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In the present paper I attempt to make two different but intimately related cases. One of these is a substantive case, and the other is a terminological case. I want to make a substantive case to the effect that Whitehead has a more fluid understanding of existence than his interpreters sometimes realize. That is, I wish to make a case for a highly processive understanding of the "final realities" or res verae which are Whitehead’s ultimate existents.

My difficulty with Whitehead scholars who interpret him in a less fluid or a less processive way is that they clutter up his universe with a vast number of actual entities which continue in existence like hard little nuggets, even after their spurt of creativity has terminated. For William Christian, actual occasions endure for a tiny but extended moment of time (for a "pause") after they have completed their becoming;¹ and for John Cobb, these completed occasions appear to linger, intact, forever.²

As against all this, I hope to show that, once actual occasions are firmly formed and finished, they are drawn instantly into a creative onflowing which is thereafter ceaselessly making something partly new of them. Actual occasions do impose their achieved character upon the creativity which rushes through them and drives beyond them; but they make their immortal mark in this fashion precisely in the act of exhausting their own creativity. And in this same act, which is their terminal act, they surrender their status as "final realities." They are thenceforth dependent for further existence upon the subsequent occasions which grasp them and are partly shaped by them.

If I am correct in this, one might ask why the highly processive quality of Whitehead’s ultimate existents has not been more universally recognized. One reason, I believe, is the presence of some ambiguity in Whitehead’s crucial terms. I should call it a broad sense only in which Whitehead uses these terms when he refers to past, completed occasions as "actualities" or as "actual entities" (cf. PR 101, 326f). This broad use of the terms can make problems. If a completed occasion is called an "actual entity" in this fashion, then the conclusion would seem to follow that this completed occasion has the capacity to exist in its own right indefinitely. This conclusion seems to follow because an "actual entity" is by definition a "final reality" or a res vera (PR 32). I do not think Whitehead intended this, however, and if an interpreter accepts this conclusion he seems to me to he well on his way towards populating Whitehead’s lithe universe with a host of stolid, unintended entities, each of them gazing cow-like at us from a frozen past.

Since a terminological ambiguity in Whitehead seems to have contributed to obscuring the substantive point I wish to make, I shall make a terminological case as well as a substantive case. In fact, I shall argue my substantive case in and through my terminological case.

The main points in my terminological case are these. I hope to show that, besides his broader senses of the terms, Whitehead needs and uses the terms "actual," "actuality" and "entity" in strict senses as well. If one uses these terms purely in their strict senses, however, the following curious situation results. With the exception of a breadthless instant at the end of an occasion’s concrescence, an occasion is "actual" (meaning that it is actively self-creative and existent in its own right) only so long as it is not yet an "entity"; and an occasion becomes an "entity" (meaning that it becomes singularly one and relative) only with the expiration of its "actuality." In other words, "actual entity" comes very close to being a contradiction in terms when, as in the preceding sentence, these terms are strictly construed. The accompanying diagram shows the outlines of the terminological case I wish to make.

"Actual" in the usual, broad sense

"Entity" in the frequent, broad sense

"Actual" in the strict, ontologically basic sense "Entity" in the strict or proper sense

^ ^

Formal constitution of an occasion -- its concresence Objective constitution of that occasion -- as determinate and concrent

^

Breathless instant of transitiion at which the occasion

is still strictly actual, yet already strictly an entity

Though Whitehead distinguished a "proper" sense of ‘entity," as will be explained, I doubt that he deliberately intended or that he was even distinctly aware of the strict sense of "actual" and "actuality." I hope to show, nonetheless, that this strict, ontologically basic sense is required by his position, that it is present in his writings, and that he even used "actual" and "actuality" purely in this strict sense from time to time.

How does my terminological case serve as the vehicle of my substantive case? It does so in that the fluidity of Whiteheadian existence is epitomized in the strict senses of the two key terms. The actuality underlying everything is fluent because this basic actuality is comprised of instances of becoming. It is made up of concrescences. It is not an array of fully formed, concrete "entities." On the other hand, no entity, as proper entity, possesses "actuality" in the basic-existent sense. Rather, every proper entity, in order to continue to exist at all, must be suspended in ontologically more basic droplets of still uncongealed becoming. In Whiteheadian existence thus described, the strict notion of "actuality" repels the proper notion of "entity," and the proper notion of "entity" repels the strict notion of "actuality." Otherwise put, "actual entity" is some sort of a contradiction in terms. And the quickest way to affirm the fluidity of ‘.Whiteheadian existence is to put stress on these strict senses by stating that there is a contradiction at this point.

Though this quick way of stating the matter is highly suggestive, it does require some supplementation, especially in that this hasty statement ignores the "instant of transition" mentioned above. This instant of transition not only rescues Whitehead from the alleged contradiction in terms. (It rescues him thus because every occasion, as it passes from its formal to its objective status, is both strictly actual and strictly an entity -- for a breadthless instant) It is also the case that the transitional instant keeps the highly fluid Whiteheadian existence from being an inscrutable blur. The recurring transitional instants, that is to say, are the moments of fully formed, determinate actuality, without which existence would indeed be "without form and void."

Notwithstanding all this, these transitional instants do not obstruct or clog up the cosmic flow. Since they are breadthless or unextended, they constitute not the slightest stutter in the onrushing current of the creative process. At bottom, existence remains fluid.

What exactly is one of these transitional instants? A transitional instant is the point of arrival at an actual entity’s satisfaction. Since the "notion of ‘satisfaction’ is the notion of the ‘entity as concrete’" (PR 129), this transitional instant is the precise point at which the occasion congeals, so to speak, into a concrete entity (cf. PR 71). Now, a concrescence would not be a whole or complete concrescence without this termination of itself (cf. PR 38, 335). For that reason the arrival at concrete entityhood is one aspect of the concrescence itself. And thus, since an occasion has strict actuality during its entire concrescence, the breadthless instant of barely attained concrete entityhood is an instant still of strict actuality.⁵

The reason this transitional instant must be breadthless is that it is a transition between two stages which stand in sharpest contrast to each other, one stage active and the other static (PR 126), one stage not determinate and the other determinate (PR 38), one stage requiring genetic analysis and the other requiring coordinate or morphological analysis (PR 334-36, 433f, 448). Squeezed from both sides, as it were, the transitional instant is forced to be two things at once: the termination of an active concrescence, and the establishment of an objectively immortal entity. As Whitehead puts it, "The terminal unity of operation, here called the ‘satisfaction,’ embodies what the actual entity is beyond itself" (PR 335).

It might be added that, although a good bit of the language of the present article assumes that a concrescence has temporal breadth, my case would remain basically unchanged if it were recast in language free of this assumption.⁶

I. Arguments for the Strict Sense of "Actual"

As noted, "actual" and "actuality" are used in Whitehead in their broad sense to characterize past and determinate occasions as well as present and concrescent occasions. Furthermore, the use of these terms in this broad sense is probably more prevalent in Whitehead than is their use purely in the strict sense for which I am arguing. So much I concede.

I concede more as well. Even though the broad use of "actuality" can lead to that less-processive reading of Whitehead against which I have protested. this broad usage is by no means to be written off as a quirk or a laxity on Whitehead’s part. This broad use of "actual" makes an important point. It makes the point that an entity’s actualness is its decisional quality, and that the entity is decisional, or ‘actual" in this broad sense, whether the entity be concrescent and thus still deciding, or whether the entity be concrete and thus already decided. As Whitehead puts it: "‘decision’ -. constitutes the very meaning of actuality.... The real internal constitution of an actual entity progressively constitutes a decision conditioning the creativity which transcends that actuality" (PR 68f).

Thus the broad, decisional sense of "actual" has to be recognized as quite significant and as altogether unobjectionable⁷ -- in itself. Trouble arises only when the strict sense of "actual" is left out of the picture.

I turn now to the first of six arguments for this strict sense of "actual."

1. From the ontological principle’s second corollary. The ontological principle has at least two corollaries. Whitehead has distinguished them, but not enumerated them. We shall call them "first" and "second" according to their order in the passage in which he distinguishes them. The passage reads:

Since Whitehead construes the ontological principle "as the definition of ‘actuality’" (PR 123, cf. 116). the following question is pertinent: Do the two corollaries of the ontological principle define "actuality" in two different senses? Apparently they do. We have already seen Whitehead’s broad definition according to which "actual" means "decisional" (PR 68). In propounding that definition Whitehead is clearly drawing upon the first corollary "that every decision is referable to one or more actual entities" (PR 68). This is clear from the way the "decisional" definition emerges directly out of his statement "the ontological principle asserts the relativity of decision" (PR 68).

By contrast with this "decisional" definition of "actual," my proposed strict definition is that "actual" means "existent in its own right." or "being a basic existent." Precisely this meaning is dictated by the second corollary, for it says, "Everything must be somewhere; and here ‘somewhere’ means ‘some actual entity’" (PR 73). According to this corollary no entity could qualify as "actual" except one which is a basic existent. Two further examples of this second-corollary form of the ontological principle are as follows: ‘... apart from things that are actual, there is nothing -- nothing either in fact or in efficacy" (PR 64) and "thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of "existence," are derived from actual occasions" (PR 113)⁸

The argument thus far has established only one of two points which are needed, namely, that one meaning of "actual" is "being a basic existent." Will the ontological principle also provide my second point, that an occasion is a basic existent only during its formal, concrescent-to-concrete stage? It seems so. Articulating the principle in its second-corollary form, Whitehead says, "The ontological principle can be expressed as: All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality" (PR 48, emphasis added). And again, in a statement which is closely similar, but which is not said to be an expression of the ontological principle: "No things are ‘together’ except in experience; and no things are, in any sense of ‘are,’ except as components in experience or as immediacies of process which are occasions of self-creation" (AI 304). In the preceding quotation I understand the following two phrases to be referring to one and the same thing: "components in experience," and immediacies of process which are occasions of self-creation" (cf. PR 38, Cat. Expl. xxii-xxiii). On this basis I reason as follows. If no things "are" except as immediacies of Process and if a now-completed occasion has lost the immediacy of its own process ("completion is the perishing of immediacy," PR 130, cf. 336), then a completed occasion, so far from being a basic existent, is dependent for any further existence it may have upon its being included as a datum within the immediacy of present concrescences. Thus a completed occasion does not qualify as one of those "actual entities" to which the ontological principle refers in its second-corollary form. And since a completed occasion is unquestionably an "entity" (see Part II below), the thing which keeps it from being an "actual entity" in this connection must be that it is not "actual," i.e., not "actual" in the sense intended by the second corollary.⁹

2. From Whitehead’s use of "actual" and "actual entity" in Cartesian senses to mean "existence in the fullest sense" and "res vera." Whitehead quotes a lengthy passage from Meditation I in which Descartes acknowledges that what he thinks he is perceiving he may only be dreaming. As the quoted passage continues, Descartes reassures himself with the thought that the representations In a dream "‘can only have been formed as the counterparts of something real and true [ad similitudinem rerum verarum],’ " and that the images of things within our thoughts are formed from " ‘other objects yet more simple and more universal, which are real and true (vera esse)’" (PR 115) ¹⁰

Referring directly to this passage Whitehead observes that "Descartes uses the phrase res vera in the same sense as that in which I have used the term ‘actual.’ It means ‘existence’ in the fullest sense of that term, beyond which there is no other" (PR 116). This obviously is the ontologically basic sense of "actual" in which I am particularly interested. It is to be noticed that what are res verae, or what are "actual" in the sense of this particular passage, are occasions in their formal reality (cf. PR 117f). As the context makes patent, completed occasions, or entities objectively considered, or (in Descartes’ language) things "existing in the mind, not indeed formally... but objectively" (PR I l8) -- all these are being contrasted with res verae, so that the implication seems inescapable that they are not "actual" in the sense here at issue. I conclude that this particular passage gives me the two points I need: (a) that one of the meanings of "actual" is "having existence in the fullest sense," or (as I take it) "existing in its own right," and (b) that occasions are actual in this sense only in their formal reality.

The importance of these conclusions is vastly increased by the fact that the particular passage involved (PR 116) is anything but an isolated phenomenon (cf. PR 64). In his first category of existence, when he is giving a definition of his "final realities," Whitehead provides the Cartesian phrase, res verae, as one of the synonymous technical terms for his ultimate existents (PR 32). This leads one to expect that wherever the term "actual entity" appears, it will have the Cartesian sense indicated above, if it is being used "strictly," or as a technical term for an ultimate existent. Whitehead states this quite explicitly: "An ‘actual entity’ is a res Vera in the Cartesian sense of that term; it is a Cartesian ‘substance,’ and not an Aristotelian ‘primary substance’" (PR viiif, cf 116). Whitehead rejects the Aristotelian notion because Aristotle would not allow that one substance or entity could be present within another; and Whitehead discards that particular side of Descartes’ notion of substance which derives from Aristotle. namely, Decartes’ doctrine that a substance is "an existent thing which requires nothing but itself in order to exist" (PR 79). But these are qualifications, not retractions. The crucial Cartesian connotations of Meditation I remain in Whitehead, even sometimes when they are not announced, as in the following: "‘Actual entities’. . . are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real" (PR 27f).

So an occasion in its formal reality is, though in its objective reality it is not, "actual" or existent in the fullest sense.

3. From the fact that the ultimate cell of actuality has an unequalled "completeness of actuality." "The philosophy of organism is a cell-theory of actuality," Whitehead writes. "Each ultimate unit of fact is a cell-complex, not analyzable into components with equivalent completeness of actuality" (PR 334, emphasis added). Here Whitehead distinguishes a sort or a degree of actuality -- an unequalled completeness of actuality -- which is the peculiar possession of ultimate units of fact. This appears to be, once again, the ontologically basic sense of "actuality" I am in search of. The passage quoted yields another point as well. Occasions in their objective reality are components within concrescent actualities, and these components, according to the passage, fall short of the completeness of actuality possessed by their hosts. Occasions in their objective constitutions thus lack the sort or degree of actuality possessed by occasions in their formal constitutions.

4. From the incurably atomic character of actualities. The philosophy of organism is "an atomic theory of actuality" (PR 40) as well as a cell theory of actuality. The two sorts of theory come very nearly to the same thing: "Each actual entity is a cell with atomic unity" (PR 347). But Whitehead has the indivisible character of actual entities particularly in mind in calling them "atomic" (cf. PR 359). And one might also speak of the "discreteness" as well as of the "indivisibility" of actualities: "Continuity concerns what is potential; whereas actuality is incurably atomic" (PR 95).

What this means is that datum entities are not "actualities" in the sense at issue, because as determinate and objective they are not atomic; they are divisible (PR 337, 435), jointly constituting the continuous, "real potentiality" of the extensive scheme (PR 107f, 441f). Here once again is the sense of the term in which an occasion formally is. but objectively is not, "an actuality."

Whitehead uses and illuminates this sense of "actuality," which I believe to be my strict sense, in the following passage.

This seems to say that, as together with the process which produced it and ended in it, a concrete entity or satisfaction retains the actuality of the atomic, undivided entity. But apart from its originating concrescence -- that is, as objectified in superseding occasions -- this concrete entity has lost this actuality.

5. From the prima facie meaning of "perishing." It does not seem to be necessary to provide samples here of Whitehead’s vivid descriptions of the way in which an actual entity, in completing its concrescence, "perishes." or loses its own living immediacy," and precisely thereby assumes the role, as a "dead datum," of objectively conditioning the creativity vested in superseding actualities (cf. PR ix, 38, 124, 126, 129f, 249, 320, 336, 340, 448; AI 238, 305).

What all this language about perishing means is a vexing question, to be sure; but I believe it says something for my view that my view finds an important sense in which living entities are "actual," and perished entities are not "actual," since this is the very sort of thing the perishing language implies.

6. From some indications that, as Leclerc argues, an actual entity is an acting entity. In his "Form and Actuality" (RW 169-89), an article which has been recognized as definitive in some important respects," Ivor Leclerc gives a detailed explanation of that ontologically basic sense of "actual" for which I am arguing He says that

This line of thought in Leclerc’s article is epitomized in his thrice-repeated judgment that Whitehead, by contrast with Aristotle, "decisively rejects any identification of form and act." Leclerc goes on to say, "For Whitehead form does not in any respect ‘act’; for him all activity belongs to actuality" (RW 178, 180, 188). To say that form and act must not he identified is one way of saying that an occasion’s actualness and its determinateness are not to be identified; for the "form" with which "act" must not be identified in this case is "structure, pattern, character, definiteness" (RW 189).

If Leclerc believes form and acting must not be identified, one might ask what the relation is between form and acting, in his view. He explains that "we have to think of the acting as an ‘enacting of a certain character’. . . . the individual ‘as actual’ is the enacting of a form; the enacting of the form is the ‘real internal constitution’ of the actuality" (RW 187).¹³

So much for Leclerc’s view itself. Is there an adequate textual basis for it? An affirmative answer seems to be justified by the following texts, about half of which Leclerc himself has used.

Whitehead says that "the stuff constituting those individual things which make up the sole reality of the universe" is "the interplay of subject with object" (AI 228). That this interplay is activity is stated in the same general context "An occasion of experience is an activity, analyzable into . . . the total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which fin each case] the special activity is concerned" (AI 226).

To speak of the actual entity as an activity in this fashion is in keeping with the notion of the very essence of the actual entity. That "essence," Whitehead says, "consists solely in the fact that it is a prehending thing" (PR 65), and prehending is patently an activity. Directly stated: "Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data" (PR 65, emphasis added). Or again, Whitehead speaks of the "many operations" which comprise an actual entity’s process, and then adds: "The process itself is the . . . ‘real internal constitution’ of the actual entity" (PR 335) On such bases I conclude that actuality in the ontologically basic sense, as belonging to the formal constitution of actual entities, is activity.

A textual basis for Leclerc’s further judgment that the actuality’s activity is the enactment of form is found in Whitehead’s statement that "definition is the soul of actuality: the attainment of a peculiar definiteness is the final cause which animates a particular process; and its attainment halts its process, so that by transcendence it passes into its objective immortality" (PR 340). Thus, quoting Whitehead again, "an actual entity has ‘perished’ when it is complete. The pragmatic use of the actual entity, constituting its static life, lies in the future" (PR 126, emphasis added).

It follows from such considerations that an actual entity is required to expend precisely all the actuality it has, in this basic or acting sense of "actuality," merely in arriving at its determinate satisfaction (PR 380. It has no residue remaining with which it might sustain itself further in existence, even momentarily. If the actual entity were not immediately grasped from all sides by the rising generation of actual occasions, it would have defined itself right into the void.

As grasped, though, the expiring occasion is objectively there, stubbornly imposing itself upon every concrescence which sustains it. For and in every one of the subsequent occasions it fills the region of space and time which it finally managed to atomize, or to bring into being as a whole, coincidentally with its expiration (PR 96, 104f, 112, 124, 4340. We might say that, in the same instant in which it "goes static" (cf. PR 126), the actual entity also goes public" (cf. PR 443f), or makes itself available as data for all. But it has thereby made itself dependently existent, or actual only in the broader sense.

Other arguments for the strict sense of "actual" could be offered.¹⁴ The six which are provided above may suffice, however, since the complete success of any one of them would presumably establish the relevant part of my case, and since they are mutually independent of one another.

II. Arguments for the Strict Sense of "Entity"

Although Whitehead does sometimes refer to concrescences or instances of becoming as "entities" (cf. PR 321), it seems quite possible to understand this as his use of the term "entity" in a broad sense. Such a broad sense of the term Whitehead takes note of where he writes, "The notion of ‘entity’ Is so general that it may be taken to mean anything that can be thought about" (SMW 206f). In addition to this broad sense of the term, however. White-head sets forth the stricter sense of a "proper entity" (PR 45, 338, 342, 348).

What is, and what is not, a proper entity? "Every entity should be a specific instance of one category of existence," Whitehead says (PR 31). But the converse of this statement does not always hold. Whitehead states that multiplicities are not entities in the proper sense, even though they comprise one of his eight categories of existence. A multiplicity or a class is not a proper entity, he explains, because it lacks the unity of an entity, and does not itself enter into the process of the actual world." Only the multiplicity’s individual members enter, severally, "into process in this way" (PR 44, cf. 44f).

Implicit in the preceding remarks from Whitehead is a well-conceived idea of a proper entity. In the six arguments which follow, I shall undertake to spell out what is involved in this idea in order to show that it is not only a multiplicity, but also an actual occasion, which fails to be a proper entity. Or rather, more precisely, an actual occasion fails to be a proper entity in its pre-terminal concrescent phase A proper entity is exactly what an occasion becomes at the terminal instant of its concrescence; and this is doubtless an additional reason, over and above his broad use of "entity," why Whitehead is able to speak occasionally of a concrescence as an entity.

I. From the assertion that an actual entity "becomes a being." Whitehead states that "thing," "being" and "entity" are "synonymous terms" (PR 31, cf. 68, 321). Thus he is saying that an actual entity becomes an entity when he says, speaking of an occasion which has entered upon its superjective phase, "It has become a being’" (PR 71). If Whitehead so explicitly says that it is an "entity" which the concrescence becomes, he is at least implicitly saying that the concrescence, as an unfinished process, is not an entity. A similar line of reasoning might be applied to Whitehead’s statement that an actual entity "becomes itself" (PR 228).

2. From the question, Which entity? If A is an entity, then surely there is in principle a precise answer to the question, Which entity is A’, even if no one is in a position to give or even to know that answer. But In A’s concrescent phase there is in principle no precise answer to this question. The reason is that A has not yet decided which among a range of possible alternative entities it is to be: "The actual entity, in becoming itself, also solves the question as to what it is to be" (PR 227, emphasis in the original). Thus, insofar as A is in becoming or is incompletely concrescent, A is not an entity.

3. From the singularity of an entity. Does the use of the question, Which entity?, smuggle in some metaphysics via the grammar? And if so, does that metaphysics comport with Whitehead’s own? Both questions seem to have an affirmative answer. In Whitehead’s "category of the ultimate" the term "one," which is paired with the term "many," stands for "the singularity of an entity" (PR 31). And the singularity of an entity, Whitehead further explains, is "the general idea underlying alike the indefinite article ‘a or an,’ and the definite article ‘the,’ and the demonstratives ‘this or that,’ and the relatives ‘which or what or how’ " (PR 31).

During its concrescence the occasion is not yet a "one" among the "many." Since it is not yet the complete "togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds," it is not yet "one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves" for the simple reason that it has not "left" yet. It is still the vessel for a partially disjunctive "‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity" (PR 32). There thus is no way even in principle to "get at" this particular concrescence with a demonstrative "that one." This means that, in the sense intended by the category of the ultimate, the concrescence is not singularly one. So the concrescence is not an entity, or not until the terminal instant of its concrescing, in any case.

4. From the requirement of the ontological principle that "every entity is felt by some actual entity" (PR 66). What actual entity could possibly feel a concrescence? Clearly other concrescences could not feel it. That is the meaning of "the causal independence of contemporary occasions" (AI 251). But neither can the concrescence feel itself. Anything a concrescence feels is a component contributing to that concrescence. Yet Whitehead explicitly says that the satisfaction, which is the concrescence as a complete whole, "cannot be construed as a component contributing to its own concrescence; it [the satisfaction] is the ultimate fact, individual to the entity" (PR 129, emphasis added). If every entity is felt, and an uncompleted concrescence cannot be felt, then such a concrescence is not an entity.

5. From the prima facie inapplicability of Whitehead’s definition of "entity" to a concrescence. Some version or portion of the following, which is Whitehead’s "principle of relativity," recurs like a refrain through the pages of Process and Reality.

One vivid expression of the above refrain is the assertion that the term "thing" or "entity" means "nothing else than to be one of the ‘many’ which find their niches in each instance of concrescence" (PR 321).

Now it is not saying the same thing to say that A is a concrescence, and to say that A is something which by nature finds its "niche" in a concrescence. Thus when Whitehead strictly uses the term "entity," it is by no means apparent that he is talking about, or could be talking about, a concrescence.

This apparent non-fit of the term "entity" in reference to a concrescence crops up also in the numerous places where Whitehead brings out this aspect of his definition "‘potentiality for process’ is the meaning of the . . . general term ‘entity.’ or ‘thing’" (PR 68, emphasis added; cf. 44, 71, 101). Is it appropriate or informative to say that a process (a concrescence) is a "potentiality for process"? Surely not. Yet this is what one means if he calls a concrescence an entity in the strict sense of that term.

I conclude that, if a process or a concrescence is an entity, then the proper Whiteheadian sense of "entity" leaves it very much to be shown that this is so, and how this can be so.

6. From the antithesis between the relativity of an entity and the intrinsically private or absolute status of a concrescence. The Whiteheadian texts quoted in the preceding argument make it clear that a Whiteheadian entity is defined so as to be radically relative. To take the actual entity as an example, we observe that once it has privately decided which entity it will be, it imposes itself as entity upon every then-arising concrescence without exception. It imbeds itself in absolutely every accessible process of becoming. The actual entity is as relative as that. But every other category of entity is equally relative, even if it jacks the dynamics of the actual entity. For Whitehead’s "principle of relativity" is explicitly framed so as to cover "all entities, actual and non-actual" (PR 33).

By abrupt contrast, a concrescence is qualified by a thoroughly unrelated and insular privacy. If it is the case that "an actual occasion . . . is the whole universe in process of attainment of a particular satisfaction" (PR 305), or if "each actual entity is a locus for the universe" (PR 123), and "has to house its actual world" (PR 124), then from what quarter could there possibly come any intrusion upon the privacy of that occasion? The concrescing occasion has the entire universe, its universe, and that is all there is for that occasion. "This subject-superject is the universe in that synthesis, and beyond it there is nonentity," at least for it (PR 41).

To be sure, there are contemporary occasions transcendent to the present concrescence. But they do not abridge the privacy of the concrescence in the slightest. They only loom as a future which must be reckoned with -- but not now, and not directly by this concrescence. "The vast causal independence of contemporary occasions is the preservative of the elbow-room within the Universe. It provides each actuality with a welcome environment for irresponsibility" (Al 251). As noted in argument II, 3, just above, a concrescence cannot be "got at" (cf. PR 322).

Of course, and in the nature of things, once an actual entity’s "own process, which is its own internal existence, has evaporated, worn out and satisfied" (PR 336), then (but only then) it is relative. Then it "goes public" as I have termed it in argument 1, 6, above. Thus: "The creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private individual to the publicity of the objectified individual" (PR 229).

The formidable amount of language which Whitehead expends upon this notion of "privacy" (PR 32, 130, 232f; 443-48) is augmented by other language concerning the "absoluteness" of the concrescent occasion.

It should be noted that the required counterpart of "relativity" is what I am calling "intrinsically private status" or "absoluteness," and not merely "privacy." The need to make this distinction will be apparent from an objection which would otherwise apply at this point: Within the privacy of a concrescence, novel entities of all categories except that of eternal objects come into being. Are these not entities, and yet private? Or even more pertinently: A subjective form is by definition a private matter of fact (PR 32), but still it is an entity in the strictest sense (PR 45). How then can I deny that a concrescence is an entity, merely because a concrescence is private?

But of course I don’t. It is not the private nature, ha the intrinsically private nature of a concrescence which bars it from being an entity. Except for eternal objects, which are not born at all, all entities are "born privately," yet "have public careers," as Whitehead says explicitly of prehensions (PR 444). They emerge into their public life as exactly the same things -- entities -- which they have been since birth. Indeed, it is precisely because they are entities that they must emerge, a necessity which is laid even upon subjective forms (PR 444-47).

On the contrary, it is only by becoming non-concrescent that a concrescence is able to go public.¹⁵ Concrescences are the womb of the universe, the intrinsic and absolute privacy in which every non-eternal entity is wrought.

In a rather inelegant epitome of the public-private rhythm, one might say that an actual entity’s growing is followed by its showing; that while it grows it does not show; and that when it shows it no longer grows.¹⁶ But, however elegantly it may be expressed, an uncompleted concrescence is not properly an entity. For an entity is relative, and an unfinished concrescence is intrinsically private or absolute.

Thus the strict senses of "actual" and "entity" which may be pried out of the foundations of Whitehead’s ontology reveal the following situation: Whitehead’s ultimate existent is designated by a technical term, "actual entity," which is almost a contradiction in terms, in the strict senses of its terms. The only thing which rescues "actual entity" from this fate is that breadthless transitional instant at which the existent is both strictly actual and properly an entity. This is the instant at which the basic existent "pivots," so to speak, from private to public.

This breadthless instant of the pivot is the point at which the creative process plucks the individual being from its microcosmic privacy and holds it up as macrocosmically public, fleetingly available to the graspings of all. But the rush of the cosmic process is such that the being itself cannot hold on to its fullness, once attained. It is quite true that, as grasped, it is forever referent to the place where it grew up. But its place knows it no more, for that place is no more -- except in the enjoyment of the later experiences. To them the satisfied occasion has surrendered itself. And gladly, as I view it. For where would be the freedom or the satisfaction of the past being if, once it wrought, it were caught in what it wrought, like a bear in a trap, immortally?

Whether the past surrenders itself to the present gladly or sadly, however, the past does in fact depend upon each new present for the fact that it exists. That is part of what I have argued here. It might be put thus: there is no existence apart from presently creative actuality. But so far as this past-present issue is concerned, I have also argued another point, one which runs something like this: there is nothing completely determinate but the past; there is no wholly concrete entity but a past one. In that connection, what I have argued makes the present dependent upon the past for most of what the present is. Since no present has ever, in any given instance, quite decided what it is, and could not fully so decide without becoming past, then anything completely determinate in the present, or any fully definite "whatness" which the present may have, must be a legacy of the past. This is especially the case, though it is not solely the case, at the outset of each new present.

