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The title of this contribution has a double meaning: one is existential, the value of process thought in my life; while the other is philosophical, the meaning I find in process thought. I begin with the first, meaning, which inevitably involves an excursion back to when the light began to shine in my darkness.

I became interested in process thought as a result of a conflict in my life that came from biology on the one side and from religion on the other. I have had a love affair with biology ever since I was a schoolboy making an insect collection and reading J.B.S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds (PW). I wanted to become a Haldane! As an adolescent I was craving for meaning, for something to make sense. By dint of circumstance I thought I had found it in a fundamentalist faith. I accepted a very simple set of affirmations about God, the world, and myself. As an undergraduate in the University of Melbourne I kept these two passions uncertainly together. It was passion rather than thought that governed my life. Indeed, looking back, I would say that I never learned to think as an undergraduate.

With my first degree under my belt I became a research student in a high-powered research institute in the University of Adelaide. I was only the second research student this institute had ever had. When I presented myself to the director, who had come from the famous Rothamsted Agricultural Experiment Station in England, he told me that their first and last research student was a failure, which seemed to suggest to me that my chances were pretty slim. So I felt that the first steps towards being a Haldane were going to be difficult. They weren’t. What was difficult was the challenge that rigorous laboratory gave to the whole edifice of my thought. Just about everyone in it seemed to be an agnostic. My immediate colleagues had carefully thought their agnosticism through, which was more than I could say of my faith. I was learning more and more about science but was less and less able to defend my religious convictions, which were constantly under challenge. Had I never heard of the Enlightenment? I discovered that my religion had foundations of sand. But not all, for I still treasured some deep experiences that had to do with forgiveness, courage, facing loneliness in a place far away from home and friends, and with other values that had permeated my being.

II

The science of biology presented me with a mechanistic or substance image of reality which provided no clues at all to the meaning of my life and its fundamental experiences of value. The science of life had nothing to say about my feelings. The reason I now see is clear enough. Biology has to do with the sorts of causes we can manipulate in the laboratory. They are external causes. As for mind, purposes, and feelings -- they are at most regarded as epiphenomena, which means they are seen as side-effects, not causes.

The beginning of a resolution of my pressing search for meaning came through the Student Christian Movement in the University of Adelaide. It showed me there were alternative interpretations of Christianity to fundamentalism. When reassurance began to reestablish itself, it came like the weaving together of strands. I was conscious of a bottom forming under me. I tried to break it down, partly for moral and partly for intellectual reasons. The strands refused to be broken. The effect was to re-establish a fundamental trust with respect to the meaningfulness of human life. I found that some of the former elements came back, different from the old, no longer borrowed dwellings. For better or for worse, they were mine. Trust is that sort of thing.

My newly discovered mentors in the Student Christian Movement, especially one of them, urged me to read Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (SMW). I felt this book was written just for me, especially Chapter 5 on the Romantic Reaction. On reading Whitehead my mind flashed back to a lecture I had heard as an undergraduate in Melbourne from my professor of zoology, Professor W.E. Agar. It was on the philosophy of biology. I remembered just enough about it to realize that he had discovered Whitehead. So I wrote to ask him what I should now read. He replied that I should read immediately Charles Hartshorne’s The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (PPS). He added he had just completed a book on a Whiteheadian interpretation of biology called A Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism (CTLO). Its first sentence reads, "The main thesis of this book is that all living organisms are subjects." So here was a biologist who accepted mind and feelings and sentience as real and not just epiphenomena. Moreover, he identified three areas of biology that seemed resistant to the application of the mechanistic thinking of science. They were developmental biology (embryology), behavior, and evolution. They remain so to this day, despite the enormous advances in our understanding of many of the processes from a mechanistic standpoint.

Agar was a brilliant cellular biologist. He was educated in King’s College, Cambridge. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1921, at which time he became Professor of Zoology in the University of Melbourne. In those days professors in Australian universities were almost invariably Englishmen. Agar’s book was such a beacon for me that I invited him in 1943, through the students’ biological society in the University of Adelaide, to travel to Adelaide to give three lectures on the philosophy of biology. He was not well enough to accept. However, in his reply to the invitation he wrote to me, "I shall preserve your letter among my most treasured possessions as the most cordial expression of good will I have ever received from my fellow biologists." Behind that sentence was his disappointment that biologists, for the most part, had ignored his book and went on with their mechanistic analyses willy nilly.

I have said that Agar began his book with the thesis that all living organisms are subjects. He ended with the suggestion that a world of purposive agents suggested the manifestation of a cosmic purposive "Agent," but added that a discussion of this was outside the scope of this book. Agar was a distinguished biologist. I was a mere graduate student. I was delighted to have confirmation of the direction in which my thoughts were moving from such a one, especially as my biological colleagues in Adelaide had little time for this sort of thinking.

I had a lurking feeling that perhaps I had got myself onto a false path, even though all this meant a great deal to me. I had deluded myself once before with fundamentalism. I could be deluding myself again. After all, I was in the antipodes far away from the center of any form of process thought. Then something very important happened to reassure me. The time came to leave the research institute in Adelaide. In 1946 I had a grant to pursue further research and study in the University of Chicago, which was a center of ecological research. And what a goldmine it was! In the department in which I was to work I found Sewall Wright, one of the three architects of the genetical theory of natural selection. But more important for me, he was a Whiteheadian and close friend of Charles Hartshorne. His presidential address to the American Society of Naturalists, published in 1953 under the title "Gene and Organism" (AN87), is a closely argued case for regarding the gene as an organism and therefore a subject. He later contributed to the Hartshorne Festschrift (PD 101-25). As an evolutionary biologist he could see no basis for believing in the mysterious "emergence" of completely novel properties as organisms became more complex. This being the case properties such as mind and consciousness must exist in the most elementary particles. His philosophical views received little attention from his fellow biologists. A fine tribute to Sewall Wright’s life and work was given by J. F. Crow on his ninetieth birthday in December 1979 (PBM25).

Charles Hartshorne was professor of philosophy in the University of Chicago and, unknown to me until I got to Chicago, the Divinity School was the center of the most distinguished group of process theologians in the world: Williams, Loomer, Meland, Wieman, and others. On Sunday mornings crowds would flock to the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel when they preached. To this day I recall Hartshorne preaching on "Insecurity and the Abiding Treasure" ("where neither moth nor rust corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal") and Meland on "Not by Might nor by Power." He spoke of existence in most instances as being sustained by a perilously slight margin of sensitivity, and of the creative advance of any generation resting upon the responsiveness of a pitifully small margin of human consciousness.

I was torn between my ecology in the department of zoology and sitting in on courses in the Divinity School. They were heady days that shored up, in ways I could never have imagined, the trust in life I had come to through Whitehead and Hartshorne. I now felt I was on a road I would never leave. And so it was to be.

I came to know Charles Hartshorne and his wife Dorothy in subsequent years, both on his visits to Australia and mine to the U.S. One day I asked him who else I should get to know. He replied immediately, "My most brilliant student, John Cobb." So began a friendship across the years that came to working together on process thought and biology (MN and LL).

Not many biologists have been keen to plumb the depths of process thought. An exception, together with Sewall Wright, was C.H. Waddington, the British developmental biologist and geneticist. I discovered his interest in Whitehead in Rome when we were together at a conference on biology. Waddington told me he had become a developmental biologist as a result of having read all the works of Whitehead as an undergraduate in Cambridge. He subsequently wrote an important paper on how his metaphysical views had influenced his science (TTB). This is an unusual confession for a scientist to make. Usually it is the other way around. I think it was his conviction that led me to take a more metaphysical stance to my own field of ecology, while from John Cobb I was learning about the ecology of internal relations.

My research interest in the ecological aspects of evolution brought me to work in the laboratory of Theodosius Dobzhansky in Columbia University. He was one of the three architects of the genetical theory of natural selection, the others being Sewall Wright and Sir Ronald Fisher. In the following year I worked with him in Brazil, and later he came to my department in the University of Sydney for a year. Richard Lewontin (at present Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University) was one of his graduate students at the time I was at Columbia University. The two of us had many discussions about Whitehead. At first this seemed to annoy Dobzhansky. He said we should get our noses down more to the laboratory bench. But it was not long before Dobzhkansky revealed to me his real interest in the philosophy of biology and his more vague interest in religion, which came from his Russian Orthodox background. But he was not too interested in Whitehead’s God, nor in the idea that all individual entities from protons to people were subjects. I persuaded him to come with me to some lectures by Paul Tillich. He immediately became attracted to the idea of "ultimate concern." How, he asked, could human concern for ultimate concern have evolved? This resulted in his book, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (BUC), which is more influenced by Teilhard de Chardin than by Whitehead. Dobzhansky’s colleagues certainly thought I had led him down the garden path to fairy land. But, in fact, he was struggling valiantly with the idea of the evolution of the subjective both in this book and in The Biological Basis of Human Freedom (BBHF). Few biologists were prepared to tackle this as an evolutionary problem.

But the evolution of the subjective is precisely the problem Whitehead had laid out so clearly when he wrote:

The conception of organism as fundamental for nature involves a radical break with a mechanistic or substance concept of nature. It involves what David Griffin calls "the reenchantment of science" (RS). There are no substances. What exist are relations and these relations involve subjectivity -- that is, some form of sentience -- at the heart of all entities from protons to people. The individual entities of the universe are occasions of experience.

Radical indeed is the proposition that when you pursue your feelings down the evolutionary line you come to the conclusion that a feeling is a feeling of a feeling. Mind cannot arise from no mind, Subjectivity cannot emerge from something that is not subjective. Freedom and self-determination cannot arise from something that has no freedom. Instead of feelings being epiphenomenal side-effects, they become central in process thought. This central proposition is put succinctly by Cobb and Griffin (PT 13) when they say that process philosophy sees human experience "as a high level exemplification of reality in general." All individual entities such as protons, atoms and cells have in common with human experience that they take account of their environment, without being fully determined by it. This "taking account of " is technically called an internal relation. The phrase is useful as a contrast to an external relation. Most Western thought has focused on external relations (that push or pull). An external relation does not affect the nature of the things related. The billiard ball is unchanged when it is hit by the cue or another billiard ball. An internal relation is different. A deep conversation between two friends may mean little to an outside observer. But it changes the people involved. I experience my friend and am different inwardly as a consequence. An internal relation is constitutive of the character and even the existence of something. As Tennyson put into the mouth of the adventurous Ulysses, "I am a part of all that I have met."

For me this has been the most enlightening concept in process thought, but for most of my scientific colleagues it is not a stepping stone to understanding but a stumbling block. Why?

III

One reason why my scientific colleagues find process thought a stumbling block is that they suppose one is attributing consciousness to all individual entities. Dobzhasky asked me, "How can you believe atoms have brains?" The notion that sentience is proto-consciousness (or whatever one may call feeling that is less than fully conscious) is indeed difficult to grasp for those committed to mechanism. A second difficulty my scientific colleagues create is their supposition that process thought attributes sentience to everything, including rocks and solar systems. A distinguished astronomer told me he was attracted to process thought but rejected it because he couldn’t see how the solar system could be an organism! Nor can I.

An individual entity or organism is something that feels and acts as one. The process proposition is that everything is either such an occasion of experience or is made up of entities that are occasions of experience. Things such as rocks, solar systems, and computers are not individual entities that feel. They are aggregates of individual entities, the atoms and molecules that compose them. Hartshorne’s paper (PP) is very helpful in making the necessary distinction. As David Griffin points out, the great successes of science have come from studying aggregates, such as balls on inclined planes and solar systems, where Newtonian mechanics or the Cartesian system applies (RS 24). For all practical purposes prediction is possible here, at least in principle. Hence, the success in the intricate guiding of space vehicles to Venus and Mars.

The great success of the Cartesian method is largely a result of following a path of least resistance. Those problems that yield to the attack are pursued with vigor because the method works there. Other problems and other phenomena are left behind, walled off from understanding by commitment to Cartesianism. The harder problems are not tackled, if for no other reason than that brilliant scientific careers are not built on persistent failure. So the problems of embryonic and psychic development, the function of the nervous system, and the evolution of mind and consciousness remain in much the same unsatisfactory state they were in fifty years ago, while molecular biologists go from triumph to triumph in describing and manipulating genes.

Nothing can be more confusing than to regard Newtonian mechanics as the exemplar of science. Quantum physics has gone well beyond the completely mechanistic analysis of reality. If there is to be any exemplar of science it should be biology. Unfortunately biology is still trapped in a very mechanistic analysis of living organisms (PE Chaps. 2 and 3). When biology snaps out of this restriction it will become the basic science because it will be studying those individual entities where feelings exist at the conscious level. It will then be seen to be ridiculous to suppose that we could understand what the universe is without taking into account what the universe produces in its evolution: namely, conscious, purposing human beings. Hence, the rhetorical question of quantum physicist J. A. Wheeler, "Here is a man, so what must the universe be?" (quoted in AU, p. 112). A reenchanted biology would take into account all experience, all subjectivity, and not exclude whatever cannot be weighed and measured. We shall then realize what White-head saw long ago: that biology is the study of large organisms, and physics is the study of smaller organisms.

I have mentioned two stumbling blocks in process thought for scientists, namely, the meaning of mind in nature and, second, the failure to distinguish between individual entities and aggregates of individual entities. There is yet a third related problem. Mechanistic science assumes that the world is made of unchanging building blocks -- call them protons, atoms, or what you will. All that happens in cosmic and biological evolution is rearrangement of the building blocks. Process thought proposes instead that in the course of cosmic and biological evolution the individual entities change as they find themselves in different environments. For any entity is what it is by virtue of its internal relations to other entities. Cosmic and biological evolution involve change in structures -- as, for example, when electrons and protons form hydrogen atoms. The electrons and protons now find themselves in a different environment and have therefore different internal relations from what they had before hydrogen atoms existed. A proton in a stellar mass is different from one in a hydrogen atom. A cell in my brain is different from a cell not in my brain but, say, in a culture of cells in a dish. This is ecology at the most fundamental level.

There is a reason for respecting the individual entities of nature, be they frogs or humans. It is because they are subjects and not just objects. The emphasis that all living (as well as non-living) creatures are subjects has, for me, been a wide-open gate for the development of a non-anthropocentric ethic. This is probably the most important issue in the development of eco-philosophy for the conservation of nature. "Man" is not the measure of all things. If every living creature is a subject, then each has intrinsic value to itself and to God, in addition to any instrumental value each may have in the scheme of things. The clear implication of this recognition is the extension of compassion, justice and rights to non-humans. They should not be treated merely as means but as ends in themselves. Each has a life to enjoy and fulfill.

However, it is a mistaken step to then suppose that all creatures have equal intrinsic value. There is a hierarchy of intrinsic value and a corresponding hierarchy of rights. It is right and proper that we have major concern for the poor and oppressed people on the earth, and for whales and chimpanzees in preference to mosquitoes. A hierarchy of value reflects differences in capacity for richness of experience. I don’t know what it is like to be a mosquito. I think it reasonable to presume that its experience of the world and of God is limited compared with that of Buddha or Jesus.

The call for a graded concern for all creatures does not require a lesser concern for the poor and oppressed. Shakespeare said in Julius Caesar, Act III, "Not that we should love Caesar less, but that we should love Rome more." It is not that we should love the poor less but that we should love the non-human creation more that we do at present. Love is not like a fixed quantity of gasoline in a gas pump that has to be shared around amongst customers. The springs of love are deep and without limit.

Today when Christians are confronted with the environmental crisis they exhibit a frenzied schizophrenia. They rally to the call of the poor and oppressed people. They quote texts that also indicate that God has concern for all creation and implicitly that they should be so concerned. Yet they do not act upon these professions. Instead they presume a monopoly of Gods services for themselves. For the most part they leave issues such as animal rights to the secular world. For them nature is simply the stage on which the drama of human life is performed. Yet conservation of nature at its heart is the notion that humans must reduce their demands on the environment in favor of other species. An example of this Christian schizophrenia is the embarrassment caused to the World Council of Churches by a report of one of its consultations on the need for a non-anthropocentric ethic, and in particular the need for Christian concern for oppressed animals, especially those used for human purposes. The report in question is published independently in the book Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches to Ecological Theology (LLCA). It is significant that this is a report to, and not a report of, the World Council of Churches.

IV

A stumbling block in religion for me, when I early embraced a more traditional theism, was the existence of mishaps, accidents, suffering, and the agony of nature. Later I came to see process theology as a theology that took these issues seriously in its concept of God. Others seem to leave them as mysteries, inexplicable events or the activities of a tyrannical God. Hartshorne emphasized the importance of accepting accident and chance as a part of nature, and indeed as necessary in a universe that is not completely determined, but whose individual entities have their own degree of self-determination. I vividly recall the great importance he attached to a genuine recognition of chance and accident by his response to one of the clearest statements on the subject ever made by a biologist. Hartshorne happened to be at the University of California in Berkeley when I was teaching in the Department of Genetics. There was great excitement in the department when Jacques Monods book Le Hasard et la Necessité (HN) arrived from France. As yet the English edition, Chance and Necessity, had not been published. I gave the French edition to Hartshorne. I thought he would have a negative reaction to the book because of its strict mechanism. But that was not what hit him. He was delighted. For here was a biologist who took chance and accident seriously.

In a deterministic universe God is supposed to manipulate entities. In a universe where accidents are possible and entities have some degree of freedom and self-determination, God is not coercive but is persuasive. It was this understanding of the relation between accident, chance, self-determination, evil and suffering, and a persuasive God that was the light I needed in order to escape from the omnipotent God of classical theism. That Hartshorne brought these ideas together in one book (OTM) recently has been a great help to many. Self-determination in the world on the one hand, and the persuasive activity of God on the other is, for me, a liberating way of conceiving God’s action in the world. Evil springs from chance and the freedom it allows, not from providence.

