, not true. Goheen ignores the fact that an acceptance of experience as evidence does not in itself determine the type of ethics the philosopher will develop. Every philosopher believes, and attempts to prove, that his evidence derives from experience -- whether that of God, of common sense, of Socrates, or his own; thus Plato, for example, grounds his Theory of Forms in his doctrine of recollection, a universal experience, universally forgotten (except perhaps by Socrates). In short, the important parameter that is obscured in Goheen’s suggestion is the critical necessity of attending to the content of what a philosopher believes men can, and do, experience.

And against Hume as well as Dewey, Whitehead insists that human experience includes the intuition of eternal ideals functioning as objective, yet individualized, standards for action: "There are experiences of ideals . . . entertained, of ideals aimed at, of ideals achieved, of ideals defaced. . . . We are essentially measuring ourselves in respect to what we are not . . . [as] an external standard" (MT 141f). Thus ideals have relevance to moral experience and to the development of identity exactly because they have not yet been fully realized and are here realizable by individuals in the process of self-formation. In Whitehead’s statement

Whitehead does hold that there are factors in the universe constituting a general drive towards the conformation of Appearance to Reality" (AI 292). The progress, however, is not specifically predictable or univocal. It requires the introduction of novelty and the actualization of new patterns of ideals, and these activities depend on the will of finite individuals.

Although moral progress is not obvious in history in all dimensions, and never will be, this is not taken by Whitehead to signify that no progress, however partial, is possible. The serious and tragic nature of its lack can emotionally lead one to pessimism, but pessimism is a sentiment and has no necessary or obvious ontological justification. To achieve a belief in the possibility of creative evolution in ethical life as directed by human beings, one requires, according to Whitehead, a love or respect for men -- a minimal requirement, without which it is not possible to evoke the requisite faith needed in the face of the perennial confrontation with evil.

Here one must conceive that men can be ethically respected and morally improved, for the opposite is monstrous, involving a type of ethical nihilism. Such an attitude can obtain even within a religious perspective, darkly exemplified for all history in the scornful cruelty of a type of Medieval Christian absolutism which condemned men as sinful and unable to improve by their own powers. This misuse of religious trust notwithstanding, Whitehead seems to find what he calls the "intuition of peace." And Whitehead would hold that the experience of the love of man achieved in this intuition supports the belief that any individual can change from an evil to a virtuous propensity, for perhaps unaccountably complex reasons. Here it can be recalled as a lesson that Plato never explained how or why certain individuals do rise from the Cave-world and others do not.

As elaborated in part II, it may be that certain examples of human greatness, historical or contemporary, can evoke an urge toward growth -- if one is already the sort of individual who chooses to attend to and can recognize greatness. I think Whitehead also knew this, suggesting a radical reversal of the Western philosophical and religious tradition’s insistence that virtue, there meant as obedience to law, can be externally taught. Among other reasons for this inference one might note that the intuition of peace cannot be consciously willed, and that the experience of love cannot be commanded, and both are necessary in Whitehead’s view of moral identity.

The intuition discloses that a second general principle underlies all moral aims and actions, what Whitehead calls "order" ("the principle of the generality of harmony"). The value of order, however, is subordinate to love; types of order are to be rated in importance (value) "according to their success in magnifying the individual actualities, that is to say, in promoting strength of experience [the task of love]" (AI291). That a radical novelty is here present in both the assignment of ultimate values and their definitions is no doubt apparent to philosophers, and perhaps somewhat alienating. Some psychologists, notably in interpersonal theory, are more familiar with these important ideas:

Here love is clearly experienced and expressed as a commitment to growth, one’s own included, whereas the continuity of a static order is a hindrance if it thwarts the process, as Whitehead also insisted. Other mutually held notions voiced in the above quotation, particularly the very significant fashion in which the alleged dualism of egoism versus altruism is dissolved, will concern us later on.

As the intuition of peace evokes the desire to act creatively, it also promotes one to increase his sphere of concern beyond narrow self-interest. As Whitehead put it: "Evil is the brute motive force of fragmentary purpose, disregarding the eternal vision" (SMW 192). The evil of "people of narrow sympathies, purely self-regarding" is the evil that arises when there is a "loss of the higher experience in favor of the lower experience" (RM 92). There is produced a consequent loss to the social environment since evil is unstable and does not have important or lasting positive effectiveness in the creative advance. Because one’s own "strength of experience" has been reduced, the relational influence of that experience is consequently reduced in moral importance and represents a failure to achieve genuine moral responsibility. This is what Whitehead has named "the evil of triviality," "a sketch in place of a full picture" (ESP 119), produced by "good people of narrow sympathies who are apt to be unfeeling and unprogressive. enjoying their egotistical goodness . . . a state of stable goodness so far as their own interior life is concerned. This type of moral correctitude is, on a larger view, very like evil" (RM 95).

It is of the greatest importance here to realize that for Whitehead habitual narrowness is not only ethically evil but is also self-defeating, denying self-realization and satisfaction. This complex conviction is directly reminiscent of Spinoza’s identification of virtue and power and his similar additional claim that virtuous activity is the only genuinely satisfying activity. To substitute conformity to habit for intensity and openness of experience is, to Whitehead, destructive of the obvious metaphysical truth that all actuality is essentially relational. When an entity ceases to relate entirely, it ceases to be actual; when it is curtailed in its relations, it is to that extent deprived of development, and of satisfaction. According to a brilliant analysis by Rollo May, "Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is. The opposite of will is not indecision but being uninvolved, detached, unrelated to significant events. . . . It leads to emptiness, and makes one less able . . . to survive" (LW 29, 33). The withdrawal of love and of will and commitment are the "chief casualties" of apathy, says May; in Whitehead’s analysis, "In Discord there is always a frustration. But even Discord may be preferable to a feeling of slow relapse into general anesthesia, or into tameness which is its prelude" (AI 263). At every stage in psychological and (therefore) ethical development, much depends upon the weight one gives to growth and to security (in Whitehead’s language, love and order) when the two conflict -- and they will.

That the narrowness of the "lower experience" has been often considered the meaning of happiness by common sense while security and order in life are extolled as virtue is itself a tragic testimony to the folly of human timidity, as analyzed below. The view has been a remarkably successful self-fulfilling prophecy -- as Whitehead recognized, and as novelists never cease reminding us. The mistaken estimate that happiness can exclude growth or that survival itself can obtain by negating creative change is itself based on a mistaken definition of the self as analogous to a substance that reaches identity and survival through exclusion, rather than through relational expansion. To Whitehead, such expansion would ultimately include a relation of concern with the entire universe of values, ideal and actual. This choice is the meaning of love, freely willed; its moral significance is eternal and objective. To be sure, the desire for its realization, as for the realization of the subordinate value of order or harmony, is subjective. But all desires are inevitably subjective in their psychological origin, and the fact is beside the point.

It is necessary to clarify briefly the relation between these two foundational Whiteheadian values of order and love to establish firmly their priority, for contrary to some critics, I do not agree that order is meant by Whitehead to be the highest value, as argued above, or indeed, that it is identical with goodness. Although the selected importance of this claim is ethical, its basis is metaphysical. Whitehead has stated in apparently, but only apparently, unusual ethical language that "Morality consists in the control of process so as to maximize importance. (MT 19) and, further, that "importance depends on endurance, . . . the retention through time of an achievement of value" (SMW 193). In thus aiming not only at the creation of value but at its endurance, morality avoids becoming the rather self-indulgent experience of (merely) immediate, fleeting creativity, however genuine at that moment. And it is the achievement of harmony, the stability of order, that provides the endurance. However, like all realities in Whitehead’s universe of process, nothing actual can retain a static identity. Situations either advance into novelty or degenerate and decay, for there is no other alternative, metaphysically. Thus endurance through order is not enough, because it is not permanent. It is then the obligation of love to save the process from issuing into decay through introducing novelty which is additionally creative and alone can advance the value of experience. This obligation is, in one aspect, a recognition of tragedy. All life requires interplay with its ever-changing environment and "in the case of living societies this interplay takes the form of robbery . . . life is robbery. It is at this point . . . that morals become acute." And, Whitehead insists, "The robber requires justification" (PR 160).

Since no achieved stability can be taken as final, the decision to introduce novelty that advances progress is paramount, and everlasting. The inexhaustible possibility inherent in the world through ingression of an indeterminate number of eternal objects in combination substantiates the latter conclusion. But it is not necessary also to conclude that any possibility is equally possible in every concrete situation. It is surely the case that past events combine to enforce the greater probability of certain developments which are, so-to-speak, more potential than other (simply abstract) possibilities. To deny this would imply the belief that creativity is tantamount to non-causality or chaos, which is grotesque and certainly mistaken. Indeed Whitehead insists that there is always inheritance from the past which induces formation and that establishes identity.

But to return to my original point, Whitehead also insists that "the form of process is not wholly dependent upon derivation from the past. As epochs decay amid futility and frustration, the form of process derives other ideals involving novel forms of order" (MT 142). Thus although there is inheritance from the past, this nonetheless allows for the introduction of creative novelty. Exclusion to either extreme as if it were the sole interpretation of the universe would commit a philosopher to further doctrines which are, I believe, unintelligible. At any rate it is certain that Whitehead, as is methodologically characteristic, attempts to synthesize the two extremes. The balance issues in his fundamental doctrine of creative process or evolution, which modulates between the notion of mere possibility (lacking directional influence or aim) and the notion of a rigorous directional determinism. Because of this creative evolution, to a real degree it is not possible to predict the future qualitatively, although there is certainly causation which can be discovered after the fact. And this is all that one could expect.

The latter conclusion has important, and tragic, consequences from the perspective of a Whiteheadian ethics. Every act becomes to some degree a moral risk so that despite the possible (but also largely unknowable) purity of one’s intentions, human guilt will often arise because of unexpected and evil results of one’s acts. To Whitehead, as against Kant, if one is interested only in the morality of his motives, he has not accepted the full ethical responsibility of being an individual related to others with the total commitment of love. As Whitehead so magnificently said it, "The book of Job is the revolt against the facile solution, so esteemed by fortunate people, that the sufferer is the evil person" (RM 49).

Several of the above ideas, among others, force Whitehead’s well-known conviction that the claim to the existence of static, unchangeable moral codes is a dogmatic and dangerous error. By contrast, societies should carefully expand and qualify standards as the particular social realities change since what was omitted as irrelevant, or was unknowable, can become relevant and important. In short, "the moral code is the behavior-patterns which in the environment for which it is designed will promote the evolution of that environment toward its proper perfection" (AI 291; italics mine). Whitehead’s typical location of importance as referent to the particular rather than the general is here directive in his insistence that it is the needs of the particular society that require attention. Universal homogeneity, if such were possible, would be of secondary interest, if meaningful at all. These implications further suggest that for Whitehead both temporality and situation would necessarily be moral parameters in judging the rightness of social codes or constitutions, past or contemporary. In this position Whitehead is repudiating any theory that claims knowledge of absolute values and (therefore) duties, while, I think rightly, implying that this repudiation does not also deny the possibility of ethics itself. Skepticism is not legitimate here. For one cannot logically conclude that ethical theory is impossible if what was demanded of it, namely absolute values, was not in fact necessary as a minimal condition.

Thus although the perspectival determination and the relational nature of moral codes is recognized by Whitehead, this need not lead to the further notion, a nonsequitur, that moral standards are merely relative in the mistaken sense of being irrevocably private. Since the age of Socrates and the Sophists, many philosophers have recognized that these two op-posed positions are not exhaustive of what can be intellectually validated. Relationally defined standards can be accepted as having the same degree of objectivity in those circumstances to which the standards apply as absolute standards are alleged to have in all circumstances. The differentia does not reside in the existence or nonexistence of objectivity but simply in the claims made concerning the extension of applicability. The absolute code claims objective and universal relevance for all time; the particular code, for that time and place in which the relevant circumstances still obtain, and not beyond. But that is enough.

If this recognition cannot be commonly agreed to, ethical subjectivism will pervade any society that has become aware of each individual’s equal right to judge moral codes, as is inherent in the Western liberal or democratic notion of civil justice. Such a privilege can be turned either toward creative communal progress or toward individual, and therefore social, anarchy. No one can ignore the grim fact that the latter event has begun increasingly to prevail, and against it develops the solemn conservative request for stability and order. Professor Rubinoff states this dilemma forcefully:

Whitehead similarly warns: "We are at the threshold of a democratic age, and it remains to be determined whether the equality of man is to be realized on a high level or a low level" (AE 77).

To Whitehead moral codes originate in individual decisions as determined by the present location of importance. However, to conclude therefore that the decisions must remain private, and thus potentially anarchic, is by no means necessary. In Whitehead’s succinct statement:

Because all actualities are thus in relational communication, objectivity obtains as a necessary metaphysical aspect of activity. Although all decisions are subjectively originated, any can be communicated publicly so that charges of ethical subjectivism, or indeed of epistemological skepticism, do not hold. Such skepticism can arise only in a doctrine that claims the further notion that what is privately originated cannot be subsequently shared or communicated. This amazing dogma, however, is clearly refuted by Whitehead, among notable others. It is ultimately dependent upon an analysis of the self as some sort of self-enclosed independently existing entity and produces precisely the difficulty for ethics that has been erroneously attributed to Whitehead, namely that his ethics would be a private-interest theory, at best.¹ But Whitehead clearly repudiates the contributing analysis of the self, which would be "no more original than a stone" (PR 159), and repudiates its consequences for ethics: "The doctrine of minds, as independent substances, leads directly not merely to private worlds of experience, but also to private worlds of morals. The moral intuitions can be held to apply only to the strictly private world of psychical experience" (SMW 195) -- which is precisely what was to be disproved.

Elsewhere, and with direct implications for his own possible ethical theory, Whitehead states that "what is known in secret must be . . . verified in common. The immediate conviction of the moment in this way justifies itself as a rational principle enlightening the objective world" (RM 133; italics mine). In short, Whitehead is insisting that not only can something subjectively originated become, in his metaphysics, objectively real and communally known, but that, ethically, it must become so, since the willfulness of "immediate conviction" is not self-justifying. The general conclusion as regards claims to moral seriousness of any original view is assumed to be obvious.

A final issue regarding the analysis of moral standards in a Whiteheadian ethics remains. Even when a valid moral code or constitution is accepted as relevant and binding by a society, it cannot direct individual moral choices in any univocal fashion. The familiar philosophical awareness that ethical theories can make general recommendations but cannot claim to advise individuals regarding concrete situations would be a necessary view for Whitehead. No code can successfully reduce all possible duties arising in a world of creative process to its own clarity and manageable finitude. Moreover, because the criteria are general while the reality of each situation is ultimately particular, contextual interpretation is always necessary, although, to be sure, difficult. Everybody knows this, and men argue against its necessity and legitimacy only if certain decisions offend them morally and/or politically, as occurred for example in the attack on the Warren Court by the Conservative Right. Attention to the concrete satisfies further the positive moral requirement of concern with the different needs of this or that man as an individual rather than as an instance of a generalized group. The latter approach is familiarly, and all too often, described as "justice" in democratic societies. By contrast, individual attention is the claim of love, and is paramount in an ethics based on concern for the importance of individuals, as a Whiteheadian theory undeniably is. Interpretation of codes is necessary since how its central values can be actualized must differ as the society itself changes. In addition, the actual meanings of value terms change since the sense of ethical concepts is vastly dependent upon what is learned from their enactment in experience. "A precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge" (PR 18).

The denial that absolute and unchanging moral codes can be concretely formulated implies numerous other conclusions in ethical theory as given from a Whiteheadian perspective. Against dogmatic suppression of the freedom of individual conscience that was a consequence of absolutistic claims to final certainty, Whitehead stresses the necessity for tolerance towards the novel opinions of individuals; this is his emphasis on the social value of what he calls "adventure." "The duty of tolerance is our finite homage to the abundance of inexhaustible novelty which is awaiting the future. . ." (AI 59). Again, the future, including its ethical dimension, cannot be totally known, not only because men are finite and thus partially ignorant, as Locke suggests, but essentially because ultimate novelty cannot be mechanically predicted. Tolerance of adventurous novelty is the single rational response possible. It is a necessary response if civilized society is to remain civilized, for, as Whitehead suggests, freedom to tolerate novelty "haunts the higher civilizations" (AI 280). This tolerance is nowhere more significant, or difficult, than in ethical or political codes, because nowhere more dangerous when ignored.

With Dewey, Whitehead would appear to recognize that education to the tolerance of change and ambiguity is a serious social need if freedom is not to forever remain fearful and largely illusory (as Fromm suggests, it still generally remains so). Believing rigidity, clarity, and homogeneity to be prerequisites for psychological and social peace "the middle class pessimism over the future of SMW 208).

Oddly, and unfortunately, in various discussions Whitehead seems to suggest that any novelty is in itself desirable, as if, from the point of view of value, novelty were self-validating (whatever that may mean). Nonetheless, although novelty is a necessary condition to achieve value, it can also produce evil should it introduce a chaos that cannot be creatively formed into a higher order, for as Whitehead did clearly state: "The novelty may promote or destroy order; it may be good or bad" (PR 284). Thus it must be part of my work here to discover how Whitehead would have us tell the difference. This task of differentiation is particularly important today since, whether cynically or accidentally, all too many otherwise sensible scholars (and amateur politicians) appear to scorn it.

II Ethical Identity

In the "creative ethics" that I here attribute to Whitehead, freedom is clearly a central value since enactment of all goods and satisfaction is obviously conditional on freedom of pursuit, and "life in its essence is the gain of intensity through freedom . . ." (PR 164). And it will be recalled that although "God’s purpose in the creative advance is the evocation of intensities" (PR 161), men, as free, are alone able to create this advance. Thus one may conclude that to Whitehead freedom is not so much a right as it is a duty and an obligation; these derive from the religious level and apply to the level of ethical life. And it is clear that a radical and unfamiliar notion of God is being suggested, producing unfamiliar results for ethics. Whitehead’s God does not claim obedience as the highest relational value of man to himself, nor does he claim passive worship to be such. Rather, God wills man’s freedom and creativity as completing His own purpose. To Whitehead, God is dependent on the world as well as the world on God. "The worship of God is not a rule of safety" (SMW 192).

By contrast, in an authoritarian religion obedience stands as the ultimate moral duty wherein creative moral freedom could be only the freedom to sin. Nor are creative efforts individually to advance value considered necessary (albeit also unavailable to men due to original sin), for such absolutistic attitudes produce an astonishing complacency regarding human suffering in this world. This complacency must be clearly distinguished from tolerance of change, being quite the opposite. However disguised, the ideology of this view hides at its heart the essence of intolerance and prejudice and is, from a Whiteheadian perspective, a moral and metaphysical nightmare. In the extreme, one recalls Sartre’s Anti-Semite:

And, as everybody knows, racism can be a full-time job. All of it is, of course, magicalism, as Sartre exquisitely showed. But the racist, as full-time immoralist, has no need for reason. As Whitehead often warns, this is the lure of imagined absolutes and, of course, the danger.

The alternative response of cynicism regarding the possibility of any sort of ethical life whatsoever, once the absolutist’s naive (and opportunistic) optimism is rejected, is similarly mistaken and not acceptable. As noted above, Whitehead’s doctrines imply that a narrowing pessimistic attitude, a lack of faith in the possibility of creative advance, is evil, particularly by its obvious tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But, again, cynicism is a sentiment, not a conclusion. When it purports to present a "realistic" assessment of history, it robs men of the courage and urge (eros) to go on creating value for the future. In short, cynicism robs moral life of its "zest for adventure" by its inability to transcend a narrow interest in hopelessness. The affirmation of possibility, by contrast to both dogmatic optimism and pessimism, has as "one of its fruits . . . that passion whose existence Hume denied, the love of mankind as such" (AI 284).

Although the complex moral ability called courage, highly honored by the ancients and ignored by most non-existentialist modern philosophers, is not directly named by Whitehead, it is directly implicated throughout his works in discussions of tragedy and heroism. And in his discussions of wisdom Whitehead would seem to be endorsing the moral value of understanding the existence of greatness in human aims, thought and act wherever illustrated in history, however fitfully. Such recognition avoids the grim but fashionable conclusion that human reality must mean the trivial experience of individuals, leveled by a homogeneous majority complacently satisfied with the "unholy" given. For Whitehead, civilization is not like this and never has been like this. To judge that it is and will be would suggest to Whitehead that a misguided decision and wish is operating here, since all judgment is guided by interest, and interest is, at ground, an emotional choice. But what the actual causality operating in this attitude may be is not here important courage is not among the causes. For courage cannot reside in a man’s passive, pessimistic submission to reality as it is -- in a world of possibility and tragedy -- any more than it resides in the dogmatic absolutist’s applause for that reality as allegedly containing "the Good." In their own manner, both engage in systematic and elaborate shadow-boxing: Whitehead’s narrow self-regarding people" mistaking sentiment for morality. "Tolstoy tells of the Russian ladies who cry at the drama but are oblivious to their own coachman sitting outside in the freezing cold. Sentimentality glories in the fact that I have this emotion; it begins subjectively and ends there" (LW 291). It does not seem necessary to reiterate Whitehead’s agreement with these splendid statements by Rollo May. And although we need not agree fully with Heidegger that the origin or source of willing and acting is care, or that the source of conscience is care, we can agree for Whitehead that care and ethical life are correlated in a way they need not be in an authoritarian ethics based on obedience and fear.

Courage, Whitehead implies, is the ability to aim adventurously toward creative improvement, of one’s self and of the society, with no particular shackles of evil being accepted as necessarily final. Despite the overwhelming testimony of particular tragic epochs, such as our own, there is a moral order in the world to be actualized by individuals. And one does not create in spite of the tragedy but, so-to-speak, by recognizing it in order thereby to transcend the situation should any action be possible. To ignore the possibility of, for example, nuclear disaster in order to preserve temporary "sanity of mind" is to become a co-participant of its inevitably growing probability. For, and this is very important, in a Whiteheadian ethics one may be considered morally guilty for what one rejected from consciousness and action as well as for what one has done.

Courage therefore implies a certain refusal to accept what is not humanly acceptable, in order to change it, however apparently quixotic: contemporary examples include Gandhi and Martin Luther King, whose goals and methods express care as well as courage. Such action requires the decision to renounce one’s secure position in the prevailing social structure and to risk ostracism and isolation, the risk of being forsaken by one’s social world. In the extreme, Whitehead notes that courage accepts the final risk, for according to Whitehead "It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God" (RM 19). Here Jesus is the historically permanent example.

The alternative is pseudo-heroism: an agreement to accept a goal of passive adaptation to life as it is presently structured, thereby helping both to perpetuate that structure and the myth of its permanence. There is neither metaphysical nor moral justification for this attitude in the world as Whitehead sees it. In process there is continual introduction of novelty, which in the interest of survival can be responded to in one of two manners: one may reduce the event to irrelevance by "blocking out unwelcome detail" (negative prehension) or "by an initiative in conceptual prehensions, i.e., in appetition its subjective aim originates novelty to match the novelty of the environment . . . through thinking." And, according to Whitehead, "the primary meaning of ‘life’ is the origination of conceptual novelty -- novelty of appetition" (PR 154-56). That the former, non-originative choice corresponds to what Whitehead would condemn as leading to the evil of the "lower experience," pursued by the "good people of narrow sympathies [who] are apt to be unfeeling and unprogressive. having reached a state of stable goodness so far as their own interior life is concerned" (RM 95) is, to me, an inescapable conclusion. In Berdyaev’s statement, "Egoism and cowardice are inwardly related" (MCA 245).

A point of further importance for ethics is included in the above quotations from Whitehead. If originative novelty is a defining characteristic of life, to the degree that entities respond in the first, nonappetitive mode, they become to that degree nonliving or inorganic. It begins to appear that a human being who habitually chose such a mode of behavior would, in a psychoanalytic translation of Whitehead’s ideas, progressively undergo a pathological dehumanization of the self, by the self. There results a gradual destruction of the self as a living integrated being, first in imagination and then in behavior, such as in the psychotic’s withdrawal. The narrowing of interest (care) and relation would result as the individual became increasingly unprepared to cope with environmental novelty. Seen alternately from the conceptual perspective of existentialism, this mode of being in the world is what is called "bad faith" or "inauthenticity": the attempt, often profoundly successful, to act as if one were a thing, an impenetrable object -- the self that "need be no more original than a stone" (PR 159). In a Whiteheadian universe where novelty is continuously arising and demanding response, such an illusion of static, atomistic identity would be difficult indeed to sustain. It would be, in fact (as is racism, with which it is often intimately related), a full-time preoccupation, robbing the self of all energy and desire for spontaneous, free response. To Whitehead, any destruction of the energy of life is a primary evil, including self-destruction.

It is, however, as a social force that such individuals, while still more or less sane, can be remarkably destructive. In fact, if I am correct in connecting Whitehead’s ideas here with Erich Fromm’s portrait of the necrophile, this individual "loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. [He] is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic . . . as if all living persons were things" (HM 41). And, in absolute contrast to Whitehead’s moral man, the biophile committed to "the love of mankind as such," the necrophile, as immoral man, is fascinated by all that is destructive or destroyed.

It must be clear that this orientation toward hate and fear of life and all that is living, uncertain, and creative, characterizes the individual who, on a less pathological level, is committed to the type of ethics I have called "authoritarian," rather than to the "creative ethics" I have attributed to Whitehead. That such individuals are, tragically, not rare in the Western post-industrial world cannot be news to intellectuals; that Whitehead’s process metaphysics implies an ethics remarkably relevant to this contemporary moral perversion may be.

Now for some time the sociality of man has been recognized as being natural and necessary. Some amount of individual social consciousness and willingness to perform certain social acts is necessary for a society, even the society of Eichmann, to obtain at all and to persist. This must be an obvious point. We may not approve the particular rules, but we cannot repudiate the necessity that some rules prevail, and we cannot try to destroy all the rules at once unless we are prepared to defend the ideology of anarchy. Whitehead would not be so prepared, for, as before discussed, creative freedom does not, to him, mean chaos or whim. Rather it must include order and "unflinching rationality" without which there is no creativity, nor surely any social environment to support and judge it. It may thus appear that arguments to the contrary are essentially rhetorical, because existentially solipsistic. Moreover to dispute authoritarian ethics is not also thereby to commit oneself to a repudiation of every authorized social order and thus embrace anarchy. The alternatives are false and surely foolish, the two "horns" and, therefore, the entire dilemma is unnecessary. Thus it is not as important that Whitehead’s metaphysics affords an exceptionally lucid explanation of the reality and necessity of society, and therefore social consciousness, as that it enables him to go on to stress the unique value that such community can have for an individual.