On this past-present question, therefore, I am proposing counterbalanced points: much of the whatness of the present is a function of the past just as surely as the thatness of the past is a function of the present. That is the way it must be if the ongoing creative process is to be vested in not-yet-defined heady little occasions which are at first self-creatively actual, and then determinately entitative, but never (or almost never) both of these at once.

References

IWM -- William A. Christian. An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.

RW -- Ivor Leclerc (ed.) The Relevance of Whitehead. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1961.

1. A. H. Johnson. "Whitehead as Teacher and Philosopher," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 29, 3 (March, 1969).

N o t e s

1 IWM 29f. In 1936 Whitehead told A. H. Johnson that he (Whitehead) rejected the idea that (in the words Johnson placed before him) "for a ‘split second’ the complete actual entity pauses to enjoy itself as fully complete -- before passing on" (1:363).

2 John B. Cobb, Jr., "The Finality of Christ in a Whiteheadian Perspective," in The Finality of Christ. ed. by Dow Kirkpatric (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1966). pp. 148-54.

3 "The ‘formal’ constitution of an actual entity is a process of transition from indetermination towards terminal determination" (PR 72, emphasis added).

4 "The ‘objective’ Constitution of an actual entity is its terminal determination, considered as a complex of component determinates by reason of which the actual entity is a datum for the creative advance" (PR 72).

My employment of "concrete" in the diagram and hereafter is in keeping with Whitehead’s normal usage. The term has the meaning for him of "already become" or "completely concresced." In his words, "Genetic Consideration is Analysis of the Concrescence. The Actual Entity Formaliter; Morphological Analysis is Analysis of the Actual Entity as Concrete, Spatialized, Objective" (PR 331; cf. PR 359, 66, 129, 448, 433, 108). George Kline differs at this point. Without citing any texts in support, he states that "concrete" has "the double sense of ‘experient’ and ‘self-significant.’ " See Kline, "Form, Concrescence. and Concretum." Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7, 4 (Winter, 1969.70), p. 353; cf. pp. 353-55.

If I stay close to Whitehead’s vocabulary in my use of ‘‘concrete," this is because I fear that the concrescing, experient occasion will almost inevitably be invested with some thing-like qualities if we follow Kline and call it "concrete." In Whitehead and in English generally, "concrete" carries some connotations of "firmness" and "settledness."

5 Elsewhere I have argued that this breadthless transitional instant is the occasion as initial datum. But that issue is more complex than can be dealt with at this point.

6 If my case were recast in this way, the transitional ‘instant," instead of being a breadthless instant in a temporal series, would be treated as a limit between two aspects of every basic existent. It would be a single limit which, in the appropriate senses, belongs to both aspects of the existent and to neither aspect. That is to say, this "instant" would be the terminus of a concrescence. a terminus which is at once both involved in the very nature of a concrescence as its conclusion, and yet excluded from the concrescence as the establishing of something non-processive. For the difficulties which lie in wait when one says that a concrescence has temporal breadth, see John Cobb, Edward Pols and Lewis S. Ford in the Southern Journal of Philosophy. 7. 4 (Winter, 1969-70), 409-25, and Robert C. Neville and Ford in Process Studies (PS) 1, 3 (Fall, 1971).194-209.

7 John Cobb has also made this point against Donald Sherburne, who had written, "it is antithetical to Whitehead’s whole scheme of thought to hold that past occasions are actual." But in saying this Sherburne was overlooking she past, already’decided meaning of "decision." lie was taking "decision" only in its "still being decided" sense. (PS 1, 2 [Summer, 1971], 107).

8 Without mentioning a "second corollary," Donald Sherburne shows himself aware of it when he says, "the ontological principle demands that everything have its being as, in, or through actual entities." (PS, 1. 2, [Summer, 1971], p. 105).

9 Part of the inspiration for this particular argument has come from the Sherburne-Cobb exchange mentioned in the two preceding notes. I believe I have mediated their differences, at least with respect to one of the questions at issue between them. I have agreed with Cobb that past occasions are meaningfully and properly called "actual" (in the broad sense). I have agreed with Sherburne that only concrescent, acting occasions are "actual" in a sense implicit in the ontological principle (in its second-corollary form).

10 I quote verbatim from PR 115. Whitehead himself has inserted the Latin in that place in square brackets.

11 Richard Rorty praises it as the point of departure for any future Aristotle-Whitehead comparisons, and expresses regret at not having read it prior to writing his own related essay, "Matter and Event," in The Concept of Matter, ed. by Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press. 1963), pp. 477 ff. See p. 477n.

12 RW 184, emphasis and parentheses in the original. Leclerc makes the same point in his Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New York: Macmillan, 1958), p. 70. 1 am indebted to Leclerc’s article for first suggesting this meaning of "actuality" to me.

13 In the preceding I have drawn upon only one of two opposite points Leclerc makes in this article. In his last five pages he argues that, to be Whiteheadian, we must not only (a) reject any identification of form and act, as has already been shown; we must also (b) identify form and actuality. When he explains what he means by identifying form and actuality in two respects (pp. 185f, 187), it seems clear that it is actuality only in my broader sense with which form is to be identified, viz., actuality in the sense of formed, enacted actualities. But Leclerc himself does not distinguish these two senses of "actual" in the article. I believe the coherence of his essay would have been more marked had he done so.

14 One could argue (1) from the first category of explanation, which states "That the actual world is a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities" (PR 33); (2) from the statement that "the very essence of real actuality -- that is of the completely real -- is process" (AI 354, emphasis in the original); (3) from the categoreal statement that "an entity is actual, when it has significance for itself" (PR 38), taking the "when" in this statement to mean "only when," given its context: (4) from the "principle of process" that an occasion’s "‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’" (PR 34f); and (5) from Whitehead’s repudiation of the notion of "vacuous actuality," that is, his repudiation of "the notion of a res vera devoid of subjective immediacy" (PR 43, 253).

15 Whitehead conceded to A. H. Johnson in 1936 that concrescences do not provide data until they are complete (1:363).

16 So far as this "showing" or "revealing" is concerned, see Whitehead’s comment about an occasion’s "objectifications in which it transcends itself" Such transcendence, Whitehead goes on to say, "is self-revelation" (PR 347).

Much of what Peirce has to say throughout his published papers is pertinent to a philosophical perspective on the problems of creativity. However, the introduction of the notion of agape in his speculations about evolution is of particular importance to anyone who has thought seriously about those problems. His thoughts on the special role of agape in evolution may serve as a point of departure for developing a conceptual scheme that makes room for the origin of what is radically new in a world of regularity and order. The following remarks are intended to explain this point of departure.

I should emphasize at the outset that although I begin with Peirce and shall refer to what I understand to be his view, the discussion will not be restricted to a straightforward exposition. For the most part, what I shall say is interpretive. Furthermore, I shall extrapolate rather freely from Peirce’s statements -- and to such an extent that I should acknowledge that the result may not resemble Peirce as he is ordinarily interpreted.

My plan is to approach the topic in terms of a very brief account of Peirce’s three categories as they bear on his view of evolution. I shall then turn to a consideration of what I believe is the key problem of creativity. In the light of this problem, the way in which Peirce’s notion of agape is suggestive can be seen. I shall consider reasons why Peirce introduced the notion of agape into his cosmology and why it was required as an addition to his three fundamental categories when he turned his attention to the origin and aim of evolutionary process. I shall then indicate how Peirce restricted his insight into the role of eros and agape in creative evolution, but I shall also suggest why his insight is fruitful.

I. Peirce’s Categories and His Cosmology

Peirce’s cosmology is given structural framework in terms of the universal categories, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. The categories serve as principles explanatory of the interplay of chance, action, and continuity or law in evolution. Chance is the condition that predominates in tychastic evolution. It is the condition of blind change, which Peirce associated with Darwinian theory. Action and law dominate in what Peirce calls anancastic evolution. Action and law function as mechanical necessity in the ordered development of stages required by either past or future causes. Each theory of evolution, tychasm and anancasm, is partially correct. Peirce’s own view, "agapasticism," however, embraces them both in a synthesis in which they are transformed and supplemented. Agapasticism affirms the interweaving of chance, action, and law in a process which includes spontaneity and which is directed toward an intelligible end (6.287-317, especially 6.302-05).

The feature of evolution which points toward the need for agape is creative growth, that is, the presence of spontaneity and the introduction of unpredictable, intelligible novelty into the process of evolution. This kind of creative growth includes what I refer to as "radical creativity."

Peirce shows us that he acknowledges radical creativity both implicitly and explicitly. There are a number of places in his writing to which we might turn. Since my purpose is not to offer a study of Peirce’s thesis, but rather to indicate the significance of his insight, I shall illustrate his recognition of radical creativity with only a few references.

Peirce’s argument against determinism in "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined," published a year earlier than his paper on evolutionary love, clearly lays the basis for the affirmation of radical creativity and the need for the principle of agape (6.36-65). He argues that there is a "really sui generis and new" in the universe. Observation reveals continually increasing variety and complexity of phenomena. At the same time, the world is growing into increasingly complex established habits or laws. Laws and necessities cannot be complete from the beginning of time. Thus chance or spontaneity must be a real increment in the universe. Unless spontaneity were real, we could not account for what is both ordered and diverse or new.

Again, in "The Law of Mind," Peirce argues that personality, which is one of the manifestations of the law of mind, is a structure that evolves (6.102-63). He says that personality is the coordination of ideas and that this coordination implies a teleological harmony. But the teleology is "more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predeterminate end; it is a developmental teleology" (6.155-57). By "developmental teleology," he means a growth of purposes, not a growth of ideas in accord with purposes. Such a view clearly not only leaves room for, but requires that there be, sui generis, new order in the evolution of mind. And this is to affirm radical creativity.

In order to see why Peirce considered agape to be a principle necessary to understanding evolution as he understood it, it will be helpful to focus on certain puzzling features of the view that evolutionary change includes instances of radical creativity. Peirce was aware of some but not all of these features.

First of all, we should observe that Peirce believed his thesis that there is spontaneity to be explanatory of "the general fact of irregularity, though not, of course, what each lawless event is to be." As an explanation, the thesis does not make predictions possible, but it does refer to a condition for the unpredictable intrusion of law in the world. Peirce believed that since his thesis opposed the claim that there is universal necessity, he was allowing for a distinctive process of unpredictable causation while making it possible to understand "how the uniformity of nature could have been brought about" (6.60). His point is that in asserting that spontaneity occurs, or that there is a lawlessness of uniqueness and individual events, he offers a generalization that does not contradict the further generalizations that there are laws and that they originate and grow in complexity. When the generalization that there is spontaneity is considered with the fact that there are other generalizations that cover specific laws, then the fact that there are formations of specific laws is rendered intelligible.

I am inclined to agree with Peirce’s understanding of the limitations of the explanatory value of his thesis. He admitted that the intelligibility in question lacks predictive power. And he offered his thesis as a way of keeping the direction of inquiry open rather than closing it at the point at which the origin of laws are accepted as ultimately unexplained. Thus, the thesis of spontaneity is at least heuristic. On the one hand, it is heuristic with respect to our expectations that new laws may be discovered. On the other hand, it is heuristic in promoting the demand of thought for more comprehensive and more fundamental generalization.

What is most important, however, is a further limitation implied by the thesis of spontaneity. If the term "spontaneity" refers to the condition by virtue of which there can be new order in the world, the term seems to do no more than name the generalization that something conditions irregularity and consequent orderliness. To say that there is spontaneity in the world, then, is to say that ordered generality, or what for Peirce is intelligibility, is founded on the unique, or what resists intelligibility. This point directs us to what I refer to as the paradox of creativity. Peirce’s notion of agape offers a conceptual frame for articulating, if not resolving, this paradox at the same time that it extends his thesis of spontaneity. In order to see why, it is necessary to view the paradox more closely.

II. The Paradox of Radical Creativity

The paradox of creativity can be seen in a peculiar character of the kind of process that culminates in something intelligible and novel that contributes substantively to a tradition of human endeavor. This sense of creativity is often overlooked by those who inquire about the topic because most inquiries are concerned with generic traits and abilities common to all processes rather than with the conditions of processes which are peculiarly creative.

Before this point is pursued, however, a few preliminary comments are in order. The kind of inquiry that leads to the paradox of creativity springs from the question: What source makes creativity possible? The terms "source" and "possible" are used here for two reasons. In using the word "source," I want to avoid the suggestion that creative acts can be fully traced to causal antecedents. Thus I do not pose the question in terms of the cause of creative acts. Further, in using the term "possible," I want to emphasize the point that whatever conditions are relevant to creative acts, these conditions are not guarantees, but at best are necessary if not sufficient for occurrences of radical creativity.

The basis for my skepticism about the possibility of identifying causes or of constructing a complete explanation of creativity cannot be presented here. I have tried to offer this basis elsewhere (1:20-47). However, most important for our immediate purposes, the view that there are limitations on both mechanistic and teleological causal explanations of creative events is expressed in Peirce’s own writings. In general, skepticism about a complete explanation of creativity is based on the notion that a creative act issues in an outcome that is new in kind, which was unpredictable, and which has a definite character that is neither reducible to the sum of its elements nor exhaustively traceable to its antecedents.

What, then, can be said about the source or active principle of a process that leads to created novelty?

A step toward answering this question is suggested by passages in Whitehead’s Adventures of ideas and Process and Reality. It will be helpful to use this approach to formulate the problem. Whitehead offers an analysis of the factors which function in the self-determination of an actual entity. In his analysis, he discriminates three factors or aspects of the developing process, all of which, acting together, determine the process so that it exhibits a novelty or a character not accounted for by data and principles which were present at the beginning of the process. The three factors he describes are the subject, or the unity of the process; the subjective form, or the manner of development; and the subjective aim, or the final cause of the process. Thus, in the growth of the process, the subject begins to develop in accord with its subjective form, and it is directed by the telos of its subjective aim. However, the manner of development and the initial aim both change as the process develops. The subjective aim at the end of the process is not what it was at the start, and, accordingly, the subjective form must change as the subject evolves.

What regulates the modification which subjective form and subjective aim undergo? Whitehead says that in general the condition for a process must have its reason either in another actual entity or in the subject which is in process (PR 36). The question of source or condition raised here concerns the self-development of a process which yields novelty, or a product not predetermined by prior data; consequently, the answer must be that the subject is the source of determination. And Whitehead affirms this answer. He says that of all the factors which might regulate a change in the subjective aim, it is the subject, out of the spontaneity of its own essence, which is responsible for effecting this evolution (AI 328).

Now, there are two points which this analysis indicates and which are suggestive for the proposal I want to sketch. First, if a creative process begins with a telos and an aiming at an end, even though this end may be vague or only partially determinate, then the creative process begins, at least in part, by virtue of being lured. The process is given thrust and direction because it is a seeking of the aim which attracts it. Secondly, if the unity or subject of a creative process acts out of the spontaneity of its own essence, then it bears a certain kind of responsibility for the directions which its seeking takes. It is this aspect of the process which helps account for why the subjective aim is modified during the evolution of the actual entity.

These two points, that the creative process includes the lure of a telos and that the agent of creativity is responsible for its activity, serve as a basis for the suggestion that self-determination in creative processes can be conceived in terms of two notions familiar to the philosophical tradition: eros and agape.

The chief advantage in calling on these terms in order to bring into focus the integration of telos and spontaneity in creativity is that these two notions are both rich and heuristically powerful. They point to aspects of the phenomenon of creativity in a way -- a metaphorical way, perhaps -- that more technical terms in a longer discussion would not.

It would be foolish to engage here in either a definition or an analysis of the terms, eros and agape. I must hope that their meanings will be evident in the context of the discussion. But a few brief remarks about how eros and agape contrast will be helpful. Eros is love that is expressed by what seeks something more perfect, or more fulfilling, than what is possessed by the lover in the absence of union with the beloved. Thus, eros is expressed by an agent that is relatively dependent on the beloved for fulfillment. Agape, on the other hand, is love expressed by an agent already fulfilled in its own terms, and it is directed not as a seeking but as a concern for the beloved. Agape is not the power to overcome dependence; it is the power to overflow in interdependence toward an other which is not something to be identified with but which may be dependent and in need of the love that overflows. Agape is commonly said to be illustrated by brotherly love or parental love or love for children.

The notion of eros as a dynamic principle in evolutionary processes is relatively easy to see in light of Whitehead’s analysis. To be lured by a final aim is to express eros. The evolving process is a passage from lack to fullness, from the less perfect to perfection -- where perfection is realized in a union of the lover and the beloved in a determinate end which is sought by the subject that loves. The process begins in relative indeterminateness and is directed toward the determinateness of the requirements of the telos which lures it. And eros serves as the dynamic principle which propels the process from the indeterminate condition to the determinate condition that fulfills the process. Although the movement eros introduces depends upon the power of the end which lures it, eros must be an integral component of the source of the process. For the telos taken alone could not impel or activate the process. Just as eros requires the telos to give it direction, eros is required in order that the telos be actualized in the product of the process.

The idea that creative acts may be driven by love in the sense of eros should not seem surprising. Eros has been construed as a power which in itself is not rational, and since creative acts elude rationality, eros seems to be an appropriate source of power for them. Furthermore, one of the key psychological concomitants of creating is an experience of elation like that which accompanies fulfillment of love. It is true that anguish and painful effort are often associated with creativity, yet creative processes have also been described in terms of fulfillment, ecstasy and love. The artist is said to have a love for his work, the scientist loves his subject, the moral reformer loves the values he brings forth for society. In particular, the artist is often said to be compelled to work because he recognizes and finds irresistible an envisaged result, however vague and puzzling that result might seem when he begins to create. And when he achieves the result, he is overcome with a joy like the joy of consummated love.

However, there is reason to insist that the kind of love which operates in creativity cannot be adequately described exclusively in terms of eros. As already suggested, eros requires a dynamic thrust from incompleteness toward completeness, and the basis of this thrust is the end or attraction of the perfection which is desired and sought after. Completion of the process serves the subject. The subject seeks this completeness because of a desire for the attractive nature of the end. If the subject is nonconscious, it is directed toward the end because the end fulfills it. Thus, if eros were the exclusive dynamic principle, of a process, that process would not be creative, for it would not allow for a change in the subject as determined by its initial direction. The subject would appropriate what it lacks, but it would have no way of varying its growth against the background of established goals and patterns of development. Novelty in the intelligible structure of the outcome would be absent. The structure of the process, the manner of developing, and the character of the subject would be predetermined according to the conditioning called for in the telos. The process would evolve in accord with a pattern, as an acorn evolves into an oak tree.

But a creative or self-determining process does not conform to this kind of evolutionary change. As Whitehead points out, the telos of the process itself changes; hence, it could not prestructure the process. Further, at the beginning of a creative process, the subject envisages only a vague and at best partially determinate end. The subject cannot initially seek a perfection or a completeness in an end to be attained at the terminus of the process. The subject must contribute to the constitution and the determinateness and thus the perfection of the goal which attracts it. The subject as well as the telos bears responsibility for the change. The subject must give as it seeks. If a process is creative, then, the subject contributes out of itself to the evolution of its process. Its spontaneity is given direction not because the subject is concerned for itself exclusively or for a predetermined goal which lures it, but because it is concerned for a creature to be in the future. The subject cannot be concerned exclusively for itself in such a process, because at the inception of the process, the character of the subject is not the process determined as it will be at the culmination of the process. Nor can the subject direct its activity in terms of a determinate standard of excellence which can serve as a model for the creation. But the subject must be concerned for a future creature which will or would exemplify an excellence in an end to be realized if the process is or were completed.

The dynamic principle of such self-development must be agape. In those instances in which spontaneity leads to valuable novelty -- that is, in those cases in which the subject is transformed and the final perfection is not given prior to the act of creation -- agape must operate. In creating valuable novelty, a subject is not impelled by a desire to fulfill itself. Instead, it offers itself by permitting its creation to grow in its own terms. Thus, paradoxically, in offering itself, it generates the excellence which, out of agape, it gives to its creature. Creative love must be agapastic.

The defect in eros and the need for agape is also evident in the relation of creative love to disorder and disharmony. In psychological terms, the creator senses disharmony at the inception of the creative process, if only in recognizing the need for something to be done. Moreover, the evolution of structure that takes place in creativity is a change marked by discontinuity. The status quo is overcome. What is intelligible before and at the beginning of the process is inadequate and is transmuted. Traditionally, eros was construed as a unity, driving linearly toward a goal. In this situation, disharmony is present -- the disharmony persisting until lover and beloved are united. But the disharmony is external to eros. Thus Empedocles saw the need for two forces in the cosmos, both love and strife. But love as eros is not directed toward strife; it is directed away from strife. Creative love, on the other hand, is concerned with strife; the creative agent loves strife. It must do so in order to transcend what is given as antecedently intelligible and valuable.

This discussion began with the observation that Peirce offered an insight into speculation about evolution when he introduced the notion of agape as an operative principle. It is in order now to consider what he thought to be the advantage of this insight.

IV. The Need for Agape in Peirce’s Doctrine of Evolution

I said earlier that in his account of evolutionary growth Peirce recognized the need for a condition not included in the other theories of evolution with which he was familiar. This condition he found in agape. It will be helpful to look briefly at ways in which Peirce anticipated the need for agape as a condition in evolution.

Peirce’s sensitivity to the fruitfulness of the notion of agape is foreshadowed in his writing of 1877-78, if not earlier. Although he does not introduce the notion of agape in these early writings, he does lay the basis for it. He characterized the development of thought as a process, each moment of which is transcendent of all predetermined contexts, and as a process that progresses toward new intelligibility.

In his paper, "The Fixation of Belief," he rejected all methods of inquiry which are terminated in conclusions limited by self-fulfillment (5.358-87). The methods of tenacity, authority, and a priori reasoning serve goals defined by restricted standards, standards dependent upon finite inquirers. Only the method of science is other-directed and dependent upon a standard that transcends finite determination. As indicated in "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," this standard consists in a community that has no assignable, actual boundary (5. 388-410). It is the drive toward the realization of this community that guarantees the growth of thought and the survival of mankind itself. At the same time, however, this community remains unknown to the finite mind. It cannot be envisaged as a defined goal, for it remains to be given form and it lies in an infinite future, a future not wholly free of surprises and irregularities within a growing system of laws.

In addition to his insistence on the inadequacy of moments of thought that do not transcend themselves, Peirce also makes it clear that he views the growth of thought in the light of normative conditions. The hypothesis that there are reals and an external permanency is affirmed as a commitment -- a commitment of the kind one makes in marriage. It is a commitment to what one ought to think in order to know what one’s conduct ought to be. This last point is suggested in a number of Peirce’s discussions, particularly in his accounts of the function of the sciences (see, for instance, 1.191) as well as in his references to the goal of rational conduct which is the summum bonum (e.g., 5.4-5, 5.433).

The pattern of development from the limited to a goal that is unbounded and envisaged in an infinite future also can be seen in Peirce’s rejection, in "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," of Cartesian philosophy, particularly in his opposition to what he took to be the standard of subjectivity (5.263-317). This standard, he thought, was grounded in the finite thinker; hence it was inadequate.

Now, what is important here is that the pattern of development from the finite to the infinite as Peirce defines it can be accounted for by the notion of agape. To see why this is so, we must consider his genetic account of the world, an account that concerns the origin of the universe. Peirce’s discussion of this origin is presented as a metaphysical hypothesis about an initial condition or state prior to evolution itself. It is "a state of things in which that universe [the whole universe of being] did not exist" (6.214). It is the state from which the universe originated.

This initial condition of the universe is not referred to as a state in which either actual being or law reigns. Nor is it clear on Peirce’s account that the initial state is to be identified under the category of firstness, for it is not, since it is prior to the universe, a condition in which chance functions or in which sheer qualitative suchness is manifest phenomenally. Yet it seems to be most readily spoken of in the way firstness is when firstness is considered as a mode of being. The initial state is a pure nothing (6.217). As a pure nothing, it is without determination. Consequently, it cannot be limited or in any way finite. Nor does it either consist in or contain determinate, and thus limited, components. It is not the nothing of negation in the sense of being something which, as something, must be other than another thing. At the same time, however, Peirce insists, it is not a nothingness of inactivity. Here Peirce seems to treat the initial state as real possibility. It is real, first, in that it is not dependent on a mind or a community of minds; it is not dependent on any thing whatsoever for its being. Secondly, it is real in that it cannot be unrealized. It is the possibility not of non-self-contradiction, but of what may exist. It is a condition of actuality. It is pure potentiality. That it is pure potentiality is argued by Peirce when he indicates the grounds for saying that it cannot remain inactive. Peirce says that it must annul itself as nothing, because otherwise it would be idle, "do-nothing potentiality" (6.219). But completely idle potentiality is annulled by its complete idleness. Either it is not completely idle, in which case, it annuls its inactivity, or it is completely idle, in which case it annuls as potentiality, thus generating its own activity. Peirce, then, must assume that pure nothing in some sense is, viz., as potentiality. It must be at least this; otherwise, it would not be an initial state, and no thought or language would apply to it. Thus Peirce treats being as necessarily dynamic. But it is not necessarily dynamic in some specific way. Though it is germinal, foreshadowing the universe, it has no constraint on what is foreshadowed (6.217). What remains for an account of evolution, then, is not to account for a dynamic principle as such, since being dynamic must be taken for granted if anything is to be hypothesized about the origin of the cosmos.

Let me digress for a moment from the main course of the discussion to observe that this last point must be kept in mind as an answer to a possible objection to Peirce’s account. The objection I have in mind is that the initial state is an ideal limit and, as such, is prior to any actual state or process. But this ideal limit for Peirce is not an abstraction. It is what is proposed hypothetically through the articulation of a language that it is in part nonliteral. The thrust of Peirce’s hypothesis is metaphorical, or perhaps, analogical. With such language, he tries to suggest the concrete content of the limit which is an ideal. What he attributes to the initial state is prescinded, and it is based on his three categories.

If my interpretation of Peirce’s discussion of the initial state of the universe is correct, then dynamism is given; and the issue before us is to account for the direction the given dynamism takes. Peirce suggests a beginning for such an account when he indicates that once sporting within the initial state is acknowledged, we are drawn to a consideration of the respects in which sporting occurs. Once determination and thus differentiation is acknowledged, we are drawn to the question of what kinds of differentiation take place. Differentiations occur in directed ways, ways that constitute a pattern in which there is increased orderliness of determinations. How is this to be accounted for? Sheer undifferentiated real possibility cannot account for the direction of its realization. Since the initial state is necessarily non-idle, differentiation is necessary. But there is no necessity that can constrain one direction rather than another.

Nor can the directed change, the orderliness, or developing third-ness, account for itself. Peirce claims that law wants a reason. The laws of nature and their connections present the intelligibility of the universe. But this intelligibility itself is without foundation just insofar as it is claimed to be introduced out of a state of pure potentiality, lacking one or more necessities that have specific directedness. What, then, is the basis for directed development toward new order? What is the source of directed change or ordered tendencies toward law?

Now, it is my contention that Peirce’s discussion of evolutionary love is his answer to this question. Ordered development out of sheer potentiality and spontaneity requires that there be love in the cosmos. Without the principle that love is, there would be nothing operative in the origin and development of the universe which could give it specificity and directed order. However, it is essential to see that such love cannot itself be a law like the laws for which it is responsible. If, as Peirce says, agapasm is the proposition that the law of love is operative, this law could not be a regularity of any specific determinateness (6.302). Laws, Peirce says, cannot ultimately be accounted for by reference to prior laws. Laws cannot produce heterogeneity from homogeneity (6.14). The initial condition of the universe together with the laws that make it intelligible do not yield a system of laws. Thus the tendency to growth must be supposed to have grown from an infinitesimal germ accidentally started (6.202-09). Once this accident has occurred, it is more than accident. It is an event over against what it is not, and regularity is ingredient within it, since it is sustained even if only momentarily, and it thus has an increment of continuity in it (6.203). Further, the initial incident may be sustained long enough to initiate a habit, which is a generalizing tendency (6.204). Out of a complex of such generalizing tendencies, finally, "is differentiated the particular actual universe of existence in which we happen to be" (6.208). The laws of nature, then, are "formed under the influence of a universal tendency of things to take habits" (6.209). This tendency is the foundation of lawfulness and is the product or expression of evolutionary love.

A link between Peirce’s most highly speculative remarks on the origin of the universe and his somewhat less speculative discussion of evolutionary love can be seen in his reasons for considering tychastic and anancastic theories of evolution to be inadequate when taken alone. Briefly, his reasons are as follows. Tychastic evolution depends upon fortuitous deviations, which are arbitrary and require the rejection and sacrifice of some creatures in favor of others. Departures from what is lawful are purposeless, and these departures which set up their own habits establish new lawlessness purposelessly. The anancastic theory is inadequate because it depends upon necessity, which excludes freedom. Its tendency is toward preordained perfection. Developments are constrained, though without the possibility of foreseeing the direction toward which they tend. Tychasm construes evolution as heedless. Anancasm construes it as blind. In contrast, agapastic evolution does not require the sacrifice of any of its deviations. Any deviation may be a creation accepted by positive sympathy. Agapastic evolution is open to free development, neither heedlessly nor blindly, but "by the immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by virtue of the continuity of mind" (6.307). The love that drives the world toward lawfulness provides the world with a tendency between the poles of spontaneity, of indeterminate and unlawful occurrence, and established order. It does so out of sympathy, not for preordained order, but for order as such. Thus Peirce introduced an account of growth that applies to the origin of law from the sheer indeterminate potentiality of the initial condition of the universe.