There is a certain frustration in the creation. We cannot claim that any part of the cost can be dispensed with earthquake, plague virus, or tiger. It is not that the devil or Eve upset the divine plan. God made the world subject to frustration. Without that possibility there could be no freedom in the creation at all at any point. The cross pattern is woven into the whole fabric of our world. There seems to me to have been an evolution in the thought of Saint Paul in this respect. He came to Corinth humiliated by his failure to present God as power at Thessalonica, or in terms of wisdom at Athens, and resolved that he would no longer accommodate the faith to his audience. He would be content to know one thing and one thing only. So writing to the Corinthians he could say, the Jews seek after miracles, they are beset with an idea of God as a God of power, a miracle worker. The Greeks are crazy for wisdom, they think of God in terms of the supreme philosopher and mathematician. But we are not satisfied with a picture of God in terms either of power or wisdom. We see God in terms of a man on a cross, of love that suffers, and of suffering that redeems. We see God in terms of persuasive, outgoing, and transforming love.

There is a second aspect of God’s nature recognized by process theology which traditional theism neglects. It is the feelings of God for the creation. It is the idea that God feels and saves the feelings of all creation, its joys and its sufferings, as it evolves. God is no mere spectator of the ocean of feelings which is nature at any moment. God is the supreme synthesis of these feelings. I have come to see, particularly from Hartshorne and Cobb, that unless we recognize God as responsive beneficiary as well as benefactor, it is illusory to talk of God as a God of love. Saint Paul (or whoever) seems to have made this discovery in the letter to the Romans (Chapter 8) where he writes of creation groaning in agony in its sufferings. It is the creative agony of childbirth. Furthermore, he adds God comes alongside creation "with groanings unuttered" (verse 26). God is not the spectator of existence but the one who feels all the joys and groanings of all creation.

There are the two aspects of divine love as of human love. Love gives and love receives. There is the divine eros and the divine passion. If we and all creation have no value for the cosmos, we have no value. To pretend we have is self-delusion. This is the ultimate meaning of process thought to me (PE 98-103).

V

Process thought means so much to me that I would like it to be accessible to a wider community than it is. The group in the wider community I know best is scientists. I have already mentioned some of the stumbling blocks they find in process thought. But the biggest one may not be conceptual but linguistic. It is usual for a scientist to learn the language that is common parlance in his or her own science. He or she is less enthusiastic about having to master the language of another subject, especially one that seems irrelevant. It is the exceptional scientist who is interested in the philosophy of science. As one of them said, "The philosophy of science is as useful to a scientist as ornithology is to birds." But even to those who are interested, the language of process thought presents a formidable difficulty. I asked a distinguished philosopher of science at the University of California in Berkeley why he never referred to process thought. He replied that he was put off by the necessity to have to be reared in this way of thinking since birth to get anywhere with it! It is not just the language of process thought that is an obstacle, but also its lack of telling models.

Sallie McFague’s criticism of the lack of relevant models in process thought in her book Models of God could well be heeded (MG 19, 38). Her criticism is that process thought has not focused much attention on the kinds of metaphors and models most appropriate for our time. She argues that belief and behavior are more influenced by images than by concepts, that concepts without images are sterile. Her point is that if a particular way of thinking is to become more generally accessible to people who are neither philosophers nor theologians, one has to work hard on new images appropriate for our age, which she describes as an ecological and nuclear age. Whitehead was very effective in invoking the poets. We can do that with contemporary poets. Process thought uses its key words not unfamiliar in ordinary speech-words such as "event," "process, organism," "sentience" and "internal relations." Can these be worked into images more than they have been?

I have used the conductor of an orchestra and the players as a model or metaphor of the persuasive ordering of creation by God (PE 43). In the process model of God the persuasive ordering principle coordinates the creativity of a multitude of creative agents, each with its own degree of freedom. Each player in an orchestra interprets the score in his or her own way. But all are coordinated by the conductor.

A brilliant documentary film was made in 1984 of Leonard Bernstein conducting an orchestra and singers during rehearsals of his own composition, "West Side Story." Those who saw this documentary were struck by the way in which musicians, composer and conductor became one. Bernstein originated the score. Each player was making an interpretation from both the score and the grimaces on the conductor’s face. Sometimes the orchestra seemed not to come up to the conductor’s expectations of it. At other times it seemed to exceed the conductor’s expectations. He responded with intense delight.

The individual entities in nature, like the musicians in the orchestra, have their own degree of freedom to respond or not to respond. This may be tiny at the level of the proton. It is highly significant at the level of the human person. God is like the composer-conductor who is writing the score just a few bars ahead of the orchestra, taking into account their harmonies and disharmonies while proposing the next movement of the music. God does not determine the outcome. That is open-ended. The power of God is the power of persuasion to harmonize the whole. The great conductor never feels that he or she has got it quite perfect. He or she keeps on trying to bring out the best. Is this not also true of God? And when some creative advance is achieved, be it small or large, there is joy "in heaven."

The shortest of all the parables of Jesus was a parable of creativity (Mark 4 v. 26). A farmer scatters seed on the land and goes to bed at night. He gets up in the morning to find the seed sprouting, first the blade, then the ear, and then the full head of corn. The earth bears fruit of itself. It is so constituted that it bears fruit. The world is so ordered in relation to God that God’s creativity finds fulfillment in it. This is a parable of cosmic and biological evolution.

The importance of telling images and parables is hard to exaggerate. When I meet former students, long after their student days are over, I sometimes get the impression that they remember nothing I ever told them except my jokes and stories. They do remember these, and some have even retained the message they were meant to convey! We need to give a jolt to traditional thought, even to the point of being shocking. Whitehead pointed out that all really novel ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when first perceived (SMW 70).

The cosmological task is enormous. If we imagine a microbe confined to the surface of a microscopic speck of dust floating in the middle of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, the microbe’s problem in inferring the properties of the Cathedral, let alone the earth as a whole, would be trivial compared with ours. Using a different image, Gregory of Nyssa had a wise word for the Arians: "Let those who would pry into the mystery of the life of God, realize how little they understand of the mysteries of the life of the ant." A.N. Whitehead said that we may never fully understand but we can increase our penetration. Did not Newton do just this within the constraints of the physics of his time? The fall of the apple and the movement of the planets were encompassed in one great scheme. Somewhat later Lord Rutherford said that no physical theory is worth much if it cannot be explained to a barmaid! I think he meant that the mathematical model is for the mathematician, but for others there can be other more appropriate models. Even more recently quantum physicist J.A. Wheeler has given a life-long message to his fellow physicists: "What is deep is also simple." Cosmologists in physics today speak of searching for one formula to encompass the laws of the physical world so precise that it could be written on the back of a t-shirt. Theology can be just as bold as it contemplates the bold images of the bible and of those church founders who managed to find a great coherence between their religious faith and knowledge from the Greek world.

Let me end on a more personal note. For me what is important is whether I care or don’t care. Process theology lifts the richness of human experience to a level that gives me a new perspective of care for all creation. The world is more like a life than a mechanism. It is feeling through and through, from protons to people. There is a sense of newness with which the world of process, imbued with Life, is viewed, a new feeling of possessing, being possessed, and of participation. At its heart it is A.N Whitehead’s "Peace" which, for him, was an individual experience including within itself the harmony and integrity of the universe.

References

AN87 -- Sewall Wright. "Gene and Organism." American Naturalist 87 (1953): 5-18.

AU -- Paul Davies. The Accidental Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

BBHF -- Theodosius Dobzhansky. The Biological Basis of Human Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 1956.

BUC -- Theodosius Dobzhansky. The Biology of Ultimate Concern. New York: New American Library, 1967.

CTLO -- W.E. Agar. A Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism. Melbourne University Press, 1943 (2nd ed. 1951).

HN -- Jacques Monod. Le Hasard et la necessite. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970.

LL -- Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr. The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

LLCA -- Charles Birch, William Eakin and Jay B. McDaniel. Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches to Ecological Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990.

MG -- Sallie McFague. Models of God: Theology for an Ecological and Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

MN -- Mind in Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy. Ed. John B. Cobb, Jr. and David Ray Griffin. Washington: The University Press of America, 1977.

OTM -- Charles Hartshorne. Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

PBM25 -- Sewall Wright. "The Scientist and the Man." Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 25 (1982): 279-94.

PD -- Sewall Wright. "Biology and the Philosophy of Science." Process and Divinity. Ed. W.L. Reese and E. Freeman. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1964.

PE -- Charles Birch. A Purpose for Everything: Religion in a Postmodern World View. Mystic, CT: Twentythird Publications, 1990.

PP -- Charles Hartshorne. "Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature." In MN.

PPS -- Charles Hartshorne. The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.

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

PW -- J.B.S. Haldane. Possible Worlds and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927.

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

TTB -- C.H. Waddington. "The Practical Consequences of Metaphysical Beliefs on a Biologist’s Work: an Autobiographical Note." Towards a Theoretical Biology. Vol. 2. Sketches. Ed. C.H. Waddington. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1969.

Bertrand Russell said that either life is matter-like or matter is life-like. A proposition of process thought is that matter is life-like. The proposition that life is matter-like leads to the traditional reductionist analysis of living organisms that goes on in biological laboratories. The ultimate apotheosis of this approach is molecular biology. Reductionist analyses are analyses of the objective aspects of living organisms such as the conduction of electrical impulses in nerves or the biochemistry of the formation of blood. As a methodology, reductionism is justifiable provided due recognition is given to its limitations.

In contemporary biology subjective aspects of life such as consciousness, purpose and free will are either ignored or else attempts are made to reduce the subjective to the objective. Instead we can take another approach as described by Mary Midgley: "There are two points of view -- inside and outside, subjective and objective, the patient’s point of view on his toothache and that of the dentist who studies it" (OW 508).

The concept of "the patient’s point of view," which is its own experience, applies all down the line from people to protons in process thought. Processing towards life is my metaphor for cosmic evolution from a relatively undifferentiated universe right after the big bang, for example a universe consisting of hydrogen atoms only. It seems to me that Whitehead’s two lectures entitled "Nature and Life" (in MT) delivered at The University of Chicago were essentially saying that an understanding of cosmic evolution had to be informed by a concept of what life is. The concept of what life is proposes that the individual entities of existence, or "the really real things (which) compose the evolving universe" (MT 151), are occasions of experience.

In the universe that consisted of hydrogen atoms alone, the sum total of occasions of experience must have been minimal in cosmic history. The internal relations of that universe must have been minimal compared with a universe that has in it plants and animals including us. What has happened in between a universe of hydrogen and us?

One aspect of the story is told by scientists in their account of cosmic and biological evolution. This is an account of the evolution of (what they see as) objects. Individual organisms are investigated as if they were machines, devoid of self-determination or spontaneity in any sense and so subject only to external forces. They are objects, not subjects. Are there any leads from the world of science of today suggesting that the individual entities of creation from protons to people are not simply objects pushed around by external forces? There is one, I suggest, that arises from what is called complexity theory. It proposes that sufficiently large systems of parts with enough interactions will generate totally new, but simple, laws of self-organization that help to explain what has happened in evolution.

I. Self-organization in Cosmic and Biological Evolution

Physicists and cosmologists regard self-organization as the source of order in cosmic evolution up to and including the origin of life. Some of them, notably Paul Davies, have said that the onus is now on biologists to demonstrate the importance of self-organization in biological evolution. An example of what is meant by self-organization from physics is the formation of the myriad symmetrical shapes of snowflakes. Probably no two snowflakes are alike. Snowflakes are formed by crystals of ice that generally have a hexagonal pattern. Often the pattern is beautifully intricate. The size and shape of a snowflake depends mainly on temperature and the amount of water vapor available as they form. The details of the design are dependent upon the environment in which the snowflake forms. In all this physical forces are involved, pushing atoms of water this way and that.

Many simple physical systems exhibit spontaneous order of this sort. An oil droplet in water forms a sphere. Lipids in water form hollow bilipid membrane spheres, such as cell membranes. Further examples of self-organization in physics are given by Paul Davies (CB 72-92). The question I now put and leave as a question for the moment is this: is anything else going on in the self-organization of snow flakes and the self-organization of hydrogen atoms that led to the universe and us?

But first consider some examples of self-organization in biology at different levels of organization. It seems likely that the self-repeating patterns generated by growth processes of plants that result in the symmetry of a sunflower or a pine cone are best understood in terms of self-organization. The spiral rows of scales in a pine cone conform, in their mathematical arrangement, to the famous Fibonacci series of numbers (RU 151). A simple virus, such as the tobacco mosaic virus, forms by self-assembly in which all the participating proteins are organized into a complexly structured virus. If the parts of these viruses are disassembled they spontaneously reassemble. More complex viruses cannot do this (see VA). Another example of self-organization at the molecular level is the local interaction among amino acids which give rise to complexly folded protein molecules. When the complex protein molecule is dissociated from a three dimensional state to a simpler linear state, it is followed by spontaneous reassembly. They are not always able to so self-organize without guidance from the charmingly named chaperone proteins that guide the three dimensional folding of proteins.

Spontaneous self-organization is invoked by biochemists in the evolution of the prebiotic world in which a variety of atoms assembled into organic molecules eventually giving rise to molecules of RNA, DNA and proteins which led to further complex assemblies and eventually to cells. Manfred Eigen coined the term "molecular self-organization" to describe molecular evolution that could have given rise to the origin of life. A summary of some of these processes is given by Fritjof Capra (WOL 75-150). Kauffman sees the origin of life not as an incalculably improbable accident but as "an expected fulfillment of the natural order" as a result of the phenomenon of self-organization (HU 20). Most of Kauffman’s long book deals with mathematical models and some biochemical models of "non-equilibrium ordered systems that lead to spontaneous self-organization into more complex structures. The universe soon after the Big Bang consisted of only one sort of entity -- hydrogen. Today the living world consists of at least ten million different small organic molecules and at least one trillion different proteins. Where did all this diversity come from (HU 115)? Kauffman’s book is devoted to answering this question in terms of the principle of self-organization.

Until recently self-organization had been little recognized in more complex entities. All the examples which follow were, until recently, interpreted in terms of centralized organization. However, recent studies provide evidence that in each of the following examples the order is a consequence of self-organization and not centralized organization. The evidence is given in each case.

A notable example is the slime moulds that live in soil. Spores of slime moulds on germination produce amoeba-like cells. These cells immediately disperse as though mutually repelled from each other. Provided they have sufficient bacteria, which is their food in the soil, they divide like amoebae by simple fission. When food becomes scarce the amoeba-like cells tend to distribute themselves uniformly and no longer repel one another. Then they aggregate at a number of centers to form at each center a slug-like creature that slithers like a slug. It may reach a diameter of 25 centimeters or more. From this apparently undifferentiated mass of cells a stalk grows at the top of which a fruiting body is formed that develops spores. The fruiting body bursts to distribute its spores and so the strange life-cycle continues. What causes these changes? The present understanding is that a chemical substance called acrasin is secreted by the amoebae when they run out of food. The amoebae move up a gradient of acrasin resulting in their aggregation to form the slug. Many different species of slime mould may live in the same place. How is it then that the cells of the different species don’t get mixed up in aggregation? The answer is that different species secrete different acrasins. There is some evidence also that concentration waves of a chemical substance governs the production of the stalk and fruiting body. The effect of the concentration wave is to activate genes whose message is -- produce a fruiting body (see DIM and GSSA).

Resnick simulated the aggregation of slime mould cells in a computer model (LL 232-233). Each "creature" in his model is given the characteristic corresponding to the emission of a chemical substance while also following the gradient of this chemical substance. The chemical is given a finite life corresponding to its rate of evaporation. With this decentralized strategy the creatures’ aggregate into clusters on his computer screen.

With such examples in mind we can define self-organization as "patterns determined, not by some centralized authority, but by local interactions about decentralized components" (LL 229). It is a process of ordering from a less ordered state to a more ordered state. Self-organization is contrasted with centralized organization, such, or example, as the production of order by DNA in the cell. This has led to the classical model that evolution is change in the organizing molecules of DNA and RNA. So we can recognize two forms of organization in living organisms, self-organization and centralized organization.

Other examples of self-organization in biology have been investigated such, for example, as the construction of a termite nest with its complex chambers. Termites construct their complex nests in an orderly fashion that, at least in part, is guided by chemical gradients. Termites are among the master architects of the animal world. When a termite deposits a lump of earth on the base of the forthcoming nest it deposits at the same time a chemical that attracts other termites to the same place to deposit their lumps of earth there and so form a pillar. That is but one aspect of the building of a complexly structured nest by a large number of individual termites cooperating together. Each termite colony has a queen (OC 186). But, as in ant colonies, the queen does not "tell" the termites what to do. The queen is more like a mother than a ruling queen. There is no one in charge of a master plan. Rather, each termite carries out a relatively simple task. Termites are practically blind, so they must interact with each other and the world around them primarily through the senses of touch and smell. From local interactions among thousands of termites impressive structures emerge.

Resnick has made computer models of some of the steps in the construction of a termite nest (LL 234). As he points out, the construction of an entire termite nest would be a monumental project. Instead, he proceeded with a simple model to program termites to collect wood chips and put them in piles. At the start of the program wood chips were scattered randomly throughout the termites world. The challenge was to make the termites organize the wood chips into a few orderly piles. He made each individual termite obey the following rules:

The program worked. At first the termites gathered the wood chips into hundreds of small piles, but gradually the number of piles declined while the number of wood chips in surviving piles increased.

AntFarm is a computer program that simulates the foraging strategies of ants (FC 248 -251). Many ants obeying simple rules produce the complex foraging behavior. Self-organizing ants require just four rules to be followed:

Another striking example of self-organization in animal behavior is the swarm-raid of the army ant (AA 139-145). A raid consists of a dense phalanx of up to 200,000 workers that march relentlessly across the forest floor. The raiders can be up to 20 meters wide. It leaves in its wake not only a trail of carnage but also a series of connected columns along which the victorious army ant workers run with their booty. These columns all lead to the principal trail of the raid, which links the swarm front to the temporary bivouac. It is inconceivable that a tiny individual within the 200 meter long raid has any knowledge of the plan of the raid as a whole. The structure of the swarm can be achieved by simple, self-organizing interactions among the raiding ants. Franks (AA) devised computer simulations in which moving ants lay down chemical trails which organize the movement patterns of other individuals throughout the developing raid. His simulations mimic with some precision real raids. His models show how the collective behavior of the swarm can be achieved with no central coordination, but instead through the communication between foragers by the laying down of, and reaction to, trail chemicals.