Even this last statement is, until qualified, morally ambiguous for -- and this is the essential point that has been long overlooked -- everything depends upon what it is in social relationships that is considered valuable. Are people seen as being necessary for mutual exploitation as serviceable "things" or are they related to, and needed, as persons, available for mutual care, growth, and love? The important recognition that men are social animals who need, and therefore value, each other cannot alone prevent attitudes that confuse men with property, sometimes indeed identify them, or sometimes, as in "shoot to kill" orders during ghetto looting riots, assign priority to property. That the recognition of sociality is not enough, and that this is not humanism, need not be labored further.

The moral issue to be decided here is not therefore that of egoism versus altruism, or private versus social concern, but rather of what one means by "egoism" or, indeed, by "social concern." If one has misidentified the meaning of his own self and thus his "enlightened self-interest," then neither his egoism nor his altruism will be successful. Regarding the former, he will not recognize wherein genuine satisfaction resides or what therefore to pursue -- he is the anti-hero of much contemporary drama, in and out of books. Regarding his effort at altruism, we may be convinced by the genuineness of his moral and social intentions even while his acts are largely unacceptable in their results. The failure is ultimately not attributable to egoistic motives due to "narrowly self-regarding" interests when relating to others but when relating to his own self.

It is this psychological error that has serious and unfortunate moral and intellectual results, for, as Whitehead well knew, feelings direct thought. The central failure here, more familiar in its moral than psychological interpretation, is the individual’s inability to recognize emotionally the meaning of human satisfaction and need, his own as well as those of others. It is here claimed that Whitehead provides important concepts by which one can overcome this classical but superficial dualism that is alleged in the construct of egoism versus altruism.

According to Whitehead all life aims at satisfaction, albeit the varying contents of the particular satisfaction are determined by the subjective aim of the unique creative desire of each entity. This is Whitehead’s analysis of "self-causation" which arises from feelings aimed at the subject’s satisfaction and which at the same time also further defines the subject. Everything here depends upon how the goal, the satisfaction, is understood, for though this the incompatible feelings will be disregarded and through this process the self is formed, continuously. From the point of initiation, all novelty and diversity will be subject to the defining unity of the self as formed from feelings. Now if the self’s identity is narrow, lacking intensity and scope of feelings, the result of the exposure to varying data available for inclusion will be to deny habitually that which is novel. This will curtail self-actualization or growth, and therefore satisfaction, so that the selfishness of those who are "purely self-regarding" is also largely self-destructive. Whitehead has provided us with a metaphysical paradigm of the individual who is both immoral and unhappy. This individual has long occupied psycho-analysts but too often confused moralists, who notice only the immorality. But it is perhaps even more difficult to imagine Eichmann happy than it was to imagine Sisyphus so, as Camus requested. As a final point here, it is important to challenge those critics of Whitehead who suspect that because his metaphysics is based in a theory of feelings it cannot provide an adequate (i.e., nonsubjectivistic) ethics. For it would rather seem that because of Whitehead’s recognition of the thoroughgoing importance of feelings as the initiation of all judgment and action that he is in a uniquely perceptive position to discuss ethics, if and once, the critic recognizes the centrality of feelings for ethical life.

I must now claim that Whitehead is offering a radically novel version of evil in human life. If it is true that life aims at satisfaction, and, as already discussed, evil, narrow, self-regarding attitudes cannot produce genuine happiness for oneself or for others, it would seem that egoism is a self-destructive identity based on a false view of the self and its needs. To say this is also to imply that the tendency of philosophy, religion, and common sense to ascribe evil acts to the moral inferiority of the individual -- summed up for all time in the extraordinary metaphor of "original sin" -- is not a fundamental explanation. Rather it would seem that egoism, being a thoroughgoing failure, is rooted not in moral depravity but psychological ignorance concerning one’s own needs and feelings, including the experience of happiness. Such an individual is fundamentally self-alienated before he will become alienated from others. Only the latter, however, will be visible to the nonpsychologist, which is perhaps a partial explanation of why what is actually an effect of an inner and primary failure has long been considered its cause.

Or perhaps for unaccountably complex reasons men find it somehow less disastrous to ascribe the origin of evil to an inherent moral depravity than to an ignorance of our feelings and emotional needs, what Whitehead calls "conceptual prehension." Thus we declare that it is because of certain experiences of guilt that an evil act may at times evoke unhappiness in the individual, rather than noticing that evil is in fact unsuccessful in producing genuine happiness. Self-actualization, and therefore satisfaction, cannot be achieved if the self is mislocated though the original destruction of feelings, what Whitehead calls "negative prehension." And what must be now also obvious, although it was not and could not be to J. S. Mill, is that asking the individual what in fact makes him happy is not a source of information at all. To the degree that he is alienated from feelings aimed at satisfaction of his actual self’s growth, his response will be largely inaccurate. He will, of course, respond nonetheless, for men need to think they know what happiness is. Rather perversely, such "necessary illusions" combine to lead us away from any real discovery. One could speculate that the emotional ground of this type of complex illusion has been man’s apparent need to believe he is motivated by self-interest, (which is later to be called the cause of the "egoist’s" evil), whereas all the above suggests that, where men are evil, the "original" sin has been self-hate, leading to self-alienation and self-destruction. The negativity will, of course, then pervade social relations as well.

The agony of such speculation does not seem unknown to White-head, who discusses the tragedy inherent in the loss of what "might have been and is not" (AI 275), a loss primarily to the individual and secondarily to the world. If psychologists combine to teach us that the achievement of genuine self-love (which is an achievement and not a given) is rare, this is not surprising -- although far too many of us will be surprised. If philosophers, including Whitehead, suggest a metaphysics of the self which can insist and explain why self-love is the very opposite of egoism, and happiness not in conflict with social relation, it is perhaps more comprehensible why evil may arise from psychological ignorance rather than some original moral depravity.

As a final note: because of Whitehead’s well-known rationalism it is perhaps useful to remark that although rationality, as above variously remarked, is indeed a necessary aspect of moral life-- "where attainable knowledge [including self-knowledge] could have changed the issue, ignorance has the guilt of vice" (AE 26) -- I doubt that a Whiteheadian ethics could recommend that the level of moral and social virtue be transcended to an allegedly superior level of isolated intellectual virtue. In this sense the naturalistic aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysics would prevail more thoroughly than did Aristotle’s. One’s highest virtue and the happiness of actualized self-identity will be realized in some society, if realized at all. Since human individuals are essentially and naturally relational, the recommendation is clearly to expand and intensify relations, as above shown, and not, against Aristotle, to transcend the need for relation by means of some supposed individual and self-sufficient activity. There is no such activity.

References

ASJ -- Jean-Paul Sartre. Anti-Semite and Jew. New York: Schoken Books, 1965.

CHG -- Saul Newton and Jane Pearce. The Conditions of Human Growth. New York: Citadel Press, 1963.

HM -- Erich Fromm. The Heart of Man. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

LW -- Rollo May. Love and Will. New York: Norton, 1969.

MCA -- Nicholas Berdyaev. The Meaning of the Creative Act. New York: Collier Books, 1962.

PANW -- John Goheen. "Whitehead’s Theory of Value" in P. A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 2nd ed., New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1961.

PP -- Lionel Rubinoff. The Pornography of Power. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967.

Notes

1 See P. A. Schilpp, "Whitehead’s Moral Philosophy" (PANW 561-618) and John Goheen, op. cit. (PANW 435-59); for a refutation of the private-interest attribution, see L. Belaief, "Whitehead and Private-Interest Theories," in Ethics, 56/4 (July, 1966) 277-86.

Whitehead’s thought covered vast areas of learning in diverse fields. In each of the areas of mathematical logic, the philosophy of science, and cosmology, his output was prodigious. However, the mere fact that we assign different names to these different branches of learning ought not to lead us to think that they were separated in Whitehead’s thinking. On the contrary, their cross-influence and interactions were vital in the growth of Whitehead’s thought. When the mind dwells at great length on any one subject, the characteristics of that subject are bound to impress themselves in the thought process. Hence it is that the characteristics of mathematical logic imprinted themselves in Whitehead’s mind and served as a root for some of his cosmological doctrines. That this is the case can perhaps most readily be appreciated in Whitehead’s early paper "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World."

The importance of this paper is frequently overlooked or underestimated as an antecedent of Whitehead’s later work. This is unfortunate for the paper provides great insight into the working of Whitehead’s thought. Here we see him grappling with the nature of the material world and using the newly developed symbolism of formal logic as his tool. This is in itself an exciting sight. But more importantly, in the paper Whitehead comes very close to enunciating a possible world view that bears a strong resemblance to the one that finally emerged in Process and Reality. It becomes strikingly obvious that his complete cosmological scheme did not spring all at once, fully formed, like some Athena from his mind. Rather, Whitehead returned repeatedly to some of the same cosmological themes, evidencing in his development what Mays properly calls a "spiral structure" (RW 259). Accordingly, in this paper I will attempt to point out some of the close thematic connections that exist between an early and a late part of Whitehead’s development -- specifically, between his work in formal logic as applied in "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World" and his later cosmological doctrines.

Whitehead wrote "On Mathematical Concepts" in 1905, at a time when he was two years into writing the Principia. (He worked on the latter from 1903-1912.) Not surprisingly therefore much of the paper deals with logical formalisms. Fortunately, Whitehead takes frequent breaks from the mathematics to develop the concepts verbally, and hence his progress through the paper can be readily followed. It is helpful, though, in reading the paper if one has fixed firmly in mind the general characteristics of logical systems.

We recall that any logical system starts with a set of entities, as the primitive existing things within the system. For example, in arithmetic the primitive entities are integers, in algebra they are the real numbers, in geometry (as conceived by Euclid) they are the point, the line, and the plane. In addition to the primitive entities there are rules governing the system -- the axioms. These axioms consist of statements about relations. For example, if we let A stand for the relation of addition, then Axy = Ayx might be an axiom for arithmetic expressing the transitivity of addition. Finally, there are theorems -- statements that are logically implied by the axioms. Thus a formal system has as components: primitive entities, relations, axioms, and theorems.

Like any good mathematician Whitehead starts the 1905 paper with a series of definitions. He defines "the Material World" as "a set of relations and of entities which occur as forming the field of these relations" (MC 13). (Note: A "Field" is the set of primitive entities with which a formal system deals.) This is a most revealing definition. It shows that Whitehead conceives of the world as a logical system and therefore believes that it is possible to view the world in this way. By this one stroke Whitehead has cut through a morass of potential problems. Anyone who quarrels, on whatever grounds, with the possibility of investigating such all-embracing world views is brought up short. By his defining the material world in mathematical terms, his ability to investigate ways of conceiving the material world becomes as certain as his ability to do mathematics. No one challenges the latter. Hence the former must likewise remain unchallenged.

Given this definition of the material world, Whitehead sets out to analyze different ways of conceiving of the material world, i.e., sets out to investigate the different possible primitive entities and relations between these entities. Indeed, it is the choice of one relation, the "essential relation," that defines which concept of the material world we are dealing with. Mays (RW 240) points Out the similarity between every world view’s having an "essential relation" and Whitehead’s opinion expressed in Process and Reality that certain characteristics are shared by every cosmic epoch. Alternatively, it could be argued that there is a connection between which essential relation is chosen and which cosmic epoch is described. The five different essential relations which Whitehead discusses in the 1905 paper all correspond to different ways of picturing the current epoch, it is true, but there is no reason why Whitehead’s method could not be generalized to other cosmic epochs by making several modifications. (See MC 82 for an expression of Whitehead’s belief in the possibility of extending his method, albeit in a different way.)

Whitehead’s method in dealing with each concept of the material world rims as follows: He chooses a set of primitive entities and an essential relation between some of the members of this set. He then asks: What other properties must this essential relation possess in order for the field of the essential relation to be "meaningful," i.e., so that the theorems of Euclidian¹ geometry are rendered "true" in the field? These other properties then become the axioms of that concept of the material world.

The above is probably unclear and will likely remain so unless an example is given. Indeed, Whitehead deduces five separate "concepts" of the material world based on the above procedure. The first concept is the "normal" one and will serve as an example. The other four will serve to illustrate the variety of the possible concepts and the power of the procedure.²

Concept I is the "standard" world view of classical physics. The set of primitive entities is defined as the union of the sets of all point of space, all instants of time, and all particles of matter. (These three are, of course, the primitive entities of Newtonian physics.) The fundamental relation is one which defines the nature of "extension." Whitehead shows that from the concept of extension one can derive all of Euclidian geometry (not surprisingly, since Euclid had the concept of extension, e.g., lines, planes, etc., in mind while developing his geometry). Whitehead dryly remarks that this concept I of the material world would be "beautiful . . . if only we limit ourselves to the consideration of an unchanging world of space" (MC 28). The realization that the world is changing, though, upsets the beauty. For to account for change we must introduce an indefinite if not infinite number of "extraneous relations" (i.e., relations other than the fundamental relations) of the form M (p,x,t) which indicate that particle p is at point x at instant t. The laws of mechanics have their origin in (i.e., are axioms of) these extraneous relations. Whitehead criticizes this conceptual scheme by means of Ockham’s razor. He asks if it might not be possible to form a simpler concept of the material world, ideally one that does not involve an indefinite number of extraneous relations.

As a first step toward simplifying the concept of nature, Whitehead introduces concept II. In concept II the fundamental relation is also one of extension. But the extraneous relations involve only relations between points of space and instants of time, whereas concept I involved points, instants, and particles of matter. The particles of matter have been dropped. Whitehead observes that "If we abolish the particles . . . everything will proceed exactly as in the classical concept [i.e., concept I]. The reason for the original introduction of ‘matter’ was, without doubt, to give the senses something to perceive. If a relation can be perceived, this concept II has every advantage over the classical concept" (MC 29). The advantage to which Whitehead refers, of course, is greater simplicity. It is here that we begin to see the power of Whitehead’s method. Because the mathematical formalism does not necessitate the existence of particles, Whitehead dispenses with them. Note that the world we are left with is one wherein there is only time and space (i.e., extension) and relations between these two. This is in some ways a foreshadowing of Whitehead’s later cosmological views, where the relation is taken as primary.

Whitehead derives concept III by "abandoning the prejudice against points moving" (MC 30). Thus moving points, and instants of time, comprise the set of primitive entities. The essential relation is a four-place one, connecting three moving points and an instant of time. But most importantly, in sharp contrast to the indefinite extraneous relations required of concepts I and II, concept III requires only one that defines three mutually perpendicular axes whereby one can define motion, acceleration, etc. This concept "pledges to explain the physical world by the aid of motion only. . . . The ‘corpuscle’ will be a volume in which some peculiarity of the motion of the [primitive entities] exists and persists" (MC 31). Here again we see Whitehead’s tendency to regard things (corpuscles) as derived from something more basic, a tendency that, of course, finally reaches full fruition in his cosmological scheme some twenty-five years later.

Concepts IV and V are very different from concepts I, II, and III. Whereas the first three concepts take points to be primitive, the last two take lines to be primitive. This is a bigger leap than might at first appear, and Whitehead has to go though some lengthy mathematics to show that "points" can be derived from "lines," since the concept of "point" must appear somewhere, either derivatively or primitively, in any scheme purporting to describe a concept of the world.

Concept IV is precisely analogous to concept I, but uses lines instead of points. The essential relation is a five member one, relating the condition for the intersection of four lines at an instant of time. Whitehead is able to show that thirteen axioms can be written in terms of this relation that will define Euclidian geometry and thereby shows that this is a "reasonable" relation on which to build a concept of the material world. However, concept IV suffers from the same flaw as concept I in that an indefinite number of extraneous relations are needed to specify the relationships between the derived points (in contrast to the primitive points of concept I) and instants of time. Hence by the criterion of Ockham’s razor it too is unsatisfactory.

It is the fully developed form of concept V that bears the closest similarity to Whitehead’s later cosmological construction. Concept V, like concept IV, relies on lines as primitive and regards points as derived. Unlike concept IV, concept V enables Whitehead to make do without the indefinite number of extraneous relations, substituting a single extrinsic relation in its place. Furthermore, he can derive the concept of a "corpuscle" as "a volume with some special property in respect to linear objective reals ‘passing through’ it" (MC 43). The development of concept V is the most mathematical of all the concepts considered. Fortunately, we need not consider the details of the derivation, but may instead simply ask: What is the nature of the concept that ultimately results?

First, each "point" is defined in terms of the intersection of the primitive lines. Whitehead observes that these lines could be taken as "the lines of force of the modern physicist" (MC 32), with the one proviso that, unlike line of force, these primitive lines never end. Thus in this concept "action at a distance" is readily explicable, since the point acting and the point "being acted upon" can both share a common component, namely the line they have in common. But most importantly, observe that each point is built up from these lines (i.e., the intersection of several lines can be used to define a point), and, since these lines can be regarded as lines of force or influence, it would be but a small jump to say that each point is composed of the "influences" of other points. Note how very close this is to the scheme outlined in Process and Reality. Whitehead never explicitly says in the 1905 paper that outside influences "create" the point; he regarded the point as a geometrical form. He is, though, so close. Indeed, he gets even closer than this. Who can read his definition of a "corpuscle" in concept V as "a volume with some special property in respect to linear objective reals ‘passing through’ it" without extrapolating the "corpuscle" to "the event," and "linear reals" to "prehensions," and the "special property" to "synthetic ability"? Further, since every point and every other point have a line in common, i.e., every two points have a "part" in common, we can see why Whitehead may later think that every event prehends every other (noncontemporaneous) event. (The matter of contemporaneousness does not arise this early, though. Whitehead has not yet begun to question the notion of time.)³ But perhaps most interesting of all, Whitehead observes that "It is necessary to assume that the points in this concept disintegrate, and do not, in general, persist from instant to instant" (MC 43).⁴ Since a point is composed of lines and the lines are moving, then, unless all the lines are moving uniformly in the same direction, the lines will be constantly "touching" and "breaking contact with" other lines. Hence "old" points are constantly "dying" and new ones being "born" all the time. Once again we see how very close White-head is to the view that he would ultimately adopt concerning the transience of actual occasions.

In sum, then, in concept V we see that Whitehead has already taken the following crucial steps: (1) He regards points and "corpuscles" as derived, not primitive. (2) He regards them as being derived from lines (which he seems to want to equate to lines of force) passing through other points, lines capable of communicating "influence" from these other points. (3) He regards a point as being a transient entity which exists only for an instant before "dying."

When one realizes that these concepts were brought forward by Whitehead at the peak of his ‘mathematical’ period, one sees how long these ideas were gestating before reaching their mature form in Process and Reality some twenty-five years later. One can also realize how inaccurate the suggestion is that Whitehead "turned into" a philosopher, after having been a mathematician. He was always a philosopher, even in his early writing. Even though he may not have thought of himself in these terms, Whitehead clearly does show an interest in, and a questioning of fundamentals, which is the true mark of the metaphysician (cf. UW 169-71). On the other hand, he was also always a mathematician since, as he clearly indicates in the 1905 article, he seems to conceive of the world as a formal logical system.⁵ No wonder he regards metaphysics as a possible occupation. Given his outlook he could no more think metaphysics impossible than he could think formal mathematical systems derived from axioms as impossible. Whether he consciously realized what he was doing I do not know; but I am sure that he implicitly thought of metaphysical principles as the axioms of the "logical system" of the world.

To maintain some perspective, it perhaps ought to be remarked that no claim is being made that Whitehead’s work in mathematical logic impelled him to his later cosmological doctrines. On the contrary it is quite certain that his cosmology, though strongly influenced by "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World," was still a "free creation of the human mind." Indeed to see the divergent effects that a common mathematical background could have, it is instructive to contrast White-head and Russell, since during their extensive collaboration on the Principia they were both exposed to similar mathematical influences.

Russell writes (LA 362f) of a procedural technique which both he and Whitehead adopted:

The techniques which Russell outlines is, of course, precisely the one employed by Whitehead in the 1905 paper. The "supposed entities" are the primitive particles of matter, points of space, and instants of time of the normal world view. The "purely logical structures" which can replace these are the five possible concepts of the material world developed in the paper. And the unchanging "details of the body of propositions in question" are the details of geometry, and, ultimately, Whitehead hoped, physics as well. In essence, Whitehead employed the maxim to forge the somewhat random "normal" world view with its separate concepts of matter and extension into a system, a synthesis within whose framework, he hoped, a place could be found for each of the manifold phenomena of the material world (MC 81f).

In sharp contrast, Russell employed the maxim for the purpose of analysis. He cites it as a guiding force for the dissection of language which he performed (LA 364). Specifically, he uses it as a model for his analysis of definite descriptions into all the smaller units contained in such descriptions, as in his essay "On Denoting" (LK 39).

This basic difference in temperament -- Whitehead’s leaning toward synthesis of systems, Russell’s bending toward detailed analysis -- seems to be a recurrent theme in both of these men’s work. As a final ironic note it is interesting to observe a few connections that exist between the two works cited above: Both "On Denoting" and "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World" were written in 1905, a time when both men were collaborating on the Principia. Both Whitehead and Russell, looking back later in life, regarded their respective essays as among the finest pieces of work they had produced (UW 466; LK 39). Both employed their common work in mathematical logic, specifically Russell’s maxim quoted above, as a guide in the formulation of their respective papers. Yet because of the difference in outlook between the two men, one essay becomes a penetrating analysis of common language, while the other becomes a synthesis of possible world views and, indeed, a stepping stone to a cosmology.

References

LA -- B. Russell. "Logical Atomism" in Contemporary British Philosophy. Ed. J. H. Muirhead. London and New York, 1924.

LK -- B. Russell. Logic and Knowledge, ed. B. C. Marsh. London: Allen and Unwin, 1956.

MG -- A. N. Whitehead. "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World" in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, 205 (1906). Pp. 465-525. Reprinted in F. S. C. Northrup and M. W. Gross, Alfred North Whitehead: An Anthology. New York, 1953. All page references refer to the reprinted version.

RW -- W. Mays. "The Relevance of ‘On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World’ to Whitehead’s Philosophy" in The Relevance of Whitehead. Ed. Ivor Leclerc. London: Allen and Unwin, 1961. Pp. 235-60.

UW -- V. Lowe. Understanding Whitehead. Johns Hopkins, 1962.

Notes

1 Whitehead specifies Euclidian geometry, but observes the other geometries might also be employed, provided some minor changes were made in the system. He employs Euclidian geometry because he in fact believes it to be true of the "real world." (This is hardly surprising when one realizes that Whitehead’s essay was written in the same year that Einstein struck the first major blow against the classical Newtonian-Euclidian world view with his paper on special relativity.) It is significant, though, that even later, in his own Principle of Relativity, Whitehead still retains a "uniform" geometry (of which Euclidian geometry is a subspecies) in sharp distinction to the nonuniform, "warped" geometry of Einstein’s general relativity.

If the method Whitehead employed in the 1905 paper were to be generalized so as to be applicable to other cosmic epochs (as was suggested above might be possible by choosing other essential relations to represent different cosmic epochs), one would desire a criterion of "meaningfulness" for the field of the essential relation other than the satisfaction of Euclidian geometry (or any other geometry, for that matter). Whitehead suggests (PR 103) that even the bare fact of dimensionality, apart from the number of dimensions, may be characteristic of only this epoch. Hence geometry, which presupposes dimensionality, might not be able to be used as a criterion of "trueness" in other epochs.

2 W. Mays (RW 235-60) gives n more detailed account of each of the five potential world views. The more abbreviated accounts here are presented solely to enable parallels to be drawn between aspects of these world views and Whitehead’s later cosmology.

3 See UW 161 for a description of Whitehead’s view of time at this stage.

4 Whitehead is referring to concept IV, but the same wonld hold true for concept V, as Whitehead indicates MC 81.

5 Cf. W, Mays, The Philosophy of Whitehead (London and New York, 1959), chapter 7. Mays seems to be one of the few commentators on Whitehead who adequately appreciates the importance of the formal logical method on the development of Whitehead’s thought. Lowe (UW. ch. 7) is also very useful in this regard.

In 1922, some nine years after Einstein had published his first paper on General Relativity, Whitehead was compelled by the differences he had with Einstein’s view to come forward with his own work, The Principle of Relativity, in which he formulated a theory of gravitation more in keeping with his own philosophical outlook.

The resulting theory, though founded on quite different principles and developed in an independent fashion from Einstein’s theory, nevertheless gives predictions that are identical to the latter’s, within observable limits, for each of the four classic tests of gravitational theories (i.e., precession of the perihelion of Mercury, redshift of light emitted by a massive body, the bending of light-beams in a strong gravitational field, and the apparent slowing of the speed of light propagation near massive bodies). Whitehead’s theory not only agrees with Einstein’s and with observations in these crucial cases, it is also a mathematically simpler theory. Einstein’s gravitational equations are nonlinear, and the difficulty in solving them for even a simple problem are enormous. Whitehead’s linear theory is almost simple in comparison. Hence, if the two theories always gave identical predictions, Whitehead’s formulation would be the theory of choice (2:303). However, despite the similarity of prediction for the four "classic" tests, there are some differences between the two theories that can be exploited to disconfirm one or the other.

To understand the recently discovered evidence against Whitehead’s theory it is necessary to examine the Newtonian gravitational law in the light of Einstein’s and Whitehead’s /theories. We recall that Newton’s law for gravitational attraction between two bodies is given by: force=(Gm₁m₂)/r², where m₁ and m₂ are the masses of two bodies, r the distance separating them, and G the gravitational constant which acts as a factor of proportionality. The value of G can be found experimentally: If two spheres of known mass are separated by a known distance, there will be a measurable force between them. Knowing the force and knowing the masses and distance involved, one can find G from the above force law. The question can now be asked: Is the value of the gravitational "constant" G, thus measured, truly constant and independent of the location or orientation of the two masses? The answer, in brief, is that on Einstein’s theory the value of G is constant, while on Whitehead’s theory it is not. In other words, on Einstein’s theory two given masses separated by a given distance will attract each other with the same force anywhere in the universe. On Whitehead’s theory the attraction between the two masses will vary slightly as a function of the position of other bodies in the universe.

The reason for this difference goes right to the heart of the two theories. Einstein’s theory is characterized by having no prior geometry, no prior structure to space; the geometry of space, its local curvature, is determined entirely by the location of masses within it. The attraction which we observe between objects is a manifestation of the motion of an object in the space that has been curved by the mass of another object. Now since curvature is the origin of attraction (Or, more accurately, curvature manifests itself as attraction), the only factor that determines the attraction between two bodies is the local curvature of space. Since there is no prior geometry, the only thing that determines the local curvature of space is the amount of "curving force," i.e. mass, that is present. For Einstein, the constancy of G is a consequence of the direct connection between the quantity of mass and the degree of curvature, for nothing else causes curvature aside from mass; there is no prior geometry that also contributes to the curvature.

