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Some thirty years ago Charles Hartshorne raised two questions concerning the Whiteheadian understanding of the temporal structure of God.¹ He asked first if, in spite of relativity physics, there must not be a cosmic present, a divine immediacy in which the de facto totality of simultaneous actual entities exist. This question has received a measure of attention in thc last decade.² His second question concerned the temporal length of the divine present. If the divine present is construed epochally, what must its temporal span be for its creative interaction with the advance of nature? This second question has received scant attention in the literature. My task will not be to answer this question, but to show how problematic it is for a Hartshornian conception of God.

A few preliminary remarks on the epochal theory of time, which Hartshorne generally accepts, are needed to provide a context for the discussion. According to the epochal theory, time is not some absolute container within which actual entities become; rather, time is an abstraction from the succession of actual entities. The basic thrust of the matter is expressed by Donald Sherburne: "Concrescence is not in time: rather, time is in concrescence in the sense of being an abstraction from actual entities" (KPR 38). From the point of view of physical time actual entities are temporally atomic. That is, they are indivisible into earlier and later portions; but they are not, like instantaneous points, indivisible because unextended. Each actual entity has temporal extension, but the temporal extension happens all at once as an indivisible unit. Time might be construed as being built up out of the successive relations of actual entities.

In some abstractive, though legitimate, sense one can speak of the temporal length of an actual entity’s epoch. Whatever its temporal length or extension may be, the actual entity prehends God at its inception and is prehended by God at its satisfaction. Furthermore, since God is conceived by Hartshorne as a society of actual occasions, it is legitimate to ask what the temporal extension of a single divine experience is.

The issue begins to take shape. God must be able to prehend the satisfaction of every actual entity of the temporal process. God’s omniscience requires this. Furthermore, the satisfaction of a divine occasion must be able to be prehended by every incipient actual entity. God’s creative role in the world requires this. It follows then that God’s successive experiences must coincide with the inception and satisfaction of every actual entity, lest there be an actual entity for whom God is not available as an initial datum, or an actual entity whose satisfaction is not prehended by God. This is not to suggest that any one of God’s successive experiences is coincident with all the actual entities at some divine present. It is to say that each actual entity at its inception must prehend some divine satisfaction or other, and each actual entity at its satisfaction must be prehended by some divine occasion or other.

Such speculation may be foreign to Whitehead’s system, yet the following quotations from Hartshorne and John Cobb suggest that their notion of God lends itself to such an analysis. Hartshorne observes that

Along similar lines Cobb suggests that

The picture can now be boldly sketched. The temporal process is moving forward in a unison of becoming. At any given cosmic present, as determined by the divine simultaneity, some, but not all, of the actual entities have reached satisfaction.³ The satisfaction of no actual entity escapes some cosmic present, for at that time God prehends the datum and thereby increases his knowledge. The frequency of the cosmic present, or the divine "psychological simultaneity," is such that no actual entity fails to be creatively related to God. God’s life must be synchronized with the lives of every actual entity. What then is the temporal length of the divine occasion?

God’s successive experiences must be as rapid as those of any in creation, lest God’s knowledge and creativity be diminished. Suppose that in all of creation every actual entity has a temporal extension of either 1/5, 1/10, 1/20, 1/40, or 1/80 of a second. This is but to say that five actual entities with a temporal extension of 1/5 of a second when serially ordered would require a time lapse of one second, and similarly for the other four possibilities. It would seem that, according to Hartshorne and Cobb, each of God’s experiences would have the same temporal extension as the most rapid of actual entities, in this case 1/80 of a second. Thus God would prehend the satisfaction of those actual entities of temporal extension of 1/80 in every successive moment of his life. Every other occasion of the divine life would prehend those entities with temporal extension of 1/40. With respect to those actual entities of greatest temporal extension, 1/5 of a second, God would have sixteen successive occasions to every one of them. Nevertheless in this pattern it is sufficient for the temporal extension of a divine experience to be that of the least of all actual entities.

But other patterns can be devised where the temporal extension of the divine experience must be much smaller than that of any actual entity. Consider the following pattern of temporal extensions.

Figure I:

Suppose that every actual entity in the universe enjoys one or another of these twenty-four temporal extensions, it being understood that each represents a fraction of a second. In this case 1/3 is the greatest extension, whereas 1/136 is the least. But what must the temporal extension of the divine experience be if God is to function separately in relation to each individual in this series? The answer to that question is found by determining the lowest common denominator of the fractions, for only by this means can we determine that the inceptions and satisfactions of the divine occasions will coincide exactly with the inception and satisfaction of every actual entity. It is 2³ x 3 x 5 x 7 x 11 x 13 x 17, or 2,042,042. Therefore, God has 2,042,042 occasions of experience per second, whereas the least temporal extension in the pattern is 1/136 of a second.

But one might object that the disparity between the temporal extension of the experience of God and that of other entities is occasioned by the disparity of temporal extensions in Figure I, from 1/3 to 1/136 of a second. Furthermore, the objector might continue, twenty-four possibilities is too great. It could be said that there is no reason to think that actual entities differ that much in temporal extension⁴ or that so many different possibilities exist. Let us then consider another pattern of temporal extensions, this time with twelve options and all approximately 1/10 of a second.⁵

Figure II

As before, every actual entity enjoys one or another of these twelve temporal extensions. What must the temporal extension of the divine experience be in such a case? The answer is 1/22 x 32 x 5 x 7 x 11 x 17 x 19 x 23 x 31 x 37 x 41, or 1/4,842,179,260,380 of a second.

At this point one might be tempted to say that the temporal extension of every actual entity is the same. God could be conceived as sharing this same temporal extension. But the problem is not really solved unless one says that all of the actual entities are in phase or synchronized. Let the temporal extension of all actual entities be some constant 1. Arbitrarily select an actual entity AE; its temporal extension is 1, obviously. But somewhere in the universe there are twelve actual entities whose temporal extensions, also 1, overlap that of AE. Return to Figure II. The temporal extension of one actual entity overlaps that of AE by 1/9 of the constant 1, another by 1/10, and so on until each of the twelve possibilities of Figure II is uniquely assigned to the twelve actual entities. It is obvious that the problem has reappeared in different form, and the temporal extension of the divine experience is 1/4,842,179,260,380 x the constant extension of all actual entities.

Now it is appropriate to explore briefly some of the issues which the preceding considerations raise. First, one might claim that these arguments constitute a reduction to absurdity (such frequency of divine occasions being construed as absurd) of the Hartshornian position and consequently that the position must be altered to avoid this absurd result. I think this claim is mistaken. Although the number of divine occasions in a second would have to be incredibly large on this accounting, there is no reason in principle why Hartshorne could not affirm it. Such a frequency of divine experience is unimaginable, but it is not logically impossible. Hartshorne has often chided the positivist for claiming that God cannot be intelligible unless God is imaginable. Doubtless it is open to Hartshorne to claim that the divine occasions, no matter how small, are of finite duration and hence intelligible and not absurd.

Second, an intriguing problem is raised with regard to the growth of God’s knowledge. According to Hartshorne and Cobb, God’s knowledge grows in each successive experience. Yet the pattern of actual entities in Figure II raises a curious problem at this point. Arranged in increasing magnitude of temporal extension, the actual entities appear as 2/23, 3/34, 4/45, 1/11, 2/21, 3/31, 4/41, 1/10, 2/19, 3/28, 4/37, 1/9. Assume that there are twelve actual entities, each uniquely possessing one of these values. Further assume that all of these actual entities commence simultaneously at some time t. Arbitrarily select any two contiguous fractions, such as the third and fourth in the series, 4/45 and 1/11. After the completion of the actual entity with a temporal extension of 4/45 of a second, God will have 9,780,160,124 successive experiences before the satisfaction of the actual entity with a temporal extension of 1/11.6 This means that God has nearly ten billion successive experiences before there exists an actual entity whose satisfaction he can prehend, thereby increasing his knowledge. This assumes that all of God’s successive experiences are equal in temporal duration. If this is true, it is incorrect to think that each successive experience of God increases his knowledge.

One might try to mitigate this conclusion by pointing to the immense density of the temporal process with regard to the satisfactions of the countless actual entities of reality, and then argue that surely there is at least one of these actual entities which reaches satisfaction simultaneously with the incohate divine occasion. This move will not do for two reasons. One, to emphasize the number of actual entities is to raise the possibility of a greater diversity in temporal extension and a greater number with overlapping extensions, hence causing the divine occasions to be even more frequent and more likely of occurring without an increase in the divine knowledge. A sort of helpless cycle is instituted. Two, this response fails to recognize the objection as systematic, not factual. That is, the objection points to a weakness in the Hartshornian system; on the system’s own terms there seems to be no guarantee that each of God’s successive experiences will coincide with the satisfaction of some actual entity. Thus the problem of divine synchronization seems to be a two-edged sword -- God’s experiences must be thin enough to be prehended by every actual entity in its inception and to prehend every actual entity in its satisfaction; but if his experience is that thin, there is no assurance that each divine experience will result in an increase in the divine knowledge.

How might a Hartshornian respond to this latter problem and retain the usual claim for the increasing divine knowledge? At least three responses exist. One, he might claim that all actual entities are in phase and the largest temporal extensions are multiples of the smallest extension, e.g., 1/320, 1/160, 3/320, 1/80, 1/64 Here it would suffice to have the temporal extension of the divine experience as that of the shortest temporal extension. The problem with this response is that it is blatantly ad hoc, besides contradicting the explicit remarks of Hartshorne and Cobb on the lack of synchronization among actual entities.

A second alternative would be to challenge a premise implicit throughout the entire discussion, namely that all divine occasions are of the same temporal length. The temporal span of divine occasions might vary so that divine occasion A does not reach satisfaction and divine occasion B does not commence until at least one actual entity in the universe has reached satisfaction. On this interpretation then, the temporal span of divine occasion A might be 1/495 of a second, i.e., that span between the satisfaction of an actual entity with a duration of 4/45 of a second and the satisfaction of one with a duration of 1/11 (see above, p. 204) while occasion B would have a longer temporal span, 1/231 of a second, given the difference between the satisfactions of actual entities with spans of 1/11 and 2/21 of a second. The principle governing the temporal duration of divine occasions could be stated roughly: No new divine occasion commences until at least one new satisfaction of an actual entity has been reached.

This second alternative shows some promise, but problems remain. How would God know when to reach a satisfaction and commence a new divine occasion coincident with this newly achieved satisfaction? On the Hartshornian model of the divine life, God is occupied with synthesizing and unifying those physical prehensions of the initial stage of that particular divine occasion. Following the initial stage, the divine occasion is closed to any further physical prehensions. Hence the divine occasion would be unaware of any new satisfaction that occurred coincident with this period of divine closure and synthesis. The divine occasion cannot prehend the emergence of the actual entity’s satisfaction because ex hypothesi the divine occasion in its concrescence is closed to further physical prehensions.

This objection might be countered by the following argument. Since the divine occasion includes within its prehensions the past actual world of some actual entity, call it AE (1), the divine occasion could calculate the temporal span of AE (1) from inception to satisfaction and could time its own satisfaction and successor’s inception to coincide with the satisfaction of AE (1). This could be done for every actual entity so that the divine occasions would be synchronized with the creative advance of reality. The lengths of the divine occasions would vary as the divine calculations dictated.

Although this proposal strikes me as somewhat forced, it is not unintelligible. However, one objection can be brought against it. Hartshorne has long been an advocate of the indeterminacy of the future; the specific concrete character of the actual is not knowable beforehand, not even by God. Can a Hartshornian consistently claim that God knows the quantitative duration of the immediate future? Why not its qualitative character too? The notion that God can compute the temporal span of concrescing occasions strikes me as being rather systematically irregular, if not ad hoc.

All that remains is a consideration of a third alternative. Allow the initial stage of the divine occasion to have some extensive breadth (possibly up to its satisfaction) so that it can have physical prehensions throughout its concrescence. This move would obviate all the talk about the divine computation of an entity’s temporal duration. God would be open to new satisfactions throughout its own concrescing occasion. This solves the problem of how God could know the next satisfaction, but a problem remains with regard to God’s creative role in the universe. The divine occasion is not allowed after its initial stage the luxury of several nonsimultaneous physical prehensions before reaching satisfaction. It must reach satisfaction coincident with the very first new satisfaction; otherwise, the successor to the recently completed entity will have no divine occasion to prehend. The divine occasion, call it DO (10), must prehend the first new satisfaction in the universe, call it AE (10), and reach satisfaction simultaneously with it; for only then could DO (10) provide the subjective aim for AE (11). DO (9) no longer exists to provide the subjective aim for AE (11). And, given the Hartshornian insistence upon the causal independence of contemporaries, DO (11) cannot provide the subjective aim for AE (11).⁷

All is not well with this alternative, unfortunately. First, the notion of a divine occasion’s reaching satisfaction upon its prehension of the first new satisfaction would necessitate a revision of the whole idea of concrescence itself. How could the satisfaction of AE (10) be synthesized and harmonized within DO (10), when DO (10) ceases upon its prehension of that satisfaction? How could the satisfaction of AE (10) enter into the divine life except to bring one of the divine occasions to a halt? Two, this alternative is self-defeating in the following way. If the satisfaction of AE (10) is prehended by DO (10), then no new initial datum exists for DO (11). And without a new initial datum, how is this divine experience to result in an increase in the divine knowledge? On this view, however, DO (11) would be open after its initial stage to receive physical prehensions. But now the first mentioned problem returns: Is a prehension without a synthesis and unification into the divine life knowledge?

Of course the Hartshornian might want to claim that the divine occasion can be prehended at any stage of its concrescence, not just at its satisfaction. But this move cuts the ground out from under the Hartshornian rationale of conceiving of God’s "psychological simultaneity" as temporally thin. If God can creatively interact in any phase of concrescence, then why must that occasion be temporally thin? Could not its temporal span be several seconds, several hours, several days, ad indefinitum, and still be creatively interactive? This would commit one to a radical reconstruction of the Hartshornian scheme, moving closer to the position of William Christian.

Doubtless the three alternatives are not exhaustive. Nor do I deny that the alternatives mentioned may hold possibilities for further interpretations which I have overlooked. The purpose of this paper has been achieved whatever solution is proposed, for with any proposed solution there is an implicit recognition that the matter of divine synchronization is problematic for a Hartshornian position. To stimulate that recognition has been the purpose of this study.

References

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

Westminster Press, 1965.

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

PI -- Philosophical Interrogations, edited by Sydney and Beatrice Rome. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

Notes:

1 Charles Hartshorne, "Whitehead’s Idea of God," in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. by Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosophers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1941), pp. 545-46.

2 The issue was raised anew by John T. Wilcox’s "A Question from Physics for Certain Theists," The Journal of Religion, 41(October, 1961), 293-300. Hartshorne’s answers appear in PI 324f and in his A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle: Open Court Publishing Company, 1967), pp. 93-95. Lewis S. Ford, in "Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?" The Journal of Religion, 48 (April, 1968), 124-35, proposes a new solution to the question, along with a criticism of Hartshorne’s position.

3 It might be objected that since Whitehead wrote that an actual entity lies in infinitely many durations (PR 191) and is temporally atomic, it is not appropriate in a Whiteheadian framework to raise questions about a cosmic present and the relative extension and overlapping of actual entities. The objection may be well-founded, yet it does not bear against the approach of the present study. All that the present study affirms is that such considerations are appropriate to the thought of Hartshorne and of Cobb. This may raise the question of the legitimacy of the Hartshorne-Cobb development of Whitehead’s thought at this point.

4 In fact, the disparity is probably not great enough, though for my purposes the more limited range of lengths is sufficient. In personal correspondence Lewis S. Ford called my attention to an article by Robert Efron, "The Duration of the Present," Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 138, 2 (February 6. 1967), 713-29. This work may be interpreted within a Whiteheadian framework as indicating that the temporal span of the shortest human mental occasion is 20-40 milliseconds, and that of the longest up to several seconds. Moreover, electronic occasions doubtless even range to less than 20 milliseconds in length. Whatever values one may settle upon empirically, my analysis still obtains, being formal in nature.

5 In AI 49, 233, Whitehead seems to suggest that an actual entity might have a temporal span of 1/10 of a second.

6 The figure of 9,780,160,124 was arrived at by subtracting 4/45 from 1/11, which results in 1/495. But in 1/495 of a second God will have 9,780,160,124 experiences, for 1/495 x 4,842,179,260,380 -- 9,780,160,124.

7See Hartshorne’s discussion in PI 325 and in "Idealism and Our Experience of Nature" in Philosophy, Religion, and the Coming World Civilization: Essays in Honor of William Ernest Hocking, ed. by Leroy S. Rouner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 79-80. For our purposes it suffices to say that Hartshorne argues that, for two contemporaries DO (11) and AE (11), AE (11) receives its subjective aim from DO (10), and the satisfaction of AE (11) is prehended by DO (12). The third alternative has already resulted in a modification of the principle of the independence of contemporaries, for DO (10), rather than DO (11), is construed as prehending the satisfaction of AE (10). But now if DO (11), and not DO (10), is construed as providing the subjective aim for AE (11), this principle is totally abandoned.

In this paper I shall investigate the interpretive method which Wolfe Mays brings to Whitehead’s later philosophy as well as the resultant interpretation, particularly in The Philosophy of Whitehead (PW).

According to Mays (RSW 429, RL 284) there are two approaches to the interpretation of Whitehead’s later writings: (1) the aesthetic-religious and (2) the logico-mathematical. Most discussions are based on the aesthetic-religious approach; and, on the assumption of a shift in the issues and problems which exercise Whitehead in this later period, these discussions make a sharp division between his work in mathematics and nature philosophy and his metaphysical work. Mays adopts the second approach, whose cardinal tenet is the continuity of Whitehead’s earlier and later writings. Whereas the first approach pictures Whitehead’s philosophical interests as developing in a linear manner -- from mathematics, to nature philosophy, and finally to metaphysics, Mays uses the analogy of a spiral (RW 237, 259; of PW 20/15). From the speculative endeavor of "On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World" (1906) in which Whitehead was showing how one could construct alternative concepts of the physical world, i.e., cosmologies, he moves into his nature philosophy in which his speculative work is infused with empirical studies. In his later philosophy Whitehead returns to his speculative endeavors.

In Process and Reality, however, Whitehead has not merely returned to the position of the earliest period. Were that Mays’s interpretation, a cyclical analogy would better suit him. Yet there is a continuity between the first and final periods of Whitehead’s philosophizing, for "despite the formidable terminology [of PR],the ideas contained in his later work are much simpler than is usually assumed, since he is working Out some of his earlier ideas on a larger philosophical canvas" (PW 18/12). It is this point which is crucial to understanding Mays’s interpretive method:

"Whitehead’s later writings are to be interpreted in terms of his earlier ones and in the light of his logical and scientific ideas" (RL 284; my italics). This gives to Mays’s works a gnostic quality as he interprets what Whitehead really means. Don’t be deceived by the obscure language, Mays cautions us. Just remember that "the key words [of PR] derive their meanings from his earlier studies in mathematics and the philosophy of science" (RL 284).

In particular, Mays interprets Process and Reality in light of two central notions: "the postulational method of modern logic with its emphasis on complex relational systems, and the field theory of modem physics with its emphasis on the historicity of physical systems" (PW 20/14). The axiomatic method in logic is the key to Whitehead’s metaphysics; field theory is the key to his cosmological speculation about perception and causation.

I

Let us look first at Mays’s interpretation of Whitehead’s metaphysics and then at the implications and shortcomings of such an interpretation. Mays recognizes that Whitehead’s method in speculative philosophy is akin to the hypothetico-deductive method of the sciences, where from particular observed data one frames a theory and then tests it against other data. Even as science seeks theories of high generality, so in his metaphysics "Whitehead is trying to find a scheme of the highest order of generality made up of more general notions than those found in any of the sciences -- notions which are applicable to every kind of experience" (PW 30/22). These notions are required not merely to be applicable to every experience of our particular cosmic epoch but to be applicable to every cosmic epoch, for they are "the logical conditions to which all possible experience must conform" (PW 30/22). One might think that the Categoreal Scheme (PR I, chapter 2) provides such notions. Not so, according to Mays, for they are only "classificatory principles descriptive of empirical processes" (PW 35/28) and do not hold for all cosmic epochs. Mays uses the term ‘cosmology’ to refer to those general principles true of our cosmic epoch but not all others and the term ‘metaphysics’ to refer to those more general principles true of every epoch (PW 34/27).¹

Mays’s dismissal of the Categoreal Scheme as not being truly metaphysical is curious. Utilizing Whitehead’s discussion of the marks of speculative philosophy (PR 4), Mays argues that all metaphysical systems are :1 coherent, logical, and necessary. Moreover, since the Category of the Ultimate, i.e., Creativity, is an essentially temporal notion, it is not logical, coherent, and necessary. Hence, it is not a metaphysical principle. Quite strictly, all one could conclude from this is that creativity is not a metaphysical system; but on the supposition that all metaphysical first principles are coherent, logical, and necessary, the argument is valid.

Mays offers no explanation why being essentially temporal implies being nonlogical, noncoherent, or nonnecessary. The notion of Creativity does have an essential reference to a temporal process, but that does not render the notion illogical or incoherent. And merely to assume that temporal process is not characteristic of all cosmic epochs, and hence not necessary, is to assume the very conclusion in question. This is particularly problematic in that Creativity is usually understood as a metaphysical principle. For example, Robert M. Palter writes that "creativity is not only a necessary feature of any possible world but it is the single trait common to all actualities" (WPS 111),

Whitehead’s own use of the term ‘metaphysics’ is not systematic, as is well-known,’ so not much is gained by pointing out that Whitehead speaks of Creativity as "the ultimate metaphysical principle" (PR 32; my italics). It does seem unusual, however, that the section immediately following Whitehead’s discussion of metaphysics and method in metaphysics is an overview of a cosmological scheme. I shall not pause to argue that the Categoreal Scheme has a wider generality than this cosmic epoch, simply noting that, in excluding the Categoreal Scheme and its application, Mays is working with a restricted view of what Whitehead’s metaphysics concerns.

According to Mays, Whitehead’s metaphysics is that coherent, logical, and necessary system of general ideas whose model is a purely abstract system of mathematics and formal logic. And where do we find such a system of general ideas in Process and Reality? It is the "abstract scheme of extensive relations which, owing to its generality, applies to every cosmic epoch" (PW 34/27). Thus the essentially metaphysical section is the chapter on "Extensive Connection" (PR IV, chapter 2: PW 43/37). The logical systematic framework of extensive relations is the formal or metaphysical side of speculative philosophy, whereas the empirical or cosmological side concerns the way this scheme applies to the actualities of our present cosmic epoch (cf. PW 36/29, 43/37). In light of Mays’s remarks it is astonishing to find that he devotes a mere ten pages to the method of extensive abstraction (PW 109-18/115-25), and these do not begin to offer any clarification of the exact nature of this metaphysical scheme.

The relation which Mays suggests between the formal and empirical sides of speculative philosophy is puzzling. When he emphasizes the formal side of speculative philosophy, he considers the empirical process as providing an interpretation of the formal system, in the way that "an abstract system is spoken of as being given an interpretation by definite values" (PW 32/25). We have then an abstract system (i.e., a set of formulas) for which we provide an interpretation by specifying a domain of discourse and by assigning a set of meanings to the primitive symbols.² Consider the abstract system composed of the one formula

(1) (x) (y) Qxy.

We provide an interpretation for (1) when we specify its domain as the set of all living human beings and let Q be the identity relation. Under this interpretation (1) is false. Letting the meaning of Q remain as before, we readily see that (1) is true only in single-membered domains.

The point is that an abstract system in isolation from some interpretation is neither true nor false, but is true or false under some interpretation or other. Thus, given Mays’s understanding of the relation of the formal and empirical sides of speculative philosophy in Whitehead, if we were to discover that our abstract system was false under the interpretation of "our concrete spatio-temporal scheme" (PW 32/25), we would not conclude that the system was false, rather that we must look elsewhere for an interpretation or a model under which it is true. But this is just where Mays’s analogy becomes untenable, for if the complex scheme of generalities were found to conflict with present experience, the scheme as a whole would be rejected as false. Otherwise, what would be the point of the application of philosophic generalizations beyond the data of their immediate origins (PR 8)? Hence the analogy which Mays suggests for the relation of the formal and empirical sides of Whitehead’s philosophy is unsatisfying.