It is important to emphasize that the creative love which Peirce identifies is different from eros. The operative principle, agape, is not a power or force that constrains or is constrained by precedent or previously conditioned directions. It is dynamic. But it is permissive. Moreover, in its permissiveness it embraces discord. For Peirce, disharmony was integral to evolutionary love. He says that God’s love, agapastic love, embraces and needs hatred. Quoting Henry James, Sr., he says that agapastic love must be "reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself" (6.287).

V. A Limitation on Peirce’s Thesis and the Value of His Insight

In spite of Peirce’s insight into the need for agape in evolution, his metaphysical inclinations placed boundaries on the application of his insight. One way in which he limits his insight can be seen in his conception of the connection between discord and agape. Although he viewed disharmony as integral to the function of agape, he remained faithful to his inclination to be an idealist by subsuming disharmony under harmony. The disharmony that is acceptable to agape must be overcome. In this respect Peirce’s agape is inseparable from eros with respect to the goal or final end to be reached by love. And more important, agape, like eros, takes on a unifying function, a function of exfoliating a fundamental continuity of past, present, and future. This continuity is the heart of Peirce’s general doctrine of synechism, under which, as I read him, agapastic evolution must be subsumed. Agape is not pure spontaneity. Rather, it is manifested as directed chance; it is manifest in a teleological continuum.

It should be emphasized, to be sure, that Peirce does not affirm an anancastic teleology. As he suggests in "The Law of Mind" the teleology of the growth of regularities is developmental (6.156). Consequently, the teleological form agapastic evolution takes includes a spontaneity and both a giving and a surrendering of lawfulness -- a lawfulness which must be determined by other conditions that are independent of agape, and which are defined subsequently to its agapastic act. This is why Peirce says that agapastic evolution consists in a bestowal by parents on offspring of spontaneous energy. To the extent that this characterization of evolution is emphasized, Peirce does seem to leave room for the possibility of discord.

However, Peirce also says that it is the disposition of the offspring to catch the general idea [the lawful process] of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose (6.303). Further, he speaks of the movement of evolutionary love as circular; it is a projecting of independency and a drawing of created products into a harmony (6.288). In saying that agape is circular, Peirce reminds us that agape introduces direction into the universe. In being permissive, it is not blind. Its sights are on harmony -- and a specific harmony to be defined by its creatures.

On the cosmic scale, Peirce’s agapism in part accommodates the characterization of radical creativity suggested earlier. It offers a way of speaking about a source which spontaneously yields new intelligibility. The source of this kind of novelty cannot be preconditioned, and it cannot itself precondition or constrain. It must let its creatures establish their own intelligibility. It establishes a distance between itself and its creation. Yet it is concerned with or aimed at the good of its creation.

On the cosmic scale, the intelligibility that agape originates is a harmony; it is an orderliness of continuities among things and events. In this respect, agape is circular, since it permits what it loves to be like itself insofar as it is a tendency toward lawfulness in general, i.e., insofar as it is a harmony. Cosmic love is permissive and giving of itself as a grand movement that is inevitably reflected in the orderliness of particular creatures.

It must be emphasized, however, that what has been said applies to creativity on the cosmic scale. In the context of finite creative acts, the creator’s love cannot have the same structure that agape has in the context of the cosmos. It cannot be permissive in the same way as cosmic creative love. The contrast between cosmic agape and finite individual creative love was not explored by Peirce. In my final remarks, I should like to consider this contrast. These remarks will indicate that Peirce’s notion of agape must be modified when applied to finite contexts within the cosmos.

The finite creator is responsible, not only for accepting disorder and for openness to developing tendencies to lawfulness in general and thus to intelligibility, but also for actual specifications of this tendency and of the order it reaches in individual outcomes. This responsibility requires that an element of eros be an ingredient of finite, creative love. The relation between eros and agape may be seen more clearly if we notice the role agape plays in the Christian tradition. In this tradition God has been thought of as creating out of agape which he has for his creatures. In this context, the Creator has been considered to be a Supreme Being, omnipotent and omniscient. Consequently there is a basic difference between this general notion in the tradition and the notion of agape in finite creativity. The creative process which we are considering is constituted by specific aims and finite acts. If agape is operative in such finite processes, then the creator could not be omnipotent or omniscient. Whether or not one insists on the supremacy of God as a Creator, my contention is that there are also finite agencies and events in the world which manifest creative spontaneity. Peirce seems to believe this, too, since he views agape as spreading among the creatures who participate in creative evolution, and he speaks of the genius as one who acts agapastically as an individual rather than as a community. Let me suggest, too, that Whitehead similarly insists on finite creativity, though in different words, when he says that "all actual entities share with God" and that they have the "characteristic of self-causation" (PR 339).

Now, the presence of creative love in finite creatures is paradoxical. As was pointed out a moment ago, because the agape in question is a principle of finite creative agents, the agapastic love of these agents must be infected by eros. A subject functioning agapastically directs its concern toward its creature. But both the creature and the creative agent are incomplete during creation. The creator is not fully what it must be as a source responsible for its creation. Its power lacks the determination necessary to specify the criteria of the creature to be created. Its permissiveness, unlike the cosmic creative force, does not flow from a fullness. Its permissiveness is limited. Hence, it seeks while it gives. The creative agent is directed in eros away from its initial state toward a perfection. Yet is not directed in some given way toward the specific end it will achieve. It seeks something more specific than sheer intelligibility, or regularity -- but it knows not what. As it develops, through its own spontaneity, it generates some particular direction and purpose. And as it does this, it generates its gift to its creature. As it forms the product, it forms the standards which serve as the model for the creation.

The point I am trying to make is consistent with Peirce’s reference to the agapastic relationship of the creative agent to its creatures as circular, "at one end the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony" (6.288). But there is a difference between this circularity when we consider cosmic love and when we consider finite love.

Universal agape engages in a closed circle; harmony gives way to diversity which is transformed back into general harmony. Finite agape engages in an open circle, giving way to specific order that is other than the order of the giver.

It should be pointed out here that Peirce’s view of the circularity of cosmic agape is consistent with the overarching thesis of synechism which embraces agapasticism. Thus, he says, "Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay ‘The Law of Mind’ must see that synechism calls for" (6.289). In the final analysis, then, Peirce is committed to a fundamental continuity to which are subjected all departures from law, and all leaps from the established to what is novel. Novelty, after all, is submerged in the continuity of the world and the final whole realizable in an infinite future. Although Peirce does insist that there is divergence from law and increasing variety in the world, and that at no time in the finite future will there be no aberrancy from law (6.91), he also insists that growth is continually expanding into law and that if we were to reach a point in the infinitely distant future, we would have reached a state of no indeterminacy or chance but a complete reign of law (6.33). Synechism, Peirce’s fundamental "regulative principle of logic," requires the ideal removal of novelty from the world (6.173). But when we apply the notion of agape to finite contexts, the subjection of novelty to fundamental continuity cannot be appealed to without admitting a radical appeal to a context far removed from cosmic creation. The order, the valuable novelty, for which the finite creator is responsible is not general harmony, but a specific order, and an order that may, in the context of what is finite, stand in disharmony with its past. It is significant that if there is such discord, there are more severe demands placed on the finite creator than on the cosmic creator. The cosmic creator loves disorder within a larger context in which discord is assuaged. The finite creator does not have the benefit of this context. The finite creator must love discord without benefit of envisaging a place for the discord within a larger harmony.

The mixture of eros and agape deserves much closer examination. However, the chief purpose of the point I am trying to make has been served. I have tried to emphasize the reason agape is both relevant and essential in an account of creative evolution at the level of both the cosmic and the finite. It is to Peirce’s credit to have revealed a fundamental insight in introducing agape as a dynamic principle.

Let me conclude with a brief suggestion about the conceptual utility of Peirce’s view. There are two ways the notion of agape as applied to creative activity is conceptually helpful. First, further development of the proposal that agape functions in evolution, and specifically in finite creative processes, would provide a general framework within which distinctively creative processes can be related to other processes. It is significant that provision for such a framework was also one of Whitehead’s aims in his process philosophy. The difference between the conceptual function of Peirce’s view and the metaphysics of Whitehead lies in the kind of focus each gives to spontaneity. For Whitehead, creativity, in the final analysis, is an ultimate category. As such, it is inexplicable, and whatever can be said about it takes the form of illustration. Further, as an ultimate category, creativity for Whitehead must be present in some degree in every process. Every subject of an actual entity determines itself from its own essence. Creative acts are illustrated everywhere. As an account of spontaneity, Peirce’s view leaves creativity just as inexplicable as does Whitehead’s category of creativity. However, in proposing that agape is the principle of creativity, Peirce attempted to show that specific instances of spontaneity can be the responsibility of an operative principle, agape, which specifically functions creatively. Peirce did not propose agapism as a premise, but rather as a hypothesis based on both inference and the experience of love. Thus, a metaphysics based on a notion of agape as suggested by Peirce, when applied to finite contexts, has its sights directly on what is manifest as distinctively creative rather than what is manifest everywhere in change. Peirce points to the importance of viewing creativity in a developmental teleology -- a teleology in which new intelligibility can develop. And such a metaphysics requires more than a general category of creativity. It requires the presence in the world of a special dynamic principle, agape, which is especially meaningful, if not fully understandable, in concrete instances of the origin of new intelligibility. Whether Whitehead’s conceptual framework is like Peirce’s and includes interesting question. But this question is a topic which deserves major study.

There is another, more immediately applicable way in which the notion of agape introduced here is preferable to the use of the notion of eros in accounting for creativity. The suggestion may point us to a clue about certain traits in human personality which are necessary conditions of creativity. Thus, a person incapable of agape would not be expected to create. If the dynamism of his life were that of eros, he might grow and develop and achieve valuable results in his activities. But he would not achieve novelty through his actions, for, put simply, he would only achieve excellencies which are already determinate. On the other hand, if he were capable of agape, he might be capable of creativity. His seeking could be for something more than ends which are operative prior to his seeking. His motives could transcend utilitarian ends -- a desire for wealth or, to recall a thesis of Freud’s, a desire for love and fame. This is not to say that predetermined ends and that wealth, love, and fame might not be conditions of his activity. Eros would function in his life. But unless he were driven by more than eros, then he would not, out of the spontaneity of his own essence, be directed toward valuable novelty. Unless he were a source of agape, he would not be radically creative.

References

All references to Peirce’s writings have been cited according to volume number followed by paragraph number of the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985).

1. Carl H. Hausman. "Spontaneity: Its Arationality and Its Reality," International Philosophical Quarterly 4/1 (February, 1964), 20-47.

Henri Bergson’s view of creative change exhibits tensions between conceptual and supra-conceptual assumptions about the nature of cognition and reality. It seems to me that such tensions are inescapable in any attempt to give an account of creative activity. Given such tensions, however, some fundamental questions arise. Not only is it proper to ask whether one pole in these tensions has priority over the other, but, obviously; the question remains concerning how these poles function in influencing what happens in creative activity.

Professor Pete Gunter has addressed both issues with respect to Bergson’s philosophy as a whole. Indeed, Gunter points us to these tensions and to the possibility that these are less dissonant than they might seem, when Bergson is read carefully and properly. My paper will not challenge Gunter’s argument. I believe he has offered a welcome statement about the extent to which Bergson took account of modern science in developing a metaphysics full of insights. In doing so, Gunter shows how the tensions in Bergson’s thought are at bottom mutually supportive. It seems to me that the two kinds of mathematical calculus that he says are interactive in the dynamic processes of the universe may well be a proper way to help interpret Bergson. Thus, rather than raise objections, I shall consider briefly the tensions with respect to Bergson’s metaphysics and epistemology I shall try to extend consideration of the senses in which intuitions are rational and may be inclusive of conceptual experience. I shall also consider the conditions for understanding creativity. These issues will be reviewed in terms of what I believe is a proper extrapolation of Charles Peirce’s notion of cognition and his view of the conditions of cosmic evolution.

Before continuing, I should emphasize that I believe that there is much common ground between Peirce and Bergson. Both writers reject atomistic conceptions of reality and epistemological foundations. And the idea that reality is a kind of tendency fits both. Peirce’s synechism or insistence that continuity is of prime importance in philosophy and his effort to show that continuity fundamentally has no gaps (although continuity is nevertheless open to spontaneous, emergent developments) exhibit a fundamental affinity with Bergson. Peirce’s account of continuity in terms of a theory of infinitesimals seems to me to reinforce this affinity. Nevertheless, the relation of form or conceptually understandable creative advances and their origins within continuities seem less obviously common to both writers. I shall try to develop these remarks briefly in what follows.

As an entry into the discussion, it may be helpful to mention some questions that arise in connection with several points in Gunter’s account of Bergson. I shall occasionally insert brief comments about how Peirce’s views are relevant. Gunter’s discussion of the interdependence of the poles in the apparent conflicts in Bergson’s thought serves two purposes: as indicated above, he tries to show that the charge of irrationalism is improperly made against Bergson, and he argues that there is a fundamental unity in Bergson’s philosophy. This unity supports the idea that Bergson affirms an irrationality is misguided.

Not every trace of tension, however, can be assuaged without sacrificing some of the power of Bergson’s account of creativity As proposed at the outset, such tensions are unavoidable in a view that affirms the idea that creativity advances knowledge, a tradition, and all intelligible process by generating new intelligible outcomes, new forms or kinds that were unpredictable. With this, Bergson and Gunter would probably agree.

Gunter identifies the divergent tendencies in Bergson’s thought with reference to a "struggle between two contrary tendencies: one creative, expansive, dynamic, the other conservative, repetitive, static." Telescoped, these may be called the dynamic and the static. Tendencies like these appear in Peirce as quality and actuality in contrast to possibility and regularity. It should be noted that for Peirce, regularity, whether intuitive or conceptual, is evolutionary and is inclusive of quality and actuality. For Bergson, regularity for conceptual thought is static. Bergson’s tensions also underlie an opposition between life and matter, creative and conservative impulses, and an open society and a closed society For Peirce the first is mind, which is lively, and matter, which is sheer (although evolutionary) regularity, and is called "effete mind." Matter as sheet, frozen regularity still is subject to modification, for matter is capable of being warmed to life in some degree in the course of evolution. For Bergson, each tension yields a problem that is also the mark of apparently irreconcilable views of what is vital to the place of human beings in the world: (1) Time is measurable according to length and brevity, but immeasurable in reality, because it is qualitative, felt, and immediate; (2) Psychological life is divided into a self awareness of deeper, dynamic layers of human beings and what is superficial and fixed; (3) There is an inner consciousness and an independent world apart from inner consciousness. Bergson’s approach calls attention to an unavoidable disunity in its stress on the three loci of tension and thus it is less unified initially than Peirce’s, at least with respect to the continuity between the poles of the tension. The disunity is of course in the opposition and distortion that discursive, conceptual speech offers in treating the fluid reality that concepts are supposed to be designed to capture. Although Peirce insists that there is an ongoing qualitative presence that itself is prior to rational thought, he leans toward accounting for the relation of qualitative presence to thought by proposing that one is continuous with the other.

What is the Bergsonian way of assuaging the tensions? Apparently, it lies in what Gunter refers to as rhythms of duration. Not only are rhythms of duration uniting conditions, but they also serve as a way to distinguish the two poles, mind and matter, from one another. Both matter and mind are constituted by rhythmic durations. For matter, these occur as recurrent present moments. For mind, rhythmic durations are not recurrent, but successive and progressive. For both matter and mind, rhythmic durations occur as segments. In matter, in which they are recurrent in the present, the segments can be regarded as discrete. In mind, the segments are continuous. The contrast between matter and mind seems to lie, on the one hand, in a renewable occurrence of the present (and thus in what is momentarily unchanging), and, on the other hand, temporality that is in change. The rhythms of consciousness are said to be of the same kind as matter. The only difference is in the breadth of time -- the present vs. endurance (temporal) in the past and the future. Gunter sees the account of rhythmic durations as a kind of "rapprochement" between quality and quantity and between mind and matter.

It is not clear to me how this account gives us a fully adequate way to provide a rapprochement between mind and matter, at least in a way that seems to fit the Bergsonian program. Even if the rhythms of consciousness are not different in kind from those of matter, they are in passage, while in matter, they are, or are necessarily treated as, segments that seem to be discrete, in the sense of their recurrences, and are thus conceptually identifiable. Thus, we still have two aspects that are distinguished and that relate to one another as two poles with respect to distinguishing consciousness from the material world. And as Croce said in discussing art and artist, contrasts within one kind may be great enough to appear as differences in kind. Similarly, if the distinction between mind and matter is a function of breadth and brevity; the differences between lengths of rhythmic durations are so great that a qualitative difference of kind is exhibited. At some level or limit, rhythms become brief enough to appear as recurrent present moments, in which case, they are "distanced" from long rhythms of (fluid) consciousness and require intuitive access.

What is external to mind, then, must be accessed through intuitions. Because through intuitions we can participate in the rhythms, we can have an intuition of what is material. Again, even if what is thus apprehended is of the same kind, the distinction is great enough -- has enough breadth -- to require consciousness to function by modes that themselves appear as different in kind. This leads to one of the two major issues I would like to address: the character and function of intuition.

The rejection of Bergson’s view of the role intuition plays in understanding reality seems to be what Gunter regards as one of the grounds for the charge of irrationalism. Thus, the meaning of "rationality," especially as it relates to intuition needs consideration. It is significant that writers as divergent in philosophical perspectives as Croce and Russell seem to agree that Bergson’s intuitions prompt the charge of irrationalism. Croce’s reasons surely are not limited to the fact that Bergson’s intuitions play a role in metaphysics, whereas Croce’s play a role in artistic expression. And the role of intuitions in Russell’s view seems, on the face of it, similar to Bergson’s in being foundational -- they consist of knowledge by acquaintance, thus serving an indispensable role in epistemology. The way intuitions function, of course, is different in light of the atomistic place of intuitions for Russell. But why should these critics regard Bergson’s intuition as irrational while presumably they believe theirs are not? The answer must be found in what one understands by "intuition" and "irrational." These objectors may have assumed different notions of "rational" and have overlooked the point Gunter makes that Bergson’s intuitions are reflective.

It seems clear that if Bergson’s intuitions are reflective, they surely have their own special character. They have intellectual sympathy, and with respect to their sympathy, I suppose, they share with common sense intuitions an immediate, positive directedness toward that on which they focus. But as intellectual, they are more complex than common sense intuitions. They must be distinguished from popular notions that intuitions are emotionally charged, immediate (unreasoned) insights or premonitions. If reflective, they seem to be more than immediate. As more than immediate, they must include distinct moments of some kind of internal distancing, a marking of a distinction a "stepping back" and an implicit awareness of what is occurring during an act of intuiting. Without this implicit awareness, I see no way they could apprehend the movement to which they must penetrate. Consequently, they must include, in some form, an aspect of incipient discursive and conceptual thought. Let me add here that if my interpretation of intuitions as reflective is not off the mark, then there is a way to help account for the idea that intuitions and spatialized, conceptual understanding are relevant to one reality, as Gunter insists. For it must be in intuitions that two contrary modes of knowing are merged -- that is, an immediate focus that "enters into" what is apprehended and at the same time enacts a process that includes some aspect of spatializing thought, distinguishing and somehow distancing.

Bergson’s intuitions seem complex rather than purely monadic acts. In short, if intuition is reflection, it is not simply dyadic but triadic, too, including (if it does not depend on) an activity of mediation -- a third mediating condition. This, I think, distinguishes them from Cartesian intuitions, which were rejected by both Bergson and Peirce.

I must emphasize that I am not trying to take issue with the idea that there are intuitions that include reflection. But I do want to try to suggest a way of interpreting what it means to say that they are reflective. In what way, then, do intuitions differ from cognitions that are gained through concepts functioning outside as well as within metaphysics? Reflective intuitions must be different and special because they are expected to insert themselves into reality that is in flux in terms of rhythmic durations. They are expected to have an intimate access to reality, unlike conceptual cognition.

Lest it be objected that I am proposing an analysis of intuition through concepts or discursive thought, which is contrary to what Bergson seems to insist on, my answer in the first place starts with a characterizing of intuitions that not only invites but implies attention to the presence of extra-intuitive relations necessary for intuitions to contribute to rational understanding. In the second place, even if the only way to characterize intuitions is to say that they are not conceptual -- to say that they are fluid, unitary, etc -- in saying that they are non-conceptual, we have predicated conceptually available ideas, which is necessary in order to claim that conceptual thought is foreign to their referents (which transcend conceptual thought). We cannot help distorting when we use language of one order of reference to apply to another order -- a first order that resists being the object of the second order reference. This dilemma can only be mediated by openly insisting that only metaphorical uses of concepts to stretch beyond themselves can approach an adequate characterization of the otherwise ineffable domain. This, after all, is crucial to Bergson’s view, and, fundamentally to Peirce’s view as well. The term "reflective" applied to intuition, then, ought to be understood as a metaphorical suggestion that can be expanded -- although not paraphrased fully without reducing what is paraphrased to the very conceptually available ideas that intuitions surpass.

It is worth noting here that Peirce rejects the idea that intuitions can themselves be cognitive. They are immediate and thus pre-interpretive. Cognitive acts must be triadic, that is, they must involve the mediation introduced in interpretation. As I shall mention below, this point indicates an interesting comparison with Peirce’s idea of intelligibility as triadic and intuition as pre-intelligible. I think, at least on Gunter’s account, that Bergson wants to pack incipient mediation into intuitions, which are ordinarily taken to be immediate and dyadic. But Bergson’s intuitions must be rich with aspects that raise them to a relation that is more than dyadic and, as I tried to indicate already, is inclusive of interpretation.

What kind of cognitive significance is at issue here? If intuitions are not cognitively significant in a way that can be public and interpretive, mediating, relations, which can be discursively continued by connecting with further relations, what sort of cognitive significance can they have?

Again, my point is not to reject this way of understanding intuition. I want to suggest that a Peircean way of treating intuition and cognition lays out distinctly and, it seems to me, more clearly, the way intuitions can be or become cognitive and thus contribute to discursive, conceptual, cognitive experience. In order to expand this point in another way, let me turn to the question of what counts as intelligibility and rationality -- a question concerning the assumptions that underlie both Bergson’s and Peirce’s views of intuition.

As already suggested, for Peirce, cognition involves interpretation. In order for interpretation to occur, something must be identified as the object or subject of interpretation. This is so even if the interpretation is not fulfilled but reaches no further than the dyadic relation of reference-pointing, for instance, or some other act of referring. The referent initially may be simply a this. But two terms alone are not sufficient to do more than initiate interpretation. Pointing needs supplementing with a third relatum, some comparison or noting of resemblance, which itself introduces a third principle or quality linking more than one item. Mediation is necessary) Peirce’s characterization of the three conditions that are necessary for a genuine sign to offer meaning may help to make this clearer. For a thing to function as a sign it must have an interpreter for whom (or for which) an object is referred to in some respect. There are, then, sign, object, and interpretant, all three relata related in some respect. I shall not try to interpret the idea of the respect involved in sign action except to say that it seems to fuse with both the relation of the sign to the interpretant and the relation of the sign to the object. In his early writing, Peirce calls the respect the ground of the sign’s function, and I think that as a ground it has the function of leading the interpretation to another interpretation with another sign as its subject, all in an on-going semeiotic process. In any case, it seems to me that Bergson’s intuition on Gunter’s account, which refers to intuitions as reflective, must be a special case of a triadic relation. If so, intuitions are not, at least not necessarily, irrational. The interpreting act obviously does not need to be analyzed nor made explicit during interpretation itself. Reflection may occur without the agent reflecting on that reflection. But what goes on in the richer notion of intuition seems to me to include the kind of conceptualization implied by the triadic structure of interpretation. A bit later, I shall try to explain why my point is borne out by an account of the structure of metaphors, which are, after all, the proper modes of linguistic expression and access to reality for Bergson. At the moment, however, we are left with the key question: "What assures us that an internal interpretation within an intuition is intelligible or rational -- that it is to be trusted?"

Simply being an interpretation is only a necessary condition of rational significance. At this point, it will be helpful to cease assuming that rationality and intelligibility are equivalent. Intelligibility is a broader notion, for it includes thoughts that may be meaningful without regard, at the time of recognition, to both conditions of rationality (self-consistency and coherence), which will be discussed in a moment. Those ideas that are intelligible without consideration of their rationality or irrationality may not make sense to us at first, but instead may suggest something that will make sense in the future. This is crucial to what I shall characterize later as creative outcomes and as a mark of metaphorical expression.

I believe that it is generally accepted that at least two conditions are necessary for a thought to be rational. The thought ought not to be self-contradictory, and it ought to be coherent. The second condition, coherence, is that the thought should be consistent with an established system of theories and generally accepted beliefs.² Coherence, as I take it, is consistency or fittingness with more relations and a set of consequences. Further, as already indicated, I would add that this second condition does not need to be met at the moment the thought is articulated; otherwise, all creative advances in thinking, which break beyond established beliefs and theory, would be discarded as incoherent and even irrational. If the thought does not give a hint or anticipatory suggestiveness that it could fit a future context, it would ordinarily be rejected as at least questionable, if not unintelligible. It does take time for radical innovations to become effective in future systems of belief as has been the case in the history of both art and science. This follows from the idea that innovations to some extent modify the system that they are to fit in the future. They contribute to its development. For instance, post-impressionistic painting arose in the wake of impressionist painting and contributed to the evolving tradition of painting, even helping to show impressionism and its antecedents in a new light.

Assuming that this brief characterization of rationality and intelligibility is accepted, it is possible to consider further the place of interpretation in intuitions. If an intuition is to be cognitive, which must mean that it is intelligible, then it must exhibit a sense of having an expectation, not of something determinately envisaged, but of something regarded as anticipatory of self-consistency and coherence in the future. What is apprehended is an Incipient telos. I should think that this fits Bergson’s view in spite of his ingenious argument that we cannot foresee the future of an art tradition -- an argument that applies to predicting even in some sketchy detail what artworks will be like in the future. In referring to an anticipatory quality, I do not mean that some specific or general character must be foreseen. What is anticipated is a vague end, that some development in the future will bring about something with character that will not be incoherent. In any case, an intelligible intuition would presumably exhibit the appearance of something that has the potential of being related to another cognition, intuitive or conceptual. Perhaps Bergson’s reference to intuitions as having intellectual sympathy is a mark of anticipatory character with respect to the forward moving pulsation of reality. In having sympathy, the intuition, I take it, is empathetic and with attunement to its focus of attention, reality. This expectation is comparable to Peirce’s idea that intuitions -- which, as suggested earlier, are thinner than Bergson’s -- would be subjected to critical interpretation. But I take it that Bergson’s intuitions are supposed already to be subjected to a kind of internal criticism and thus inclusive of some degree or aspect of interpretation.

The significance of these suggestions about what is rational and intelligible as applied to intuition is not that intuitions fall below the level of intelligibility or that they belong to a domain inherently inaccessible. Rather, the main point I want to make, which is to my mind following a Peircean line, is that intuitions are not explicitly cognitive in the sense of exemplifying prima facie rationality; yet they may and should contribute to explicitly cognitive levels of experience. Peirce’s intuitions are not themselves cognitive but are subject to and contributory to triadic experience, which is interpretive, critical, and fully cognitive.

Another way to make this point is to turn to Peirce’s categories and to his semeiotic. Firsts (which include pre-cognitive intuitions) can be prescinded (abstracted) from thirdness and secondness as necessary conditions of the higher level relational experiences. We can prescind quality from struggle and effort, and we can prescind both quality and struggle from mediated lawful experience. Sheer resemblance can be prescinded from comparison and both from symbolic meaning. Similarly, icons are conditions of indices and symbols. On this view, the richness that Bergson seems to build into his intuitions (their reflective character) may simply be laid out and made explicit. In other words, I think what Bergson sees as intuitions belong properly to Peirce’s level of thirds. They are thirds in which firstness is so prominent that they are taken to be firsts in the pre-cognitive state, not yet subjected to further interpretation within a semeiotic context. They are thirds awaiting the future.

Before concluding this paper, I should like to relate what I have said so far to the other major question about the Bergsonian view of evolution or creative process. Both Bergson and Peirce declare that reality is in process and that the process must be understood in terms of continua. It seems that for Bergson, however, reality as a whole is one continuum. For Peirce, continua pervade the universe. If this is correct, then there are consequences that differentiate their approaches to evolution and thus to understanding creativity. However, I think that Bergson’s continuum, his duration, is subject to discontinuities, just as is Peirce’s, and these discontinuities are just as real as continuities. This is to say that even though it comes about through the distortion of spatialization that conceptualization forces on reality, this conceptualization and the very tension it generates are integral to reality as a whole.

Gunter points Out that Bergson’s view of creativity proposes that creating occurs with a "rupture" with the forms and structures that have preceded it. Thus, it seems that when there is a moment of creativity, there must be discontinuity, and a discontinuity transcends the quantitative discontinuities that occur when reality is carved into measurable, discrete segments of the same kind. Further, if the rupture occurs m relation to forms and structures, it must yield a qualitative change, for the forms are not simply sheer numerical or spatial differentiations. The forms are distinguishable moments in the on-going process that constitutes reality, Creating a new style in painting, such as Picasso’s innovations in cubism, is surely a qualitative change in kind within antecedent traditions of painting.