In colonies of social insects, workers perform a variety of tasks such as foraging, brood care and nest construction. As the needs of the colony change, and as resources become available, colonies adjust the numbers of workers engaged in each task. Task allocation is the process that results in specific workers being engaged in specific tasks in numbers appropriate to the current situation. Until the mid-1980s, research emphasized the internal factors within an individual that determine its task. Internal factors had to do with body size, age and genetic constitution. However, in recent years it has become evident that division of labor had more to do with environment and that it is rare for individuals to specialize in particular tasks throughout their lives. From day to day or even hour to hour an individual worker may perform a variety of tasks, changing its task as circumstances require. For example, a honey bee forager’s decision whether to collect nectar or remain in the nest depends on how much nectar is already stored in the nest (OWSI). As a result of investigating such phenomena Deborah Gordon makes the following assessment of what is happening:

There is, in the above quotation, the important suggestion that self-organization may help to elucidate one of the most complex ordering processes, as yet little understood, in living organisms, namely development from egg to adult. The initial single cell of the egg undergoes a number of cell divisions to produce a mass of similar cells. At some subsequent stage differentiation of these cells proceed as they multiply further. Some become muscle cells, others nerve cells, and so on. All coordinate to become a unitary organism of millions of cells with a body plan that is different for different organisms. Muscle cells are different from nerve cells, not because they have different genes; their genes are the same. However, different genes are switched on in different environments. How the appropriate genes are switched on in appropriate places remains a problem. One proposal involves chemical gradients. For example in the fruit fly the first difference between the front and back end of the egg is caused by the cells of the mother’s ovary, external to the egg, that release at the anterior end a specific chemical which then diffuses backwards, giving rise to a chemical gradient of concentration. This in turn could cause different genes to be switched on in different places. A single gradient cannot set up a whole pattern, but a succession of such processes might. We know that chemical gradients are involved in the ordering of the building of a termite nest and in the life history of slime moulds. It is possible that in embryonic development similar sorts of ordering are at least initiated by chemical gradients (see LEC).

Self-organization is part of the research program of so called complexity theory at the Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complex Systems. The approach of the workers in this institute is highly theoretical. As Lewontin had remarked, complexity theory "proposes that sufficiently large systems of parts with enough interaction will generate totally new, but simple ‘laws of organization’ that will explain, among other things, us" (LN 26). The behavior of these models turns out to be what are, in the mathematical sense, chaotic. Kauffman (in OO) argues that chaotic systems can give rise to structures "for free," instead of each detail of structure having been forged independently by natural selection. According to his interpretation of his models the system leaps spontaneously into a state of greater organized complexity. This is what Kauffman calls self-organization. The devotees of this approach have been criticized by geneticists and evolutionists as practicing "fact-free" science in contrast to ordinary "earth-bound" genetics (see OE and LEC). It is a question for the future as to whether or not Kauffman’s models will be heuristically valuable for biology.

All the examples I have given of self-organization in biology are explained by biologists in strictly mechanistic terms, complex though these mechanisms usually are. Some of the processes can be replicated to some extent on a computer. But this does not necessarily imply that the behaving entities are in all respects machines. This is the subject of the sections which follow.

II. Self-organization and Internal Relations

Self-organization is exactly what we might expect of Whiteheadian individual entities. Each individual entity, be it a proton, a protein molecule, an amoeba of a slime mould or an ant in an army raid can be regarded in the Whiteheadian scheme as being what it is largely by virtue of its internal relations to its environment, be those components of environment temperature for a snowflake, acrasin for an amoeba or a neighbor ant for another ant. Each entity is then seen as a subject relating internally to its environment. Each is having experiences, unconscious though they may be. Individual entities conform to Charles Kingsley’s proposition in his novel "The Water Babies" that God makes things that make themselves. In Whiteheadian terms God is not responsible unilaterally for what happens. God and the entities of the world are co-creators.

The Whiteheadian interpretation of self-organizing entities is in contrast to the parts that make up a machine. He enunciated more clearly than anyone how creative evolution of living organisms cannot be understood if the elements composing them are conceived as individual entities that maintain exactly their identity throughout all the changes and interactions, as is the case with the parts of a machine. That is the Newtonian model of the universe. Complex living organisms can be broken down into their component parts such as their cells. How is it that the whole has properties the components do not have? It is evident that the properties of the whole are not found in the parts, except as they are organized in the whole. It is for this reason that the reductionist program of science is deficient. One response has been to say that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. There is an element of truth in this statement, but it does not go far enough. It is not just that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is that parts become qualitatively different by being parts of a whole. Lewontin, Rose and Kamin discuss the different levels at which atoms assemble to make molecules, molecules assemble to make cells and so on: "as one moves up a level the properties of each larger whole are given not merely by the units of which it is composed but of the organizing relations between them ... these organizing relationships mean that the properties of matter relevant at one level are just inapplicable at other levels" (NG 278).

In the process perspective, cosmic and biological evolution are not simply the evolution of objects that are reorganized by change in their external relations but change in internal relations of subjects. It is the evolution of subjects. A subject is an individual entity that has a degree of self-determination. It has some degree of mentality that is presumably minuscule in the proton compared to the person. Of course we don’t know what it is like to be a proton or an electron and to have its subjective experience of being what it is. Sir J.J. Thompson, who discovered the electron in 1897, said that to know what an electron is you would have to be one. Complete knowledge is complete possession. He was making the distinction between knowing something from within and something from without. The only individual entity that we know from within is ourselves. We can only infer the within of other individual entities. The important point is that mentality is not just in a corner of nature. It is pervasive.

But you may ask -- at what point does life appear in the processing? The answer is -- at no point. For matter is life-like. The life-like process is tied up with novelty. Novelty is not mere change. The ever-present entropic tendency to decay is change. That tendency can be resisted in two ways. It can be resisted by the very stable structure of many aggregates such as rocks. These endure by countless repetition of unchanging patterns. It can be overcome locally by creative novelty which rises above external determination. Hence life is directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe. There is an urge in life to meet life’s as yet unrealized possibilities.

"Life," says Whitehead, "is novelty of appetition" (PMO2). "The universe is creative advance into novelty" (PR 222).

III. Progress in Evolution?

The fundamental question to ask about cosmic evolution is why the universe that at one time consisted of hydrogen atoms and nothing else didn’t just stay that way? Why go on to other sorts of atoms, complex molecules, cells and countless species of plants and animals? The Whiteheadian proposition is that on the one hand the individual entities themselves at any stage have a propensity for creativity and that this urge is met by the potentiality of the universe from its foundations for all sorts of possibilities to be realized. Lure is met by urge of the creature.

The Whiteheadian perspective appears to be counter to an emphasis by some biologists, notably that of Stephen J. Gould, in their interpretation of biological evolution. "Natural evolution," says Gould, "includes no principle of predictable progress or movement to greater complexity" (LG 222). Since complexity of organization has frequently been used as a measure of progress in evolution Gould equates progress with complexity. There is no inevitability, says Gould, that there will be an increase in complexity with time. Bacteria must have been amongst the earliest organisms to evolve some billions of years ago. And they haven’t changed much. They do what they do pretty well and there are more of them, both in kind and numbers, than of any other sort of organism. There is no law that says they have to change. "The Age of Bacteria," argues Gould, was an age that persisted for billions of years from near the beginning right up to now. Bacteria alone formed the tree of life for the first 2 billion years, about half of life’s full history. We still live in the "Age of Bacteria" Bacteria are a classic example of persistence with little change. Other organisms have changed from a complex state to a less complex one. Many intestinal parasites have lost most of their organs to become simple sacs with few organs to deal with reproduction and the digested nutrients they absorb from the intestine of their host. They have lost rather than gained complexity.

There are, of course, other sequences of evolution which can be regarded as progressive trends in complexity such as the increase in size of the brain of Homo over the last two million years. But there is no law that says the brain must go on increasing in size. It has got to a point where it seems to be doing a pretty good job in enabling humans to survive, provided we don’t decide to destroy ourselves. Trends continue while they have adaptive value for the organism as a consequence of natural selection. The history of biological evolution is also the history of dead ends such as the dinosaurs. The tree of life is not like a single ladder with bacteria on the bottom rung and humans on the top with increasing complexity in between. It is more like a tree with a myriad of branches, many of them dead ones. Most of the species that have ever existed are extinct. Indeed it is the fate of all species to become extinct.

While simple forms dominate in most environments Gould concedes that there is an increase in complexity of the most complex organisms and that human beings are probably more complex than anything that preceded them. But he adds, "I fervently deny that this limited fact can provide an argument for general progress as a defining thrust of life’s history" (LG 169). His reason for saying this is that if you look at organisms, not just at the beginning, when life had its minimal complexity, but at any subsequent time in evolutionary history, there is no evidence that these organisms in the course of time led to more complex creatures. Some did, but sometimes the movement went in the opposite direction.

What seems to have happened in evolution is that every conceivable ecological niche gets occupied. If the occupants are simple bacteria and no one else can do the job as well, then there is no cause for them to be pushed out by more complex creatures. It might happen that a more complex organism might do the job better, in which case they would probably invade the niche. Or an even less complex organism may invade the niche. In this sense every step in the evolution of a new organism (be it an increase or decrease in complexity) is in Whitehead’s terminology "a creative advance into novelty" (PR 222).

Gould’s argument has the merit that it warns us not to be too simplistic about attributing trends in evolution. Yet none of what he says is counter to the proposition that every creature has its inborn propensity to survive and reproduce. This can be measured in objective terms of survival and reproduction and biologists do just that. But the principle can be interpreted subjectively, as Whitehead does in terms of an urge to live (FR 8). Human beings, for example, experience an urge toward novelty of experience and more satisfying experience. When it disappears the quality of human life and even life’s physical manifestations cease to exist. The same subjective principle can be applied to other organisms, be they simple bacteria, dinosaurs or cats and dogs. Evolutionary biologists for the most part deal with living organisms as objects and not as subjects, so it is not altogether surprising that they do not take account of the subjective. To so take account is not to invoke some mystical force but to regard the subjective as real both in interpreting animal behavior (as Donald R. Griffin does in his book, Animal Minds) and as I am suggesting in interpreting evolution. So Whitehead wrote:

V. The Past, the Present and the Future

My understanding is that there are two elements in internal relations, be the actual entity a proton or a person or anything in between such as an army ant. One is that the entity has internal relations with its immediate past which we could call memory (Whitehead’s prehension). The other is that the entity has the aim of constituting its present occasion both for immediate "satisfaction" and for the sake of the anticipated possible future state. "Life," says Whitehead, "is the enjoyment of emotion derived from the past and aimed at the future" (MT 167). The past is a real cause, so too possibilities are real (final) causes. And so too are external or mechanical (efficient) causes.

The evolutionary history of life suggested to Whitehead that there is an ever present urge which can be interpreted as purposive. It can be seen as an aim to greater richness of experience or "higher modes of subjective satisfaction" (FR 8). This does not mean that every successive step in evolution involved an increase in richness of experience of the entity being evolved. It does mean that from the foundations of the universe there was the possibility (not the inevitability) of all sorts of experience, including self-conscious experience that we know in ourselves. For Whitehead the art of life is first to be alive, secondly to be alive in a satisfactory way, and thirdly to acquire an increase in satisfaction. We know how this is true of human life. The conduct of human affairs is dominated by our recognition of foresight determining purpose and purpose issuing in conduct. Whitehead comments that "Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study" (FR 16).

In writing about purpose Whitehead was discussing not just human life but life in general. The extreme rejection of final causation from our categories of explanation has been fallacious. The "vacuous actualities" of classical physics cannot evolve. They can only be rearranged as substances. "On this theory," says Whitehead, "all that there is to be known is that inexplicable bits of matter are hurrying about with their motions correlated by inexplicable laws expressible in terms of their spatial relations to each other. If this be the final dogmatic truth, philosophy can have nothing to say to natural science" (FR 50). The process view is that each actual entity from protons to people are occasions of experience which is the outcome of its own purpose. As Charles Hartshorne says, "I believe that the most significant model we can have even of the simplest parts of the universe, say molecules, atoms, and particles, is that they are the simplest, most primitive cases of that which our own natures illustrate in vastly more complex and highly evolved forms" (WM 120).

In the process perspective, biological evolution is seen not just as involving mechanical changes say to the heart as a pump, but internal changes whereby the experience or internal relations becomes richer in a human being as compared with a mosquito. "Creativity,’ said Whitehead, "is the principle of novelty" (PR 21). What then is creatively novel about evolutionary change? There is novelty along the route in the sense that human experience is novel compared to the experience of a dinosaur. A world of dinosaurs without humans is a different world from one that contains humans. But human experience has a continuity in origin from the feelings that constituted the being of the first mammals, the reptiles from which they evolved and all individual entities prior to them in the evolutionary sequence going back to the physicists’ initially featureless universe -- hence Whitehead’s proposition that the cosmic evolution of the universe "is a creative advance into novelty" (PR 222). Something is achieved in the process. To call that something creative advance or novelty is less ambiguous and less misleading than the term progress.

There exists the counter tendency of entropy in which organization becomes less with the passage of time and the universe as we know it will no longer exist. This is a reason why we need in addition to a processing toward life a processing toward death which has to do with the saving of what has been achieved in cosmic evolution, despite the death of the universe as we know it. These two become one coherent concept in the Whiteheadian scheme in which God not only persuades the world but experiences the world as it is made. God is different because of all that has been created in cosmic and biological evolution. So it is true to say that the universe would not be as it is if we had never been. At the end of the Russian Orthodox service for the dead, the choir and the mourners join together in saying "Viechnagu Pamjat." The words mean eternal memory. The memory in question is God’s. That is another story. It is a story that Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God.

References

AA Nigel R. Franks "Army Ants: A Collective intelligence," Scientific American 77 (1989), 139-145.

CB Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint. London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1989.

CSSA John Tyler Bonner, "Chemical Signals of Social Amoebae," Scientific American 248 (1983), 106-112.

DIM P. Hagan and M. Cohen, "Diffused-Induced Metamorphosis in Dictyostelium," Journal of Theoretical Biology 37(1981), 881-909.

FC Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, Frontiers of Complexity: The Search for Order in a Chaotic World. London: Faber and Faber. 1995, 248-251.

HU Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, The Search for Laws of Complexity. London: Viking, 1995.

LEC John Maynard Smith, "Life at the Edge of Chaos?," New York Review of Books (March 2,1995), 28-30.

LG Stephen J. Gould, Life’s Grandeur. London: Jonathon Cape, 1996.

LL Mitchel Resnick, "Learning About Life," Artificial Life An Overview. Edited by Christopher Langton. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1995, 229-441.

LN Richard Lewontin, "The Last of the Nasties" New York Review of Books 43 (1996), 20-26.

NG R.C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

OC Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam, 1984.

OE Gabriel A. Dover, "On the Edge," Nature 365 (1996), 704-706.

OO Stuart A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order. Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993.

OW Mary Midgley, "One World, But a Big One," Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1996), 500-514.

OWSI Deborah M. Gordon, "The Organization of Work in Social Insect Colonies," Nature 380(1996), 121-124.

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

VA W.B. Wood, "Virus Assembly and its Genetic Control." Self-organizing Systems: The Emergence of Order. Edited by F.E. Yates. New York: Plenum, 1987.

WIL Michael P. Murphy and Luke A.J. O’Neill. What is Life? The Next Fifty Years, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996.

WOL Fritjof Capra. The Web of Life. London: Harper Collins, 1996.

The reformed subjectivist principle, that the primary togetherness of things is their togetherness in experience (PR 189/288), is mentioned but rarely in Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Nevertheless many have intuitively appreciated its centrality to his endeavor. The theologian Schubert Ogden sees it as "the starting-point for a genuinely new theistic conception" (RG 57). As we shall see later, the reformed subjectivist principle is so fundamental as to derive from a modification of the most basic principle of all, the ontological principle.

What the principle is all about, however, is open to question. I shall challenge a prevalent interpretation which focuses on the nature of what is experienced.¹ This interpretation starts with what Whitehead designates, but does not adopt, as (simply) the subjectivist principle, which asserts "that the datum in the act of experience can be adequately analyzed purely in terms of universals" (PR 157/239). Why this should be called a subjectivist principle is by no means evident. If we adopt Descartes’ subjectivist bias, however, that we replace "the stone is gray" with "I experience the stone as gray as the primary datum of philosophical reflection, and also assume the pre-Cartesian pattern of qualities inhering in subjects, then only universals can be ingredient in experience, just as only qualities and not other substances can inhere in a substance. Whitehead argues this inevitably leads to the solipsism of the present moment.

Therefore "Descartes’ discovery on the side of subjectivism requires balancing by an ‘objectivist’ principle as to the datum for experience" (PR 160/243). From this line of argument Ivor Leclerc concludes: "This is what Whitehead calls the ‘reformed’ subjectivist principle" (WM 121).

Donald W Sherburne also agrees that the subjectivist reorientation of Descartes needs to be balanced by an objective element. "Whitehead’s rebuttal is to accept the subjectivist bias and couple it with his ‘reformed’ subjectivist principle, which states that actual entities, and not merely universals, are revealed in experience" (KPR 138).

Moreover, Jorge L. Nobo recognizes that the datum for experience includes particulars as well as universals, though he questions whether this should be called a reformed principle: "In truth, however, the organic conception of the datum constitutes an outright repudiation, rather than a reformation, of the subjectivist principle; for it denies categorically . . . that the datum for subjective experience consists exclusively of universals. On the contrary, the datum is conceived by the organic philosophy necessarily to include the objectifications of other particulars" (WMES 375f).

Now Leclerc, Sherburne, and Nobo are surely correct that occasions prehend particulars and not simply universals, and that the subjectivist principle must be revised accordingly, but it is by no means certain that this is done in Whitehead’s discussion of the reformed subjectivist principle.