One might suggest that Mays’s position could be strengthened if the notion of an intended interpretation were utilized. Briefly, often when one sets up a formal system, it is to characterize precisely the assertions of some theory (Euclidian geometry, for example). The formal system is judged on the basis of whether or not on its intended interpretation the resulting theorems coincide with the assertions of the theory. In our particular case the intended interpretation of the formal system would be our cosmic epoch, and provided that there were truths about it that the formal system either did not express or contradicted, the formal system could be judged inadequate. The problem with such a tactic is that for Mays the intended interpretation of the formal system cannot be just this cosmic epoch. Every cosmic epoch is an interpretation of it ideally, and no particular one is the intended interpretation. The set of all cosmic epochs is the intended interpretation. And with this understanding of the intended interpretation the initial distinction between the formal system (which is metaphysical) and its interpretation (which is cosmological) is blurred. Both the formal system and its intended interpretation have essential reference to all epochs, and the relation between the general and the particular which Mays sought to elucidate is not clarified.

Although he interprets Whitehead’s ideal for a metaphysical system as being "a super-deductive system" (PW 40/34), Mays realizes that Whitehead had some severe remarks to make about the deductive method in philosophy (PR 9-12). According to Mays, the trouble to which Whitehead called attention was not deduction per se but the assumption of dogmatic premises on which the deductive system was founded (PW 50f/46f). Whitehead tentatively asserts generalizations whose deductive implications are then tested against the facts of experience. Deduction provided the means of schematizing the general principles into a coherent system as well as making clear the implications of the principles (PW 45-51/39-47). Coherence of the system is not enough. In this sense Whitehead is closer to a mathematical physicist than a pure mathematician (PW 47/43); the metaphysical system must be tested against experience and "depends for its truth upon its empirical verification, and not merely upon its logical criteria" (PW 51/47).

A problem which Mays never addresses is how with this understanding of Whitehead’s metaphysics and method one can legitimately speak of the empirical verification of a metaphysical principle. Even if the principle somehow holds in this cosmic epoch, how do we determine that it holds in others? How could such a principle be verified by one instance, i.e., this cosmic epoch?

Wherever Whitehead does metaphysics, he is talking about general patterns of connectedness at the base of all cosmic epochs. It is not unusual that Mays finds Whitehead’s talk of God metaphysical, but it is unusual that he interprets it as being vague talk about the extensive scheme (or system).’ "Whitehead’s deification of the extensive scheme" in his natural theology is a not too happy means of expressing the abstract notions which permeate his philosophy (PW 61/59). Hence Mays sets for himself the task of translating Whitehead’s theological terminology into a neutral, less misleading language (PW 57/54, 59/56). In places even Mays despairs of this heroic attempt at demystification: "It is difficult to follow Whitehead when he says that ‘the consequent nature of God is conscious’ [PR 524], but it is questionable whether he means by this more than that we are consciously aware of the concrete world in perception" (PW 61/59). Consciousness cannot be a quality of an abstract deductive structure, yet Whitehead speaks of consciousness; hence White-head must be affirming consciousness of human perception in the passage in question -- so the inference goes.

How did Mays ever come to identify God with an abstract deductive structure? The argument is not clear, but Mays proceeds by comparing two passages. Mays takes the statement that "The order of nature, prevalent in the cosmic epoch in question, exhibits itself as a morphological scheme involving eternal objects of the objective species" (PR 447f) and renders it: The order of nature is a morphological scheme of mathematical Platonic forms (PW 58/56). Then a theological passage, ‘Eternal objects, as in God’s primordial nature, constitute the Platonic world of ideas" (PR 73), is translated: God’s primordial nature is an abstract structure of mathematical Platonic forms (PW 59/56). Hence ‘God’s primordial nature’ is but an imprecise way of speaking about the order of nature -- a formal structure expressing the theory of extension in its most general form (PW 58/56).

Absent is Whitehead’s distinction between eternal objects of the objective species and eternal objects of the subjective species (PR 445-47). The latter are not susceptible to cataloguing as mathematical Platonic forms; hence, despite Whitehead’s explicit remarks that the Primordial Nature includes all eternal objects (PR 134; cf. 70), the Primordial Nature is identified with the eternal objects of the objective species. Even if this identification were permissible, a problem of assimilating the Primordial Nature to the general order of nature would remain. The order of nature, as interpreted by Mays, could not include all eternal objects of the objective species, but only those involving the most general extensive relations. It will not do to argue that the less general relations are derivable from the structure of general relations, for Whitehead’s point is that numerous, mutually exclusive sets of less general relations are compatible with the general structure. Moreover, to identify the nontemporal actual entity with some multiplicity of eternal objects is surely to blur systematic distinctions which Whitehead labored to make. For Whitehead God is the chief exemplification of metaphysical principles (PR 521); but for Mays Whitehead’s God is the scheme of metaphysical principles. Recall that metaphysics, according to Mays, concerns the principles of extension.

The elaborate scheme by which Whitehead relates the Primordial Nature to God’s working in the world via subjective aims (PR 523-27) is ignored by Mays as he recognizes no difference in the Primordial Nature as "the ordering entity in nature" and "the order of nature" (PW 58/56). This also means that Mays fails to do justice to Whitehead’s early remarks wherein the concept of God is seen as a principle of limitation beyond the realm of eternal objects (SMW, chapter 11).

Mays claims that for Whitehead the framework of extensive order (i.e., God) lays the conditions to which all events have to conform and thus makes induction possible (PW 60 ff./57 ff.). For Whitehead those principles general enough to hold for all cosmic epochs are not sufficient to warrant induction. Those principles may justify our future claim of the transitivity of extensive inclusion (i.e., if region A includes region B, and if region B includes region C, then region A includes region C;) but they are too general to guarantee most scientific inductions. Water may boil at 90°C at sea-level tomorrow, and this event will not conflict with the general principles of extensive order. Whitehead’s discussion of induction is not centered around these general notions of extensive relation, but around the idea of societies dominant in a particular cosmic epoch (PR 312-16). These dominant societies in conjunction with the ordering of possibilities in the Primordial Nature provide the metaphysical basis for induction.

Mays recognizes that his rendering of Whitehead’s theological discourse may leave the reader puzzled. One may ask:

Mays responds that if we remember Whitehead’s early mathematical training, then it is evident that the values he later deals with are more akin to "the sort one meets within books on mathematics and mathematical logic, than those found in works on ethics, aesthetics and theology" (PW 61/59). But this is no argument for Mays’s interpretation; it merely repeats what is at issue: Whitehead’s later philosophy is just his earlier viewpoints in obscure language. It offers no further justification that the interpretation is correct.⁵

Eschewing Platonic realism in Whitehead, Mays claims that ‘by the realm of eternal objects Whitehead is really referring to an abstract logical structure derivative from the relation of extensive connection holding between events" (PW 74/75). It is notable that in his discussion of eternal objects Mays makes but one passing reference to Whitehead’s main work (PW 77/79), particularly since his book purports "to be a commentary on some of the more important aspects of Process and Reality" (PW 13/8). Mays’s discussion leans heavily on the chapter concerning abstraction (SMW, chapter 10), for Whitehead’s discussion there of the realm of eternal objects tends to lend support to Mays’s interpretation. One should note, though, that Whitehead does not later speak of a "realm" of eternal objects, but instead speaks of a "multiplicity" (PR 46, 69) of eternal objects whereby he seeks to deny some fixed order and unity inhering in the eternal objects (PR 73; cf. IWM 258-77).

Yet even Mays’s interpretation of "Abstraction" is itself questionable. He does not argue, but merely asserts that the relational essence of an eternal object A refers to "a set of extensive relations which give it [A] a status in this abstract system" and "to logico-mathematical relationships" akin to eternal objects of the objective species in Process and Reality (PW 77/79). Thus "by ‘the general systematic relationships among eternal objects’ [SMW 232] Whitehead is really referring to the extensive relations which . . . underlie every epoch" (PW 78/80).

I shall not present a full discussion of Whitehead’s notions of individual essences and relational essences, as such discussions are already available (PCW 91-98). A relational essence admits of many other relations than just extensive relations and represents a variety of possibilities for realization (SMW 231). Consider some eternal object such as the color green. Its individual essence is "the eternal object considered in respect to its uniqueness" (SMW 229). As a unique, determinate entity, the color green has a set of definite relations to all other eternal objects. In this way the whole realm of eternal objects and relations is determinate. Green with respect to other colors participates in relations such as ‘x is lighter than y’ or ‘x is darker than z,’ as well as in such complex extensive relations as ‘x lies between y and z on A,’ where x, y and z represent colors and A some general term as ‘house.’ Each relation belongs to the relational essence of green and together are constitutive of the eternal object green (SMW 230).

Mays is correct in his claim that the spacetime continuum functions as a limitation on the generalized system of possibilities in respect to the actual world (PW 78f/79f; of SMW 231-33). He goes wrong in two respects. First, though the spatiotemporal continuum does represent one of several possible extensive relations among eternal objects, it does not follow that all relations between eternal objects are extensive. Second, the limitation of which Whitehead speaks is not merely that of one particular value given to an abstract scheme (PW 78/79), but concerns the fact that there are particular, ordered actualities rather than "an indiscriminate modal pluralism" (SMW 256). But even this limitation does not suffice to explain the creative fact of a synthesis of actualities conforming to a standard; there needs to be a limitation of antecedent selection, the ordering of possibilities of actuality and value by God (SMW 256, cf. UW 100f). Mays does not mention this, for God has been assimilated to the general order itself.

It is also interesting to see how Mays seeks to avoid the Platonic character of Whitehead’s claim that every actual occasion has associated with it an infinite abstractive hierarchy (SMW 244). Mays understands this to be the empiricist’s claim that an object or event presents an indefinite number of perspectives to an observer (PW 89-91/92-95). I would suggest that Whitehead is saying every occasion is associated with an infinite hierarchy of relations, relations which reflect the unique determinations of the object. That is why one is closer to the concrete fact (i.e., less abstract) when he predicates some complex relation of it than if he merely predicates some simple fact of it (SMW 245f). That it is an infinite abstractive hierarchy of relations is why it is impossible to complete the description of an actual occasion by means of concepts (SMW 245) and not because of its perceptual perspectives. The latter understanding is more akin to Mays’s own position and his interpretation of Whitehead as an empiricist, pure and simple (PW 74/75), than to the Platonic quasi-world of forms which actual occasions mirror via ingression. Mays wants, of course, to interpret Whitehead as a non-Platonist (PW 20/15, 74/75).

Mays raises an interesting hermeneutical issue when he admits that his interpretation of Whitehead’s metaphysics as a search for a logical structure of utmost generality may be said to be "largely circumstantial, based upon attempts to set up correspondences between different parts of his writings" (PW 94/98). How are we to judge the validity of his interpretation? He claims that there is a decisive bit of evidence in his favor, and that is found in Whitehead’s 1937 response to John Dewey (reprinted in ESP 122-31). There appears Whitehead s celebrated remark: "We must end with my first love -- Symbolic Logic" (ESP 130).

Mays claims this piece provides a clear statement of Whitehead’s later philosophical method. In this regard Mays makes several points. The first is that according to Whitehead the algebraic method is "the best method we have on our hands for the expression of metaphysical first principles" (PW 97/101f). But then Mays makes a further claim: the algebraic method becomes the foundation of our methodological approach to the study of direct experience" (PW 99/104). Hence the method is similar to that of a deductive system, i.e., the axiomatic method (PW 98/103). Mays’s view of the final goal of the method is predictable, viz., a pattern of logical relationships . . . [of] complete generality," which is "the extensive continuum or the logical structure of fact" (PW 97/l02).

Since Mays stakes so much on this article, I should offer an alternative interpretation of it. Whitehead’s discussion of the algebraic method arises out of considerations pertaining to the deficiency of language. There are nuances of meaning and insights of experience which we apprehend, but which resist verbalization. "Philosophy is largely the effort to lift such insights into verbal expression" (ESP 127). The algebraic method offers a partial remedy of defective language in that the basic connectives retain an invariant meaning throughout their use, irrespective of the complexity of the arrangement of the algebraic patterns. At least such variations as may occur are irrelevant (ESP 128). Thus when we wish to express the patterns of experience with precision and clarity, we have at hand a technique for doing so. Yet "the clarity is deceptive," and our use of the method is precarious "unless care be taken" (ESP 128).

The warnings suggest that the statement of the principles which concrete events evidence is incompletable (ESP 128). The problem, as elsewhere stated, is that the precision of language and arguments cannot take the place of a philosophic method in which imaginative generalization and insight are paramount. We must not be seduced by the exactness.

As I read it, Whitehead’s response to Dewey focuses on one aspect of Dewey’s interpretation, "the primacy of the static over process" in Whitehead’s philosophy (DWP 177). Hence Whitehead dwells on the relation of accidental fact and essential pattern. Dewey’s purpose was to draw attention to what he saw as a tension in Whitehead’s philosophy. What status does the systematic statement of first principles have? If modeled after a mathematical scheme, the system will represent actual logical relations in the world, "an aboriginal structure, the components of which are . . . deductively woven together" (DWP 175). A kind of rational intuition is needed to perceive the general principles which are there ready-made in actuality.⁶ Or if patterned on the genetic-functional model, the generalizations have as their subject-matter "distinctions that arise in and because of inquiry into the subject-matter of experience-nature, and then they function or operate as divisions of labor in the further control and ordering of its materials and processes" (DWP 175). The distinctions and relations arise out of experience and are then applied to the world for our own manipulation of it. But the important thing is that these distinctions and relations which we form are not claims about the way the world is, but mere means of working with the world (DWP 175-77).⁷

Whitehead does not wish to choose between these two options concerning first principles, but stresses the need for attention to both pattern and process. Perhaps it was because of some ontological priority to general characters implicit in Dewey’s statement of the mathematical model ⁸ or because of the rather static epistemological methodology inherent in the characterization of the mathematical model that led Whitehead to refuse to ally himself with it. As far as metaphysical generalizations representing knowledge about the world (rather than being mere functional conveniences), he does adopt the mathematical model. His remark that "the historic process of the world . . . requires the genetic-functional interpretation" seems to be within context no more than an emphasizing of the creative process, for the mathematical model is not committed to a denial of the reality of the historic process. The complete statement reads: "The historic process of the world, which requires the genetic-functional interpretation, also requires for its understanding some insight into those ultimate principles of existence which express the necessary connections Within the flux" (ESP 123). Surely this indicates that Whitehead has not thrown over the mathematical model for the genetic-functional model. Whitehead in his response to Dewey ignored the conflicting epistemological status of generalizations in the two models and adopted the language of Dewey to make a familiar point. Whitehead used ‘the mathematical model’ to represent the pattern within the process and the ‘genetic-functional model’ to represent the ontological ultimacy of the historic process. He did not hold to both models in Dewey’s terms, but he did hold to the importance of both pattern and process.

In any event Whitehead uses the algebraic method as an example of how one can with precision express pattern within process, necessity amidst accident. When symbolic logic has expanded so as to examine patterns depending on connections other than those of space, number, and quantity, then it can be utilized in examining the patterns in aesthetic experience (ESP 130). But it is an error to suggest, as Mays does, that Whitehead is here adopting a deductive method of inquiry. Whitehead writes that "the algebraic method is the best approach to the expression of necessity" (ESP 128; my italics); he does not say it is our best means of discerning the pattern. As a linguistic tool symbolic logic can be adopted, but insight into the Connections and patterns so symbolized requires imagination and insight beyond mere deduction. Whitehead remarks elsewhere on this point:

Whitehead comes down clearly on the side of Dewey’s mathematical model when he is concerned with the "ultimate principles of existence which express the necessary connections within the flux" (ESP 123). The true statement of a connection tells us something about the world as it is and is not merely the reflection of a commitment to use concepts in a certain way. Mays, on the other hand, is most sympathetic to the reading of metaphysical first principles according to the genetic-functional model. These conceptualizations may be a convenient tool for investigating nature, but Mays questions "whether Whitehead’s account of ‘metaphysical necessity,’ or ‘the necessary connections within the flux,’ refers to anything more than this conceptual superstructure" (PW 100/105).

Such a disposition on Mays’s part renders him a most unsympathetic reader of Whitehead. For instance, Mays interprets the extensive continuum as a system of logical relations by which we represent nature (PW 103/108, 106/111). But for Mays these logical relations, at least those of great complexity, are not met within experience and are intellectual creations for dealing with experience, not components of experience itself. But, according to Mays, Whitehead mistakenly confuses these logical structures with contingent fact, giving to the former existential status (PW 103-07/108-13). Mays sees Whitehead’s mistake as analogous to that of the schoolboy who expects to encounter a parallel of latitude or a meridian of longitude over the next hill; they may be convenient ordering devices, but they are fictions.

Whitehead is guilty of such a confusion only if we read his philosophy in terms of the genetic-functional method. On this reading logical distinctions and orderings are human artifices, not to be identified as constitutive of the world as on the mathematical model described by Dewey for traditional metaphysics (PANW/657). But if we understand Whitehead in light of the mathematical model, then his identification of the extensive continuum with the most general limitation upon general potentiality, the fundamental determination of order in this epoch (PR 103, 148), does not represent confusion but straightforward metaphysics. Hence Mays’s charge of confusion rests upon his claim that Whitehead is not doing metaphysics, and Mays’s discussion of the extensive continuum does nothing to establish that claim.

II

Mays’s discussion of Whitehead’s speculative cosmology covers a variety of topics and does so with seemingly little concern for exploring Whitehead’s system. It is, as one reviewer put it, a discussion of "those things in Whitehead which interest Mays" (TPW 277). If there is a basic thesis, it is that Whitehead has used the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics as a model for human experience (PW 125/134, 183/201; RL 285). But understanding this as Mays’s interpretive key is not sufficient to prepare the reader for Mays’s interpretation, and criticisms of Whitehead. We must remember that Whitehead is not a metaphysician seeking to describe the ultimate facts of existence (so WM 17-20), but a realist philosopher of science remarking on uniquely human matters such as perception and freedom. Moreover, Mays has a phenomenological axe to grind, namely that human experience in its particularity is not explicable on the general terms and theories of physical science. Add to this Mays’s scientific instrumentalism, and then one may be prepared for his analysis.

The number of topics which Mays discusses is sufficiently large to preclude my commenting on each. What I propose to do is to sketch Mays’s interpretation on a variety of points, mentioning along the way its shortcomings.

Mays refuses to use the language of actual entities (except in direct quotes from Whitehead) but instead speaks of ‘events’ and ‘event particles.’ Nowhere do we find any justification for this omission, but doubtless for Mays the idea of an actual entity carries with it too much of the idea of a subject. According to Mays there are subjects (human beings particularly), and there are things. And we must be careful not to be confused by Whitehead’s language, for he too accepts that fact. Other interpreters may have been misled by Whitehead’s language of feeling, but not Mays. Simple physical feelings are but "the transmission of a form of energy from event to event in the physical world" (PW 123/131). Complex physical feelings deal with the perceptual events of human beings (PW 123f/132f).

Granting that Whitehead speaks of the subjective form of all events and the category of subjective unity, Mays is undaunted and proceeds to demystify Whitehead’s language. With respect to perceptual events, subjective form refers "to the complex patterns we are aware of in direct experience" (PW 127/136). A subjective form at the level of physical events is merely a particular pattern or characteristic of the event. That is, the subjective form is some form of the subject, for "by a ‘subject’ in this context, he [Whitehead] usually means an event causally influenced by some other event in its past" (PW 127/136). Mays does not comment on the remark (PR 35) that a subjective form is how that subject prehends its datum, the manner of prehension including various emotional and attitudinal characteristics. But we can utilize Mays’s own techniques and interpret this as referring to some characteristic of an event in light of its causal history.

Mays’s translation of the category of subjective unity (PR 340/44) is noteworthy in that he seeks to avoid the idea of a subject altogether. In discussing this category, Mays offers the following interpretation:

These remarks are hardly pellucid. Somehow the future event e conditions the influences of the past so as to achieve a unity--a pattern characterizing e itself. The questions is, how does this conditioning work? Since e is a future event, it can hardly be an efficient causal condition. If e functions as some sort of final cause, Mays does not inform us how; and if it were so to function, we seem to introduce an element of subjectivity and intentionality which Mays would eschew at the level of physical events. In this regard Mays’s demystification of the idea of a subjective aim is pertinent. He writes:

This interpretation is not bolstered by detailed textual argument. In fact, no textual evidence is even cited.

Mays claims that the process of integration of past influences is a rather straightforward notion -- the influences of the past are superposed in a region of spacetime so that incompatible features are eliminated, leaving one complex pattern that characterizes the novel event e (PW 129/138). The complex pattern is the subjective unity, much like the subjective form on Mays’s interpretation. This is an example of a malady that affects Mays’s whole interpretive scheme: Whitehead’s systematic utterances are so interpreted that what apparently represent different concepts end in a dull similitude. If Mays is correct, one must be struck by the paucity of Whitehead’s ideas and the variety of his remarks.

Despite Whitehead’s talk of self-causation at the level of physical events, he is really a determinist. Taking his cue from Whitehead’s remarks on scientific objects as fields of force (AE 297), Mays notes that the field at any time, having its focus in an electron, is completely determined by its previous history. Moreover, the influence of the electron or its field streams away from it with finite velocity, transmitting its character into the future (PW 205/225). Now if we look just at the electron and its past, we have efficient causation; the present state is determined by its past. However, if we look at the present state of the electron, we see that its future state is determined by the present event in which it is situated. This is what it means for an electron to be entirely self-determined (PW 206/226). It would appear that we do not have two different kinds of causation but two ways of speaking about a process, dependent on the speaker’s perspective on a particular stage of the event-succession Supposing we are contemporaneous with an electron, we look at its present state in relation to its past, and we say "efficient causation"; if we look at its present state in relation to its future, we say "final causation." In any case we have determinism at the level of physical causation.

Whitehead agrees with Aristotle in affirming that there is direction toward a goal. Yet for Aristotle this direction is completely determined in advance by the essential nature of the object, whereas for Whitehead the direction is a function of several variables: the object in relation to its environment (PW 187/206). Whitehead’s teleology is then descriptive of the event’s process of actualization; it says nothing about the event as striving to give rise to a specific character determined beforehand by its essential nature (PW 188/207), nor is it in conflict with physical determinism (PW 206/226).

Not surprisingly, Mays finds Whitehead’s attempted solution of the problem of determinism and free will unsuccessful. The molecules comprising the human body exist within a deterministic framework, for "the future state of the molecule could be calculated from a knowledge of its past and present history within the system" (PW 233/258). The molecules in our body run blindly according to certain general laws, transmitting their determination to all parts of the body, including volitions (which are part of the total pattern of the body). The volitions are determined by these general laws; hence there is no free will. But, volitions are supposed to modify the molecules, enabling man to exercise individual control over parts of his body. Then it follows that molecules are not determined by general physical laws. Hence Whitehead is involved in contradiction on two-sides: volitions are both self-determined and physically-determined; molecules are and are not determined by general physical laws (PW 234/259f).

The issue of freedom and determinism, even in Process and Reality, is much too involved to pursue here.⁹ But Mays’s discussion (PW, chapter 17) contains not one footnote to this basic text. He refuses to take seriously the Whiteheadian affirmation of freedom in all occasions (PR 355) and makes a sham of Whitehead’s attempt to avoid a bifurcation of nature. As to the latter, Whitehead may have failed; but surely this failure must be demonstrated on the basis of the speculative scheme itself and not on the basis of a patchwork of remarks drawn from other sources. The position which Mays criticizes is problematic, and for the reasons he gives. But is it Whitehead’s?

Mays’s dissatisfaction with Whitehead’s treatment of freedom and determinism is really symptomatic of a more basic disagreement as to philosophical method. He sees Whitehead as a scientific realist striving after some sort of correspondence between the world as understood by modern physics and the world of direct experience (PW 214/236) Whitehead represents the opposite of Bertrand Russell in his phenomenalist period. Russell sought to construct scientific objects from the immediate sense objects of direct experience, whereas Whitehead begins with scientific objects and seeks to provide an explanation for the character of our direct experience. For instance, Whitehead draws a parallel with forms of energy in physics and emotionally toned sensory qualities. Mays complains that even if physical concepts were more than pragmatic devices (which they are not, according to Mays), this isomorphism between forms of energy and sensory qualities does not hold (PW 210-16/231-38). Generally Whitehead begins with the understandings of physical science and attempts to show how this is compatible with the world of direct experience; for instance, the doctrine of transmutation is his means of explaining our perception of continuous regions rather than of atomic particles. Other times, as when he argues from the supposed uniformity of our perceptual field to the uniformity of the spatiotemporal continuum, Whitehead begins with direct experience (PW 217-21/240-45). Mays generally claims that the similarity between the world of physical science and that of direct experience "is usually of an extremely attenuated nature" (PW 215/237).