As Gunter points out, however, Bergson’s qualitative universe has quantitative aspects. Rhythmic durations have quantitative and qualitative aspects. Quantitative aspects presumably emerge from qualitative continuity when conceptual thought marks the ruptures and thus recognizes that there are differences. In any case, if there are ruptures, it seems reasonable to claim that Bergson’s reality must be much like Peirce’s with respect to there being a plurality of continua that pervade the universe.

It also seems to me that the rejection of the idea of ex nihilo creation overlooks the point that if there is a rupture, that out of which a new form or new continuity originates is nil insofar as there is a rupture, an interruption, and thus a momentary gap or absence which inserts itself within a continuum and precedes the transformation of one kind (form) into another. Unless one assumes a determinism or a theory of creativity that claims creative outcomes are predictable in principle, there is nothing that fully (reductively) accounts for what appears as the new intelligibility of the new form or the newly transformed intelligible outcome -- the new continuity. It is, of course, obvious that creativity occurs against a background and in that sense does "come from" something -- where "come from" has reference to being understood in contrast to, and showing traces of past influences, that is, of past continuities and durations of a variety of sorts. However, again, unless "come from" refers to explaining or predicting the future from knowledge of the past, there is necessarily in some respect an absence of conditions or continuities that breaks connections among continua. In that sense, there is ex nihilo creation. I think this is a crucial point to note for any attempt to understand creativity, for to ignore it is to fall back into a quasi-deterministic way of thinking, according to which the denial of ex nihilo creativity means "there is nothing new under the sun." I mention this not only as a point in relation to Gunter’s statement that creation ex nihilo never occurs for Bergson but also with Peirce in mind. I do not know, however, that Peirce ever used the term "ex nihilo" in discussing creativity and evolution.

What is crucial in the immediate context, however, is the question: "How are the aspects, quality and quantity, related to one another where rhythmic durations exhibit ruptures?" In trying to answer, I shall turn exclusively to Peirce on the assumption that rhythmic durations have the function that infinitesimals have in part of Peirce’s account of continuity³ I can only hope that a Bergsonian scholar will judge the extent to which my account of Peirce shows common ground with Bergson. I should add that if I am off the mark in suggesting such common ground, then I recommend that Peirce’s account brings into focus more sharply what the central tension must be in any metaphysics of creative evolution.

While Peirce views the cosmos as swimming in continua, he leaves room for the origination of new intelligible purposes. There is in the universe what he calls "developmental teleology." New purposes emerge in process. New forms arise out of acts of spontaneity. Instances of spontaneity are not limited to dramatic creative advances that catch attention and cause surprise. They can, indeed must, occur, even in eruptions at infinitesimal moments in continua. There are conditions for actualizable and potential points in continua, at infinitesimal nodes in continua that, when actualized, introduce new continuities and thus new forms, new purposes. Perhaps Bergson’s vertical durations mark the outcomes of these infinitesimal nodes within continua.

With these brief suggestions about infinitesimal occasions, let me turn to another question. What more can he said about the conditions for ruptures in continua? Are instances of spontaneity no more than chance events? An affirmative answer to the latter, I suppose, would exemplify a purely Darwinian restricted view of evolution -- Peirce’s tychism. But the restricted Darwinian view can be supplemented, as Peirce supplemented it, with the developmental teleology and the general agapastic theory of evolution.⁴ Peirce hypothesized that there must be some agency in nature by virtue of which spontaneities lead to diversity and complexity in nature. And I think he developed this notion when he hypothesized again that there is an agapastic source functioning in evolution. This source loves without demands on its creatures, creatures that themselves could be creative and thus could exhibit agape. This agency or sources looks much like what Bergson hinted at as God. Peirce knew that in discussing evolution in this way, he was speculating and resorting to figurative ways of forming his thesis. I shall not undertake here to argue in defense of his having proceeded in this way. But I do want to insist that Peirce’s conviction that evolution includes teleological direction is crucial to a view of evolution that does not stop with a restricted Darwinian view and recognizes that evolution does occur not simply as process as such, but as progress.

We can now return to the issue of intelligibility and intuition. In the present context, this issue arose in connection with the idea that Bergson’s view turned irrational. My concern now, however, is with two considerations. The first is raised briefly by Gunter when he points out that for Bergson intuition is integral to creativity. The second has to do with the relation of intuition in creativity to its past -- memory, tradition, style, etc. -- and in turn with the expression of intuitions in communicable terms. My suggestions here will be centered in a claim about metaphor.⁵

What role does intuition play in creative acts? If we emphasize that creative advance issues in a change in continuity; a rupture, there must be some break with continua that are conceptually available. But the origin of the break could not have as its basis only concepts available up to the time of creativity. Nor could the origin of the break have as its basis concepts available after the break. Thus, the origin of the break must be pre-conceptual yet intelligible insofar as its outcome promises to he also available to human conceptual cognition. This pre-conceptual and intelligible activity is the office of a pre-conceptual but "reflective" cognition. This pre-conceptual cognition, I think, is both Peircean and Bergsonian intuition understood, as I suggested earlier, involving three relata: (I) an immediate, monadic intuition, (2) an incipient, mediating interpretation, and (3) a triadic outcome available to discursive thought.

The role of intuitions for Peirce also is suggested in his theory of the logic of abduction -- the technical term for hypothesis formation which is a third form of logic different from induction and deduction. Abductions arise in pre-interpreted cognitively significant acts in the discovery and creation of new cognitions about natural laws. The significance of intuitions is also indicated by Bergson’s view that it is by intuition that humans have access to reality It is also significant that these intuitions are expressed in metaphorical language (in "fluid" thoughts). Peirce too credits metaphors as necessary to thought.

Gunter has provided some of the support helpful to what I have said about intuition and metaphor in Bergson. But I shall not take the time here to try to extend further these comparisons and the evidence of them in Peirce’s writings. It is more important to consider what I think are crucial insights in both Bergson and Peirce about the interdependence that should be recognized between conceptual thought and intuitions. This interdependence can be seen in Bergson’s fluid concepts, if these are understood in accordance with an interactionist account of metaphor. In brief, on the interactionist view, metaphors are made possible when two (or more) concepts are joined in a sentence and the joining exhibits a dissonance. One term violates its own established meanings and/or the other term. "That man is so straight that he is wooden." Both "wooden" and "straight" as predicates of "man" are now pretty well understood so readily that the incongruent connection that must have been exhibited in the first instances of predication is easily overlooked. But taken literally, humans are not wooden and they are not straight in the sense created, that is, of being determinate, inflexible, in honesty. Another example will do better for showing how concepts play a role in metaphors. The word "understand," is, of course, now readily understood as having to do with being intelligible. But the word is, after all, a compound of two concepts, taken literally, "under" and "stand." The compound now is what I would call a frozen metaphor. Its significance, however, is radically new in relation to the two concepts, which, although nor dissonant if taken apart and joined in the expression "stand under," are at least syntactically dissonant with respect to their order in the expression, "understand" -- and more importantly their forming a compound now means something radically new in relation to the terms taken literally and in the reverse order.

The most general structure of metaphors, then, includes two conceptually accessible terms rendered initially not accessible when taken literally in combination. But in a metaphor, a new meaning emerges. The new meaning may’ then become established as conceptually accessible -- that is, once the whole expression is seen as having meaning. If the new meaning is conceptually accessible, then its vehicle, has become a frozen metaphor and can be treated as an analogy that can at least partially be paraphrased, as, for instance, "understand" means, among other things, "comprehend." I say partially paraphrased because a metaphor (a good one or one that has performed a creative function) is alive and significant beyond any wholly literal paraphrase. Thus, the term "to understand" carries a distinct, not clearly conceptualizable meaning so that it is not strictly equivalent to comprehend -- unless for practical purposes speakers freeze the relationship, forcing an identity on the relationship. If language could not and did not exhibit the kind of flexibility and creativity that metaphors can bring to it, language could not evolve. And this would be tantamount to affirming the cliché that there is nothing new under the sun. It seems to me that both Bergson and Peirce had the insight that the cosmos, including human languages, does involve evolution from past to future that expands reality. In one sense, this is to say that everything is new under the sun, from moment to moment, but that the conceptual, quantitative aspect of it freezes the evolutionary process -- temporarily.

Notes

1. What I shall say about Peirce on interpretation and mediation and their relation to his categories is based on various discussions in Peirce’s writings, found in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-1960), for instance, in Vol. 1, paragraphs 540-564, Vol. 2, paragraphs 228 -- 229; in Writings of Charles S. Peirce. Chronological Edition, ed., Edward C. Moore, Christian J.W. Kloesel, Nathan Houser, et. al, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988- 1993); and in letters to Lady Welby, Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles A. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby ed., Charles S. Hardwick and James Cook (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977).

2. The argument I have in mind is in Bergson’s The Creative Mind, tr. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946) the section entitled "The Possible and the Real," 91-106.

3. Hilary Putnam has offered an interesting analysis of Peirce’s treatment of infinitesimals, and his analysis is suggestive as a way to understand how a continuum can break at loci that are points of division as infinitesimal intervals. See his "Peirce’s Continuum," in Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries (New York: Fordham University Press, 1995). 1-22. I have tried to draw our some of the ideas in Putnam’s account in "Infinitesimals as Origins of Evolution: Comments Prompted by Timothy Herron and Hilary Putnam on Peirce’s Synechism and Infinitesimals," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 34/3 (1998).

4. I refer here to Peirce’s essay on "Evolutionary Love," and the preceding essays in the series, "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined," in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 6, chapters 2 and 11.

5. I shall assume here various arguments presented in my Metaphor and Art. Interactionism en the Verbal and Non-verbal Arts (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Although they have exercised much influence on Protestant theology, process theists have had disappointingly little influence on philosophical discussions of the problem of evil. Despite the fact that leading process theists have devoted a substantial part of their writings to the discussion of evil, we find publication after publication by philosophers on the problem of evil with hardly a mention of process theism. Nelson Pike’s widely used anthology, God and Evil (6), contains no discussion of process theism and John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love (4), generally considered the most comprehensive treatment of the problem of evil to date. virtually ignores process theism. Although we might have hoped for a change of attitude, M. B. Ahern, the author of the latest philosophical book devoted to the problem of evil, persists in ignoring process theism. In our book, Evil and the Concept of God (5:104-36). we seem to have been the exception in taking nontraditional as well as traditional forms of theism seriously.

In this paper we shall not attempt a full-scale reply to critics of our discussion of nontraditional theism. Instead we hope to make a further contribution to the philosophical discussion of nontraditional theism by examining in more detail than we did in our book one strand of thought that plays a crucial, and philosophically fascinating, role in process theism’s treatment of the problem of evil. Basic to this strand is the view that God’s power is persuasive, not coercive.

Our argument will proceed as follows: (1) we accept many of the metaphysical and moral reasons given for supposing that God’s power is in some degree, and in some respects, persuasive rather than coercive, but we do not find that any good reason has been given why God’s power must and should be exclusively persuasive; (2) even in those contexts where persuasive and not coercive power is appropriate we find that process theists have made no attempt to provide a theodicy that explains how the high proportion remaining unpersuaded is compatible with the exercise of great persuasive power; (3) if it is replied that a persuasive God can be expected to maximize only creativity and freedom, and not good acts and experiences, we point out that process theists have no more produced a theodicy that shows that the limitations of creativity and freedom in this world are compatible with the exercise of great persuasive power than they have produced a theodicy showing that the extent and distribution of evil acts and experiences are compatible with great persuasive power; (4) if no theodicy is produced to explain these purported compatibilities, then we may as reasonably believe that great evil persuasive power is being exercised as that great persuasive power for the good is being exercised; and (5) if the process theist wishes to circumvent this need for a theodicy by claiming that process theism, like any metaphysics, can never be disproved by experiential findings but only by a demonstration of its conceptual incoherence, then we insist that the notion of persuasive power as used by process theists must be shown to be, contrary to appearances, a coherent concept. If, as we believe, such a conceptual theodicy can only succeed by modifying the concept of persuasive power in such a way that an experiential theodicy is again needed, then there is no way of circumventing the need for an experiential theodicy, a theodicy that, as we have already indicated, no process theist has produced.

(1) The arguments, both metaphysical and moral, given for supposing that God’s power is persuasive rather than coercive are too well known to readers of process philosophy to need repeating in detail here, Let us begin by granting that the idea of God’s power as totally coercive is morally repugnant as well as conceptually incoherent, Process theists make a useful point when they insist that such coercive power is incompatible with divine goodness. They are also right in claiming that it is "double talk" to say that "God decides my decisions . . . yet they are truly mine" (3:203). However, process theists fail to notice that while totally coercive power may be objectionable, solely persuasive power may also be objectionable. Why must we suppose that God’s power is solely coercive or solely persuasive? ‘Why must we consider coerciveness and persuasiveness to be mutually exclusive?

Process theists excuse God of evil by saying that he quite properly respects the freedom ₀f his creatures and only tries to persuade them to do good-Although we agree that it would be morally repugnant for God to take all freedom from his creatures, we fail to see why there are not many situations in which a certain amount of coercive power is morally required. We cannot agree with John Cobb when he says that "[t]he only power capable of any worthwhile result is the power of persuasion" (2:90). Consider an analogy. It would not do to excuse a mother for the grossly evil habits of her child by appealing to her use of persuasion only, when sometimes there have been situations in which some coercion was morally required. To be sure, a mother who uses coercion frequently destroys the child’s individuality and, in so doing, destroys, in a sense, her power over him. However, no reasonable person is asking for the frequent use of coercion. Rather the reasonable person asks for whatever mixture of coercion and persuasion is appropriate to a particular situation. The reasonable person asks of God also the same appropriate mixture of coercion and persuasion. Consequently, it is not enough to show that this or that evil in the world is compatible with divine persuasive power for the good; it must also be shown that this or that situation is one in which the exercise ₀f only persuasive power is morally appropriate. If it is not a situation in which only persuasive power is appropriate, then it must be asked why God did not use a degree of coercion. Once one recognizes that it is not a question of whether God’s power is to be conceived of as either totally coercive or totally persuasive, one must ask the crucial question whether the extent and distribution of evil in the world are compatible with the existence of a God who always exercises the mixture of coercion and persuasion that is morally required.

We recognize that in a metaphysics of social process "coercive power" is considered a self-contradictory term and existence of any kind, sentient or non-sentient, entails freedom. However, choice of terminology is unimportant. Surely in any plausible metaphysics it is possible to distinguish degrees of creativity, freedom, etc. Hartshorne admits as much when he says that "all creatures have some [our emphasis] freedom" (3:205). When such distinctions are made, something equivalent to degrees of coercion are recognized and one can meaningfully ask whether the morally appropriate degree of coercive power is being exercised in a particular situation.

(2) Persuasive power alone is appropriate, however. in at least some contexts. But even in those situations process theists have left important questions unanswered. Is the extent and distribution of evil in those contexts compatible with the exercise of great persuasive power for the good? We cannot be satisfied with Lewis Ford’s assertion that any evil is "compatible with unlimited persuasive power" (PPCT 289). In ordinary contexts we quite reasonably cease to believe that great persuasive power is being exercised if we find that a high proportion of those who should be persuaded remain unpersuaded. We all recognize that a high enough proportion remaining unpersuaded makes unlikely the exercise of great persuasive power and no reason is given why this isn’t also the case with God. It is hardly adequate to answer. as Ford does, that the "measure of persuasion . . . is not how many people are actually persuaded at any given time, but the intrinsic value of the goal proposed" (PPCT 298n13). We agree that the intrinsic merit of unselfishness, for example, is very great and we applaud a mother who tries strenuously to convince her child to be unselfish, but if she generally fails, then we think that she does not have much persuasive power in spite of the excellence of her goals.

Our point is simply that process theists have not taken the problem of the large number that remain unpersuaded seriously. Any process theodicy that pretends to be adequate must provide an answer to this question and not content itself with saying that the exercise of persuasive power entails the existence of at least some who are unpersuaded. Clearly we agree to that. John Hick in his theodicy has attempted to explain in detail in terms of soul-making how the existence of traditional theistic power is compatible, not just with any evil, but with the extent and distribution of actual evil in the world, but process theists have made no parallel attempt to explain how the very high proportion remaining unpersuaded is compatible with the exercise of great persuasive power by God, though they have shown with little difficulty how the existence of some who are unpersuaded is compatible with great persuasive power.

(3) Process theists are sometimes inclined to minimize the problem of explaining the large number that remain unpersuaded by emphasizing the intrinsic value of the creativity and freedom that God promotes, albeit entailing risk of evil. Let us grant that God may have set up the laws of nature for the development of the intrinsic values of creativity and freedom, and that he may do many other things to promote these values. However, if this is the case, an adequate theodicy must show that creativity and freedom are being maximized In this world by a great persuasive power. It is not sufficient to point to the fact that all process involves emergent novelty in some degree and infer from such emergent novelty a God exercising great persuasive power to foster creativity and freedom. Nor is it sufficient to pronounce creativity the ultimate metaphysical principle and say: "To be is to create" (CSPM 1). In ordinary contexts we would find unacceptable an analysis of a society which pointed to the fact that even men in solitary confinement exercise some freedom of choice and inferred from that freedom that this is a society In which creativity and freedom are being fostered by a great persuasive power. An adequate analysis of a society must take seriously the question of whether more creativity and freedom are feasible. While it is clear that there is genuine creativity and freedom everywhere in this world, it would seem to us that there are many situations in which we would like to see a great deal more creativity and freedom, and an adequate theodicy must show that this additional creativity and freedom cannot be achieved by even unlimited persuasive power. If the process theist is right in supposing that God’s power is the power to inspire freedom in others, then he must answer the question of whether more freedom could be inspired -- or whether the maximum amount has been achieved.

(4) One cannot avoid answering the above questions with impunity. If such questions are not answered, then we do not know that there is not a great persuasive power for evil. How do we know that the good acts in the world are not acts of resistance to an evil persuasive power? If we do not take the trouble to estimate on the basis of good and evil in the world the degree and kind of persuasive power being exercised, we may as reasonably believe that unlimited and evil persuasive power is being exercised as that great persuasive power for good is being exercised.

(5) Some process theists appear to be inclined to circumvent all these questions by insisting that process theism, like any metaphysics, cannot be disproved by the experiential facts of evil or by any other experiential findings. A metaphysics, Hartshorne argues, is to be judged on the basis of its conceptual coherence. The metaphysics of traditional theism he criticizes not on the grounds that empirical facts are incompatible with it but instead on the grounds that, e.g., the concept of omnipotence in traditional theism is incoherent:

Let us suppose that we accept this account of how a metaphysics is to be judged. The important question is then whether such concepts as persuasive power in theism are coherent. It is by no means clear to us that the concept of persuasive power as used by Hartshorne is coherent. Does it make conceptual sense to speak of a sort of power whose nature and extent is in principle impossible to estimate experientially? In ordinary contexts power is always something that can be, at least indirectly and roughly, measured experientially. To speak of completely unmeasurable power appears to be as much a "pseudo-idea" as to speak of weight that can never require force to lift.

If the concept of persuasive power in process theism is incoherent, then the metaphysics of process theism fails to pass the very test that Hartshorne proposes. If, on the other hand, persuasive power is made coherent by making such power experientially measurable, then the process theist is obliged to produce a theodicy in which it is shown that the proportion of goods to evils in the world is compatible with the exercise of great persuasive power for the good, and, as we have seen, no such theodicy has been produced.

References

CSPM -- Charles Hartshorne. Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method. LaSalle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1970.

PPCT -- Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves (eds.). Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971, for the essay by Lewis S. Ford, "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good," pp. 287-304.

1. M. B. Ahern. The Problem of Evil. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

2. John B. Cobb, Jr. God and the World. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969.

3. Charles Hartshorne. "A New Look at the Problem of Evil," in Frederick C. Dommeyer (ed.). Current Philosophical Issues: Essays in Honor of Curt John Ducasse. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1966.

4. John Hick. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

5. Edward H. Madden and Peter H, Hare. Evil and the Concept of God. Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1968.

6. Nelson Pike (ed.). God and Evil. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

A view held by many contemporary metaphysicians is that the problem of induction, so much discussed by philosophers of science, arises only because of mistaken metaphysical views; in particular views (deriving from Hume) about the nature of the causal relation and/or about the internal relations among different entities.¹ Contrary to this view, I will try to show: (I) That a rejection of the Humean view of causality in favor of one which allows for some sort of real relation of production (or "implication") between cause and effect is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for solving the problem of induction; (II) That a rejection of Hume’s metaphysical atomism in favor of some sort of theory of essential internal relations among entities is likewise neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for the solution of this problem.

I. Induction and Causality

Hume’s own discussion of induction (or, to use his language, "reasonings about matters of fact") in the first Enquiry is, of course, tied to his theory of causality. He begins by asking for the foundation of inferences made about matters of fact that are not immediately given to us and answers this initial question with the claim that all inferences about matters of fact are based on cause-effect relations. He then inquires about the foundation of assertions about cause-effect relations and decides that they must be based on experience since, the cause and its effect being contingently related entities, we cannot deduce a priori the latter from the former. Hume next asks, What is the foundation for these experiential arguments for the existence of cause-effect relations? In answering this question, Hume generalizes his discussion in a very significant way. He proposes a line of argument that purports to show that all arguments from experience (not just those for the existence of cause-effect relations) are rationally unjustifiable:

For our purposes, the most striking thing about this argument is that it does not appeal to Hume’s doctrine that causality involves no relation between the cause and effect other than constant conjunction. In fact, Hume accepts, for purposes of this argument, the more ordinary idea that there is some power in the cause that produces the effect ("the secret powers to produce nourishment and support"). To feel the force of Hume’s contention, we need only agree that the kind of effect produced by a cause is not determined simply by the external appearances of the cause; e.g., that the nutritive powers of bread are not present because of its color shape, texture, etc. We do not need to agree that, when eating of bread is followed by nourishment, the bread did not produce (by powers exercised by it on our body) the nourishment. In short, Hume’s problem is not the metaphysical one of whether or not some kinds of things in fact causally produce other kinds of things; but rather the epistemological one of determining what kinds of things will, in the future, produce certain other kinds of things. This latter problem arises, no matter what our view of causality, as long as we agree that the appearances of a thing prior to its causal activity do not determine the effects of this activity.

To illustrate further the point I am making here, consider one of the examples of truly productive causality which Whitehead gives as a refutation of Hume’s constant conjuction theory:

Suppose we accept completely the account Whitehead gives here, but that we ask the man in question a further question: "If tomorrow you find yourself in a dark room and a light is suddenly turned on, will you again blink?" Presumably he will reply that, other things being equal, he will. Why does he say this? Because he is convinced that the same causes in the same situations will have the same effects -- hence his qualifications of "other things being equal." The important point is that the circumstances tomorrow be sufficiently similar to those of today. Without knowing this, our knowledge of the relation of causal productivity establishes nothing.

I think the above discussion indisputably shows that acceptance of a theory of genuinely productive causality is not a sufficient condition for a solution to the problem of induction. Moreover, I think a little further reflection will show that acceptance of such a theory is not even a necessary condition for a solution to the problem. For suppose that it were; i.e., suppose that, for us to be rationally justified in predicting that the past conjunctions of C and E will occur in the future, it were necessary that we be justified in believing that C is causally productive of E. This would mean that we could never be rationally justified in expecting the future repetition of conjunctions between events that we know are not causally related. For example, in spite of all the supporting instances, there would be no rational foundation for believing that when barometers drop there will be a storm or that when the bell rings the students will leave the classroom. But surely we are rationally justified in believing things of this sort, just as we are rationally justified in believing the countless constant conjunctions discovered by science between quantities that are not causally related.

Thus, having good reason to believe that there is a relation of production between two kinds of things (or two events) is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for having good reason to believe that in the future things of this kind will act as they did in the past. But perhaps it can be shown that some sort of information about productive causal relations is a necessary condition for justified inductive inferences. For example, isn’t it the case that we are justified in believing that a storm will occur when a barometer drops only because we have reason to believe that the storm and the barometer-drop are products of a common cause? It may well be true that, if we know there is a regularity in drops of barometers being followed by occurrences of storms, we also know that there is a common cause for the two events. But surely it is wrong to say that having the latter knowledge is a reason for our having the former. Quite the contrary: the reason we believe the storm and barometer-drop have a common cause is that we are already convinced of the regularity of their conjunction. And, more generally, it is already-justified beliefs about regularities that, for the most part, provide the foundation for our conjectures about the existence of relations of causal production. And in the cases like Whitehead’s blink example where we do seem to have direct knowledge of casual production, this knowledge is surely not necessary for us to be justified in asserting a regular connection between light flashes and blinks (e.g., we could assert the regularity on the basis of records of experiments done on other persons).

In summary: (1) Having good reason to believe that events of type C have in the past causally produced events of type E is not a sufficient condition for reasonably asserting that events of type C will in the future be followed by events of type E. For to justify the prediction in any particular case we must also know that the future event of type C is sufficiently similar to the past event of type C. (2) Having good reason to believe that events of type C have in the past causally produced events of type E is not a necessary condition for reasonably asserting that events of type C will in the future be followed by events of type B. For we are justified in predicting the future conjunction of events that we know are not causally related. (3) Having good reason to believe that events of type C and E have a common productive cause is not a necessary condition for reasonably asserting that events of type C will in the future be followed by events of type F. For, in many cases, it is precisely our justified belief that a regularity will be observed between C and E which is the reason for believing that C and E have a common cause. (Nor, of course, could this condition be sufficient, for the same kind of reasons relevant to [l])

II. Induction and Internal Relations

The acceptance of a theory of real causal production does not provide a basis for solving the problem of induction because that problem is not concerned with the nature of the connection between "causally" connected events but with the relation between our knowledge of past instances of such connected events to the probability of future occurrences of similar instances. Schematically, we are not concerned with the relation between C₁ and E₁ or with the relation between C₂ and E₂ ; but we are concerned with the relation between the pairs (C₁E₁) and (C₂E₂). (C₁ and C₂ are things of the same type -- e.g., loaves of bread -- which act, at different times, as causes of their respective effects, E~ and E, -- e.g., nutrition.) The problem of induction is: How can we know that the similarity between C₁ and C₂ is great enough to make likely the similarity of E₁ and E₂? This formulation suggests that what is needed metaphysically is a doctrine that will provide a genuine link between (C₁E₁) and (C₂E₂) -- a link that will provide enough essential continuity between the two pairs of events to make likely the sufficient amount of similarity needed to ground an inductive inference rationally. Such a link seems to be provided by metaphysical theories which posit real internal relations between past and future events. Whitehead, for example, holds that what any given actual entity is depends, to a great extent, on what the actual entities in its past were; for a large part of the present actual entity’s nature consists in its internal re-realization (via "prehension") of the natures of past actual entities. Since on this view the actual entity is, to a great extent, itself a projection of the past, it would seem that we are justified in projecting its future behavior on the basis of the known behavior of past actual entities.

Whitehead develops this kernel of thought in his treatment of the problem of induction:

For the purposes of our discussion, let us translate this account into the language of Hume’s example of the loaves of bread. If we ask, Will loaf of bread A (today) nourish us, as did loaf of bread B (yesterday)? we presuppose by the very form of the question that we have the same general kind of entity today that we had yesterday (both are loaves of bread). Now, according to the Whiteheadian doctrine of internal relations, to be a loaf of bread means to have incorporated a certain kind of structure from things in one’s past (this is the "presupposed type of data"). But this, in turn, means that to be a loaf of bread is to be part qf a certain kind of environment -- i.e., to have certain types of entities in one’s immediate past. Consequently, as soon as we talk about "a loaf of bread," we are necessarily talking about a certain kind of physical environment. But part of being "a certain kind of physical environment" is being governed by certain kinds of physical laws (i.e., regularities in cause-effect sequences). As a result, when we talk about today’s loaf of bread, we are necessarily discussing something that obeys the same kind of laws of nature as did yesterday’s loaf of bread. Since the nutrition follows the eating of bread in virtue of laws of nature, we can justifiably conclude that today’s bread, like yesterday’s, will produce nutrition.

I think we may take this argument of Whitehead’s as typical of the kind of solution to the problem of induction that can be based on a metaphysical theory of internal relations. However, as I will now try to show, this solution is not an acceptable one; and, in fact, a metaphysics of internal relations, like a theory of productive causality, is neither (1) a sufficient nor (2) a necessary condition for a solution to the problem of induction.

(1) As the quotation from Whitehead shows, the argument based on internal relations requires for its cogency the assumption that the cause whose future effect we are predicting be of the same type as the cause whose effect we have observed in the past. Thus, we have the same problem of determining sufficient similarity that we discussed in connection with theories of productive causality. Whitehead himself is aware of this problem. After noting that the core of the justification of induction is the claim that the future entity and environment are somehow "analogous" to the past entity and environment (from which it follows that similar laws "dominate" the two environments), he says:

Let us try to develop the point Whitehead is making more thoroughly in terms of the bread example. We have knowledge of a past situation (S) in which an entity (x) possessing the set of properties (B) that prompt us to call it "bread" produced the set of properties (N) that we call "nutrition." Now we encounter another situation (S) involving an entity (y) which also possesses the set of properties B. Will it produce the set of properties N? The theory of internal relations allows us to say that, to the extent that the two things sharing the set of properties B are alike, they will obey the same laws of nature and hence produce the same result. But to what extent are these two things alike? In addition to the known common properties B (and some known but presumably irrelevant different properties) they surely each have an indefinite number of other properties which we do not know about. How do we know that these unknown differences will not make a significant difference in the kinds of laws relevant to x and y? For example, y may be laced with arsenic or be a clever synthetic product which simulates all the external properties of bread but has no nutritional value. Of course, no one would claim that such possibilities are out of the question. It is only a question of what will probably happen. But then we must ask, Why is the case of no significant difference in the outcome of eating the bread the most probable case?