In sharp contrast to Einstein’s theory, Whitehead’s demands a prior geometry for space. That is, it demands that space have some structure that is independent of the location of bodies within it. Whitehead felt that we needed a prior geometry, a uniform "structure for the continuum of events, . . . because of the necessity for knowledge that there be a uniform relatedness, in terms of which the contingent relations of natural factors can be expressed. Otherwise we can know nothing until we know everything" (H 29f). Thus it comes about that for Whitehead the attraction between two given bodies, which measures the value of G, is a function not only of the masses and the separation involved, but also of the prior geometry. Hence, if Whitehead were correct, it would be theoretically possible to perform an experiment to detect the variations in the force of attraction between two masses as the position and orientation of the masses varied. Though the masses involved in such an experiment would, of course, remain unchanged, fluctuations in G still should be observable, for the masses and their separation are not the only factors responsible for the observed attraction: the prior geometry enters the calculation as well (1:1121-25).

The detection of variations in G form the basis of the empirical test that was actually performed. In the experiment (3:141-56) one mass was the earth, and the other a gravimeter located on the earth’s surface. Variations in G would produce changes in the gravimeter’s readings. Calculations (3:141-56) based on Whitehead’s theory (2:303) showed that the orientation of the two masses relative to the center of the galaxy should produce a variation in the attraction between the two masses, and hence in the gravimeter’s readings: as the earth rotates, bringing the earth, gravimeter, and galaxy center alternately into and then out of line, Whitehead’s theory predicts that the attraction should likewise vary periodically, with period 12 hours (i.e., the galaxy center, gravimeter, and earth are in line twice a day.) Actual measurements found no variations in G with such a 12 hour period, not even in amounts as small as 1/200 the amount predicted by Whitehead’s theory. Accordingly, the theory must be judged to have been empirically disconfirmed.

References

1. Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. Gravitation. San Francisco: Freeman and Co., 1973. The description of the differences between Whitehead’s and Einstein’s theories followed the discussion here, especially pp. 1121-25. See also pp. 429-31.

2. J. L. Synge. "Orbits and rays in the gravitational field of a finite sphere according to the theory of A. N. Whitehead." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 211A (1952), 303. The calculations employed in the experiment were based on Synge’s generalization of Whitehead’s original work.

3. C. M. Will. "Relativistic gravity in the solar system, II: Anisotropy in the Newtonian gravitational constant." Astrophysical Journal, 169 (1971), 141-56, and references cited herein.

Dialog between Buddhists and Westerners moves back and forth between two levels: the conceptual and the religious, valuational, or existential. On the conceptual level Buddhists insist on nothingness while Westerners characteristically speak of being and think of things as having substantial reality. Associated with this conceptual difference are profound religious ones.

However, the traditions of being and substance are not the only ones in the West. There are also traditions of process with roots in the Greeks, but largely new beginnings with Hume and Hegel. These traditions reduce the conceptual opposition between Buddhist and Western thought. Yet even the advocates of process philosophies rarely approximate the Buddhist religious sensibility.

This paper undertakes to examine the conceptual relation between Buddhism and Western process thought and to consider whether there remain conceptual differences that explain the continuing religious differences. Instead of characterizing the two complex movements in general terms, we select one spokesman of each: Nagarjuna and Whitehead. Nagarjuna, a second century Indian Buddhist, is the single most influential thinker of Mahayana Buddhism. Whitehead is, in the view of many, the most penetrating and inclusive of Western process thinkers.

Nagarjuna’s major attention was devoted to carrying through Buddhist negation to its fullest extent. He believed that the categories used by earlier Buddhists in the negation of the phenomenal world were themselves left unnegated. This led to a false hypostatizing of a reality distinct from the phenomenal world.

Nagaijuna sees that even Buddhists fall into the view that there are real existent things (bhava). He shows that this is bound up with the idea that some things exist in themselves or possess sell-existence (svabhava). A main purpose of his argumentation is to expose the error of the idea of svabhava, that is, of self-existence or of things existing in themselves. When he does this, then the emptiness or voidness (sunyata) of all things becomes apparent.

Svabhava, self-existence, is understood by Nagarjuna to mean that by virtue of which a thing has its being. He understands that to be svabhava is also to be unproduced, that is, not to be constituted by something other than itself. If things (bhava) have no self-existence (svabhava), then they do not possess being and they are constituted from beyond themselves.

The meanings Nagarjuna hears in svabhava are close to those the Westerner hears in substance. Of course, the two words are not identical in history or connotation. But the Western common-sense attribution of substantial existence to tables, stones, persons, and even concepts is very close to what Nagarjuna is striving to overcome. Hereafter substantial existence and substance will be used as equivalent to svabhava as that is used by Nagarjuna.

Nagarjuna’s arguments are generally illustrated at what Whitehead calls the macroscopic level. He shows that tables and stones do not have substantial existence since they are products of multiple factors including human sensation and thought. But Nagarjuna’s ontological teaching can be more fully grounded on the basis of Whitehead’s microscopic analysis; for although Nagarjuna does not employ this distinction, he clearly intends to go into the realm prior to human perception and conscious experience.

The view of substantial existence of a self is bound up with the idea of an agent. When there is an action there is supposed to be someone who acts. The agent is supposed to exist prior to and apart from his act. Nagarjuna devotes much of his attention to denying the existence of such agents. He writes, for example: "It is said: ‘The "goer" goes.’ How is that possible, when without the ‘act of going’ (gamma) no ‘goer’ is produced? Those who hold the view that the ‘goer’ goes must [falsely] conclude that there is a ‘goer’ without the ‘act of going’ since the ‘act of going’ is obtained (icchata) by a ‘goer’" (M 2:9-10). Similarly, there is no seer who sees, no desirer who desires, and no producer who produces (M, chapters 3, 6, and 8).

Whitehead makes the same point. "It is fundamental to the metaphysical doctrine of the philosophy of organism that the notion of an actual entity as the unchanging subject of change is completely abandoned (PR 43). He argues that "a feeling cannot be abstracted from the actual entity entertaining it" (PR 338). He terms this entity a subject-superject in order to make clear the contrast to the notion of subject in the philosophies of substance. These "presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum, and then reacts to the datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a datum which is met with feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a subject" (PR 234). In Whitehead’s conception, the process does not start from the subject. Instead, the subject is, as it were, thrown up by the process. It comes into being only in virtue of its feelings.

In contrast to earlier Buddhist philosophies Nagarjuna does not deny the substantial character of the ordinary world in favor of another sphere of being supposed to be more real. In Buddhism this world of ceaseless flow and change is known as samsara, and to samsara is opposed nirvana, the world of nonorigination and nondestruction. The early Buddhist tradition attributed to nirvana four qualities denied to samsara: permanence, bliss, purity, and substantiality. Thus nirvana was hypostatized as a mode of reality opposite to that known in ordinary experience.

Nagarjuna, however, applies his critique of substantialist thinking as much to nirvana as to samsara. This leads to the denial that there is any real separation of nirvana from samsara. The separation is made by the false supposition that nirvana and samsara are two self-existent things (svabhava). Hence Nagarjuna writes: "There is nothing whatever which differentiates samsara from nirvana; and there is nothing whatever which differentiates nirvana from samsara. The extreme limit of nirvana is also the extreme limit of samsara; there is not the slightest bit of difference between these two" (M 25: 19-20).

Of course, the words nirvana and samsara continue to have different uses even in Nagarjuna’s language. Their relation may be clarified through a remark of Whitehead: "Civilized intuition has always, although obscurely, grasped the problem as double and not as single. There is not the mere problem of fluency and permanence. There is the double problem: actuality with permanence, requiring fluency as its completion; and actuality with fluency, requiring permanence as its completion" (PR 527). Accordingly, nirvana does not reach its perfect fulfillment without full realization of samsara; and samsara does not reach its full realization without perfect fulfillment of nirvana. Nirvana can attain its totality only within the fluency of samsara; and samsara can manifest its wholeness only within the permanence of nirvana.

Nagarjuna’s central thesis is that whatever is supposed to be substantial, whether in the sphere of samsara or in that of nirvana is actually nothing but pratitya samutpada, which is translated as dependent co-origination. That is, what appear to be things with substantial existence turn out to be processes to which many elements contribute, each of these elements being in turn nothing other than such a process. At no point does analysis arrive at anything that exists in itself. And dependent co-origination in its turn must not be hypostatized as a thing or substance.

Whitehead’s doctrine is very similar. The macrocosmic objects of presentational immediacy, which Nagarjuna has primarily in view, are constituted in much the way Nagarjuna supposes, with important contributions by the human sense organs and mental activity. On the other hand, considered apart from human experience, they are composites of microcosmic processes. These microcosmic processes (concrescences or actual occasions) in their turn do not exist in themselves but only as foci of their data momentarily unified and transmitted beyond themselves. "An actual entity, on its subjective side, is nothing else than what the universe is for it, including its own reactions" (PR 234). Something very much like what Nagarjuna understands by pratitya samutpada is expressed by Whitehead in his account of creativity as an ultimate notion. Creativity is that "principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively" (PR 31). For Whitehead, as for Nagarjuna, these conjunctions in their turn "are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity" (PR 32). "The most general term ‘thing’ -- or equivalently ‘entity’ -- means nothing else than to be one of the ‘many’ which find their niches in each instance of concrescence. Each instance of concrescence is itself the novel individual ‘thing’ in question. There are not ‘the concrescence’ and the ‘novel thing’: when we analyze the novel thing we find nothing but the concrescence (PR 321). In Nagarjuna’s sense, all things are sunyata, or empty.

There is an apparent difference between Nagarjuna and Whitehead with respect to the subject-object distinction. Whitehead makes extensive use of this distinction whereas Nagarjuna polemicizes against it. However, what is negated by Nagarjuna is negated also by Whitehead. That is, contrary to substantialist views, there is no object apart from a subject. and no subject apart from an object. Whitehead explains this more intelligibly through his concept of prehension, which functions as a transaction relating an experiencing subject to a datum as its object. The datum of the prehension can be an actual entity, an eternal object, a proposition, or a nexus, but in no case can it exist independently as an object. (Even eternal objects exist only through envisagement.) It is through being felt that the datum becomes an object" and then it is the object of that subject’s feeling. Insofar as the actual entity as datum can be described without reference to a subject prehending it, that actual entity is only potentially an object. It is actually an object only as prehended in a concrescing subject. Thus, the object never exists in itself as object. As Nagarjuna never tires of pointing out, consideration of any element of that concrete transaction -- whether of the subject, the activity, or the object -- as if it existed in itself involves abstraction and false substantialization. In Whitehead’s terms, it is an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

The area of fundamental philosophical agreement between Nagarjuna and Whitehead could readily be expanded. They both understand that direct intuitive insight (for Nagarjuna, prajna) is prior to discursive reasoning. Both know that language can never grasp and embody what is intuited.

Both have doctrines of cause and effect that deny their substantial and independent existence. Whitehead’s doctrine of causal efficacy could illumine the Buddhist idea of Karma. Also both insist on the importance of the causal relation without allowing a resultant determinism or fatalism that would imply man’s helplessness.

Both recognize that time is doubly removed from the substantial character sometimes attributed to it. First, it is a function of processes. In Nagarjuna’s words: "Since time is dependent on a thing (bhava), how can time [exist] without a thing?" (M 19:6). Second, the things on which time depends have no substantial character.

If Nagarjuna and Whitehead agree so extensively in their dissolution of all being into becoming or process, we might expect that the religious or existential meaning of their thought would be similar as well. But here the basic difference of Buddhism and typical Western thought reappears. For Nagarjuna the conclusion drawn from the absence of substantiality is that all is sunyata, or emptiness. Ontologically sunyata is dependent co-origination or the inextricable interrelatedness of all things including human experience. Its existential realization is the enlightenment that brings freedom from attachment.

The same ontological situation Nagarjuna describes as emptiness Whitehead calls the creative advance into novelty. To recognize the absence of substantiality for him paves the way for the perception of the presence of value in all things. The direction in which Whitehead sees gain is in the widening of horizons of concern rather than in nonattachment.

The contrast is not a simple one. For Nagarjuna the existential realization of the interconnectedness of all things leads to the compassion of the Bodhisattva who sees that all must gain release together, although at the deepest level there is neither release nor need for release. On the other hand, Whitehead is aware that "Decay, Transition, Loss, Displacement belong to the essence of the Creative Advance" (Al 368-69), and this recognition of all things as process leads toward viewing life as "a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience" (SMW 275). But to ward off this final threat to the Western sense of meaning he appeals to the consequent nature of God as the locus in which events add up in such a way that their real value is established.

Hence it remains that fundamentally similar ontological doctrines have given rise to profoundly different religious attitudes. One interpretation of this situation could be that Whitehead inherited a Western tradition of meaning and value and failed to recognize that his onto-logical analysis radically undercut this tradition. Another interpretation would be that Nagarjuna inherited a Buddhist tradition and simply made use of his ontological analysis to interpret it. There is truth in both these interpretations. Fundamental valuation is partly independent of ontological analysis, and both Nagarjuna and Whitehead were undoubtedly shaped by their religious traditions. But it is also true that fundamental valuations are affected by ontological vision, and both men were deeply sensitive to this relation within their own thought. Hence it is appropriate to probe further to discover the point at which their valuation divides.

Basic to Whitehead’s vision of creative advance into novelty is his understanding of prehension. A prehension is a process of appropriation of a particular element" by an actual entity from its universe (PR 335). The word prehension is a technical one devoid of valuation, favorable or unfavorable.

Nagarjuna, on the other hand, employs for this same activity of appropriation of which the entire process, as in Whitehead, is composed, the term mosa-dharma. He begins the thirteenth chapter of the Mulamadhyamalcakarikas with the statement: "A thing which is constituted by mosa-dharma is deceptive" (translation Ours) "Mosa" is derived from the verb stem "mus" which means to steal, rob, plunder, or carry off (1:824). Mosa is originally an act of stealing or plundering, but more generally, delusion and deception. It is then easy to understand why Nagarjuna could state as evident that whatever is constituted by mosa-dharma is deceptive. With this conceptuality the whole creative advance is continuous distortion. As this vision is existentially appropriated, dis-attachment is furthered. The negative connotations of mosa-dharma have anchored in the world view of Buddhism a profoundly negative evaluation of the world of process (samskara).

If mosa-dharma is identical with prehension and prehension is a value neutral word, we must ask whether the use of so negative a concept is a fateful accident of the history of language or whether it has justification in what is actually involved in the prehensive act. Clearly the value-laden terminology does have a fateful character for those who use it, but the full explanation does not end there. The negative element the Buddhist emphasizes as constituting the act of appropriation also appears in Whitehead’s analysis of prehension.

To conceive of a prehension as mosa-dharma is to focus on the absence of "truth" in the relation of the entity that is prehended in a physical feeling and the way it is objectified, that is, between the initial datum and the objective datum. "There is a transition from the initial data to the objective datum effected by the elimination. The initial data constitute a multiplicity, or merely one ‘proper’ entity, while the objective datum is a ‘nexus,’ a proposition, or a ‘proper’ entity of some categoreal type. There is a concrescence of the initial data into the objective datum, made possible by the elimination, and effected by the subjective form. The objective datum is the perspective of the initial datum" (PR 338). "Thus the initial data are felt under a ‘perspective’ which is the objective datum of the feeling." Thus the initial data "are felt under an abstraction" (PR 353). This abstraction which objectifies the initial datum under a perspective involves an element which the Buddhist sees as falsification.

That this "falsification" is central to reality as Whitehead understands it is clear from his discussion of decision, of which the elimination effected by physical feelings is a part. "‘Decision’ cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality" (PR 68). Decision is that "whereby what is ‘given’ is separated off from what for that occasion is ‘not given’. . . The word ‘decision’ does not here imply conscious judgment, though in some ‘decisions’ consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a "cutting off" (PR 68). This means that "cutting off" is the very meaning of actuality. And cutting off has connotations quite similar to those of mosa. Thus the Buddhist sense of an absence of truth in that process that constitutes the entirety of things is reinforced.

The Buddhist understanding of truth is completely neutral to the world of morality. It is most fully characterized by the Sanskrit term tattva, which literally means thusness or suchness. This term has been translated as truth in Chinese. For Buddhism, to be true means for something to be as it is or such as it is. But nothing is ever quite as it is when it is the objective datum of a prehension. Hence, prehension is in fact distortion.

Whitehead recognized this problem about truth. For him, too, the truth that matters most is the relation of the way the world is experientially appropriated to the way it is in itself. In Adventures of Ideas he discusses this as the relation of appearance to reality. Reality corresponds to the initial data, and appearance includes the objective datum along with supplementation especially in sense perception. Whitehead writes: "There is the Reality from which the occasion of experience springs -- a Reality of inescapable, stubborn fact; and there is the Appearance with which the occasion attains its final individuality -- an Appearance including its adjustment of the Universe by simplification [i.e., elimination], valuation, transmutation, anticipation. . . . Sense perception, which dominates the appearance of things, in its own nature re-arranges, and thus in a way distorts. Also there can be no mere blunt truth about the Appearance which it provides. In its own nature Sense perception is an interpretation, and this interpretation may be completely misleading" (AI 377-78).

Furthermore, this recognition that prehension involves deception is by no means religiously neutral to Whitehead. He sees it as tending to cut the nerve of striving, and for him this would involve the abandonment of all worthwhile goals. ‘A feeling of dislocation of Appearance from Reality is the final destructive force, robbing life of its zest for adventure. It spells the decadence of civilization, by stripping from it the very reason for its existence" (AI 378).

Nagarjuna and Whitehead thus agree that prehensions are deceptive, indeed necessarily so. For Nagarjuna this reinforces the dis-attachment from the activity of creating appearances and from the products of that activity. It thus leads to the release that as a Buddhist he seeks. For Whitehead it constitutes a problem, a threat to the beauty, adventure, and peace that are his ultimate goals. Hence Whitehead distinguishes between the inevitable element of difference between appearance and reality and the destructive dislocation of appearance from reality. He needs some grounds for assurance that the latter can be avoided. He asks, therefore, about the existence of a "factor in the Universe constituting a general drive towards the conformation of Appearance to Reality. This drive would then constitute a factor in each occasion persuading an aim at such truth as is proper to the special appearance in question. This concept of truth, proper to each special appearance, would mean that the appearance has not built itself up by the inclusion of elements that are foreign to the reality from which it springs. The appearance will then be a generalization and an adaptation of emphasis, but not an importation of qualities and relations without any corresponding exemplificaton in the reality" (AI 378).

Whitehead’s struggle with the existential implications of his own ontological vision bears witness to the profound connection that exists in Nagarjuna between the ontological analysis and its religious issue. Whitehead senses a strong pull in the same direction. Unlike Nagarjuna Whitehead feels that a move in that direction would mean anaesthesia or sleep. He might have said also emptiness, but he would then have heard only the negative meaning in the word. The religious, in distinction from the systematic, importance of God for Whitehead appears clearly in this light. God as the "adventure of the universe as one" (the Consequent Nature), in which the passing flux finds permanence, grounds the importance of life. God as the "factor in each occasion persuading an aim at such truth as is proper to the special appearance in question" (the Primordial Nature) assures that appearance need not be destructively dislocated from reality. Because of God man can affirm the creative advance in spite of perpetual perishing and the inevitable deceptiveness of appearance.

Thus for Whitehead, as in the Western tradition generally, belief in God, perception of intrinsic value in events, and finding meaning in a forward movement, belong together. It is not possible to say whether Whitehead primarily perceives intrinsic value in events and finds meaning in a forward movement because he believes in God or whether he primarily posits God to ground the otherwise threatened value and meaning. Both procedures seem to characterize his thought. In any case he rightly recognizes that value and meaning are bound up with his belief in God as an ontological reality.

Concern for value and meaning in events in their discriminable particularity also moves Whitehead’s total enterprise in a direction quite different from that of Nagarjuna. In rejecting the notion of svabhava or substance in favor of emptiness or dependent co-origination, it is not Nagarjuna’s purpose to explain how things are dependently co-originating. He intends instead to help one obtain that way of looking at the world that reveals things as they are. His consuming concern is to observe reality as it is in its totality and wholeness, svabhava or substance in favor of emptiness or dependent co-origination, or creative flux as the occasion for probing into reality by the analytic and anatomical methods that have been so successful in the sciences. Recognizing that the actual is beyond expression in language, he nevertheless undertakes to make it as intelligible as possible through novel verbal characterizations. Thus he elaborates a conceptuality for improved interpretation of the flux, whereas Nagarjuna is content to show the inadequacy of all conceptualization.

The Buddhist rightly sees that Western belief in God is at the center of the difference between the two traditions. The Buddhist objection to such belief is not primarily that of the skepticism generated in the West by empiricism, phenomenalism, and scientism. Buddhist thought is full of entities that are similarly vulnerable to these approaches. Neither is the Buddhist objection the Nietzschean refusal to tolerate a superior being because of its repressiveness to men. The Buddhist objects that God is viewed as substantive and that belief in him leads to attachment to the world.

Both objections reflect a correct understanding of most Western thinking -- Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and modern philosophical. However, in Whitehead a nonsubstantialist view of God has been developed. God, too, is an instance of creativity, or process, or dependent co-origination. God cannot be abstracted as subject from the world that is his object or as object from the world that subjectively feels him. God is, or exists, for Whitehead, not in some eminent sense, but in just the sense in which any other actual entity is or exists. Hence the objections Nagarjuna raises against tendencies to attribute substantial reality to the Buddha M, chapter 22), and which apply a fortiori to traditional Western doctrines of God, do not apply to Whitehead’s doctrine. Since the notion of substantial existence is a vacuous one, questions about the existence or nonexistence of God, when existence is supposed to be substantial, are meaningless questions, as Nagarjuna shows. Whether among the processes of dependent co-origination is one that has the character Whitehead affirms of God is ontologically an open question for the Buddhist.

Indeed, in the Shin tradition, the strongest in Japan, where Nagarjuna is highly respected, there is a doctrine of Amida Buddha which has interesting affinities with Whitehead’s doctrine of God. Amida does not have substantial existence, but Amida’s vow to save all sentient beings is affirmed as an ultimately potent force in reliance on which salvation occurs.

Whitehead remarks that "what is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world" (PR 532). That reciprocal relation is affirmed as the foundation for "faith" in Shin Buddhism. The two processes of "transforming" and "passing back" characterize the content of the karuna (compassion) embodied in Amida.

This suggests that ontologically even Whitehead’s doctrine of God need not be a final block to the appropriation of his thought by Buddhists. The term, of course, is too fraught with objectionable connotations to be acceptable. But Whitehead is not wedded to the word. In the passage just quoted he speaks of a "reality in heaven" rather than of God. In Adventures of Ideas, the primordial nature of God is called "eros," and the consequent nature is termed the "adventure of the universe as one." Given this fluidity of language, there remains no necessary conceptual obstacle to Buddhist appropriation of aspects of Whitehead’s thought even about God. Perhaps it may be Christians whose traditional understanding of the divine is more seriously challenged.¹

There remains the religioexistential question. For Nagarjuna, as for Buddhism generally, the conceptual analysis serves the end of release through nonattachment and nondiscrimination. Whitehead discerns a drive toward novelty or appearance without dislocation from reality and a unified adventure that "embraces all particular occasions but as an actual fact stands beyond any one of them" (AI 380). This encourages him to seek peace, not through nonattachment but as "a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul" (AI 367).

Is the peace Whitehead seeks finally alien to the Buddhist, and if it is, is this bound up with features of his doctrine of God which the Buddhist must accordingly reject? We do not know the answer to this question, but we are sure it should not be given hastily. Nagarjuna’s understanding of the realization of sunyata differs from Whitehead’s understanding of peace. But sunyata is not the anaesthesia against which Whitehead warns, and peace is not the attachment opposed by Buddhism. To suggest the possible fruitfulness of further work from both sides this paper concludes by presenting quotations from Streng’s book about Nagarjuna and from Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, and adding a few further comments.

"Nagarjuna’s answer to the problem of negating sorrow was a form of therapy which sought to clarify the basis for self-understanding at the most profound level. . . . Being aware of emptiness was sarvajuata (all-inclusive understanding) because it expressed the real nature of knowing (as being empty) and remedied the harmful misapprehension of self-existent things. Thus to know emptiness was to perceive things as empty of independent and self-established selves. Such an awareness, when fully developed, was felt as a tranquility arising out of the indifference to distinctions" (2:163-64).

"The awareness of ‘emptiness’ is not a blank loss of consciousness, an inanimate empty space; rather it is the cognition of daily life without the attachment to it. It is an awareness of distinct entities, of the self, of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and other practical determinations; but it is aware of these as empty structures. Wisdom is not to be equated with mystical ecstasy; it is, rather, the joy of freedom in everyday existence" (2:159-60).

"The importance of ‘emptiness’ for transforming action (karma) from a binding force to a liberating one is seen when we realize that emptiness does not destroy everyday life but simply perceives its nature as being empty. Thus the ideal is not dissolution of the structures of existence, but the awareness that these structures are empty, i.e., that they exist in mutual dependence. The ability for the notion of karuna (compassion, pity) to play a growing role in the expression of Mahayana Buddhism is not so surprising if we remember Nagarjuna’s cosmology of relatedness which was a correlate to the denial of self-sufficient entities. It is also important here to emphasize that this relatedness is not a static principle; rather, ‘relatedness’ is the situation of active change. This understanding of sunyata, expressed from the mundane point of view, is the basis of a ‘becoming’ ontology which moves either for the binding, polluting, and illusory activity, or for the releasing, purifying, and enlightening activity. Thus the bodhisattva, i.e., one whose being consists in enlightenment (bodhi), can be seen to have an awareness of emptiness while directing the spiritual energy of the dis-integrating character of emptiness toward all beings" (2:168).

Whitehead describes peace as follows:

". . . Peace . . . is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the ‘life and motion’ of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. Its first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul’s preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. There is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty. It is a sense that fineness of achievement is, as it were, a key unlocking treasures that the narrow nature of things would keep remote. There is thus involved a grasp of infinitude, an appeal beyond boundaries. Its emotional effect is the subsidence of turbulence which inhibits. More accurately, it preserves the springs of energy, and at the same time masters them for the avoidance of paralyzing distractions. The trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith, where reason fails to reveal the details.

"The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. The deliberate aim at Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anaesthesia. In other words, in the place of a quality of ‘life and motion,’ there is substituted their destruction. Thus peace is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction. It results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the field of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest -- at the width where the ‘self’ has been lost, and interest has been transferred to co-ordinations wider than personality" (AI 367-68).