Thus Whitehead’s discussion of psychological physiology is completely misguided, according to Mays. Whitehead as a physicist begins with inorganic entities and attempts to show how these are structured in man so as to give rise to a conscious personality (PW 200-03/219-23). But Whitehead also wants to allow the volitions and cognitions of that personality to modify the events throughout the rest of the body. But this is to confuse entities of different grades of generality, correlating scientific concepts with direct experience (PW 202/222, 226/251). Whitehead’s discussion of the human soul is notoriously difficult," but that he is involved in such a category confusion rests on Mays’s failure to appreciate Whitehead’s metaphysics, built around the notion of a dipolar actual entity as a vibrant, dynamic center of integrative processes having both physical and mental poles. Whitehead was steering a via media between the usual monisms and dualisms of mind and matter. This is generally accepted, even though his resolution may not be equally as well accepted. But it is extremely doubtful that he is subject to Mays’s criticism, since these criticisms assume a dualism that Whitehead was at pains to circumvent.

The general topics of perception and cognition occupy the first half of the section devoted to Whitehead’s cosmology. These topics are of chief concern to Mays because it is here that Whitehead’s failure to bridge the gulf between direct experience and the world of scientific realism is most evident. Although we must ignore most of Mays’s discussion here, several problematical features require attention. Mays observes that the concept of causal efficacy concerns sense-reception, that process whereby an animal body receives and transmits forms of energy through itself. By an elaborate process of analysis and emphasis (transmutation, e.g.) we perceive the common-sense world of physical objects, situated in spacetime with definite sense-qualities (PW 140/151). A proposition is on Whitehead’s terms what we consciously experience, specific sensory qualities located at a definite place and time. Whitehead’s statement that propositions are "lures for feeling" (PR 395) means that the commonsense world which we perceive is symbolic of the throbbing world of physical activities (PW 141/153). Propositions are percepts in the mode of presentational immediacy; they are theories about the world -- some adequately symbolizing facts, others not. The entertainment of a proposition by a perceiver is called a ‘propositional feeling."

It is remarkable how many issues Mays ignores or glosses. Propositional feelings need not involve consciousness (PR 399, 402). Secondly, because May’s ties propositions to human consciousness, he must involve propositions in judgments of truth or falsity. Whitehead explicitly remarks that this is the false interpretation of overintellectualized philosophers dominated by logical concerns. Propositions are not primarily for judgments of truth or falsity, but for feeling (PR 283), Propositions are lures for feeling in that they involve an actual entity’s (not necessarily conscious) decision for or against the value of some predicative pattern. The proposition’s importance to an actual entity stems not from its truth value but from its focusing of interest (PR 395f).

Quite apart from these problems, his discussion of perception is most unsatisfactory. He makes no use of perception in the mode of symbolic reference in his discussion of "Perception and Propositions" (PW, chapter 9). Later, symbolic reference is alluded to as the theory "according to which our sensory perceptions stand as symbols for the activities in the external world" (PW 169/186). Whitehead’s developed theory of the integration of pure and impure modes of perception is passed over. Mays’s discussion suggests that presentational immediacy is the mode of perception characteristic of human beings whereby we are aware of enduring objects with particular qualities (PW 142/153), when clearly this mode of perception is much more limited than that. It is a perception of a contemporary region (temporally thin) as having some quality (PR 184f). Accordingly, in this mode of perception we might say, "Grey, there!", but not "The stone is grey.

III

What may be said, in conclusion, about Mays’s interpretation? One thing is certain: his interpretation is difficult to argue against, not because it is obviously correct, but because his interpretation is so heavily dependent upon a kind of argument from similitude whose value is difficult to assess. Early works, late works, Russell’s works, all present views similar to ("suggestive of," "corresponding with," "seemingly identical to") views of Process and Reality. How would one ever know this is the case? Presumably, one would take the book itself, treat it as a coherent piece, and by a process of analysis arrive at an interpretation that could be compared with other works. But this cannot be Mays’s approach, for he is convinced that it is filled with abstruse items that demand illumination from other sources. The overall impression one gets is that Process and Reality is the work of a garrulous old fool whose ability to mislead was exceeded only by his prolixity.

Perhaps one could use the other sources to interpret certain of these features and then utilize these to interpret and structure the other items. We have then a sort of hermeneutical key whose validity is dependent upon two prime considerations: (1) Does it illuminate other passages without contradicting their apparent meaning? And if such a contradiction does occur, can the apparent meaning be reasonably rejected on grounds other than merely its contradicting some implication of our interpretive scheme? (2) Does it provide a means for interpreting all other features of the work in question?

Mays adopts something akin to this alternative. I have indicated that in several ways he falls afoul of condition (1). Mays’s interpretive scheme fares no better with respect to condition (2) -- so much of Whitehead’s philosophy is ignored! Mays interprets certain aspects by means of similitude, but rarely attempts to bring this interpretation to bear on related concepts and problems. These issues remain unclarified. Ultimately, perhaps, Mays does not have to extend his interpretation to the varied utterances in Process and Reality and can content himself with providing an interpretation for some of them. For the others, he can simply ask, "Now don’t you see?" To that I answer, No!"

References

DWP -- John Dewey. "Whitehead’s Philosophy," The Philosophical Review, 46/2 (March, 1937), 170-77.

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

PANW -- Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Evanston: Northwestern University, 1941.

PCW -- Paul F, Schmidt. Perception and Cosmology in Whitehead’s Philosophy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967.

PW -- Wolfe Mays. The Philosophy of Whitehead. The Muirhead Library of Philosophy. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959. (Page references left of the ‘/‘ are to this edition, while those to the right are to the 1962 Collier paperback edition.)

RL -- Wolfe Mays. Review of Whitehead’s Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition, by Ivor Leclerc. Philosophical Quarterly, 10/40 (July, 1960), 284-85.

RSW -- Wolfe May’s. Review of Whitehead’s Theory of Experience, by Ewing P. Shahan, and Process and Unreality: A Criticism of Method in Whitehead’s Philosophy, by Harry Kahlsaat Wells. Mind, 61/243 (July, 1952), 429-32.

RW -- Ivor Leclerc, ed. The Relevance of Whitehead. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1961. For Wolfe May’s, "The Relevance of ‘On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World’ to Whitehead’s Philosophy."

TPW -- John Tucker. Review of The Philosophy of Whitehead, by Wolfe Mays. Philosophy, 35/134 (July, 1960), 276-77.

UW -- Victor Lowe. Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press 1966.

WM -- Ivor Leclerc. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition. New York: Macmillan Company, 1958.

WPS -- Robert M. Palter. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.

Notes

1 This terminological distinction is likewise adopted by Schmidt (PCW 140). He too sees the bulk of Process and Reality concerned with cosmology, though it is unclear that he would include under that term just those things which Mays does.

2 Nathaniel Lawrence (review of Perception and Cosmology in Whitehead’s Philosophy, by Paul F. Schmidt, in PS 2:233) writes that the term ‘metaphysics’ is "unstable in Whitehead through the years and even within a single work, e.g., Process and Reality." In AI 221, 236 Whitehead uses ‘metaphysical’ where Mays would assuredly read ‘cosmological.’ In one passage Whitehead distinguishes a general metaphysics from a more limited investigation of the order of nature in the p resent epoch: "The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to a discussion -- largely conjectural -- of the hierarchy of societies composing our present epoch. . . . It is to be carefully noted that we are now deserting metaphysical generality. We shall be considering the more special possibilities of explanation consistent with our general cosmological doctrine, but not necessitated by it" (PR 147; my italics). Not only does he fail to utilize the terminological distinction which Mays adopts, Whitehead controverts it, for here he acknowledges the scope of metaphysics and cosmology as equally general.

3 I am aware that tins sketch is incomplete and that an interpretation can be given a set of formulas without recourse to meanings by assigning a denotation to each nonlogical symbol. But for my purposes here the presentation is adequate.

4 A typical response to Mays’s interpretation of Whitehead’s theological statements is that of Lowe (UW 232, 252n).

5 In An Introduction to Mathematics (London: Williams and Norgate, 1911), p. 9, Whitehead writes: "The leading characteristic of mathematics [is] that it deals with properties and ideas which are applicable to things just because they are things, and apart from any particular feelings, or emotions, or sensations, in any way connected with them. This is what is meant by calling mathematics an abstract science." Thus Whitehead in his later philosophy attempts to state abstract mathematical structures in the language of feelings and emotions, according to Mays.

6 In another place Dewey makes a similar point: "It [a system of descriptive generalizations] makes . . . an assertion about what the constituents of nature itself must be in and of themselves. This conception of the nature and office of philosophy is in line with the classic tradition, according to which philosophy is that branch of theory which tells, in the theoretical form appropriate to knowledge as knowledge, the story of the ultimate metaphysical or ontological structure of the universe" (PANW 657).

7 Cf. PANW 657, where Dewey writes that on such a model philosophy "will not take itself to be a kind of knowledge."

8 Cf. PANW 657f, where such a statement of ontological priority appears in Dewey’s remarks on the mathematical model.

9 The problem of human freedom has become a central issue in Whiteheadian scholarship with the publication of Edward Pols’s Whitehead’s Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967). For responses to Pols, who argues that Whitehead’s philosophy precludes human freedom, see Lewis S. Ford, "Can Whitehead Provide for Real Subjective Agency?" in The Modern Schoolman, 47/2 (January, 1970), 209-25 and John B. Cobb, Jr., "Freedom in Whitehead’s Philosophy in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7/4 (Winter, 1969-70), 409-13.

10 Recent discussions include Donald W. Sherburne, "Whitehead’s Psychological Physiology," The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 7/4 (Winter, 1969-70), 401-07; John B. Cobb, Jr., and Donald W. Sherburne. "Regional Inclusion and Psychological Physiology," PS 3:27-40; William Gallagher, "Whitehead’s Psychological Physiology: A Third View," PS 4:263-74.

The present article is a comparative study of two process philosophies, the Philosophy of Organism and the philosophy of Organicism. It is designed to serve three stated purposes of Process Studies, the first giving primary emphasis to Whitehead’s thought, the second including other process philosophies, and the third inviting "radical critiques of process thought."

Need for brevity limits this comparison to seven metaphysical issues. To sharpen the issues, comparisons will be stated in terms of charges of deficiency.

First some similarities.

1. Both aim to give primacy not only to the dynamic or processual but also to the organic conceived as consisting in "a union of opposites" (AI 245).

2. Both agree that there is no existence apart from events ("actual occasions" or "eventities").

3. Both conceive the organic as involving both unitary and pluralistic ingredients, which may be called "mental" and "physical" poles (Philosophy of Organism) or "spiritual" and "material" poles (Organicism). [See "Matter and Spirit: Implications of the Organicist View," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 20, 1 (Sept., 1959), 103-08.]

4. Both regard the universe as a process of self-creating creativity.

5. Both agree that creativity involves emergence of unique events ("actual occasions" or "eventities"), that each such event is unique, and that each involves, and is involved in, others. "Actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehending each other" (PR 29). "Somehow each individual involves, and is involved in, every other individual, even if primarily in negative ways" (1:269).

6. Both find organic relatedness between experience and existence, and the emergence of subjectivity within experience in response to objective causes.

7. Both agree that intrinsic value is concrete, and that whatever is concrete is (Philosophy of Organism) or may be (Organicism) intrinsic value. [See "The Aesthetics of Organicism," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 26,4 (Summer, 1968), 449-59.]

8. Both are devoted to overcoming dualism, by antibifurcationism, on the one hand, and by "bothism," on the other. [See "Organicism -- A New World Hypothesis," Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Philosophy, Mexico City, Sept. 4-14, 1963, Vol. IX, pp. 21-43, c. 1.]

9. Both reject as inadequate some traditional notions of substance and subject-predicate logic, but in radically different ways.

Differences include:

1. Whitehead is only a semi-process philosopher. Although the universe as a process of self-creating creativity consists entirely of actual occasions, Whitehead postulates unnecessary eternal objects to account for the forms of such occasions. Eternal objects, together constituting the Primordial Nature of God, subsist eternally without process, and magically zip into ("ingress") and out of actual occasions as needed. Organicism, influenced by the emergent evolutionists, regards the causation of the forms of events fully accounted for by whatever causes the events. The forms of things emerge internally to the things as the things themselves emerge. No dens ex machina is needed.

2. Whitehead bifurcates. "The fundamental types of entities are actual entities, and eternal objects" (PR 37). There are "two ultimate classes of entities, mutually exclusive. One class consists of ‘actual entities’ and the other class consists of forms of definiteness here named eternal objects’" (PR 2.39). Despite disclaimers by his defenders, these two kinds of entities are entirely unlike in nature; events happen, eternal objects never change. Their momentary intersection through ingression leaves eternal objects unchanged. Whitehead, half Platonist and half processist, ingeniously attempted to integrate incompatibles. But in the end, bifurcation remains. Elimination of eternal objects and the Primordial Nature of God saves Organicism from such bifurcation.

3. Whitehead tried to construct an organic, processual metaphysics with a nonorganic, static logic. Logical realism, with its completely external relations and material implication, presupposed in Principia Mathematica, is retained to provide some of the structure of actual occasions. Despite ingenious adaptation ("The actual entities involved [in a proposition] are termed the ‘logical subjects,’ the complex eternal object is the ‘predicate.’" PR 36), logical structures as such have no causal efficacy. For Organicism, organic logic as a study investigates the dynamic structure of existence as experienced, and discovers polarity and dialectic as omnipresent features of dynamic interdependencies. [See Polarity, Dialectic, and Organicity, Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1970.]

4. Whitehead, like Dewey. mistakenly abandoned substance as a category of existence. Both could have reconstructed substance dynamically, but were misled by the unfortunate prevalence of the notion of substance as something both static and standing by itself. But substance is that which remains through change. If no change, then no remaining through change, and no substance. Change and permanence (substance) polarly interdepend. Both are aspects of eventities. To change is to become different. Some changes take longer to occur than others. Each event involving a change remains from the beginning to the end of that change, and that remaining functions as substantial. Longer events are more substantial than shorter events. Each heartbeat, each lifetime, each galaxy is an event. Substance is essential to, not antithetical to, process (1: Ch. 20).

5. Whitehead denied actuality to all time except the instantaneousness, or at most momentariness, of occasions. "An actual occasion has no history. It never changes. It only becomes and perishes" (AI 262). Even "in considering our direct observation of past, or of future, we should confine ourselves to time-spans of the order of magnitude of a second, or even fractions of a second" (AI 247) "The ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism" (PR 53). Time, then, must be accounted for in terms of a nexus, or serial "society," of occasions, in which contiguity provides continuity (see AI 259). "There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming" (PR 53). Endurance of an individual appears when a serial society of occasions "assumes the guise of an enduring entity" (PR 257), but is only an "historic route" of analogous forms in the becomings of really momentary occasions. Time characterizes appearances, not reality.

Organicism, on the other hand, views time as involving both events and duration, conceived as polarly related, such that each event endures long enough for it to happen. Some changes take years, centuries or aeons to occur, while others require less than one three-hundred-quadrillionth of a second. Thus there can be no events without duration. "Evendurations" (events-durations) overlap in multitudes of different ways, as aspects of the dynamic functioning of many levels of existence. Time is both continuous and discontinuous because existence both partly continues, or endures, and partly ceases, with each change. Each duration during which something remains the same from beginning to end is a present; many presents overlap others, and many presents of some events come and go during the presents of other events. Several heartbeats complete their whole actual history during one breath cycle; thousands of breath cycles complete their histories during a single lifetime; several generations of lives may complete their histories during the existence of a nation. The temporal maximums and minimums of dynamic existence are so vastly different from how Whitehead conceives them that, by comparison, he must be accused of reducing time to only a tiniest fraction of its actual existence. [See "A Multiple-Aspect Theory of Time," The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 2, 1-2 (Spring-Summer, 1971), 163-71.]

6. Whitehead failed to recognize the omnipresent role of dialectic in existence, experience and logic. This failure resulted naturally from the atomistic features of his metaphysics, epistemology and logic. Although he recognized the existence of numerous opposites and asserted that "All of the ‘opposites’ are elements in the nature of things, and are incorrigibly there" (PR 531), he viewed their functioning more as ideals among contrasts "given in direct intuition" (PR 511) than as structural relations between existing actual entities, and between what is internal to and external to them. Although "all actual entities" are "dipolar" (PR D²⁴), such dipolarity pertains to the originating and completing phases within each occasion which just happens. It does not relate shorter events to longer events when the shorter function as parts of the longer ones as wholes.

Dialectic is that dynamic structural characteristic of each existing thing ("eventity") which, when it changes and becomes different, incorporates that difference within itself so that then it proceeds as both partly the same thing and partly a different thing continuing to function as one whole thing. Eventities do not just happen. They are parts of larger eventities and continue part of their existence as partial differences in large continuing durations. Whereas, for Whitehead, every actual entity is related to other actual entities by "prehending" and "being prehended," for Organicism, everything is related to everything else multi-polarly, multi-leveled-ly, multi-dimensionally, and multi-dialectically. Each eventity participates actually in the constitution of many other eventities, both larger and smaller (both temporally and spatially). All such partial, but actual, reincorporation of each eventity in other eventities is dialectic. There can be no organisms without dialectic; this is something which Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism seems to have overlooked completely.

7. Whitehead regarded God, in both its Primordial and Consequent Natures, as fundamental to his Philosophy of Organism. For Organicism, the issue of whether one chooses to regard existence, the universe, or Nature as atheistic or theistic is insignificant. [See "Organicism: The Philosophy of Interdependence," International Philosophical Quarterly, 7,2 (June, 1967), 251-84, section on "Theology."] On the one hand, Organicism is completely naturalistic. On the other, religion is natural, and the quest for comprehensive answers to life’s questions often naturally leads one to ask certain kinds of questions and to prefer comforting answers. Organicism lends itself, for those interested, to the development of a theism which may be claimed to be superior to all others. By gathering up all, rather than merely some, of the existing "alls," omni, or wholes, and conceiving God as "all alls," where each "all" is a concrete universal (i.e., both any sameness shared by two or more things and all such things), one may escape both inadequacies and contradictions in traditional theologies. So conceived, God is constituted by all of the wholes of things as its parts. Such a view is panentheistic, viewing God as actually immanent in all things, and yet leaving the eachness of each thing, as well as its parts, different from, even if polarly related to, its allness, or wholeness, which functions as one of the alls which are parts of God.

God then depends upon the emergence of each new event which thereby provides, or causes, a new part of God. But God also ceases actually in part with the cessation of each event. Whereas, for White-head, the passage of each actuality "is not its death" (PR 530) because it passes into "objective immortality," for Organicism, death is actual, even if only partial, for man and God. Hence, God not only emerges and perishes with each smallest eventity, e.g., one which endures for only one three-hundred-quadrillionth of a second, but also endures everlastingly so long as there is any change which takes forever to occur. Even if there is no event which takes forever to occur, any longest event is followed by, or overlaps with, another longest event, which is, dialectically, both partly like as well as partly different from it, and which has a whole, or all, which is one of the alls constituting God. God as all alls is an organism in which the all is the dynamic whole and the ails are its dynamic parts. [See ‘Wholes and Parts," The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 3, 1 (Spring, 1972), 17-22.] God evolves dialectically, both remaining the same, as all, and becoming different by incorporating within itself each newly emerged all. Even if for quite different reasons, Organicism and the Philosophy of Organism agree that "Each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God" (PR 529). [See "Organic Unity and God," Iliff Review, 5, 3 (Fall, 1948), 98-102.]

Reference

1. Archie J. Bahm, Philosophy, An introduction. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1953.

Whitehead’s view of time is multilateral, intricate, and finely drawn. It abounds in unique conceptions and undergoes considerable metamorphosis, starting as an epistemological realism and culminating in a philosophy of organism. But as a whole it may be characterized as naturalistic. At least there is no rejection or amendment of the early declaration that "there can be no time apart from space; and no space apart from time; and no space and no time apart from the passage of the events of nature" (CN 142).

In Whitehead’s treatment of time, three stages of development may be observed. The first embodies a philosophy of space-time with a realistic position assumed and nature accepted as consisting largely of space and of time (CN 33). The second and third stages respectively stress concepts of "creativity" and of the "actual entity." Throughout this theoretical succession, analysis of continuous change is a primary task. Moreover, at no point does Whitehead allow time to have the status of an independent datum. In the relativistic universe which he accepts, time as intrinsic and as self-sufficient is not an appropriate element. Any attempt to set up time as an independent terminus for knowledge is like "the effort to find substance in a shadow" (CN 66). Nor can time and space be primarily loci of simple locations, for "each volume of space, or each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or of all lapses of time" (SMW 104). However, in the case of an abstraction from an event, time and space are differentiable (PNK (63). They also may be distinguished by reason of an enduring pattern within some events (SMW 174-75).

Passage and creativity. Whitehead’s philosophical thinking about time begins with questions about passage as a character of nature. His method of inquiry follows a rather definite shape. He first is concerned with immediate experiences, which he believes are genuinely actual. But he quickly recognizes deductive science with its act of considering concepts which apply to the data of experience. He then proceeds to concepts which relate to the concepts under consideration. By these steps he seeks to attain concepts which are successively more abstract, and by being more abstract are more general, and by being more general are, in his eyes, less liable to exceptions. Yet he does not lose sight of the concreteness of the universe (SMW 33). Thus, although his starting point in physical nature and individual psychology is nonformal, he makes logical and mathematical departures from this position to explore formal possibilities achieved by abstraction. However, he does not relinquish his basic doctrine that time is in nature and while allowing time to have formal aspects by abstraction, he does not equate it with a lifeless form (MT 127). Time may be seen formally to the degree that its "extensiveness" and geometrical structure are subject to logical analysis, but primitively time is not formal. Primitively time has the character of process, which has "creativity" as its essence and reveals itself in the becoming of actual occasions (PR 31f).

The "creative advance" which Whitehead says is "the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates" (PR 32) is a conception which, in its first version, is called "passage." In considering passage Whitehead assumes that a structure of events "provides the framework of the externality of nature within which objects are located" (PNK 80) and that "space and time are abstractions expressive of certain qualities of the structure" (PNK 80). In this phase of his theory time is a relation between events, and the qualities of the structure expressed in the abstractions which are space and time apparently are qualities of passage. But one time-system is inadequate to express the passage of events which is the creative advance of nature. One time-system stands as only a partial expression of the passage, the complete expression of which requires an indefinite number of time-systems. Moreover, all properties of the creative advance cannot be rendered explicitly in thought. But those that can will require a medium consisting of the whole set of time-systems derived from the whole set of space-time abstractions (PNK (81). Yet man cannot provide a satisfactory representation of this required medium. In his efforts to describe the universe he is restricted to only one time-system among many. But, according to Whitehead, there is a partial solution to such a predicament by distinguishing between the nonserial creative advance of nature and any one time series. This distinction relieves the confusion between two different conditions: one is experiencing the creative advance and knowing it is as the perpetual transition of nature into novelty and the other is using a single-time series for measurement of it (CN 178). Time merely exhibits some aspects of the more fundamental factor, that is, of passage itself. Concerning the origin of time a crucial part is enacted by the relation, of extension (CN 185), the relata of which are events (PNK 61).

There is a difference between the creative passage of nature "which is not properly serial at all" and passage in any one time-series (CN 178). At this point Whitehead sees passage as creative but not in itself atomic. Subsequently he examines creativity further and attributes to it a dimension of value The result is a conception of atomic self-creativity, whereby the sell-creativity not only is atomic but also is interrelated with all other units of self-creativity. Whitehead calls such a unit an "epochal occasion" (RM 91). These units are responsible for a conjunction of creativity and creature and each unit has two sides. On one side it is a mode of creativity and a cause of itself, thereby serving to integrate the universe. On the other it is a creature whose identity is one emergent fact having its own sell-value (RM 101f). The process of self-creation is the transformation of the potential into the actual, and the fact of such transformation includes the immediacy of self-enjoyment (MT 207).