The theory of internal relations can give us no answer. Even if, on the basis of it, we admit that the same set of laws governs the two situations, S and S¹, we still have no way of knowing that the particular laws that are applicable to the behavior of x will be applicable to the behavior of y. For example, even given the same physics and chemistry for S and S¹, different laws will be relevant depending on whether y is "ordinary" bread or laced with arsenic. Once again, there is an epistemological problem of determining sufficient similarity, which cannot be resolved by any metaphysical views.

We know how we would proceed in practice. We would examine what for the particular situation, we regard as a sufficient number of relevant properties of y (fewer in an ordinary situation in our own kitchen, more if we have received the bread by mail from an unknown person and have recently escaped several attempts on our life). If these properties were shared with x, then we would conclude that the effect of y would probably be nutrition. This is undoubtedly the correct procedure to follow, although how to justify it has been long disputed. However, we can at least point out that the procedure is not justified by appealing to the fact (founded on the theory of internal relations) that S and S¹ are governed by the same set of laws of nature. For the problem is rather, which of these laws apply to the behavior of y. To answer this question, we need to know how similar y is to x, given that it is similar with regard to the set of properties B. But the metaphysics of internal relations gives us no basis for answering this question. At the best, it can tell us that if there is a sufficient similarity, the same laws will apply.

Whitehead implicitly concedes the insufficiency of the metaphysics of internal relations when, to obtain a basis for making probable assertions about future events, he introduces two special assumptions about the relation of actual occasions to their environments:

Whitehead introduces these two assumptions to guarantee that the thing about which we want to make a prediction will have only a finite number of properties relevant to the future behavior in which we are interested. Given this, he will argue (in terms of a Keynesian statistical theory of probability) that the more relevant properties common to x and y we find, the more likely it is that all the relevant properties are common. Quite apart from any questions that might be raised against Keynes’s approach or statistical probability in general, it is obvious that the two assumptions Whitehead introduces to insure the "limitation of independent variety" are not logical consequences of the metaphysical doctrine of internal relations. (I.e., the fact that what an entity is depends on its relations to everything else does not imply that "everything else" is a finite set or that only a finite set of "everything else" is significant -- for some purpose -- in the determination of what that entity is.) This shows that for Whitehead’s account in particular internal relations are not a sufficient condition for a solution to the problem of induction.

(2) We can also readily see that, for Whitehead, the doctrine of internal relations cannot even be a necessary condition for the validity of inductive inferences. For, given the Keynesian approach to statistical probability (which Whitehead seems to accept in all relevant respects) the only prerequisite for a validation of induction is a limitation of independent variety, such as Whitehead insures by the introduction of his two hypotheses. Now it is true that Whitehead states these hypotheses in terms of the theory of internal relations (saying, in effect, that only a finite number of these relations are ever relevant for the behavior of a given actual entity). But it would be just as possible to guarantee the limitation by hypotheses that were not formulated in such terms (as, for example, Keynes himself did). All that is needed is that we somehow have good reason to believe that the properties of an entity relative to its future behavior are finite in number. And surely no one could successfully maintain that these properties could be finite in number only if they are determined by the entity’s internal relations to other entities. Even in the most atomistic Humean universe, this kind of finitude is quite possible.

Further, even outside the framework of Keynes’s theory, probability approaches to induction seem to have shown that a validation of induction can be given with far weaker factual assumptions than the doctrine of internal relations. For example, even his critics agree that D. C. Williams’ attempt at an a priori defense of induction achieves its desired aim if we add the assumption that our statistical samples are random.² Of course, if Williams really must add this assumption, then his program is a failure, since he thinks that such an assumption would have itself to be based on inductive evidence and so would render the argument circular. But the proponents of metaphysical validations of induction must clearly hold (to avoid circularity) that their metaphysical views are derived from methods other than the inductive. Consequently, against them, it is perfectly appropriate to point out that there are alternative assertions about the world which, supposing them to be justified by metaphysical methods independent of induction, would validate induction without the assumption of the doctrine of internal relations. This, I think, suffices to show that this doctrine is not a necessary condition for a solution to the problem of induction.

To summarize this section (1) The doctrine of internal relations is not a sufficient condition for solving the problem of induction because, like the doctrine of causal production, it gives us no information on the crucial question of the essential similarity of the past and the present cause. (2) Nor is the doctrine a necessary condition for the solution, since there are other independent metaphysical assertions which, if justified in a non-circular way, would be able to support a solution.

References

1. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Ants, 1955.

Notes

1. See, for example, D. J. B. Hawkins, Causality and Implication (London: Sheed & Ward, 1937), Ch. VI; A. C. Ewing, The Fundamental Questions of Philosophy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951); PR II, Ch. 9. For a discussion of Whitehead’s views on induction, cf. the exchange between J. W. Robson and M. W. Gross, "Whitehead’s Answer to Hume," Journal of Philosophy, 38 (1941), 85-102. These essays are reprinted in George L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on his Philosophy, 1963. Also of interest is Harold Taylor’s comment on the Robson-Gross exchange, "Hume’s Answer to Whitehead," Journal of Philosophy 38 (1941). 409-16.

2. Williams’ treatment is in The Ground of Induction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947). One of his most acute critics is F. L. Will, "Donald Williams’ Theory of Induction," Philosophical Review, 57 (1948), 236 ff.

Introduction

None of us is wholly the creation of his past, but each creates something new on the basis of what he receives. This statement summarizes an important aspect of the views and teaching of Professor Hartshorne; but, interestingly, it also provides a key to the understanding of his own place in the tradition. Hartshorne is intimately related to a number of recent thinkers, especially, as is well known, to A. N. Whitehead. But he in also a part of the Western tradition of speculative metaphysics that reaches back through Plato to the Presocratics. Its past is his past, and therefore an examination of the relation of the twentieth century process philosopher to three important predecessors will be instructive both for an illustration of the way ideas develop through history and for an understanding of Hartshorne himself. In the following account some simplification is inevitable, as it is with all attempts to look at the history of ideas synoptically. But even simplifications can be illuminating.

I. Idealism: Berkeley Reversed

Each of the three main sections of this paper will begin with a claim of Hartshorne’s and illuminate it with the help of a comparison with a figure in Hartshorne’s past. The first claim concerns his idealism, about which he is explicit. In one early paper he espouses idealism as "the doctrine that psychological categories alone explain the universe" (7:466), while the title of a later article is significant: "The Synthesis of Idealism and Realism" (8). How our philosopher achieves a combination of two apparently opposing doctrines remains to be seen and will emerge as the comparison with Berkeley proceeds.

Bishop Berkeley’s chief popular fame is derived from his theory of perception. In this he takes up his great predecessor’s doctrine that the objects of our thinking, obtained as they are through perception, are ideas. Now, we are not so much concerned here with Berkeley’s narrowing of Locke’s conception as with the kind of language in which his theory is expressed. An idea is something that is "in" the mind. "Since therefore the objects of sense exist only in the mind . . . I choose to mark them by the word idea" (l:xxix). The meaning of in, however, is not very clear in Berkeley. It is beyond doubt that he meant something other than a simple assertion that the mind is a kind of box container into which ideas are conveyed by the senses, although that is the metaphorical background of Lock’s conception of mind as "the yet empty cabinet" (9:I, II, 15). One suggestion is that the "in is the equivalent of in relation to" (10:286), but in reply to this is I. C. Tipton’s view that Berkeley is more ambiguous than his defenders allow (12:93-95). It is therefore a complex and difficult matter of interpretation, by contrast with which the view of Hartshorne is somewhat more straightforward. "The vaunted transcendence, taken as externality of known to knower, is . . . really a defect of our human knowledge." It is when philosophers do not take account of our finitude that they can hold "the view that mind does not literally include its objects" (DR 111).

Hartshorne’s view that in perception the mind includes its objects does not entail that he is being crude or less subtle than Berkeley. Rather, he is working in a different direction and with a particular theological model in the background. For him, the paradigm case of perception, against which all other instances are to be judged, is that of God. Only God is omniscient, and for him alone there is nothing "outside." This is, of course, what is meant by panentheism: not that God is in everything -- though in a secondary sense he is -- but that the primary relation of God to other things is that all things have their becoming in the omniscient mind of God. In him they live and move and have their being (PSG 22).

But our inquiry is in danger of running ahead of itself. The nature of the inclusiveness will occupy our attention later; in the meantime we have to ask what precisely it is that is contained in the mind of God and in the minds of other things and how it gets there. Here the contrast with Berkeley marks Hartshorne’s essential difference from, and development of, the great idealist. How do ideas enter the minds with which Berkeley is concerned? Certainly, they have to be placed there, because we ourselves are not responsible for them.

If we are passive in perception, whence our ideas? The heart of Berkeley’s apologetic for theism beats in the twofold answer to the question. First, there is nothing about the ideas themselves that could account for their being as they are. They are totally inanimate and inactive, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that they should initiate our perception; "how can that which is inactive be a cause; or that which is unthinking be a cause of thought?" (2:250). Second, therefore, such ideas as are not accountable for in terms of the agency of finite minds must be accounted for theologically. They derive from the one infinite mind, God’s: "there is a mind which affects me at every moment with all the sensible impressions I receive. And from the variety, order, and manner of these, I conclude the author of them to be wise, powerful and good, beyond comprehension" (2:249).

Hartshorne agrees in the basic idealism, that all reality is in some way related to mind. He agrees in seeing the mind as a receiver of the objects of perception: like Berkeley’s his is a causal theory. Where he disagrees is in his rejection of the two central points of Berkeley’s theory that have just been described. In doing so, he shifts the initiative for perception’s causation from God to the individual object, or cosmic event, to see it in his terms. Far from being nonsense that the object of perception should cause us to see it, it is a major feature of Hartshorne’s world-view. Objects of perception are not inanimate ideas but real events (hence the "realism"). Reality consists of events that are all animate to a degree appropriate to their complexity and organization. Hartshorne, as he often says, is a panpsychist. His doctrine holds that everything is creative, producing something that did not exist before it; and it is these creative events that are the causes of other, later events perceiving them as they pass into the past (RSP 134f).

God has an essential part to play in all this, but inevitably it is very different from the function ascribed to him by Berkeley. In the latter, God is essentially an active being, as is clear from the passages quoted above, while other beings are passive, at least insofar as they are related to God. It is a very voluntaristic conception of God, a God who is pure will, and therefore in this respect nearer to the classical concept of God than to Hartshorne’s. It is he who causes passive minds to perceive; how, otherwise, could inanimate ideas enter mental realities?

Hartshorne’s God, on the other hand, is not conceived in terms of his difference from other realities in the world; the concept is true to Whitehead’s principle that God should be the supreme instantiation of and not the exception to metaphysical principles (PR 521). Just as finite events receive some of their reality from the predecessors they perceive, so it is with God. Like them, and therefore also like Berkeley’s finite perceivers, he is passive in perception; with them, the content of his perception is independent of his will, for the creative events are free -- though, of course, within the limits that God also represents -- to give to reality and so to God something of their creative novelty. God’s function in relation to other beings is therefore rather of persuasion than of voluntaristic initiation. "God changes us by changing himself in response to our previous responses to him, and to this divine response to our response we subsequently respond. Creation is modeled in dialogue" (CSPM 277). Precisely how this is conceived to take place does not concern us here. For our purposes, the point is, in summary, that Hartshorne shares Berkeley’s idealism, for all reality is to be understood in terms of mind. But the idealism is transformed. Reality is not ideal simply in being mind-related. It is ideal in that every event -- and that means all reality -- has a mental component. Therefore, through its initiative, it really impinges upon the events that are related to it in the spacetime continuum. The present event perceives the events immediately in its past realty, as they are, and as they pass into the cosmic memory. The transformation is brought about by applying Berkeley’s concept of the perceiving mind also to God -- and at the same time by transferring the initiative in the mind-object relation from God alone to the individual event in dialogue with God.

II. Neoclassical Theism: Aquinas Upended

Hartshorne’s assertion that his theology is neoclassical is his second major claim to be considered here. In this, his relationship to Aquinas is important, since the medieval scholastic theologian represents classical theism in its most perfect form. As any reader will know, much of Hartshorne’s writing is concerned with sparring with the classical concept. Indeed, it is not a great exaggeration to say that the battle is a constant preoccupation. But this only serves to emphasize the importance of the relation to the figure in the past. Men do not attack those they think to be unworthy of notice or beneath contempt. Moreover, the very name, neoclassical, is significant. Different emphases of Hartshorne’s theology will come to light when different parts of the word are stressed. Neoclassical theism is new, but it is new in relation to the classical tradition.

Hartshorne takes from Aquinas his realist view of perception. When an event of perception takes place, the perceiver is really related to the object of perception and is therefore internally related to it. Moreover -- and it is here that Hartshorne is unequivocally opposed to some idealistic theories -- the object perceived is externally related to the perceiver since he, qua perceiver, is passively receptive and in no way affects its reality. "Aquinas . . . makes a fine contribution to the theory of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ relations, to use language current recently. The Thomistic language is perhaps better: that relations are either ‘real’ or merely ‘logical’" (PSG 119f). In fact, all is well until Aquinas comes to deal with the relation of God to the world, when, like Berkeley, he refuses to see God in the same way as the rest of reality. If the perceiver is really related to, and so affected by, his relation to what he perceives, God, as the supremely relative being, the omniscient perceiver, will be the most affected of all. Aquinas has made the mistake of inverting the relation: "the divine knowing is creative and hence not at all the same thing as human knowing . . . Thomas thinks it has, however, an analogically common meaning. But it is an analogy which inverts the two terms, giving the ‘subject’ the very role taken, in the ordinary case, by the object!" (PSG 120). "Does this not imply that God, so conceived, is a super-object rather than a super-subject?" (PSG 131). Where, in the standard case, the subject is internally related to the object of perception, with God it is the reverse: the subject (God) is externally related, so that his perception of the world makes no difference at all to him. But that is a logical absurdity.

Why is it so important for Hartshorne to point out the source and nature of the error? First of all, it is because he believes that by making a logical blunder Aquinas has produced a false concept of God. But, second, Hartshorne wants to show that a true concept of God can be derived from philosophizing within the same tradition of thought. What is here meant by the "same tradition of thought" requires some clarification. The neoclassical theologian believes that Thomas has not only a distorted concept of God but also a false ontology. Where the two are in the same tradition is in their sharing what can be called a cosmological approach to metaphysics: both derive their concept of God from reflection upon the cosmos. To put it otherwise, both produce a concept of God by arguing from the world to God by means of analogy. Aquinas begins in the right place, but his analogical reasoning is false. God is treated as the exception to metaphysical principles, with the result that his relation to the world is fundamentally misconstrued. Because he is unrelated to the world, and as a result unaffected by its relation to him, he is the unloving, impassible, absolute, timeless unmoved mover and, one might add, the negation rather than the affirmation of our life on earth.

That this distorted view of God is closely related to the inversion of the perceptual relation is clear when we realize that all the attributes of the classical deity follow from the assertion of God’s absoluteness. For Hartshorne absolute is a technical philosophical term, whose meaning he takes from Aquinas. It is only secondarily to be understood in its meaning of an absolute ruler, with all the unfortunate implications that has for man’s relation to God. Primarily, it is a synonym for externally related: the absolute is the term of a perceptual relation that denotes total unaffectedness by the relation, just as the number three or the Form of the Good or the tree in the quad are unmoved by my conceiving or perceiving them (DR 67-74).

If God is conceived as absolute in relation to the creatures, as we have seen that he is according to Aquinas, then all the gloomy negatives of the classical concept follow logically and necessarily from the primary insight. Hartshorne will have nothing to do with this abstractly negative God, and it is one of the achievements of his philosophy continually to have pointed out the implications of classical theism (even though, of course, classical theists would wish to resist the drawing of some of them). Perhaps, however, it is more accurate to say that he will only deal with the negative abstractions if they are firmly subordinated to other conceptions; if the language of classical theism is turned firmly upon its head. Two things happen in Hartshorne’s positive doctrine. First, he uses the same language, but negates the negatives. God is not absolute, but relative, because, as omniscient, he perceives all those events that cause him to perceive them; not unmoved and impassible, but very moved, sharing all the joys and sorrows of the creatures; not timeless, but participating temporally in all that happens.

The other major process theologian, A. N. Whitehead, found it needful to create a whole new language for his ideas. Hartshorne has expressed a similar philosophy very much in traditional Aristotelian terms, for example in his use of the language of perceptual relatedness for Whitehead’s prehension. Hartshorne’s achievement is the less original, for the creator of new language, so long as he is not using barbarisms or neologisms for the sake of it, is the one who enables language to do more in its quest to grasp symbolically the universe in which we do our thinking. Hartshorne’s merit is a lesser one, but important for all that: he shows us how neoclassical metaphysics is anchored in the great philosophers of the past and thus allows us to evaluate the present philosophy more easily.

This brings us to the second consequence of the inversion of the original Aristotelian language. As is well known, Hartshorne’s God is dipolar. We have so far described the concrete pole of God, God as he is in his direct relatedness to all other reality. But that is not all that has to be said about him. After all, God is not merely relative: his is a supreme relativity, embracing all else that happens; he is not merely temporal, but his reality stretches infinitely back in time and will continue to eternity. There is an abstract pole, too. Abstractly considered, God is absolute, for his relativity is absolute and unsurpassable; he is immutable, for his mutability cannot waver, and soon (MVG, ch. I; CSPM, ch. VI). All of Thomas’s abstract terms are used, but not in the sense in which he used them. They describe the abstract pole of the concretely relative God (PSG 507f). Indeed, cannot the scholastic’s chief error be characterized by saying that he has made the whole what should only be a part, and a subordinate part at that?

And so the relationship between Hartshorne and Aquinas is not unfairly described, in the words of the old cliché, as one of love-hate. It might be said, without exaggeration, that the former has played the same game, but with very different rules; or rather, according to his own account, that he has played the same game but has shown that Aquinas did not keep the rules at all. The first version would be fairer to Aquinas, for it is unlikely that he would find Hartshorne’s charge convincing. He was operating with a negative theology, while Hartshorne’s is a theology of eminence. They are in different worlds of thought: the one sees the thing or substance as the ultimate reality, the other the event. All follows from that. Therefore Hartshorne might seem to be a little hard on Aquinas when he accuses him of mistaking the facts of perception. Thomas had his reasons for seeing God as an exception, for he was operating with a very different set of axioms. But, for our purpose, the interesting feature to note is that the worlds of the two, though different, are in a dialectical relation to each other. Negation is not simply negation, but negation with a view to taking the negated concept up into a higher synthesis.

III. The World-Soul: Spinoza Transformed

The third claim of Hartshorne’s that we shall examine is that God is the soul of the world (MVG, ch. V). Once again, we shall find him in a dialectical relationship with a predecessor, though not one that fits the Hegelian pattern as does that with Aquinas. First we must examine briefly what he says about Spinoza. His word of praise is that the great rationalist performed a notable service in carrying through the logic of the classical conception, thus revealing it in its true colors (PSG 189-91). Spinoza is still numbered among the unconverted, but there are signs that light is dawning. By taking the physical world up into God he at least went some way to seeing a real reciprocal relationship between God and the creatures. "We wish only that Spinoza had dared further and had treated temporal extension according to the same logic. We endure through limited time God endures though unlimited time. . . . But had Spinoza done this, he would have been a panentheist rather than a pantheist. We must take him as the pantheist which he is" (PSG 191).

If we probe a little deeper, we shall find that there is much more to be said about their relationship. Spinoza is often thought to be the most abstract of thinkers, the one most successful in expelling figurative and metaphorical concepts from his system. Thus Stuart Hampshire attributes to him the liberation of theology from gross pictures (6:40f). And yet, paradoxically, that same commentator speaks, somewhat dismissively, of metaphysical systems like Spinoza’s as depending on the generalizing of metaphors ("logical doctrines and linguistic analogies" -- 6 :218f). This is a far more fruitful suggestion, for it is in their metaphorical background that we shall best view the relationship between the neoclassical panentheist and the classical pantheist.

God -- or substance, or nature, or the universe, however we wish to put it -- is, for Spinoza, comprehended by the human mind under two of his attributes, thought and extension. God is infinite thought and infinite extension (10: II, PROPS. 1-2). Whence did Spinoza derive those concepts? Not from pure thought alone, surely. If we glance back a few years to the speculations of Rene Descartes, we shall see that for him thought and extension were the two realities comprising the human person. Descartes metaphysics -- his view of what was real -- derived from reflection on the fundamental discovery that he, Descartes, was "precisely speaking, only a thinking thing, that is, a mind (mens sive animus), understanding or reason" (4:88). Thus he was "a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing" (3:27). That is to say, Descartes’ view of the world began with his reflections on the non-extendedness of mind and proceeded to contrast it with matter, of which his body consisted, whose essence was extension. The whole of reality is conceived after the pattern of either mind or body. When Spinoza took over the two key terms, and made them to coalesce into one single reality with two aspects, can it be supposed that the original metaphor was completely lost? Rather, it would seem that Spinoza’s generalized metaphor is that of the mind and body, though, of course, he conceives the relation of thought and extension very differently from Descartes.

The Spinozist substance, Deus sive natura, is then a kind of infinite mind-body (mens sive corpus). But that, of course, is true also of the conception of the world to be found in the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne: "we shall never understand a God of love unless we conceive him as the all-sensitive mind of the world-body" (BH 208). There are, needless to say, great differences in the understanding of the analogy, but let us first glance briefly at some of the features the two have in common. In particular, there is present in both the desire to solve the problem of the relation of mind and body by denying that there is an essential difference between the two. Ever since the problem was set in its starkest form by Descartes, there have been various attempts to wrestle with the question he bequeathed. Over the years these have ranged from attempts to uphold something like a Cartesian position, to theories which deny the ultimate reality of either mind or matter. Hartshorne’s wish to be both idealist and realist is again revealed in his doctrine that everything is both "mental" and "physical." In this sense, he shares the concern of Spinoza.

Where he differs is in the way he achieves his synthesis. For him ultimate realities are not things, but events. "Substance is a ‘being’ to which adventures happen, or experiences. . . . . The alternative . . . is to view events or states (e.g., ‘I now’) as the concrete realities, and construe enduring things, substances, persons, as ways in which events are qualified, and related to other events" (CSPM 45f). What we take to be things are in fact composed of myriad events, linked together in both space and time in various groupings at different levels of complexity. Each event is a momentary mind-body understood on the analogy of the organism. "We must choose between a dualism and an organic monism" (LP 191f), Hartshorne argues and proceeds to show how it is possible to understand both reality as a whole and its parts to be organic (LP 191-215). Thus the panpsychism we mentioned in section I above must be further specified. it is not a panpsychism of Cartesian souls extended in time but not in space. Everything for Hartshorne is both spatial and temporal, or it would not be at all. From the lowest electronic event to the highest most complex cosmic becoming (God’s) there are found elements of what we call matter and mind. Our frequent mistake is to abstract one from the other, and in our everyday language and metaphysical thinking to misconstrue the nature of reality.

The temporality of every reality brings a contrast with Spinoza’s system, for which time is fundamentally unreal. The infinite mind-body is not for Hartshorne a static whole "thing" whose apparent changes and movements are merely rearrangements of an unchanging totality; rather, each event is real, new, unique and, moreover, contributes cumulatively to the reality that has gone before. When we ask, then, in what sense Hartshorne’s God is the soul of the universe, the answer is that God is the soul-event in which is summed up all past and present reality. God is the divine cosmic happening that embraces all other past and contemporary happenings. He is the whole universe as it happens, on the basis of its remembered (by God) past at any given moment in the universal process, and he is more than that.

The relationship of God to the world is, therefore, an inclusive one, to be understood on the analogy of the case we know directly, our own. According to the neoclassical understanding, the human mind-body is a series of events organized into a particular finite chain. Some of the events that impinge upon our minds are internal to ourselves -- pain, memory, etc -- while others are external, as when we perceive other series of events going on about us. With God, there is no such distinction. Everything is directly and omnisciently perceived because everything is both internal to him and consciously observed (MVG 177-92). The world could therefore be defined as what happens within God; and God as the soul of the world which is his body.

I have suggested elsewhere that Hartshorne’s cosmos is what happens when Spinoza’s God is catapulted into time (5:93). But it should be stressed that to make the timeless temporal is something of a transformation. In particular, it is to make possible a distinction between God and the world. Whereas in Spinoza God is the world, with Hartshorne there is, as was observed near the beginning of this paper, panentheism rather than a pantheism. Sometimes this cosmos appears to be little more than a pantheism in motion, as when Hartshorne says rather cryptically that "God is the self-identical individuality of the world somewhat as a man is the self-identical individuality of his ever changing system of atoms" (MVG 230f). But from another point of view it is possible to stress the distinction between God and the world. How near we are to pantheism is not easy to discover and is in any case outside the limits of this study. Suffice it to say that when we think of God as the contemporary cosmic event -- stressing his relative pole -- the system seems rather pantheistic; but when we stress the abstract pole, and conceive of God in his function as the cosmic memory and container of the past, the distinction comes into greater relief. As always with this philosopher, it is necessary to keep both aspects in view.

As a concluding summary, we can say that Hartshorne shares Spinoza’s predilection for the mind-body metaphor, and, moreover, his fundamental rationalism: the belief, that is, that it is possible to describe the universe as a whole by means of philosophical concepts. The difference is revealed in the use that is made of the metaphor and the way in which the words mind and body are understood. The universe is conceived to be essentially temporal in its deepest reality and to be internal to God rather than to be God.

Conclusion

A philosopher’s relation to his past is always important, because ideas do not just happen in an intellectual vacuum. Whatever the merits of Hartshorne’s speculation for an understanding of the universe, he has thrown light on the way that human thought moves and develops. His relation to the three great metaphysicians we have treated -- and it is possible that treatment in the light of others would also be illuminating -- is by no means uniform, His relation to Berkeley has to be teased out, for the British idealist is not often mentioned by the neoclassical metaphysician. But, nonetheless, he does provide an interesting backcloth to some of the elements of Hartshorne’s view of the relation of man and God to the world. The relationship to Spinoza is also elusive, for mention of him is made chiefly in the context of a discussion of classical pantheism, neither of whose leading ideas is accepted by Hartshorne. The chief hint we are given of a relationship is the clear feeling that Spinoza might have looked at other possibilities opened up by his speculation.

In Hartshorne’s relations to both of these predecessors there are elements of rejection, influence, and development. But his dominating concern in his relations with the past is to overturn the classical concept of God. This means that Aquinas’s Aristotelianism is never far from his thoughts and writings. The pattern, however, is almost classically Hegelian: if Aquinas is the thesis (the absolute), Hartshorne is the antithesis (the relative) and the resulting synthesis (dipolarity of relative and absolute)

Thus the relationship with the past is an eclectic one. Different parts of the metaphysical inheritance have been combined in an original way to produce a view of the world that is Hartshorne’s alone, for even those who follow him will have alterations to make. Undoubtedly they will if they are true to his doctrine that there must be an element of freedom in the way a present creative event uses its past.

REFERENCES

BH -- Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature. Chicago: Willet, Clark & Company, 1937. Nebraska: Bison Books edition, 1968.

CSPM -- Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method. London: SCM Press, 1970. LaSalle: Open Court, 1970.

DR -- The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948.

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

MVG -- Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism. Chicago: Willett, Clark & Company, 1941. Reprinted, 1964, by Archon Books, Hamden, Conn.

PSG -- Philosophers Speak of God (with William L. Reese). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953.

RSP -- Reality as Social Process: Studies in Metaphysics and Religion. Glencoe: The Free Press, and Boston: Beacon Press, 1953. Reprinted by Hafner, 1971.

1. G. Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge.

2. G. Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. London: Dent, 1910. -

3. R. Descartes, Discourse on Method. London: Dent, 1912.

4. R. Descartes, Meditations on the First Philosophy. London: Dent, 1912.

5. Colin Gunton, "The Knowledge of God According to two Process Theologians," Religious Studies, 11/1 (March, 1975), 87-96 (abstracted in PS 5:144 f).

6. S. Hampshire, Spinoza. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962.

7. C. Hartshorne, "Contingency and the New Era in Metaphysics," Journal of Philosophy, 29 (1932) 421-31, 457-69.

8. C. Hartshorne, "The Synthesis of Idealism and Realism" Theoria (Sweden), 15 (March 12,1949), 90-107.

9. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

10. A. A. Luce, "Berkeley’s Existence in the Mind," Locke and Berkeley, C. B. Martin and D. M. Armstrong, ed. London: Macmillan, 1968.