Surely the similarities are striking, but differences remain. Nagarjuna finds release from selfhood and its accompanying bondage through the cessation of a false activity. Whitehead loses "self" by expanding the range of interest to wider co-ordinations. It is true that when the Buddhist following Nagarjuna gains release from self he has compassion toward all sentient beings, but he would probably not invest himself in the particular co-ordinations of value of which Whitehead speaks. Discrimination of particular patterns of value is not characteristic of Buddhist enlightenment. Whether nondiscrimination in this sense is essential to Buddhism or only a profound, but inessential, consequence of its negative evaluation of process remains to be seen.

References

M -- Nagarjuna. Mulamadhyamakakarikas Trans. in Frederick I. Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967.

1. Monier-Williams. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. New Delhi: Matital Banarsidoss, 1970.

2. Frederick J. Streng. Emptiness: A Study in Religious Mcaning. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967.

Notes:

1Additional comment by Ryusei Takeda: "I would like to make one more statement with respect to the religious relevance of Whitehead’s philosophy. Through the comparison of Whitehead and Buddhism I have come to the point where one question has occurred to me: Would it be too far out of place to argue that Whitehead’s philosophical achievement could be more relevant to Buddhism than to traditional Christianity? Of course we cannot ignore the fact that Whitehead himself comes from the Christian tradition, nor the fact that he has brought severe, although sporadic, strictures against Buddhism. But, despite these facts, I have been so much impressed by Whitehead’s philosophy as to be willing to hazard a bold assumption: The religious aspect of Whitehead’s philosophy is the kind of religion which Buddhism has been seeking for."

It is sometimes urged that Whitehead presents doctrines without giving supporting reasons. I wish here to consider one important defense of psychicalism, what might be called "the argument from parsimony," which may be approached via some remarks of Whitehead’s on "Philosophic Method" in Adventures of Ideas. I shall argue both that the defense fails and also that it fails in a way which actually leads to rejecting panpsychism as false.

Similarly Hartshorne writes: "By metaphysical system, I mean one in which the attempt is made to generalize all ideas to the fullest possible extent" (LP 219).

Now few people would quarrel with the view that a general idea should not arbitrarily be limited to the topic of its origination. Yet after issuing this warning, perhaps Whitehead over-redresses the balance? His subsequent plea is that we should extend the general idea as far as we conceivably may, and this procedure is apparently equally arbitrary. The extension may or may not be warranted, and the only means of reaching any kind of rational decision is surely to appeal to the available evidence.

Nor, it might be pressed, is this objection avoided by appealing to Whitehead’s explicitly adopted method of metaphysical construction, the method of imaginative generalization (of which his plea here as in effect an expression). For even if the "first requisite" of speculative philosophy is to "proceed by the method of generalization so that certainly there is some application," Whitehead goes on to say that "the test of some success is application beyond the immediate origin" (PR 8). and this invites the question of what is the test of application beyond the immediate origin; and the answer must be more than "conceivability." It is necessary to distinguish between a speculative but tenable hypothesis because to some degree authenticated, on the one hand, and conceivably plausible but wholly unwarranted fantasy. Consequently an appeal to evidence is ineluctable. By all means let observation be directed by theory and let the relevance of evidence be dictated by theory (AI 221) -- but evidence there must be.

Yet none of this is decisive. Whitehead refers to Occam’s doctrine of parsimony, and here is the crux. The world may or may not be as tidy as it is often possible to conceive it to be; but it is part, and surely a legitimate part, of our inheritance from the successes of science, quite apart from anything else, that given two otherwise satisfactory interpretations of which one is simpler then that simpler one is preferable even if there is no means of judging -- by appeal to evidence, say -- that it is not, in respect of its greater simplicity, mere plausible fantasy. There is an important sense therefore in which the test of application beyond the immediate origin may not have to be anything more than "conceivability," in which the stretching of an idea to its limit and applying it may not be arbitrary. For if it is granted that our awareness of ourselves leaves us no option but to admit the existence of experiencing entities, and if it be further granted that it is conceivable that supposedly vacuous matter be constituted by occasions of experience, then, arguably, preference should be given to the panpsychist doctrine on the ground that it is a more economical theory than any kind of dualism which posits an additional, radically different kind of entity, the unit of vacuous actuality. In effect, as Hartshorne at one point urges, "the panpsychist challenges his opponents to indicate any reason for admitting an additional factor of insentient matter to explain the world. Can the challenge be met?" (BH 173f). It may be added that Hartshorne’s overall claim on behalf of the Whiteheadian system in this respect is very large indeed. "Causality, substance, memory, perception, temporal succession modality, are all but modulations of one principle of creative synthetic experiencing, feeding entirely upon its own prior products. This I regard as the most powerful metaphysical generalization ever accomplished" (CSPM 107).

Nevertheless although the appeal to parsimony may be right in principle, in practice it is less successful than Whiteheadians suppose. With regard to causality, for example, the supposed simplification is offset by having to introduce a primordial actual entity, God, to intervene virtually continuously to keep the process going by supplying each novel occasion with its initial aim. Now although this primordial actual entity may itself be interpreted in terms of the principle of creative synthetic experiencing, the fact remains that simplicity of principle is gained at the expense of multiplication of entities, and the latter offends Occam’s principle as surely as does multiplicity of principles.

A similar objection might be lodged against the Whiteheadian interpretation of substance. (The objection is mentioned here for the sake of completeness in response to Hartshorne’s overall claim above, but this is not the place to try to substantiate it.) If anything may be regarded as a substance in a Whiteheadian context, the self may be. Yet since the account of substance offered is of a route of occasions or a personally ordered society of selves rather than of, say, a changing continuant, the objection may be raised that this atomization of substance involves an enormous multiplication of entities which in the case of selves at least goes well beyond necessity -- though this would have to be shown. Moreover, it is arguable that the Whiteheadian analysis of the self is morally unacceptable; for insofar as each momentary self is held responsible for the actions of its predecessors in the personally ordered society of which it is a member, the Whiteheadian analysis involves the Old Testament practice of visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons. It is interesting to note in this respect that in Whitehead’s judgment the Jews "conceived one of the most immoral Gods ever imagined" and that he endorses Thomas Hardy’s remark in Tess of the D’Urbervilles "But although to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature."¹ Hartshorne, of course, claims that the Whiteheadian view of the self is the only fully moral view since it alone enables complete obedience to the Great Commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. For: "To love oneself as identical with oneself and the other as not identical with oneself is not, whatever else it may be, to love the neighbor as oneself" (CSPM 200). Yet as E. L. Mascall neatly observes, "The other side of this view . . . must presumably be that I am just as altruistic in promoting my own future welfare as in promoting that of other people!" ²

Hartshorne refers too to temporal succession. It is perhaps just worth mentioning in passing that, according to a recent notable analysis, adoption of the Whiteheadian view creates apparently insuperable obstacles for the theory of time being used successfully in physics.³

The difficulty on which I wish to focus attention here, however, arises in connection with perception. We perceive an apparently material, spatially extended world. Can Whiteheadian panpsychism account for this? Naturally it undertakes to do so, but with what measure of success?

Let us first be clear about a possible misconception of Whitehead’s doctrine -- a misconception perhaps shared indeed by D. H. Lawrence. (The misconception hardly needs exposing for readers of Process Studies, but reference to it serves to bring into focus the basic point at issue.) In chapter sixteen of Lady Chatterley’s Lover the following passage is quoted: "The universe shows us two aspects: on the one side it is physically wasting, on the other side it is spiritually ascending. It is thus passing with a slowness, inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from non-entity" (RM 160). It would seem that Lawrence interprets this as a vision and prediction of a nonphysical cosmos in place of the "mixed" mental and physical cosmos in which, as White-head (on this view) concedes, we find ourselves. Now as V. Lowe observes regarding Lawrence’s interpretation, "in terms of Whitehead’s system, this is a complete mistake, since the physical and the mental are universal features of every actual entity, including God" (UW 108). Yet this way of puffing the objection reinforces the view that for White-head the cosmos and indeed all its ultimate constituents are "mixed." Johnson too writes, in similar vein: "Every actual entity has a physical and a mental pole -- i.e., every actual entity is composed of physical and mental activities" (WTR 39). Moreover from Whitehead’s own pen we read:

In the light of such remarks Lawrence and others may be forgiven for supposing that Whitehead’s panpsychism takes the form of some kind of "double aspect" atomism. Moreover outside a Whiteheadian context panpsychism is not infrequently defined in "double aspect" terms, that is to say, it is defined as the doctrine that entities or individuals possess mental properties as well as physical properties. Now the claim that could appropriately be advanced on behalf of this form of panpsychism in respect of considerations of parsimony would be that it does with fewer kinds of entity what it would be vain to do with more -- that it does with one kind of entity what the dualist only achieves with two. Yet against this claim it could be urged that it vainly does with more mental entities what may equally satisfactorily be done with fewer -- that the panpsychist multiplies beyond necessity the features considered generic to all entities. Thus this dispute is not one which an appeal to Occam alone can settle.

It must be emphasized, however, that in a Whiteheadian context this interpretation of panpsychism is a misconception -- though not one that Lowe and Johnson in fact share. Nevertheless Johnson may again mislead when, after pointing out that every actual entity is composed of physical and mental activities, he adds that in Religion in the Making there is a suggestion that some occasions are not bipolar, for Whitehead speaks of "mental occasions" and "physical occasions" (RM 102f, 118). The distinction is not at all one between mind and matter, however, as Whitehead’s reference to "a physical occasion of blind perceptivity" makes clear (RM 103). The physical pole of an occasion is constituted by physical prehensions or feelings (strictly the notion of feelings excludes that of negative prehensions, but that is irrelevant here). Moreover, to the extent that their being "physical" prehensions is defined in terms of their being reactions to concrete occasions rather than to eternal objects (in which case they would be "conceptual" and form the mental pole) (PR 35, 366), they are not "physical" in the sense of "material" at all. Dualism of mind and matter is replaced by duality of quality of experiencing corresponding to the actual occasion/eternal object duality of what is experienced. Again Hartshorne, having conceded that, relatively speaking, molecules are mindless, denies that they (or their constituents) are totally lacking in experience and continues: "the panpsychist . . . further will not admit that the lower degrees of awareness are due to the dilution of mind by its mixture with increasing doses of another something, matter" (BH 170). For him, as for Whitehead too, dualism of mind and matter is replaced by a gradation of higher and lower degrees of experience.

Yet now the question becomes pressing: what account of the properties generally regarded as material is furnished by this analysis? There are indeed only two possibilities. Either they are said to he mental properties after all; or, if this should prove impossible, or implausible, they are said to be only apparent rather than real properties.

Now the latter alternative is intended to apply to the property of total vacuousness, for example; but not to all properties. According to Hartshorne,

Methodological materialism abstracts from the complete fact -- and in Whitehead’s view "wherever a vicious dualism appears, it is by reason of mistaking an abstraction for a final concrete fact" (AI 190). Yet the abstraction is not unmitigated falsification -- it focuses too on genuine attributes of what are essentially experiencing entities even though they are not recognized as such. Among these attributes is spatial extendedness.

Here indeed is a test case. The problem is illustrated by Descartes’ division of the world into mind and extension; it is natural to treat the two as irreducible opposites. Yet Whiteheadian philosophy, following Leibniz, interprets the latter in terms of the former. After describing an actual entity as "the enjoyment of a certain quantum of physical time," Whitehead continues: ‘There is a spatial element in the quantum as well as a temporal element. Thus the quantum is an extensive region" (PR 434). Elsewhere we read that "every actual entity in the temporal world is to be credited with a spatial volume for its perspective standpoint" (PR 105). Hartshorne too writes:

Moreover, in some cases we are aware that experiences are not pointlike -- the case of images, for example; "and obviously if there were not a spatial pattern in some of our sensations, we should never have come to the idea of space at all" (BH 174f).

I must stress that it is this property of spatial extendedness claimed for the individual occasions which I am taking as the test case for the ability of the Whiteheadian analysis to furnish an account of properties generally regarded as material. In common parlance we do not distinguish between this property’s being material and its being physical, but we do distinguish between its being both or either on the one hand and a property’s being mental on the other. It is with this latter contrast that I am concerned. It is thus not necessary for my argument for me to introduce more technical parts of the Whiteheadian scheme such as the difference between a physical entity (an occasion dominated by physical prehensions) and a material entity (a society of physical occasions) and to distinguish correspondingly between the physical properties of individual occasions and the material properties of societies of occasions. These distinctions are unnecessary for I am concerned with something more basic than they, namely the property of spatial extendedness common to all occasions. Again, I do not need to say exactly what the difference is supposed to be between mental and material or physical properties as commonly understood, for my argument will turn on a particular example of the contrast which should be clear and unproblematic. Moreover, since the general, nontechnical use of the term "mental" is all that is required for the argument, it is not necessary to introduce technical Whiteheadian distinctions such as that between "mental" and "subjective."

What then is to be said about the "mentalist" interpretation of physical space offered by Whitehead and Hartshorne? (Any differences between their positions are also unessential for present purposes.) It is not wholly implausible, yet it is, or so I now argue, unacceptable. Consider in this respect a form of that materialism which in Hartshorne’s view "is so plainly untrue that it is hardly necessary to discuss it" (BH 165). This judgment might he justified with regard to behaviorism, but it is virtually worthless with regard to central-state materialism. Now if the latter is to be rejected, it must be because mental events firstly are considered not to be mere appearances and secondly are considered to possess properties which are incompatible with physical properties. Moreover a prima facie case can be made out for incompatible spatial properties. It is said for example that thoughts do not occur at a place in the body at all, not even in the brain; more importantly it is pointed out that the spatial properties of images do not coincide with spatial properties of any part of the brain and that therefore the images must be in some sort of mental space. Yet the central-state materialist replies that images are not really spatial entities of any kind at all except perhaps in appearance -- they are the way in which certain brain processes appear to the material system which we call a person and whose brain it is. Now in my view this is unsatisfactory. Yet the essential consideration for present purposes is that whether or not central-state materialism is true it would seem from a panpsychist or nonmaterialist standpoint to be a necessary condition of its being true that such things as images be only appearances (since otherwise there is the problem of incompatible spatial properties).

Conversely, the panpsychist or nonmaterialist must claim either that both the mental images with their spatiotemporal pattern and the brain with its different and incompatible spatiotemporal pattern are real, or that the images are real and the brain itself only an appearance. Granted this, however, the panpsychist generalizing in Whiteheadian fashion from the case in question must argue either that both mental and physical properties (Or the two kinds of spatiotemporal extensiveness enjoyed by mental images and physical brains respectively) are real and that all entities have both kinds, or that mental properties are real but physical ones only apparent. The former alternative is the non-Whiteheadian double aspect panpsychism; yet the latter and sole other alternative is non-Whiteheadian also, for the Whiteheadian view is that the properties which science abstracts from occasions and embodies in its theories are genuine as far as they go -- though they do not go far enough. It

However, if the argument advanced here is correct, what it shows is that this complementary view of physics and Whiteheadian panpsychism is untenable.

The conclusion is of considerable importance. Even if Whiteheadian philosophy is more of a generalization from human experience than from modern physics, it is inconceivable that it should repudiate the latter. Moreover if it did (assuming this to be possible in the framework of an overall Whiteheadian scheme), then it would itself be forcefully repudiated -- and not simply by physicists, for the material world of common sense as well as of physics would be drastically impugned. Thus examination of the argument from parsimony serves finally to suggest not merely that Whiteheadian panpsychism remains unwarranted, but also that it is actually incompatible with what it seems responsible to take to be facts about a physical world, and should therefore be deemed false. The process of basing the doctrine of panpsychism in an imaginative generalization from our experience as experiencing subjects cannot even get started because our experiencing or mental activity, at the very least with regard to mental images, has to be distinguished from material happenings in the brain, and while the former is not reducible to the latter, the latter can neither be constituted by the former nor wished away.

References

BH -- Hartshorne, Charles. Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature. Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co., 1937; and Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books, 1968.

CSPM -- Hartshorne, Charles. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. London: SCM Press, 1970.

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

UW -- Lowe, Victor. Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1962.

WTR -- Johnson, A. H. Whitehead’s Theory of Reality. New York: Dover Publications, 1962.

Notes

1 See Lucien Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), p. 162.

2 E. L. Mascall, review of CSPM in the Journal of Theological Studies, 22 (April, 1971), 316.

3 See Adolf Grünbaum, Modern Science and Zeno’s Paradoxes (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), especially pp. 53-65.

Lewis Ford stands at the head of the line of many distinguished philosophical theologians who find creative inspiration in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. This is a high compliment, because that list includes such thinkers as Charles Hartshorne, Lionel Thornton, Daniel Day Williams, Norman Pittenger, William Ernest Hocking, Henry Nelson Wieman, Schubert Ogden, John B. Cobb, Jr., Marjorie Suchocki, David Ray Griffin, Robert S. Brumbaugh, George Allan, Jorge Nobo, and many others. Each of these has made creative use of Whitehead, some such as Hartshorne by adopting most of the system and making a few decisive changes, others such as Thornton and Wieman by importing significant Whiteheadian themes into theologies with independent agendas. Ford has worked consistently within the Whiteheadian conceptuality to stretch it to meet the dialectical needs of the religious situation. In doing this he has modified and developed Whitehead’s thought more thoroughly and originally than the others, for which contribution he should be recognized as the most creative.¹

Lewis Ford is best known for his very technical studies of Whiteheadian theology as well as of other topics in process philosophy; he is also known for his compositional analysis of Whitehead’s texts, using techniques of biblical studies to comprehend the layers of composition in Whitehead’s work.² A later section of this paper will address his technical argument that God is best to be conceived as the future, a claim with which I have long had a disagreement. But this argument needs to be put in the context of a general discussion of Ford’s role as a theologian. The focus on Whitehead, his work with Process Studies, and the intimidating technical nature of most of his writings that are accessible only to scholarly Whiteheadians, have obscured the fact that he is one of the most penetrating Christian theologians of our time. Indeed, he is one of the most penetrating theologians of our time, Christian or not, and I aim to show this is so even while I urge him toward what I take to be a better view.

I. Ford as Christian Theologian: The Context

Ford’s direct and non-technical contribution to Christian theology is principally in The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism (LG), a book that generally has been neglected in the discussion of Ford’s theology. More unfortunate, it has been neglected in the larger discussion of contemporary Christian theology. On the assumption that not all readers of this philosophical journal are clued into the current state of Christian theology, permit me to sketch certain of the conditions of that larger discussion to which Ford’s work is relevant.

The most general condition, and still most problematic, is the challenge of the modern worldview to the worldview of European late antiquity in whose symbols and conceptualities Christian scriptures and creeds, communal polities, liturgies, spiritual practices, theologies, and other self-conceptions have been expressed. The specific contents of that challenge have shifted through the five centuries of modernity. But they all have required the scriptural, liturgical, and other traditional symbols of Christianity to be rethought in terms that can move the hearts of modern people whose plausibility conditions for commitment are, or at least seem to be, different from those of the ancients. (Other religious traditions whose core texts and motifs of worship, thought, and practical life were formed in the ancient world have analogous problems.)

The Protestant Reformation doubled the problem within Christianity, however. For, by insisting on the importance of the Bible and casting doubt upon the imagination of post-biblical periods, the Reformers made the biblical language with its ancient symbols the very stuff of Christian theology, the primary language of theology itself. Biblical language did not have such exclusive importance during either the Patristic period or the Middle Ages. Philosophic language, which might have mediated the shift to modern worldviews as it had the shift from Galilean to Hellenistic culture, again from that to late antiquity, and yet again from that to the intercultural richness of the Jewish-Christian-Muslim High Middle Ages, was cast under suspicion by Protestant reformers; perhaps philosophic reflection was too elitist for the project of making God accessible to anyone who can read or hear clearly the Bible. The Roman Catholic Counter-reformation responded with scholasticism and appeals to authority rather than imaginative new mediating theology, until it moved close to Protestant biblicism regarding theological language with Vatican II. The Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe were slow to relate thoroughly to the plausibility conditions of modernity.

So the conundrum remains today for Christians: how can the fundamental expressions of the faith make sense to a world whose plausibility conditions are different from those in which those expressions originated? "Making sense" is not a merely intellectual theological enterprise. In order for those fundamental expressions, those basic symbols, to be effective in transforming souls and creating a vital Body of Christ within which Christians are members, they must resonate with the deepest imaginative structures of individuals’ and communities’ lives. The authenticity of those symbols can be circumvented by bifurcating life into religious versus other domains, or by appealing to authority for religious identity so as to keep the force of the symbols at bay; but that is precisely to circumvent the authenticity of the Christian gospel and its embodiment in concrete life. Therefore the symbols must be mediated to the imaginations of modern people if they are to do what Christianity has claimed they do, and theology is thus a practical discipline.

Within Protestantism, there is a trajectory running from Hegel and Schleiermacher at the beginning of the 19^th century to the present day to recover appropriate senses of philosophy for Christian theological purposes. This was perhaps best focused at the beginning of the 20^th century in the work of Ernst Troeltsch, and criticized most severely in the work of Karl Barth and his Neo-orthodox followers. Barth revived biblical language for a generation through his use of it to criticize the Christian culture susceptible to Nazification, and a second generation of his insights developed the Yale School according to which Christianity is to be understood as a cultural-linguistic system organized rigorously through biblical language.³ Yet biblical language has been hard to sustain among critical educated people in the modern world.⁴ Much of the current debate in "religion and science" has taken the desperate form of trying to maintain a "classical" conception of God as agent, by which is meant a God who can be described with prima facie references of biblical language, in relation to modern science, showing how God can act in and on the world without abridging scientifically known laws.⁵ Much of the desperation comes from the fact that contemporary scientifically-shaped imagination is not receptive to prima facie non-metaphoric biblical language, even if explicit contradictions can be avoided. The religious problem is with the imaginative connection of late antiquity with late modernity, a problem concerning the power of the symbols to give religion life. Most theologians oriented primarily to biblical language are by no means fundamentalists or literalists; they appreciate biblical metaphors as such. Yet they want to assume conceptions of God as a personal agent who reigns over the world and thus treats the world as a moral field -- all difficult to imagine when the world is conceived as universally subject to meaningless standard measure.

The genius of Paul Tillich was to call attention directly to the problems of contemporary imagination. He developed the "method of correlation" explicitly to translate back and forth between the religious depth of the traditional texts and symbols and the religious depth of contemporary life. Yet his contemporary symbology, for instance speaking of God as the Ground of Being, was very far from biblical language and it has been accused of being less a translation than a replacement. Tillich’s treatment of such a central doctrine as the Trinity, for instance, is relegated to a little essay on symbolism si4ck between Parts IV and V of his Systematic Theology (ST3 283-294).

II. Ford’s Theological Strategy

The key to understanding Lewis Ford as a Christian theologian is the recognition that his graduate specializations were biblical studies and the thought of Paul Tillich with a late interest in Whitehead. His graduate school environment was the heated debate between the Barthians and Tillichians over the plausibility conditions for Christian theology, or the lack of need for them. His turn to Whitehead was in one sense an attempt to find a middle ground for the use of biblical language with a God who could be construed as finite and personal over against the world, interacting with the world in emotionally freighted evaluative ways. In another sense, it was a turn from the whole Christian insular theological tradition to take up the philosophical tradition of modernity about God. The Western European philosophical tradition, from Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Steward, Reid, and Kant down to Hegel and Schleiermacher was deeply formed by the impact of scientific ideas. There was no problem there of "science and religion" because the philosophers were all thinking abreast of science. Whitehead followed in this line. His Science and the Modern World is an excruciatingly beautiful engagement of that tradition of science-oriented philosophic thinking about God. That the tradition of Christian church theology had not engaged these philosophical geniuses was a tragically missed opportunity. With the rise of the bourgeois sense of moral responsibility for one’s beliefs in an age of science, church theology thus was in a hard place. But process philosophy offered an alternative. It has been a scientifically sophisticated and philosophically responsible, technical project to interpret a biblically friendly conception of God to the world of late modernity.

Ford has a complex view of the relation between theology and philosophy in the Western tradition.

Ford, I believe, primarily conceives himself as a Christian theologian doing the philosophizing appropriate to that task.

We should note how rare this is. Contemporary theologians such as Jürgen Moltmann or Robert Jensen are preoccupied with Christian symbols, especially biblical language. Yet they have very little philosophy to make those symbols plausible to the late modern imagination. Others such as Wolfhart Pannenberg and David Tracy speak powerfully of the importance of philosophy, yet avail themselves only of borrowed goods. Ford is surely right that theology needs to work out its philosophy for itself and from within. Tillich, the most philosophical and original of the 20^th century theological giants, focused on existentialist philosophic concerns rather than the philosophy of nature which is needed to address the scientific imagination of late modernity. Ford notes accurately that philosophy of nature ought to be central to the theological task in our time. Yet the 20^th century German schools of theology, influenced by Kant’s argument that nature is to be studied by empirical scientists only and that philosophy is limited to transcendental reflection on the conditions for science (philosophy of science), are inhibited to engage philosophy of nature and are limited to existential or hermeneutical philosophies.⁶ So Whitehead’s process philosophy is an obvious source for creative Christian theology. At the very least it gives the lie to the Kantian claim that we simply cannot do philosophy of nature and naturalistic metaphysics any more, by doing it. Whereas Kantian fideism rigorously separated the ancient religious and modern scientific imaginations, making religion irrelevant to the extent the scientific imagination forms the soul, process philosophy makes possible their integration.

The problem with process theology, according to Ford, is that it is a mere metaphysics. He says that "much of what has been written as "process theology" is really simply philosophy written within the context of a Christian perspective. It is a sustained reflection upon the generic features of experience, taking seriously those dimensions of experience most fully apparent within the religious life" (LG ix). "As a result, however, the distinctively theological task has been comparatively neglected. This study [The Lure of God] seeks to redress the balance" (LG x). Hence, Ford the church theologian.

If the challenge of the modern worldview to that of the ancient is the general condition of the contemporary theological discussion, Ford has a specific interpretation of where that discussion lies now. Neo-orthodoxy has collapsed, he says, and "theologians are recognizing the need for an increasingly wider conceptuality which frees theology from the ghetto of sacred history and places it within the whole sweep of human and natural history" (LG ix). "The ghetto of sacred history" is strong language for what has been a dominant theological motif of our time.⁷ But in light of the late-modern imagination, that is exactly the right phrase.

III. Ford’s Theological Contribution

According to Ford, the Bible gives particular, historical specificity to the general metaphysical picture provided by process philosophy. The general process conception is that God acts on the world through persuasion, not on just the human world but the whole world. Ford writes:

This is a powerful logos doctrine that embraces the non-human world and the whole of humankind, including other religions; it does not require other religions to be anonymous versions of Christianity because what would elicit maximum richness of existence differs, depending on the situation. This doctrine honors differences among religions.