Creative advance is the property of the universe whereby its present passes into a future. But Whitehead, in considering passage, sees also that some account must be given concerning the relationship of present to past. He summarizes his thought on this question by asserting a principle of "conformation," which rests on the point that "the immediate present has to conform to what the past is for it, and the mere lapse of time is an abstraction from the more concrete relatedness of ‘conformation’ " (S 36). The principle of conformation expresses "the stubborn fact that whatever is settled and actual must in due measure be conformed to by the self-creative activity" (S 36), and also assumes that "universality of truth arises from the universality of relativity, whereby every particular actual thing lays upon the universe the obligation of conforming to it" (S 39). Whitehead believes that the conformation of the present to the past is not doubted in practice, is implied by passage, and belongs to the ultimate texture of experience. Conformation dictates that "the how of our present experience must conform to the what of the past in us" (S 58). Creativity, then, makes an adjustment to its immediate past in the sense that the nature and character of each new instance of self-creativity undergo modification in conformity with the nature and character of the past.

A final feature of creative advance is exhibited through Whitehead’s concept of process wherein the essence of nature is transition (MT 207). By itself nature passes from itself into the future (MT 73) and the outcome of this process is an atomic pulsation (MT 120). Creativity is the most real aspect of fact, and transition of time with its included extensive relationships depends on creative transitivity.

Continuous change. A fundamental feature of Whitehead’s philosophy of nature is his analysis of continuous change. In treating questions of becoming and continuity he takes the position that "there is a becoming of continuity but no continuity of becoming" (PR 53). He holds that becoming cannot have an instant of time as a locus but must be extended and must end in an atomic occasion. Thus he faces the difficulty of explaining how continuity is obtainable. How shall he combine temporal extension and atomic unity? The resolution is elaborate but includes two cardinal points, the first being that "continuity concerns what is potential, whereas actuality is incurably atomic" (PR 95); the second is that if we admit that something becomes, then "every act of becoming must have an immediate successor . . . [and] the conclusion is that in every act of becoming there is the becoming of something with temporal extension; but that the act itself is not extensive, in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of becoming which correspond to the extensive divisibility of what has become" (PR 107). Whitehead discerns an intimacy of present to future found in the transmission of characters from an actual occasion to its successor. By definition the condition of having contiguous occasions will imply physical transmission (PR 468). The mechanics of the transmission seem to be analogous to those of contemporary quantum theory (PR 468).

It is not time but rather the atomic "actual occasion" which is the key to the solution of the question of becoming and continuity. Yet the actual occasion is the outgrowth of Whitehead’s earlier thought about "events." Our knowledge of nature is diversified into a complex of events (PNK 72). For Whitehead nature is not in time; time is in nature and the way in which time is in nature is as a system of relations amid relata (PNK 61): the relata are neither external objects nor matter; they are events (PNK 61f).

Duration and simultaneity. Closely allied to the conception of an event is Whitehead’s conception of a duration as the general fact comprising the simultaneous occurrence of all nature discernible now (PNK 68f). A duration is neither an abstract stretch of time nor an instantaneous present (CN 72), but rather "retains itself within the passage of nature . . . in other words . . . retains temporal thickness" (CN 56) and is "limited only by the property of being a simultaneity" (CN 53). It is a whole of nature simultaneous with a percipient event, a percipient event being the event to which awareness is related directly within a discerned complex of events (PNK 68). A duration furnishes awareness a percipient event; but then awareness, from its more or less absolute position, must in some manner relate itself to a duration The relationship is achieved by the condition of "cogredience" (PNK 70f). Later Whitehead defines a duration as "a complete set of actual occasions, such that all the members are mutually contemporary one with the other" (PR 491). The relation, "contemporary with," is characterized by being symmetrical and free from causal forces (PR 192). Any actual occasion is situated within an infinite number of durations (PR 487f).

Time as epochally atomic. When first treating the question of becoming and continuity Whitehead did not describe all events as atomic. In succeeding endeavors, however, he proposed that they are, and that they also are constituted as a pattern (SMW 174) in the manner of a non-uniform object, a non-uniform object being one which requires an extended locus to show its complete nature, that is, it cannot be found in any situation less than the whole situation (SMW 183). With events seen as atomic and as "the grasping into a unity of a pattern of aspects" (SMW 174); with the requirement that this pattern will have "a definite duration determined by a definite meaning of simultaneity," which "relates the pattern as thus displayed to one definite space-time system" (SMW 182); and with endurance consisting of "the repetition of the pattern m successive events (SMW 183), requiring a succession of durations, Whitehead now sees time as atomic in the sense of being epochal, though he adds that "what is temporalized is divisible" (SMW 102).

Prehensive unification. In the development of the natural context of time, Whitehead assumes that nature has two aspects: creativity and the realized products of creativity, that is, the events. In the realization of natural entities, there is an act of gathering things into the "unity of a prehension," a concept which, in the first phase of Whitehead’s treatment of it, "defines itself as a here and a now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential reference to other places and other times" (SMW 102). A prehension likewise is "a prehensive occasion; and a prehensive occasion is the most concrete finite entity, conceived as what it is in itself and for itself, and not from its aspect, in the essence of another such occasion" (SMW 104f). Prehensive unification does not merge things in themselves, but only things from its standpoint in space and time. Its central feature is the property of being a perspective. Whitehead considers it a derivative of a Leibnizian monad, restricting the mirroring function to events in space and time (SMW 102).

Features of the "occasion." But the creativity of which events are the realized products can have no pattern it is neither determined, realized, nor atomic. It is instead a pure, ultimate, and unconditioned activity, arid appears to be somewhat ineffable: "it cannot be characterized because all characters are more special than itself" (PR 47). White-head’s next step brings creativity and creature into a greater degree of unity (RM 101f). They now are seen as one atomic "occasion" (RM 100). Besides the unity of creativity and creature contained in an occasion, there is a conjunction of a physical and a mental pole (RM 118) taking place as a process of supersession (IS 240f). The supersession is supratemporal (IS 241). Moreover, the unity of creativity and creature is not apprehensible in a physical aspect, but rather through value, or realized self-enjoyment (RM 100). Both physical and mental poles contribute to this value which is innate and particularized with respect to an occasion (RM 103). From the physical pole pure perceptivity issues in a value-feeling; from the mental pole the issue of reflective perceptivity is likewise a value-feeling (RM 102). Since occasions have value they cannot be subdivided infinitely into parts like themselves.

Prehensions of actual entities. Whitehead’s endeavors to resolve questions of becoming began with physical nature as a frame of reference and an event as the primary datum in the construction, functioning, and form of nature, with the time factor of space-time constituting one of the major expressions of the relation between events. From this foundation a cosmology arose, one which included and transcended a physical world and which depended on an atomic unity found in "actual occasions" or "actual entities," these being the final real organisms composing the universe. To suit these atomic units, that is, the actual entities, Whitehead develops a second phase of his doctrine of prehensions (PR 35). Concern about space and time or about here and now is subdued in favor of the dual constitution of an actual entity and its life span, which embodies a process of transition from initial indetermination to terminal determination (PR 72). Two species of existence are found in the actual entity: one is "formal" (in the sense of Descartes’ formaliter); the other is objective. The formal existence of an actual entity consists of the prehending activity displayed as "a concrescence of prehensions, which have originated in its process of becoming" (PR 72) with all further analysis being an analysis of prehensions. When the prehending process ends, so does formal existence. After that point an actual entity has only objective existence, whereby it serves as an "object" in the constitution of a superseding actuality and becomes a datum for the creative advance (PR 72).

Actual entities may be analyzed in an indefinite number of ways, but most analysis will lead to abstractions, for example, awareness, private sensation, emotion, purpose, appearance, or causation. Whitehead calls such abstractions "ghosts of the old ‘faculties,’ banished from psychology, but still haunting metaphysics" (PR 27). But abstraction may be avoided by an analysis of an actual entity into prehensions. Prehensions maintain concreteness and yet have a subjective form and aim, and may involve emotion, purpose, valuation, and causation (PR 28’). Intrinsically prehensions are not atomic and can be divided into other prehensions and combined into other prehensions, yet "a prehension, considered genetically, can never free itself from the incurable atomicity of the actual entity to which it belongs" (PR 360).

The emphasis on actual entities and prehensions obscures the significance of time in Whitehead’s later philosophy, although it was through the development of the study of time in nature that his final position was reached. In the interim, concern for time was replaced by concern for becoming and at the end both seem overshadowed by concern for value.

Concluding comments. Perhaps no other attempt to identify time is as comprehensive as that of Whitehead. Most views of time are elaborated within a single context, such as empiricism, or mathematics, or ontology. But Whitehead’s thought is not thus limited. It embraces rationalism, the psychological function of perception, and the field of value. However, these are seen as adjuncts to the prior and primary category of creativity. Although this variety of supplementary elements is recognized, these elements are not incorporated into an ultimate living unity. They are honored in themselves and in one mode or another are implicated with creativity without having the status of a vital component of it.

In Whitehead’s own terms, philosophic discourse should produce self-evidence, but "it is impossible to achieve any such aim" (MT 67). Yet much of his philosophy is self-evident and also radiates his effort to make it so. However, there are opaque spots. Some of these occur in the case of the actual entity where there is an assertion of: the unity of creativity and creature; the concurrence of divisibility and indivisibility; the pervasion of atomicity by nonatomicity; and the conversion of something indeterminate into something determined.

But Whitehead upholds such perplexities by his conviction that recognition of a thing as a composite and also as a unity are required modes of understanding, that these two modes are reciprocal, that they presuppose each other, and that the perspective emphasizing the composite exhibits an outcome and the perspective emphasizing the unity exhibits a causal factor (MT 63). But are there not limits to this prescription for understanding and are these limits not exceeded when, in the account of the actual entity as a composite, disparate or incompatible conditions are dissolved within each other, blended, or otherwise combined, without benefit of a principle according to which incongruities interpenetrate? Can the composite side of an actual entity be something grotesque? When looking outside of his philosophy, Whitehead does not allow such composites. He will not allow Newton’s law of gravitation to result from a composite of a Newtonian notion of mass, the notion of occupancy of space, and Euclidean geometry (MT 190f). Yet he himself explicitly is committed to the concept of a whole or unity as an assembly of parts which, either in fine art or in nature, may be disjoined and reunited by logic alone (MT 85). He also refers to a presumably relevant property of human consciousness whereby, when consciousness entertains abstractions, "there is always present a preservative instinct aiming at the renewal of connection, which is the reverse of abstraction" (MT 169). But, unless instinct is either a ground for logic or one of its associates, this remark seems extraneous. Whitehead tends to ignore the point that, outside of mathematics, a whole may exceed or differ from the sum of its parts, and that adequate comprehension of it does not require reference to these parts. It may be that the acceptance of a mechanism of reversibility between a unity and its abstracted members, which is indicated repeatedly in various contexts, is the most decisive weakness of Whitehead’s philosophy.

Another way to see the suspected discrepancy in the conception of an actual entity is to note that the entity itself as a unity is a consequence of the functioning of Whitehead’s creative imagination in which intuition discloses a whole immune to vivisection or oppositions, whereas the actual entity as a composite is the consequence of the functioning of his productive imagination (in the Kantian sense of the term), which is limited to treating things discursively and is unable to include apprehension of an intrinsic whole. The question is: Do the functions of creative imagination with its alogical wholes and productive imagination with its attention to logical consistencies or inconsistencies of parts, yield results which are reciprocal or otherwise interdependent or conjoined? This question warrants more deliberation than Whitehead gives to it.

In the theoretical architecture through which he seeks to describe time, as well as in other parts of his philosophy, Whitehead emphasizes abstraction, which he interprets in various ways. It may be incomplete, relative, violent, rigid, chill, extreme, high, or special. It also may be complete, in which case it is rejected (PR 42). In this gamut of usage, confusion is not readily avoided. For the present comment, the sense of abstraction will be equivalent to that of ideal.

Consider three conjoined instances of abstraction. First, there is space-time itself which is denoted as an abstraction and is denied the status of a self-sufficient entity (SMW 96). Second, there is a set of time-systems derived from the whole set of space-time abstractions and this set of derivatives of an abstraction "expresses the totality of those properties of the creative advance which are capable of being rendered explicit in thought" (PNK 81). Third. there is the single time series or time-system which is a member of the derived set of time-systems and, in conjunction with a space-system, is used for natural measurement (CN 178). These instances seem to raise an issue of whether the datum from which abstraction is made -- concrete passage -- is not different in kind from the three successive abstractions: space-time, its derivative set of time-systems, and a single member of this derivative set serving in the activity of natural measurement. Whitehead seems aware of this issue He tacitly acknowledges it in the statement, "an abstraction does not mean that an [abstracted] entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only one factor of a more concrete element of nature" (CN 171). Very well, but, as such a factor, cannot the abstraction differ from its host and yet not be nothing? The instances cited appear pertinent to this question. May it be suggested that the abstractions they represent are more convincing as idealizations generated out of ordinary subjectivity to assist communication about time and passage, than as living, moving, and changing process being at once at home and away from home?

The suggestion that the three abstractions noted may be interpreted as disguised idealizations leads to a much larger question concerning the identity of relations in the context of Whitehead’s conceptions of nature. Are the relations he constantly asserts indigenous to facts or does he start with relations as ideal data and look for facts on which to impose the relations? This question will be left as resistant to resolution.

For Whitehead "the great difficulty of philosophy is the failure of language" (MT 67) and to compensate for the defects of the linguistic tradition he saturates the rendition of his thinking with terminological novelties, which leave an impression that his work is highly stylized, but also that its stipulations and theoretical definitions make it almost impregnable to objections. His pursuit of time began in the context of the assumptions and mathematics of physical science and was conducted with precision and with prodigious ingenuity. But these conditions invite some questions: Is the field of physical science an appropriate point of departure for philosophy? Are most philosophical questions adaptable to subjugation by bare precision and persistent refinement of it? Can ingenuity exceed itself to the point where its result is a tour de force? It is easier to ask these questions than to answer them and even the most likely answer remains relative to the individual offering it.

Lewis Ford has recently been developing a fresh new interpretation of God,¹ one that he thinks resolves a crippling incoherency in Whitehead’s metaphysics and in any theology based on it. I shall begin by explicating that dilemma and Ford’s way of escaping the prick of both its horns. I will then attempt to show that Ford has not resolved the dilemma but only relocated it. I go on to suggest that this dilemma is so recalcitrant because neither Whitehead nor Ford -- nor, it would seem, most theologically inclined philosophers -- are willing to take time seriously. I conclude that they -- and if not they, then certainly you and I -- should.

What is it to take time seriously? It is to insist not only on the primacy of becoming but on its absolute imperium. All things come to be and perish. What does not is an abstract expression of the features of what does. But more of this anon. Let me begin with Ford and his theory of "God as the future."

I. The Dilemma: God as Irrelevant or as Uncaring

Ford’s critique of the idea of God in Whitehead’s philosophy takes the form of a dilemma. If God is personal, if the primordial actual entity has subjective immediacy, then God cannot be known and hence can have no influence on the world. But if God influences the world and is knowable, then the divine creature must be already completed and so must lack subjectivity. The problem is epistemological: only what has reached determinate satisfaction can be prehended by another subject. To be known is to be an object for knowledge, and to be an object is no longer to be in the process of becoming but to have fully become. Concrescence is radically interior, closed to all but the concrescing subject itself, an actualizing entity available for appropriation by other subjects only with the perishing of its own subjectivity. An actual entity is either a subject for itself or an object for others, but each only once: first only as subject, then no longer as subject but only as object.

If we affirm, on the one hand, that God is everlastingly a subject, then obviously there can be divine knowledge of the world. The subjective form of God’s prehension of the world, moreover, can be thought of as compassionate: God loves the world, loves its creatures each for their own individual uniqueness, rejoices in their joy, even suffers because of their suffering. But such feelings can be only a private matter, aspects of the interiority of the divine becoming. They cannot be known by the world because God never reaches a determinate satisfaction of which they would be features. But if God’s feelings are not known then they are without influence, for to influence another’s becoming is to be an object of knowledge for it, to be prehended by it as a datum for integration within its own new-forming determinateness.

If we affirm, on the other hand, that God has an influence on the world, then God must be objectified for the world’s occasions. God’s subjectivity cannot be what is objectified, however, since that would mean that God had perished. The object for prehension has to be independent of God’s subjective development: a primordial feature of God as the primordial entity. God can only be present for the occasions’ prehensions as the totality of all possible combinations of valuational features, as an unalterable plenum of objects for prehension the origination of which is prior to that of any created object, a plenum of eternal objects ordered in all possibly relevant ways for any possible occasion. But the price for this sort of influence is indifference. If what is objectified for the creatures is prior to whatever difference creaturely strivings might make, then God’s influence can in no way be based on those strivings.

Timelessly available, any particular configuration of eternal objects can be relevant to a particular situation only passively. The possibilities are all always there; the specific character of each changing situation then spotlights the ones which happen to be relevant to that situation. God’s influence on the world cannot be the sensitive creative response of a fellow-sufferer to the feeling of another’s suffering. Such feeling there may well be, but God’s response, insofar as it is relevant to the world, cannot be fashioned in the light of that feeling because whatever is available to the world cannot be fashioned at all.

Hence the dilemma. As a result of the epistemological constraints in Whitehead’s metaphysics, either God’s love is without influence or God’s influence is without love. But God should be understood as the cause of worlds and of the worlds’ creatures, the supremely determining power in the universe. And God should be understood as good, as caring for what has been caused to be, seeking the best for individual creatures and for the whole creation. Neither quality alone gives us an entity worthy of our worship. A worshipful God, the God we all thought we were getting in Whitehead’s process theology, must be both influential and lovingly responsive -- influential, indeed, because lovingly responsive. But Whitehead’s God fails to satisfy this necessary condition for any entity to be genuinely divine. We ought therefore to reject this God as an idol of the philosophers. It is no God at all.

II. The Dilemma Resolved: The God in Ford’s Future

Although I won’t rehearse his arguments here, Ford demolishes the various attempts by Whiteheadians to solve this dilemma from within Whitehead’s system. The primordial nature of God cannot be sensitized to the changing contingencies of temporal achievement and the consequent nature of God cannot be an object for worldly prehension. Impassive influence and uninfluential compassion, bifurcated into separate natures, is an incoherent way to portray the divine -- no matter how much the friends of Whitehead fine-tune the details of his metaphysics or attempt to fill in its lacunae.

According to Ford, the only solution is to abandon two key assumptions in the philosophy of organism: (a) deny that the only way any reality can influence a concrescing occasion is by being an objective datum for that occasion to prehend; and (b) deny that the indeterminate possibilities relevant to a subject’s concrescing synthesis must be timeless rather than the result of some creative process, must be determinable as recurrent features of new achievements but never themselves newly achieved.

Ford’s rejection of (a) allows him to conceive of God’s influence on the world as sensitive to its contingent differences without having to involve the notion of an objectifiable consequent nature. That there is feedback to the world from God’s consequent nature is an idea, claims Ford, that Whitehead hastily introduced at the end of Process and Reality. But this sort of feedback simply isn’t possible. Within Whitehead’s system, there is no way in which God’s experience of the world at any moment can be fully objectified.² Yet unless it is, it cannot be prehended by any actual occasion. Ford is willing to retain the consequent nature, but only as God’s private enjoyment of the world. If we are ever to arrive at a coherent theory of divinity, he argues, there can be no objectification of God’s enjoyment available to the world’s creatures for the enrichment of their own enjoyments. God, Ford insists, is "totally imprehensible" (DAF 314).

Having privatized God’s consequent nature, Ford is left only with the primordial nature as a source of influence. God as primordial is devoid of concrete actuality and subjective immediacy: such a God can be the indeterminate Ground of the being of the creatures but not their creator, companion, or redeemer. The major difficulty with God’s radical indeterminacy is the absence of purpose it entails. God may be the source of the creatures, but though no creative act, for no particular reason, for the sake of no particular end. Origins and outcomes are contingent achievements which can make no difference to what is already unchangingly complete. And what makes no difference can have no value. Ford recognizes, therefore, that God must be thought of as having an inherently teleological aspect in order to give meaning to the temporal processes of becoming and perishing. There must be something important, even if not something ultimate, about the lives and deaths of finite creatures; otherwise it would be better were there only God and God’s indeterminate endless plenitude.

So Ford rejects the (b) assumption of the philosophy of organism: the necessary link between what is indeterminate and what is impersonal and purposeless. He wants God to be understood as non-objective but also purposive and personal, indeterminate but caring and redeeming. To accomplish this goal, Ford introduces two new theses to replace the two Whiteheadian ones he has rejected. His new theses are: (c) that Creativity can be qualified, and (d) that eternal objects can be temporalized.

In order the better to follow Ford’s argument, let me first clarify what I take to be the ontological difference in Whitehead’s thought between Creativity and the eternal objects. Both have to do with indeterminacy. Creativity is pure transformative power, the vector force at the foundation of reality, a drive from indeterminacy toward determinacy. The eternal objects are constraints on that vector, limitations with which it must work in effecting its transformation. They are the functions through which Creativity runs its course, the conditions of the shape of the vector.³ Creativity and the eternal objects are each a necessary condition of meaningful order, but neither alone nor both together are a sufficient condition. Without the eternal objects to give it a form, Creativity would be a wind blowing endlessly from nowhere toward nowhere, a vectorless force, a power that never empowers. Without Creativity, the eternal objects would be empty forms, ordered in arrays because of their systematic similarities but never providing the order for anything, forms that never inform. Together, however, these two kinds of reality provide the dynamic, time-making conditions for meaningful processes and valuable products.

(c) Ford makes a simple but strikingly insightful adjustment in Whitehead’s theology. He associates God’s primordial nature with Creativity as well as with the eternal objects. The passivity and vacuity of the primordial nature immediately vanish. God becomes a transformative power and the eternal objects instruments by which that power influences the processes of concrescence. God as creative power is a vector force, a power oriented toward a goal, and God as home of all relevant possibilities is the repository of the functional ways for attaining that goal, for realizing the vector. Ford is too acute a Whiteheadian to undercut the irreducibility of the creatures, however. It remains they, not God, who effect the transformation of potency and potentiality into the determinacy of actualized occasions. God is the power required for the transformation and the relevant ways for accomplishing it, but the various occasions, each in the uniqueness of its own subjective immediacy, are the ones who alone use the power and the tools made available to them by God, using them for whatever finite outcome they happen to achieve.

Ford thus departs considerably from Whitehead’s concept of Creativity. Whitehead, as I understand him, insists that Creativity, like Aristotle’s Matter or Spinoza’s Absolute, is "without a character of its own" because it is the "ultimate notion of the highest generality" and so only "capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality [i.e., of character]" (PR 31, 7). Each concrescing actual occasion is an immediacy of integrative power roaring through transformation functions from an initial pure indeterminacy toward some concrete synthesis. Why there should be a new rush toward closure supervening upon each achievement of closure, the perishing of vector power always concurrent with a fresh upsurge of that power, Whitehead leaves unexplained. It is the category of the Ultimate: such is just the way things are. Creativity is the fact of this recurrent vectoring power and of the fact that it is the same power in all its recurrences, understanding that only these recurrences are that power. There is no Creativity over and beyond its particularized expressions.

A concrescing occasion for Whitehead is Creativity characterized, a rush not toward closure as such but toward a particular kind of closure. This character is the contribution of the eternal objects uncovered by the occasion’s rush, eternal objects found in and broken off from the physical prehensions which are the initial characterization of the occasion’s vector power. For Whitehead, the reason the sort of closure aimed at is in part novel is due to the occasion’s prehension, not only of its physical past but also of God, of God’s primordial envisagement of all possibilities as relevantly ordered with respect to the occasion’s initial character. Without God there could be no novelty of aspiration, no reach for a richer kind of closure than the past discloses, and no fresh resources for determining how to realize that aspiration.

But we’ve seen that Whitehead can permit the occasion’s prehension of God to be only of functions primordially envisioned; novel functions based on God’s experience of the contingent achievements of prior actual occasions are impossibilities. Ford therefore proposes that Creativity be characterized by such novel functions in advance of its pluralization into the subjectivities of the many concrescing occasions. By identifying God with Creativity, God is no longer a creature and so no longer accessible only by becoming an object for prehension. God’s aim, argues Ford, is conveyed "by the subjective form of the appropriate portion of [C]reativity" (DAF 441). And reciprocally, by identifying Creativity with God, Creativity gains a teleological character not reducible to the accidental characterizations variously wrought by the various actual occasions.