11. B. Spinoza, Ethics.

12. I. C. Tipton, Berkeley: The Philosophy of Immaterialism. London: Methuen, 1974.

I

Let us follow John Wilcox in defining temporalistic or process theism as any theism which portrays God as an experiencing subject, the knower of temporal processes, whose knowledge is itself subject to growth, expanding along with the growth in temporal reality which is the object of that knowledge (2:295a). Recent discussion of the bearing of relativity theory on process theism has suggested two mutually incompatible approaches to the problem of conceiving God as a temporal being in such a way as to respect the teachings of both relativity and process theism. Lewis S. Ford has recently pointed out some drawbacks of one of these approaches, that defended on occasion by Charles Hartshorne (1:127-30) and argued for the second, which is essentially that attributed by William Christian to Whitehead in An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (IWM). But the second approach has not yet, to my knowledge, been fully explored, in particular with regard to the question of exactly how the world’s temporality is reflected in God’s consequent nature. On closer examination it turns out to cover several alternatives. The purpose of this article is to spell them out and suggest the advantages and drawbacks which a process theist might see in each.

The problem for the process theologian stems from the fact that according to relativity theory there is no such thing as absolute simultaneity for spatially separated events. Certain pairs of events A and B are such that whether A is to be regarded as occurring before B, simultaneously with B, or after B, depends on the coordinate-system with respect to which one judges. These event pairs, which Whitehead calls "contemporaries" of one another, are picked out by the fact that no light signal traveling even in vacuo from either could reach the other. This entails that what counts as "the past" or "the future" is also relative to coordinate-systems. The question facing the process theologian concerns the way in which this relativity of simultaneity and of the future is to be fitted into a consistent doctrine of God as a temporal being whose knowledge is growing. Which events does God experience simultaneously? If two events are contemporaries of one another, does God experience them simultaneously or successively, or is there no temporal ordering of his experiences of the events? Is God’s experience, and the growth of his consequent nature, relativised to one or more coordinate-systems? And if not, then can it be temporal at all? Exactly what would its temporal structure be like? Even Whitehead, who explicitly incorporated into his metaphysics a recognition of the relativity of simultaneity, did not fully spell out the consequences of this with respect to the temporal nature of God. Before doing so we will have to explain a bit more fully just what relativity theory teaches. (See also 1:125-27, 2:293 ff.)

II

Special relativity modifies our concepts of space and time to accord with the experimental finding that light has the same speed in all directions and relative to all (inertial) observers or coordinate-systems. This last fact is really quite surprising. We ordinarily think that if, for example, a body B travels at 20 miles an hour relative to a body A, and C travels in the same direction at 30 miles an hour relative to B, then C is travelling at 50 miles an hour relative to A. Relativity, however, teaches that this conclusion is only approximately correct. And the approximation gets poorer as larger speeds are chosen, becoming disastrously wrong when the speed of light is in question. For the speed of light (in vacuo) is about 186,000 miles per second relative to A, and exactly the same relative to B, regardless of how fast B is moving relative to A. In short, it is invariant with respect to all (inertial) coordinate-systems or observers. Since a speed is a distance traversed divided by the time interval required to do it, relativity’s radical change in our concept of speed implies a corresponding change in our concepts of space and time. In particular, it implies the relativity of simultaneity previously mentioned.

We can picture on the accompanying diagram the changes in our concepts of space and time which relativity forces on us. Assume that we are dealing with two inertial observers or coordinate-systems who are in relative motion and pass by each other at an event P. The line t is the time axis of one observer and represents all the temporally successive events occurring at what he regards as the same place as event P. If those events constitute the history of a material object, then the line is said to be the "world-line" of that object. Later events are pictured as occupying higher positions on that line than earlier events. The line labeled X represents a set of events which that observer regards as having the same date, t=0, as event P, and thus as simultaneous with P. A plane perpendicular to the diagram and containing the line x=0 picks out the locus of a larger such set. For simplicity only the x-coordinate is pictured, though we could have pictured (in perspective) the y-coordinate as well, lying in that plane. And in reality there is a z-coordinate. perpendicular to the other three, but this we needn’t try to picture.

The line t’ is the time axis of the second observer. It is the locus of events occurring in temporal succession at what he regards as the same place as event P. The line x’ represents a set of events which the second observer regards as having the same date t’~0 as event P, and therefore as simultaneous with it. The second observer does not agree with the first that all events on line x are simultaneous with event F; he regards events on the right side of that line from P

as earlier than P, and events on its left side as later than P. Think of a plane perpendicular to the paper in which the diagram is drawn and intersecting it at the line x' . All events in that plane are regarded by the second observer as simultaneous with event P and one another. All events below that plane are earlier than P, and all events above it are later than P.

Now for the significance of the cones. These are to be thought of as intersecting the plane of the paper on the lines CPB and DPA, but extending out toward us and also inward beyond the plane of the diagram. The line PC represents the history in space-time of a light ray sent out in the negative x direction from event P. The line PD is the history in space-time of a light ray sent out from event P in the positive x direction. The coordinates are so calibrated that one unit along the time axis t represents one second, and one unit along the space axis x represents 186,000 miles, so each point along line PD represents the location of the light ray at the time in question. The entire cone CPD is the history in space-time of a circular wavefront of light emitted from event P and expanding in the x-y plane of 3-dimensional space. (A spherical wavefront expanding in 3-dimensional space cannot have its history pictured in the diagram, as that would require a four-dimensional diagram.) The significance of the cone CPD, called P’s "future facing light cone," is that all events within it or on its surface are absolutely later than P, that is, regarded as later than P relative to all coordinate-systems. The reason is that a signal sent from P with the speed of light in vacuo would reach events on the surface of the cone, and events within its surface could be reached by a slower signal emitted from P. Relativity theory generally works with the assumptions (1) that no causal influence can be transmitted faster than the speed of light in vacuo, and (2) that if two events P and D are so situated in space-time that a causal influence travelling from P with this maximal speed can reach D then P occurs prior to D absolutely, that is, relative to all coordinate-systems. Similarly, the cone APB represents the history in space-time of an actual or hypothetical circular wavefront of light contracting in the x-y plane to a point at event P. This cone is P’s "past-facing light cone." All events on its surface or within it are absolutely earlier than P, and represent what Whitehead calls P’s "actual world." Only these can influence P causally, that is, in Whiteheadian terms, be prehended by an occasion at P.¹ Each point-event in space-time has associated with it a future-facing and a past-facing light cone, which determine respectively its absolute future and its absolute past. Regions not included within either cone of an event P constitute P’s "absolute elsewhere." This is the locus of events which are such that (a) their temporal relations with P vary with choice of coordinate-system, (b) they are what Whitehead calls the "contemporaries" of P, and (c) they cannot causally influence P and P cannot causally influence them, since any such influence would have to be propagated at a speed greater than that of light in vacuo, which until recently was assumed impossible.²

III

If we assume that relativity theory is giving us something close to the truth about space-time, at least in our present cosmic epoch, and is not simply a computational device with no ontological significance, then we must be sure that any form of process theology which we care to accept is tuned to harmonize with it. Several different variants of process theology seem at first hearing to do this. But they clash with one another, and each played separately has some jarring notes.

To get oriented, let us start with an over-simple version which most process theologians would be inclined to reject. This is the "God of the Privileged World-Line." A world-line is the history or career in space-time of an (actual or hypothetical) person or thing. It might be suggested that whether or not God is literally located in space, he is peculiarly associated with a privileged world-line in the sense that he has just that unique succession of experiences of the world which would be had by an ideally sensitive personal being whose history was represented by that world-line. Each of God’s total momentary states of consciousness would be determined by the actual world associated with a point (or occasion) on that world-line. And the succession of them would correspond to the succession of occasions along the world-line. This is probably the most anthropomorphic way to conceive of God’s temporal life. For it is the way in which human beings experience the world. Their successive states of consciousness are dense-packed like dewdrops along a world-line.

This view has only two advantages. First, it is compatible with the letter of relativity theory. Second, it gives a straightforward and comprehensible account of God’s temporal life; no bandying of words or specious appeal to the mysteries of the matter are needed to cover up metaphysical failure.

But the view suffers from two serious drawbacks. The first is that there is a certain arbitrariness about which world-line is God’s. We seem to have no way of discovering the privileged world-line or of explaining why God has it rather than any other. The second drawback is that God as so conceived may well be unable to meet certain conditions imposed by process theists. For example, he might not be able to play the role assigned to him in Whiteheadian and Hartshornian metaphysics of providing each actual occasion with its initial subjective aim. Take any occasion which is not located on God’s privileged world-line. He would experience it only after it is in his absolute past and already has objective immortality. If God’s providing of the occasion’s initial aim requires God to be simultaneously aware of the occasion’s past world, then the God of the Privileged World-Line cannot do the job. For God becomes aware of the occasion’s past actual world only after (absolutely) the occasion has perished.³ Again, if God’s providing of an initial aim requires that God physically prehend the occasion’s past actual world from the standpoint of the occasion, then we have a problem. For the Gad of the Privileged World-Line does not prehend the world from any region not located on his privileged world-line.

IV

A second relativistic variant of process theology involves the "God of the World-wide Simultaneity-System." On this view, God is not associated with any unique world-line, but his inner life is nonetheless viewed as a temporal succession of conscious states. Physics seems to indicate that simultaneity across a spatial distance is purely relative. But if we bring God into the picture then we get a kind of absolute simultaneity. Those events are really or absolutely simultaneous which are experienced by God as occurring simultaneously. God experiences all events as soon as they "really" occur. And his sequence of experiences determines an absolute simultaneity and a world-wide, absolute succession of events, the unique creative advance of nature. This God of the World-wide Simultaneity System is the one which, as previously mentioned, has been defended by Hartshorne and attacked by Ford.

The present proposal suffers from two drawbacks analogous to those which afflicted the preceding one. The first flaw involves the arbitrariness of God’s simultaneity-system. The second involves difficulties connected with God’s consequent nature and its influence in the world.

As to the first difficulty, we have no inkling of which events are experienced as simultaneous by God, of how we would find out the identity of this privileged set of durations, in the Whiteheadian sense, or of the reason why God comes to be associated with this simultaneity-system rather than with some other.

It might be suggested that the difficulty could be resolved if the world happens to have a "cosmic time" of the sort which we find in some general-relativistic world models. The field equations of general relativity do not by themselves uniquely determine the overall features of the universe, such as the mean pressure and density, their distributions and those of other physical quantities, the expansion or contraction of space, and so forth. So the equations are compatible with different world models, which they yield when suitable physical boundary conditions are specified. Cosmologists generally work with simple, mathematically tractable world models in which the distribution of these quantities is homogenous and isotopic. And in some of them the world systematically evolves through time. For example, the mean density in typical regions may tend to decrease uniformly, and space expands. In such worlds a privileged set of coordinate-systems and an associated "cosmic time" can be defined. One regards as mutually simultaneous all those local regions which are contemporaries and which have the same mean density. In this way a linear ordering of instants constituting a cosmic time is picked out. Relative to this cosmic time, the world has the same mean density in any one direction as in any other, and the mean density of randomly chosen regions which are sufficiently large (perhaps cubes with a side of one hundred million light years) will cluster closely around a given value, which can be called the "mean density of the universe" at the time in question, and which increases relative to our cosmic time. Although to my knowledge no process theologian has suggested pressing cosmic time into service as "God’s time," Arthur Eddington seems to have had this in mind when he said, "Just as each limited observer has his own particular separation of space and time, so a being coextensive with the world might well have a special separation of space and time natural to him" (STG 163).

The only sense in which the cosmic time is "natural" for God is that when the world is described relative to a coordinate-system whose time coincides with cosmic time the description becomes much simpler than otherwise. Things are neater. This may have some weight but is not a compelling reason for associating God’s time with cosmic time, assuming that there is such a thing. Moreover, that assumption is not certain. And even if the world does have a cosmic time, that is a statistical matter anyhow. There will probably be several different, mutually incompatible ways to group events into mutually simultaneous classes that statistically most mutually simultaneous regions have about the same mean density. This means that strictly speaking several mutually incompatible "cosmic times" will be definable, each equally usable for the gross purposes of the astronomer, and none sufficiently preferable to the others to justify identifying it with "God’s time."⁴

There seems to be no way to avoid arbitrariness in assigning to God a privileged simultaneity-system. But even if this could be done, a second difficulty would arise in connection with a common teaching of process theology about how God influences the world, namely, in virtue not only of his primordial nature but of his consequent nature as well.

The difficulty is this: If God has a privileged simultaneity-system then some pairs of mutually contemporaneous occasions are experienced not simultaneously but successively by God. So one member of such a pair, occasion A, would be experienced by God and would modify his consequent nature prior to his experiencing of the other member, occasion B. It would seem that God’s consequent nature as modified by A would be experienced by B, and thus A would indirectly through God, influence B. But a standard teaching of orthodox relativity theory is that contemporaries cannot influence one another causally.⁵ In any case, critics have objected that which events God experiences simultaneously with a given event B ought to be empirically detectable through the influence which those events, or their immediate predecessors, have on event B through God. Wilcox says that "God’s chosen space-time system ought to show some distinctive marks in the world, being reinforced or ratified, as it were, by the non-worldly being" (2:296), And Ford asks "Yet if God exemplified some particular inertial system, should this not be detectable in some fashion?" (1:129). Hartshorne denies this consequence and suggests that

There is something to be said for both parties in this debate. The objection from relativity posed by Wilcox and Ford seems to me to carry some weight but to fall short of being conclusive. And one who accepts the main tenets of process philosophy as shared by Whitehead and Hartshorne should in all consistency assign it less force than I do.

If the objection is saying that empirical investigations which could be conducted in the foreseeable future should reveal something about God’s simultaneity system, on the assumption that he has one, then it seems to me to be weak. Just how are events taking place "now," according to God, in the bright bowels of Alpha Centauri supposed to reveal themselves in my present experience, via God? Ford and Wilcox should suggest some specific empirical test whose negative outcome would disconfirm the hypothesis of a divine simultaneity-system. This will be difficult to do, because the whole story of how God influences us as a function of what has "already happened" is too speculative and loose-jointed for us to know what would count as an empirical disproof. If the misery which we observe in the world does not do it, then what would? Of course, "in principle" one should be able to detect the influence which contemporaries exert through God on me here-now. And so, too, should one be able to detect my alleged hybrid physical prehension of God. And God’s aim, which is at a maximum intensity of experience for himself and the world. And the way in which God orders possibilities so as to "persuade" me from occasion to occasion to realize that aim. None of these claims seems at present susceptible of confirmation by empirical tests, and they arc accepted not because of coercive scientific evidence in their favor but because of general metaphysical reasons or inclinations. If a Whiteheadian swallows these camels, why should he gag on the little gnat of a belief that some contemporaries subtly influence his present occasion through God, but that the influence is too soft-gloved a caress for present empirical tests to detect? Or why not follow Hartshorne in adopting an ad hoc belief in appropriate negative prehensions which screen out the anti-relativistic influences? From the standpoint of contemporary science that is no more ad hoc than the doctrine of subjective aim, say, or of the genetic succession of phases within an actual occasion.

A process philosopher should reject the God of the Privileged Simultaneity-System because it is an unnecessary departure from the spirit of relativity theory, not because we could expect clear-cut empirical consequences from it which we can see are not forthcoming. At one point Lewis Ford characterizes the situation aptly, saying "Like the Ptolemaic system, Hartshorne’s theory may account for all the appearances, but at the price of simplicity and elegance" (1:130). Right. But can we find a more simple and elegant theory which is compatible with both relativity and process theology?

V

Both views of God discussed so far share the conservative interpretation of God’s temporal life as a single linear succession of conscious states. That approach causes strained relations with relativity theory, for its teaching that the world lacks a unique cosmic advance of time makes it hard to see why a cosmic being like God should experience a unique one. What I dubbed the second approach to our problem assumes that he does not. Relativity would naturally suggest that God in his relations to us betrays no trace of such a privileged divine succession. And most commentators have agreed that God’s influence on an actual occasion does not reflect his prehensions of occasions outside of the past actual world of that occasion.⁶ What have not been sufficiently discussed are the tricky questions which arise when we turn our attention from the way in which God is objectified for us, at our different place-times, and ask exactly how his temporal experience in se is to be conceived. Is God a single actual entity, or some kind of society or multiplicity of occasions? If we refrain from projecting into God the doomed notion of a single-world-wide cosmic time, then how are we to understand such phrases as "everlasting concrescence" and "God’s continual becoming"?

Why not simply project into God the temporal structure which relativity theory sees in the world? God lives and develops along with the creatures, experiencing the concrescing of each actual occasion as it happens, and living through temporally successive strings of occasions. Whatever experienceable temporal relations obtain among occasions are found in God’s experience of those occasions.

An occasion A will be called an immediate predecessor of another occasion B if and only if B prehends A and no occasion is temporally between B and A in the sense that B prehends it and it prehends A. A relation of immediate successorship can be defined analogously. Each worldly occasion has one or more immediate predecessors and successors. The immediate predecessor relation can be used to order the world’s occasions into strands of successive occasions. Each strand is such that each member of it has a unique immediate predecessor in the strand and a unique immediate successor in the strand. The strands in the world intersect one another. In general, any occasion is a member of several different strands stretching back into its past actual world and streaming out from it into the future.

We might posit that corresponding to each worldly strand of occasions there is a temporal sequence of momentary experiences of these occasions in the mind of God. If God experienced only one such strand then his mental life would be like the stream of consciousness of a single person. Our hypothesis is that he experiences all of the strands. Suppose that the strands did not intersect at all; that each occasion belonged to one and only one strand. For each occasion, say one occurring at place-time P, there would be a divine consequent nature, God-at-P, which remembers the earlier occasions of the strand to which P belongs, and nothing else. God-at-P anticipates subsequent occasions on the string and provides the occasion at P with its initial subjective aim. The sequence of subsequent natures corresponding to a single worldly strand would be like a society of occasions with personal order, an intelligent consciousness lasting through time, and having its own little world to supervise. The mind would have divine sensitivity and responsiveness, so it might be regarded as a godling.⁷ God in his totality is the full collection of godlings, all in process of growth, all sharing a common primordial nature, but none having any memory or other knowledge of the particular experiences had by the others. God would have an infinitely split personality, each sub-personality evolving in monadlike isolation from the others.

In actual fact it seems hardly likely on empirical grounds that the world has this sort of structure, so there is no point in projecting it into God. This structure would entail, for example, that if I here-now am influenced by occasions occurring within my brain two minutes ago then I cannot be influenced, even indirectly, by occasions occurring outside my brain two minutes ago. The fact is that strings of occasions, assuming that there are occasions, almost certainly intersect with one another in space-time. It is not likely that each occasion has only one immediate predecessor and only one immediate successor. The average occasion probably prehends several distinct occasions which are contemporaries of one another, and thus belongs to several different strands of occasions. My here-now is the point of convergence of several causal sequences, which may, moreover, have interacted with one another. The strands of occasions are all interlaced So we must see how this interlaced structure is reflected in God; that is, we must interlace the godlings.

The simplest way to do this is to conceive of God as experiencing each act of becoming as it occurs, and as experiencing all and only those temporal relations among occasions which are independent of coordinate systems, and which are reflected in the real natures of the occasions. Call this the "Principal of Minimal Temporal Experience." Its chief effect is to exclude from God any experience of the "simultaneity" of mutually contemporary occasions, for that is in general relative to particular coordinate-systems and would not be experienced by a consciousness subject to relativistic principles. In Whiteheadian metaphysics there could presumably arise cases in which simultaneity of contemporaries is not relative to coordinate-systems, namely, when we are dealing with two spatially adjacent contemporaries. But even here one would not expect God, as he is experiencing one of them, to experience the simultaneous occurrence of the other. For that simultaneity is not reflected in any direct way in the experience of either occasion separately. So on the present proposal God-at-P has no experience of any occasion Q which is a contemporary of P. God-at-P is a total momentary conscious state, with memories and anticipations, presumably. But it is not a member of a single temporally successive stream of consciousness. It is a member of several such streams. The streams or godlings are interlaced personalities in that several of them can share numerically the same single actual occasion or momentary conscious state. We can leave it an open question here whether "God-at-P" the momentary conscious state, is itself a single distinct act of becoming or occasion, or whether it is not but is simply paired with a unique worldly occasion, the one taking place at P. In any case, the present proposal is partly reminiscent of cases of co-consciousness, in which a single human body is, through a given time period, the body of two or more distinct personalities, which alternately dominate it, and which are some-times conscious of one another, as in "the three faces of Eve." But the disanalogies are as marked as the similarities. For the godlings comprising God share the same divine primordial nature and constancy of purpose. And at any given occasion they literally coincide, so there can be no difference of motive or reaction on that occasion. There is not even co-consciousness, for God-at-P is "single-personalitied," though it is the ancestor and the descendant of several streams of experience, or godlings. We could with equal justice regard God as having a single personality divided up into a number of temporally successive streams of experience, which flow into and out of one another in a way which we might find rather bewildering. But not nearly so bewildering as some traditional teachings about God.

To take a concrete example, we might have four occasions of experience in the world. One of them, occasion A, is absolutely earlier than the other three. Occasions B and C are contemporaries of one another, but absolutely later than A and absolutely earlier than occasion D. The occasions A, B, and D might constitute successive stages in a stream of divine experience. A, C and D might be stages in another such stream. Associated with each occasion there is a consequent nature of God, influenced by all and only the events in that occasion’s absolute past. So we have God-at-A, God-at-B, and so forth, as stages in the divine experience of the world. There is no such thing as the progressive development of God. For there need not be, and in general will not be, a unique successor to a given occasion, and so there is no such thing as the next momentary experience in God after this experiencing of that occasion.

God-at-B would include a memory of God-at-A, but no experience whatever of God-at-C. For C is a contemporary of B, and the Principle of Minimal Temporal Experience rules that God-at-B can include no experience of any of its contemporaries. However, both God-at-B and God-at-C could have memories of A and of God-at-A. It is as though God’s personality has split in two after A occurred; in fact, at the juncture of B’s and C’s past-facing light cones. For events at that juncture or absolutely prior to it are remembered by both God-at-B and God-at-C, whereas no event absolutely later than the juncture can be present in the memory of both.

God-at-D would remember experiencing B and remember experiencing C, though he did not experience them simultaneously, and he experienced neither prior to the other! For they were experienced in different time streams, which have a confluence at D. It is as though you remember two states of your mind as both being past, but neither was earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than the other in your experience.

I think that this consequence, though surprising, is acceptable. One who finds it intolerable might try to avoid it in either of the following ways.

The first way is to have each godling or stream of experiences in God associated with a coordinate-system, in the sense that the godling experiences as simultaneous all events which are simultaneous relative to that coordinate-system. This involves jettisoning the Principle of Minimal Temporal Experience; and projecting into God as features of his experience all of the simultaneity relations posited by different coordinate systems. We would get the strange situation in which two contemporary occasions, A and B, would be experienced in several different temporal orders within God. One godling experiences them simultaneously, many other godlings experience first A and then B, and a host of others experience first B and then A. Nevertheless it is held that there is within God a single reflection of A’s act of becoming. This immediate experience of A is thus shared by many streams of experience (godlings) within God, as is the immediate experiencing of B. Each stream of experience differs from the others not in its experiencing of occasion A but in the temporal relations between A and B which are experienced within that stream or by that godling.

The second alternative is to have each godling associated with a world-line. At any given occasion P any godling associated with a world-line that includes P experiences, simultaneously with P, all of the events which are nestled just above the surface of P’s past-facing light cone. These events are, so to speak, the earliest contemporaries of P, and so are not prehended by P itself. But each shares with P the feature of being an immediate successor of some event within the cone. That gives them whatever meager title they may have to be experienced simultaneously with P.

On this second alternative as well as on the first, several godlings or streams of experience may share numerically the same worldly occasion, or direct experience of it. For any given worldly occasion P is on the surface of many different past-facing light cones. The apex of each such cone is represented by an occasion which is experienced simultaneously with P within some divine stream of experience. And in general different apexes correspond to different streams of divine experience.

All things considered, it seems to me simpler to adhere to the Principle of Minimal Temporal Experience and to accept the consequence that certain events experienced by God are not experienced as having any temporal relation to one another. The alternatives are inelegant and no easier on the imagination. But this matter is entirely speculative, and I suppose that those who prefer complexity to simplicity in God have a right to their personal tastes.

VI

We have not yet exhausted what I earlier called the "second approach" to the problem of incorporating the world’s temporality into God’s experience. Instead of positing the God of the Infinitely Interlaced Personalities, with its faint scent of polytheism, the process theologians might try other ways of incorporating the world’s temporality into God’s experience without construing that experience as a single stream of successive states. So I will now suggest two other variants. Both variants construe God as experiencing the world in a single synoptic vision, rather than a single succession of synoptic visions (as in the first approach to our problem), or as a multiplicity of such successions, as in the God of the Infinitely Interlaced Personalities (variant of the second approach). The idea now is to regard God as experiencing all of the world’s temporal relations within his single endless synoptic vision, but to refrain from construing that total experience as organized into a plurality of societies with personal order, or "godlings." flow is this to be done? ⁸

VII

The first way to do it involves what I call the "God of the Single Specious Present." A specious present is traditionally supposed to be a momentary though not instantaneous total state of consciousness. Sometimes we have experiences, such as that of hearing two snaps of the fingers in quick succession, in which temporally successive phenomena make their appearance within a single now. We do not first experience the earlier phenomenon while anticipating the later, and then experience the later while recalling the earlier. It all happens so fast that both have a kind of subjective immediacy together. This sort of single now which includes temporally successive phenomena is what is sometimes meant by the phrase "specious present." Why not try to construe God’s experience of all of world history as included within a single divine specious present?

Note that there is a spatial analogue of the specious present which is important for our purposes. Imagine that you feel simultaneously an ache in your left jaw and a cold sensation on your right cheek. You do not experience these as occupying literally the same spatial region. But both are present to you; both are happening where you are within a single personal "here." What you on any given occasion regard as here, your spatial locus, may include events which do not overlap spatially. And its boundaries may be vague. (Speaking strictly, a "here" which is analogous to an experienced specious present should not in-elude any item which is regarded as closer to the agent than any other item experienced on that occasion.)

Such a "here," lasting for a single specious present, constitutes a single spatiotemporally extended here-now or "personal standpoint." I think that some such spatiotemporal unit of personal experience is the prototype of a Whiteheadian actual occasion. Personal standpoints can differ from one another in extension and duration, as well as content. Let us here beg a disputed question among scholars of Whitehead’s philosophy and assume that he would agree that each of these personal standpoints as above described constitutes an actual occasion, and that each worldly occasion is like a single personal standpoint in encompassing temporally successive phenomena: Each occasion comprises prehensions of different aspects of its past actual world. And each such prehension has a characteristic locus, a spatiotemporal region within the occasion, from which the relevant facet of the past actual world is experienced. Call that locus the "physical standpoint" of the prehension. The entire occasion also constitutes an inclusive physical standpoint, viz. the region of physical space-time which it occupies. If the occasion is a momentary state of a conscious personal being, it constitutes a single personal standpoint.

We are going to conceive of God as experiencing all of world history within a single all-inclusive specious present, an ‘everlasting" worldwide act of concrescence. We can, if we like, continue to speak, as in Section V, of God-at-P, God-at-Q, and so forth, where P and Q are worldly occasions. But now we do not regard God-at-P and God-at-Q as distinct occasions within God, as we did before. Occasions P and Q are each provided with an initial subjective aim by God, insofar as he is influenced by the past actual world of P and Q respectively. God-at-P is God as influenced by P’s past actual world, the contents of P’s past-facing light cone. It is a phase of God’s consequent nature which is distinct from God-at-Q. And if Q is absolutely later than P then God’s prehensions of the world from Q are experienced by him as being later than his prehensions of the world from P, just as in the God of Interlaced Personalities. But unlike that sort of God, the God of the Single Specious Present does not consist of several societies of occasions sharing a common primordial nature. He is more like a single concrescence, a single worldwide and "everlasting" personal standpoint, or "specious here-now." This means that in God there is no literal remembrance of things past or expectation of things to come. Nothing ever loses subjective immediacy. The joys of anticipation and the sorrows of nostalgia are absent from his nature.

VIII

Is this notion of God-in-growth compatible with the teachings of process philosophers concerning the nature of time, the status of the future and of statements about it, God’s foreknowledge, and the freedom of creatures? Expressed in a pre-relativistic vein, those teachings go as follows. At any given time, the past is fully determinate, whereas the future is only partly determinate. Statements which assert the occurrence of some future event which is as yet causally undetermined by present and past are as yet neither true nor false. They will become true or false, as soon as the event occurs as predicted, fails to occur at the time predicted, or becomes causally determined to occur, or precluded from occurring, through the coming into being of conditions sufficient to ensure either.¹⁰ It may become causally determined today that a given event, e.g., a sea fight, will occur tomorrow, though that event is still in other respects causally contingent and thus ontically indeterminate. God at any given time knows everything that there is to be known; that is, he knows the truth of all true statements and the falsity of all false ones. In this sense he is omniscient. As further statements or propositions become true, God acquires the corresponding knowledge. So his knowledge grows with the world’s advance in determinateness.

This story must be changed somewhat to conform with relativity." Statements are true, false, or neither, relative to place-times, rather than relative to times simpliciter. And there is, at least quoad nos, a growth of God’s knowledge which is like that posited for the God of the Infinitely Interlaced Personalities. Corresponding to each time-like world line there is a line of advance in the divine knowledge. But there is no single worldwide line of advance. That would reintroduce absolute simultaneity.