Yet at the same time it provides the rationale for the specificity of the religions of the biblical tradition, which otherwise might seem so arbitrary. Precisely because Abraham was different from Ikhnaton, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, revealed in the lures defining that people, is different from the God of the Egyptians. We should not expect it any other way, says Ford, and should thus look to the specifics of our history and current situation to interpret and bring to consciousness the content of divine persuasion for us.

A related general process conception is that the freedom of every agent lies in its self-creativity given the actual potentials at hand and the real possibilities. Hence the well-known process defense of the goodness of God through the claim that people and other creatures have the freedom to reject or distort the divine lure, choosing the worse rather than the better. Ford relates this specifically to the history of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. As the prophets so often argued, the people often chose the worse and this amounted to a rejection of God, not just a bad choice. At this point, Ford contrasts the process philosophical conception of God with that of "classical theism." Because the latter believes that God controls everything, it has to say that people get what they deserve, which runs contrary to obvious fact. The tortuous writhings of the prophets to make it seem as if God runs a tight ship cannot be sustained. As Ford says:

According to process theology, there is no strict correlation between conduct and consequence: God proposes, and creatures dispose for better or worse. And then God has to make the next best offer. Sacred history is a ghetto not only because it assumes too central a place for human history but also because what happens reveals as much the character of the human actors as it does of God: God can only make the best of things.

Without defending classical theism’s claim that God is both external and controlling (as process philosophers interpret it, though that might be a bad rap), I want to register a theological alternative to Ford’s view here. A standard criticism of process theology is that we simply do not know the lures of God in every actual occasion. Ford writes eloquently of the religious geniuses who are able to discern from history and their circumstances the large social patterns of justice and beauty that elicit increased value (LG ch. 2). But I would say that this discernment of the divine Word should not be viewed as a generalization of lures ingressed in actual occasions as initial aims, the standard process account, but rather exclusively as a reading of the differential value inherent in possibilities offered by the future. That there is this aesthetic envisionment of value-laden possibilities is also integral to process philosophy, and Ford makes much of it in his theory of God as the power of the future, Human discernment does not require the standard process claim that God constitutes an initial aim for us, only that the future is alluring.⁸ The significance of this qualification will appear shortly.

IV. Ford on God

The central theme of Christian theology, of course, is God and how God relates to the world, human history, Jesus Christ, and salvation. The acknowledged contribution of process theology is its conception of God. I want here to detail Ford’s special version of this, associated with his claim that God is the power of the future.

The first thing to note about Ford’s conception is that it includes attributing a positive reality to God apart from the world, "pure presence." This stands in sharp contrast to many process theologians following Hartshorne for whom only the abstract elements of God exist apart from the world and hence could not exist at all. For Ford, apart from the world God nontemporally creates himself by envisioning "the infinitude of pure possibilities." This is a very strong creationist theme, atypical of process philosophers, and it puts Ford in close conversation with Thomists such as W. Norris Clarke, S.J.⁹ Ford’s emphasis on non-temporality was characteristic of his early work, for instance the (1973) essay "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead’s God" (194-195) which made much of Whitehead’s notion of divine envisagement of possibilities as the primordial created f act.¹⁰ By the time (1987) of his "Creativity in a Future Key," he could hope to assimilate the nontemporal to the temporal by means of an enriched notion of the future. The point here is that in his explicitly theological work, The Lure of God, in 1978, he could insist upon self-creativity in God apart from the world, a self-creativity according to which God creates the primordial part of the divine nature. In this, Ford sides with the Scotists against the Thomists in making the divine will prior to the divine nature, which is consequent on the creative will. It seems to me confusing to call the nontemporal "presence, because presence is a temporal notion connected to past and future, and what Ford means is that which is not in that connection. That confusion also sets one up for an anti-presence onto-theo-logo Heideggerian blast quite unnecessarily.

Another confusion lurks here, however. Ford is clear that what is created is God as envisioner. The eternal objects, ungraded and irrelevant to one another, are aboriginal and uncreated, according to Whitehead. Yet how could they exist, without vacuous actuality, in an unenvisioned state? They could not, and so they are said to be nontemporally, i.e., eternally, envisioned. But isn’t the only nontemporal creativity possible to God the actual creating of the eternal objects as envisioned, which is the same as creating God as envisioner? I think so: for eternal objects to exist they must be envisioned and this means that they are created as envisioned. But this is a big slip down the slope to creation ex nihilo, which Ford wants to avoid, and for this reason he has attempted to minimize the nontemporal aspects of factual creation.

Ford says, in the passage just quoted, that a finite creature receives its past from other creatures of the world, its future from God, and creates a new present (itself) out of these. This is a decisive abandonment of another typical process claim already noted, namely, that a creature’s past includes a hybridly prehended lure from God; for Whitehead, God’s lure constitutes an initial aim which is not future but among the data prehended. Ford’s modification is to locate the lure in the future possibilities. Because for him God is the creativity shaping the future real possibilities, all of the creature’s possible being derives from God -- a powerful doctrine of creation. But the future real possibility is always a little indeterminate or vague -- otherwise it would be actual! So the creature makes the final decisions as to how that vague lure shall be actualized, and thus has a free responsibility over against God with which it is possible to sin or at least choose stupidly. "I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life that you and your descendants may live" (Deut. 30:19).

God, by contrast, receives the world from the past into the nontemporal present and creates the future for the world by transforming the pure possibilities into real ones relevant to decisions of finite actual entities. The readiness of real proximate future possibilities to be realized is what motivates a finite actual occasion to become (CFK 188-189). But exactly how that finite occasion becomes, within the limits of the possibility, is its own choice. No matter how you cut it, a process God, Whitehead’s, Hartshorne’s, or Ford’s, is not very much like a finite actual occasion. In Ford’s case, the future has its actual residence -- that which makes it a non-vacuous reality -- in God. The future cannot be actual on its own, for the future is precisely that which is not yet actual and is too indeterminate to be so. Nor can it be resident in the becoming of the present, because the present has its own creative act separate from the creativity of the future. This means that God cannot be in present time if God is the actuality of the future and the present and future have different temporal acts. Of course the future cannot be actual in the past. So the future is actual in no time at all, rather in eternity or in the peculiar time of God which combines past data with non-temporality. God’s peculiar time cannot be the present, for Ford, as most other process theologians would say, because present time has a different act of concrescing from the reality that would hold future possibilities.

Ford’s originality can be understood in part in the temporal implication of his view of God as the power of the future, namely, that the future and past are as real in their ways as the present. Although Whitehead himself was not clear on this, most process theologians say that the past is unreal except as objectively prehended in some present concrescing actual occasion, and that the future is unreal except as anticipated in superjection by a present concrescing actual occasion. For most process theologians, the flow of time, transition, is from one present moment to the next present moment, not from future to present to past.¹¹ For them, the past and future are real as different from the present only within the mind of God through remembrance and anticipation, and for them God too (at least for the Hartshorneans) is actual only in the present. For Ford, the future is not to be reduced to the present in anticipation, not even to some divine present (in which it would still have to be anticipation). Rather, the future’s possibilities are real, the locus of the divine contribution to finite process.

However anomalous Ford’s position on this is to his fellow process theologians, it is quite comfortable to me, a creation ex nihilo theologian with a deep appreciation of eternity. Agreeing with process thinkers that "actuality" means "actualized in time," I would not say that the future is actual in any sense. Nor is God actual in the nontemporal or eternal aspects. But the future is real. What Ford has shown with his claim that God is the creativity of the future is that the flow of time involves not only change in the present but the constantly shifting contours of real possibilities, and that these are necessarily connected. If the future were only projected, anticipated, or superjected, as process philosophers sometimes say, it would not be real and the becomings of present actual occasions would be miracles each time. Ford should also say that the past does not cease to exist except insofar as objectified in some present actuality, as some process thinkers say, but that the flow of time from present to past involves a similar shift in temporal modalities with the past being as real in its way as the present.

In contrast to both Ford and most other process theologians I say that the open-ended flow of time requires God to create all the temporal modes together, not "at once," which is a temporal expression, but eternally together.¹² Within the divine creative act, every date of every temporal thing’s existence is constantly shifting like a future kaleidoscope as the time of its becoming nears, every date has its decisive moment of becoming, and every date fits into a past that extends ever more remotely as time marches on. Whereas in the line of temporal flow there is a singular order such that at any present date some things are all past and others are all future, in the divine life lies an eternal dynamism in which all futures are constantly shifting, all presents are happening, and all pasts are actually exhibiting their achieved value. Temporal things are stretched out in time, eternal in their full identity within the singular divine creative act.

Against this, Ford and most process theologians would object that the integrated divine creation of future, present, and past eternally together for all things in the moving flow of time ruins the strategy of separating divine and creaturely acts of self-creation and hence different loci of responsibility. True, I have to say that God’s creative act is responsible for everything in one sense. But responsibility in the relevant moral sense has to do with temporal decisions, decisions within time.¹³ God is not within time, and only the finite creatures are. For the latter, the future is open to some extent, and Ford’s analysis of partly indeterminate real possibilities applies. God, however, does not know or determine things in advance because God occupies no temporal place in advance of anything, on my theory. So, to my mind, the difference between the singular eternal act of creating which issues in and contains the whole of time’s flow and the limited temporal nature of responsibility in finite creatures is sufficient to locate human responsibility solidly in humans. The sense in which God is responsible for the whole, including its dark side and evil, is very different from human responsibility, and resonates with deep religious sensibilities on its own. The point for morality is to locate human agential responsibility in people and prevent the scapegoating of God. The point for the dark side of creation, and for the transformative bliss of blessing God with gratitude for the life that contains indifference of scale, suffering, evil, and death within it -- an integral part of many people’s Christian spirituality, including mine -- is not registered by Ford or any other process theologian. There might be a disagreement of basic intuitions or sensibilities here. But let us not acquiesce in differences in intuition yet.

The defense of different metaphysical views is very complicated and both Ford and I have given many that cannot be reviewed here. But I would like to raise here the question of the unity of the temporal modes, at least those of the present and future, in temporal flow. Ford’s hypothesis is that creativity, not God, is the integrating connector of things future, present, and past. This is the only way to preserve the separation of the divine exercise of responsibility and that of humans. Yet creativity has no character of its own save in its exercise in specific actualizations. Even if God creates future possibilities to be relevant from the future’s standpoint to concrescing actual occasions, there is nothing in that to make the possibilities relevant from the standpoint of the concrescence which is not real until it happens. It was for this reason that Whitehead and others placed the divine lures in the past or actual world of concrescing occasions; for them, future possibilities are not relevant for concrescence save insofar as anticipation in conscious beings might shape a superject through them. But lures from the past are not enough ontologically if contemporary concrescences are required jointly to specify a common future with a field character, as surely they must; Ford rightly recognizes that the future has to be real, not mere anticipation, even divine anticipation. Creativity, featureless as it is, cannot manage transition through the modes of time, future, present, and past, if the acts of creativity are modally different, one (divine) for the future, another for the (finite) present. Far better it is to say that one eternal divine creative act creates temporal things in their flow with all the modes working together in the shifts from one present moment to the next (oversimplifying here the problems of simultaneity, etc.). Only a creative act that is eternal, embracing the various activities and shifts of the temporal modes together and not itself in any temporal mode, can make the temporal modes relevant to one another, specifically, make the real possibilities relevant from the standpoint of emerging concrescent occasions.

V. Ford on Christology

Setting aside our disputes about time and eternity, and the differences about the philosophical models of God, I want to point out some further theological aspects of Ford’s theory. In Christology, he holds plainly that the Christian commitment is to Jesus as the incarnation of the logos for the human situation, and perhaps not for the whole of the human situation but for that interpretable within the history of Israel and the expanding cultures of Christianity (LG 63ff). For Ford, "salvation is the application of God’s creative purpose to intelligent life" (LG 64). Not all intelligent life could make much of Jesus. But we need to ask, for the intelligent life that can, what salvation in Jesus would mean.

Ford directly bases his answer to that on the resurrection of Jesus. How should we interpret the New Testament witness to the resurrection? Ford cites Pannenberg’s claim that both Jesus’ resurrection and the promise of resurrection for Christians are to be interpreted in light of an apocalyptic general resurrection, He then cites Gordon Kaufman’s claim that if the apocalyptic expectation is disregarded, as Ford himself wants to do, then the resurrection experiences of the early church were hallucinations, Kaufman concludes that the hallucinations were fortunate, for they led the early Christians to found the church, the body of Christ. Ford distinguishes, however, among hallucinations, which are merely subjective, veridical perceptions, which did not happen in the case of the resurrection appearances, and visions. Visions have a subjective shape like hallucinations, but objective reference to non-perceptible realities (LG 71- 74).¹⁴ What is the non-perceptible reality referred to in the case of the experiences of the resurrected Jesus? Ford suggests that it is the spirit of Jesus that animates the church. This is to say, the logos incarnate in Jesus is apprehended in the love of the disciples so that it animates the community. The resurrected Jesus is literally the church as the Body of Christ, for Ford, a very high Christology and ecclesiology indeed.¹⁵

The spirit of Jesus animating the church is not some vapid liberal "team spirit" for Ford. "This transformed human community forms a living organism, a biological phenomenon which we conceive to be the next stage in the emergent evolution of the world, and the incarnation of the divine Word" (LG 74). Thus the general divine purpose of eliciting value in intensity of experience is made specific for the present situation of humankind. The kind of human community the church is supposed to be, and ideally is as animated by the mind of Christ, is a new level of biological evolution for intelligent beings, claims Ford. It could not have happened without the readiness of the disciples through the history of Israel, nor without the life of Jesus; and it is contingent upon the continuing inspiration of the church community.

But how does this redeeming community work? Jesus’ encouragement of his disciples to get along with one another in love during his life was spectacularly unsuccessful. Ford’s answer is that reconciliation comes through the cross, which makes resurrection possible. "Evil lies in the mutual obstruction of things; their conflict and disharmony engender suffering and loss" (LG 93). God’s infinite conceptuality allows any conflict to be taken up into a higher pattern of harmony. Whitehead said that the appreciation of this fact is what gives rise to Peace. But most of us do not have that Peace and cannot be reconciled by an intellectual hypothesis. Ford points out that this Peace is exactly what Jesus lost on the cross when he cried that God had forsaken him. "Jesus did not die a ‘good’ death, with the serene nobility of a Socrates, but in the painful awareness that the intimate presence of God had been withdrawn in the ultimate hour, and that he had been abandoned as one rejected" (LG 93). Yet Jesus continued to love God, and to commit his spirit to God. This pain and love make sense to us, so that we can participate in the living resurrected Body of Christ as reconciled.

All this leads Ford to a version of Christian trinitarianism: "the divine creative act nontemporally generating the primordial nature, from which proceeds the consequent nature as implicated in the Whiteheadian ‘categorial conditions’ established by the primordial envisagement" (LG 110). The Father (the nontemporal creative act) generates the Son (the primordial nature) from which the Spirit (the consequent nature) proceeds. Unlike the Patristic formulation, God does not exist in total independence of the world, for Ford; indeed, the consequent nature requires the prehension of the world and the divine address to the world. So, Ford’s doctrine of the spirit essentially relates to the world. But unlike what process philosophers call the neo-classical conception of God, Ford’s position does not conceive the world to be wholly dependent on God but partially transcendent so that finite things are responsible far their own exercise of creativity, and God is thus essentially relational regarding the world as well as in the internal persons.

Many questions remain concerning whether this trinitarianism can be worked out. On the metaphysical level, I have argued that it is not possible for God to prehend the world, and vice versa.¹⁶ On the Christological level, Ford’s is what Wesley J. Wildman would call a "modest Christology" which better than the Patristic creedal ideas captures what was authentic in biblical views of Jesus and what is plausible and transformative today.¹⁷ Much work remains to be done to study Ford’s views as Christian theology and to put them in perspective with those of, say, Schubert Ogden, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Marjorie Suchocki. I hope I have shown enough of his view here, however, to make that work attractive and to indicate my enormous respect.

References

CFK Lewis S. Ford, "Creativity in a Future Key," New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Robert C. Neville. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.

LG Lewis S. Ford, The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism. Philadelphia, PA, Westminster, 1978.

NTWG Lewis S. Ford, "The Non-temporality of Whitehead’s God," International Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1973).

ST3 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

Notes

1 I am privileged to have begun learning from Ford back in graduate school when we held detailed and technical discussions of Whitehead and Tillich, and he attempted with only moderate success to cure me of my errors. Our latest exchange in print continues his attempt to help me with his essay, "Creation and Concrescence," and my "Reply," in Critical Studies in the Thought of Robert C. Neville, edited by J. Harley Chapman and Nancy Frankenberry (Albany: State University of New York Press, forthcoming 1999). In the meantime, there have been sets of published debate and many conversations. For instance, see The Southern Journal of Philosophy 7 (1969-1970) with his "On Genetic Successiveness" and my "White-head on the One and the Many;" and his response, "Neville’s Interpretation of Creativity," his Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, edited with George L. Kline (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983). My Creativity and God (New York. The Seabury Press, 1980; new edition: State University of New York Press, 1995) discussed his philosophical theology extensively to which he responded (with Charles Hartshorne and John B. Cobb, Jr.) in "Thee Responses to Neville’s Creativity and God" in Process Studies 10(1980), 33-34, and to which I came back in "Concerning Creativity and God: A Response" in Process Studies 11(1981), 1-10. Moreover, those fortunate enough to be Ford’s correspondents know the treasure of his long, detailed letters chock full of arguments and citations and totally devoid of ego.

2His best-known work in the last genre is The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. 1925-1929 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984).

3See, for instance, George A. Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1984)

4See Hans Frei’s lament of this in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1974).

5See, for instance, the extraordinarily well structured set of debates in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, edited by W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman (New York: Routledge, 1996).

6 See Herman Deuser’s brilliant analysis of the differences between continental theology, with its exclusion of philosophy of nature, and American theology influenced by process and pragmatic thought, in "Neville’s Theology of Creation, Covenant, and Trinity," American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 18 (1997), 215-237.

7See, for instance, Oscar Cullmann’s Christ and Time, translated by Floyd V. Filson (Revised edition: Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1964).

8 I have argued this complicated alternative to process theology in my thee-volume Axiology of Thinking, consisting of Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981), Recovery of the Measure (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1989), and Normative Cultures (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995).

9 See, for instance, his discussion of this point in "Creativity in a Future Key," New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Robert C. Neville (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987), 179-197, especially 194-195.

10Whitehead’s point begins chapter 3 of part 1 of Process and Reality "The primordial created fact is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects. This is the ‘primordial nature’ of God." Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 31. Ford discusses God as the creativity of the future in many places beyond those discussed here. See for instance "The Divine Activity of the Future," Process Studies 11 (1981), 169-179

11The subtlest discussion of this is Jorge Luis Nobo’s in Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986). Ford believes that Nobo’s account is right about a view of time’s passage that Whitehead subsequently gave up (an argument within Ford’s compositional analysis). I think that Whitehead was mistaken to give that view up, coming as close as process philosophy can to acknowledging real transition within the flow of time, and that Nobo’s theory is the best attempt to save Whitehead.

12 I have argued this at length in Eternity and Times flow (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993); see also my "Time, Temporality, and Ontology," The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, Library of Living Philosophers, edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn (La Salle, IL, Open Court, 1991).

13See my The Cosmology of Freedom (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1974; new edition: Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1995).

14 My own The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1996) defends this point.

15 See Ford’s subtle discussion of New Testament terms for the physical and spiritual bodies of resurrected persons, including Jesus, at The Lure of God, 74 ff.

16 See my Creativity and God (new edition: Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995).

17 See his Fidelity with Plausibility: Modest Christologies in the Twentieth Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998).

The generous critical attention Hartshorne, Cobb, and Ford have focused on my small book (CG) should be the envy of any author (PS 10:73-88). The greatest true respect one can pay an author’s work is to take it seriously enough to attempt to refute it. I tried to do this for the authors of process theology, and they have repaid that respect with a generosity that humbles while it flatters. John Cobb is surely right when he argues that all conceptual schemes are wanting in their own cogency and in need of sympathetic, frank criticism. Not only to have registered a critical response to process theology but to have evoked serious criticism in return is more than I had dared to hope.

There are too many points of debate raised by the papers to be taken up comprehensively. I can consider here only certain major themes, mainly those that are important to more than one of the critics, beginning with the technical interpretation of process theology and extending to those more generally problematic for the relation between philosophy, theology, tradition, and religious experience.

The first topic, technical in its formulation but at the heart of nearly all the other topics, is whether the subjective immediacy of an occasion’s coming-to-be perishes with the attainment of satisfaction. Over against Ford and me, Hartshorne and Cobb claim that the subjective immediacy does not perish and is available for being prehended by subsequent occasions. This continuity of immediacy is the license for what Cobb so nicely calls the "intimacy" between God and man, and my failure to accept that continuity accounts for the alienation I see between ourselves and Whitehead’s God. Whitehead himself would have rejected the claim of continuity, I suspect, because he was very concerned to articulate the special category of "hybrid physical prehensions." If subjective immediacy is continuous, then all physical prehensions would be hybrid physical prehensions, resulting in an extreme panpsychism embraced by Hartshorne more fully than by Whitehead. But as Ford can probably tell us, there must have been a season or two in which Whitehead did accept the doctrine of continuity of subjective immediacy.

Of course we are not bound by Whitehead, and it is a matter of fundamental philosophical strategy which principles to make basic and which to make derivative. To declare continuity of immediacy to be basic, with Hartshorne and Cobb, secures the advantages mentioned for process theism. But it abandons what I take to be Whitehead’s greatest metaphysical contribution, namely his sharp distinction between genetic and coordinate analysis. Genetic analysis attends to the subjective coming-to-be of an occasion, arising from past physical things and finding satisfaction in a definiteness that itself takes up or makes a new physical position. Coordinate analysis attends to the objective orders within which finished occasions fall. Whitehead’s monumental construction of post-Cartesian philosophy, articulating the full and total integrity of intentionality through genetic analysis and the frill and total integrity of scientific order through coordinate analysis, depends entirely on allowing that the satisfaction aimed at by subjective coming-to-be is identical with objective physical fact available for subsequent prehension. If the satisfaction, once attained, is not wholly physical and objective, then the genetic and coordinate domains are either sundered or the distinction between them ignored. The latter would happen if subjective immediacy were continuous from one occasion to another. This seems to me a retrogression to a pre-Whiteheadian vitalism. I prefer many metaphysical advantages which come from distinguishing the genetic from the coordinate, with its consequence that subjective immediacy is the existential heart of each new moment, to the theological advantages of continuity with its vitalistic implications.

As for Hartshorne’s argument "that the satisfaction contains its process of becoming (‘the being cannot be abstracted from the becoming’), so that to prehend a past satisfaction is to prehend the becoming," I simply do not see how this can be so on anything like Whiteheadian grounds. Becoming is a process of making indefinite things definite, and when they are all definite, there is no more becoming, only being, the satisfaction. Becoming cannot be a term in a relation so as to be contained in a subsequent prehension because it has no existence except in its satisfaction, which is no longer becoming. To prehend a becoming might be possible on a vitalist’s view in which an occasion becomes from its earlier to later temporal phases; this is to make becoming a matter of coordinate disposition, an Aristotelian and pre-Whiteheadian supposition.

Whitehead’s distinction between genetic and coordinate analysis rests on the conceptual innovation that becoming is from nothing but past finished data to the whole finished occasion with its temporal stretch, constituting the occasion’s earlier and later temporal phases in the outcome, not as a frame for the becoming itself. Because becoming has such importance for me as self-creative, and is not to be construed merely as volatile being, it is apparent why my own view of God requires divine presence in the fount of becoming, not only in data prehended (cf. CC).

Hartshorne also argues that "it is part of the meaning of ‘event’ to be destined to be prehended by subsequent events, this destiny constituting the very ‘being’ of the event." Now strictly speaking, the "being" of an event is its objectivity or availability to be prehended by subsequent events. "Destiny" is too strong a term for the event’s being, because it requires, beyond the being of the event, the continued applicability of the category of the ultimate. That is, there must be subsequent events for the earlier event to have a destiny, and those subsequent events must have their own existential coming-to-be in order to take up the being of prior events to give them a destiny. Hartshorne has shown better than anyone that the set of past events by itself does not produce its new integration in another event. But this removes the weight of ontology -- why there is something rather than nothing -- from the being of occasions to the category of the ultimate, creativity producing new ones out of manys.

If the category of the ultimate should fail to operate, then there could easily be a last moment, followed by the everlasting availability of finished occasions to be prehended with no emerging occasions to prehend them. The importance of the category of the ultimate cannot overlooked or translated into the mere momentum of becoming. For creativity not only integrates past occasions into a new occasion but also constitutes a fundamental ontological togetherness wherein the subjective creativity of emergent occasions is relevant to the facts of past occasions. The genius of Whitehead’s defense of novelty was to see that occasions have their own existence by which they take up and tie themselves to their neighbors. The togetherness involved in being mutually relevant at the ontological level cannot be reduced to the mere conditioning which the later occasion has from the past. The ontological togetherness of mutual relevance itself makes possible the conditioning of the later by the earlier through prehension. This is why Whitehead gave the category of the ultimate its honorific title and analyzed it as many, one, and creativity rather than many, one, and unification.

This brings us to the point made most acutely by Cobb, namely the thesis that "every plurality cries aloud for explanation in terms of a unity." Although he attributes this thesis to me, I agree with him in rejecting it, for many reasons. If a unity lies behind the plurality of earlier and later, there is no novelty. If two things are unified by a third, they must be unified with the third by a fourth and fifth, ad infinitum. And experientially, I agree with Cobb that any fact of definiteness requires a plurality of other definite things. I even go so far as to say that the category of the ultimate itself, having one, many, and creativity, is a plurality, not a self-evident, self-explaining, or self-sustaining unity.

What may have led Cobb to attribute love of unity to me is my advocacy of Whitehead’s ontological principle, namely, that any plurality cries aloud for explanation in terms of decisions. The decisions are what put complex pluralities together in mutual relevance with one another. Decisions have no more unity to them than is contained in what they decide, the togetherness in their products.

Cosmological schemes like Whitehead’s indicate where to look for the various decisions determining actual entities. But what decisions account for the complexity in the categoreal scheme? In particular, what decision makes there be the category of the ultimate? I agree with Cobb that the category of the ultimate, or "creativity" taken as shorthand for that, expresses the most basic "what is" of things. But according to the ontological principle, that "what is," being complex, must be the result of some decision. The decision is not another being, and it has no determinate character other than what it decides; but following the ontological tradition in the West and my own religious experience I still can call it divine. The category of the ultimate, and even the ontological principle, therefore, must be elements in the primordial created fact, in the dyad, the second hypostasis, themselves created. To this sensibility, and in light of this argument, even the most self-surpassing of actual entities is a pallid candidate for divinity.