In order to make my point evident we need to introduce genetic considerations. In the Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, I argue that it is possible to discern stages in Whitehead’s thinking in terms of the composition of Process and Reality and that in particular there is a major shift in his philosophical position from the nine and one-half chapters he wrote during the summer of 1927 (which I have designated as the Giffords draft) and the final revisions added later. The reformed subjectivist principle seems to be the summary statement of shift. Whitehead then sought to find a suitable place in his writing for this principle, finally attaching it to the discussion of "the subjectivist principle."²

For our purposes the salient difference between the Giffords draft (roughly, PR part II, without later additions) and the final revisions (roughly, PR part Ill) lies in that from which concrescence starts. Is it a single datum, constituted by the efficient causation of past actualities in a process of transition (so the Giffords draft), or are there many past actual entities, to be unified in the process of concrescence (EWM 189-217)? The standard interpretations of Christian, Sherburne, and Leclerc have developed Whitehead systematically in terms of part m theory, ignoring evidence of part II theory. Jorge Nobo, in Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity,³ effectively argues the case for systematically understanding all of Whitehead’s work in terms of the part II theory. The two theories are very much at odds with one another, yet come out of the same book. I argue we can understand both as Whitehead’s, provided one represents a theory he ultimately gave up.

The shift basically concerns the scope of concrescent unification: does it include efficient causation, or not? In the Giffords draft, Whitehead had come to understand the process of actualization in terms of subjectivity and the unification or integration of feeling, but there was one form of composite unity -- the original datum from which the concrescence began -- that was outside concrescence. By the identification of feeling with (positive) prehension, Whitehead sought to include even this within concrescence and therefore within subjective experience. Since it would now be possible to generalize this to mean that no composite unity stood outside concrescence, Whitehead could proclaim that the primary togetherness of things is their togetherness in experience (PR 189/288).

While it is certainly true that for Whitehead we experience particulars and not merely universals, the primary reason why this is not the burden of the reformed subjectivist principle is that this was a well-established teaching within the Giffords draft, and did not need the basic shift in order to become evident. In "Fact and Form" (PR 11.1), an early chapter of the Giffords draft, in a passage which shows no signs of being inserted later, Whitehead observes that his philosophy "directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum, A substance is not present in a subject.’ On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities.... The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity"’ (PR 50/79f).⁴ This does not mean "the crude notion that one actual entity is added to another simpliciter" (PR 50/80), for the first is objectified for the second, but it is the particular actual entity which is so objectified. This is an important teaching, but if it were all that Whitehead meant later after the shift by his principle, it would not have to be enunciated.

In challenging the prevalent interpretation, it is not enough simply to give a close reading of the text. It makes all the difference in the world what interpretive principles we adopt in response to Whitehead’s compositional methods. Thus in the second section I shall examine the basic texts with an eye to determining how they came to be so. The third section details a developmental account of the reformed subjectivist principle in terms of the deepening of panpsychism, achieved in the essay on "Time" (1926), to pansubjectivity. The final section then assesses the significance and implications of this principle. Before we examine the relevant texts in detail, it will be helpful to consider an exchange between Lindsey and Griffin on these same issues.

I.

As James E. Lindsey, Jr. notes, "The reformed subjectivist principle is, in spite of its name, not a revised or reformed version of the subjectivist principle," although we may see it as an extension of Whitehead’s affirmation of the subjectivist bias (PS 6: 101f). It depends crucially upon that fundamental reorientation as to the nature of that from which concrescence begins which Whitehead had not yet undertaken. In the earlier discussion, epistemological considerations predominate, but in the final formulation it is broadened into an ontological doctrine.

Lindsey argues that there are two distinct and incompatible meanings for the subjectivist principle’ or that Whitehead intended some other term such as ‘subjectivist bias’ in at least one instance (PR 167/253; PS 6:98ff). The editors of the corrected edition agree, in part. They leave this text alone, but note: "This is clearly nor a reference to the ‘subjectivist principle’ as defined in the opening section of this chapter (PR 157.28f/239). . . . For one thing, the definition on 157 is of a principle Whitehead rejects, whereas these latter two references are to a principle which he accepts.

Perhaps Whitehead should have written "subjectivist bias" instead of "subjectivist principle" in the passage Lindsey cites (PR 167/253). This would have made things much clearer, and avoided the contradiction he notes, but the fact remains that Whitehead did apparently write "subjectivist principle," both here and on the previous page, where it does not fit either. Why? It behooves us to find a genetic explanation, if one is possible.

Whitehead’s inconsistencies can be accounted for if we postulate two revisions of the subjectivist principle, both occurring during the final effort at revision after giving the Gifford Lectures in June of 1928.

The first is fundamentally conceptual, based upon a generalization of the old subjectivist principle (the experient togetherness of the subject) extended to the data of experience in the light of Whitehead’s revised theory of concrescence. The shift from an original datum from which concrescence springs to a multiplicity of past data, themselves concrescent experiences, enables Whitehead to extend the principle of experient togetherness to the data as well. Since he construes this as a generalization of the subjectivist doctrine, it can be specified as his version of the subjectivist doctrine in contrast to others.

Kant’s version is criticized in that the temporal world is merely experienced. "The difficulties of the subjectivist doctrine arise when it is combined with the ‘sensationalist’ doctrine concerning the analysis of the components which are together in experience" (PR 190/289), for the components were not themselves products of experient togetherness that Whitehead requires.

As part of this conceptual revision Whitehead could well have written the final section of the chapter on "The Subjectivist Principle" (II.7.5). This section was devoted to what was then probably called the "subjectivist principle adopted by the philosophy of organism." This was defined as the principle "that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects" (PR 166/252). (This seems innocuous enough, until we realize that Whitehead means it in a radical form. Not only do subjects experience, but what they experience were themselves experient subjects.) For brevity’s sake he simply referred to this as "the subjectivist principle," leaving it understood that it was his new principle, and not the old one he rejected, that he meant. After all, he was in all probability much engrossed in his "subjectivist principle," seeing the other one as a half-forgotten principle.

Then there may well have been a second editorial revision, perhaps occasioned by a rereading of his initial section (11.7.1), recognizing the confusion that different meanings of ‘subjectivist principle’ could cause. At this time he may have specified his own theory as "the reformed subjectivist principle" (PR 157.12/238, 160.28/243).⁵

The editorial revision would also extend to the last section of the chapter on "The Subjectivist Principle" (II.7.5). Here the revision seems most incomplete, and probably was limited only to adding the word "reformed" to "subjectivist principle" in the first sentence (PR 166/252). Another sentence, "Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PR 167/254) seems to have been added later.⁶

Unfortunately the other two mentions of the "subjectivist principle" were overlooked, causing confusion ever since. One of these is the one Professor Lindsey would emend to ‘subjectivist bias,’ which makes better sense than the present text, but which does not fit with the terminology of Whitehead’s conceptual revision. If in the final section (II.7.5) Whitehead had originally meant ‘subjectivist principle’ to be his new term for the ‘subjectivist doctrine’ (of II.9.2) he adopts, then it would generate an (unnoticed?) conflict with the ‘subjectivist principle’ he rejects (in II.7.1). Perhaps he needs to fall back on subjectivist bias,’ although ‘subjectivist bias’ does not seem to be part of his philosophical vocabulary any longer. At any rate the editorial revision of this section (II.7.5) seems never to have been carried out. It appears as if Whitehead made the first notation to remind himself that the whole section needed revision, and then neglected to do so.

In his response to Lindsey (PS 7:27-36), David Ray Griffin recognizes that Whitehead uses ‘subjectivist principle’ in two different senses: SPd as to the datum, which he rejects, and SPr as to reality as a whole, which he adopts. Assuming that all these passages form a coherent unity, and seeking to save the text as much as possible,⁷ Griffin is obliged to make some very careful distinctions between subjectivist bias, SPd, SPr, and reformed subjectivist principle.⁸ He does identify ‘subjectivist doctrine’ with ‘subjectivist principle’ (i.e. SPr), as we do also, although Whitehead carefully distinguishes between these in his first essay (II.7.1). If this were a unified text, we should expect him to maintain some distinctions throughout.

On the other hand, if this material was written in three or four tries over a span of more than a year, which were not carefully coordinated, we need not expect that every earlier distinction would be maintained. I agree with Griffin that Whitehead has two notions both named ‘subjectivist principle’ (SPd and SPr), but take the second (also named ‘subjectivist doctrine’) to be the result of further ruminations on this theme one year later, when memory of the first has been overlain by additional considerations.

My genetic reconstruction here proposed sees a lineal descent from ‘subjectivist bias’ (II.7.2) by way of subjectivist doctrine’ (II.9.2) to the subjectivist principle’ Whitehead accepts (i.e. SPr in II.7.5). Unfortunately in the later two instances the doctrine/principle is not defined in its generality, but is discussed in terms of particular versions thereof, Whitehead’s and others. Whitehead’s own version is the "reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine" (PR 189/288),⁹which in its later formulation becomes the ‘reformed subjectivist principle.’

II.

Let us attempt to reconstruct the section which initiates this whole discussion in Whitehead, the first section of "The Subjectivist Principle" (117.1) as it stood as part of the Gifford’s draft of the summer of 1927, and then examine the other two pertinent passages from a genetic perspective:

A Since this section (7.1) is in all probability part of the Giffords draft, but the chapter to which it now belongs was not (EWM 182-88),¹⁰ we may suppose it belonged elsewhere, perhaps as the concluding section to either "Locke and Hume" (II.5.6) or "From Descartes to Kant" (II.6.6).

The mentions of the "reformed subjectivist principle" are quite superficial, and can be supposed to have been added later. Let me quote the two suggested insertions in italics with the surrounding context so that we can see how the original text flowed without these insertions:

(a) "It is usual to combine the two [i.e., ‘the subjectivist principle’ and the sensationalist principle’] under the heading of the sensationalist doctrine’; but two principles are really involved, and many philosophers -- Locke, for instance -- are not equally consistent in their adhesion to both of them. The philosophy of organism denies both of these doctrines, in the form in which they are considered in this chapter. though it accepts a reformed subjectivist principle ( cf. sect. V¹¹ below and Part II, Ch. IX). Locke accepted the sensationalist principle, and was inconsistent in his statements respecting the subjectivist principle" (PR 157/238).

(It might be thought that only the last clause is inserted, but this would ignore the way doctrines’ in the insertion rides roughshod over the careful distinction between doctrine’ and ‘principle’ in the original, and it undercuts the continuity of the original discussion of Locke.)

(b) "In contrast to Hume, the philosophy of organism keeps this stone as gray in the datum for the experience in question. It is, in fact, the ‘objective datum’ of a certain physical feeling, belonging to a derivative type in a late phase of a concrescence.¹² But this doctrine fully accepts Descartes’ discovery that subjective experiencing is the primary metaphysical situation which is presented to metaphysics for analysis. This doctrine is the ‘reformed subjectivist principle,’ mentioned earlier in this chapter. [I.e. at (a).] Accordingly, the notion ‘this stone as gray’ is a derivative abstraction, necessary indeed as an element in the description of the fundamental experiential feeling, but delusive as a metaphysical starting-point" (PR 160/243).

In addition to these insertions, which were not part of the original text, there could well have been a passage which was, but which is now placed elsewhere:

Immediately following upon the discussion of Descartes and Hume in this section (11.7.1), Whitehead may have included two paragraphs, one on Kant, the other summing up the difficulties of the subjectivist doctrine, material now found in the chapter on "Propositions" (II.9.2: 190.8-33/289.6-38).¹³

This passage may also have included the first three sentences of the next paragraph: "The philosophy of organism admits the subjectivist doctrine (as here stated), but rejects the sensationalist doctrine: hence its doctrine of the objectification of one actual occasion in the experience of another actual occasion. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. The problems of efficient causation and of knowledge receive a common explanation by reference to the texture of actual occasions" (PR 190/290).

Because of its present location in the insertion (in II.9.2, to be discussed under C), let us designate it as the middle segment. Its paragraphs are roughly of a piece with our section (II.7.1), but they fit rather less well in their present context. I suspect Whitehead drew upon them here because the second paragraph mentions "the components which are together in experience," while the primary emphasis of the first two paragraphs of this section (II.9.2) is on "togetherness in experience." But the new emphasis these paragraphs introduce concerns the activity of the subject in unifying the given components, although the first paragraph simply repeats earlier analysis of the components of experience in terms of universals and particulars. ¹⁴

On the other hand, they represent slightly later thinking by Whitehead than his initial material (II.7.1) because now he supplements the sensationalist doctrine’ (constituted by subjectivist and sensationalist principles, both rejected) with a ‘subjectivist doctrine’ he now accepts. This doctrine appears to affirm the subjectivist bias, and is acceptable when not combined with the ‘sensationalist doctrine.’ This seems to be an intermediate step on the way to reconceiving the subjectivist principle, as the next passage indicates.

B. A passage originally placed just after this initial discussion¹⁵ consists in all of the final section of "The Subjectivist Principle" (II 7.5), except for these two insertions:

(c) "The reformed subjectivist principle adopted by the philosophy of organism is merely an alternative statement of the principle of relativity. This principle states that it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming.’ Thus all things are to be conceived as qualifications of actual occasions. According to the ninth Category of Explanation, how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is. This principle states that the being of a res vera is constituted by its ‘becoming.’ The way in which one actual entity is qualified by other actual entities is the ‘experience’ of the actual world enjoyed by that actual entity, as subject" (PR 166/252).¹⁶

(d) "Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness" (PR 167/254).

These four editorial insertions are the only passages naming our famous principle by its standard name! If we remove them, our chapter (II.7) has nothing to say about it, and needs to be read by itself as not involving any contrast between unreformed and reformed subjectivist principles. At the time of initial writing Whitehead had most probably no developed thoughts about "togetherness in experience," nor did he have a concern to contrast this with the ‘subjectivist principle.’

On the other hand, he appears dissatisfied with the narrowness of his initial definition of the subjectivist principle, for this he can only reject, allowing him no scope to express the sense in which he accepts a subjectivist orientation. (If so, another writer would simply modify what he had first written, but not Whitehead! What is written for publication stays written.) He modifies his position by what he writes further, not by modifying the original text. Thus he comments: "According to the philosophy of organism, it is only by the introduction of covert inconsistencies into the subjectivist principle, as here stated, that there can be any escape from what Santayana calls, ‘solipsism of the present moment’" (PR 158/240). The words I have italicized suggest that there might be an alternative formulation of the subjectivist principle not subject to those difficulties.

The subjectivist principle he rejects, "that the datum in the act of experience can be analyzed purely in terms of universals" (PR 157/239), was a staple of Whitehead’s lectures.¹⁷ Yet, as he recognizes, that particular form of the principle, expressed in terms of universals, follows from three assumptions, only the third of which he accepts (PR 157f/239). The third, the reorientation to subjective experience as the primary datum of philosophy, is isolated and named the subjectivist bias: "This is the famous subjectivist bias which entered into modem philosophy through Descartes. In this doctrine Descartes undoubtedly made the greatest philosophical discovery since the age of Plato and Aristotle" (PR 159/241).

On the other hand, Whitehead recognizes that Descartes’ discovery on the side of subjectivism requires balancing by an objectivist’ principle as to the datum of experience" (PR 160/243). As Nobo points out, this cannot be done in terms of a subjectivist principle defined solely in terms of universals, for particulars are needed. But if we ignore all intrusive references to a reformed subjectivist principle, we may see Whitehead working towards a more general version of the subjectivist principle.

The final section (7.5) provides that generalized approach: "The subjectivist principle is that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects" (PR 166/252).¹⁸ This is not yet the reformed subjectivist principle, because the emphasis is upon what is disclosed to subjects rather than upon their unifying activity, but it is a reformulation of what he had originally termed ‘the subjectivist bias.’ Let us call this revision the revised subjectivist principle,’ which is not yet the reformed subjectivist principle.

This strategy means that Whitehead no longer rejects ‘the subjectivist principle’ but only the other philosophic assumptions made in affirming it. "The difficulties of all schools of modem philosophy lie in the fact that, having accepted the subjectivist principle,¹⁹ they continue to use philosophical categories derived from another point of view" (PR 167/253). These other categories were specifically the first and second premises (the acceptance of substance/quality approach and the dictum that a primary substance is always a subject and never a predicate) that were integral parts of the subjectivist principle as initially defined (PR 157/239). Now that they have been removed from the definition, it contains nothing objectionable from a process perspective.²⁰ Whitehead here has shifted his understanding of the ‘subjectivist principle,’ but it has left considerable confusion because he did not then go back and revise his original account (7.1) in line with his new definition,²¹ nor were assertions about the revised subjectivist principle well integrated with the old context.

C. To determine the original meaning of the reformed principle, however, we must turn to a passage tucked away as an insertion in the chapter on "Propositions" (II.9.2) which doesn’t mention the principle by name. The insertion spans two pages, from the middle of the first paragraph (PR 189.30/288.16) to the seventh paragraph (PR 191.11/290.30). The initial part of the first paragraph concerns the truth and falsehood, "and the account of the intuitive perception of truth and falsehood. The former concerns propositions, the latter concerns judgments." The seventh paragraph immediately picks up with this theme: "[Thus a] a judgment is concerned with a conformity of two components within one experience. It is thus a ‘coherence’ theory. . . . ²²

The first paragraph illustrates Whitehead’s practice of including new material within the same paragraph, even though the two topics may be widely divergent. From these concerns about truth and falsehood in the first half, the second half concerns ‘togetherness in experience,’ which is then elaborated upon in the rest of the insertion as the "reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine" (PR 189/288), from which it is but a short step to ‘the reformed subjectivist principle.’²³

This makes for a very strange first paragraph, for there is no real connection between the original talk of propositions and the intrusion of talk about ‘togetherness inexperience.’ It is an independent reflection of Whitehead’s, not growing out of his work with propositions, or with the subjectivist principle either. Its source, I suspect, stems from his attempt to understand how composite unity (the way he understands actuality) can come into being. Originally this is ‘prehensive unity’ or ‘prehensive unification’ (5MW), but in that context it simply meant the way an event was constituted by its relations to all other events; all notions of the subjectivity of prehension are foreign to that context (EWM 23-31). Then it could include efficient causation: others could act upon the actuality in question and form its composite unity, at least in part. In the Giffords draft, the subject in concrescence played an increasingly large part in its determination, but it was always qualified by the other-causation of transition (as then conceived), which constituted the original datum from when the concrescence started.