We now meet a problem. All of these crisscrossing lines of advance, snaking futureward, are supposed to be included within God’s single specious present. Does God’s specious present constitute a privileged divine standpoint relative to which all propositions are true or false, so that for God no proposition changes from being neither true nor false to being true? If so, then how can God experience temporal passage, if that is conceived as transition from the indeterminate, the ontological correlate of the neither-true-nor-false, to the determinate? On the other hand, if God’s specious present does include experience of such ontic transition, and thus does not constitute a privileged standpoint relative to which all propositions are true or false once and for all, then how does this talk of the divine specious present make much of a difference? We would still seem to have something very much like the God of the Interlaced Personalities. In fact, I think that this is the case.

Let us illustrate the problem with a typical scenario. Suppose that relative to me here-now it is neither true nor false that I will commit suicide tomorrow. Call it "neuter," for short. The reason for the lack of truth-value is that my committing suicide depends on a future free decision of mine. We are granting for argument’s sake the controversial claims that free decisions are not completely determined by prior events, and that any event which relative to a given place-time is causally undetermined in a certain respect is ontically indeterminate in that respect.

What truth-value, relative to my here-now, should be assigned to the statement that God believes that I commit suicide at time T (where tomorrow’s date is filled in for "‘T’)? Note that the verbs have been italicized to indicate that they are being used tenselessly, in accord with Richard Gale’s convention in The Language of Time (LT). The tenseless verbs do not predicate timelessness. They simply leave open the questions of whether the state of affairs predicated is timeless or temporal, and if temporal, whether it precedes or follows the uttering of the statement in which they appear. Relative to my present locus, place-time P, nothing in God later than God-at-P is fully real. The statement that I commit suicide at time T is neither true nor false. The statement that God believes that I commit suicide at time T is certainly not true relative to me here-now at P. For God-at-P includes no such belief, since God believes only truths, not "neuters." But the statement is not false either, relative to P, for it is not solely about God-at-P. but about God tout court. Since it is possible that God-at-Q, a future locus, will include the belief, the statement attributing the belief to God tout court is not false. So it is neuter, relative to my present standpoint here at P. So much for God quoad nos.

We have so far been speaking of statements as having their truth-values relative to place-times, or standpoints. The question which now faces us is whether God has a standpoint over and above those provided by worldly place-times such as our friends P and Q above. It might be thought that his single specious present provides such a standpoint, a worldwide, time-wide one relative to which each statement is true or false, there being no transition from being neuter to being true or false. But such a view should be rejected by a process philosopher, assuming that he accepts doctrines of time and temporal experience which are typical of process philosophy.

As previously mentioned, these doctrines are that the passage of time involves a transition from ontic indeterminateness to ontic determinateness; that there is a correlative change in the truth-values of propositions about temporal entities; and that the experience of time’s passage involves experiencing the ontic transition. If God’s single synoptic vision is a single now relative to which all statements are true or false, and within which there is no experienced ontic transition from indeterminateness to determinateness, then in accord with the above doctrines he cannot experience the passage of time. So he does not experience the temporal world as temporal. Moreover, it will not do to posit a single divine standpoint of the kind just envisaged if one retains the view that, relative to any given worldly place-time, certain statements are neuter, and the absolute future is partly indeterminate. One would find oneself saying, from some worldly standpoint P, that there is a fully determinate divine standpoint, relative to which the world is fully determinate. But this fully determinate standpoint would be God-at-all-place-times. Alas, relative to P, God-at-all-place-times is not fully determinate, and never (at no place-time) will be.

IX

It now appears that God’s single synoptic vision, as conceived above, adds little to the previously investigated "cast of thousands" view in which God is an infinite hubbub of divine occasions. The synoptic vision does not involve the unity of a single divine standpoint, relative to which each statement has its truth-value changelessly. Indeed, it had better not involve that. But then just what does it involve? What is the force of the notion of a divine specious present?

Alas, its force acts adversely to the cause of process philosophy, I think. What exactly does the "specious present" amount to? Though there may be two or three different notions of the specious present, I think that the most common one is that which arises as follows. We notice that often what we call a "now" comprises a temporal period, such as an hour, within which several distinct "nows" can be distinguished. This leads us to wonder whether we can locate within our experience a sort of minimal now. We set the boundaries of the now, often generously. How parsimonious can we be? Sometimes, when we pick out a time period as now, our mental act of selection takes less time than the period itself does. So to get a minimal now we would have to resolve that its temporal boundaries be so restricted as to coincide with our act of selecting a time as now. This selecting we think of as a saying to oneself "Now"; a sort of linguistic or mental pointing to a time. The duration of that mental act is the duration of the now picked out by it and is a specious present.

We can be conscious of successive events as occurring within the same specious present. Event x may be followed in our experience by event y, and yet both may be within the temporal boundaries of the mental act whereby we note that they are occurring now. Similarly, three successive events within someone’s experience, x, y and z, are within a single specious present of the experiencer provided that while z is experienced as happening the experiencer is aware of x and y, but not through what he would regard as an act of recollection. His consciousness of x and y has not yet had time to subside, so to speak. Thus an act of explicit recollection is neither necessary nor, as yet, possible. A better way to put it is perhaps this: what he thinks of as a single state of awareness is one in which he is aware of x, and it spans y and z as well. He is aware of them all in that single act or state. For they follow so close on one another’s heels that he could not engage in two successive acts of now-selection in such a way that each act temporally overlapped only one or two of them, instead of all three. He simply cannot think that fast. The time span of x, of y and of z, taken singly, is within the time span required for the experiencer to fix a now within which they occur.¹²

If this account of the specious present is correct, a curious consequence arises if we construe God as experiencing the world in a single synoptic vision modeled on the specious present. God has an all-inclusive specious present. That seems to mean that he is infinitely "slow on the uptake," in that his fixing of a now literally takes forever! It appears that although perceptually no detail of world history escapes him, he does not first take explicit note of one detail and then of another. He can forget nothing of what he notices, for his noticing of it takes forever and there is no later time, after it has been noticed, at which God would have forgotten it, that is, be unable to recall it to mind at will. This makes God out to be a sort of infinitely sluggish observer of the passing scene. How could he have the mental dexterity to respond creatively, in a deliberate way, to unforeseen novelties in time to provide occasions with subjective aims which take these new factors into account? Contrary to what appears at first, it is a defect rather than a merit to have a specious present which is all-inclusive.

X

Is there some other way to conceive of God as having a single synoptic vision within which temporal succession is experienced, but which is sufficiently different from a human specious present to avoid the divine sluggishness? I think that the trick is to regard the single synoptic vision as determined not by a temporally extended mental act, as with the specious present, but by a set of interrelations among temporal and nontemporal divine states. And in terms of this conception we can see how God can experience temporal succession and vet have a kind of eternity-wide single vision. Such a notion was hinted at by traditional formulas such as "totum simul" which, however, carried the unfortunate sug,gestion that God’s single synoptic vision was instantaneous, or that he experienced temporally successive things as simultaneous, or as timeless.

Start with a simple thought-experiment. I am now perceiving the desk before me from a particular place-time or standpoint. I can distinguish the apparent location of its colored surface out there before me, from the location from which I prehend the color. The standpoint "from which" I prehend the desk’s color will be called the "primary physical standpoint" of that prehension. In Whitehead’s philosophy that region is the region of my present occasion of experience.

Conceive now what it would be like to feel the coldness of the desk’s surface by extending one hand and touching it, while simultaneously seeing it from the ceiling, five feet above one’s head. Here we have two simultaneously experienced prehensions, each with a different primary physical standpoint. We can extend this thought-experiment by conceiving the desk as simultaneously experienced by one person from many different places.¹³

Suppose now that I have two of these simultaneous physical prehensions, A and B, from different standpoints, and a concomitant awareness, C, of both of them as occurring simultaneously with one another. In that case, awareness C has a temporal location and duration. But it is at least arguable that it has no spatial standpoint in any direct primary sense. We might adopt the convention of assigning a sort of derived spatial standpoint to C, viz., the scattered standpoint (A, B) whose spatial parts are the spatial parts of A and B. But C has a temporal standpoint in a fairly direct sense, within my stream of consciousness.

So far I have talked about first-order acts of awareness which have primary standpoints that are place-times, and second-order acts of awareness which have phenomenal times as their primary standpoints and can perhaps be assigned place-times as their standpoints in some extended or derived sense. Now, to render intelligible the notion of Cod’s synoptic vision, VC must make the leap to something which can be conceived but never occurs in human experience. We must conceive an act of awareness which has no primary standpoint at all, neither a place, time, nor place-time. It would be an act Z which was an awareness of two or more physical prehensions, A, B, . . . etc., but which literally occurs or obtains at no time. It is real but extra-temporal. Whiteheadians conceive God’s primordial nature in this way. Here we want aspects of the consequent nature to be so regarded. We would expect that at some point or other God’s inner life would be different from ours not simply in degree but in kind. It might as well be here.

Since we want God to experience the temporal succession in the world, we posit that the contents of each place-time, or occasion, are prehended by God from each and every future place-time; that is, each place-time within or on the surface of its future-facing light cone. So God experiences the world from every place-time, and each place-time is the primary standpoint of a set of divine prehensions. (If these are numerically identical with the prehensions of the worldly occasion which occupies that place-time, so be it. The relations between God’s prehensions of the world and creatures’ prehensions of it is not my primary concern here.) Since the standpoints of these physical prehensions can be temporally extended, the prehensions can involve awareness of the temporal duration of what is prehended. So within God there is a direct experiencing of the temporality of the world.

Having made the synoptic vision temporal, we must ensure its singleness. We do not want to construe God’s mental life as a succession, or set of successions, of total mental states, but as a single integrated one. We might seem to have an answer to this by saying that God is a single occasion of experience, not an interlaced succession of them. But we would then have to spell out exactly what this involves. And we would have to contend with those who maintain that there is no genuine temporal succession within an occasion, only "genetic succession," so that if God is a single occasion then he does not experience temporality at all. Better to spell out from scratch what we have in mind by speaking of God as having a single total integrated mental state and let others decide how this is to be described in the technical terms of some particular process philosophy.

Within a single human personality different states are picked out as simultaneous or successive. A single total mental state is conceived as the sum of all of the person’s mental states at that moment of psychological time. The notion shares the fuzziness of the specious present. In any case, what we are after is a notion which applies to a God who does not have a specious present. So we have to abstract out certain features of the human specious present while discarding others. If two states of the same person’s mind are literally simultaneous in the sense that there is no discernible time even within the specious present during which the one obtains and the other does not, then they belong to the same total mental state. But this is not the only way in which they may so belong. For example, they might overlap temporally without coinciding perfectly, and the person in question might have an explicit second-order awareness of both as overlapping, while both were occurring. "I now feel the cold on my wrist and the ache in my jaw, which began before the cold feeling." In such a case all three awarenesses are part of the same total mental state. Similar relations among several second-order awarenesses and a third-order awareness which has them all as direct objects entitles us to regard the whole group as belonging to the same total mental state. Assume that the relation "belongs to the same total mental state as" is transitive symmetric and reflexive. Then we can regard the total mental state as the class or, if you prefer, the sum-individual, of all the mental states which bear this relation to one another.

Generalizing the above condition somewhat, we can say that two mental states A and B belong to the same total mental state S of a mind M if (i) they belong to the same mind M (a relation which is here left unanalyzed) , (ii) they are simultaneous, and/or (iii) mind M has a higher order awareness C which is a direct awareness of A and B, and which does not occur at any time other than perhaps the times common to both A and B. Note that these conditions are offered as jointly sufficient, but only (i) is offered as necessary. Note also that in humans the third condition is satisfied by C’s occurring simultaneously with A and B. In God, however, we are going to posit a literally timeless higher-order awareness of physical prehensions. These latter are of course spatiotemporally located, but the awareness of them is not, and they need not be in any sense simultaneous with one another within God’s experience. Yet because the higher-order awareness C satisfies the condition that it does not occur at any other time than those of its objects A and B (since in fact it occurs at no time at all), it follows that A, B and C all belong to the same total mental state. Such a state includes non-simultaneous prehensions which have physical standpoints, as well as timeless ones which lack them.

Next, we need some way to guarantee that there is just one total mental state in God. This means that each of his mental states belongs to the same total mental state as every other. A simple way to do this is to posit that for every pair of physical prehensions A and B in God, there is a second-order, timeless prehension C in him whose direct objects are A and B. His omniscience demands that each higher-order awareness be itself known by a still higher-order awareness, and we might conjecture that all N-tuples of awareness are themselves the direct objects of another awareness. Whether or not this is so, the first move ensures that God has no more than a single personal standpoint or total mental state. To put the idea in a nutshell: God knows what is happening in the world by perceiving it temporally, and he knows what is happening in himself, including his prehensions of the world, by prehending nontemporally. This is the sense which can be given to the idea that God experiences all of the spatiotemporal diversity in the world from a single standpoint. This single standpoint, contrary to traditional formulas, is in no reasonable sense a single Now, or an eternal Now, or a totum simul. The only reason, I think, why such formulas seemed appropriate is that they denied that God’s mental life was a multiplicity of distinct total mental states. That implies that it has the unity of a human’s single mental state, which latter is coextensive with a specious present, whence "Now" and "totum simul." But these formulas are as misleading as they are helpful, and had best be dropped forever.

XI

This last version of God’s single synoptic vision seems to me to reconcile some of the ostensibly conflicting doctrines about the divine experience which have jostled one another in the pages of Western theology. It avoids that multiplicity of successive total states which the totum simul formula was supposed to rule out. At the same time, it makes clear just how God experiences the temporality and successiveness in the world, and does so in a truly temporal way. And it avoids the unbecoming divine sluggishness which threatened when God’s single synoptic vision was construed in close analogy with a human specious present.

Unfortunately, I believe that it is not really compatible with those views about the nature of time which were previously mentioned as typical of process philosophy. Here is the problem. On the view now under discussion, all facts about the world are known by God extra-temporally. For God prehends temporally all worldly states of affairs, and he prehends extra-temporally the relations among his temporal prehensions, and thus the content of the prehensions themselves. So consider a future contingency, such as my committing suicide tomorrow. It is supposed to be as yet neither true nor false that I will commit suicide tomorrow, and therefore it is neither true nor false that God knows (tenseless) that I commit suicide tomorrow. The ontic indeterminateness of tomorrow’s activities are reflected in the divine nature.

But we are also asked to accept the view that there is in God either a perfectly determinate state of knowing that I commit suicide at time or else a determinate state of knowing that I do not commit suicide at time T (tomorrow). Is not the presence of such a determinate state exactly what we were denying in the preceding paragraph? For we said there that it is neither true nor false that God knows that I commit suicide at time T. This lack of truth-value is the semantic correlate of ontic indeterminateness.

We might be tempted to say that the divine knowledge in question is extra-temporal in se but temporal quoad nos. It is extra-temporal in se in that it simply lacks the quality of temporal duration, that elapsive character which we know by direct experience. It is temporal quoad nos in that it behaves metaphysically from our perspective in the way that temporal things behave. That is, certain statements about it which were neuter at earlier times are true or false at later times. This suggests a corresponding ontic change in the object of those statements from indeterminateness to determinateness. But the change is somehow only quoad nos, not in se.

I am unsure whether or not an account like this can be made to work. In its present facile form it bares its flank to the following attack. The allegedly extra-temporal divine states do certainly undergo a transition from ontic indeterminateness to determinateness, or propositions about them go from being neuter to being true or false. To say that this change is only quoad nos is to suggest that "really" there is no such change. But there is! Nor will it do to admit that the ontic change takes place but deny that the divine knowledge states have temporal location and duration. For on the view of time which is involved here, to have temporal location is simply to be subject to the kind of ontic transition tinder discussion. Experience of a thing’s duration is simply experience of the transition from partial indeterminateness to complete determinateness on the part of its successive temporal stages.

To counter this attack one must develop a more subtle view of what it is for something to have duration, to be temporal. It is particulars, not universals, which have duration. A particular is an X which is not repeatable, but is an instance of repeatables. By "repeatable" I simply mean "capable of having two or more different instances." A particular need not be a fully determinate individual, if such there be. The smile of the Cheshire cat, the roundness of my basketball, and the redness in my toothbrush handle are all particulars, however abstract they may be.¹⁴ Every concrete individual is also a particular, of course.

Some particulars can serve as loci relative to which propositions have truth-values. For example, the proposition about my suicide tomorrow is neither true nor false relative to my present place-time, a particular which serves as such a locus. Relative to the place-times of next month that proposition is not neuter. It is either true or false. Call such loci "truth-value loci." Most truth-value loci with which we are familiar are themselves temporal. But perhaps some are extra-temporal. In particular, we want to investigate the possibility that there are one or more extra-temporal truth-value loci in God. These would be, or include, his extra-temporal states of knowing. More precisely, if there is in God a giving of assent to some proposition, an occurrent, not merely dispositional, assent to its truth, then that mental act either is, or is part of, some truth-value locus. Here the term "part" must be taken in some suitably generalized mereological sense which goes beyond spatial containment. We must investigate what it would be like for such a truth-value locus to be itself extra-temporal, even though relative to temporal loci propositions about it change from being neuter to being true or false. This will give a sense to the contrast between being temporal in se and being temporal only quoad nos.

I hope that others will help me to paint in the following sketch. Let us assume the following tenets, in order to get a first rough idea of what it might be like for something to be temporal quoad nos but not in se. Assume that all temporal truth-value loci are themselves not literally instantaneous but have some finite duration. Assume also that any particular which has finite duration undergoes some process of absolute becoming, conceived as a transition from ontic indeterminateness to ontic determinateness. This means that if the particular is a truth-value locus, then relative to it some propositions about it do not have one and only one truth-value. For certain of those propositions deal with aspects of the particular which become ontically determinate only as the particular occurs. They somehow undergo a transition from being neuter to being true or false. And the transition takes place within the time spanned by the particular itself. So relative to that truth-value locus they are not neuter simpliciter, nor true or false simpliciter. They have what we call a "mixed status." I now suggest that any truth-value locus which is such that relative to it some propositions about it have a mixed status is a temporal particular in se, not merely quoad nos.

A particular which is a truth-value locus but does not lend some propositions about it a mixed status is not temporal in se. The extra-temporal divine states of knowing are to be viewed as extra-temporal in se because they, or some fuller divine state which contains them, are not associated with a set of propositions having mixed status relative to them. For any extra-temporal divine state of knowing, either it or the minimal truth-value locus containing it is such that relative to that locus all propositions about it have just one of the two standard truth-values. That is what it is to be extra-temporal, on the present view. A particular which is extra-temporal in this sense may also be temporal relative to some other truth-value locus or set.

I do not think that this way of giving sense to the distinction between temporality in se and temporality quoad nos sits well with certain doctrines which are typical of process philosophy. If temporally extended truth-value loci "lend" certain propositions a mixed status, then one would think that each of them spans smaller loci. For example, if relative to a given locus L a proposition changes from being neuter to being true, it seems that this entails that there is a sub-locus included in the earlier portion of L, relative to which the proposition is neuter without qualification, and another sub-locus included in the later portion of L, relative to which the proposition is true without qualification. These in turn, being temporally extended, impart mixed status to propositions about them, and so include sub-loci and so on ad infinitum, into Zenonian doom. This line of thought seems to be opposed to the epochal theory of time.

If we adhere to that theory, then I do not see how to draw the distinction between temporality in se and temporality ab extra. I know of no discussion of the exact relation between actual occasions and truth-value loci, but presumably one of the following accounts would be accepted by a process philosopher. Either the actual occasion is itself the minimal truth-value locus, or else an individual phase of that occasion is the minimal truth-value locus. The temporal status of the phases within a Whiteheadian occasion is known to be a matter of controversy. But whichever line is accepted, we get minimal loci relative to which no proposition has mixed status. And the present attempt to use that notion to explain the two kinds of temporality is torpedoed. Perhaps some other way of drawing the distinction can he found which is more congenial to process philosophy.

Until it is found, it seems to me that the God of the Infinitely Interlaced Personalities is the view which does the least violence to relativity theory and process philosophy together. I am unimpressed by the suggestion that it is too close to polytheism to be acceptable. For given any reasonable criterion of singleness of personality, the God in question has as much claim to such singleness as to plural personalities. It is a question of his having the constancy of character and purpose which is suggestive of a single personality, together with a temporal structure which suggests a multitude of streams of consciousness. When such streams are human streams of consciousness, they indicate a plurality of personalities. But it is not easy to show that when they are divine streams of consciousness they must indicate such a plurality. And if they do, what exactly is wrong with that?

R e f e r e n c e s

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

LT -- Richard Gale. The Language of Time. New York: Humanities Press, 1967.

PI -- Charles Hartshorne. Philosophical Interrogations. Edited by Sidney and Beatrice Rome. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

STG -- Arthur Eddington. Space, Time and Gravitation. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959; original edition 1920.

1. Lewis S. Ford. "Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?" Journal of Religion. 47, 2 (April, 1968), 124-35.

2. John Wilcox. "A Question from Physics for Certain Theists." Journal of Religion, 40, 4 (October, 1961), 293-300.

Notes:

1 No occasion literally occupies only a geometrical point of space-time, so this is an idealization.

2 Recently the assumption was brought into question, and hypothetical faster-than-light particles, called "tachyons," have been suspected and sought, with no success to date, If these particles should exist, and be controllable by human beings, that would have profound philosophical and theological implications. For example, the cause of an event Q might be absolutely later than Q. Cf. Paul Fitzgerald, "Tachyons, Backwards Causation and Freedom," pp. 415-36 in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 8, edited by Robert Cohen and Roger Buck (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co., 1971).

3 At least this is so in general, though special provision might have to be made for an occasion which was spatially adjacent to God’s world-line.

4 For similar reasons, there is no point in looking to the phenomenon of entropy increase to provide a privileged divine simultaneity system.

5 This rests on the assumption that no causal influence can be propagated faster than the speed of light in vacuo, and may need to be revised in the unlikely event that tachyons exist.

6 For example, Christian says, "For any concrescent occasion A, God is objectified as a specific satisfaction, which results from all God’s prehensions of all the occasions in A’s past actual world. This unity of satisfaction which A prehends does not include God’s prehensions of any contemporary of A, as B, because B has not yet become. . . . A does not prehend God as conditioned by B" (IWM 332). The "has not yet become" calls for careful treatment; relative to some coordinate-systems B occurs prior to A. Wilcox says that "When God first prehends P he prehends with P only those occasions in P’s Absolute Past," and "P can prehend in God only those satisfactions which arise out of P’s own past actual world" (2:229); repeated by Ford (1:133).

7 After this was written, I discovered that Hartshorne had discussed the version of it to be present next, attributing it to Howard Stein. Cf. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method by Charles Hartshorne (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1970), pp. 123-25.

8 Many passages in PR suggest that Whitehead held a view such as that to be developed in the remainder of this article: "In the case of the primordial actual entity, which is God, there is no past" (PR 134). "In it [God’s consequent nature] there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison of immediacy. The property of combining creative advance with the retention of mutual immediacy is what is meant by the term ‘everlasting’" (PR 524f). "God is primordially one . . . in the process he acquires a consequent multiplicity, ‘which the primordial character absorbs into his own unity" (PR 529). "An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlate fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison" (PR 531f; my italics). This seems to say that there is genuine temporal succession within a present. Alas, all is never smooth sailing, for Whitehead also says, "Each actuality in the temporal world has its reception into God’s nature. The corresponding element in God’s nature is not temporal actuality but is the transmutation of that temporal actuality into a living, ever-present fact (PR 531). This looks self-contradictory ("not temporal actuality . . . but ever-present fact . . .").

To my knowledge, the best previous development of the God of the Single Synoptic Vision is in Lewis Ford’s "Boethius and Whitehead on Time and Eternity," International Philosophical Quarterly, 8, 1 (March, 1968), 38-67. He does not, however, to my mind, fully explain how the single vision includes all of the temporal succession in the experienced world. "Eternity is the complete summation of all temporal events in a sheer immediacy which excludes any real division between that which is earlier from [sic] that which is later. All moments of actualized time are embraced in a single inclusive simplicity, ‘all at once,’ for this is complete and perfect possession in a single moment" (ibid., p. 49). How can there be no real division between moments which as they occur in the world really are distinct from one another? And how can successive times be embraced "all at once"? "The everlasting passage of concrete time must all be included within the eternal now which is always now because there was never a ‘then’ or ‘will be’ within God. Either possibility would undercut God’s simplicity by dividing his unified experience into successive parts. What is experienced is successive, but not the experience itself" (ibid., p. 50). But what is the nature of this unified character of God’s experience whereby he experiences the successive as successive and yet does not successively experience the temporal sequence? "The divine present never becomes past and never gives way to some future coming after itself (for nothing can possibly come after that which is everlasting); nevertheless, it is a present, ever growing with the successive addition of temporally present moments" (ibid., p 51). Apparently it has successive stages, for it is ever-growing, but these stages never become past. But how can they fail to do so? And does an earlier moment added to God nonetheless remain present when a later moment is added to him? "In the temporal now God can only contemplate the future as possibility . . . not as present actuality. . . , though in his eternal now he contemplates each actuality as it becomes present, never losing its dynamic immediacy (always thereafter experiencing it ‘as if it were now taking place’" (idem). This seems to give God a split personality, one facet of which contemplates things from the temporal now, as future, and for which all the problems of relativity theory must be faced, the other of which is somehow in eternity, not time, and yet has a curiously close relation to time, for he contemplates each actuality "as it becomes present" (though not before it becomes present) and forever "thereafter." This cannot mean "at every later moment can it? I am asking these insensitive questions to point up the need for further development of what I think is an interesting position, and in the hope that misleading characterizations of that position (e.g., the "totum simul" formula) will henceforth be avoided.

9 Part of the difficulty with Whitehead’s concept of an actual occasion is that it is not clear to various commentators whether or not occasions are found within human experience or are hypothetical posits pertaining only to sub-microscopic "electromagnetic events," as Edward Pols believes (cf. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: A Reply to A. H. Johnson" in Dialogue. 7, 3 [December, 1968], 476-79). Pols supports this with quotations from PR 5 and 150. I am here assuming that for Whitehead human experience consists of actual occasions, or something reasonably like them.

That is not the whole difficulty with grasping the doctrine. These questions have also been raised, First, is there genuine temporal succession within an actual occasion or is there not? Is Whitehead’s talk of successive phases of concrescence and of genetic succession within an occasion to be construed as mistaken; as correct but as not involving temporal succession at all, as John Cobb and Paul Schmidt appear to hold; or as correct and involving temporal succession, as Lewis Ford holds?

Second, if there is a temporal succession of phases within an occasion, how does this relate to the succession of occasions in physical time? Are there two time orders?

Third, what exactly is the nature of the transition from indeterminateness to determinateness within an actual occasion?

For some remarks on this last issue see note 10 below. For discussion of the other issues see Edward Pols’s Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967; the review of it by Paul Schmidt in The Journal of the History of Philosophy, 7, 1 (January, 1969), 100; and the discussion by John B. Cobb, Jr., Edward Pols, and Lewis S. Ford in Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7, 4 (Winter, 1969-70), 409-25.

10 Charles Hartshorne in "The Meaning of ‘Is Going to Be’," Mind, 74, No. 293 (January, 1965), 46-58, has a variant of the doctrine in which the ontological asymmetry between past and future is retained, but statements concerning the future are nonetheless held to be in each case true or false. I here assume that the other version of the doctrine, which denies the principle of bivalence, is the standard one. But this is simply to save breath, and the reader who prefers Hartshorne’s version can make his own corrections to what I say as he reads along.

I have not found any unequivocal statement of this doctrine in Whitehead. It is attributed to him specifically by George Kline, for example, in his "Form, Concrescence, and Concretum: A Neo-Whiteheadian Analysis," Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7, 4 (Winter 1969-70), 351-61; and he is not alone among Whitehead scholars to do so. But the quotations from Whitehead with which I am familiar and which speak of the resolution of indeterminateness all seem to me to be susceptible of alternative interpretations.

Whether or not the theory of time in question is Whiteheadian, I believe that it is false, and have argued to that effect in "Is the Future Partly Unreal?" Review of Metaphysics. 21, 3 (March, 1968) 421-48. Other attacks on the doctrine can be found in the writings of Donald Williams, Adolf Grünbaum, and J. J. C. Smart, to name only some of its more prominent foes.

11 Various ways of adapting the doctrine to relativity theory are discussed in my article, "The Truth about Tomorrow’s Sea Fight," Journal of Philosophy, 66, 11 (June 5, 1969), 307-29. The doctrine suffers some embarrassment from the fact that there are several mutually incompatible ways to do this, and it is hard to see how any one of them emerges as clearly superior to all of its rivals.

12 The fact that we can chop up experience into nows leads some philosophers to think that the epochal theory of time has a basis within human experience of time. It may also account for why some think that there is a plurality of successive phases within a single Whiteheadian act of becoming. For they may think of that act of becoming as a specious present, and the succession within it as a succession of phases.

But the epochal theory of time is not really supported by the phenomenology of lived time. For one thing, atomic units emerge only when we decide to pick out nows. Otherwise we have, as Bergson saw, a more or less continuous, qualitatively variegated succession, and not at all a staccato tattoo of nows.

For another thing, try as we will to chop up experience into discrete nows, the temporal borders of each now tend to fuzz a bit.