To avoid my consequence it is necessary to cut off the ontological principle from application to ultimate matters, as Whitehead was willing himself to do. This seems to me sheer arbitrariness. Hartshorne finds my extension of the principle "subtly ambiguous." He argues that "contingency is not in definite complexity but in particular complexity, like the complexity and determinateness of two apples." This allows him to say that the pair of apples are created but that pairedness is not. But this begs the question, from my standpoint. The decisions resulting in the two apples are to be found in concrete past occasions, as well as in their own existence. The decisions resulting in eternal objects or truths cannot be of that sort.

But this does not prove that they do not result from decision. Even Whitehead extended the ontological principle so far as to say that any relational quality of eternal objects had to result from divine decision; prior to that decision eternal objects are indeterminate with respect to each other so that a pair would be neither greater nor less than a one or three. On my view, and Whitehead’s, it is not particularity that wants a decision but definiteness, and definiteness applies to the universal and necessary as well as to the particular and temporally contingent.

Even granting Hartshorne’s claim that metaphysical principles are a priori, incapable of falsification, the requirement of a decision still holds. For, the question is not how these metaphysical principles could be otherwise, which might indeed be inconceivable, but rather why there is this definiteness rather than no definiteness. To conceive that definiteness results from decision does not require conceiving some positive, pure indefiniteness; in fact, given the created intelligibles, we cannot help but think that this definiteness exists and testifies to its founding decision.

Up to now Ford has likely agreed with most of my claims about the perishing of immediacy, the individual integrity of occasions, and the dependency of all definiteness upon decision, however he would modify them. But he would say that God is not the creator defining the category of the ultimate or any such, but in his modification of Whitehead’s theology claim that God is the future. This is a radical reversal of the usual line of process theology. For Ford the future is a dynamic field in which abstract possibilities are continually readjusted to the changes of present actualities so as to produce immediately relevant concrete potentialities. God’s divine mind is the creative adjusting here, and God’s reality is the always unfinished concrescence of that dynamic future field. God is deficient in concrete actuality, as Whitehead said, because every time the adjusting of abstract possibilities to concrete events butts up against complete definiteness, the existence that makes the final decision shifts from God to the presently emerging creatures. Whereas Ford’s novel theory deserves deep consideration in its own right, for present purposes I can consider it only with respect to the special advantages he claims for it.

First, it allows him to say creatures’ freedom is distinct from God’s freedom, because the decisions they make are different. Note, however, that the very independence of the existential acts of God and creatures underscores the need to which I called attention earlier for a deeper decision making present and future mutually relevant. For if God is the future with its own existential decisive acts and if creature’s existential acts, being present, are different, how do the possibilities get from God to the creatures? Not by the existential acts of either God or creatures but by a prior or deeper establishment of them in mutual relation. Whereas Whitehead could define past and future by reference to decisive existential events which are present by definition, Ford defines at least the future by reference to possibilities whose careers must pass from one decisive agent to another.

Even supposing that the problem of mutual relevance of present and future were solved, I doubt this still would allow the kind of freedom process theologians want in creatures. For, instead of having creatures create their own possibilities within the limitations of the fixed past, Ford would have God arrange the possibilities down to the last step before definiteness. Admittedly the final decisive act is the creature’s, but if God has circumscribed the possibilities down to the next to last decision, the creatures can do hardly more than ratify God’s set up. Human freedom requires not only that the decision be identified as the person’s own reality but that the decision have a free range over significant options.

Ford’s view shares the difficulty I find in Cobb’s view, namely that God’s input, even if vague enough to be altered or made more determinate by the creature, is an external imposition magnified to divine proportions. It is a separate issue whether God’s lures (for Cobb) or arranged potentialities (for Ford) are loving addresses calling forth loving responses. The issue here is the sufficiency of independence to make a responsible response. It seems to me that Ford as well as his colleagues hands human freedom a stacked deck, more stacked than experience indicates.

Ford’s second advantage for his view is that it allows every occasion to contribute to the divine experience. But this is so only insofar as God adjusts possibilities. God as future has no actual experience because that would require God to be past and therefore finished with respect to some later occasion.

The third advantage is that although God is responsible for potential coordination of the world, evil and conflict arise because creatures make the final decisions. But if evil is a way among others of finally resolving the possibilities God offers, is not God responsible for evil just to the degree, and in the same way, that God is responsible for good? On Ford’s view, God is responsible or the possibilities alone, and creatures for all actuality, and he should admit that evil, like good, is possible before actual.

The fourth advantage is that God and the world are represented in a mutual solidarity whereby God elicits order out of the relatively chaotic. But on Ford s account, the chaotic side cannot be in the world but must be in the relatively abstract possibilities, brought to greater determination by divine adjustment to the world. God, on Ford’s view, elicits nothing from the world but rather only presents the world with something, limits within which the world must respond. This is not divine guidance but quasi-fiat, the very thing that limits freedom.

The fifth advantage is that in responding to the world, God as future has contingent aspects that cannot be known philosophically. Of course on a creationist view like my own, anything contingent in the world is a contingent creation. But to say that God is influenced by independent actualities requires solving the problem mentioned above of making God and the world mutually relevant.

The sixth advantage of Ford’s new theory is that God is not said to be a being but always a becoming, and as such still exemplifies the categories. But then if God is always a becoming, there is never a divine being that can be prehended by creatures. God would have to be only the potentiality for a creature’s becoming a subject, never an object; and this is far from the biblical view Ford wants to support.

Let me now turn finally to three general topics concerning which my own view is criticized by Hartshorne, Cobb, and Ford. The topics are freedom, Biblicism, and dialogue.

To say as I do that human freedom is at once divine creativity can be taken to be a contradiction; worse, a monstrous view, both sadistic and masochistic, as Hartshorne acutely calls it. This surely would be the case if God is construed as an agent like a person, only separate and bigger and overwhelming. But what are the issues here? The first is whether the activities in question are genuinely the person’s, so that the choices between options are not forced by circumstances but rather constitute the person’s own decision-making. In my book The Cosmology of Freedom (CF) I believe I have shown how these questions about the identification of freedom and decision-making are cosmological matters to be understood in terms of the self-determining acts of things and their relations.

The second issue is whether God’s decisive acts interfere with human freedom. There is serious divine interference on the views that God provides either subjective aim in initial data or the prefigured possibilities, but God on my view does neither. Rather, God on my view creates the spontaneous features within a person’s decisions; the decisions are the person created, and since they are the person’s resolving of indefiniteness, they are that person’s responsibility. No other agent is responsible except the decision-maker. Similarly, God is the creator of spontaneous features in all past decisive occasions, and future ones as well, and therefore is the creator of all things, considering their mutual determination through the modes of time. This is the way God is the ground of mutual relevance of existentially independent yet conditioned things. But at no time does God s decision displace or modify what the creature’s decision otherwise would be. God in a local existent is the creature deciding in mutual relevance to the conditions for decision. In an ontological sense, of course, God is given responsibility for all decisions; yet God is not a separate being for which responsibility is an attribute. If the world is a mixture of evil and good, then God is as much responsible for the one as for the other -- or as little responsible. God is the empty creator of the full world, of whatever it is.

Cobb points out that my view is not at the center of the biblical tradition, that its antecedents are mystics like Meister Eckhardt, and that the dominant tradition is to worship "One who is good and loving and whose character is manifest in the efforts to overcome injustice rather than in inflicting it." To sustain the dominant biblical view Cobb wants to insist on the difference between such a God and creativity. Now the Bible as I read it has God both good and terrible at once. We can understand in some dim way why Israel thought that. But the centuries between biblical times and our own many times have changed the conditions for seeing God. Through the medieval period and the scientific renaissance in Europe goodness and terror were experienced together in a God who was a providential and benevolent tyrant, finally the watchmaker who made a good watch and left it. The assertion of individual freedom in the modern period, however, led to the inability to experience the tyrant as God, and Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God the Terrible. Whitehead and others thought they found a way to have God the Good without Terror and Tyranny by making God a definite Other, like persons subject to creativity.

But can this be experienced as God today? Certainly not by me. It is very difficult, if not foolish, and surely arrogant, to tell other people what they experience. But it seems to me that the contemporary experience of God as Good is just a projection of human altruism. Without the Terror it is not experienced as a real God. The genuine experience of the lure of goodness need not be projected onto an imagined fellow sufferer but can be grasped as God’s creative deciding of our ownmost possibilities and the divine grace that wells up spontaneously each moment to give us an absolutely real and fresh start, ever again.

Furthermore, I agree with my colleague Altizer that, far from experiencing God in the old ways of biblical, medieval, or modern times, the epiphany of God in our day in the West takes the form of total presence of divinity (TP). God is not experienced as a being who is present to us other beings, but as the reality of all things existing as mutually relevant, including us and all our perspectives without our alienating self-consciousness of ego. God is not experienced as good and others as evil, but as the wholly present mixture of goods and evils, orders and chaos. God is not experienced as the interactions of things, pantheistically, but as the creative ground in things interacting, creating them as mutually relevant. God is not experienced as God, sacred rather than profane, but as the total presence of things, indistinguishably sacred and profane at once.

As to dialogue between the world’s religions, it seems to me the issue is not whether two religions are about the same religious object. Here I agree with Cobb. But neither is it the question of finding a conceptual context in which mainstream biblical Christians can talk with mainstream Buddhists bent on Emptiness. This formulation of the question, seems to ignore a crucial dimension of the historicity of religious belief. Authentic heirs of the biblical tradition could not have the ancient biblical faith today except as nostalgia, because times have changed. One of the chief cultural transformations has been the growth of individual freedom, as the process tradition itself has emphasized. A contemporary Christian must find a contemporary way of experiencing God. I presume that a contemporary Buddhist would stand in a similarly problematic relation to the ancient Buddhist tradition.

The question of dialogue, I suggest, is how or whether heirs to the biblical tradition experience divinity in ways that bear upon the ways heirs of the Buddhist tradition experience matters of ultimacy. In a strict sense, the issue of whether there is one ultimate or two should be subsequent to whether either side or both experience anything worth religious discourse. In addressing the primary question, I suspect that the context of dialogue would make it possible for people to become heirs of both traditions in selective ways.

One of the greatest strengths of process theology, as it is of process philosophy generally, is its consistent sensitivity to the difference the abstractness of concepts and the concreteness of experience and to the ways by which each side influences the other without supplanting it. This sensitivity is a significant hedge against dogmatism, and I could not agree more with Cobb’s remarks about the fallibility of theological systems. I confess that all this sensitivity, however, still leaves me at a loss to know how to respond to fundamental differences in basic intuitions about life tutored by life itself.

The arguments of Hartshorne and Cobb have moved me a short way down the path toward seeing how the postulated ability of God to prehend subjective becoming allows for divine intimacy with us. But that kind of intimacy between different societies of actual occasions, one of which is scaled up to the divine level, seem counter-intuitive. That is not how I experience what I think is divinity; it seems rather to be what I feel as wish-projection in myself and others. Yet despite my profound feeling that this is a category mistake with horrible existential consequences, I have known many people, particularly Roman Catholic religious, who have indeed oriented themselves to God in the place of friends and have experienced even the deepest relations between people as but a vestige of divinity, or a sign of a more intimate relation with God.

An even deeper gulf of sensibility separates Hartshorne and me regarding evil, nonbeing, and emptiness. His view that creativity "is the passage from an actuality to a greater and, in a sense, more richly concrete actuality" expresses a wholly positive intuition of reality and the stuff of human affairs. Yet my experience is that the space of freedom lies precariously between chaos and ideal unity.

Let me switch my approach now toward an imagery that conveys this experience. Human affairs take place in an arena that is itself a mixture of the relatively more fragmented and the relatively more ordered. Every thing, every component of process, is a harmony of other things. As a harmony it lasts as long as conditions reinforce or at least tolerate it, and no longer, however much it is contained in later things. The forces of chaos ground the terror we rightly have about the sheer fact of existence. Not that the destruction of a particular harmony is necessarily evil, for the harmony itself might be bad. Morality is concerned with which potential harmonies ought to be actualized and which actual and potential ones ought to be avoided, modified, or set in other contexts. Chaos presents us with a religious terror at the sheer contingency of existence as harmony, a terror that clutches at symbols like the polarity of life and death, the creative dance of Shiva the Destroyer, the Pit.

Chaos is not pure disorder, of course; rather it is the relative disorder of what things would be if some particular harmony were taken away. Our lives make sense, when they do, because of a fine and fragile texture organizing the sea of underlying forces. And when we locate one of those underlying forces -- an economic drive, a blind libido -- with a clarity that allows us to let go our overt harmonies and relate directly to their components, those components themselves in turn begin to dissolve into thin films covering even more alien vortices of strange harmonies. Life is made of fragile mixtures because all mixtures are just mixtures.

The religious burden of freedom is acceptance of the terror of chaos and the importance of the ideal. There is a religious temptation to hide both terror and importance by dramatizing the relative chaos, making it a divine struggle, salvation history, the dialectic of benign creation’s unfolding. That is whistling in the dark. It is better than running inside from the dark but not as direct as simply doing what needs to be done in our none-too-well-lit world. Our responsibilities are local, often unexpected, usually undramatic and frustrating, but they are the only important loci of our existence in the middle space. This is a dualistic intuition of reality balanced between the positive and the negative. To change the metaphor of darkness and light: perhaps the light of the world a p pears in insignificant places, faces basic choices in dingy gardens, fails to be effective beyond a few fainthearted friends, and shines but a short season. That is, however, the light the world has.

A wholly positive conceptual scheme contradicts this intuition, this nontriumphantalist post-modern vision. If the intuitive vision itself contradicts other intuitive visions, after all the clarifications and siftings of dialogue have been run through, I do not know where to turn but to acknowledge diversity in the ultimate decisions whose apocalyptic force gives content to religion. Does this mean, as Cobb would urge, that there are different ultimates? If so, then it is impossible to understand how they could be related to one another enough so as to be different. Or does it mean that the divine creative act giving existence to all things encompasses the negativity and disjunction of chaos as well as the lure of order?

References

CF -- Robert Neville, The Cosmology of Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

CC -- Robert Neville, Creativity and God. New York: The Seabury Press, 1980.

GC -- Robert Neville, God the Creator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

TP -- Thomas J. J. Altizer, Total Presence. New York: The Seabury Press, 1980.

The problematic nature of truth stands at the center of an array of philosophic issues for our time. To one side lie questions about reality. To another side lie questions about the nature of interpretation. To yet another side, or perhaps underneath all these issues, lie the questions of value: whether reality exhibits worth independent of interpretation, whether interpretation inevitably is valuation, whether political life which contests values is a struggle about reality or about the intentions in interpretations or merely about getting along socially. If political life itself is a struggle with reality, interpretation, appraisal, and appreciation of values, as I believe it is, and if truth is the connection between reality and interpretation, then the problematic nature of truth lies at the center of our time’s travails with distributive justice, with the balance of nature, and with peace.

The thesis to be presented concerning truth is that truth is the properly qualified carryover of the value of a thing into the interpreting experience of that thing. The thesis has three preliminary parts: a theory of reality, a theory of interpretation, and a theory of value and valuation, developed each upon the other.

1. A Theory of Reality

To be real is to be determinate. By characterizing determinateness it will become apparent what this claim means and why it has some plausibility. To be determinate is to have identity with two aspects. On the one hand determinate identity is determinate with respect to other things; where an identity is wholly irrelevant to something else or is undecided about several potential relevancies, it is to that extent indeterminate. A thing must be determinate with respect to some things, however, if it is to be determinate at all, for otherwise it would not be what it is in contrast to being something else or nothing. Things are determinate with respect to other things by being related to them in orders of relevance. Let us call the features of things by virtue of which they are determinate with respect to other things their "conditional features," because those features mark the ways other things condition their identity.

On the other hand determinate identity cannot consist only in conditional features, for that would be as if the determinate identity were only the product of the other conditioning things. Yet the conditioning elements by themselves do not include the product; the product’s own reality is precisely what is not a function of the conditions, for if it were, the conditions alone would include the product without producing. So there must then be also "essential features" in determinate identity that harmonize with the conditional features. Determinateness is harmony of essential and conditional features.¹

A determinate thing is a harmony of essential and conditional features, which is to say that the essential and conditional features are together without necessarily being included within some higher integrating feature. Whitehead’s word for this kind of harmony is contrast," which he distinguishes from a pattern of the features which might be abstracted from the concrete togetherness (PR 349ff./ 228ff.). The kind of unity a harmony has is aesthetic, which is the basis for the theory of value and valuation below.

A determinate thing is real because it is a harmony of essential and conditional features. By virtue of its essential features it is not reducible to the things with which it is connected, such as interpreters, or to the connections, such as interpretations. By virtue of its conditional features it does occupy positions with respect to other things and thereby makes a difference to the world. The reality of a thing is its making a difference to other things but not being exhausted in those differences. A thing’s reality is its having a nature of its own, one which is both distinct from and relative to other things. These two traits of reality, self-nature and relative making-a-difference, are constituted by the essential and conditional features harmonized in determinateness. One can now prefigure an answer to the question whether things are real independently of our knowledge of them: whereas interpretations are always matters of conditional connections, things interpreted are harmonies of those conditional connections with essential features, and by that are not reducible to the interpretations. But this is still a paradoxical answer. For, how can we say that things are independent by virtue of their essential features without coopting the essential features into our interpretation? The theories of interpretation and valuation are required to resolve this paradox.

2. A Theory of Interpretation

I want to use the word "interpretation" as a large umbrella to cover the cognitive processes involved in all sorts of assertion. Assertions, to the extent they are not vague, are true or false of their objects, and thus fundamentally involve that dyadic true-false relation. At the historical center of the development of theories of interpretation, however, is the conviction that knowledge is triadic, that it involves representations. Knowledge is not the immediate entertaining of an object itself or its form, but rather the correct representation of an object with a propositional idea. In this sense knowing is a move away from the object, a re-presentation. Nevertheless, knowing must assert a connection between representation and object if one is to identify the object as that which is represented. The connection, however it be made, is what transforms the material reality of the representation into interpretation. Interpretation is irreducibly triadic: it involves an object, a sign representing an object, and a further sign interpreting how the first sign represents the object. Or, to use the similar language of Charles Peirce, an interpretation includes an object, a sign of the object, and an interpretation of the sign which the sign asserts to hold of the object. The triadic character of interpretation is embodied in each element -- object, sign, interpreting sign; each is what it is only by virtue of mediating relations to the other two.

An interpretation is true if it asserts the fit sign of the object. This general observation about truth is complicated by the fact that interpreting involves selecting. To move away from the object in the direction of one sign or line of signification is selective. One could have moved off in a different direction. To note that the table is brown, for instance, is selectively different from interpreting it as expensive or old. In this sense, all knowing involves abstraction or simplification.

In order to recover full concreteness one may dream of assembling all of the interpretations into a coherent whole. The principles for such assemblage cannot naively present themselves in the thing interpreted, however. At the very least, the assemblage must respect the history and the set of contexts of the several specific interpretations. Therefore the interpreter, not alone the object, supplies elements of the reconstructed summary interpretation. In fact, the very selectivity of interpretation reveals that the perspective of the interpreter is partially constitutive of the knowledge of the object. More than that, the selective process of interpretation is one of the crucial ingredients in the construction of interpretive perspectives. An interpretation is a new natural reality beyond the interpreted.

The question of truth for interpretation becomes whether the sign corresponds to the object in the respect specified by the interpretant-sign that connects them. The respect of the representation s correspondence is all-important, for without it there is no connection between object and sign that could be true or false. The apparently dyadic true/false distinction, determined by the norm of truth, is thus made internal to the triadic relations in the interpretive situation. Correspondence cannot be understood apart from the understanding of the principle of selection indicating the respect of representation. Therefore, an interpretation cannot be understood simply in its own terms, for further terms are necessary to explicate the respect of interpretation.

From this point of view, the power in the pragmatists’ association of truth with warranted assertability in a self-correcting community of inquiry is obvious. Warranted assertability differs from direct correspondence precisely by its reference to interpretation’s triadic character. To warrant an assertion is to explicate and justify the respect in which the assertion is made as well as the assertion, relative to the context, purposes, history, and needs of the situation. More exactly, to say that truth is warranted assertability is to note that the assertion is embedded in a context of inquiry that is indefinitely self-critical and liable to become unstable when a shift in assessment of the nature and merits of the respect of interpretation shifts the truth value of the interpreting sign. The pragmatists correctly noted that the truth of interpretations is relative to common culture, shared goals, and mutually critical communication. An interpretation supposes a vast culture forming the imagination in such a way that things stand out as objects to be interpreted, that things function as signs, and that respects are articulated in terms of which it is culturally important to make interpretations. Cultural imagination presents a world relatively preformed with objects, signs, and relevant respects of interpretation.

Within the field of cultural hermeneutics, this recognition of relativity has been extraordinarily liberating. We now come closer to understanding other cultures and our own distant past on their own terms precisely because we recognize that their own terms differ from ours.

The gods of cultural relativity, like most gods, are not entirely benign, however, and certainly not tame. For, is not the recognition of thorough cultural relativity the abandonment of the sense of reality? Just as a dyadic quality of truth is subsumed within the triadic quality of interpretation, so assertions within a culture are true or false only within the culture. Because the very meaning of representing an object with a sign in a certain respect is a function of the larger culture, one cannot speak of true or false interpretations except insofar as those interpretations are embedded in some culture or other. One cannot say that contrary assertions in two different cultures might differ with respect to one another in truth value: they are true or false only relative to their respective cultures, not with respect to one another. The reality of things, which must be at once independent of any interpretation and yet connectable with other interpreters, regardless of cultural selectivity, evaporates inexorably.

We find ourselves interpreting things in radically incoherent respects, each situationally appropriate, but without a sense of reality, even of "our" reality over against "theirs." The advance of cultural hermeneutics right now consumes its own children.

3. A Theory of Value and Valuation

Why not celebrate the loss of "reality" rather than lament it? The "deconstruction" of Western reality seems to do just that. The reason for lamenting is this: loss of reality is in fact loss of value, not simply loss of imperial control of Western reality (or the reality of East Asia, or the Muslim world). The connection between reality and value leads to a theory of value and valuation.

Harmony is a concept of value, and the harmony of essential and conditional features in a determinate reality is its value. The value depends on what is harmonized and how the harmony is achieved; whether the value is appropriate depends on the context. But simply to be a harmony is to be a value, to be an achievement of worth. That is my thesis.

What kind of thesis is this? It is an empirical hypothesis. When we take something to be valuable, we grasp it as a harmony. This means first, that we appreciate the harmony as a way of having together the components each of which has some value. On the theory proposed, each feature of a harmony is itself a harmony. It means, second, that the form of the harmony, the ways in which the components are combined in contrasts, has a value precisely in having the components together. The form of the harmony is grasped in a kind of aesthetic judgment, although "aesthetic" should not be taken to refer exclusively to art or to imply that the value is actually appropriate to the situation. To grasp that a thing’s value is too low or misplaced also requires an aesthetic judgment or intuition of the value. The essential features of a thing are those elements that integrate or form the harmony; they are what allow the conditional features to be together. The value lies in the conditional features harmonized with and by means of the essential ones.

The plausibility of this hypothesis comes in reflecting on what we do in deliberating about the worth of something. Stated most abstractly, we deliberate by varying one or both of two factors that make up harmony: complexity and simplicity. The complexity of a harmony is the array of different things it combines. We deliberate about complexity in a moral situation, for instance, by imaginatively varying the things to be taken into account, adding or leaving out actors, motives, interests, domains of consequences, and the like. The simplicity of a harmony is the ways by which the components are combined so as to reinforce and build upon one another; simplicity makes higher level unities out of lower level diversities. We deliberate about simplicity by varying the unifying patterns. Complexity and simplicity require each other in order to be valuable. Complexity can be increased easily by lowering the standards of simplicity, with the extreme case being sheer conjunction: a and b and c and d and n. This has minimal harmonic worth. Simplicity can be increased by eliminating complexity at various levels, the extreme case being sheer homogeneity: character a all the way through, again of minimal harmonic worth. In deliberation we attempt to maximize both complexity and simplicity, as is clear in making works of art, in arranging affairs of life, and in moral dilemmas. Pure moral egoism is an extreme case of simplicity with minimal complexity in the moral sphere; extreme complexity without simplicity would be the acknowledgement of a wide array of agents, interests, and values with too little coordination to allow of selective response or action.²

As Dewey so well pointed out, there is an affective tone in all things experienced, even those that rarely if ever come to the focus of attention. The metaphysical point is that the value is in the harmonic structure of a thing, where that includes the concrete components harmonized. The values of things are thus real, independent of the interpretation of them in the same sense that things are independent by virtue of being harmonies of their conditional features with and by means of their essential features.

Valuation is when the value of something becomes a value or plays a value-laden role in something else. With respect to interpretation, valuation is giving the value-laden thing a role in the experience of the interpreter or in the form of the interpretation which might be possessed by a community. The problem of interpretation of course is that the value of the interpreted thing must be harmonized with the values of the other things entering experience; in the course of this it is likely compromised. Valuation quickly becomes evaluation when the integration is done on a comparative level.

Interpretation is selective valuation in four forms. First, the object is a harmony present in interpretation with its constitutive value. Second, the interpreter, by virtue of its own harmonizing essential intentional interests, values interpreting the thing in a selective respect. Third, there is the representation or sign, perhaps derived by abstraction from the object, in the respect. Fourth, there is the interpretant which asserts that the sign interprets the object, or which takes the sign as a sign in the relevant respect. Without the fourth form, which values the sign relative to the object in the appropriate respect, there is no assertion. Without the third form there is no selection, no distancing, no representation, and hence no advance whatsoever on the object by itself as uninterpreted. Without the second form there is no valuable or warrantable direction of selective representation, no connection with a context of meaning. Without the first form, there is no reality to be interpreted.

Both the philosophical and general cultural problem with realism arise when the first form, the presence of the objective harmony as a constitutive value, is denied or ignored. The principle argument for denying or ignoring the real object is that it is never present in experience without being interpreted. And when it is interpreted, it is always in the selected versions presented by the sign, the interpret-ant, and the respect of interpretation. We never objectify an object except in an interpreted form, and this is because we objectify objects only by making them constituents of our own processes in which they must be selectively harmonized with other constituents. But there is no reason to truncate the interpretive process, as this argument does, by denying or ignoring the valuable object-to-be-interpreted with which it begins. The process of selection must begin with that from which selection is made.