Within the Giffords draft, to be sure, there is a concern with composite actuality which anticipates some of the features of the reformed subjectivist principle: "In the philosophy of organism it is assumed that an actual entity is composite. ‘Actuality is the fundamental exemplification of composition; all other meanings of ‘composition’ are referent to this root-meaning. But ‘actuality’ is a general term, which merely indicates this ultimate type of composite unity: there are many composite unities to which this general term applies. There is no general act of composition, not expressible in terms of the composite constitutions of the individual occasions" (PR 147f/223f). As yet, however, that composition is not rooted in subjective experience.

The reformed principle begins to emerge as nearly possible with the shift to the final revisions (D), which replaced the unity of an original datum brought about purely by past efficient causes with the multiplicity of the past actualities themselves²⁴ If so, it is up to the experiencing subject to unify them, or bring them together, within concrescence. Before the shift, there were at least two kinds of togetherness, two ways of achieving composite unity: transition, bringing together the objective components of actuality, and concrescence, their subjective unification. After the shift only one, experiential togetherness, was necessary, and that is here generalized to claim, quite boldly, that all (originative) forms of togetherness had to be experiential, subjective in character. The subject is the primary agent of unification. If this is the basic meaning of the reformed subjectivist principle, then it denies any prior stage of transition as essential to becoming, as proposed by Whitehead in the Giffords draft and championed by Nobo. (This, however, does not speak to those meanings of ‘transition’ prevalent in the literature which have been devised on the basis of Whitehead’s final position (in part III of PR).

At this stage, however, Whitehead did not yet conceive God as having physical temporal experience of the world (first reached in stage I: EWM 227-29). Prior to then he not only conceived God to be wholly nontemporal, but it is not generally appreciated that this meant God was nonsubjective as well.²⁵ Hence there was one outstanding exception to the reformed subjectivist principle: the togetherness of the eternal objects was not achieved by any subjective experience. Once God was reconceived as subjectively experiencing, the principle could be asserted.

There might be a few transitional passages conceiving of God as both purely conceptual and yet concrescent, and one of these could be the first section of "Some Derivative Notions" (PR 1.3.1) in its original version. There Whitehead gives an alternative formulation of the ontological principle as: "All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality" (PR 32/48). He uses this generalization to argue that God provides "the ultimate, basic adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects on which creative order depends" (PR 32/48). Previously the ontological principle had concerned actual entities in their composition (see EWM 323f), now Whitehead turns his focus to their composing, their concrescence, their formal reality. For the justification for the composite outcome is to be found in the process of composition.

This notion of togetherness in concrescence is then considered from an epistemological perspective in terms of ‘togetherness in experience.’ The togetherness White-head wishes to speak of will have "that special peculiar meaning of ‘togetherness in experience"' (PR 189/288), since ‘experience’ is the only way we have a purchase on concrescence, the formal reality of anything. Whitehead here identifies the claim that denies any meaning of togetherness not derived from ‘togetherness in experience’ as "the ‘subjectivist doctrine,"’ but it is really his version of the subjectivist orientation of modern philosophy.

These few paragraphs, now buried as the first segment of the insertion in "The Propositions" (II.9.2), tentatively identify his insight as a "reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine" (PR 189/288). It reforms the original subjectivist doctrine (the combination of the subjectivist and sensationalist principles he rejected) by not only repudiating sensationalism but also by reconceiving subjectivity. The newness of his insight is better expressed more precisely, however, by ‘the reformed subjectivist principle’ as reconceiving the second version of the subjectivist principle, i.e. the revised subjectivist principle he accepts, that "the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of [by] subjects" (PR 166/252). It builds on this principle about the contents of experience while adding to it the subjective activity of bringing the contents together.

Armed with his new principle, named in a way relevant to "The Subjectivist Principle" (II.7), Whitehead is prepared to make a few editorial changes in that chapter. The first (a) merely mentions that the new principle will be discussed later (PR 157/238). Whitehead shows a tendency to confuse his second version of the subjectivist principle with the newly discovered reformed version, to think that what he had already articulated in the second section was the reformed version, and could be labeled as such.

The second version (b) states that "the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects" (PR 166/252)²⁶ It is an alternative statement of the principle of relativity, as stated by our third mention of the reformed principle (c). For if every ‘being’ is a potential for every ‘becoming,’ then every becoming (i.e. every subject) will have every being within its experience. The principle of relativity was already part of the Giffords draft²⁷ and did not need the reformed subjectivist principle.

That is not true, however, with respect to the next mentioned principle of process, "the ninth Category of Explanation, how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is. This principle states that the being of a res vera is constituted by its ‘becoming’" (PR 166/252). Yet the first sentence just quoted is also found in the list of metaphysical principles undergirding the Giffords draft (EWM 323). "How an entity becomes" comprises two stages in the Giffords draft, first a stage of transition constituting the original datum, then a stage of concrescence whereby it is subjectively appropriated. This double process gives us the final being of the actual entity. Given the shift in Whitehead’s thinking, expressed by the reformed subjectivist principle, the ‘becoming’ is now identified with the ‘concrescence,’ which is an activity of experience. Then the being, i.e. the objective outcome, is formed by the concrescence: all elements of the composite unity are then formed in the togetherness of experience.

Yet whether or not the other mentions of ‘the reformed subjectivist principle’ refer to that principle or another, the final reference (d) is unmistakable: "Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing. bare nothingness" (PR 167/254). The first and second versions of the subjectivist principle were basically epistemological, analyzing the contents of experience. This reformed principle is ontological, denying any objective being without a correlative subjective becoming.

III.

We may summarize this genetic analysis by suggesting that the ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ is not organically concerned with the epistemological intricacies of the ‘subjectivist principle’ but intrudes upon that discussion from wider, ontological concerns. It signals the deepening of Whitehead’s panpsychism (every actuality has a mental as well as a physical pole) into pansubjectivity (no actualization apart from subjectivity)²⁸ To see how that deepening occurs we need to sketch briefly the history of the concept of subjectivity in Whitehead’s writings.

1. In the early books on the philosophy of nature, such as The Concept of Nature (1920), Whitehead intentionally excluded subjectivity (or mind) from the focus of his concern, which was nature. "Nature is that which we observe in perception through the senses. In this sense-perception we are aware of something which is not thought and which is self-contained for thought. This property of being self-contained for thought lies at the base of natural science. It means that nature can be thought of as a closed system whose mutual relations do not require the expression of the fact that they are thought about" (CN 3).

2. Yet Whitehead was very much aware that, if he were to generalize his philosophy of nature as a metaphysics, some place for mind would have to be found in nature. Many readers have found in his first metaphysical work, Science and the Modern World (1925) a full-blown panpsychism, but this is largely due to the fact that ‘prehension’ in that work is understood in terms of ‘prehension’ in Process and Reality, where every prehension necessarily has its subject. Earlier ‘prehension’ simply meant a concrete fact of relatedness constituting (in part) an event or actual occasion. seems to have been derived as the obverse of extension (cf. EWM 23-31).

Science and the Modern World shares with Process and Reality the idiosyncrasy of containing a major shift, and hence of having been written from two points of view (EWM 2-12). The earlier point of view is embodied in the Lowell Lectures for 1925, which understand events to be infinitely divisible, and to be included within ever larger events without end. The later point of view is to be found in the added material which espouses the temporal atomicity of actual occasions, which cannot actually be further subdivided. Nearly all the passages suggesting panpsychism are to be found in the Lowell Lectures.²⁹ If we applied panpsychism to events of all sizes, then we should have such absurdities as the Spanish and American War enjoying its own subjectivity, as well as the corner grocery, etc. What Whitehead was concerned with in these lectures was to find room for mind in some events, not to claim that it characterized all events.³⁰

One strong reason for supposing that Whitehead is already a panpsychist (in SMW) is the problem of overcoming dualism. Hartshorne has proposed panpsychism as the only alternative to materialism and dualism.³¹ Since Whitehead denies both materialism and dualism (and its variant in biological theory, vitalism), does he not affirm panpsychism? Only if these are the only alternatives. What Whitehead proposes is an ‘event,’ which is perfectly neutral as to what is physical and what is mental, which therefore can be either. His dominant account analyzes the properties of physical actual occasions, but there is also room for the characterization of some events as ego-objects (SMW 151f/218f).

3. (a) Events characterized by ego-objects are reconceived as mental occasions in Religion in the Making (1926), now contrasted with ‘physical occasions,’ descendants of the ordinary actual occasions of the previous book. Mental occasions simply designate those events which we normally consider to be minds having consciousness. There are routes of mind (mental occasions) and routes of matter (physical occasions). As an empirical fact, "routes of mind and routes of matter [occur] in the very closest connection" (RM 106/110), but the question whether there are any purely spiritual beings other than God, mental routes without attending physical routes, is left open. It is not claimed here that every mental occasion must be derivative from some physical occasion.

(b) Whitehead is also concerned to explain the creative advance into novelty in Religion in the Making (RM 107ff./111 ff.), for which he introduces the contrast between ground and ideal consequent. The ground is simply that which is already actual as entering into the birth of the new occasion (RM 109/112f.) Yet if there is to be any novelty whatsoever, there must be a new set of ideal forms to be actualized. David Ray Griffin then asks, "How could ideal possibilities be relevant to events, devoid of mentality?"³² Knowing the answer from Whitehead’s later writings, we may wonder, "How, indeed?" But we need to remember that prehension was not generalized to include conceptual prehension until later (PR). At this time forms merely ‘ingress.’ Neither conceptual prehension nor the requirement that conceptual prehension presupposes that mentality is present here.

The first example that Whitehead draws upon in illustrating the contrast between ground and ideal consequent is vibration (RM 111f/ 114f). This is a favorite example, for it is a very widespread phenomenon in the physical world (electromagnetic radiation, waves of all kinds) which Whitehead was quite familiar with from his early studies. It propagates a definite pattern, such that every other event is the same, yet contrasting with the intervening ones. Vibrations involve novelty -- minimal, to be sure -- but the two-paragraph analysis makes no mention of mentality whatsoever.

Then Whitehead selects an example of novelty from the opposite end of the spectrum, the mind: "Both mind and body refer to their life-history of separate concrete occasions" (RM 112/116). ‘Mental occasions’ are introduced to designate such occasions of the mind or consciousness. He does recognize that ‘immediate experience’ may have either of two meanings, depending on whether it refers to the body or the mind: "It may mean a complete concretion of physical relationships in the unity of a blind perceptivity. In this sense ‘immediate experience’ means an ultimate physical fact. But in a secondary, and more usual, sense, it means the consciousness of physical experience. Such consciousness is a mental occasion" (PR 113f/118).

It is clear that ‘blind perceptivity’ is not conscious, but this may still suggest that it is somehow subconscious, and therefore still subjective. Whitehead is primarily interested in excluding consciousness and does not explicitly address the issue of subjectivity. "A concretion of physical relationships," a pattern of efficient causation, however, is not normally very subjective, and "a unity of blind perceptivity" is simply another way of describing ‘prehensive unity’ (SMW) without introducing that neologism. ‘Perception’ (as used in RM), especially when blind, does not entail subjectivity, despite its ordinary connotations.

Another indication of Whitehead’s nonpanpsychistic leanings in Religion in the Making is his use of ‘mental occasion’ and ‘physical occasion’ to name particular kinds of actual occasions. The term ‘occasion’ becomes ambiguous, meaning either a concrete whole or one of its parts, once these terms merely designate aspects, as they do in "Time." Whitehead is not likely to have devised such terminology except as the outcome of a previous theory having distinct types of actual occasions.

4. The (September) 1926 essay on "Time" does espouse panpsychism insofar as "each occasion is dipolar, and . . .one pole is the physical occasion and the other pole is the mental occasion" (EWM 303#3).³³ By identifying ‘ground’ with ‘physical occasion’ and ‘ideal consequent’ with ‘mental occasion,’ Whitehead effected considerable simplification of theory, further specifying it. It assigned a mental occasion to every physical occasion, and vice versa, and made every mental occasion derivative from its physical occasion. The concept of a ‘mental occasion’ was considerably enlarged by this generalization.

We need to recognize that it was the problem of novelty, and not the problem of overcoming dualism, that led Whitehead to embrace panpsychism. Novelty is no casual adjunct of his theory. Each occasion is self-creative (RM 98f/101f), and whatever is created is to that extent new. The ‘ideal consequent’ named this novel element, but did not explain its effectiveness. ‘Mental occasion’ as an aspect of every actuality at least provides a way of accounting for novelty: the new can first be entertained in the mind before it is actualized concretely.

That is as far as the texts permit us to go, but we may speculate a bit further. Ideal forms cannot directly, or better, unilaterally affect physical occasions, in contrast to efficient causes. Forms are effective only through the medium of a mind that can entertain them, and be influenced by them. This influence is not automatic, but depends upon the responsiveness of the mind to the forms. This is a form of indirect or multilateral causation which is only effective by means of a combination of different types of causation -- in this case, the ideal forms and the responsive mental occasion.

As we shall see, one of Whitehead’s major contributions to philosophy is the notion of multilateral causation. It is present in germ in the theory of "Time" (1926), but in a mixed form, because it is combined with a traditional understanding of unilateral efficient causation. That would change with the introduction of the reformed subjectivist principle.

5. As long as there were physical occasions that were independent actual occasions (perhaps with negligible mentality), ego-objects could be reconceived as contrasting mental occasions. Once every actual occasion was constituted by both a physical occasion and a mental occasion, the ‘occasion’ comes to mean both a concrete act of becoming and a phase in that becoming. Gradually Whitehead came to abandon that terminology for a new way of conceiving the act of becoming from the standpoint of the mental phase, for that was the way in which the new occasion was self-creative. This is the activity which makes the occasion concrete; hence it is a ‘concretion,’ or a ‘concrescence’ according to the preferred term.

From the standpoint of the concrescence, conceived as an integration of subjective feeling, the previous physical occasion appears only as an achieved datum for that concrescence. "This datum is ‘decided’ by the settled world. It is ‘prehended’ by the new superseding entity. The datum is the objective content of the experience. . . the new concrescence starts from this datum" (PR 150/227; cf. EWM 189-91).

Thus from ‘actual occasion’ and ‘ego-object’ Whitehead proceeds to ‘datum’ and concrescence’ in the Giffords draft, by way of ‘physical occasion’ and ‘mental occasion.’ That intermediate usage has almost completely disappeared from the pages of Process and Reality.³⁴

Except for having clearly situated the creative self within what had been the ‘mental occasion,’ the conceptuality of the Giffords draft does not advance Whitehead’s theory of subjectivity. Like its predecessor, this theory is panpsychist in the sense that every actuality enjoys mentality as a way of accounting for novelty, but there are still processes by which composite unity is achieved which do not involve subjectivity. In particular there is the act of transition achieving the original datum from whence the concrescence starts.³⁵

6. All of this is reconceived at the outset of part III (of PR). Instead of proceeding from a single unified datum, the initial phase finds the concrescent subject itself prehending a multiplicity of past actual occasions. The way these are to be unified and integrated into the final satisfaction is the task of the subject working through various phases of conceptual reproduction, reversion, transmutation, etc. The past multiplicity is not first unified and then appropriated, but the process of subjective appropriation is the means of achieving such unity.

The earlier ‘mental occasion,’ and its successor in the notion of ‘concrescence’ in the Giffords draft made use of the notion of multilateral causation, however implicitly, because two different factors were required: (a) the novel forms, and (b) the response of the subject as to how the novel forms would be actualized. It seems that any novelty requires multiple types of causes, for any unilateral causation would simply reiterate in the effect what was already in the cause. Even if there were many causes of the same type, they would only produce a combination of those causes, not a new effect.

On the other hand, this multilateral causation in the achievement of novelty was hemmed in by the unilateral causation of efficient causation, which Whitehead retained with respect to the determination of the original datum of concrescence. The transformation of this datum into data for unification made it possible to conceive of concrescence as a pure instance of multilateral causation, in which efficient causation from the past is balanced by final causation in the integration of these efficient causes. Also, the unification of all causal factors in an act of becoming can now be vested in its subject.³⁶

Once God is reconceived as achieving the togetherness of the eternal objects in experience,³⁷ Whitehead can generalize his findings: all togetherness is togetherness in experience (i.e. within concrescence). ‘Togetherness’ had been used by Whitehead previously to mean the unity of the concrete, i.e., that which has grown together (in concrescence): "Actuality is through and through togetherness -- togetherness of otherwise isolated eternal objects, and togetherness of all actual occasions" (SMW 174/251). But now the stress is not so much on unity as on the (subjective) process of unification, the growing together. This sort of togetherness only happens within concrescence. Since concrescence necessarily depends upon subjectivity for the unification of its elements, there can be no such togetherness except in subjective experience for actual occasions. This rules out the old meaning of ‘transition,’ whereby there was a purely objective unification of the past to obtain an original datum from whence concrescence starts (as in the Giffords Draft: EWM 177-210).

In his final reflection on the nature of creativity,³⁸ Whitehead remarks:

"‘Together’ is a generic term covering the various special ways in which various sorts of entities are ‘together’ in any actual occasion. Thus ‘together’ presupposes the notions ‘creativity,’ ‘many,’ ‘one,’ ‘identity’ and ‘diversity.’. . . The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves. . ." (PR 21/32). The ‘many,’ in themselves do not constitute a togetherness, but the many are felt (experienced) as together within concrescence, which brings them together to form a new composite unity. Individual actual occasions are composite unities, but only as the result of experiential togetherness. "The contrary doctrine, that there is a ‘togetherness’ not derivative from experiential togetherness" leads to such difficulties that Whitehead rejects it (PR 190/288).

7. Meanwhile, when Whitehead was still drafting the Giffords, and had not yet undergone the shift he was to characterize in terms of the reformed subjectivist principle, he expressed his rejection of what he called "the subjectivist principle" of the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers (II.7.1). This was a complex and overly cumbersome principle, since it not only reflected Descartes’ subjectivist turn which Whitehead endorsed, but additional Cartesian substantialist assumptions he rejected.