God has particular purposes for the particular creatures, present for them in the transformative power of Creativity at the moment of its becoming the powers of the creatures. The creatures do not prehend their initial aim; it is already present as the character of their initial creative power. Ford contends that by giving Creativity a contour in advance of its pluralization into the becoming of the occasions he has resolved the theistic dilemma: the bestowal from the future of a function uniquely qualifying each occasion’s creativity "constitutes a genuine divine response, articulating the personhood of God as a responsive source of value" (DAF 441).

But for these initial purposes to be original, to be uniquely fitting for each new occasion’s unique particular situation, Ford must make a second move. He must appeal to his second thesis: (~ that eternal objects need not be eternal. The functions by which God influences the character of the closure sought by occasions need not all be pre-assembled. They can also be made on demand, fashioned to frame, enhance, or alter the consequences of prior and impending vectorings. Ford lets the approach of the moment of pluralization be one in which the growing specification of the possibilities of each occasion’s situation triggers the creation by God of new appropriate functions which are then available to the occasion as a characterization of its initial aim. Thus Ford wants to call possibilities "primordial objects" rather than "eternal objects": they are functions the reality of which precedes the transition from the perishing of an occasion’s predecessors to the emergence of its initial phase but which need not be prior to the origination of any and every occasion’s initial phase. Possibilities, for Ford, are not absolutely but relatively primordial, not unmade and necessary but made in the accidental course of things, and made and remade because of that course.

Thus in Ford’s ontology, Creativity is a function as well as a power. Whitehead gives no function to Creativity: it is purely a vector force, the endless drive toward actualization. He gives no power to the eternal objects: they are purely functions, pathways for canalizing power. In breaching this separation, however, Ford, insists that a purposeful Creativity, a constrained vector, does not entail particularity and hence does not require pluralization. Creativity itself, not just the occasions expressing it, is characterized by a purpose. Its purpose is the fashioning of novel purposes. The function of Creativity is to make new functions. As a tool designer makes new kinds of tools for others to use in making new kinds of things, Creativity develops new complex (or, perhaps, even new simple) primordial-object functions which a nascent occasion can then use to give novel shape to the further characterization of creative power that is its concrescence.

Because Creativity has this purpose, this function within the context of the complex of functions which permit the creative advance of cosmos, Ford is justified in calling it God. God is no longer the first creature expressive of Creativity but rather Creativity as firstly characterized. No longer the first becoming of a present actuality, God is rather the shape of the future as it first presents itself to the becoming of each nascent actuality. Purposeful, sensitive, meliorative: Ford’s God loves a world that can feel the effect of that love and so respond to it worshipfully and prophetically.

Unfortunately, Ford’s notion does not make sense.

III. Source of the Dilemma: Not Taking Time Seriously

A God who is the future constantly transforming its relevance to the ever freshly emerging present must interact with it. In the cosmos as Ford depicts it, Creativity is always qualified relative to the opportunities for determination available for a nascent occasion, contoured so as to disclose the best form of determination possible given the existing conditions. So, according to the logic of Ford’s argument, Creativity must be constantly making and unmaking the functions which give it the shape by which it is constantly relevant to the ever-changing repertoire of possibilities for each possible occasion’s eventual realization. These functions characterizing Creativity are made in response to the achievements of actual occasions. It is because the world is changing that the features of Creativity must change.

If this is so, however, then Creativity is as much a creature as are the actual occasions, for both are constrained -- contingently characterized -- by the achievements of past occasions. Creativity is a creature of the world’s past because the physical data and functions present occasions have inherited from their predecessors, and those which its possible successors are likely to inherit, limit the range of the possible functions relevant to each new present. So what new functions God can usefully make and what functions, old or new, God can recommend for present use are constrained by the actual achievements of actual occasions. In order constantly to take the shape of relevance, God must acquire the resources for that shape from the perished work of the creatures. The boundary conditions of relevance are the determinate facts, from the implacable rule of which not even God is exempt.

For both Whitehead and Ford, God’s primary character is to be the dynamic function of a telos. God’s aim is to provide each new creature with the newly. made novel possibilities it needs in order to optimize value outcome. In the philosophy of organism, this provision of a special providence for special occasions means that interactions must take place between the present concrescence and the past achievement of creatures as objectified in God’s consequent nature. In Ford’s modulation of Whitehead, the interactions are between present concrescence and the future possibilities contouring God’s future-constituting primordial nature. But Ford’s shift from God’s consequent nature to God’s primordial nature as the intercessor between past achievement and its reiteration, bringing fresh possibilities for the improved achievement, is insufficient to resolve the theological dilemma.

In Ford’s ontology, God is sensitive to what the world is likely to be, knows it as not yet objectified; contrarily, for Whitehead, the world knows God as not yet objectified. In both cases, there is prehension of a less than objective datum. Either the world’s achievements are reflected in the dark glass of a ghostly future, God’s teleologized primordial nature busily adjusting its possibilities to those achievements so as to be able to influence their successors. Or the works of the world cast a shadow into a ghostly past, God’s consequent nature busily reconciling their incompatibilities so as to be able to influence their successors. God, possessing an evanescent image of the world, and the world, somehow influenced by God because of that image: two distinct realities necessarily interacting. Yet the interaction makes no sense: requiring an impossible kind of knowing, it posits an impossible kind of reality to know or be known. Ford and Whitehead alike end up with an incoherent dualism between God and the World. In ways similar, ironically, to Descartes’ inability to explain how mind and matter can interact, they posit a mode of connection they cannot justify. It’s more a matter of mystery than metaphysics.

One way in which Ford attempts to make his analysis look plausible is by reifying the temporal modes. He argues that past, present, and future are "modes of actuality," each with its own primary "species of actuality." Thus "in the present mode only concrescences primarily exist. In the past mode only concrete determinants primarily exist" (DAR 326). Creativity, which is God, is the primary species of actuality indigenous to the future mode of temporality. God exists, for Ford, but in a way appropriate to future existence: as a monistic imprehensible indeterminate purpose. According to Whitehead’s ontological principle, only actualities can be the reasons for things. Ford undercuts the force of this principle, however, by rejecting a univocal sense of actuality. He denies that actual entities, as functions or as powers, are the only actualities there are. Instead he equivocates, proposing three species of actuality -- concreta, concrescences, and Creativity -- each of which provides a reason for the things appropriate to its mode.

The Future, in Ford’s description of things, is a region of the cosmological landscape, occupied by two kinds of fauna: Creativity and primordial objects, a power and its functions. This diaphanous landscape has a contour. It is fairly smooth, an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum at its farthest horizon, but increasingly differentiated in the direction of its near-side boundary with the present. The more that boundary is approached, the more it becomes ridged by functions that sort primordial objects into relevant packages available to the occasion-structures which are continually bubbling up in the present region that lies just beyond the boundary. These contours are not static, however, but are like an inversion of ripples created when an object is thrown into the water: initially indistinguishable amid the undisturbed placidity, they grow more distinct until at the very edge of the future they are almost indistinguishable from the actuality to which they are about to give way.

This Future seems uncomfortably like Newton’s space, a container in which Creativity and primordial objects are located, its contents an environment to which they can adapt and which they can alter. But although the contours of Creativity are constantly changing, and although new primordial objects are constantly being made and perhaps unmade, the Future remains constantly the region where all of this goes on. And if the Future is real, in however obscure a sense, then so are its contents. And the same for the Past: its vast silent fields are an archeological delight of layer upon layer of the objectified remains of former concrescing processes, each of which is as actual in its mode as the actual occasions which made them.

This regionalizing of time, however, is an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Ford reifies the concrescing of the creatures, treating both their indeterminate and determined aspects as actualities locatable, vaguely or precisely, within a landscape itself a reification of the togetherness of the brief lives of those creatures. Instead of activities of actualization exemplifying features which are analyzable genetically and coordinately into patterns of inheritance and influence, Ford gives us transcendental regions: one a fluffy cloud, another a mausoleum, the third a device for making stone statues from gossamer. Ford in his Future reforms process philosophy into just another substance ontology.

IV. Source of the Dilemma

Process philosophers, oddly enough, always seem reluctant to take time seriously. They should be celebrating the primacy of becoming over being. They should be insisting that whatever entities are actual are therefore temporal accomplishments, analyzable into their component data, vectors, and functions, but themselves the only actualities. They should be denying the very possibility of eternal or any other non-temporal realities, of substances and all other endlessly enduring realities. They should be arguing that there can be no region of reality except that made in the emerging of finite perishing events. But process philosophers are always slipping in by the back door what they say they have booted out the front door. They keep discovering, with great yelps of joy, some sort of entity independent of and more important than the momentary temporal achievements of which they had just a moment ago been proclaiming all else are only features,

Why these persistent efforts to multiply entities beyond necessity? Substance ontology and the notion of a realm beyond time are resilient errors, but why should they plague even those ostensibly committed to their denial? The reason might be simply because the foundational character of process is obscured by the residues of old metaphysical beliefs, including those embedded in our most archaic habits, in our languages, maybe even in our genetic structure. Perhaps. But one reason substance thinking never seems to go away is because too many thinkers fear the consequences of taking time seriously. It’s not just that process is obscured but that process philosophers are too often obscurantists, purposefully attempting to hide the full force of their ontology’s implications.

Charles Hartshorne, for instance, insists that there is no reason to create value unless one is assured it will not be lost: "what does our being definite matter if the universe has no way to retain the definiteness?" (IOGT 360).⁴ Either created value is preserved forevermore or making it is a meaningless activity. The old metaphysical view was that genuine value lies outside of time, in eternity, and enters time only to its detriment. Whenever temporalized, value is corrupted, its worth diminished, its good fallen or even lost by being transformed into evil or dissipated into undifferentiated chaos. Our aim ought always to be upward, away from time and toward the timeless: the flight of the alone to the Alone, of the soul to God, the replacing of the kingdoms of earth by the Kingdom of God. To the old metaphysics, created value was indeed not worth much.

Hartshorne repudiates this metaphysics. He gives time a new status, agreeing with Whitehead that only in time, only in the becoming of occasional satisfactions, is value made. But once made, says Hartshorne, its value is dependent upon its never being unmade. It will be unmade in this world, of course; for all things perish. The price of the creation of value is that the achievement must perish as a temporal process in order to become fully made. It can be remade by another occasion, but that making would be a new value different from the earlier one, retaining it at best under a limited aspect. However, says Hartshorne, fear not, for behold: each value made is secured against ultimate perishing by its presence to God, by its objectification as a feature of what never perishes. The achievements -- of actual occasions, like the souls of Christians, saved and damned alike, are once made but everlastingly preserved.

For Hartshorne and so many other process philosophers, there may be no hands but our hands to do God’s work, but what is important is not the temporal world where that work is done but the divine world where it is preserved and woven into an ultimate harmony, our values become God’s Value. Ford, acknowledging that God’s consequent nature cannot be of benefit to the world, and so trying to find a way to reassign that role to God’s primordial nature, nonetheless retains the consequent nature for reasons identical to Hartshorne’s. Even if for Ford God’s enjoyment of the world is God’s alone, just knowing that our --creations, their objective values, are cherished forever is enough to give these efforts meaning. Ford retains the consequent nature for that reason and no other: not that the temporal world might be redeemed but that our pitiable words and deeds might live forever as elements in a Value beyond all values.

We would suffer our finitude, according to Hartshorne and seemingly to Ford as well, only if we are assured it is not the final truth about ourselves. So the becomings and perishings of the creatures, their living immediacies and their-soon-forgotten influences, lack intrinsic value. Their efforts are meaningful only if their accomplishments, or rather the good to be found in their accomplishments, serve to enrich a divine becoming that never becomes in time. Temporal value is instrumental; everlasting value alone is intrinsic. The flowers of the field wilt, the empires crumble, the mountains are brought low, the stars flicker out, but God endures. And because that’s true, only because it’s true, all else is good.

So process philosophers join with substance philosophers in taking God more seriously than time, preferring permanence to the flux of becoming, praising the achievement more than the struggle to achieve -- even at the cost of metaphysical incoherence.

V. Dissolving the Dilemma: Taking Time Seriously

The temporality of things, their occasionalness, can only be taken seriously by affirming that all there is to reality is the recurrent vectors of transformation running from indeterminacy to determinacy. This is the plain, and I think univocal, meaning of the ontological principle, and we should resist the temptation, even if Whitehead himself failed to do so, to construe it as permitting realities that do not become and perish.

There can be no actual entity other than the actual occasions because to be actual is to become a determinate harmony. Every actual entity is a vector expression of Creativity, and this means to be a product that is neither more nor less than its process, the two inseparably and immediately. The functions qualifying temporal realities recur, to be sure, but they recur only because the features of perishing realities can be appropriated by their successors. But a feature has no independent reality, no actuality. It is a contribution to the shape of an event, a condition in the contouring of its trajectory. There are no shapes as such, only shaped events; no functions as such, only vectors functioning in certain ways. Process, vector, function, product: one occurring event, distinguishable for analysis but not distinct in actuality.

I agree, following Neville, that value is the quality, the character, of the unity of each achieved determinacy as it is carried over into succeeding vectors.⁵ But since this unity is the unity of an event, it takes place and then it is no more. To be valuable is the process of creating something of value which then perishes. The value, not the vector, is what is carried over, and its carryover is effected only if the new vector finds the functions it needs for its own achievement in those rather than other features of the past it had prehended.

We need to account for how functions make value outcomes possible, and how functions emerge which make improved values possible or previously attained values no longer replicable. If providing such an account requires identifying a special creature, a primordial actual occasion called God, then fine. Such a God would have a specific function: to assist in making it possible for actual occasions to aim beyond the limitations of mere repetition, to aim beyond the good to the better and the best. But the best is as fleeting as the worst. The main question is always how to secure a repetition of the best or to improve on it, how to prevent a repetition of the worst or to mitigate its influence. That there might be a benefit to God in these efforts should be at most a secondary question, for God’s primary good is as instrumental: a resource in the struggles of worldly occasions to achieve the intrinsic good they alone make and are.

There’s a moral grandeur to the notion of finite creatures fashioning values valued for their intrinsic character, for the content, intensity, and mode of the harmony they have made. There’s a moral grandeur to these finite creatures recognizing the contributions others make to what they achieve, thus recognizing the ways their achievements might contribute to what others make, and shaping their own efforts in the light of these interoccasional dependencies. There’s moral grandeur to a God whose role is as a contributor to these makings, aiding in the deepening of harmonies by luring the creatures toward a widened sense of the other harmonies thought relevant.

How different such a world and such a God are from a world in which the creatures aim at the preservation of whatever good they may have done and God’s good is to fulfill their aim. The latter world is essentially selfish; the former, essentially self-transcendent. So if there is a metaphysical reason for believing in God, let that God not be God the Creator or God the Preserver, but God the neighbor present to us in our self-creation, exemplifying for us how self-creation need not be selfish but can be compatible with other-creation through mutual influence, anticipation, and coordination, through mutual accommodation and surrender. Let our God be the poet of the world, luring us also into a life of creations made possible through zestful mutual interactions and enjoyed for what they intrinsically are: fragile, momentary, once-only glories of contingent accomplishment.

Ford’s arguments teach another lesson, however. For despite the attractiveness of a metaphysics in which God functions as a co-creator with the other creatures of the value only vector determinations make possible, that metaphysics would nonetheless still be incoherent. Ford has shown that the extant process notions of God are as plagued by unresolvable dilemmas as those of the traditional theism they claim to have superceded. Ford’s reformed Whiteheadianism, with its emphasis on God’s role in the presentation of novel possibilities rather than on God’s role as preserver of achieved value, merits our close attention and should be celebrated for its creative vision, its bold willingness to look beyond the familiar horizons of Whiteheadian truth. But, as I have argued, Ford fails to exorcise the dilemmas of theism. God cannot be the neighbor of actual occasions without becoming an actual occasion, and yet no actual occasion can be every other occasion’s neighbor. We can all be poets of our worlds, but the world as such can have no poet.

This theistic impasse doesn’t bother me. We can do without God and still account for value. The aspiration beyond inherited value to greater value, the temptation of immediate values which undermine that aspiration, the lure of the familiar values repeated which also undermine it, even the attraction of aspirations which, too exuberantly embraced, undermine past achievement quickly rather than slowly: these world-making and world-destroying functions of the vectors of Creativity require no God. In order to get about these tasks of making value, remaking it, resisting false lures, and all the rest of the busyness of reality, we must learn to take time seriously. We must focus on the creaturely tasks of vector determination and come to recognize that it is this process, not some extraneous putative preservation of its remains, that is the living value for which there is no substitute.

We need to immerse ourselves in the adventure of seeking the intrinsic values found in temporal accomplishment and we need to learn the delight which comes from realizing that, because of us, such value can be. We need to recognize, therefore, that our own value -- our dignity, our joy, our excellence as creatures -- is found only in the processes of these makings and unmakings. Our good we make together here and now, amid an inheritance of achievements and methods for effecting achievement, an inheritance of dreams and methods for more effective dreaming. Making and made, perishing and perished: our worlds, time-filled and time-bound worlds without end, amen.

References

MEA George Allan, "The Metaphysical Axioms and Ethics of Charles Hartshorne," The Review of Metaphysics 40 (1986).271-304.

TSRW James Bradley, "Transcendentalism and Speculative Realism in Whitehead," Process Studies 23 (1994), 155-191.

CFK Lewis Ford, "Creativity in a Future Key," New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Robert C. Neville. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987, 179-197.

DAF Lewis Ford, The Divine Activity of the Future and Other Forms of Process Theism. Albany, NY; State University of New York Press, forthcoming.

GSF Lewis Ford, "God as the Subjectivity of the Future." Process Studies 11(1981), 169-179.

IOGT Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy. Albany, NY; State University of New York Press, 1983.

WIG Charles Hartshorne, "Whitehead’s Idea of God," The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. New York; Tudor Publishing Co., 1941, 513-560.

Notes

1Ford has been addressing this topic in one way or another since "God as the Subjectivity of the Future" (GSF) and "Creativity in a Future Key" (CFK). He has forcefully pulled his arguments together and deepened them in a forthcoming book, The Divine Activity Of the Future (DAF). My concern is with the main contours and underlying logic of Ford’s argument, however, so I will make little use of specific citations; those I make are to the pages of the unpublished DAF manuscript.

2Ford dismisses Hartshorne’s argument that God can be a society of occasions -- e.g., in "Whitehead’s Idea of God" (WIG) -- by arguing that "This option reduces the transcendence of God to the abstract features of this society, which all too easily coincide with the most general features of the world" (DAF 314).

3My interpretation of eternal objects and subjective forms as conditions of actualization, calling them its "functions," owes much to James Bradley’s use of that term in "Transcendentalism and Speculative Realism in Whitehead" (TSRW).

4 For my own critique of this argument, see part LV of "The Metaphysical Axioms and Ethics of Charles Hartshorne" (MAE).

5Robert Cummings Neville, Axiology of Thinking, published by the State University of New York Press in three volumes: Reconstruction of Thinking (1981), Recovery of the Measure (1989), and Normative Cultures (1995).

For this essay I shall select one issue from the roster of problems which comprise the nation’s education agenda: that of the intellectual canon. The dispute is over whether there is one, and what the ramifications are of this for curricular coherence and hence for pedagogical effectiveness. The dispute is loudest at the college and university levels, especially when focused on matters of general education. Unfortunately the exchange of views is carried on with little attention to underlying assumptions and in a rhetorical mode that leaves no space for compromise. It is as though we were once again with William James’s camping party in the mountains, red-faced from shouting down our friends, engaged in a new version of the wrangle regarding whether or not a man goes around the squirrel when he goes around the tree to which that ever-watchful creature clings, its face kept always toward him.

Let us think of process philosophy as a method designed for use on such occasions, evoked by such disputes as an instrument of reasonable good sense and creative imagination, one that will serve to fix what had broken down and to get things running smoothly once again. As James expected the camping party to get back to the useful business of chopping firewood and cooking supper once he had "assuaged the dispute" by his pragmatic observations, so the application of process thinking in reference to the canonical wars now ravaging American higher education should be the means by which faculty might be led back from endless idle arguments to their real and proper work of designing good courses and teaching them well.

A "canon" is the set of general rules and fundamental principles that govern a subject, that reveal systematically its structure of relationships. The fundamental principles are the essential or core features of the subject, those upon which the other features, the accidental or peripheral ones, depend. Thus an "educational canon with respect to some subject is the set of rules for determining what materials -- ideas, methods, heuristics, texts, data -- are essential for someone to learn if he or she is to grasp adequately that subject. By an obvious process of metonymy, the educational canon is usually taken as referring to those materials themselves rather than to the rules for their determination, and the subject at issue is taken to be human knowledge in general. Hence within the context of the present dispute in American undergraduate education, the canon at issue is the set of texts that contain those ideas which it is essential for American young people to know in order for them to become responsible citizens. As William Bennett puts it, paraphrasing Matthew Arnold, the educational canon is "the best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience" (TRL 3).

Advocates of canonical education view with dismay the decline over the last century in the "authority of tradition." They see an old consensus about what it is essential to know eroded by the acid rains of professional specialization. The explosion in information, the need for increasingly specialized skills to acquire or understand that information, and the resulting emergence of a professionalized faculty more interested in their narrow research programs than the general education of students: these have led, the canonicists argue, to a dangerous "dispersal of authority," to a "loss of integrity in the bachelor’s degree" (ICC; TM).

A curriculum without "integrity" (ICC) is one without "coherence" (TM), one in which "intellectual authority" is replaced by "intellectual relativism" (TRL). The roster of evidence showing the failure of the American educational system to teach its young people what they need to know is said by the canonicists to be the result of this fragmentation, this collapse of any distinction between essential and unessential materials. The solution they advocate, therefore, can be said to be "modernist": it believes in essential structures, and proposes that we recover the old and proper integrity of the undergraduate curriculum by reaffirming the centrality, and hence the authority, of those essential structures of understanding that have been defined by the traditional educational canon.

"Some books are more important than others" (TRL 10), says Bennett, and these should be studied with care. They bring students into "the company of great souls" (TRL 11), confront them with "the questions that are central to human existence" (TRL 29), and so by the universality of that encounter provide them with a common heritage that serves as "the glue that binds together our pluralistic nation" (TRL 30). Bennett’s list of the great books authored by such great souls, limited to the Humanities which are his immediate concern, run from Homer to Nietzsche, and from the Federalist Papers to Letter from the Birmingham Jail.

Other canonicist reports focus on method rather than content. The AAC monograph, for instance, identifies nine "methods and processes, modes of access to understanding and judgment" (ICC 15) that it thinks are essential to know: logical analysis, verbal literacy, numerical understanding, historical awareness, scientific method, informed and responsible moral choice, art appreciation and experience, international and multicultural experiences, and study of one field in depth. These it takes as the conditions for nurturing "qualities of mind and character" (ICC 25) that have enabled and should again serve to enable "generations of men and women to grasp a vision of the good life, a life of responsible citizenship and human decency" (ICC 6).

The critics of canonic learning do not simply direct their attack at these sometimes atavistic proposals for what counts as the essential content or methodology for undergraduate education. That would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Bennett, for instance, skips over the Middle Ages, omitting everyone from Augustine to Ockham, mentions Locke and Hobbes but not Hume, Kant, or Hegel, affirms Hawthorne and Melville but not Dickinson, Faulkner but not Hemingway, and completely ignores Whitehead, Bergson, and the American pragmatists. Such a line of criticism would be superficial, however. Bennett is quick to note that his list is by no means exhaustive. He also acknowledges that it would benefit from more attention to great souls who are not Western nor culturally mainstream nor male. His point is not that education should be confined to reading what he has recommended, but that for Americans what is essential to their education can and must be learned from a traditional collection of works by North American and West European authors, along with certain of their Hebrew, Greek, and Roman predecessors. On this foundation one can then construct a fuller cultural edifice of other authors who are worth reading, a house of intellect that is wide, diverse, and generously pluralistic. But it would be a house built upon the sand, say Bennett and his colleagues, except that it first reach to bedrock by means of a canon such as the one they propose.