The most striking implication of the theory of value and valuation is that interpretation is primarily valuation and only secondarily representation of "facts" or "nature." "Description" must be an abstract part of interpretation, however much it lies at the surface of awareness. And is this not in fact the case? Interpretations are guided in their selective respects by the general cultural and personal interests of human activity and enjoyment. Therefore it stands to reason that what most often gets selected out for notice in consciousness is the factual structures that serve those interests. But this is only selectively to value those constitutive values that are universal, measurable, and replicable, values which we call facts. In our ordinary experience, we take things to be harmonic structures embodying some appreciable worth, even when this worth is subordinated to a factual function in an instrumental relation.

The important point to stress in the theory of value and valuation is that the value constitutive of the nature of a real object can become a constituent in an interpreting being, although only in ways compatible with the interpreter’s other constituents. In contrast to the main drift of the modern Western tradition, which asks how we can reconstruct or represent things within us and concludes that the activity of reconstruction or representation is almost wholly a matter of our own creation and projection, the theory of value and valuation suggests a different question. On the hypothesis that the values constitutive of things enter into those interpreting them, the question is why the values that the interpreters objectify in their thinking differ from the constitutive values with which thinking begins. The answers to that question have to do with showing how the constitutive values must be altered to become compatible with the other elements in interpretive experience, particularly with the inherited or learned cultural values concerning respects in which things are to be interpreted, with inherited signs for interpreting, and with both cultural and situational intentionalities or leading interpretants. This is to say, the resources of hermeneutics are to be marshaled to explain the particular selectivities of any interpretation. They can explain why the constituent values of objects in one person or culture are interpreted one way and yet these same value-laden objects are interpreted otherwise elsewhere.

4. A Theory of Truth

The thesis concerning truth which emerges from this discussion is that truth is the properly qualified carryover of the value of a thing (or situation, or state of affairs, or fact, or any complex harmony) into the interpreting experience of that thing. The achieved value in the thing is always a measure of the interpretation, and the dyadic character of the truth relation is thus preserved. Moreover, the reality of the thing with its achieved value is manifest in the context of divergent cultures or lines of interpretation, because the differences between them are differences in the proper qualification of the carryover, and both are measured by the same real achieved value. Now the definition of truth in terms of carryover of value rather than correspondence of form is a serious innovation. It can be made plausible if the more usual senses of truth can be shown to follow from it. The place to begin is with a discussion of properly qualified carryover.

Carryover itself means that the value achieved in the thing not only enters into the constitution of the interpreters but is objectified in their experience. The practical (as well as theoretical) meaning of "objectification" is that other interpreters or the original interpreters themselves can later experience the value of the thing by getting it out of the interpretation. That carryover results in objectification means that truth is a relation between an intentional object (the objectification) and that to which the intentional object "corresponds" (the thing with its achieved value). On the other hand, that the carryover is a causal process means that truth is a character or norm for natural processes, even if indirect and filtered through many interpretive representations or when it involves inferring to the future. There are enormous philosophical advantages to having the same process be both intentional and causal in specifiable senses.

The proper qualification of carryover acknowledges the fact that selection and alteration are involved in any process by which a thing becomes a component of another thing, modified to fit with the other components. There are, of course, an indefinite number of different kinds of modifications a thing undergoes when entering as a condition into an interpreter. The kinds relevant to truth, however, are those marked by the selected valuations involved in interpretation.

The first kind of proper qualification for carryover is that carryover is limited to the respects in which interpretations are made. These respects are conditioned in part by physical considerations. But by and large the interesting selections of respects in which to interpret things are determined by culture, minutely modified by personal history and idiosyncrasy.

Selective intentions constitute the second kind of proper qualification for carryover. In a culture, the same values that determine typical respects of interpretation might also determine typical purposes, intentions, goals, prized objects of attention, and so forth. But the value determining intentions and purposes are likely to be more variable, more relativized to context, to small groups, to individuals’ personal histories and particular context than the respects in which interpretation might be made. A proper qualification to the carryover of achieved value is to select out that in the achieved value which is relevant to one s own intentions.

Signs themselves, with their networks of syntax, semantics, general and special usage, constitute a third kind of proper qualification of carryover. Even after determining the respects in which things can be interpreted, and the intentions for interpreting relative to context, the signs make a further selection. The signs make the assertions that can be true or false. The assertions are true to the extent they carry over the achieved values of their subject matter into the interpretations as qualified by the selective elements iii the limited respects of interpretation, by the context and will-determined purposes guiding interpretation, and by the signs actually used to represent or objectify the subject matter.

To sketch the thesis that truth is the properly qualified carryover of the value of a thing into the interpreting experience of that thing is merely to suggest a long and complicated philosophical project. One must show how more usual meanings of truth follow from it as special cases.

The metaphysical generality of the thesis is a great advantage, however. Consider that moral, social, and political truths are also subcases of this thesis. Is not a moral action one that carries over the achieved values of the relevant participants, as properly qualified by the respects in which they participate, by their conjoined purposes, and by the particular roles they have? Is not moral, social, or political normative evaluation an attempt to discover patterns of social "weaving," as Plato put it in the Statesman, which carry over the achieved values of the participants while achieving greater value through their interactions? Like truth in assertion, rightness in action is a dyadic relation to a measuring reality. What measures both truth and rightness is achieved value of the world out of which they arise, the real world.

The reality of things consists in their being harmonies of conditional and essential features such that the essential features, when harmonized with the conditional ones, guarantee integral independence from potential interpreters. The resultant harmonic product, however, the value achieved, can enter as a condition of other things, including interpreters. What perishes in this process, marking the loss of reality’s subjective immediacy, is the existential reality of essential features; what remains is the objective reality of conditional and essential features harmonized. The process of conditioning is fundamentally asymmetrical, with the condition being whole and independent in its own right as a harmony of conditional and essential features, whereas the conditioned thing must add its own essential features to the received conditions in order to be. The process of conditioning is natural genesis, consisting of cosmological causation. The ontological relation of things acknowledges the mutual togetherness and causal independence of the essential features of all related items. Truth is the intentional objectification of the value things achieve as carried over into experience by the various selective elements in interpretation. A true assertion is measured by the resultant harmony of the essential and conditional features of things that make up the world. While we must still admit that nature reveals to us only the answers to questions selectively focused by our interpretive structures, we may reaffirm that we are still in her leading strings, to reverse Kant’s point, because reality is the first motive for the natural process of thinking as well as the final measure of its results.

Notes:

1 The distinction between essential and conditional features derives from a discussion by Paul Weiss in Nature and Man (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1948), pp. 39ff. I believe this distinction was a decisive move beyond Weiss’s teacher Whitehead from general cosmology into metaphysics; for this historical point see my review of metaphysics in the twentieth century, "Metaphysics," in Social Research 47/4 (Winter, 1980), 686-703. Weiss developed the point most fully in Modes of Being (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958), p. 512 and passim. I criticized and extended Weiss’s view in the direction of the present theory in God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), chapter 2.

2 This theory of value derives from and attempts to focus one of the main themes of the Platonic tradition. See, for instance, the discussion of measure in Plato’s Philebus, or normative measure in his Statesman. My Cosmology of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), chapter 3, "A General Theory of Value," states the theory in Platonic terms. Leibniz attempted a theory of value of this sort with his principle of the greatest possible variety together with the greatest order (Monadology, 58), although he did not hold that the parts ofeomplexes must also he complex. Whitehead presented a modern version of the view with his theory of the order of nature and of "balanced complexity" (PR 127-67/ 83-109, 424E/ 278). John Dewey stressed the valuation side of the theory in his Theory of Valuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939) and Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1935). My own most complete discussion deals with synthesis, beauty, form, and art in Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), Part Two.

I. Hartshorne’s Achievement

The twentieth century has not been graced with many complete philosophies. In Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method Charles Hartshorne demonstrates that his is among the few.¹ Of course, completeness in a philosophy is relative to what the philosophy says it should contain. Hartshorne himself has said on many occasions that the problem of God is the consummate philosophic problem, and, in light of his earlier books, many people had suspected he was a one-issue philosopher; this book sets that fear to rest.² The volume systematically covers all the main problems its basic principles say should be covered -- logical, epistemological, methodological, historical, moral and metaphysical. If Harts-horne’s philosophic world has less variety in it than, say, Paul Weiss’s there are philosophic reasons for it.³

Hartshorne’s book is also complete in its positioning of the personae. The dominant character, of course, is Charles Hartshorne himself. Without pretension he assumes his place as a grand master of American philosophy, citing opinions he developed fifty years ago, giving a personal history of his career, his friends and his controversies, but never losing the thread of his abstract argument. More than any other philosophy book I know, the identity of this one’s author is drawn out explicitly, yet without nostalgia or irrelevant anecdote. There is an alter ego to Hartshorne’s career depicted here, Paul Weiss, to whom the book is dedicated. Nonsectarian metaphysics in the middle two quarters of the twentieth century has survived in the careers of these two philosophers, virtually alone, and Hartshorne shows here what it has been like. In this respect Hartshorne’s book has the historical interest of Weiss’s Philosophy in Process volumes; but unlike Weiss’s historical reflections, Hartshorne’s are always in the context of his familiar abstract argumentation about what must be true apriori.⁴

Two things stand out in Hartshorne’s reading of history. First, his philosophy finds a location in the history of philosophy only by reinterpreting the main emphases of that history. In a sense every new philosophical position requires a reinterpretation of history. Whitehead had attempted something of the sort in Part II of Process and Reality: but Hartshorne carries the reinterpretation out thoroughly, from Plato and Aristotle to Nagel, Quine. Wittgenstein and von Wright.

Second, Hartshorne takes the history of philosophy to include Indian and Chinese philosophy as well as the footnoters of Plato. Not since Hegel has a major philosopher had this catholicity, and Hegel ruined his point by relating the traditions sequentially, not as alternatives. Like Whitehead. Hartshorne attacks the idea of substance as supposed by the Western tradition since the Greeks. To many in the West this attack seems preposterous. But in India and China, only a fool would believe in enduring substances! Hartshorne does not allow this polemical evidence to be discounted. The age in which a responsible thinker can ignore the traditions of the East is past.

The completeness of philosophy in Hartshorne’s book is also exhibited in the fact it is a book you would give to non-philosophical friends. Not that this book is any less tightly argued or given to symbolic expression than Hartshorne’s previous works. The arguments here are directed at intelligence, but not at academic sophistication per se. Hartshorne has hit the golden mean for pitching one’s philosophical address to both expert and layman.

Furthermore, Hartshorne is basically persuasive, at least to me, on at least seven basic points. Since this review was commissioned to be an outsider’s critique of Hartshorne’s philosophy, it is important to put the points of agreement forward at the beginning.

1. Hartshorne has not only urged the importance of metaphysics, but in this book he has also demonstrated it by example. "Metaphysics" in this context means the study of the conditions for, or what would be true in, any possible world. Hartshorne calls metaphysical statements apriori, and there may be some problems about that (discussed in VII below); but it is clear that metaphysical statements are not subject to test in any ordinary experimental way. Their importance lies in this, that the metaphysical structure of the world sets the conditions for experience, and if that structure is misunderstood, experience itself will be misunderstood. One cannot do without metaphysics; one can only have a better or worse metaphysics.

2. Hartshorne also makes clear the importance of systematic philosophy. Not all metaphysics is systematic and not only metaphysics is systematic. In fact, Hartshorne’s preoccupation with apriori philosophy may have led him to neglect a systematic consideration of some of the more experiential elements of life. In this, he again contrasts with Weiss. But he shows the importance of system in another way. In discussing why proofs for the existence of God are valuable, even though people might still reject them, Hartshorne points out that, at the very least, the proofs illuminate the price of rejecting the conclusion: namely, having to relinquish some of their premises or habits of inference (pp. 257f). So it is with the systematic connections of all life -- rejecting a belief in one domain might require paying a price somewhere else. The pedestrian applicability of this point is obvious in this day of environmental collapse beneath the weight of technological exploitation.

3. Hartshorne shows the viability of construing creativity rather than being as the basic metaphysical category. Whitehead. of course, had elaborated a system in which being was defined as potentiality for becoming in the creative process, and Bergson earlier has argued someone ought to invent such a system. But Hartshorne shows the "viability" of this program by using the Whiteheadian categories to sort through the main problems and figures of philosophy. Whereas it could still be argued against Whitehead that creativity is basic only within his own system. Hartshorne has shown that a great many other philosophers would have been better off with creativity at the root of their visions.

But "viability" is a weasel word for describing a philosophy. Elsewhere I have argued that Whitehead’s notion of creativity answers only to some cosmological questions about the world, leaving the more ultimate ontological ones untouched (6). For his part, Hartshorne’s interpretation of God so qualifies his meaning of creativity that the contrast between becoming and eternity within the cosmological process is softened, reduced in fact to what Peirce would call a "degenerate third."⁵ So I must claim that Hartshorne is at two removes from the truth. To reveal my position at the outset, I believe that the ultimate category at the ontological level has to do with creation ex nihilo, not with creativity bringing a new "one" out of antecedent manifolds (cf. 4). And at the cosmological level something like Plato’s irreducible contrast between being and becoming exhibits more intensity for experience than the swallowing of being into becoming, or vice versa.

4. Hartshorne masterfully demonstrates the importance of memory and perception for causation, and shows how Whitehead’s notion of "prehension" is a brilliant example of metaphysical generalization (pp. 910. One thing causes another by being prehended by it, and prehension is of some past occasion of experience. Hartshorne goes a long way toward showing the viability of this notion for interpreting causation in general. He does not show how the theory of prehension can render a consistent theory of causation, for Whitehead did that in Process and Reality. (especially Part IV that nobody reads!). Hartshorne shows instead, how the idea of prehension handles issues as formulated by the public philosophical discussion, This advance from the privacy of Whitehead’s system to the public arena is one of Hartshorne’s most important contributions. Hartshorne has always dealt with problems as formulated by public discussion, usually that of analytical philosophers, and he has argued consistently that his ideas solve their problems better than their own.

Once again, however, the viability of Hartshorne’s analysis must be qualified. The qualification I would append is to restore the doctrine of "perishing" to the significance Whitehead gave it. Hartshorne is concerned to say that actualities do not perish in any significant sense. His words are worth quoting:

Significant or not, something is lost from the present becoming of an occasion when it is finished and past. The occasion has lost its subjective feeling of being in process. This feeling has to do with entertaining a somewhat vague proposition as a lure for one’s own concretion, with subjective elements of negativity in not having embodied that proposition, in having alternative concretions, and so forth. To be sure, there are propositions intermediate in the concrescence of an occasion expressing this feeling of being in process. All prehension of past conscious thought depends upon a subsequent occasion’s having a hybrid-physical prehension of these intermediate propositions as embodied in the objectified subjective form of the finished occasion. In this sense, all continuity of conscious life depends on the objectification of those intermediate propositions. But there is a difference between these propositions themselves and the subjective feeling of them. The propositions are enjoyed subjectively and that gives them the special tone of subjective life. The feeling of deciding is not the same as entertaining in propositional form the alternatives for decision. Subject life is the feeling of incompleteness on the way to completion. It is the feeling of self-creativity. And that must pass away when completion is attained.

Is the perishing of subjective immediacy of creativity in an occasion a matter of significance? It seems to me this issue depends on whether one’s ultimate ontology is a monism in which the world is summed up in its achieved value---a value-oriented twist on the Aristotelian notion that the best being is that which is complete in itself -- or a fundamental dualism in which value-achievement is always contrasted with creative value-achieving. Hartshorne holds to the former view, whereas Whitehead held to the latter. I agree with Whitehead, for reasons to be given later. The point here is that the loss of immediacy of becoming is of essential significance to the dualistic view. If becoming stands in fundamental ontological contrast with being, then the rhythm of creating and perishing must be integrated with the rhythm of many which becomes a one (which in turn is part of a new many which becomes a new one, and so forth). Of course the rhythm of the immediate process has no being or achievement other than the determinate occasions it brings to fact; but that is the poignancy of change and becoming, always losing its thrust when it succeeds. And I must admit that Whitehead, in his discussion of the Category of the Ultimate in Process and Reality, emphasized the accomplishment in reality of the definite manys and ones, to the subordination of the infinite incompletion of creativity. Nevertheless, if we say, as I think we should, that the subjective feeling of creative unification of the incomplete is at the heart of human experience and the universe, and that our ontology should reflect this by maintaining the fundamental contrast between creative becoming and accomplished being, then perishing is a very important doctrine indeed!

5. Hartshorne presents the best case against determinism I have seen. In his introductory essay, "A Philosophy of Shared Creative Experience," he develops the notion of creativity through a careful polemic against determinism. and argues persuasively that no event can be analyzed exhaustively into the realities of its antecedents. At the very least the event must synthesize the antecedents in its own self. Even if the pattern for synthesis comes from antecedents, the synthesizing itself is new. It is interesting to complement Hartshorne’s arguments in this regard with Weiss’s. Weiss’s usual line is to say that if determinism is true, no change can take place because there could be nothing new (cf. 8:3-11 and 9:42-45). Hartshorne and Weiss are not usually so nicely complementary.

The source for both Hartshorne and Weiss’s opinions on this point is Charles Peirce, whose essay, "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined," presents a more dialectical argument than that of either of his students for why people might mistakenly believe in determinism (7: pars. 35-65). This remark is a good occasion for stressing Hartshorne’s indebtedness to Peirce. He is usually called a Whiteheadian and, judging on the basis of his language, for good reason. This book very clearly shows that Peirce was nearly an equal influence with Whitehead (cf. pp. xv f) and in fact where Hartshorne has departed from Whitehead it has often been for Peircean (or Roycean) reasons. He thinks Peirce’s categories should be purified, that they should be applied to God, and that Peirce’s emphasis on continuity is one-sided. But these are minor corrections compared (a) with his rejection of Whitehead’s doctrine of eternal objects, (b) with his claim that God is a society, not a single actual occasion. (c) with his wariness of the doctrine of phases in an actual occasion, and (d) with his modification of the Whiteheadian doctrine of perishing. Some graduate student should write a thesis on Peirce as the founder of process philosophy!⁵

The attack on determinism, quite apart from its systematic philosophical interest, is a matter of vital cultural importance today. The publication of B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity signals the direction in which our established social currents are carrying us in the reorganization of society to respond to new technological conditions. Skinner rightly sees that behavior control is one of the great problems of the technological age. But his conception of the solution is so derivative from his scientific mythology that the values at stake in behavior control are trivialized before the problem is taken up. Hartshorne’s attack on determinism should demythologize scientific determinism once and for all. It should be noted, however, that this is only a first step. Hartshorne’s vision of things does little to articulate positively either the wealth of human freedom and dignity or the achievements of culture attained through nobility and suffering that are necessary to be reappropriated if the real stakes in behavior control are to become apparent.

6. Hartshorne has demonstrated the viability of the doctrine that events, not substances, are the basic individuals of the world. Again, the theory was Whitehead’s, at least in its rough contours, but the viability for public discussion comes from Hartshorne’s work. In his chapter "Events, Individuals and Predication: Defense of Event Pluralism" Hartshorne shows how the process conception of events answers to the problems of predication better than the substance conception does. The main traditional defense of the doctrine of substance has been that it is required to make sense of predication, and Hartshorne attacks this belief at its core. This is the point at which he cites the authority of the Buddhist tradition with good results. The Buddhists, of course, have never been taken in by the substance doctrine, and Hartshorne reminds us we do not have to grope back to a few epigrams from Heraclitus to get a considerable body of interpretation of the claim that all things flow (p. 177).

A serious question must be raised here, however, concerning whether Hartshorne has proved as much as he believes. His chief polemical focus is to show that individual events are the most concrete of things because the connectives between events, taken by themselves, are always somewhat abstract and indifferent to the adventitious determinations of the events connected. I have no quarrel with this. But the question has long been raised, by Weiss among others, whether this view of events, and of persons as event-sequences, properly accounts for the continuity of the enduring human being. At the outset it can be admitted that the continuity is perhaps not as concrete as the events themselves. But for the most human purposes the continuity is much more important than the concreteness, and although Hartshorne admits this, he does not see much force in the point (p. 195).

7. As a final persuasive point, Hartshorne has made out the case for the greater excellence of relativity over independence, just as he rejects the substance doctrine of ultimate individuals, so he rejects the correlative belief, stemming from Aristotle, that self-sufficiency, the ability to be complete by oneself, is the greatest kind of excellence. Rather, the greater excellence is in being sensitive and responsive to the elements in the environment.⁷

The process model of a thing, of course, is the self-constitution of a new entity out of a plurality of past things, and Whitehead had worked out the basic logic of this position. But Hartshorne shows its advantages in a range of questions from metaphysics on the one side to ethics on the other. To be unrelated to something existent in one’s environment, to which there is a real possibility of being related, is a mark of stupidity and fragility.

Philosophical theses can have plausibility (or implausibility) on at least two levels. On the one hand they can be defended individually in the dialectic of the public discussion. On the other hand they can be defended as interpreted by a comprehensive systematic metaphysical theory. In the former the interpretive theory is presupposed but employed vaguely or suppressed from the discussion entirely. In the latter the individual theses stand or fall with the whole theory interpreting them. I believe Hartshorne has successfully defended the seven points mentioned above mainly on the first level. I have serious critical questions to raise about his theoretical interpretation of the whole. So, whereas I am persuaded of these theses in general, it may take some theory other than Hartshorne’s to interpret them systematically. To be sure. Hartshorne considers the systematic defense to be the most important. And in pursuit of this he tends to neglect the philosophical job of articulating the wealth of human experience; experience, for him, enters primarily in reference to the system. But it is with the system itself that I have my greatest quarrels. The remaining sections shall therefore be devoted mainly to negative criticisms at this level.

II Continuity

The problem of the continuity of individual life is the first issue to be taken up. No complaint is being voiced with the process commitment to events or with the claim that an enduring individual is an event-sequence. The problem concerns what distinguishes those event-sequences that are enduring individuals from those that are not.

Whiteheads answer is that the event-sequence of an enduring individual has all its members characterized by a certain pattern, or by closely resembling patterns, whereas other event-sequences do not. For instance, the event-sequence of a human being repeatedly exhibits the human arrangement of bodily parts, no matter how the person is postured in diverse events.

But the important kind of human continuity seems not to be organic, but rather mental. Prosthetic devices can replace a person’s body, but he would still be himself if his emotional and intellectual continuity were preserved. Yet conscious mental life is characterized by novelty of thought-pattern, not repetition. Whitehead in fact makes the point that repetition in the bodily environment is the necessary prerequisite for novelty of imagination. Therefore, repetition of pattern cannot by itself account for continuity. As Hartshorne points out, the event-sequences leading to mentally dominant events are generally of two basic types, memory and perception. A memory event-sequence goes back through brain events all of which belong to the remembering person. But perceptive event-sequences, by definition, are quickly traced out through the sense organs into the events of the environment explicitly not parts of the person. So whereas the memory event-sequence repeats the remembered pattern through occasions all of which are part of the person, a perceptive event-sequence repeats the perceived pattern through a series some of whose members in principle are outside the person.

Perhaps a person’s dominantly mental events are his own, not so much because they repeat a pattern intrinsically, but rather because they feel themselves always to be taking place in the environment of the person’s body, and that body is perceived to have a repeating pattern. There is a profound cosmological and phenomenological truth in this. A person’s feeling of continuity with his past thoughts reflects a feeling for their common setting; as William James said, a person’s thoughts seem "warm" to him.

The feeling that all one’s thoughts are possessed by oneself is not the only kind of continuity, however. Our experience seems committed to moral continuity. That is, a person is obligated to keep promises made in the past, even if he forgot them. He is obligated in the present to plan his future so as to be able to be responsible for his actions. And in less deontological kinds of situations, a person conceives himself as having a unique life, a career, with problems of life-style and of leading a meaningful life. These conceptions do not make much sense unless the person’s integral continuity is more than the embodiment of all his thoughts in the same body. Process thought, as it stands, does not easily explain this.

These, of course, are common-sense suppositions about what the continuity of human life consists in. To take account of them I would suggest the event model of life be modified in the following way. Let us distinguish among the data prehended in an event in an enduring individual between essential and conditional data. Essential data are factors determining the subjective form of the event. Conditional data are factors integrated by subjective form but not significant for determining the subjective form itself. There may he borderline data. Whitehead acknowledged what I call essential data in only one case, that of the basic lure for the subjective aim derived by a hybrid physical prehension of God. But in an enduring individual like a human being at least two and perhaps three kinds of essential features are needed. First, there must be essential features deriving from past events in the person’s life that carry obligation from the past Second, there must be essential features deriving from the future and binding a person’s present actions in terms of norms for future consequences These future-derived essential features might be consciously anticipated, but even if they are not a person still is responsible for unanticipated consequences. Third, if the event in question involves free choice, there may be essential features spontaneously arising as the person commits himself to a value chosen; these are not of special concern here. Now an enduring individual with personal integrity (as either an ideal or an accomplishment) is an event-sequence any of whose member events has essential data deriving from antecedent and consequent members of the sequence. This difference between plain event-sequences and ones with enduring integrity is a complication of the event model, but one that seems to be demanded by our common experience.

It is just at that last point, however, that Hartshorne would object. Perhaps our common experience is too narrow, biased in fact by the implications of a surreptitious substance ontology. Perhaps we should be open to the Hindu experience that continuity, when pressed, turns out to be the union of all in the world soul, Atman. Perhaps with the Buddhists we should say continuity is a mere appearance covering a mere multiplicity of flashes of reality. One of the greatest virtues Hartshorne sees in event-pluralism is that it does away with the metaphysical underpinning of egocentrism and the self-interest theory of motivation (pp. 190, 198 ff.). A person should make amends for his own past wrongs; but it also makes sense to say he should amend the past wrongs of his whole society. Likewise, a person should aim for the future good of all events affected by his present actions, not only those of his own person. Refutation of self-interest by denying the self, however, seems extreme surgery.

The critical point I want to make is not that Hartshorne has failed to account for continuity; his answer to that would be to deny the kind of continuity I have in mind. The critical point is that I can find no argument for his position on continuity. He cannot say that his position is strictly entailed by the event philosophy, because I have sketched how an event philosophy can be amended to account for very strong kinds of continuity. To make out his position Hartshorne would have to deal extensively with the problem of which experiences are normative for theories and how theories give better or worse renderings of those experiences. For reasons having to do with his theory of apriori metaphysics, discussed below, he does not take up this question. We should conclude, therefore, that at least for us Westerners, Hartshorne’s event pluralism does not articulate our sense of individual continuity.