There seems to be no anticipation of a contrasting subjectivist principle Whitehead could endorse, other than the claim that it should be balanced by some sort of objectivist principle. Whitehead’s rhetorical position on the subjectivist principle seems to be: let’s stamp it out.

Later, however (in II.7.5), he does draft a version of the subjectivist principle he can endorse, which limits itself to the subjectivist bias while excluding other assumptions. At this stage, however, he does not tell his readers that there is a difference between the principle he now accepts and the earlier principle he rejects. In formulating the latter discussion, the former does not seem fresh in his mind.

Still later, this oversight is "corrected" by labeling his second subjectivist principle the reformed subjectivist principle, using the device of four insertions introduced after the major shift.

The problem is that the second subjectivist principle is not the same as the reformed subjectivist principle. The second principle asserts "that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects" (PR 166/253), while the reformed principle holds that the process of togetherness can be found only in subjective experience. Yet since both express facets of Whitehead’s radical emphasis upon subjectivity in his philosophy, we can readily understand why one eager to read later interpretation into earlier statements may have supposed that his second principle expressed what he meant by the reformed principle, and why this title, derived from the struggles about how to formulate precisely the process of actualization, could be superimposed upon a subjectivist principle born out of Whitehead’s epistemological debate with his philosophical predecessors.

IV.

Now we are in a position to appreciate the significance and implications of Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist principle:

It is the basis of his pansubjectivity, that every actual entity enjoys its measure of subjectivity, and its way of being affected by other actualities and entities is by means of subjective prehension.

This is a form of panpsychism in the sense that every actuality has a mental pole of conceptual prehension and a physical pole of physical prehension, but it is more than this. Pansubjectivity is a deepening of panpsychism. While earlier every actuality had its mental occasion, its corresponding physical occasion was unaffected by subjectivity. Now the subject prehends both conceptually and physically. Previously there was no novelty without subjectivity; now there can be no actuality without subjectivity. For actuality is the composite unity resultant upon concrescence or experiential togetherness.

Pansubjectivity also places subjectivity within nature in a much more thoroughgoing way than panpsychism. Panpsychism reconciles mind and nature, but leaves freedom solely to mind. Nature is the domain of efficient causation, and can be quite deterministic. If subjectivity underlies both physical and conceptual prehension, and is the indispensable means for their integration, then freedom (the scope of subjectivity) is a minimal prerequisite for all actuality.

While Whitehead seems not to have made this fully explicit, experiential togetherness enables us to understand ‘present’ and ‘past’ in terms of their metaphysical qualities. We clearly experience in the present; the only questions are whether experience also applies to the past, and whether present immediacy can be identified with the subjectivity of concrescence.

The earlier theory of ‘mental occasion’ and ‘physical occasion’ offers here no sure guide. While ‘mental occasions’ may be present, a past mental occasion seems no contradiction in terms. If there is first a physical occasion superseded by the mental occasion (EWM 303f), then the physical occasion had to be present before the mental occasion could be present. So we can have both past mental occasions and present physical ones.

Experiential togetherness means, however, that the present concrescence must result in composite unity. More importantly, all composite unity must be the result of concrescence, since there is no togetherness not derivative from experiential togetherness.³⁹ Whatever results from present concrescence must be past, the objective datum of prehension. Nothing subjective could be past, for to be subjective means to be engaged in a process of growth into one determinate actuality, and the past would lack the subjectivity of becoming. Whatever is to be prehended of actuality, i.e. an actual datum, must lack subjectivity of becoming. In some such way we can justify Whitehead’s practice of never permitting the prehension of other subjectivities or unfinished actualities. If so, we can summarize these findings: whatever is objective, is past, and vice versa; while whatever is subjective, is present, and vice versa.

Because it entails that there is no unilateral causation, since all actualization requires the subjective integration, the reformed subjectivist principle requires that we rethink creation. Whitehead did not wait until he had that principle firmly in mind before criticizing inherited notions of creation. Opposition to unilateral divine causation, which is epitomized in the traditional conception of creation ex nihilo, was a very large factor in his earlier atheism, and he did not introduce ‘God’ into his philosophy (SMW) until he had devised a concept (the principle of limitation) which was not simultaneously the creator of the world. Nevertheless, though it plays no role in Whitehead’s own development, the reformed subjectivist principle does by itself entail the rethinking of any unilateral act such as creation.

Creation and actualization have been traditionally separated in order to preserve creation as a purely divine act producing being, which is then capable of further actualization. Multilateral causation integrates creation and actualization, requiring efficient (or material) causes from the past, novel forms from God, and subjective integration. This is usually considered simply as actualization, but it is really creation: the coming into being of an occasion which heretofore had no being. Becoming for Whitehead, by the time he arrived at the reformed subjectivist principle, was not merely dynamic activity contrasted to static rest, but creation as opposed to mere existence. Yet this was hardly creation as traditionally conceived. Instead of being one unique transtemporal act by an external creator, it was pluralized and temporalized as an infinite series of immanent finite acts in the world.

If all unification is subjective, then there can be no unified being somehow underlying the concrescent activity, as is explicitly held in substance-theory, and which implicitly guided the theory of Giffords draft. There the original datum could function as the one unified being for the concrescent process. To be sure, there are beings ingredient in the concrescence as understood by the final theory. It is becoming, not a sheer nothing. But these beings are the prior actual unities prehended. They constitute the many which must become one before the being of the concrescence itself arises. Self-unification in the sense of being the unification of itself can only emerge as a result at the end, not underlie the process. Self-creation is not possible in the sense of having a being exist before it was created. It is possible only if the becoming of this being can be conceived as the agent of this process. If so, becoming can be understood in terms of becoming, but not m terms of being.

Ordinary theory holds that a being which enjoys subjectivity is simultaneously subject and object. Whitehead has diffracted these properties into their temporal modes, such that subject is not yet object, and object is no longer subject. If we accord the object the status of being, the subject is not yet being although not for that reason nothing, but that which is becoming being.

The clearest expression of the reformed subjectivist principle is to be found in Adventures of Ideas: "Every meaning of ‘together’ is to be found in various stages of analysis of occasions of experience. No things are ‘together’ except in experience; and no things are, in any sense of ‘are,’ except as components in experience or as immediacies of process which are occasions in self-creation" (AI 304).

These are some of the ways in which pansubjectivity, enunciated by way of the reformed subjectivist principle, goes beyond what can properly be assigned to panpsychism, which for Whitehead asserts that every actuality has both a physical and a mental side. Panpsychism was introduced to account for mind in nature, and to explain novelty, but pansubjectivity goes to the very heart of actualization itself.

For a principle which makes such a brief appearance upon the stage of Whitehead’s thought, the reformed subjectivist principle epitomizes much with far reaching implications.

References

EWM -- Lewis S. Ford. The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

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

PS 6 -- James E. Lindsey, Jr. "The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn Revisited." Process Studies 6/2 (Summer 1976): 97-102.

PS 7 -- David Ray Griffin. "The Subjectivist Principle and its Reformed and Unreformed Versions." Process Studies 7/1 (Spring 1977): 27-36.

RG -- Schubert M. Ogden. The Reality of God. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. WM -- Ivor Leclerc. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958.

WMES -- Jorge Luis Nobo. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Notes

1Ogden’s own interpretation is somewhat at variance from this prevalent interpretation. He seems to interpret Whitehead’s "nothing apart from subjects" to mean "nothing but subjects": "According to this principle, we can give an adequate answer to the metaphysical question of the meaning of ‘reality’ only by imaginatively generalizing ‘elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects.’ In other words, the principle requires that we take as the experiential basis of all our most fundamental concepts the primal phenomenon of our own existence as experiencing subjects or selves" (ibid.).

Michael Welker suggests that Ogden’s interpretation "resembles less an element of Whitehead’s theory than an assertion of Fichte or of Tillich." Universalitaet Gottes und Relativitaet der Welt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1981), p. 149.

2While EWM analyzes thirteen the major shifts (A-M) in Whitehead’s philosophy during the composition of PR, it fails to appreciate the role of the reformed subjective principle in this process.

3 I discuss this book in detail in "Recent Interpretations of Whitehead’s Writings," The Modern Schoolman 45/1 (November 1987), 47-59.

4The meaning of that claim is clarified with respect to Aristotle in Sheilah O’Flynn Brennan, "Substance Within Substance," Process Studies 7/1 (Spring 1977), 14-26.

51n line with this editorial revision, Whitehead may have also made three additions to his original discussion of experient togetherness (in II.9.2): "This reformed version of the subjectivist doctrine is the doctrine of the philosophy of organism" (PR 189.430. Also the clarification in the next sentence, "that there is a ‘togetherness’ not derivative from experiential togetherness," (PR 190.1-2), and "(as here stated)" (PR 190.34). Without these passages it seems evident that Whitehead was thinking of different versions of the subjectivist principle, not of a reformed subjectivist principle, in the initial conceptual revision.

61t is the sort of pithy saying that might have occurred to Whitehead anytime, which he then anchored in his text at the end of that section. (Then there could have been even later additions.) But the saying could not have been formulated this way until after the terminology of ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ had been introduced.

7Close scrutiny of the text leads him to substitute ‘subjectivist’ for ‘sensationalist’ (principle) at PR 158.13/239, a suggestion adopted by the corrected edition.

8In particular, the distinction between SPr and the reformed subjectivist principle seems over subtle. It obliges Griffin to seek the referent for ‘this doctrine’ other than in ‘this doctrine’ in the previous sentence (PR 162.20-26/242.9-18; see PS 7:30 and n. 4.) To be sure, "Descartes’ discovery that subjective experiencing is the primary metaphysical situation" is the ‘subjectivist bias,’ but it is also its lineal descendent, SPr. This may be a broader principle, but Whitehead identifies it with his version of it, i.e. the reformed subjectivist principle.

9Griffin (PS 7:33) suggests that Whitehead use "the reformed version" instead of "this reformed version" as given in the text. While Whitehead was probably thinking about the ‘subjectivist doctrine’ in broad terms that could be affirmed by other philosophers (e.g. Kant: PR 190/289), he had as yet only talked about his understanding of the subjectivist doctrine in terms of experiential togetherness. The demonstrative "this" indicates, rather awkwardly, that the subjectivist doctrine just described is the reformed version of that doctrine. A simple "the" would suggest that the subjectivist doctrine just described was the subjectivist doctrine in general, of which there are different versions.

101t appears to be a chapter formed primarily by editorial decision, since the middle sections (7.2-4) on consciousness and subjective form have little organic connection with the end-sections (7.1, 7.5) embracing them.

11According to the original Macmillan edition, Whitehead had originally written ‘II’ (CPR, corrigenda to 189.18). He may have originally intended this material to follow the first section, later using it as 7.5 to "sandwich" the other material (7.2-4) in this newly formed chapter.

12While this sentence does not entail the reformed subjectivist principle, its use of physical feeling’ suggests it is later than the Gifford’s draft (EWM 213-17). It may or may not have been inserted together with the sentence mentioning the principle.

13I take the original sentence to be transitional, so the passage originally began with the second sentence "Kant adopted a subjectivist position."

14The first paragraph on Kant is rather puzzling in its present context (as part of 11.9.2). It appears that Whitehead wanted to include the second paragraph on togetherness here, but included the paragraph before it either inadvertently or for editorial reasons.

15See the previous note.

16 The reason the entire passage, and not just the first sentence is deemed an insertion is that, although the Gifford’s draft had the fourth category of explanation, and probably the ninth, it did not refer to them this way. The fourth category of explanation, for example, was then the third metaphysical principle (PR 212/324).

17Thus lecturing to his students at Harvard on December 3, 1927, Whitehead defined the subjectivist principle as "The data can (must) be characterized in terms of universals." Those same notes define the sensationalist principle as "These universals involved in data are of the sort whose ingression into experience is called sensation," which is quite at variance with the definition given in the book (PR 157/239). Since the latter definition depends heavily on the concept of subjective form, a late idea in the Gifford’s draft (EWM 205-207), I propose that this section was originally composed in the summer of 1927 with a definition of the sensationalist principle like that of these notes.

I am quoting from the manuscript notes made by Edwin L. Marvin of Whitehead Lectures 1927-1928, and available at the Library of the Center for Process Studies, Claremont, California 91711, p. 64. Prof. Rosina Schmitt, St. Benedict’s College, called this to my attention.

18See the emphatic comment at 166.36 by the editors of the Corrected Edition that this is not the original subjectivist principle.

19This does not mean they have accepted the revised subjectivist principle, as a reading of this section (7.5) in terms of its opening and closing inserted remarks, and in opposition to the first section (7.5), might indicate. Few philosophers before Whitehead, if any, have accepted the revised principle.

20James E. Lindsey, Jr., "The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn Revisited," Process Studies 6/2 (Summer 1976), 97-102 argues on the basis of the definitions of the first section (7/1) that ‘subjectivist principle’ [originally rejected by Whitehead] should be replaced by ‘subjectivist bias’ [which he accepts] in the final section (7.5). David Ray Griffin, then in process of editing the Corrected Edition, argues for the original text: "The Subjectivist Principle and its Reformed and Unreformed Versions," Process Studies 7/1 (Spring 1977), 27-36. I agree with both accounts by recognizing that Whitehead shifted his understanding of ‘subjectivist principle’ between the two accounts.

21Jorge Nobo observes: "The terminological carelessness with which Whitehead presents his views on the subjectivist doctrine and the subjectivist principle is truly incredible (WMES 416n6).

22The text now reads "This judgment. . .", slightly altered to fit its present content. The bracketed portion seeks to formulate a possibly original form.

23Yet why is this not part of Whitehead’s explicit discussion of "The Subjectivist Principle" (11.7.1 or 11.7.5) instead of being struck away in an obscure passage on propositions? I suspect it may well be a case of the tail wagging the dog, and that we can best understand the nature of this insertion from its ending. It ends with a paragraph containing this sentence: "The theory of judgment in the philosophy of organism can equally well be described as a ‘correspondence’ theory or as a ‘coherence’ theory" (PR 190/290).

Whitehead had already proposed both a coherence and a correspondence theory in the next paragraph (returning to the original passage beyond the insertion), but here he sought to introduce another formulation of the correspondence theory, based in part on the notion that we experience particulars as well as universals. This in turn is tied to Whitehead’s claim that we really experience actualities and not just sensations of them, which includes in its wake the first part of that paragraph as well as the two preceding ones.

Thus this insertion consists of three segments: (1) 2 1/2 paragraphs on ‘experiential togetherness; (2) 2 1/2 paragraphs which fit by doctrine the initial discussion of the subjectivist principle (11.7.1) and may have originally belonged there (see A); and (3) an alternative correspondence theory. The first segment, because of its (somewhat superficial) resemblance with "the components which are together in experience" (PR 190/289) of the second, may have led Whitehead to pinch off the middle segment from its original locus. Then the tie-in between the second and third segments, and the relevance of the new correspondence theory to the old, would have led him to introduce all of this material, all three segments, into his chapter on "The Propositions" (II.9.2).

24EWM 211-17. The details of this central transition, which involve the introduction of subjective form, the distinction between negative and positive prehension, the identification of feeling with (positive) prehension, and an analysis of the key section (PR III.1.2), are explored in "The Concept of ‘Process’: From Transition’ to ‘Concrescence,"’ pp. 73-101 in Whitehead and The Idea of Process, ed. Harald Holz and Ernest Wolf-Gazo (Freiburg: Alber Verlag, 1984).

The revised subjectivist principle does not seem to be a factor precipitating this transition. Rather it can be construed as reflective generalization based upon the results of the transition.

25The prevailing opinion appears to hold that Whitehead adopted personalistic theism in RM; at least that was my contention in EWM, chapter 6. Detailed examination of the issue has now convinced me otherwise: Whitehead generally held God to be either nontemporal and therefore nonsubjective (so Plato) or temporal and therefore subjective. See my essay, "When did Whitehead Conceive God to be Personal?," forthcoming in the Anglican Theological Review.

26This passage already connects the subjectivist principle with the ontological principle, but it lacks the thrust of later claims. The quotation continues: "Process is the becoming of experience. It follows that the philosophy of organism entirely accepts the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy. It also accepts Hume’s doctrine that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience. This is the ontological principle" (PR 166/252f.)

Yet according to the original ontological principle, all reasons were vested in prior actualities, and these prior actualities had to be received into experience to be effective (EWM 3230. Nothing here requires the augmentation of the ontological principle by vesting reasons in the concrescing actuality, which is the basis for the later connection to the reformed subjectivist principle based upon Whitehead’s later shift.

275ee note 19.

28This systematic difference between panpsychism and pansubjectivity is explored in the middle section of my "Afterword" (pp. 322-31) to Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline (New York: Fordham University Press, 1983).

29The one exception is the fourth paragraph from the end of the chapter on "Abstraction": "So far I have merely been considering an actual occasion on the side of its full concreteness. It is this side of the occasion in virtue of which it is an event in nature. But a natural event, in this sense of the term, is only an abstraction from a complete actual occasion. A complete occasion includes that which in cognitive [i.e. conscious] experience takes the form of memory, anticipation, imagination, and thought" (SMW 170/246). There is ambiguity here: is a natural event, since fully concrete, an independent actuality, or is it only an aspect of a complete actual occasion having some mind, which alone is independent? From the standpoint of Whitehead’s later philosophy, to be sure, the second alternative will be preferred, but from where he was in the argument then, the first is more probable. More likely Whitehead was deeply divided on the issue, and let this studied ambiguity express his stance.

We should notice that the very same ambiguity is present a year later: "The most complete concrete fact is dipolar, physical and mental" (RM 114/118). It does not say that every concrete fact is dipolar, or every concrete fact must be complete in this sense.

30See my essay "From Pre-Panpsychism to Pansubjectivity," pp. 41-61 in Faith and Creativity: Essays in Honor of Eugene Peters, ed. by George Nordgulen and George W Shields (St. Louis: CPB Press, 1987) for the further development of this theme. In EWM I used the term ‘pansubjective’ to indicate these elements placing mind within nature, but I think that was an error, for the Lowell Lectures do not attempt to generalize mind’ at all, and ‘pansubjectivity’ better expresses the position Whitehead latter achieved with the reformed subjectivist principle.