What upsets Bennett and the canonicists, therefore, is not that his critics object to the content of his canon nor to its scope, but that they object to its very nature. Because Western culture is essentially [sic] oppressive, these critics argue, the canon that marks that essence celebrates values which instead should be rejected. Those great Western souls, along with their great ideas, methods, and attitudes, are hegemonic, imperialistic, colonial, patriarchal, logocentric, exclusionary. They need to be repudiated in the name of other more humane, more encompassing values, values respectful of ethnic difference and cultural variety, values of liberation, equality, and free association. As black writer Henry Louis Gates puts it,

The problem is not that the traditional canon offers a roster of repugnant ideas but that the very notion of a Canon is itself one of those repugnant ideas. For a canon is hierarchical and it is hierarchy, not this hierarchy or that hierarchy but hierarchy as such, that is the enemy of the multicultural and democratic ideals which it should be the goal of American education to inculcate in the nation’s youth. Hierarchical thinking and action, says Mary Louise Pratt, is "historically as well as morally distortive" because it divides everything into privileged and unprivileged groupings, condemning some ideas, texts, and persons to the margins of a culture while exalting others to positions of primacy. Because their attack is thus directed against the keystone presuppositions of modernism, noncanonicalists have often earned for themselves the deconstructive sobriquet of "post-modernist."

Jean Ferguson Carr proposes a noncanonical approach when she argues that literary studies should be renamed "cultural studies." The shift, she claims,

Texts need to be seen within their cultural settings in order to be revealed as they truly are, as one of the ways by which persons pursue their individual and collective interests. The sorts of books, ideas, authors that make it into a traditional canon do so because they are taken to have been influential expressions of such interests. But this role they play will be misunderstood, absolutized, unless they are "set against a panoply of other voices" from that same cultural milieu which exhibit the same or competing interests. A popular broadside, the private diary or letters of an ordinary person, bureaucratic memos, subliterary or nonliterary artifacts, are all "productions worthy of study" because they all in their different ways provide access to the culture and to the play of interests that define it.

Cultural studies, Carr insists, is "not a game to play or a code to keep people out, but [is] a method of refiguring how we have gotten to where we are and how we can effect some significant change" (Acad 28). Canon-making, she implies, is an exclusionary stratagem, a way to define an elite. Privileged authors imply privileged readers, those who are like them with respect to background, experience, and interests, and who as a consequence respond appreciatively to what they have to say. To stop studying those authors as exemplars and to inquire instead into how they came to be revered and how others came to be reviled or ignored is to find ourselves caught up in the moral and political question of why this should be so. Can envisions cultural studies so practiced as having an activist outcome because her students are ethnically diverse "ordinary readers," people whom the canon brands as having an unimportant past and a naive understanding of what they read. Students who discover that the supposed great souls are different than they are but not their betters, furthering their own interests rather than expressing universal truths, gain a new respect for their own heritage, for their own ideas and recommendations, and are emboldened to act within the culture accordingly. Thus for Can cultural studies "tries to dispel the mystique surrounding authorized knowledge" and to empower marginalized people "to enter critical conversations at diverse levels and with the authority of their own experiences and knowledges" (Acad 28).

John Searle chides the "cultural left," one of the soi-disant labels for post-modern noncanonicalists, for confusing epistemology with ontology. "All investigations are relative to investigators. But it does not follow, nor is it indeed true, that all the matters investigated are relative to investigators" (NYRB Section 3). Metaphysical realism, contends Searle, is presumed in the sciences, indeed everywhere except in English, French, and cultural studies. It is the presupposition of linguistic communication and so even to argue against it is to exemplify it. Searle dismisses noncanonicalism as philosophically muddle-headed and its views on education, therefore, as not worthy of serious consideration.

But the arguments about the canon are not really between modernist metaphysical realists and post-modernist metaphysical antirealists. The dispute is over two claims about reality, one contending that reality is ordered hierarchically into essential and accidental elements, one insisting that it isn’t. If there are essential ingredients in any aspect of the world, then the canonicalists are correct and the study of that aspect needs to give primary attention to those essential features. If there is no such distinction, however, if the ingredients of things are related interdependently rather than dependently, then the noncanonicalists have it right and the study of those things needs to take equal account of all of their various relata.

The canonicalists and noncanonicalists fire cannonades of assertion and invective at one another, each outraged at the refusal of the other to acknowledge the obvious, each muttering about the dark reasons which must constitute their opponents’ real motivation. Each side seems to ignore the fact that their differences are ontological. "Political correctness" is a donkey’s tail of vilification recently pinned on the cultural left. But it belongs on the rump of the cultural right as well, for Robert Caserio has usefully defined "political correctness" to mean "a prefabricated sense of values, a predetermined set of assumptions about what is good for people and what is bad for them" (quoted in CHE 1). Both sides in the dispute over the reality of an educational canon argue in just this way, presupposing the truth of their predetermined views concerning the nature of reality and hence of how best to learn about it.

Two human temperaments, committed to two ontologies. One rationalist in its insistence upon essential truth, one empiricist in its insistence upon the plurality of conflicting truths. One side tenderly enraptured by the notion of a few, great sacred texts to be preserved against the ravage of time as a precious resource without which we shall surely perish as a people. One side toughmindedly open to the incredibly diverse and divergent ways of belief and practice comprising the human adventure through time, that very pluralism a precious resource surely without which we shall perish as a people.

The campfire talk grows heated. Enter a recovered pragmatism.

The pragmatic critique of every "copy theory" of truth, in William James’s way of putting it, is twofold. First, there is no apparent reason for wanting to create a mental copy of an antecedent physical reality. Like the Irishman, carried to a banquet in a bottomless sedan chair, who remarks that had it not been for the honor he might just as well have walked, whether or not you copy reality would seem to make no real difference (P 105). The world remains the same either way, and so do you. Second, moreover, reality can never be simply copied anyway. "The trail of the human serpent is...over everything" (P 33), elements of human perspective, concern, and interest inextricably mixed with the elements of reality. "Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience" (P 113).

James readily meets the conditions for being a metaphysical realist by characterizing "reality" as composed both of what we experience, what our sensations are of, and what the abstract relations are that hold among ideas. The human factor has to do with fitting the two together, making judgments about which general relations obtain among the sensations, subsuming facts under theories. But the fitting must conform to the necessities of what is given: the obduracy of the sensations, the logical demands of coherence and consistency inherent in the patterns of relationship by which they are ordered.

But no matter how tightly we may be wedged, there is still wiggle room. If it is misleading to say, as F.C.S. Schiller did, that reality is indeterminately "plastic" to whatever fittings of its elements we might choose to make, we nonetheless still make additions as best we can to suit our purposes, and reality "tolerates" the additions. Reality is like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then must listen passively "to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give" (P 111). The lawyer’s case is constrained by the need to be adequate to the facts, but the constraint is only partial; he still has his task of arguing the case cut out for him and quite a bit rides on whether he does so effectively. "We receive...the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves" (P 112).

James calls these fittings "perspectives" or "hypotheses," sometimes "frameworks" or "editions of the world." He complains that the copy theory of truth presupposes an absolutist perspective, an édition de luxe above and beyond all finite, fallible editions. It can do so only by neglecting the human factor, the presence of which necessarily relativizes all perspectives into working hypotheses, necessarily turns the claim about an absolute edition of the world into one among the many fallible claims about the world proposed by fallible human beings. Truth is always a framed work; all frameworks are temporary expedients.

Canons, taken in this Jamesian sense, are thus framing devices. In Erving Goffman’s phraseology (FA; see also SEM), they are "schemata of interpretation" (FA 21), "principles of organization which govern events...and our subjective involvement in them" (PA 10). A "primary framework" is one "seen as rendering what would otherwise be a meaningless aspect of the scene into something that is meaningful" (FA 21), and the frame for all such primary frameworks, the understandings shared by a group regarding interpretive schemata, their interrelationships, and "the sum total of forces and agents that these [schemata] acknowledge to be loose in the world," constitute its "belief system" or "cosmology" (FA 27).

A natural canon, such as a scientific theory, frames the "unguided events" of inanimate nature, and the canon for such canons sets the boundary conditions for scientific inquiry in general, the conditions for what count as empirically verifiable facts or rationally intelligible concepts. A social canon differs from a natural one in that its framing also includes "guided doings," events that involve human agency. A social canon provides for the "serial management of consequentiality" by intentional agents (PA 22). An educational canon, even when it is about elements comprised by the natural canon, is a framework of this latter social sort. Its function is to make sense of human interactions, to advise us regarding how properly to act with respect to any situation framed by that canon and how by such a framing to understand properly our own and others’ actions.

In saying that a knowledge of certain facts, concepts, or methods, of certain books and certain authors, is indispensable to an educated citizenry, advocates of an educational canon provide us with a guidebook for living effectively within the culture that defines what it means for us to be citizens. The canon teaches us what to feel, what to think, and what to do. It teaches us how; it teaches us why. It instructs us in what it means to be a human being dwelling, interacting, living and dying, within the horizons of time and space that encompass us. A culture’s educational canon is an orientation program for membership in its community. Without it, we would be left to founder in a sea of confusion, feeling alienated, thinking confusedly, acting strangely.

Plato is one of the great souls. At least one of his dialogues is typically high on the list of any canon for American undergraduates to ingest. The Republic, for instance, provides an aesthetic standard for us to emulate. It is a well-crafted work of art, well worth studying for the formalistic criteria it suggests regarding what should count as good dramatic structure, literary composition, conceptual coherence, and affective import. We learn from a close reading of the text about the formal conditions for aesthetic enjoyment and symbolic significance. The Republic also offers a moral standard. Its subject matter explores the question of justice as it relates to persons, communities, and the whole of the cosmos. It offers positive and negative role models for this virtue through its portraits of Socrates, Thrasymachus, and their friends, and in the action of the dialogue offers exemplary insight into how such virtue might be best acquired by an individual or a state. By attending carefully to what Plato has to say, we learn about the conditions for right understanding, action, and sensibility. This dialogue also teaches a critical standard. It invites extrapolation of its exemplary ideas, agents, and procedures. It lures readers into applying its aesthetic and moral standards to other situations, to step out by metaphor, analogy, or generalization beyond its parochial limitations in order to bring its truths to bear upon matters of current relevance, and so perhaps to find those matters are actually recurrent instances of timeless concerns.

James says that extrapolation of this sort is the way that cosmologies. cultural worldviews, arise. "Our fundamental ways of thinking about things are discoveries of exceedingly remote ancestors, which have been able to preserve themselves throughout the experience of all subsequent time" (P 79). A certain way of framing a situation provided someone with useful guidance on some occasion long, long ago. That idea, or affective mood, or procedure was subsequently brought to bear upon another situation and here also led its utilizer prosperously. Continued use eventually made its presence canonical, a rule of thumb for dealing with certain kinds of situations, or a rule for determining the kind of situation a given situation is and hence for knowing what way of dealing with it would be most appropriate. Social canons of this sort eventuate in learned habits, in accustomed practices of such long standing and unquestioned relevance that they seem natural rather than acquired. The cosmology of a people, its common sense, is thus foundational for it, the solid ground upon which its meanings, its presumptions about reality and its sense of purpose, rest.

The purpose of a canon for education is that it be able to define what must be done in order for a culture to teach its rising generation the cosmology that frames it and makes it work. If the culture is functioning properly, common sense beliefs will be taught in family and peer group interactions, imbibed in the language and attitudes of the people, in the taken-for-granted everyday assumptions of their social intercourse. Schooling serves to make common sense explicit where this is thought necessary, but also to correct common sense with respect to the technical beliefs and institutional practices that constitute the reigning science, criticism, and legal system of the culture. From cradle to grave, cultural guidance must be endlessly inculcated and reinforced if a society is to survive. For its principles of order, the foundations for its reality, are solely cultural.

But does the necessity for such a canon entail that its rules simply be copied, that the world it frames be mirrored accurately and fully in the worldview of each citizen? This is precisely the absolutistic perspective against which James warns us. It is the reactionary claim that there is no human factor in what needs to be mirrored, or rather that the presence of any such human factor distorts reality and so should as far as possible be transcended. There is a half-truth to this demand for slavish imitation, this insistence on the direct mimesis of cultural norms. Novices to a group are well-advised to begin their acculturation by attempting to emulate its veteran practitioners, to learn its ways, its affective, effective, and cognitive dimensions, from the inside, in emic mode, by empathy.

This is what apprenticeship is all about, and in modern Western nations schooling is the way by which young people are apprenticed in the skills of citizenship required of adults. We learn to think well by thinking about an issue while utilizing the concepts a great thinker once fashioned when struggling with some similar issue. This is akin to learning how to make good cabinets by utilizing the techniques and tools a master craftsman has used, by copying one of the master’s cabinets as exactly as possible.

But these are training wheels. When a cabinetmaker’s apprentice is ready to be a master, she must demonstrate this by making her own master piece. She must cease replicating her teacher and make instead a cabinet of her own design and workmanship. Whatever the value of imitation, mature accomplishment means moving beyond our mentors, developing our own voice, a personal style, a distinctive mode of operation. Without the instructors to mimic faithfully and the pre-fashioned tools to utilize properly, we would never have been able to function on our own. But when that time comes, the old slavishness is put away and a new distinctive version of the old becomes at last a viable reality.

The wisdom of the modernists lies in realizing the heuristic necessity for interpretive frameworks and the prudential value in having canonical ones. A great books or core course requirement presumes the importance of selective valuation. It frames for students the need for frames, reminds them of the silliness in reinventing wheels and the further sight that will come to them if they learn to stand on another’s shoulders. Our concern may be with axles instead of wheels and our seeing may turn in another direction than was intended by those who invited us to use their shoulders for our vantage point. But without the wheel we would never have thought of linking wheels in pairs, and without our predecessors’ invitation to use their shoulders we would not have thought a further seeing possible, perhaps not even conceived of it. We outgrow the truths of our cultural heritage only by first growing into them. But we never outgrow the need for truths and hence for frameworks by which to make them.

No item in a canon, however, was ever created to be a norm for others to emulate. The problems that particular idea was fashioned to address, the reasons that specific book was written, that experiment conducted, that policy approved, were thoroughly situational. There is therefore something too self-conscious, too mannered, too artificial in a work undertaken with one eye on its likely place in history. It has purposefully modulated its distinctive voice in order to blend in better with the voices of its heritage. Yet in doing so it has sacrificed its own mastery, settled for being a permanent apprentice of the cultural norms. Such a work has lost what it sought to gain by the very attempt to gain it.

Concretely, amid the rough and tumble of the real world, there are no canonical happenings, no higher truths or normative ideas, except those that are self-proclaimed. Genuinely canonical achievements thrive best in the murk of an ancestral past. Contemporary candidates for the canon are notoriously suspect when paraded in the bright light of peer criticism. No one can agree who the greatest thinkers or artists or leaders of the present generation are. No new idea strikes us as equal in stature to the great, world-shaking concepts of former times. The problem is not because we are too close to see; nor is It that familiarity breeds contempt. It is because up close, within the context of the immediate, the timeless truths and universal norms that compose the frame for our beliefs and practices have no root. We bring norms to the present; we do not find them there.

This is the wisdom of the post-modernists: that there is no natural hierarchy to things, that people, deeds, and ideas are all born equal. Each concrete thing is just what it is. What it is that it is, to be sure, is not something atomistic, self-enclosed. Anything is related to other things in complex, intertwining ways. But no thing is reducible to its relationships, nor defined by them: each is a distinctive integration of its relations and relata, a one-time-only this-not-those accomplishment. The equality of the things that are should be celebrated, each of them recognized for its uniqueness, its special voice adding a new melodic line to the ongoing and unending chorale of the world.

To see Plato through fourth-century Athenian eyes as just another young aristocrat, his dialogues a way to attract a following by which to further his own political agenda or feather his nest financially, is to strip away the later accretions of canonicity and to see him for what he was rather than for what the Western world has made of him. This Plato is best understood by studying other young Athenian aristocrats, by piecing together information about high-born women of that time, by investigating the character of slavery, the status of foreigners, the dynamics of commerce, war, and demographics. There is an egalitarian and pluralistic tropism to such inquiry because what makes a given voice distinctive is best shown through comparison with other voices, including those that share with it all but its most subtle aspects.

The value of this approach to pedagogy is obvious. Pull down the idols of the tribe, debunk the status of the proud and powerful, desanctify the saints and desecrate the holy places: as the blinding sunlight of their glory fades, the gathering dusk reveals a hundred thousand points of lesser light each with a glory of its own. Ideas, authors, methods, books that the canon has neglected or vilified come into their own this way. Each has its proper framing concepts to offer, its point of view, its cosmology. But these are no longer lunar frameworks, valued only as reflections, supplementary or distortive, of a greater canonical light. They shine by their own glory now, in contrast or complement to other accomplishments. Hence Shakespeare’s sister, writing in a world where gender did not debilitate, would have written plays the equal of her brother’s plays.² The Harlequin romances are the equal of Faulkner’s fiction as expressions of American culture. The critique by a young freshman in the back row of the class can hold its own against the views of Richard Rorty, for the one no less than the other provides a fresh reading of the text. America is a congeries of ethnicity, and each deserves its equal due in any educational curriculum devoted to transmitting the nation’s heritage to a younger generation.

When the post-modernist argues that justice is a game we play; a set of rules two or more people agree upon as the frame within which to carry on their social intercourse (see, for instance, JG), the discussion shifts from a celebration of various uniqueness to the difficult question of how they interact. If there are no natural frames, if each individual accomplishment is so by virtue of the willful framing it has created in order to integrate the elements of its experience, then the shift from "I" to "us" requires that some sort of encompassing frame be fashioned. But there are none, objective and ready at hand, to rely upon. This fashioning can only be done therefore either by mutual consent or by one person imposing it through force of logic, rhetoric, or military armament. In Sartrean fashion, our self-creative acts involve canons of integration that present themselves, whether we like it or not, as principles of organization available for others to use for whatever self-creative or self-aggrandizing purposes they might choose. Education in a post-modern mode must do more than celebrate difference; it must come to terms with its necessarily hegemonic implications.

James was always willing to agree with the tough-minded among his critics that "The world we live in exists diffused and distributed, in the form of an indefinitely numerous lot of eaches" (P 118). But he also saw the unavoidable need and the utility of bringing those eaches together, both conceptually and physically, into larger unities. His name for the ideal of increasing the number and scope of such unities was "meliorism," an ideal neither necessary nor impossible of implementation and hence inviting our commitment and courage on its behalf:

The post-modernist is correct to point out the ways in which hegemonic framing marginalizes a good many people, ideas, and practices at the expense of others. It is important for us to go back constantly to the basics, to the raw truth of things, and through a close reading of the original realities to recover or gain a genuine appreciation of those things in all their uniqueness. But it is naive to imagine that we can dwell forever in a world that is no more than a random pile of eaches. Maturity comes as we learn the hegemonic skills by which communities are build up, by which one and one become a pair, pairs become families, families are gathered into a gens, the gentes become a state, the states a united nations of the Earth, the worlds a galactic federation.

This need not be an imperial effort. Language games can be fashioned through mutual give and take rather than by fiat; meta-narratives can be woven rather than imposed. Power can be an agent of empowerment, and self-interest need not be merely self-serving. An educational program aiming to nurture citizens who can function justly within the mosaic of American culture and within the world’s multicultural pluralism should teach students the dynamics of various hegemonic orders, the reasons for their emergence, the conditions of their continuence, the factors that lead to their decline and fall. There is abundant learning here, ample for helping young people see both the value and the vice of social canons, their intertwined necessity and risk.

This way of framing the aims of education would provide students with access to the process by which particular perspectives, working hypotheses, and dumb guesses sometimes are prized for more than their momentary usefulness, how they come into general use, are embedded in habits and common sense, generalized into legal conventions and scientific theories, questioned for their inadequacies and then reformed or cast aside. A justified process-rooted philosophical appreciation of social canons can be taught through a pedagogical strategy that begins with their critique, that expunges them from the natural given furnishings of the immediately real in order to rediscover them as the inherited cultural accretions by which we transform the immediately real into a world of enduring meanings and human significance.

The attack on American society by the cultural left, its diatribe against American beliefs and practices as hierarchical, hegemonic, and exclusionary, presumes that it is possible for people to live without shared frameworks or that it is somehow possible to invent frameworks that don’t order what they encompass into structures of importance, hierarchies of subordination and superordination, lattices of means and ends. This presupposition is the radical’s equivalent to the reactionary’s copy theory of cultural framing. The educational reactionary thinks there is a single natural canon for the regulation of a good and just society, and that it should be the core of any undergraduate curriculum. The educational radical thinks that since there is no natural canon the best society is an unregulated one, and that the design of an undergraduate curriculum should therefore be the responsibility of each individual student. The Kantian kingdom of ends, each member assigned by the state its proper place and fully consenting to the role defined by that place; the Marxian classless society, each member without benefit of state supervision making anew each day the place that best serves its needs and exercises its abilities. Between the rock and whirlpool of these absolutes, process philosophy offers us an uncertain but navigable passage.

When James characterized "reality" as made up of eaches and suches, of concrete particular facts and abstract relational concepts, he added a third element: "the whole body of other truths already in our possession" (P 96), the "ancient stock" of truths I have called our "social canon."

The ancient stock, if absolutized, sets rules that eventually prove inadequate to the ever-changing caches of the world. For that stock was canonized because of its relevance to worlds past, and even then its relevance was partial, its adequacy approximate, its flaws, its bugs, not fully appreciated. Things change, and old truths become uncouth because no longer able adequately to frame the world. But new truths, if designed solely by reference to their immediate relevance, have all the limitations that result from inexperience, expedience, and the absence of thoughtful criticism. Designed to solve a particular problem, their usefulness may not be generalizable. In healing one wound they may cause a hundred others. Absolutized, a frame tailored to the moment of its need is only a Band-Aide. Another frame is soon needed, and another -- the disconnected orders of the days growing into a general incoherence of things. And soon our world is no longer ordered meaningfully.

Thus a community functions viably insofar as it can marry its traditional canons with the novelty of present experiences. Our work as citizens is to attempt to effect that marriage for our country. It is our duty as Americans to know and appreciate the systems of belief -- the mythic cosmologies, the scientific laws, the common-sense attitudes -- that in times past have served to give coherence and purpose to our life together. It is also our duty as Americans to be acquainted with and appreciate the motley of particulars -- individuals whatever their kinds or styles or stations in life, ideas whatever their seeming worth, practices whatever their scope or legitimacy -- that are encircled by the horizons of that coherence and purpose. And if this be so, our work as educators and as advocates of a well-functioning American educational system is to develop citizens who are at home in the canons that comprise the formal reality of their heritage, who are equally at home with the varied individual things that comprise the material reality of that heritage and of their present life, and who are able to devise constantly new frames that are adequate to both, that marry ancient canon and novel particular in a new canon which integrates as fully and complexly as possible all its participant elements.

This means that the social canons, and therefore the educational canon, ought always to be put in question. Like the ancient kings or like contemporary CEOs, they must defend themselves constantly against younger challengers. But for such struggles there must be rules, just as much as there must be rules for the placid periods of uncontested authority. We require a canon of procedure every bit as much as we require a canon of achievement.

Even that most encrusted of modernists, the deaconal canon of the canonicists, Leo Strauss, notes the need for a continuing reinterpretation of the works of great minds:

Strauss claims that it is the collapse of "authoritative traditions in which we could trust" that has forced us into an active but unjustified role as judges reconciling the divergent views of our great-souled mentors. But we have rejected his presumption of a lost maybe someday to be recovered absolute canon of great works, a conversation of ultimate voices speaking in timeless harmony. In its place, our pragmatic reading of the canon is that the great minds of the tradition are always in need of present-day judges. We may be incompetent insofar as we cannot claim to be ourselves great-souled, but it is we alone who can judge between the canonical voices and the new-sprung experiences. And in doing so, we create canons of process by virtue of which the canons of accomplishment are continually renewed.

One obvious way to make this dynamic explicit within a curriculum is for courses to "teach the conflicts,"³ not only those among the canonical thinkers as Strauss would have us do but also those between canonical and noncanonical authors. To teach Milton’s Paradise Lost alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a way to ask if the latter can be read as a reply to the former. The question is not which is greater in its use of language and its power of insight, but why Milton has been the more important for our culture and what we can learn about the limits of both canonical writings and their challengers through this interesting juxtaposition. To read Shakespeare’s Tempest in tandem with a contemporary black Caribbean writer’s retelling of the play, framing both tellings in their respective contexts of self- and world-understanding, is to appreciate aspects of meaning available through Shakespeare’s version that are easily overlooked, and to hear resonances in the contemporary version otherwise drowned out by its overtly political agenda. The canonical texts are taught, but not as a set of isolated finalities. They are taught in conversation with other texts, other framings, some merely different, some once or presently contending with them for canonical relevance. The dynamics of the classroom thereby models that of the culture, teaching tomorrow’s citizens the knowledge and appreciation they need of ancient authorities and fresh sassy pretenders to authority, and also teaching them the dialectical skill of marrying old and new, a skill which they will need if our nation is to long endure.