Finally, there is nothing sacrosanct about the particular nows which we happen to chop out, any more than a random pointing at objects confers on them an ontic privilege withheld from objects which could have been pointed at but were not. Any act of "now selection" might just as well have started a bit earlier or later, in which case a slightly different now would have been selected. The possible specious presents overlap one another in time, unlike the epochal acts of becoming or actual occasions dreamt of in our philosophies. This can be shown as follows. Suppose a person casually observes a roomful of people for five minutes, and that unknown to him the same scene is simultaneously filmed and sound-recorded from where he is located. Let the film be replayed with accompanying sound. Ask the subject to observe the replay and to indicate which of the selected pairs of closely successive events he experienced within the same specious present. I submit that even if you can get him to understand the question, you will not find that he can group those events into neat, non-overlapping specious presents. There seems to be no clear trace of the sharply demarcated acts of becoming or atomic occasions with internal phases.

13 The thought-experiment here is similar to the one developed in greater detail in Peter Strawson, Individuals, London, Methuen and Co., 1959, pp. 90-94.

14 This notion of the contrast between universals and particulars is developed more fully in Nelson Goodman’s The Structure of Appearance, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1951. His use of the term "individuals" is rather different from the one which I adopt here, however.

A chief attraction of process philosophy for Christian thinkers has been its ability to articulate in a new way the relationship of God to the world. By contrast, traditional philosophy tends to emasculate texts like the above, construing them as mere anthropomorphisms, since obviously Gad cannot be described in emotional and temporal terms -- or so the doctrine goes, despite massive evidence of religious experience to the contrary.

Even in process philosophy, however, skies are not all blue when it comes to talking about God. There is a deep cleavage between those who agree with Whitehead in describing God as a single actual entity, nontemporal in his primordial nature and everlasting in his consequent nature (the "entitative" view), and those who prefer with Charles Hartshorne to regard God as a personally ordered temporal society of successive occasions (the "societal" view). Though I shall speak in terms of the entitative view, towards which I incline, what I have to say has nothing to do with debating the above issue since it will apply equally well to the societal view. I wish rather to call attention to a peculiar aspect of one of the arguments used to support the latter view, since I think it betrays an inadequacy in all current Whiteheadian views which has not been appreciated.

Delwin Brown, supporting the societal view, writes: "On the entitative view, God is free but once (even if, as we shall consider later, ‘once’ is to be construed in some unique nontemporal sense). This single evaluative adjustment of possibility permanently fixes the character of God’s consequent commerce with the world" (PS 2:145). He then proceeds to argue that God’s primordial nature, thus understood, is like a computer which once-for-all programs all God’s decisions in history. It follows that even in his freedom God cannot be faithful, since "faithfulness" entails adhering freely through time to one’s previous commitment, and on this view God is "free but once," not temporally free.

Ford retorts, however, that the objection fails to notice that God’s primordial decision was not made at some time in the dim, dark past. Rather, it is not made in time at all. It is nontemporal, hence unrepeatable, but emerges in time insofar as it gradually acquires its definition with respect to the world. What we find in the temporal world is a burgeoning of God’s timeless free decision as seen from our temporal perspective. Only if God’s primordial decision lay in time (in the past), would Whitehead’s position be faced with the Leibnizian difficulties.

Now although Ford’s finely nuanced exposition may answer the objection as Brown posed it, Whitehead’s position (and Ford’s and Brown’s, for that matter) is vulnerable to a more fundamental objection latent beneath Brown’s argument. For even if we grant that God’s free decision is temporally emergent though intrinsically nontemporal, Whitehead seems to grant, and Ford and Brown clearly do, that God’s freedom is solely the freedom of his primordial envisagement. Brown writes: "On either view [the entitative or the societal], . . . God’s freedom lies in his primordial evaluation of possibility" (PS 2:145). I propose to show that insofar as Whitehead holds this view, even implicitly, he reverts to a Leibnizian position which fails to do justice to religious experience.¹ I shall also suggest a way in which we can speak significantly of a temporality of God’s freedom.

I

I have said that Whitehead appears to hold that God’s freedom is solely the freedom of his primordial envisagement. This may seem a hard saying, since in the final chapter of Process and Reality he terms the action of the consequent nature "judgment," "tenderness," and "patience," and that of the superjective nature "love" (PR 525, 532). Nevertheless he also writes: "The perfection of God’s superjective aim, derived from the completeness of his primordial nature, issues into the character of his consequent nature" (PR 524). He even describes God’s patience as "the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization" (PR 526). And he had already asserted that "the initial phase of the ‘subjective aim’ " of an actual occasion "is a direct derivate from God’s primordial nature" (PR 104). Indeed, it seems clear that in Process and Reality Whitehead considered initial aims to be derived directly from the pure valuations of divine conceptual feeling. But even if we accept with Cobb (CNT 155ff) and Ford (PPCT 292n9) the systematic extension of Whitehead’s position, whereby initial aims mirror divine propositional feelings, thus involving also the consequent nature, it remains true that the character (predicate) of God’s propositional feelings toward a concrescing actual occasion is just the emergent manifestation of the relevant aspects of his nontemporal primordial nature. Indeed it cannot differ from it, given that God’s subjective aim is supreme and that the primordial nature constitutes the optimal adjustment of possibilities for value. It is therefore inevitable that the form of God’s propositional feelings should exactly mirror the conceptual valuations of his primordial nature. Hence only in the constitution of his primordial nature is God significantly free.

In Ford’s analysis of Whitehead this point is quite explicit: "God’s decision can only be nontemporal. . . . Further, it is only as nontemporally actual that God can be prehended" (IPQ 13:369). Ford speaks, it is true, of a divine "temporal freedom," but this freedom wholly derives from the divine nontemporal decision and thus amounts only to the temporal emergence of a nontemporal freedom: "God’s temporal freedom is exercised in his integrative and propositional activity, where he fits to each actual world that gradation of pure possibilities best suited to contribute to the maximum intensity and harmony of his consequent physical experience" (IPQ 13:376; my emphasis). All the decisions of the consequent nature flow from the primordial nature, and though the former does not fit the present actual occasions into a ready-made pattern of the temporal past (as Ford carefully points out: IPQ 13:356), yet "the weaving of Cod’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts (PR 524) amounts to the emergence into time, as predicates of God’s propositional feelings, of the very valuations of his nontemporal decision.

The upshot of all this, and the trouble with it, first, is that it equates the concrete with the abstract, identifying God’s decisions for concrete particulars with his decisions for pure possibilities. Facts are graded entirely according to their correspondence with a primordial ordering among pure possibilities (even though the ordering be nontemporal and the possibilities only potentially distinct from one another as nontemporal). This implies that the concrete particular can be exhaustively evaluated in terms of its forms of definiteness, although Whitehead himself affirms that "each fact is more than its forms" (PR 30). Second, it identifies God’s self-creative subjectivity solely with the constitution of his primordial nature, as Ford argues at length in IPQ. Third, it implies that God does not love particulars as such, but only the universal patterns ingredient within them. As Whitehead wrote late in his life: "If you are enjoying a meal, and are conscious of pleasure derived from apple-tart, it is the sort of taste that you enjoy" (1:686). I submit, rather, that it is the tart that you enjoy, although the tart with that sort of taste. And religious experience testifies that it is individuals whom God loves, and that when he loves a person he is not just loving that person’s characteristics.

To return to the first and central difficulty, God’s primordial nature is clearly a valuation of pure possibilities:

Furthermore, the primordial nature -- or rather, God considered only in his primordial nature -- is unconscious (PR 524). It is, then, these unconscious valuations of pure conceptual possibilities which rise to consciousness in God’s propositional feelings about the world. It is necessary that this be so, for "God’s conceptual realization is nonsense if thought of under the guise of a barren, eternal hypothesis. It is God’s conceptual realization performing an efficacious role in multiple unifications of the universe" (PR 530). The predicates of God’s intellectual feelings for real possibility simply reflect the pure conceptual valuations of his primordial nature. As Ford explains it: "God’s own inner subjective contribution to this temporal activity is wholly derived from his nontemporal activity. His conscious, temporal decisions are all temporalizations of a single, unified, underlying unconscious temporal decision" (IPQ 13:368; my emphasis.) As with the apple-tart, then, God’s love for this particular occasion is really his love for this sort of occasion inasmuch as the occasion instantiates one of the abstract patterns valuated in the primordial nature.

Now this is Leibnizian, and the source of the trouble is that no provision has been made for a dimension of divine freedom directed toward concrete individuals as such, a dimension of freedom which lies within the "weaving" itself of God’s feelings for actual occasions. Ford is correct in maintaining that on the occasion of God’s dealing with particulars the appropriate aspects of his purely conceptual, nontemporal decision come into being in time as the character of his propositional feelings, but that cannot be the whole story of divine freedom. It is not by reason of a nontemporal, unconscious adjustment of pure conceptual valuations that God exclaims: "How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! . . . My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender" (Hosea 11:8).

Furthermore, the almost exclusive emphasis which Whitehead normally lays on the primordial nature seems doubtfully consistent with passages which reflect his deepest insights. In the lyrical final chapter of Process and Reality, a chapter he is said to have thought the best thing he ever wrote, he says that it is "the perfected actuality [which he has just identified not with the primordial but with the consequent nature] which passes back into the temporal world and qualifies it" (PR 532). Similarly, in the last section of Adventures of Ideas, having spoken throughout of the primordial nature of God (in terms of the supreme "Eros" of the Universe), Whitehead adds that the feeling of Transcendence

II

How then can we coherently ascribe a temporality to God’s freedom, beyond the nontemporal constitution of his primordial nature, so as to make concrete entities, as such, the objects of God’s free response?

The most obvious solution might seem to lie in adopting the societal view of God, as Brown in fact recommends. Yet whatever other reasons we may have for adopting that view, this cannot be a reason! For in this respect the societal view is in the same predicament as the entitative. True, on Brown’s view God continually and freely reconstitutes his primordial nature in each successive divine occasion, but he always reconstitutes it the same way. He could hardly do otherwise and still be God, as Ford has pointed out (IPQ 13:374). More importantly, for the societal view as well as for the entitative, the primordial nature is an adjustment of pure conceptual possibilities, so that although in the former view there is a temporality to its successive reconstitution, there is no temporality in its valuation. On neither view is the primordial nature a divine decision regarding temporal particulars, and in neither view is there allowance for a freedom of the divine decision with regard to these particulars. Consequently, adopting the societal view does nothing to solve our present problem.

If then we need to look elsewhere in order to find room for temporality in divine freedom, the temptation is strong to furnish it by the simple expedient of transferring a few responsibilities from the primordial to the consequent nature. (We inevitably do this if we think of divine temporal freedom as consisting in the same sort of valuations as those of the primordial nature.) But how do we adjust this division of labor -- where do we draw the line? Vagueness can be avoided, of course, if we go to the logical extreme of such a move, which would lie in attributing to the consequent nature all valuations, reserving to the primordial nature only the constitution of metaphysical possibility and the subjective aim toward value realization in general. Then God’s temporal decisions for particulars would in their everlastingness (on the entitative view; in their objective immortality, on the societal view) constitute the value norm for all subsequent time.

Such a view would not be quite so absurd as might at first appear: the divine temporal evaluations would seem to be no more arbitrary than those of the constitution of the primordial nature in Whitehead’s view; and the divine subjective aim toward the maximum of value intensity, together with the property of everlastingness and the Categoreal Obligations (constituted by the primordial nature) of Subjective Unity and Subjective Harmony, would seem sufficient to insure the mutual coherence of the growing series of divine temporal evaluations. Yet the idea must be rejected as radically inconsistent with the heart of Whitehead’s metaphysical insight, the identification of actuality with "something that matters" (MT 161; cf. 149f, 159). There is no way of removing valuations from the primordial nature, no way of divorcing sheer possibility from possibility-for-value-realization. Similarly, it would make no sense to think of a subjective aim at value realization in complete abstraction from a hierarchy of valued possibilities.

We take a more promising tack, however, if we consider that there is necessarily a certain incommensurability between an actual entity and any description of it in terms of eternal objects. That is, an actual entity is not identified with its own forms of definiteness.

This is true both of the actual occasion which is the object of God’s love and of God himself in his love toward it.

Further, the free act, precisely as such, is not describable in terms of forms. Bergson was the eloquent defender of this thesis in modern times (TFW), and Whitehead accepts it when he agrees that creativity is "inexplicable by forms." The free act is not wholly describable antecedently, in view of its conditions, nor consequently, as the inevitable outcome of its conditions. It is itself the sole ultimate reason for its own decision. This is in fact another way of putting Whitehead’s ontological principle, granted that every actual entity exercises at least some degree of freedom.

But then it must follow that God’s particular affective response, his yearning for value fulfillment for the world at any moment, is somehow more than the realization within time of some limited aspect of his primordial, nontemporal valuation. We need to describe a freedom precisely in God’s response to particulars as such. This response embodies the abstract value relations of the primordial nature, but cannot simply be defined in terms of them.

"Freedom," Bergson writes, "is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefinable, just because we aide free. For we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration" (TFW 219). To attempt to define freedom, to conceptualize it, would be (in modem terms) to commit a category mistake. Yet though it cannot be defined, the free temporal act of God’s particular satisfaction toward a particular can be described in terms of its intensity. According to Whitehead: "A subjective form has two factors, its qualitative pattern and its pattern of intensive quantity. But these two factors of pattern cannot wholly be considered in abstraction from each other" (PR 356; my emphasis). Elsewhere Whitehead speaks of "quantitative feeling," and of "quantitative emotional intensity" (PR 177). Bergson would be unhappy with this quantification of subjective states (TFW 70-74), and Whitehead’s expressions may go too far, but this issue is not critical for our present purposes. Bergson notwithstanding, it obviously makes some kind of sense to speak of one emotional state as "more" or "less" intense than another, even if this "more" be not strictly quantitative.

In a passage worth pondering, Whitehead explains that the self-creative contribution of the freedom of each actual entity consists precisely in the subjective emphasis it lays upon the factors which are given it, including its own purposes and subjective aim:

I take it that the "self-creative unity of the universe" refers to the actual entity insofar as it is a particular instance of creativity. I am less clear on the sense of the last sentence but one, but I believe that Whitehead means that the quantitative emotional intensity of the entity’s satisfaction must of course be related to the intensity of its drive toward value as furnished by its subjective aim. And the absolute standard of such a drive toward value is the primordial nature of God.

Whitehead’s immediate reference to the primordial nature should not distract us from applying the above description to the consequent nature. Granted that the primordial nature constitutes God’s "free" (though unconscious), nontemporal decision, yet as an actual entity he is completed by the conscious, temporal, self-creative propositional feelings he bears toward particular occasions. Why should they too not be characterized as "putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations" received from the occasions of the actual world?

This is not to assert that in his consequent nature God adds any formal determination to the valuations of the primordial nature, still less that he in any way contradicts them. The contribution of his temporal freedom does not lie in forms of definiteness but in emotional intensity. This emotional intensity stands related to but is not determined by the qualitative pattern established by the primordial nature.

What I mean is this, and this is the heart of the matter. In the entitative view we can accept Ford’s analysis wherein, of God’s nontemporal valuation of all pure possibility, those particular aspects which relate to concrete particulars first come into being and are essentially time-related, from our temporal point of view, in the propositional feelings of the consequent nature. But this temporal coming into being of an aspect of God’s nontemporal adjustment of possibility is itself clothed with emotion, with greater or less intensity of feeling on God’s part. This intensity of feeling lies precisely in the act itself whereby God loves particular actual occasions. This act is free in the sense that there is a certain incommensurability, hence absence of determination, between the act itself in its emotional intensity and the conceptual adjustment of possibilities which it includes. This is another way of affirming with Bergson that the free act, as such, is both intrinsically unforeseeable and, even in retrospect, conceptually indefinable. Granted, therefore, that God’s infinite conceptual valuation of pure possibility may justly be termed "free" since it is "limited by no actuality which it presupposes (PR 524), yet the temporal integrative activity of his consequent nature, whereby he loves particular occasions of the actual world, may also be called "free," though in a somewhat different sense.

To affirm therefore a temporality of divine freedom is not to multiply divine acts beyond those already described in Ford’s analysis, but merely to notice an overlooked dimension of freedom in the concrete divine act wherein there also emerges the relevant aspect of God’s nontemporal, free adjustment of pure value possibility. This dimension of freedom consists in the spontaneous intensity of emotion by which God’s propositional feelings toward particulars are clothed. Since this view introduces no new divine acts, it furnishes no new argument in favor of adopting the societal view of God. On the other hand, mutatis mutandis it also fits the societal view, since, as we have seen, that view too must allow for an aspect of the divine decision regarding particulars which goes beyond pure conceptual valuation.

If we use the above proposal to interpret religious experience we are able to make sense of saying that although God loves only what is lovable, the intensity of his love for this or that particular thing or person is a matter of his free temporal activity. God took a people to himself and loved them, not only because they had lovable qualities (and perhaps unlovable ones as well), but because he chose to. That is, his heart in fact went out to them, he loved them with a special intensity for which no reason can be assigned other than the act itself whereby he loved them. And in different temporal circumstances the intensity of God’s feelings may vary: "I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them."

Further, if we integrate this interpretation of divine temporal freedom with God’s providence for the world, we notice a remarkable result. In Whitehead’s view, of course, God acts in the world by loving it:

In more technical terms, this "inclusion as an immediate fact of relevant experience" by each temporal actuality is the feeling by each concrescing occasion of its own initial aim. The hybrid prehension of God, not only in his primordial but in his consequent nature, in his particular providence for particular things," constitutes the occasion’s feeling of its initial aim.

But the actual occasion does not feel God purely in terms of universals -- that is, solely in terms of the forms of definiteness (hence the primordial valuations) ingredient within God’s propositional feelings. Whitehead’s remark is applicable: "Owing to the disastrous confusion, more especially by Hume, of conceptual feelings with perceptual feelings, the truism that we can only conceive in terms of universals has been stretched to mean that we can only feel in terms of universals. This is untrue" (PR 351; Whitehead’s emphasis). Furthermore, Whitehead’s famous assertion that "in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true" (PR 395f) applies exactly here. The interest, the effective impact, which the divine propositional feelings make on an actual occasion in constituting its initial aim does not so much lie in their correspondence to the abstract conceptual valuations of the primordial nature as in the emotional intensity with which they are felt in God’s consequent nature.

On God’s own part, the function of his primordial valuations, when they become real possibilities applicable to concrete occasions, is to evoke emotional intensity within God’s own consequent nature:

And again: "The main function of intellectual feelings is neither belief, nor disbelief, nor even suspension of judgment. The main function of these feelings is to heighten the emotional intensity accompanying the valuations in the conceptual feelings involved . . ." (PR 416).

God is effective in the world through the love that he pours back into it. which is his "particular providence for particular occasions" (PR 532); the "‘superjective’ nature of God is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances" (PR 135). Also, what Whitehead says about "physical purposes" seems quite applicable to this "pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction":

III

In sum, then, the penalty for neglecting to allow for a divine temporal freedom beyond that of God’s primordial nature is to be required to grant, in effect, that the timeless and the abstract adequately describe the temporal and the concrete, even the concrete acts of divine love for individuals.² Such a view does not agree with the deliverance of religious experience. God’s freedom is temporal as well--that is, insofar as God relates himself freely to the things of the temporal world precisely in their individuality. It lies in the spontaneous intensity of God’s affection for the particulars of the temporal world. To God’s freely constituted, pure conceptual valuations there is coupled, as it were in another dimension, his free emotional response, his love for individuals. God’s freedom is thus also temporal, not in the sense that his free acts take time, but that they are directed toward temporal occasions as such and cannot be adequately described solely in terms of the primordial nature. God’s propositional feelings toward particulars require the nontemporal conceptual valuations of his primordial nature, but their emotional intensity is not a matter of forms of definiteness or qualities. Further, it is this intensity of the divine propositional feelings which most contributes to their effectiveness in achieving the divine purpose in the world. All relevant possibilities as conceptually felt in the primordial nature are ingredient within God’s complex propositional feeling toward a particular occasion, but only that will be most influential on the occasion which is felt by God with the greatest emotional intensity. And that intensity is not determined by either the primordial nature or the actual world.

Charles Hartshorne remarked not long ago that it is characteristic of Whitehead’s God that he lands on both sides of all antitheses. Ford has convincingly argued the importance of the nontemporal freedom of God’s primordial nature. I wish to add that God’s freedom is also temporal as well as nontemporal, and that his influence on the world, beyond his free, nontemporal valuation of pure possibilities, lies in the emotional intensity with which he freely loves the particulars of the world both for what they are and for what they can become.

References

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

IPQ -- Lewis S. Ford. "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead’s God," International Philosophical Quarterly, 13/3 (September, 1973), 347-76.

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

TFW -- Henri Bergson. Time and Free Will (original title: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness). New York: Harper & Row, 1960 (original French edition published in 1888).

1. "Immortality," in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951, pp. 682-700.

Notes

1 This is equally true for Brown, who shares this view, though he does not notice its pinch faith regard to divine faithfulness, since in his societal view God’s primordial nature continually reconstitutes itself in time.

2 This view resembles that of Leibniz insofar as Leibniz’s God was, as Ford put it, "programmed to choose the best of all possible worlds," even down to the last detail. This is in virtue of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, of a divine vision of all conceivable world orders hierarchically valuated, and of the tacit but essential rationalistic presupposition that abstract patterns adequately describe the concrete. Thus for Leibniz, too, there can be no significant sense to a temporality of divine freedom.

Professor Plamondon’s contribution to the discussion of induction is interesting and fruitful, but I am not content with her representation of Whitehead’s notion of the ‘valid inductive inference’ pattern. I think she has left something out, and what she has left out is of key metaphysical importance. True, she tells us she did not intend in her paper "to provide a metaphysical justification of induction" (p. 99), yet one might understandably feel that the discussion is incomplete without at least an inchoate one. By way of such a supplement, I wish to call attention to some central and, I think, successful features of such a justification when designed along Whiteheadian lines.

There are two levels to a discussion of induction: one concerns the internal relatedness of the entities of nature; the other concerns inductive inferences ultimately based on this relatedness. Plamondon has cogently argued, with Whitehead, that "the inductive inference is ‘valid’ ultimately in virtue of [the] internal relation between entity and environment" (p. 95). Taking this entirely to heart, let us look more closely at this internal relation. In doing so we shall be addressing ourselves to what Whitehead regarded as the metaphysical foundation of all wider inductive inference such as that chiefly discussed in Plamondon’s article. Whitehead writes:

Now how does Professor Plamondon represent the Whiteheadian pattern of inductive inference? After arguing, with Whitehead, that an actual entity cannot exist except within a certain kind of environmental order, and that the relationship between any entity and its environment is an internal one, she proposes pattern (2.1) so specified as representing ‘Whitehead’s view. Here she exhibits ae₁ as internally related to E, and ae₁^_ as internally related to E^_. But then the arrow D must be taken to mean a deductive inference from environment E to the future event in question, ae₂.

Yet this is, I think, either inconsistent or involves a crucial omission. For the inference to the character of the particular event ae₂ is, according to this representation, based on the environmental order E, which is seen to be analogous to the earlier environmental order E^_ But the environment which partially determines the character of ae₂ must be that to which ae₂ is causally, hence prehensively, related. Since E and ae₁ are given as internally related, it is clear that E is already in the causal past of ae₁, hence that it is not E but rather a successor of E, say E¹, which will causally influence ae₂. The indicated inductive inference from E to ae₂ is therefore entirely precarious, regardless of analogies between E and E^_ or ae₁ and ae₁^_, unless there are metaphysical grounds for asserting an analogy between E and E¹. In other words, we are still faced with Bertrand Russell’s "interesting doubt" as to whether the laws of nature will continue to hold tomorrow.¹ The cogency of the whole discussion about analogy, then, depends on the sense we can make of an internal relatedness of the environment of the immediate future to that of the present. If we diagram simply the internal relations of entities and environments, we get something like this:

 

Here the solid arrows represent prehensive relationships of the present and past, and the broken arrows the presumed relations of the future. The environment E_{_} is analogous though not identical to E_{_} in its past, and E₂ will presumably be analogous to E₂. If there are metaphysical grounds for this presumption, then there are grounds for anticipating the general character of ae₂.

There are two distinct ways in which such a diagram can be employed. We may regard it as depicting facts of observation but not the observer, taking ae₂ and ae₁ to be specific events such as scientific observations in space and time or, as in Hume’s homely example, the past beneficial effects of eating bread. (Would this be an instance of the mere abstract" mentioned by Whitehead above?) This way of using the diagram is appropriate to the usual focus of discussion and, in the main, to that of Plamondon’s article. And from this point of view it may seem that Whitehead’s approach aggravates the problem rather than advances its solution, since, according to him, we base our inductive expectation as to the character of ae₂ on what amounts to still another inductive expectation as to the character of E₂!

But there is another way of understanding the diagram, one which is, in my view, more fundamental and one on which the former ultimately depends. In this alternative way we include in the diagram the experiential act of forming inductive expectations; we "apply reason to elicit the general characteristics of the immediate occasion, as set before us in direct cognition." In this way ae₁ will include within itself the forming of the inductive inference, and this inference will consist in an expectation as to the character of the immediately consequent experiential event ae₂. This latter reading of the diagram employs it specifically to analyze the vector fabric of experience without which inductive inferences in the sense usually discussed would remain entirely unfounded. Thus although this kind of metaphysical analysis of inductive expectations is of itself insufficient for analyzing the formation of, say, scientific predictions, it forms an indispensable part of the whole picture.

Using the diagram in this second way, we are immediately faced with the critical question, In what way is ae₁ related to E₂? How can ae₁ include within itself any sense of the character of its immediately future environment? If there is no way in which this is possible, it seems that there is ultimately no ground for inductive expectations.

Whitehead’s metaphysical position is, I think, able to provide such a justification on the levels both of immediate experience and of conceptual analysis. On the experiential level he claims, as against Hume, that the vector or casual connectedness of experience is immediately given. According to this doctrine of "perception in the mode of causal efficacy," the past is felt precisely as influencing the present, and the present felt as making a difference to the future. Correlatively, his Category of Subjective Intensity asserts that the subjective aim achieves intensity of feeling not only in the immediate subject but also "in the relevant future" (PR 41; Whitehead’s italics). At bottom, then, the inductive expectation reposes on an anticipatory feeling of the character of the immediately future experience, in our case, of ae₂. This feeling for the character of the future, this feeling of the continuity of the future with the present, is so deeply ingrained in our ordinary experience that we have difficulty bringing it to explicit attention, yet it is a feeling which, in Whitehead’s view, we share with all other entities generally.

On the level of conceptual analysis, Whitehead’s Categoreal Scheme makes sense, I think, out of this anticipatory feeling. Every actual occasion feels itself, through causal efficacy and in obedience to the Category of Subjective Intensity, as making a difference to its future. Furthermore, in its initial aim, whether conceptual reversion plays a significant role or not, it feels the forms of definiteness dominating its own past actual world as analogously relevant to its future. That is, since an entity is internally related to its actual world, for it to feel relevance to its own future necessarily implies its feeling a relevance of its own environment to the environment of its future. That actual occasion ae₁ feels its relevance to its own future, ae₂, entails that it also feels a coherence of E₂ with its own environment E₁. This feeling of the continuity of environmental order is accounted for by Whitehead first by certain statistical considerations (PR 303-15). There is a feeling of an analogy between the environment directly experienced and the presupposed environment of the future, and the statistical basis for this analogy is categoreally described in terms of social order (PR 314). The social order, I take it, is prehended by "an intuition -- in general vague and unprecise" (PR 315). I suggest that another way of expressing this is to say that each actual occasion prehends not only its actual world, taken as a mere collection of data, but in its coherence as an environmental society. It is, in other words, a feeling of the environment as constituting a generally harmonious whole. In categoreal terms, this feeling consists in a prehension of the general harmony of the subjective forms of the entities of the environmental society. Taken in conjunction with the sense of derivation through time provided by physical prehensions (causal efficacy), this feeling provides a plausible basis for the sense of derivational continuity of the environment.

But in a still more fundamental way, Whitehead adds a nonstatistical account of the validity of inductive expectations. This account is based on "the principle of the graduated ‘intensive relevance’ of eternal objects to the primary physical data of experience."

This principle expresses the prehension by every creature of the graduated order of appetitions constituting the primordial nature of God. There can thus be an intuition of an intrinsic suitability of some definite outcome from a presupposed situation. (PR 315)

If our earlier account is sound, the situation is not only "presupposed," it is in some sense prehended. And we note that implicit in the above account is Whitehead’s conviction, based on his immediate experience, that the experienced world is basically consistent and thus amenable to rational analysis. This conviction is embodied in Whitehead’s notion of the absoluteness of the primordial nature of God: that there is a timeless order of stability underlying the process and change of the universe. By reason of this timeless stability, the intensive relevance of certain eternal objects to certain types of factual situations is itself not subject to temporal vicissitude.

Such a conviction is, I suppose, unarguable: one takes it or leaves it. Whether it answers Bertrand Russell’s "interesting doubt" about induction may be also a matter of opinion. On the one hand, Russell might contend that his doubt applies to the laws of metaphysics as well as to the laws of nature, so that to accept something like the primordial nature of God is to make just the kind of a priori commitment from which he saw no real escape if one is to accept induction. Whitehead, on the other hand, might reply that his metaphysical scheme is designed precisely to account for that derivational continuity and harmonious stability which he finds not a priori but a posteriori in his experience, and which underlies our feeling for the future.

 

Note

1In Ch. VI, "On Induction," of his Problems of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1912).