31This is forcefully argued in Eugene H. Peters, Hartshorne and Neoclassical Metaphysics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), chapter 3.

32David Ray Griffin, Critical Study of Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Process Studies 15/3 (Fall 1986), 197f.

33This is not panpsychism in the Leibnizean sense of pluralistic idealism, where matter is conceived as the aggregation of tiny minds.

Nor is subjectivity differentiated yet from mentality.

34His Harvard Lectures for the fall of 1926 did continue the conceptuality of physical and mental occasions. See EWM 311#13f.

35 I earlier argued that a reconception of Zeno’s arguments led to the abandonment of the conceptuality of physical and mental occasions (EWM 153), but I no longer believe that would be necessary. The issue hinges principally on whether PR 68.18-69.26 (106.7-107.35), in which Whitehead lays out his analysis of Zeno in terms of acts of becoming, is a later insertion in "The Extensive Continuum" (11.2.2). The rest of the section is clearly an insertion based on the notion of ‘subjective aim’ (G), but the middle material is more problematic. If this reflection did motivate Whitehead to abandon the terminology of mental occasions, it would have to be very early, since that term has vanished from the book.

On the other hand, in the paragraph just preceding that portion, Whitehead writes as if he were not going to expound the argument there, but simply refer to earlier expositions of it. The portion may have been inserted when Whitehead reflected on the significance of his basic shift for the epochal theory. According to that shift, there were not two acts of becoming, an act of transition and an act of concrescence for every occasion, but only one, an act of togetherness in experience. Thus he sums up: "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. . ." (PR 69/107). What is denied are not the phases of becoming into which he proceeds to analyze concrescence, but the act of becoming which transition, in his earlier theory, had provided.

36 There remains a vestige of unilateral causation with respect to the first categoreal obligation of Subjective Unity. There is perspectival elimination from the data prehended for the concrescing occasion, although it is not clear by whom.

375ee my forthcoming essay, "When did Whitehead conceive God to be personal," and section I.C above.

38Whitehead’s discussion of the category of the ultimate may very well have been his final contribution to the composition of Process and Reality. It is absent from student notes as late as October 1928 (EWM 240).

39There may be one exception: complex eternal objects. Whether this exception exists or not depends on whether nontemporal concrescence is really possible, and if so whether it is the divine envisagement which brings about the formation of such complex eternal objects. Here Whitehead may well be hampered from achieving unrestricted generalization by his independent doctrine that the eternal objects are uncreated.

"For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience" (PR 351). The action of this fourth phase, however, requires that actual occasions prehend the consequent nature of God. Yet it would seem that the consequent nature cannot be prehended. The consequent nature constitutes an everlasting concrescence, having no end (finis), and actual entities cannot be prehended while in concrescence. Yet it seems that if the consequent nature cannot be prehended, it cannot be effective. It could have no influence on any actuality of the world.

The issue is a difficult one. As the preceding essay by Denis Hurtubise shows Whitehead was hard pressed to find an adequate solution, and his successors have tried with little success. Now Palmyre Oomen has proposed a way out. As far as I have been able to determine this is the first fully warranted solution which is able to show how the consequent nature can be prehended.¹ I must confess that prior to her essay I really did not think it would be possible.²

Her approach depends upon a very strong primordial nature. God eternally envisages not only the pure possibilities, but also every possible situation in which these pure possibilities might be actualized. Then whatever actual situation God experiences, God already (Or more precisely, eternally) has the conceptual means whereby that situation can be unified. If so, every state in God is at all times determinate, and hence prehensible. The consequent nature is incomplete, because further experiences can be added to it, but this incompleteness does not undercut its determinateness, and this is all that prehension requires.

Besides rendering prehension of the consequent nature possible, her solution explains how we can be conscious of God. Consciousness requires the complex integration of physical and conceptual feelings (PR 266f). Consciousness of the consequent nature, to be sure, is rare. It refers to those "somewhat exceptional elements in our conscious experience -- those elements which may roughly be classed" as religious intuitions (PR 343). John Cobb recently has given a fine account of these prehensions of the consequent nature.³ Without an adequate account of our consciousness of God, here achieved by prehension of the consequent nature, these intuitions would have no rational justification that they really came from the divine. This would seriously weaken their empirical warrant.

Moreover, Oomen’s theory responds to a problem few other accounts have even considered: how are the appropriate initial aims specified for particular occasions? The occasion itself, as yet bereft of any aim, cannot itself select the appropriate initial aim from the multitude of aims God offers. On the societal model, the immediate past divine occasion extends throughout the entire universe. How can the nascent occasion ever hope to select the right aim from this vastness? But it is equally a problem on the entitative model. Yet if, as Oomen proposes, the aim is that valued possibility by which that occasion’s world is unified in the divine experience, then the aim will be the one most appropriate for that occasion.

Nevertheless, there are difficulties inherent in the solution.⁵ It enlarges the scope of what is nontemporally valued to include not only all pure possibilities but also all real possibilities. Thus, pure possibilities are entertained in terms of all the situations in which they could possibly be actualized. Real possibilities constitute all the possible combinations of past actual occasions which could form the basis for concrescence. If so, nontemporal valuation preempts any role for divine temporal valuation. Then the first phase does the work of the third phase: "The particular providence for particular occasions" (PR 351) is achieved nontemporally, apart from any experience of the actual world. For many of us, the prehension of God’s consequent nature was important precisely for divine temporal valuation. Thus the key question is not simply, can the consequent nature be prehended? Oomen has shown that it can. The key question becomes: can God’s temporal evaluation be effective for initial aims if the consequent nature could be prehended?

In working out my response, I shall be developing what I consider the primordial nature must be if we are to be able to prehend the consequent nature. She did not work this out in detail in her essay, and the extensive account in her dissertation is inaccessible to most of us, since it is written in Dutch. So my portrayal of "her position" is really a reconstructed one, and probably not her own. But I submit that this is what she needs to hold to achieve the goal of her essay.

In a small way, this issue functions like Kant’s thing-in-itself. The post-Kantian German idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) all sought to reformulate Kant’s philosophy to overcome the difficulties which the thing-in-itself introduced. To do so, however, led them to depart from the master. Post-Whiteheadians, recognizing that an everlasting concrescence could not be prehended,⁶ modified it into an everlasting order of divine occasions. Neo-Kantians are calling us back to Kant by the expedient of simply bracketing the problem of the thing-in-self. As a "neo-Whiteheadian," Oomen likewise draws back and regroups: her interpretation can explain the text, all except that one little paragraph about the fourth phase. Even this paragraph might be accounted for,⁷ but only by retreating from the project of showing how God’s on-going experience of the world and temporal valuation can be made effective in the world.

Whitehead has provided us with the logical tools to make the distinction between pure and real possibility precise. A pure possibility is an eternal object, and can be nontemporally prehended. Actual occasions, of course, are temporally prehended. There is, however, a hybrid entity which combines actuality and possibility. A proposition links a pure possibility with a certain set of indicated actual occasions as its subjects. This theory of propositions (PR 184-207) is remarkable for the co-author of Principia Mathematica since it abandons its claim that the subjects of logical propositions can be imaginary. "The present king of France is bald" is a perfectly good proposition for Principia. It is not for Aristotle, who required his subjects to be actual. Whitehead here sides with Aristotle, for a proposition with an imaginary subject is merely a complex eternal object. It is not the hybrid essentially referring to actualities.⁸

Not all propositions must be real possibilities, but all real possibilities are propositions, indicating for an eternal object all those actual occasions required for its possible actualization. It would make more sense to reconceive initial subjective aims in terms of propositional feelings.⁹ The indicated logical subjects of the proposition can specify the standpoint (PR 283) whereas a pure eternal object cannot. By forming the requisite proposition God can particularize the aim to its appropriate recipient, which otherwise is quite inexplicable. Yet the exigencies of his system require Whitehead to draw back. He can allow only the nontemporal valuation of eternal objects, because only they are prehensible. Propositional feelings would bring in the consequent nature, and this is problematic. Oomen generalizes her reliance on eternal objects alone for initial aims. In effect, she transforms real possibilities into eternal pure possibilities.

By restricting himself to divine nontemporal valuation, Whitehead seems to undercut many of his best insights about value. Value does not pertain so much to the pure possibility itself as to context of its actualization. Thus, "there is not just one ideal ‘order’ which all actual entities should attain and fail to attain. In each case there is an ideal peculiar to each particular actual entity, and arising from the dominant components in its phase of ‘givenness’" (PR 84). Not the possibility itself, but "Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil" (PR 223). "There is evil when things are at cross purposes" (RM 97). "Evil, triumphant in its enjoyment, is so far good in itself; but beyond itself it is evil in its character of a destructive agent among things greater than itself." "We must conceive the Divine Eros as the active entertainment of all ideals, with the urge to their finite realization, each in its season" (AI 277, italics added). Even "the ultimate evil in the temporal world" concerns how present actualities obstruct past ones (PR 340), not pure possibilities. If only Whitehead had found a way to demonstrate the effectiveness of the everlasting concrescence, he could have reaffirmed these insights in his theory of the provision of initial aims.

In fact, it may well be that pure possibilities alone cannot be valued. What does fairness mean in a lifeless world? Are volcanos destructive on the surface of Venus? Should "justice" be conceived in the sweeping terms of Anaximander?

On the other hand, if we were to prehend divine propositional feelings at the same time as we prehend the past, these should synthesize into intellectual feelings. In other words, if aims communicated real possibilities and not simply eternal objects, we ought to be conscious of most of our the aims we receive from God. Then God could warn a passerby of an imminent danger, Sherburne argues, such as a falling piano, or captains of icebergs invading sea-lanes.¹⁰ Oomen points out this difficulty, which is not a problem on her view because consciousness of the consequent nature only rarely occurs in exceptional experience.

Cobb also points out that "particular providence for particular occasions" (PR 351) leads not only to theoretical problems for theodicy, but to practical problems in the church, "because particular providence has often been appealed to as justification for many actions on the part of believers that are disruptive of the healthy life of the church" (TIP 14).

If divine aims are propositional, we must explain why it is that we have so little consciousness of them. In the first place, we must have the matching physical prehensions. Suppose that God sees that elusive parking space that we cannot locate. An initial aim directing us to the right place will not generate consciousness of itself; we must also be perceiving it (or the piano, or the iceberg).

Also we must take into account the massive aims which come from our previous selves. Here (the early) Cobb was correct in considering multiple sources for initial aims (CNT 196-203). Whitehead’s paramount concern to make room for novelty may have led him to neglect features coming from dominant occasions in our past which may also co-constitute the aim. Furthermore, the exigencies of his system required him to conceive of the initial aim in terms of single definite form: the "aim determines the initial gradations of relevance of eternal objects for conceptual feeling and constitutes the autonomous subject in its primary phase. . ." (PR 244). Only a single definite form can be the basis of embryonic subjective unity.

The issue of divine temporal valuation transcends these theodical questions, for it concerns the very nature of God as a living God. The Bible certainly portrays God as responding directly to "his" people. The immutabilist assumptions derived the Greek ideals sought to explain this responsive activity as merely apparent: God swore in "his" wrath, that the worshippers of the golden calf would not enter the promised land (Psalm 95:7-11), but recognizing that God appears to be responding to those idolaters then and there, the writer to the Hebrews adds the qualification: "although his works were finished from the foundation of the world’ (Heb. 4:3).¹¹

Thus the action of God could appear to take place in time, even though God knows all future contingents beforehand. Oomen rejects such immutable omniscience, which undercuts any genuine freedom. A strong theory of nontemporal valuation does allow for freedom, but it is a comparable theory in other respects. For God knows from all eternity just what action will be taken under whatever circumstances. In both cases, a fantastic imaginative construct is proposed in order to meet extrinsic concerns: in the first case, divine perfection as classically conceived; in the second, the threatened imprehensibility of the consequent nature. In both cases, genuine temporal divine responsiveness, so graphically portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures (e.g., Gen. 6.6, I Sam. 15.33, 2 Kings 20), is sacrificed.

From an aesthetic standpoint, there is a certain economy to process omniscience. Instead of knowing from all eternity everything that will happen, God needs only know events as they occur. (Immutabilist knowledge must be incredibly boring, since nothing new can ever be experienced.) Strong nontemporal valuation involves infinitely more events, not only those which have happened or will happen, but also all those events which might happen as well as all those which might have happened. Consider every alternative to the physical structure of the universe. All those possibilities contingent upon each alternative, whether chemical, biological, cultural, historical etc., are possibilities which might have been but can never be actualized in our cosmic epoch. All these eventualities are assumed to be definite possibilities capable of nontemporal valuation, simply because the temporal valuation of those actual events that do occur is not deemed to be effective in the world.

Whitehead recognized the importance of "particular providence" even though he was only able to establish "universal providence." Even before he recognized the feasibility of the consequent nature,¹² he speculated on "the relevance of God’s all-embracing conceptual valuations to the particular possibilities of transmission from the actual world" (PR 244, italics added). To be sure, it is possible to interpret those particular possibilities as pure eternal objects, but it seems more likely that Whitehead was contrasting them to eternal objects, but was still groping after their proper ontological status, which I take to be real propositional possibilities requiring divine temporality.

Oomen insists that every real possibility should be a nontemporally valued eternal object, in order to argue that the everlasting divine concrescence at all times is fully determinate, and hence prehensible. If for every situation God nontemporally has its valuation, then it must also be true that God already has available the means of synthesizing that past world within the divine experience. Thus, God’s integration of physical prehensions by means of these real possibilities already entertained must be instantaneous. Every state of the divine concrescence must be determinate; there can be no indeterminate phases.

Yet if God’s experience is at all times fully determinate, there can be no distinction between concrescence and satisfaction. Perhaps we should say that there is no concrescence, because every divine prehension is directly added to the satisfaction. There is "becoming" in the sense that there is growth, for the divine satisfaction is always being added to. But this is not becoming in the more radical sense of "coming into being," for the satisfaction is always in being. There can be no radical "becoming," no divine concrescence which first brings the satisfaction into being.¹³

Determinate divine phases (thereby insuring prehensibility) seems to blur the distinction between ideal realization and finite actualization. Ideal realization in God usually is conceived as the integration of all physical prehensions by conceptual means into an imaginative construct. But Oomen’s approach requires that this realization be as determinate as that achieved by actual occasions. It must be sufficiently determinate to be physically prehensible. Why is it not also finite?

Whitehead asserts that "every occasion of actuality is in its own nature finite. There is no totality which is the harmony all perfections" (AI 276). Critics, especially Thomistic critics, have concluded that God as a being is then conceived as finite. An everlasting becoming need not be finite, but a succession of determinate phases of divine being would be finite. The succession may well be incomplete, and thus permit additional phases ad infinitum, but each particular phase (with its predecessors) constitutes a finite totality. Whitehead contrasts the primordial envisagement rather than God as a whole with worldly being, but the result is the same: "Conceptual experience can be infinite, but it belongs to the nature of physical experience that it is finite" (PR 345).

The form by which God achieves divine determinateness would have to be as determinate as the final form by which the occasion actualizes itself. Otherwise, it is not capable of unifying the occasion’s past world into a prehensible state. If the same possibility is actualized perfectly in God, why need it be actualized a second time, especially when any possible difference would be less than the first? Ideal realization, on the other hand, merely unifies that world in terms of possibility. I take it to unify that world in terms of all the ways in which it could be actually unified. In this way, divine ideal realization also functions as the basis for the initial aim. Then finite actualization dearly differs from divine unification in that only one definite form is selected from these alternatives (PR 224).

The introduction of divine determinate phases risks the confusion of subjectivity and objectivity. An occasion is either in subjective becoming or objective being. Contemporary occasions (other subjectivities) are in unison of becoming. It makes no sense for an occasion to be able to prehend any aspect of a contemporary occasion. Why should this be true for God? Subjectivity and objectivity pertain to the whole of an actual entity, because concrescence requires the unification of all feeling in order for the act of becoming to bring something into being. A partial unity simply constitutes an element in that act of becoming, not a separate being. Were it a separate being, becoming and being, subjectivity and objectivity, would be hopelessly confused. Whitehead’s genius lay in seeing that this is a temporal distinction between present subjectivity and past objectivity.

A possible exception to the temporal character of this distinction is the primordial envisagement of eternal objects, which escapes its scope by being nontemporal. Whitehead seems to have conceived of the primordial envisagement before anticipating any additional consequent nature (PS 22 [1993], 44-47). As long as he considered God to be purely nontemporal, he did not ascribe subjectivity to God, at least not in Process and Rea1ity.¹⁴ Subjectivity for him is inherently temporal. It is the process of reducing the indeterminate possibility to determinate actuality. Once determinate being, it is necessarily objective. If God were always determinate, it is difficult to see how God could be subjectively engaged in becoming.

Oomen interprets the phrase, "always in concrescence and never in the past (PR 31), to mean that God is "always subject, never merely object. God’s becoming and God’s being a subject, therefore, have not perished with God’s being and God’s being a superject." Rather, because God is always subject God is never object. Does the reversal of the poles permit us to evade this inference. She writes, "the reversal of poles entails that satisfaction for God doesn’t mean determinateness and completeness, but determinateness and incompleteness." Incompleteness opens the possibility for further addition, but it does not insure that the incomplete is a subjective experience capable of further enrichment. The world at any particular time is complete, but not for that reason subjective. A determinate divine satisfaction is more like of the actual world rather than the experiential process of determination which must presuppose earlier indeterminate states.

The reversal of the physical and mental poles does mean that God’s aim is formally independent of any experience of the world. In this sense, God "is unmoved by love of this particular, or that particular. In the foundations of his being, God is indifferent alike to preservation and to novelty" (PR 105). "The perfection of God’s subjective aim [is] derived from the completeness of his primordial nature" (PR 345). But we must distinguish God’s general all-inclusive aim from the specific aims needed for particular occasions. Yet complete reversal is not possible, because physical feelings cannot be derived from conceptual feelings. The two poles can interact, however, if both are involved in the production of novel aims.