The marriage process, as it is carried on over time, thus results in a dynamic nicely caught in James’s metaphor of grease spots. The intruding inappropriate glop of grease falls onto the cloth of tradition, spotting it. "The novelty soaks in; it stains the ancient mass; but it is also tinged by what absorbs it" (P 78). The new fact stains the ancient truths, forcing them to adjust their framings in some small but irreversible way in order to take account of it. But the new fact is changed as well by the encompassing system of beliefs into which it is now set. Always ready with yet another metaphor, James shifts in mid-sentence to the notion of a stew: "it happens relatively seldom that the new fact is added raw. More usually it is embedded cooked, as one might say, or stewed down in the sauce of the old" (P78). The flavor and substance of the stew are altered because of the new ingredient; the ingredient, however, is altered too, cooked down by the stewing until it has become an integral aspect of the whole.

Metaphysical realism, understood in a processive way, requires this triple sense of objectivity: novel human doings in need of guidance, long-enduring systems of belief that provide the schemata of interpretation by which that guiding can be done, and opportunistic skill in sculpting act and theory, fact and canon, into a coherent, fruitful basis for intelligent action. An educational canon, properly understood, marries modernists and post-modernists, shows their current dispute to leave them trapped in an ideological isolation of partial truths, and invites them instead to exchange rings in celebration of a vow to share in the adventure toward a better American culture and a better world, an adventure that requires them both.

References

Acad -- Jean Ferguson Carr. "Cultural Studies and Curricular Change." Academe, Nov.-Dec. 1990.

CHE -- The Chronicle for Higher Education. Nov. 21, 1990.

FA -- Erving Goffman. Frame Analysis. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986 (1974).

ICC -- Integrity in the College Curriculum. Association of American Colleges, Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees, 1985.

JG -- Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud. Just Gaming. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985 (1979).

LAM -- Leo Strauss. "What is Liberal Education?" Liberalism Ancient and Modern. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

NYRB -- John Searle. "The Storm Over the University." New York Review of Books, December 6,1990: 34ff.

P -- William James. Pragmatism. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981 (1907).

SEM -- Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1972.

TM -- Lynne V. Chaney. Tyrannical Machines: A Report on Educational Practices Gone Wrong and Our Best Hopes for Setting Them Right. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984.

TRL -- William J. Bennett To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984.

Notes

1Gates is one of the authors whose essays are included in a collection edited by Darryl L. Gless and Barbara Hernstein Smith, The Politics of Liberal Education (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990). Mary Louise Pratt, quoted next and again by Searle, is also represented in this collection of essays.

2This is the point Virginia Woolf makes in A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1957 [1930]).

3The phrase is Gerald Graff’s, but I don’t know the when or why of it. The examples that follow are borrowed from the rationale for Dickinson College’s recently approved new undergraduate English curriculum, which I think is a fine example of, and in part an Inspiration for, the position I have been developing in this essay.

The four articles that follow comprise a special issue of Process Studies devoted to social philosophy. Despite their vast difference in theme, style, and metaphysical commitment, these essays share certain broad concerns that are endemic to doing process philosophy from a Whiteheadian perspective.

The most basic of these is the problem of analogy. Whitehead provided a way of understanding reality that was grounded in ontologically irreducible events, momentary quanta of an order of magnitude appropriate to subatomic physics and the processes by which space-time sequences are constituted. An actual occasion is microcosmic; the durational entities of everyday experience and of history are composed of such microevents. But how are the two orders of reality related? Can a theory of momentary events provide any clue to an understanding of realities that emerge, change, thrive and suffer decline, endure for millennia? Whitehead’s insistence upon the organismic connectedness of things is certainly conducive to answering this question by means of analogy and metaphor, mapping in isomorphic fashion characteristics of the actual occasion onto the macrocosmic objects of human experience. But is it legitimate to treat the actual occasion as a model for interpreting the nature of a human life-course, the structure of an institution, the dynamics of a nation-state?

At the heart of Joseph Bracken’s essay is the insistence that an actual occasion provides no analogue for human social order. To do this, he argues, is to disvalue the unique ontological status of societies, especially human communities, as durational unities achieved through collective effort over time. The attempt to parallel concrescence with historical development ends us up in a totalitarian and static dead-end, whereas attention to the important differences between occasions and societies allows us to emphasize the genuine creativity of the former by displaying the latter as one of its distinctive products.

Randall Morris takes precisely the opposite tack, following a strict analogy between the key elements comprising the concrescence of an actual occasion and those comprising the class structure of human societies. His analogy is functionalist: physical inheritance in prehension functions like the general populace which predominates in a tradition-rooted society; the novelty of the conceptual pole of a prehension plays the same role as the originative activities of the ‘fortunate classes’, the middle class entrepreneurs, who predominate in modern society. For a truly effective social order to exist, statesmen are needed who can provide, in a way similar to what the subjective aim accomplishes for a concrescence, the vision and power required to weave these other two dimensions together into a unity.

The problem of analogy has immediate implications for a second major problem that arises when developing a social theory. This is the matter of ends. What is the relative value of individuals, groups, and the societal totality when it comes to apportioning the sacrifices and benefits that are the condition for temporal and historical achievement? Bracken’s preference for disanalogy is based in part on his worry that the notion of societal concrescence entails the subordination of part to whole, of personal good to social order. Morris argues for analogy because he believes, on the contrary, that social order is the necessary condition for personal good.

Paul Lakeland shares Morris’s interest in social groups as the fundamental constituents of social order, and by giving prominence to Whitehead’s vague notion of ‘world consciousness’ imagines the ideal outcome for history to be a reconciliation of the disharmonies among those constituents into a global political order. But Lakeland would see Morris’s interpretation of Whitehead as illustrating the charge by liberation theologians that Whitehead and process thought in general are counterrevolutionary instruments serving the status quo. To claim that a privileged few should have the power to determine the character of a community is to invert what justice requires. The universal class is not the statesmen but rather, as Marx claimed, the oppressed who comprise the vast majority of the world’s population. Lakeland sketches ways by which process concerns might lead us to solidarity with the world’s oppressed, but he is doubtful that this can be done short of a radical reinterpretation of Whitehead.

Peter Limper pursues some of these same issues, but within the context of technology rather than politics -- and to a different conclusion. He seems to agree with Bracken that the creativity of individual occasions is primary and is constitutive both of enduring human persons and of societies, but unlike Lakeland his objections to the existing social order of things are melioristic and reformist rather than fundamental and hence revolutionist. Technology is not an ideology of repression needing to be overcome by the cultivation of a nonimpositional aesthetic style that is studiously anarchic and interiorized. Limper thinks that the nature of things, the uniqueness of each creative moment, is not fundamentally at odds with a drive for self-realization that instrumentalizes nature as part of its basic strategy. Human liberation is a fruit potentially made increasingly possible by the achievements of technological society, an ideal realizable by means of our growing capacity to transform nature so that without violating its transhuman integrity it might serve, genuinely and profoundly, our collective ends.

These four process thinkers thus find themselves grappling with the two great conundrums that inevitably confront every attempt at social philosophy: the problem of the one and the many, and the problem of justice. That they can use Whitehead to such divergent purposes is not to undermine the claim that process philosophy has something important to say on these subjects. The cacophony is not evidence of disarray but rather of fresh vision. It is the Reason of Plato at work, freeing us from old, stale habits of thought in the expectation that out of the resulting conversation, from the very turmoil and confusion of interpretations at war with one another, can emerge in good time a better understanding and a better practice of what it is to become and be within human communities.

Benedetto Croce seems not to have read the works of his slightly older contemporary, Alfred North Whitehead; nor vice versa. The neo-idealist vocabulary of the Italian philosopher, in comparison to the empiricist and often scientific vocabulary of Whitehead, may have contributed to this mutual disregard. But beneath the language differences there are striking similarities that deserve investigation.

In this essay I shall attempt to encourage a program of Whitehead-Croce studies by doing two things. First, I shall briefly sketch some key themes in Croce’s philosophy, and shall do so in such a way as to expose the process character of his thought. My strategy will be to associate Croce’s account of human action¹ with the rhythms of becoming articulated in Whitehead’s theory of concrescence. Second, I shall draw out some implications from this association: on the one hand, utilizing the detailed precision of Whitehead’s analysis to assist in clarifying Croce; on the other hand, using a Crocean insight to remove a Whiteheadian ambiguity.

I

Croce speaks to us of Spirit. In attempting to probe the character of history, to understand men in their actions and interactions, their creations and their destruction of what they create, he has recourse again and again to the notion of Spirit at work in the world. Or, alternatively, Liberty: which is Spirit understood as making for the liberation of individual potential and the attainment of optimal value (SPA 50-62). The language is idealist -- indeed at times Croce utilizes "the Absolute" as yet another synonym for "Spirit." But Croce is no idealist. It is important to confuse him neither with Hegel nor with Hegel’s successors.² Thus Croce vigorously criticizes dialectical idealism for its willingness to postulate a supra-historical power at work in events but ultimately snore real than those events. He insists, in contrast, upon the historical immanence of Spirit, denying the actuality of any entities other than individuals, other than concrete individual actions and occurrences. Thus there is for Croce no "cunning of Reason," no reality that in each given historical moment is partly articulated, partly still implicit: that reaches out across the actions of individual men and of peoples toward the ultimate attainment of its absolute reality as concrete universal. There are, rather, only the multifarious acts of men, mutually related but uncompromisingly unique, each of which manifests fully and with absolute concreteness the reality of Spirit.

Thus Croce’s notion of Spirit is not unlike the category of Creativity developed in Process and Reality. It is an ultimate metaphysical principle but one which exhibits itself only modally. Moreover these modes are events, activities: in one sense discrete and in one sense organically fused with all that was or will be. But there is one important difference. Whereas for Whitehead the modes of Creativity are actual occasions of microcosmic dimension, for Croce the modes of Spirit are human actions. Thus a comparison of the two philosophies must in the first instance be indirect, a matter of metaphor or of analogy based on formal parallels. Although different in content and detail, both actual occasions and human actions are processes of becoming, dialectical in character and constitutive through their activity of temporal historical reality. They are thus isomorphic at an appropriate level of abstraction. It is at that level that I shall begin our discussion. But there are hints in both Croce and Whitehead that suggests parallels in content as well, and I shall conclude the first part of this essay by briefly exploring them.

I shall attempt to indicate the extent of the structural similarities between these two modally displayed ultimates, Spirit and Creativity, by framing Croce’s analysis of human action in terms of the phases of genetic analysis describing the process of concrescence. I assume the reader to be more familiar with Whitehead than with Croce. Thus although all my documentation is illustrative rather than exhaustive, I shall content myself with merely alluding to Whitehead, plus specifying occasionally a page from Process and Reality, while for Croce references will be more frequent and will often indicate relevant sections from his writings rather than proof-texts. It is my aim to encourage the reader to initiate his own comparative study.

With human action, as with concrescence, our starting point is "transition": the "set of all actual occasions" which "is by the nature of things a standpoint for another concrescence which elicits a concrete unity from those many actual occasions" (PR 322). Transition is the process by which this given is appropriated by a new standpoint. The inherited "physical" data are then supplemented by "conceptual" activity and integrated in "propositions" judged adequate to the evidence. If our attention is focused upon the concrescent process only up to the point of initial propositional integration, when the data of experience still reek of their vector origins but have attained the unity of being a single complex datum for the prehending subject (PR 321), then we have something similar to what Croce calls the "theoretic" moment in human action. He, like Whitehead, analyzes it into thee phases, into what are for Croce three degrees of spiritual activity: "intuition," "conceptualization," and a synthesis of the two in an act of "historical judgment." Or, since Croce often refers to these processes by the name of the discipline which is peculiarly concerned with each, we can speak of the "aesthetic," "logical," and "historiographical" phases of the theoretic moment.

The first phase, intuition, is appropriative. It is an experience of one’s world rich with emotional content and the stimuli to emotion, a world complex, confusing, demanding, a world to be taken account of (B 1-21). For Croce intuition is no merely neutral sense reception; first of all, because the individual receives his world always from a standpoint: from a specific situation with its unique concerns, irrepeatable possibilities and inescapable limitations (L 208-21; FP 33-52; SPA 19-22, 103). The intuiter is situated concretely, and what and how he perceives is a function of that situation. Even the experience of a universal such as red or triangularity is always the experience of red-thusly-exhibited, of this-triangular-shape-there (L 176-78; TS 51-63). Croce has earned a reputation as being radically "historicist" because of his insistence upon this non-neutrality of all experiencing.

But intuitions are not the neutral registering of color-patches for a second reason: what is experienced is nothing so abstract and empty as a color-patch. We experience a world of passion and impulse, a world not yet fully shaped, not yet mastered (SPA 192-93). Indeed, the fundamental sense of liberty, of the labor of Spirit, is as a process transcending the world by mastering it, by giving it meaningful form. And there is a third reason why intuition is not neutral receptivity. Where the object of intuition is another human action, what are intuited are not external shapes and colors easily registered and filed in the memory but rather the human person in all his spiritual immediacy and affective intensity (TSS 128-35). The intuition of a prior act is a feeling of feeling, demanding appropriate response.

Thus it is possible to think of Crocean intuition as akin to a physical prehension of past occasions. For it is the appropriation of initial data from a perspective, the character of the’ appropriation being a function of that perspective’s limitations and possibilities, and the resulting objective data bearing in upon the present in a manner requiring mastery or surrender. Croce does not have as strong a sense of the causal efficacy of the experienced world as does Whitehead. He emphasizes much more the artistry of intuition’s shaping and expressive power. But for both Croce and Whitehead the immediate experience of the world is already a movement from reception to possession, from suffering the world to subduing it (F 21): a movement prefiguring the more complex process of becoming that it initiates.

The second phase in the theoretic moment is, for Croce, a conceptual one. But concerning the origin and character of concepts Croce is very unclear. He distinguishes "pure concepts" from "pseudo-concepts," meaning by the latter abstractions from the particulars of experience which we use to classify and thus more easily remember things. Indeed, all scientific theories belong to this level of empirical generalization (L 19-39, 179-97). Pure concepts, on the other hand, are "universal" and "concrete," and would seem to satisfy nicely Whitehead’s requirements for metaphysical predicates (PR 300). That is, they are everywhere exemplified by their full and non-abstract immanence in particulars, but they are not reducible to the sum of their particular exemplifications (L 40-43). Croce’s occasional lists of pure concepts range from predicates appropriate to the four degrees of Spirit -- beauty, truth, utility, and moral good (L 92) -- to lists briefer and lists more expansive (L 31, 75). Since Croce implicitly accepts the ontological principle, inveighing as he does against realities not located in historical particulars, it would seem that the pure concepts share at least this in common with the pseudo-concepts: that they are not a priori, that the process by which one comes to entertain them is much as Whitehead describes the process of conceptual valuation.

Thus both pure and pseudo-concepts have many of the characteristics possessed by Whiteheadian eternal objects, although Croce’s pseudo-concepts are frequently in danger of becoming mere abstractions without transcendence and his pure concepts mere transcendentals without concrete reality. Like Whitehead, he seeks a middle ground between Hume and Kant but with mixed success.

But whatever their origin, the function of Crocean concepts is identical to the function of eternal objects. Epistemologically, they are tools for clarifying, ordering, and giving meaning to experience -- they are "the drawing aside of a veil from the face of the real" (SPA 187; cf. L 284-95; TSS 108-12) Practically, they are lures for action, propositioning passion with possibilities for exemplification (SPA 50). The latter role, the practical, we shall turn to later. The former epistemological role is played out in the third phase of the theoretic moment, the phase of historical judgment.

An historical judgment for Croce is the belief in a proposition the subject term of which refers to a particular object of intuited experience, the predicate term of which refers to a pure concept (L 148-60; FP 86-93; TSS 11-26).³ In the fullest possible sense, the object of such an intuition would be the whole complex given to experience, and the concept would be the complete set of all pure concepts relevantly ordered. Thus an historical judgment, minimally, is the act by which a particular fact is understood, by which abstract possibility is distinguished into truth and falsity. But, optimally, an historical judgment is the act of appropriating all past experience as a unity of data, an initial plurality of particulars the interrelatedness of which thought has now exposed and understood. It is an "aptitude for understanding real situations by linking them with their genesis and connecting their relationships" (SPA 186). Croce speaks of "the historical event" as this complete unification of experience in experience (FP 97; cf. L 297; FP 246-72). To appropriate "the historical event’ is to know the given-to-oneself as what it truly is, without falsehood or partiality. An historical judgment in this fullest sense is, of course, an ideal to be approached. Croce makes no claim for any person ever actually achieving such purity of understanding. Yet it is the goal and normative measure of the search for truth.

In somewhat similar fashion Whitehead’s account of the phases of concrescence is one in which the past is prehended physically, along with conceptual prehensions derived therefrom. But further, this influx of data for subsequent synthesis into a determinate satisfaction gains an initial propositional unity (PR 342). It plays its role within the subjective immediacy of the occasion as datum and not just as data: there is an initial unification by which the plurality of inheritance presents itself as the past of the nascent present.

In the historical judgment, thus, the theoretic moment culminates. The past has been taken up into the life of present activity and articulated there in its unity as constituting the given for that present But it remains tinctured with its vector origins: it remains the past given, that which is other than the living present, not that present but given to it. The transformation of vector into scalar form, of the given past into the given present, is a further labor of creation, of what Croce calls the practical moment in action.

Croce summarizes his account of the theoretic moment, its nature and its importance, as follows: "We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move toward the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge" (SPA 43-44; cf. SPA 7, 46-49; FP 293-305).

We inherit a past along routes of physical prehension which convey it to us as possessed of overweaning power demanding our conformity to it. The possibility for new activity depends upon our ability somehow or other to rise above this brute inheritance and to master it. The vehicle of success is conceptualization. The necessary although not sufficient prerequisite to fresh creation is to think the physical, to transform a physical demand into a mental problem, and in thus understanding the past, thinking it through, grasping it for what it was in a true proposition integrating the physical and conceptual, we lay the groundwork for the sort of creative activity in which new actuality is born. "The past must be faced or, not to speak in metaphors, it must be reduced to a mental problem which can find its solution in a proposition of truth, the ideal premise for our new activity and our new life" (SPA 44).

We shall turn, then, from premise to activity, from historical judgment to historical action. Croce speaks of the practical moment as complementing and completing the theoretical. "Historiography, as regards practical action, is preparatory but indeterminatory. . . . Knowledge is always of the event, not of what is to be done" (SPA 187). Possessing knowledge, we are not freed from the further task of seeing our own needs, deliberating, and choosing. Practice means the exercise of will, the deployment of physical energy in the pursuit of determinate, historical outcome. Croce distinguishes two degrees or phases of practice, the "economic" and the "ethical." An activity is economic insofar as we view it in terms of the relationship between means and ends, noting the obstacles to he overcome and the strategies by which the will reconciles differences and attains its goal. The economic, in short, is the utilitarian: it has to do with expediency, with the efficiency and effectiveness by which the agent transforms his situation toward a solution to the problem before him. In similar fashion the supplemental phases of concrescence are "non-ethical" when seen only in terms of the first seven categories of obligation. The focus is upon technique, upon success, and not upon the quality of the outcome.

But an action can also be seen in terms of its ends, and indeed is incompletely seen except when the character of the ideal aimed at and the outcome attained be taken into consideration (PP 513). Croce is obscure in speaking of the ethical degree of human action, but seems to mean by it that aspect of an act which opens out beyond the narrow and immediate interests of the actor. A moral act is one which aims at a more general unity than one sufficient to achieve individual satisfaction. Ultimately it aims at a self-unification in which the satisfaction of one’s own interests are at the same time supportive of thc interests of others and take their place in a network of universal harmony. In I fully ethical act one "promotes the realization of the Real, lives a full life and makes his heart beat in harmony with the universe: cor cordium" (FP 446; cf. FP 348-63, 440-51). Morality, in short, is an aim at intensity of outcome in the Whiteheadian sense: an intensity which prepares the future to be a preserve for its accomplishments, rather than merely flashing brilliantly and alone across the momentary sky without successor; an intensity involving massiveness of included elements in a harmony of contrasting detail; an intensity aimed restlessly beyond the acceptable to the better and toward the best (cf. categoreal obligation eight).

There is thus for Croce a certain parallel between the theoretic and practical moments in action (E 55-60; FP 3-20, 293-305). Economic will, like intuition, is an appropriation, a manipulation of material -- but with something left out. The merely aesthetic lacks the discrimination of true and false which when added culminates in the achievement of determinate understanding, the historical judgment. The merely economic lacks a discrimination of good and bad which when present harnesses technique in the service of optimal achievement (FP 438-63). Thus the moral in practical action is an urge toward those propositions displayed in historical judgment which, if rendered determinate, enhance the value of the world. The story of liberty is the account of the successes and failures of this incessant urge.

The outcome of action is the possession and enjoyment of Being: the flux of becoming terminates in an achieved value which Croce describes as "sufficient" and "perfect," meaning by this determinate, settled -- an Absolute (FP 302). What Hegel and "the philosophers of history" locate at the end of time, as the culmination of a world-historical dialectic, Croce like Whitehead finds in the termination of each moment of action.⁴ Each dialectical movement of becoming is for him "finite and perfect in itself, as far as it encloses the infinite in its actuality. . . . In every stage of development, man possesses and enjoys truth, goodness, beauty, every form of value" (EMR 23f). And if each achievement, to be sure, "gives rise to doubt and dissatisfaction and tile demand for new achievement, yet now and again there is achievement; something is possessed and enjoyed and the apparently precipitous race is in reality a succession of reposes, of satisfactions in the midst of dissatisfactions, of fleeting moments spent in the joy of contemplation" (SPA 54).

When we generalize the above statement so as to remove its specific reference to human consciousness, we have as fine a statement of the rhythm of concrescence, perishing, and transition to new concrescence as one could wish for: "Reality is development, that is, infinite possibility that passes into infinite actuality and from the multiplicity of every instant takes refuge in the one, to break forth anew in the multiple and produce the new unity" (FP 247; cf. 269, TSS 83-93). Croce finds an important place within his system for the two further concepts crucial to an analysis of this rhythm: the perpetual perishing of all achievement, both mental and physical; and the objective immortality by which what perishes gains also a permanence of attainment through its role as datum for further actions (L 493-500; FP 246-61; TSS 91-93; SPA 85-92, 161-69, 265-71).

Croce speaks of this rhythm as a rhythm of self-surpassing of development, of progress (FP 444). Although there are innumerable texts in which he seems to be proclaiming a linear, or at least ultimately linear, progress in history, a progress toward increased liberty, Croce’s theory is in fact of a quite different sort. There is progress in the sense that each action is internally a concrescent progress from an initial problem to an eventual solution, and each new problem-solution builds upon the foundations of the old. But there is no solution which dissolves all problems. Without obstacles there can be no life: becoming is inescapably a tale of struggle, of conflict, of the dialectic between inheritance (being) and possibility (nonbeing). There is a teleology in each action toward optimal outcome but no telos to the universe as a whole, and no optimal outcome überhaupt. Liberty is perpetually in peril and must perpetually rise triumphant from the ashes of old accomplishment (SPA 59-62). In similar fashion, Whitehead is open to misinterpretation (e.g., "the creative advance") but like Croce distinguishes carefully between concrescent teloi and a cosmic telos, and denies the latter (PR 128, 169).

Croce is easily taken for an idealist philosopher of history not only because he speaks of progress in history, but also because he quotes with approval Hegel’s famous slogan: the rational is the real and the real the rational (FP 253; SPA 200). But this is not to be taken as meaning that each historical activity brings onto the stage of the real that which ought to be, nor that agents act always in the service of cunning forces unfolding through them the best of all possible worlds. What-is is not what had to be nor what ought to have been. What-is is, and therefore must have some reason for existence, must be the outgrowth of an historical process and not an inexplicable surd. To find the reason for an event’s existence is thus to give an account of its genesis and development. But to make an historical judgment is to do just precisely that: "to understand the existent in its reasons for existence" (SPA 200). Hence whatever is, is rational. To be is to have a reason for being, is to arise from antecedents and to take a place among contemporaries, without which it would have no origin nor any place. The claim of the identity of the real and the rational is, as Croce interprets it, no more and no less than an appeal to the ontological principle and the principles of relativity and process (categories of explanation eighteen, four, and nine). The philosophy of spirit, he is saying by implication, accepts and insists upon the fundamental principles of the philosophy of organism.