III The Abstract and Concrete

The second serious question concerns the claim made throughout Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method that something abstract can be contained in something concrete. Hartshorne conceives the abstract and the concrete to be two poles, and the doctrine that the latter contains the former is his concept of dipolarity. Any event is dipolar and most importantly, God is dipolar, containing his abstract and necessary nature in his concrete and existential state at any given time.

The use of the word "abstract" is unfortunate here, since it may well be question-begging. It connotes that something abstract has been taken out of something larger and more concrete. But the truth of the matter may well be that something abstract merely is known because an instance of it is discovered in something concrete!

What sense does it make to say a universal is contained in a concrete particular? It is clear that an instance of a universal can be so contained. (Perhaps it is better to say that the concrete particular itself is an instance of the universal, and perhaps of several other universals also. Or perhaps the preferable language is to speak of the particular as instancing the universal.) In what sense is the universal contained in the particular when the latter is an instance of it? To this kind of question, two kinds of answers falling within the "realist" camp have been given. They can be called, for historical reasons, Aristotelian realism and Platonic realism.

An Aristotelian realist -- and Hartshorne is one -- holds that the problem of universals has to do with accounting for how similarities and identities develop in the concrete flow of events. Along with Peirce and Weiss, Hartshorne holds that particulars are completely determinate, and therefore can only be past events, and that universals are somewhat indeterminate, and can therefore characterize only the future. ‘When universals are abstracted from the concrete particulars, characters are derived from the past as vague potentialities for future realization. In this sense, all potentiality derives from concrete actuality, an Aristotelian thesis. This makes sense of Hartshorne’s contention in his chapter "Abstraction the Question of Nominalism," that the novel forms emergent in a creative event are not determinate before the event but become determinate by decision in the event; to deny this is to deny any real meaning to creativity. For the Aristotelian position, the real problem is to explain how forms get into the temporal process, and it makes sense to say that they emerge.

An emergent universal is nonsense to a Platonist, however. For a Platonist the only things that can change or come to be axe those essentially related to the existential temporal process, e.g. things that make decisions -- events, and the like. A universal is that by which we measure change and diversity as well as continuity. As Plato argued in the Parmenides, instances of forms can be alike or similar, but there is no similarity between the instances and the universal itself; otherwise you get into a third-man argument. So in a sense universals are not things, desiccated shapes imaging or being imaged in concrete particulars; rather they are norms, indeterminate in themselves, but determinate as measures of how the particular components of a complexity ought to go together. For a Platonist it is possible to abstract the pattern of a concrete thing and call it the form of the thing; but this is a shortcut to speaking the truth. The pattern is no more the universal than is the concrete thing so patterned; the only advantage of the pattern is that we can imagine it to be found in other particulars. But as Hartshorne. Weiss and others so well point out, concrete particulars always differ in their overall patterns; in fact, difference in individual identity comes down to difference in determinate pattern. The universal or form itself is the value finding embodiment in the world in "a certain way." Two particulars are alike because the same value measures their similar components with a pattern ingredient in both. Their components are similar by virtue of being measured by the same component values, and so on down. The causal reason why things are similar may well be that they both prehend the same past events, and therefore have the same components to be measured in their own subjective forms. But the metaphysical reason for the possibility of similarity and difference, according to the Platonic realist, consists in the fact that value can be ingredient with multiplicity in different parts of a process only by virtue of different structures or patterns. As a Platonist would say, the structured world is a compromise between chaos and the Good. There is ultimately only one real universal, the Form of the Good. We distinguish different forms because there are similar patterns of complexities recurring and therefore exhibiting similar patterns, each one of which seems to name a universal.

Whereas the Aristotelian story is about how universals appear in the historical process -- and in that sense they do seem to emerge -- the Platonic story is about how determinateness is possible. Regarding the latter, a decision to make pattern X ingredient in oneself as a measure of components a, b, c, is not possible unless X is indeed a way of measuring a, b, c, . . . together. Whether a, h, c,.. are measurable by X is totally irrelevant to whether a, b, c, . . . are in fact actual in the temporal process. The relation between the pattern in which the form measures the pattern’s components and the patterns of the components is quite eternal. Of course, if the components are never actualized in the real process, that relation is totally irrelevant to the course of events. But whether universals are relevant to the world makes no difference to the universals, conceived in this Platonic sense.

The Aristotelian story of how the universals come to be relevant to and function in the process of concrete events is compatible with the Platonic account of how change depends on its formal possibility. Platonists like Whitehead provide theories about the ingression of forms in things through prehension of the past as well as theories about the constitution of formal possibility as such in terms of eternal objects, the divine primordial decision, and the like. Whitehead unfortunately failed to emphasize the fact that eternal objects are norms, and had to say that eternal objects are empty except insofar as they are graded as relevant to the world by God. But his theory of propositional valuation is congenial for interpreting the eternal objects as norms, given determinate shape by the components they must measure together.

Aristotelians, however, have been less charitable in allowing the importance of both kinds of problems about universals. They assume that universals themselves must be like the instances of them in particulars, and then say the Platonic account ascribing independent existence to them is forced to believe in ghostly, wraithlike, disembodied essences. In discussing Platonism Hartshorne himself says, "I do not believe that a determinate color is something haunting reality from all eternity, as it were, begging for instantiation (p. 59). In light of what the Aristotelians are trying to explain, universals can be treated as patterns derived from past actualities. But thc function of universals to explain the Platonist’s problem of formal possibility precludes their being conceived as proceeding from actuality; they are necessarily the antecedent condition of actuality. The Platonic universal for some determinate color is the value that would be actualized if certain refracted light waves and certain conditions of perception are patterned a certain way; in no sense does the universal beg for instantiation, although the concrete world might be better if the color were instantiated.

And so whereas I have no important complaints to make about the positive things Hartshorne says about universals, since he is giving a good account of the Aristotelian problem, his negative points are ill-taken. It is a great mistake to reject all Platonic theories of universals, such as Whitehead’s regarding eternal objects (not that Whitehead’s particular account is necessarily satisfactory). This mistake has serious ramifications for Hartshorne’s view.

Return to his claim that the abstract is contained in the concrete exhaustively, that is, that the union of the abstract and the concrete is simply the concrete. With respect to how universals are ingredient in the world, this claim presents no problem. Universals are structures in the past abstracted as potentialities for actualization in the present, and they have no reality in the world except as potentialities; the concrete realization of them contains them. But with respect to the formal possibility of those universal structures, Hartshorne’s theory gives no account. That they are actually possible is not the issue, since they were actualized in the past. From the Platonist’s side, the interesting question is why certain forms of togetherness are coherent and others not, why certain forms have great harmony and others little or none. Unless this kind of question is addressed, the ontological structure of the world is taken for granted, not made intelligible. Although the question of how this or that form gets ingredient in the world is interesting, the more interesting question is what structure is, how it unifies multiplicity, how it stands related to chaos.

Pushed far enough -- and Hartshorne would surely push it that far -- the claim that structure itself needs an explanation might be thought self-contradictory. First principles are structures, and what could lie behind a first principle? But then, as Peirce said, the only thing that does not need an explanation is pure chaos; order is most of all in need of explanation, and the explanation of a state of affairs in terms of first principles is not as penetrating as the explanation of the first principles themselves. Whereas Hartshorne cites Peirce’s categories as illustrations of eternal metaphysical principles (in contrast to emerging ones), Peirce himself thought his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness evolved, evolution being the only way to explain the origin of order from chaos (7: pars 12-13). Whitehead in his turn, as Lewis Ford has pointed out, claimed that anything complex needs an explanation in a decision somewhere, and even the metaphysical structures of the world are the result of the divine primordial act giving order to the otherwise chaotic eternal objects (cf. 2). Admitting that difficulties can be raised with both Peirce’s and Whitehead’s accounts, some account of the formal possibility of potentialities is necessary.

IV. Dipolarity

Consider Hartshorne’s theory of God as dipolar in light of the foregoing criticism. For Hartshorne, the abstract nature of God consists in the apriori metaphysical conditions that would have to be exhibited in any possible world. As he has argued in his many discussions of the ontological argument, the metaphysical possibilities for God are not only possible but necessary. That is, there must be some existing actual entity exhibiting the metaphysical conditions, although how that necessary existence is actualized relative to the contingencies of the other events in the world is itself contingent. But each occasion in the divine life is an instance of necessary existence. In what does the normative force of the necessity reside?

Any subsequent divine event would prebend the necessity in the antecedent divine event and have to exhibit it. But if the necessity is completely contained as an abstract part of the antecedent divine event, there is no necessary reason for there to be any subsequent divine event to prehend it only if the abstract part of the divine nature is normative over possible divine events could those possible events be necessitated before they objectify the necessity prehended from their antecedents. But then that transcendent normativeness could not be "contained" in any concrete divine event, only illustrated.

Of course it could he argued that, if the metaphysical conditions are necessarily existent, then a~y subsequent state of the world, divine or not, would have to illustrate them and would therefore he divine. But if the abstract necessity is completely contained in an antecedent divine state, with no transcendent normativeness, then there is no metaphysical reason to expect any subsequent events. Now Whitehead could argue that the Category of the Ultimate, involving creativity, would guarantee a new one out of any old many. But because the dialectic in that Category of the Ultimate, involving creativity, many and one, would make it impossible to say in any sense that the Category is "contained" in a concrete actual entity, only illustrated, Hartshorne cannot avail himself of the Category of the Ultimate. In the long run even Whitehead’s move does not help (cf. 6). But it does take one step beyond Hartshorne.

Suppose Hartshorne were to grant that the metaphysical nature of God must be transcendent enough of any given concrete actualization of God to necessitate a successor divine occasion He would ask whether this transcendence necessitates another kind of super-divine ontological being. Would we be forced to say, he would ask, that there is some eternal divine individual beyond the temporal divine career, necessitating the divine occasions "totum simul"? The answer to that question would be Yes if and only if all universals, including normative ones, are real only in actual entities, as abstractions from their whole concreteness. That is, the answer is Yes only if the Aristotelian’s account of universals is true. But the answer is No if we acknowledge a contrast between the sphere of actual things and the domain of norms as such. Norms are not individuals and they are not actualities; they are only instanced in actualities. If norms are something like eternal objects, not like actual entities, then their normativeness can bind the progress of the actual world without being transcendent individuals, Platonic realism does not entail that the Form of the Good is an individual being. Only a view of universals like Hartshorne’s would have to bear a transcendent individual as the actual locus of a transcendent metaphysical norm.

(My own view is that the only way a norm can be effective in measuring actual affairs is by creating them ex nihilo (cf. 3 chs. 1-4, 7). So I do believe in a God beyond the metaphysical categories illustrated in temporal process; but such a God is indeed beyond the categories and cannot except by devious analogy be called individual, actual, knowledgeable, or a variety of other things Hartshorne attributes to his God. This theological view on my part also makes clear the investment I have in the notion that the universals can be collapsed into one norm of norms when the plurality measured by each norm is prescinded from.)

My conclusion is that Hartshorne’s notion of God as dipolar is much less useful than he thinks. As a consequence I think the many charts and comparisons of his idea of God with others, a primary preoccupation of this book, should be valued downward. At best God is dipolar in that his concrete nature contains instances of the normative principles that make him God, moment by moment. But the ontological status of those normative principles can by no means be reduced to the set of instances contained in the actual concrete events of the divine life.

V. God

If this conclusion is valid, then the far more important corollary is that the divine life Hartshorne calls God is not half of what it is made out to be. Beyond the divine life would be the normative metaphysical principles making it necessary that he instance them. And the transcendent status of those metaphysical principles is a more interesting prospect for divinity than Hartshorne’s God who, after all, is only infinitely big and old, bound by necessity in his essential nature, obliged to pay constant attention to all the rest of us, and limited in his creativity to choosing between only those alternatives having equal maximal value. I would not take a job like that without a guaranteed three month vacation! (In this respect, Whitehead’s God is no better off than Hartshorne’s, unless Lewis Ford can make out his case for a greater status for God’s primordial nature antecedent to the creation of the metaphysical categories or categoreal scheme [cf. 1 and 2].)

Excepting problems with Whitehead’s God, however. I want to argue for the advantages of his dualism of eternal objects and actual entities over Hartshorne’s monism of concrete actual entities containing the universal forms as abstract parts. My case is to be developed not in terms of the internal logic of the systems, but rather in terms of their overall applicability to experience.

Whitehead argued, and Hartshorne agrees, especially in the last chapter of Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, that value consists in intensity of experience and that intensity is a function of contrast. Generally put, contrast occurs when two things not fitting together according to their own internal principles are fitted together by the special context of the experiencer, by the subjective form that experiences them together. The contrast is greater the more the things contrasted are different and the less their real differences are compromised by the subjective form of their togetherness.

Human experience would have the greater contrast, prima facie, if some kind of dualism is true rather than some kind of monism. There is a metaphysically irreducible contrast in human experience if it is always a compromise between pure order and chaos, between normativeness and the unmeasured, between unifying structure and the plurality of things to be unified. For the sake of intensity of contrast in experience, it would seem to be more desirable if a Platonic metaphysics were true, in which there is an irreducible dualism between Form and chaos, in which the realm of becoming is a measured compromise but still roiling with the forces of chaos, in which intelligibility belongs to the formal pole alone (chaos not needing an explanation) and in which the realm of becoming takes explanation only hypothetically.

But does experience indeed have this contrast? if so, its marks would be in an irreducibility of contrast between the lasting and the perishing, between joy and anguish, between accomplishment and loss, between progress and tragedy. In other words, the peculiar coherence of fundamental ambiguity is a more intense contrast than the coherence of simply actualized positive fact. I place great metaphysical importance on suffering as well as satisfaction. The function of the Wailing Wall in old Jerusalem seems to me one of the profoundest insights of religion, and it has its counterparts in other cults. To put the point in theological language, glorifying God is an activity essentially sustaining a basic contrast between lamentation and thanksgiving.

Is my basically religious vision of things aimed at the truth? Hartshorne would have to say it is not. According to his conception, Nothing really perishes from God’s memory: the world is fundamentally cumulative and lasting. Although anguish may be the momentary state, by metaphysical necessity God must objectify it in his own infinite felicity. Tragedy can only be a short-run view. To say the short run is all a human being may have, and that the tragedy for him is irreducible, still lacks poignancy. As Hartshorne says, and I agree, man identifies with the good of all his successor events, not only those that can be named with his name. But if this is so, Hartshorne’s denial of perishing means future felicity amends any present suffering, no matter how far future. My own religious intuitions tell me that if God wipes away the tears he does so because he chooses to do so, not because he is metaphysically obliged. The depths of my experience, and those of men through the ages and across all cultures, are slighted by metaphysical resolutions of its ambiguity. If the ambiguity is not the last word, at least its resolution should be accomplished by creative free choice, and our metaphysics should reflect this possibility.

VI. Symmetry and Asymmetry

It is always disappointing when a philosopher has to appeal to ultimate intuitions, Let me therefore return to more dialectical ground. One of the most interesting chapters of Hartshorne’s book is called "The Prejudice in Favor of Symmetry." Hartshorne’s point is that the metaphysical hassle between monists and pluralists regarding internal and external relations has resulted from construing the primary forms of relations to be symmetrical. He undertakes an ingenious logical argument to show that asymmetry is more basic than symmetry, and that equality can be defined in terms of inequality. Although not in a position to judge the sophistication of the logical theory involved, I find myself persuaded. The asymmetry Hartshorne has in mind as cosmologically significant is in his interpretation of causal process. An event constitutes, and is then perceived by, a later event. It is a condition for the later event, although the later event does not figure in its own constitution except in unusual cases of conscious anticipation. So we can say that in the causal relation, the effect is external to the cause and the cause internal to the effect. In perception, the object perceived is internally related to the perceiver; but the perceiver is externally related to the perceived.

The upshot of this for the cosmic vision of things comes in the chapter, "The Principle of Dual Transcendence and Its Basis in Ordinary Language." As we have come to expect, the dual transcendence consists in the fact God is universally necessary in his abstract character and universally relative in his concrete contingent character, these two sides being "reconciled by the old principle that the concrete contains the abstract" (pp. 236f). The point is that any finite event, with its evil and suffering, is externally related to the future events rectifying it. But the future events contain the past events as rectified, as best as possible. So Hartshorne concludes there is no "problem of evil." This does not mean there is no evil in the world. Rather, the evil is the result of finite choices other than God’s; but it is taken up and made the best of in God’s own subsequent events. So although there is a lasting fact of evil, no evil itself lasts as evil. All evil puts unchangeable conditions on the future; but the future can make the best of those conditions and it has infinite resources for that task. Again, my intuitions are that this makes things too easy.

The moral I would draw is that Hartshorne should not have taken the issue of symmetry as his focal argument (although I do not object to his arguments there). Instead, he should have taken up the claims of metaphysical dualism mentioned above. While the course of the world might go on with the asymmetrical causation Hartshorne describes, it also goes on, I believe, as a contrast between norms and chaos. So the present does not unambiguously include the past; it loses a little, perhaps sometimes the most important part. And the present cannot content itself with its freedom external to the future, knowing that the future will inevitably take it up. The reason I believe in the dualist theory is that it seems to do better prima facie justice to experience, and Hartshorne should consider it. Or he should show experientially that the apparent ambiguities of life are not to be taken at face value, and that experience is properly to be interpreted as his system calls for.

VII. Apriori Knowledge

This brings me to my last main point ₀f contention. Hartshorne is a great believer in apriori knowledge. Apriori truths are those that must be illustrated by any possible world. There are two kinds of positive claims, says Hartshorne, those to which there are positive alternatives, and those for which positive alternatives are inconceivable. The former are empirical claims, the latter apriori metaphysical ones. Yet the latter are not mere tautologies of the sort that, once you deny the subject you can deny the predicate. On the contrary. it is contradictory to deny the subject. Of course, the positive apriori metaphysical affirmation might be completely meaningless; one needs a metaphysical system to show that the apriori claim is at least conceivable. But with such an interpretive scheme, if an apriori truth is conceivable, it is inconceivable that the world exists without it.

At the heart of these claims by Hartshorne is his defense of the ontological argument. As a reviewer I should probably attempt to refute his logic on this issue, but when denying the ontological argument, I always feel like a fool! So I shall leave that task to someone else, I do, however, have two lines of complaint about Hartshorne’s view of apriori truths.

First,. Hartshorne treats the matter almost exclusively from the standpoint of logica docens. That is, he discusses apriori truths from the standpoint of their having been discovered, where the only problem is to make them clear. One might think from this that making them clear is the discovery of them in the first place. But it makes good logical sense to say that as elements of human knowledge, the so-called apriori truths are mere hypotheses about the universal conditions of existence. I have no reason to think Hartshorne would deny this. (But then what we have in mind when thinking such truths are simply hypotheses, with varying degrees of plausibility). They are hypotheses about necessary conditions. But the conditions are not apriori; "apriori" refers to a modality of truth claims about them. Are the truths themselves apriori if they are hypotheses?

It may be impossible to conceive of an alternative to the claim that "whatever is a universal condition for any possible world is an apriori truth" But it surely is possible to conceive of alternatives to any candidate for such a truth. Therefore it can only be an hypothesis that such a claim (for instance that the necessity proved by the ontological argument is a concrete actual being) is a universal condition. Now how is that kind of hypothesis to be probated? By logic? Of course not, if it is conceivable that there are alternatives. (I hope to have shown above that there are very serious alternatives to Hartshorne’s conception of dipolar deity even within such neighboring philosophies as Whitehead’s.) Then is the hypothesis probated by experience? Not by any critical or finite experience. But neither by being exemplified in all experiences, because the very hypothesis at issue is whether all experiences are to be interpreted according to this hypothesis rather than some other. After all, the only alternative to a given hypothesis about a universal condition of experience would have to he a hypothesis that equally well claimed to interpret all experiences. So the decision would be made between the given hypothesis and some other (s) regarding which offers the best interpretation of all experiences. An alternative failing to interpret some finite set of experiences would not be a real alternative.

But now the truth ascertained by the process of probating the hypothesis certainly would not be apriori, even if the truths are about universal and necessary conditions. And what criteria do we employ in determining the "best interpretation of experience?" To some extent we can use formal criteria of elegance, simplicity and fruitfulness. For the most part, however, we employ appeals to our inarticulate, pervasive, and life-orienting experience. And "our" here sometimes means oneself, sometimes the whole race. Our experience, of course, is not completely inarticulate, being made sophisticated by having been carved up by dozens of subtle philosophical tools. Nevertheless there is always a difference between experience rendered by a philosophy and experience judging the rendering. The latter cannot be stated by itself -- and therefore is inarticulate. But it is recalcitrant, though corrigible, and thereby keeps us honest and wise, if not smart, I wish Hartshorne had paid more attention to the sense in which experience is the final arbiter. Sometimes it seems he does not believe it is. This is my second complaint.

The Hartshornean candidates for apriori truths rest, it seems to me, on an experiential sense too much refined by his philosophy. In other words, I suspect his experience confirms his theory, but his experience is too narrow. Who am I to complain about the funded experience of a man forty years my senior? It might be argued on my behalf that Hartshorne had forty years more to get enamoured of his philosophy, and hence blind to experiential counter-examples. But probably my own stage in life is more bound by philosophic categories, and the advantage of forty more years is a certain relaxation and catholicity. So my criticism is really itself an hypothesis: do the readers feel as I do that ambiguity, suffering and perishing have a more substantial place in human experience than is rendered by Hartshorne’s philosophy? (Hartshorne’s discussion of the role of experience in philosophic method [pp. 75-82] treats only memory and perception, not at all what life "adds up to.")

One of Hartshorne’s signal contributions is to have made metaphysics somewhat more respectable than it was, by virtue of his insistence on logical rigor and clarity. In this regard, Weiss would have done us all in, if he had not been balanced by Hartshorne! But love of logic may be Hartshorne’s weakest point at the same time. Not that I mean to detract one iota from the logical rigor he has attained. Still, his singular focus on it, his insistence that philosophy lives in logic first, may have made him less sensitive than he need be to the dialectical interplay of theory, which alone can be logical, and the experience to which theory is applied. One has the feeling that, although Hartshorne might convince one of a metaphysical truth, this would not enlighten one’s experience. Of course, Hartshorne would answer that if the truth is metaphysical it is embodied in any possible experience, and therefore has no empirical force. He might even claim that if a metaphysical truth made a difference to the way one experiences the world, it is an empirical claim in disguise. But surely it makes a difference to understand what the apriori conditions of existence are! At least the understanding should make us wiser. If Hartshorne’s metaphysical truths flatten our experience, solve our problems with metaphysical necessities, relieve our cares with confidence in principle instead of with felt concrete redemption, then his metaphysics impoverishes experience. And I know of no way to define truth so independent of value that a metaphysical scheme could be called true if it leaves our experience less rich than it found it.

VIII. Conclusion

This review began with praise for Hartshorne’s book as a complete philosophy. The most important sense of completion mentioned was that the book deals carefully with nearly all the philosophic questions its theory requires. But there is a bittersweet quality to this praise. My criticisms of the book amount in the end to the claim that Hartshorne’s philosophy, in its complete form, does not capture the living waters of experience, and that the reason it does not do so is that its categoreal scheme makes most of experience philosophically uninteresting. Hartshorne would answer that philosophy is not all of life, and that science, art, literature, religion, and a variety of other endeavors should articulate the rest. Of course he is right about the other tasks. But in a sense philosophy is about all of life. It should distinguish for us between the important and the trivial in the whole of things, showing their connections, and making its distinctions relevant to our sense of life’s basic meanings.

Philosophy’s tools for creating this wisdom are its categoreal schemes. With regard to Hartshorne’s categoreal scheme, I stand much closer to its commitments than I do, for instance, to those of Paul Weiss’s thought (cf. 5 and 3: ch. 2). But my sense of the upshot of Hartshorne’s philosophy is that it does not directly address the experiential problems of wisdom as well as Weiss’s does. In this review I hope to have lifted to attention some of the small categoreal difficulties that make all the difference in the world between mere metaphysical clarity and genuine philosophic wisdom.

References

1. Lewis S. Ford. "The Viability of Whitehead’s God for Christian Theology." Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. 44 (1970), 141-51.

2. Lewis S. Ford. "Whitehead’s Categoreal Derivation of Divine Existence" The Monist. 54, 3 (July, 1970), 374-400.

3. Robert Neville. God the Creator. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.

4. Robert Neville. "The Impossibility of Whitehead’s God for Christian Theology." Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 44 (1910). 130-40.

5. Robert Neville. "Paul Weiss’s Philosophy an Process." Review of Metaphysics 24, 2 (December, 1970), 276-301.

6. Robert Neville. "Whitehead on the One and the Many." Southern Journal of Philosophy 7, 4 (Winter, 1969), 387-93.

7. Charles S. Peirce. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Vol. VI. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935.

8. Paul Weiss. Man’s Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950.

9. Paul Weiss. Modes of Being. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958.

Notes

I LaSalle. Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1970. All page numbers in parenthesis refer to this book.

2 The importance of God for Hartshorne stems from his claim we have genuine univocal apriori knowledge of individuals only in the case of God; all other individuals are known as such by analogy. Also, since God includes the world, for Hartshorne (cf. e.g., p. 145), there are no problems left over. From the standpoint of wanting an interpretation of life, however, the problem of God is quite vague respecting most other interests. Hartshorne would respond that those other problems are contingent matters and not directly philosophical; philosophy is apriori; and cosmology is better left to the scientists.

3 "Uniquely complicated" is what Hartshorne gently calls Weiss’s system (p. 128).

4 Because of the specialized nature of the journal in which this review appears, a fairly broad familiarity with Hartshorne’s basic position can be assumed for the reader. If someone wants a brief sketch of what Hartshorne is about, he should buy this book and read the first chapter, "A Philosophy of Shared Creative Experience." This will at once reward philosophical achievement with money (a matter of justice) and reward the reader with an eminently clear and unimpeachable genuine exposition (a matter of wisdom).

5 Hartshorne interprets "eternity" as "everlastingness." and therefore loses the sharp modal contrast with becoming, expressed for instance in Whitehead’s or Tillich’s philosophy. Furthermore, for Hartshorne, the concrete becoming includes the abstraction of being without remainder. This makes the situation a ‘degenerate third" because the opposition or "secondness" between eternity and becoming is reduced to mere qualitative difference -- ever-presence versus sometimes-presence.

6 Actually, someone already has. See Elizabeth M, Kraus’, "Thought Before It Hardens: A Study in the Evolutionary Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce." a dissertation presented to Fordham University, 1970. Dr. Kraus presents Peirce’s thought with the humor and systematic rigor Peirce would have used had he been Whitehead.

7 Perhaps Hartshorne’s most sustained defense of this point is in The Divine Relativity: a Social Conception of God (New Haven Yale University Press, 1948), Chapter Two, "God as Absolute, Yet Related to all."