One last point of comparison deserves mention in this brief sketch. As I have already noted, the most salient difference between Whiteheadian and Crocean analyses of becoming is that one focuses upon actual occasions, the other upon human actions. Not only is there a contrast between microcosmic and macrocosmic phenomena, but concrescing occasions for Whitehead comprise the whole of reality, are its ultimate building blocks, whereas human actions make up only a very minuscule portion of the occurrences in the universe. For Whitehead all nature is marked by the rhythms we have been discussing and the rhythm of human action is but a special case. The thrust of Croce’s theory leads in this same direction, however, and its implications he willingly accepts although never adequately develops.

For Croce historical reality is the outcome of processes of human action; its concreteness is the result of dialectical interactions involving theory and practice, thought and will. Nature also is real. Like history, it is concrete and actual, the outcome of processes of becoming. The conclusion seems inescapable: "If so-called nature be, it develops, and if it develop, it cannot do so without some consciousness" (FP 249). Consciousness, but not cognition: "nature is . . . that form of spirituality and activity which is not cognitive" (L 342). But this definition -- activity which is not cognitive -- is precisely the definition of willing: the non-theoretic moment of Spirit. Hence nature is akin to history in that it too is the result of activity, although an activity devoid of the reflective moment.

At one point Croce defines action as activity plus cognition (E 47-49), thus supplying the defining characteristic of the uniquely human at the same time that he refuses to dichotomize man and nature into distinct orders of reality (TSS 128-35; SPA 292-97). History, like Nature, is active: its reality is the fruit of activity. But man also cognizes and thus his activity takes the peculiar form of action. Furthermore, although human action involves cognition it culminates not in thought but in will. Consequently, "man makes himself nature at every moment, because at every moment he passes from knowing to willing and doing" (L 343). Men transcend nonhuman nature in their action. By their powers of self-consciousness, of imagination and understanding, of expression and of criticism, they rise in freedom above the limits of the given situation to entertain novel possibilities and develop creative solutions to the problems besetting them. But as the theoretic moment of action is translated into practice, human freedom plunges back into the natural order. transforming it. Human action, like all activity, is the bringing to be of concreteness, the becoming of being. But for man the process involves a freedom and a mastery not accorded the rest of reality.

Because of this intimacy between man and Nature it is possible in principle to make historical judgments concerning any natural phenomenon; that is, to feel its feelings with the same intuitive penetration by which we know another human action. But what is possible in principle is not undertaken in fact. The distance is too great, the quality of consciousness too rudimentary, too nonhuman, to be bridged by an act of intuition (SPA 295). We know only what we make, says Croce, echoing Vico. And nonhuman realities, although they also fashion their reality, make themselves not as we do. We must remain content, therefore, with the exteriorized "pseudo-knowledge" of scientific classification.

Thus Croce hovers at the brink of organicism. Like Whitehead, he finds Nature to he a continuum of kinds of activity, varying in complexity and including among the kinds one that involves a peculiar elaboration of the "mental pole," a transformation of the conscious mode into the cognitive, of activity into action. Whitehead’s method allows him to claim knowledge of all these kinds of processes through the speculative generalization and interpretation of immediate experience. But Croce’s insistence upon intuition as the route to real knowledge, his suspicion of abstraction and schematization, prevents an extension of his theory beyond the world of human artifice, leads him to draw back from the Whiteheadian brink and to limit his theory to the historical.

II

Croce is not as precise a writer as one might wish. His insights into specific problems are often brilliant in their clarity, and his philosophical vision in its fundamental themes is unmistakable. But he is deficient in what is the forte of a mathematical mind such as Whitehead’s: the schematizing of detail. Consequently one benefit to be derived from associating the philosophies of Whitehead and Croce is the opportunity to use the former’s technical complexities to interpret the latter’s obscurities and remove debilitating vagueness and ambiguity.

To illustrate, let me focus upon the notion of historical judgment. Outside the area of aesthetics, Croce is best remembered for two claims: that all history is contemporary history (TSS 11-15; SPA 19-22), and that history and philosophy are one and the same activity (L 310-29; SPA 35).⁵ The two claims are really one. For history becomes contemporary, becomes a living vitality within the immediacy of the historian’s thought, only when appropriated through an historical judgment. "Chronicle" or "philological history" is Croce’s term for the process of gleaning and organizing information without rethinking it in its immediacy. But to rethink past facts of human action is to impregnate data with thought, to think concretely. And that is just exactly what it means to do philosophy: mere abstract ratiocination is for Croce not philosophy but either mathematics (L 406-19), metaphysics (E 64; L 420-37), or mysticism (L 449-61). Thus philosophy brings intuition together with pure concepts, the past is in this manner made alive in the present, and the name of such concrete understanding is historical judgment.

But the account is unsatisfying; Croce’s words bear opaque meanings, they lack the very clarification of fact by thought which they purport to enunciate. In reading the wide variety of views on historiography which Croce is accused of or praised for holding, one cannot help but think the fault may be due not solely to the perversity of his enemies and the blind loyalty of his disciples. Is an historical judgment an act of empathy in which the historian "identifies with" a person who lived long ago and comes to appreciate him better through feeling the very emotions he once felt? Is it a kind of mental miming, reenacting at the level of thought an event previously acted out in concrete practice? Is it, as one critic goes so far as to suggest, a grasp of the truth of all the past in a synthetic understanding worthy of the Absolute Itself? (3:93, 164. 288). Perhaps any of these. Croce gives grounds in his writings for such interpretations just as he does for more sensible ones.

If, however, the similarity to Whitehead be accepted, the Crocean historical judgment can be given "systematic" definition within the schema of concrescent phases. And if the results are adequate to Croce’s "pre-systematic" language and consistent with the rest of his philosophy. then Croce scholarship will have been advanced in so far forth.

According to Whitehead, a conscious perception is the feeling of a contrast between two feelings. One, the indicative physical feeling of a particular state of affairs, i.e., of a nexus of actual occasions. The other, a perceptive feeling of a proposition the logical subjects of which are part of the objective datum of the aforementioned nexus, the predicative pattern of which is a set of eternal objects derived directly or by reversion from the same objective datum (PR 409). It is the correlation of a possible state of affairs with an actual state of affairs, the one entertained conceptually, the other experienced efficaciously. If this vivid contrast between felt fact and felt proposition is felt with the subjective form of belief as to the congruence of the one with the other, the conscious perception is affirmed by the perceiver as true (PR 408, 411).

Now the set of all true perceptive beliefs concerning a specified past occurrence would be a set of feelings each of which contrasts an experienced fact with a proposition referring to that fact. But the results would be doubly inadequate to any attempt at a complete description of that past event.

For on the one hand the facts in present experience are not those of the occurrence in question but are rather connected to it only in complex and often tenuous ways. In short, there is a problem of inference from present fact to past fact: a problem of the authenticity of documents, the accuracy of witnesses, the proper identification of artifacts.

On the other hand, much of the relevant data leave no permanent trace at all. They are felt by a contemporary only with difficulty and generate no enduring objects characterized by the repetition of dominant forms of definiteness. That is, the intentions of the actors, their purposes, thoughts and passions, leave no public monuments. The historic routes are nexus but not societies and so have no independence of the fragile human body of which they are member. Yet without these data the perspective one has on an occurrence is deficient, incomplete and without human meaning. Human fact is debased to brute fact (TSS 73). The difficulty of gaining perceptive feelings of another’s aims and emotions is thus aggravated by the historical character of the occurrence in question.

Moreover, the historian who limits himself to conscious perceptions is not only circumscribed as to the available physical data, but equally circumscribed propositionally since his stock of concepts is restricted to those derivate from precisely this same and meager stockpile of felt data.

It seems obvious that an historian who attempts to carry out his task of describing and explaining past events by restricting himself solely to conscious perceptive judgments and the purely logical inferences therefrom will not get very far. At best he will have information about the dates and locations of various products of human action: parchments and potsherds, dikes and dams, battlefields and graveyards, and old campaign posters. These he can arrange in some order, presumably a temporal one. But no more. He would be, in short, a chronicler. Whatever history is, however, it is clearly more than chronicle; it is more than the arrangements of conscious perceptions judged to be true.

An imaginative feeling differs from a perceptive feeling in its lack of identity between the datum which includes the logical subjects of the proposition felt and the datum from which the predicative pattern is derived (PR 400, 402). Whereas these are identical in perception, they are different in imagination. Forms of definiteness other than those capable of being extracted from the direct experience of an occurrence are entertained as possibilities. If merely entertained, what we have is the free play of imagination, the aesthetic construction of propositions without regard to their relationship to what could or ought to be (PR 419). But if the imaginative feeling is brought into contrast with experienced fact through a feeling with the subjective form of an interest in the congruence of proposition to fact, then the result is an intuitive judgment. And if, furthermore the form of the judgment is a suspended one, then this possible configuration of characteristics being imaginatively entertained is taken neither as exemplified in the actual world nor as incompatible with what is exemplified, but instead it "tells us what may be additional information respecting the formal constitutions of the logical subjects, information which is neither included nor excluded by our direct perceptions" (PR 419).

A suspended intuitive judgment, in other words, entertains possible truths concerning the data before it in experience. But it does so not out of aesthetic delight in the possible but out of a concern for the truth. It is a judgment to the effect that something not directly experienced may nonetheless be the case: that the author of the parchment may have intended to speak the truth and that he may have meant this and not that by his words; that the circle of stones may have been laid out by men who labored at its construction for the purpose of astronomical observation; that this grave may contain the body of a man who died through a misjudgment growing out of an emotion blinding his powers of reason. An intuitive judgment of "yes-form" differs from a conscious perception only in the imaginative origin of the characteristics asserted as true of the event being judged.. A flicker of insight supplies what dogged perception would otherwise provide. But in the suspended judgment intuition reaches beyond its eyes and ears to grasp truths which make possible the understanding of human actions, both past and present.

An act of imagination is not the vehicle for experiencing something otherwise not open to experience. It is not a kind of Bergsonian empathy able to stretch beyond usual modes of feeling to a unique grasp of another’s immediacy, unhindered by the midas-touch of conceptualization. The unimaginative and the imaginative feel the same world. But in imagination predicative patterns derived from physical feelings other than the ones in question are brought into play and used to characterize propositionally the occasions encountered. We predicate our emotions of another’s behavior, or emotions felt. In our experience of one person we project as also present in the inner life of another whose feelings we do not have access to. An historical judgment is an imaginative act of this sort. By the play of its conceptual resources it indicates further possible truths concerning the occasion directly experienced. And as we affirm these possible truths as our own, we open out that horizon of meaningful but not immediately experienced fact which we call history.

Relating these comments to Croce’s two statements about historical judgments, we can give them the following interpretation. All history is contemporary history in the sense that an historical fact is an imaginative elaboration of the predicative pattern of a contemporary event. Thus the historical horizon of our experience is a function of facts directly experienced, taken in conjunction with imaginative articulation of those facts and decisions with respect to the subjective form of critical belief in the truth of the resulting propositions. The merely past is, to be sure, objectively immortal in the present. But it is so without meaning, without that sort of awareness and appreciation of the past of present conscious occasions which is embodied in the act of historical judgment. And philosophy understood as concrete thinking is in this sense indistinguishable from historical judgment. For imagination as here used by Whitehead refers to the philosophical work of entertaining and manipulating concepts, and utilizing them for the purpose of organizing, clarifying, and interpreting the deliverances of the senses.

Aesthetic intuition plus philosophical conceptualization are brought together in the concrete thinking of the historical judgment. Croce here speaks pre-systematically of the integration of an indicative feeling with an imaginative feeling into an intellectual feeling having the subjective form of suspended judgment.

Whitehead refers to the intuitive judgment as the "triumph of consciousness" (PR 245) for here awareness of what-is floats upon the background of what is not but could have been or could still be. This negative dimension of the experience of fact informed by imagination issues in propositions revealing present attainments as contingent and susceptible to alternative determination in the future Thus, like Croce, Whitehead sees the historical judgment as the culmination of the theoretic moment in all human action, and at the same time as the seedbed for practical effort aimed at transforming present conditions into desired outcomes.

III

I shall now reverse the procedure of the last section and briefly illustrate one way in which Croce’s thought might prove helpful to the interpretation of Whitehead. The question of historical change is worth considering, for it is unclear in Whitehead what relationship holds between the character of concrescent activity and that of historical transformation, between becoming and change.

One possible reading of Whitehead would be to apply, literally or figuratively, the structures of concrescence to the process of historical transformation. If the extension is taken in a literal manner, then one may speak of actual occasions that endure for hours or even weeks (cf. 2). But although this accords with the definitions of "event" in Whitehead’s philosophy of nature writings, it would wreak havoc upon the metaphysics of Process and Reality. Concrescence is not temporal but creative of the temporal; the epochal droplets of reality must therefore be on the order of half a vibratory period or a specious present.

A figurative extension, however, would seem systematically legitimate. That is, a human act, an institutional process, a battle, the rise and collapse of a civilization, might all be metaphorically described as concrescing processes. The structural parallelisms developed earlier in this essay between human action and concrescent becoming support this interpretation. At both the microcosmic and macrocosmic levels there is movement from inheritance to achievement, from problem to solution. But if the forms of the two processes are similar, their contents are not. Historical processes deal with complex societies of enduring objects and the shifting patterns of defining characteristics they variously exhibit, whereas concrescence tells the tale of the birth of each momentary event in that complex.

Metaphors are dangerous. They are justified by certain similarities in structure, yet it is all too easy to assert further structural similarities where none exist. It is important to pinpoint precisely the moment at which fruitful analogy gives way to disanalogy.

Now one of the features of concrescence is its dialectical character. Dialectical, in the sense that an initially implicit unit is made explicit through a process rife with contrasts requiring resolution. The particularity of physical inheritance and the universality of conceptual envisagement are transformed, through a series of resolutions each in itself partial, into a concrete universal the essence of which is the history of its unfolding. Question: is this dialectical character applicable to the macrocosmic regions? Is Whitehead’s thought amenable to the claim that history is dialectical, that the rhythm of human interaction waltzes from conflict to resolution to new conflict? Whitehead has been both criticized for lacking and praised for possessing such a notion. How should he be interpreted?

Croce’s answer is to insist upon the disanalogy. Fundamental to his philosophy is a careful analysis of the difference between "opposites" and "distincts" (E 13-31, 55-66; FP 293-305; cf. footnote 2). Indeed Croce’s self-assessment of his importance in the history of Western philosophy rests in no small part upon his critique of Hegel and of Marx, and of all philosophy of history, for confusing opposites and distincts. From that confusion flow the distorting philosophies of idealism and materialism, and the utopian aspirations which he sees as having destroyed nineteenth-century liberalism and encouraged the growth of the barbarisms plaguing the twentieth century. Certain niceties of theoretical definition are thus, in this instance, of overriding human importance.

The philosophy of spirit emphatically affirms conflict as fundamental to the processes of becoming. Croce describes human actions, which are for him the basic units of becoming, in terms of the struggle of opposites, the clash of beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood, utility and inefficiency, good and evil. All action arises amid such opposition, and always must do so. Croce saves his choicest polemic for those who would describe life otherwise or who dream of a day when such conflicts should cease (L 462-78; FP 53-72, 192-214; SPA 256-61). "Strife and victory is everywhere and in every moment of universal life" (FP 250). The overcoming of opposition is the work of dialectic, hence becoming is through and through dialectical. But in contrast to this, the transition from occurrence to occurrence, from one human act to another, is not dialectical. Each act is a manifestation of Spirit, and the relationship between the various works of Spirit is definitely not a dialectical one. The degrees of Spirit, the four modalities of human action -- the aesthetic, logical, utilitarian, and moral -- are distinct each from the others. But their interrelationship is not one of mutual dialectical opposition. The birth of each is dialectical but the transition from mode to mode is not.

What is distinct, for Croce, is also concrete and therefore capable of existing in its own right, whereas opposites are, taken by themselves, abstractions. Thesis and antithesis are moments in a concrete synthesis, each by itself incomplete. But no spiritual mode is in this sense incomplete. For example, an aesthetic act is fully concrete: the intuition-expression of a poem is real and not abstract, complete and full and not a partial approximation to something higher. Logical thought does not complete art, it is not a higher form of Spirit achieving conceptually what the artist is capable of expressing only in the incomplete medium of the sensuous. Rather it is altogether another form of spiritual expression, different but not superior, distinct from the aesthetic but in no sense its "overcoming."

Croce complicates the theory of distincts by arguing that the four spiritual forms, although distinct, are not separate. This in two senses. First, there is an order among forms such that the conceptual contains the aesthetic, the economic contains both of the others, and the ethical includes economic, conceptual and aesthetic degrees. Artistic expression might lack a dimension of conceptual reflexivity, but the articulation of an idea requires sensuous embodiment; some acts of expediency may be ethically irrelevant, but any moral act has its quality of utility or non-utility. Second, to speak of a specific spiritual mode of human action is really to claim the dominance of that mode in the act and not its exclusiveness. The "circle of Spirit" is, for Croce, the fact that all four degrees of Spirit are found exemplified in every human act although with varying importance.

Nonetheless, the process by which an individual passes from, say, the aesthetic mode to the conceptual (that is, from an act in which aesthetic form predominates) is not a dialectical one. Nor, for that matter, is the transition dialectical from one aesthetic act of intuition-expression to another. As though the paintings of an artist were to be arranged into three periods, one of thesis, one of antithesis, and one of synthesis! As though an individual in his spiritual development were to outgrow art, foregoing the childish delights of making poetry for the manly task of writing philosophical treatises! The foolishness of the claim is obvious. Each individual achievement, each art work, each poem, each treatise, is the outcome of a dialectical struggle between given conditions and envisioned possibilities. But the achievements are not dialectical advancements upon one another. They are merely different, each with its own proper completeness, integrity, value. One achievement may set the conditions against which the next must struggle, but it is never the case that one is but a partial and abstract moment in the unfolding of the other.

The misapplication of the dialectic of becoming to the processes of historical transition Croce, with Hegel and Marx explicitly in mind, decries as a "false application of the dialectical principle" (L 101), an "abuse of the triadic form" (LDH 97), or, more polemically, "a powerful but vitiated dialectic" (EMR 25). For it is Croce’s contention that historical dialectic entails both a denial of the intrinsic worth of present achievement and a yearning toward some future utopian realm in terms of which all present effort is evaluated The first notion reduces present achievements to merely instrumental value, while the latter de fines the ideal of life in terms of the cessation of struggle. Both are therefore nihilistic claims, for life finds value only in its intrinsic immediacy, which is an arena of ceaseless struggle. "The eulogy of Life is also a eulogy of Death; for how could we live, if we did not die at every instant?" (PP 252). History always pursues her indefatigable work, . . . her apparent agonies are the travail of a new birth, . . . her expiring sighs are means that announce the birth of a new world" (TSS 93).

To confuse distincts with opposites is therefore an error in theory fraught with grave practical consequences. In a concrescent process earlier phases can be understood only in the light of the ultimate satisfaction aimed at. The constituent elements have no independent actuality but are functions of a process which transcends them (PR 359), using the dash and contrast of their divisive purposes as the vehicle for its intended outcome. Therefore to carry this dialectical structure over into an analysis of historical development is to see the past as incomplete, the multiplicities of individual achievement as only apparently diverse, and the transitions from moment to moment as guided by an underlying cosmic aim toward its final apotheosis.

Such a move would destroy the central features of the philosophy of organism. The transcendent freedom of the actual occasion would be threatened by the pervasive control of the cosmic aim. The determinate completeness and intrinsic value of each satisfaction would be reduced to a partiality akin to propositional unity: by itself merely an abstract moment in the drive toward concreteness. The democracy of diverse achievement would be swallowed up in an eventual unity comprising the only true reality.

It would seem, in sum, that a careful scrutiny of Croce’s theory of distincts, his account of the varieties of Spirit’s manifestations, would help in removing from the philosophy of organism the last vestiges both of the Victorian romanticism it occasionally professes and the Hegelian-Marxist romanticism to which it is susceptible. Whitehead remarks at one point that the theory of concrescence "is nothing else than the Hegelian development of an idea" (PR 254). And indeed it is, as long as one does not go on, as Hegel did, and transform the whole of history into the one single instance of idea’s development. To do so is to misplace the concreteness, or rather to misplace its structure: to abstract the form of becoming from its place within the life of actual occasions and to spread it across the spangled heavens of the cosmos. If with Croce’s assistance Whitehead interpreters are able to resist this temptation, then they, as Croce before them, will be able to boast of having "overcome the abstractness of Hegelianism" (TSS 314).

IV

Croce’s critics tend to divide into two camps: those for whom he is too idealist, and those for whom he is too empirical. For example, Mandelbaum (3:39-57) argues that Croce holds a view of intuition in which the knower creates his object of knowledge, and that Croce is led thereby to disdain empirical verification and to overcome skepticism by recourse to a "metaphysical faith" in the Absolute. But Collingwood (1:263-78) argues that Croce is burdened by an excess of empiricist and naturalistic elements in his metaphysic, and that it is only when he shakes free of these influences that his work on history becomes fruitful.

So to the empiricists Croce is too much the idealist, to the rationalists too much a relativist; to the worshippers of the Absolute his pluralism is unfortunate, to the atomists his syntheses regrettable. This two-sided critique is one to which Whitehead also is open. Indeed, it has been the aim of process philosophers from Plato on to seek a middle course between the abstract alternatives advocated by the "gods" and by the "giants." That Croce should likewise draw the fire of both, suggests it may not be entirely in error to interpret the philosophy of spirit as a philosophy of organism.

References

E -- Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic. New York: Noonday Press, 1922.

EMR -- Croce, Essays on Marx and Russia. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966.

L -- Croce, Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept. New York and London: Macmillan and Co., 1917.

FP -- Croce, Philosophy of the Practical. New York and London: Macmillan and Co., 1913.

LDH -- Croce, What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel? , New York: Russell & Russell, 1915.

SPA -- Croce, History as the Story of Liberty. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1941.

TSS -- Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice. New York: Russell & Russell, 1960.

1. R. C. Collingwood, "Croce’s Philosophy of History," Hibbert Journal, 19 (1921), 263-78. Reprinted in Essays in the Philosophy of History, Austin University of Texas Press, 1965.

2. Nathaniel Lawrence, "Time, Value, and the Self," in Ivor Leclerc, ed., The Relevance of Whitehead. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961.

3. Maurice Mandelbaum. The Philosophy of Historical Knowledge. New York: Liveright Publishing Co., 1939.

Notes

1The most valuable sources for Croce’s position are the four volumes of his massive Filosofia come scienza spirito: Vol. I. Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. 1902 (E). Vol. 2. Logica come scienza del concetto puro. 1909 (L). Vol. 3 Filosofia della practica, 1909 (FP). Vol. 4. Teori e storia della storiografia. 1917 (TSS). And In addition, the crucial later volume. La storia come pensiero e come azione, 1938 (SPA).

2 Croce argues that Hegel’s dialectical solution to the problem of unity and difference ultimately breaks down due to his fundamental confusion of "the synthesis of opposites" with the "theory of degrees," his failure to distinguish what are mutually exclusive and abstract from what are distinct but concrete. The result, says Croce. is an unintended dualism in Hegel. Spirit and Nature are sundered and the empirical degraded to an incomplete moment of the conceptual. Hence the followers of Hegel split, almost inevitably, into a "right" which abandons itself to the transcendental fancies of dialectical idealism, and a "left" which reduces itself to the positivist barbarisms of dialectical materialism. Croce seeks to heal the division by rethinking the nature and limits of dialectic. The third part of this essay develops the issue more fully. (See LDH, especially Chs. 1. IV. X.) See also Croce’s "An Unknown Page from the Last Months of the Life of Hegel," in Philosophy, Poetry, History (London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 170-91,

3 This definition will be more fully explicated in the second part of the essay.

4 The third part of this essay is an elaboration of this point.

5 Croce occasionally distinguishes philosophy from history, calling the former the "methodological moment" of the latter (TSS 151). The two views, however, are compatible. They result from an ambiguity in Croce’s use of the term "philosophy." When it is defined as a methodological moment, it is being taken in the narrow sense of "logic," of the conceptual phase of the theoretic moment of action. But philosophy, understood more broadly as the theoretic moment itself, becomes identical with the historical understanding. An early view on the nature of historical judgment, developed in the Estetica, was discarded by Croce and is omitted from the present discussion.