Oomen proposes that we extend the notion of concrescence to cover God’s ever-growing satisfaction. In the divine case alone, God would be always satisfied (thus determinate) yet always in concrescence. This might be interpreted in terms of nontemporal concrescence. In one passage, Whitehead describes the primordial nature as "the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings, including among their data all eternal objects" (PR 87).¹⁵ In her interpretation, this nontemporal concrescence is so extensive and complete as to include all possible physical prehensions.

There are two ways of interpreting this nontemporal subjectivity. It might be conceived as the nontemporal aspect of God’s everlasting subjectivity. Or we might contemplate the existence of a distinct divine nontemporal subject. After all, classical theism affirmed such a nontemporal subject. It had to in order to combine the Greek sense of perfection with the Biblical sense of a living, personal God. The union, however, rests on the authority of Scripture; there was no rational basis for it. When Spinoza asserted the authority of reason, the subjectivity of God was lost. Whitehead has recovered divine subjectivity on a rational basis, but precisely by reconceiving God as temporal.

Suppose a Whiteheadian God were to have a nontemporal subject. It could still prehend temporal occasions, but they would be immediately (non-temporally) absorbed into the determinate satisfaction, without benefit of any divine temporal determination. It is as if God were an infinitely programmed computer, capable of "prehending" and integrating those prehensions into a determinate unity at all times. The divine program, nontemporally determined, would include all pure and real possibilities, but it would be subjective in name only. I therefore advocate that nontemporal subjectivity be strenuously conceived as an aspect of temporal subjectivity only.¹⁶

As we have seen, Oomen’s proposal conceives God to be simultaneously subject and also object. I argue that these terms are exclusive. If so, she makes the case for God’s objectivity (prehensibility) at the expense of its subjectivity. Now Whitehead expressed his understanding of subjectivity and objectivity in terms of the metaphor of "perishing": "actual entities ‘perpetually perish’ subjectively, but are immortal objectively. Actuality in perishing acquires objectivity, while it loses subjective immediacy" (PR 29).

By this metaphor, the shift from subjectivity to objectivity can be interpreted temporally. According to the theory of special relativity, only the past can be experienced, contemporaries have no influence on each other. The exclusion of contemporaries means that all present activity is concentrated on the occasion coming into being, and that only what has come into being can be prehended. Thus, the transition from subject to object is the transition from present immediacy to past determinateness. The process of subjective immediacy, i.e., the process of unification by which the many prehensions together become one, "perishes," i.e., ceases to be with the attainment of the final unity. Without the loss of subjective immediacy, nothing objective can exist. This is not the perishing of being, for being first arises in the process. It is (subjective) becoming which perishes in the achievement of being.

Unfortunately, Whitehead later used "perishing" in a different sense:

This notion of perishing pertains solely to objective being, to the way the immediate past fades as it recedes into the more remote past.

Subjective perishing is metaphysically necessary, as it describes the passage of time. Objective perishing is an empirical, contingent evil, which is ultimately overcome in God, who cherishes each immediate experience in all its vividness forever. This doctrine is popularly termed "objective immortality" yet Whitehead’s term is "everlastingness" (always in quotes, as for example PR 347), because he had already used "objective immortality" for the temporal shift from subjectivity to objectivity.

Whitehead may use "perishing" ambiguously, but he implicitly distinguishes these meanings in terms of that which is on the far side of perishing. The occasion whose concrescent immediacy perishes survives in the form of objective immortality, not in the sense that the concrescent activity will somehow persist forever. Even this objective immortality fades insofar as subsequent occasions prehend it with negative prehension, but such objective perishing is ultimately remedied by divine "everlastingness." Immortality has the connotation of never perishing because it is usually conceived in terms of a soul capable of naturally existing forever, but survival need not necessarily have such permanence.

All temporal experience requires the perishing of subjective immediacy, if there is to be any objective being. The everlasting concrescence should be no exception to this rule.¹⁷ Any objectification would require the perishing of subjective immediacy. Since there is no perishing within the divine experience, there can be no objectification either. That which is subjective is never objective, and vice versa. The more we try to conceive divine everlastingness as objective, and hence prehensible, the less we can really affirm its subjectivity.

In Oomen’s essay we have one more attempt, the best attempt so far, to show how the consequent nature is prehensible. Hurtubise’s essay shows the difficulties Whitehead faced with this issue. Rather than seeing this as a defeat, I think we should celebrate it as a victory. If the divine concrescence is imprehensible, then God is a pure subjectivity which cannot also be objectified. Buber and others have proclaimed God to be such a pure Thou; only Whitehead has proven it. All the failed attempts to show how the consequent nature can be prehended constitute an indirect arguments for divine imprehensibility.

The reason this has proved to be such a problem in process thought has less to do with the peculiar nature of Whitehead’s concept of God than with an underlying assumption about prehension. Prehension is taken to be the only way in which one actual entity can influence another. We need to explore the possibility of other avenues of causal influence.

As Hartshorne has pointed out, most prehension asymmetrically relates a datum -- whether a definite eternal object or a determinate occasion -- to a successor prehending subject. The prehending subject, still in process of determination, is internally related to the datum, while it, being incapable of being affected, is only externally related to the prehender. Prehension allows only the more determinate to influence the less determinate.

We need a way in which the less determinate can influence the more determinate. Since a determinate datum cannot be affected, such an influence must affect the present prehending subject. Hence, it must be less determinate than present concrescence. This would be possible for a more universal creativity which became particularized into individual finite concrescences. The form of these particular instances of creativity could be comparable to initial aims. Instead of being definite eternal objects, however, which can be modified only by being replaced by other definite eternal objects (or selected from an infinitely dense array of eternal objects), it could be an indefinite, partially vague form by which creativity was instanced. By means of this creativity, the occasion achieves further determination of aim resulting in a final definite eternal object. A definite eternal object is what it is apart from creativity, while an indefinite form depends upon creativity for its further determination.

The concept of prehension is a breathtaking generalization, a way of understanding physical causation in terms which embrace also perception, conception, and imagination, to mention a few. It achieves this by conceiving the subject to be actively receptive and responsive, the cause as an inactive determinate datum. The restriction of all causal influence to prehension is an effective way to achieve greater coherence. But it is achieved at the expense of adequacy, preventing us from considering how the more indeterminate could influence present subjectivity. It forces us to conceive divine effectiveness only in terms appropriate to past causation.

If we allow for other avenues of influence, then God as pure subjective becoming might be effective in the world. God could then be conceived in terms of a universal creativity which becomes particularized into many present acts of creativity individualized by indefinite subjective aims.¹⁸

References

CNT John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology, Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1965.

TIP John B. Cobb, Jr., "The Relativization of the Trinity," Trinity in Process. Edited by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. New York: Continuum, 1997, 1-22.

Notes

1Marjorie Suchocki’s approach is similar, although less fully developed. Both find a central role for the reversal of poles in God, which Suchocki interprets in terms of a primordial satisfaction and consequent concrescence. Both require a strong interpretation of the primordial envisagement. But Suchocki tends to focus on how God as whole can be prehended. Oomen avoids difficulties concerning divine subjectivity and agency by concentrating on the determinateness and consequent prehensibility of individual divine physical feelings. Then the consequent nature as the totality of these feelings always can be both determinate and incomplete. Suchocki must express herself more paradoxically, if not contradictorily: "Thus the satisfaction of God is complete, since it is the fullness of all possibility and all actuality in transformative union, and yet demands further completion. . ." (The End of Evil [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988], 142).

2At least in recent years, since I have become dissatisfied with my own "solution" in "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead’s God," International Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1973), 347-376. See particularly, Section Two.

3John B. Cobb, Jr., "The Relativization of the Trinity," Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God, edited by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. (New York: Continuum, 1997), 1-22 (henceforth cited as TIP).

4Cobb has proposed a solution in terms of the occasion’s past world, which I question in my essay, "God at Work: The Way God is Effective in a Process Perspective," Encounter 57 (1996), 327-340, at 332f.

5To simplify the following analysis, I shall assume (with Whitehead) that prehension is the only form of causal influence between actualities and that all eternal objects are uncreated and hence definite. However, I shall challenge the first assumption at the end ₀f this essay. I also question the second assumption: see "The Creation of ‘Eternal’ Objects," The Modern Schoolman 71(1994), 191-222.

6In its own way, the consequent nature is a thing-in-itself. It can be thought, but it cannot be experienced.

7John Cobb explains the fourth phase in terms of two separate prehensions of God, while recognizing that "This seems to be in conflict with Whitehead’s general position that each entity in an occasion’s actual world is felt in a single complex but consistent way" (TIP 15). I would now classify Cobb as a neo-Whiteheadian as well, although his earlier book, A Christian Natural Theology (CNN), epitomizes the post-Whiteheadian endeavor. See my essay, "God at Work" (note 4 above).

8The theory of propositional knowledge for real possibilities has strong affinities with Luis de Molina’s middle knowledge, which is between the knowledge of actualities and the knowledge of pure possibilities. Molina conceives God to have nontemporal, immutable knowledge of real possibilities. For Whitehead, however, while there is nontemporal knowledge of pure possibility, there can be only temporal knowledge of actualities and propositions.

9It will not do, however, to suppose that the subject of this proposition is the occasion now coming into existence. It does not yet exist as actual, and so cannot fulfill the requirement that a proposition combine both actuality and possibility. The logical subjects of the proposition are all those actual occasions constituting its past world.

10Donald W. Sherburne, "Decentering Whitehead," Process Studies 15 (1986), 83-94, at 88f. Cobb’s response, "Sherburne on Providence," Process Studies 23 (1994), 25-29, relies on nontemporal valuation as replacing divine temporal valuation.

11Apparently, he (and his community) could not quite believe that God was utterly atemporal, but he still could reconcile his views with Greek immutability by drawing upon the traditional view of creation in seven days. God was actively laying the foundations of the world during the first six days, but then God rested, a rest which embraces our time. Thus, God is unchanging with respect to our temporality, even if not ultimately.

12For a succinct statement of the three levels of Whitehead’s understanding of God in Process and Reality, see my "The Riddle of Religion in the Making," Process Studies 22 (1993), 42-50.

13As pure being, the divine actuality would differ from the actuality of actual occasions, which have both becoming (as concrescence) and being as concretum, its concrete result. To be sure, the concept of God I espouse also differs, for it conceives the divine actuality as pure becoming. See, for example, my "Notes Toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 39(1984), 41-46. Then the question becomes: which state is more appropriate for the divine, pure being or pure becoming? Many philosophers would give the prize to being, and it would allow for God being prehended. Yet for Whitehead, becoming is ontologically prior, being derivative, reversing the traditional ranking.

Whitehead, to be sure, conceived of God both as primordial being, and as everlastingly in becoming (PR 348). But if my argument in "The Creation of ‘Eternal’ Objects" (cited in note 5) is correct, and "eternal objects" are not uncreated but are temporally emergent, the primordial nature is absorbed into the divine everlasting experience.

14A partial exception might be: "Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects" (PR 32). On its strength, I ascribed subjectivity to "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead’s God" (see note 2). I now think that was probably in error. While Process and Reality does not assert any divine subjectivity prior to PR V.2 (and some late insertions), the fourth chapter of Religion in the Making uses language which implies it.

15This is the only text conceiving of the primordial nature in terms of concrescence, and it comes after Whitehead has recognized that God as a whole is everlasting. It is the nontemporal aspect of an everlasting concrescence. Concrescence, whether divine or finite, requires temporality. He finds no warrant for any nontemporal subject.

Process and Reality 87.43c and the following paragraph(s) appear to be a late insertion designed to show how God could exemplify the three-fold character of the actual entity (see previous paragraph) in the light of his newly won concept of the consequent nature. His initial response (PR 87.40-43b), lacking this notion, could show only how God was an exception to this three-fold character.

16Here, see my "Nobo’s Eternal Realities and the Primordial Decision," Process Studies 26 (1997), 205-217. It is important also for our understanding of Robert C. Neville’s divine creation as nontemporal determination.

17I once argued, relying on William A. Christian’s An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1959), that God was exempt from subjective perishing on the grounds that perishing was absent from the categoreal scheme. But this issue cannot be settled simply on those grounds. Oomen notes my shift on this issue. She cites Process and Reality 81f: "In the organic philosophy an actual entity has ‘perished’ when it is complete." Yet, as she argues, the everlasting divine satisfaction is never complete. Incompleteness of itself, however, does not insure concrescent status. The past also is incomplete, yet determinate at every instant.

According to the 25^th category of explanation, "‘becoming’. . . in each particular instance ceases with this attainment." As she points out, the everlasting concrescence never ceases. Should this not mean that God can never be objectified, rather than that in the divine case alone that objectification does not require perishing?

18These ideas are developed partially in "The Divine Activity of the Future," Process Studies 11(1981), 169-179, and "Creativity in a Future Key," New Essays in Metaphysics, edited by Robert C. Neville (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), 179-198.

Hurtubise and I agree on many things. We both find ample evidence for a different concept of God in Process and Reality prior to the final chapter. Besides the familiar concept having both primordial and consequent natures, there is also a more purely non-temporal approach. We agree on the use of compositional analysis for ferreting out these issues. But we disagree as to whether we should consider there to be one or two such non-temporal concepts.

That we should disagree while using the same method and agreeing on the results in many instances shows that the method is relatively neutral, and can be used by many for different results, depending on the assumptions of the practitioners.

I think there are two concepts, an earlier one which does not suggest or imply the notion of a conceptual realization of eternal objects, and one which does, which I label the middle concept. Hurtubise thinks that the early concepts already imply the conceptual realization, at least to the extent that these two concepts cannot be rigorously distinguished and so should be treated as one. A good example of what I regard as an early concept is quoted in Hurtubise’s essay. It is conceivable that the last three sentences in the passage from Process 93 are an addition, although no good reason for such an insertion is evident. Otherwise all the passages identified as early seem to be part of the original text, while those twenty-six passages pertaining to the middle concept appear to be insertions.¹ At least some of them are best construed as insertions, while all of them could be.

I conclude that Whitehead used the early concept in developing what I designate as the first version of Process and Reality (i.e., all but V2, IV.1, IV4). During this time he concentrated on developing his cosmology, and mentions God only incidentally and minimally. After that cosmology was substantially completed, he turned his attention to theology, ultimately in terms of the primordial and consequent natures found in the final chapter. The middle concept was transitional at best. These insertions are perhaps best understood as notes or sketches, aids to Whitehead’s creative thinking which flowered in process theism.

Not all of these twenty-six passages explicitly present the middle concept. Many are on other topics, but they all belong to the same train of thinking occasioned by the middle concept. Even so, I find the reduction to three far too drastic. Nevertheless, to make this manageable I will concentrate on the three selected (Process 32, 40, 46), taking them up in reverse order.

(1). The first full paragraph (Process 46) may not be the appropriate insertion. I have previously suggested that the first two sentences might belong to the original text.² If the whole complex that Hurtubise proposes is original, then these two sentences should be considered as original as well. But this need not pertain to the rest of the paragraph, which could well be an insertion.³ Whether it is or not depends upon whether the ideas it expresses are later than the original text. This cannot be established on the basis of this passage by itself, but on other passages it is linked to, such as the other two to be investigated.

(2). The second passage from Process and Reality is sufficiently important that it be quoted in full:

Hurtubise finds no insertion here, for it is rhetorically continuous throughout. That may simply mean that this is one of Whitehead’s more successful attempts as contrasted with some others (e.g., Process 278). Whether it is an insertion primarily depends upon any contrast with context. Hurtubise finds no such contrast, since for him God is conceived as the nontemporal valuation of eternal objects both in the context (italicized portions) and in the text. If there is no contrast, the passage all blends together into one.

I read the passage differently. Let us first consider the context, which appears to come from the original version of Part 11(C). Let us try to interpret it on its own terms, apart from later ideas, such as found in the insertion. This is a general rule of compositional interpretation, for it enables us to see more clearly the stages of Whitehead’s development.

If we attend to the italicized portions only, Whitehead argues that eternal objects and actual entities are mediated by an entity that is nontemporal like eternal objects yet actual like actual occasions. This is based upon his earlier theory of formative elements (Religion 90) as spelled out in the statement that the process requires a definite entity, already actual among the formative elements, as an antecedent ground for the entry of the ideal forms into the definite process of the temporal world (Religion 152). This divine element, as the ground for the entry of the forms, justifies the general Aristotelian principle that all entities, including the forms, depend for their existence upon actualities.

The context, if we put to one side the inserted material, does not specify how God mediates between the two sets. In particular, it does not appeal to the traditional argument that God contemplates the forms, even though that had already been introduced (Religion 154).

At this juncture we are at an impasse. Hurtubise can argue that both context and text here refer to one concept of God. I argue on the contrary that this passage is an interface between an earlier concept not suggesting conceptual valuation, and the middle concept spelling out just what that conceptual valuation is. To adjudicate between these two positions, it is necessary to consider our contrasting interpretations of Whitehead’s understanding of God.

Hurtubise argues that the notion of a divine conceptual valuation of eternal objects is already present in Whitehead’s earlier book:

This notion of a "complete conceptual realization" is repeated verbatim later. This is a constant feature of Whitehead’s theory of God, even after the adoption of a consequent nature. So even in texts which barely mention God, or describe other features of God, the notion of conceptual valuation is implicit.

This is a plausible position, one I previously held (Emergence 227), conceiving of God as a synthesis of purely conceptual feelings. Yet we have to reckon with the fact that "Whitehead considered his Religion in the Making a complete failure."⁴

To see how this might be so, we need to reconstruct Whitehead’s project in that book. He had previously concluded (Science 178f) that God should be conceived as a principle of limitation, and that what further could be known about God needed to be sought in the nature of the various religions. Thus the nature of God, philosophically considered (Religion chapter 3), is minimal. God is conceived as that actuality which is nontemporal.

I take actuality here most broadly to be that which is without alternative. Contingent entities, when merely possible, have many alternatives, but actualization is a decision amid alternatives: only one remains. In the domain of the nontemporal there are many alternatives, yet one core of actuality, namely that which is necessary. The necessary structure of reality as the principle of limitation excludes the impossible, and as a formative element it is both nontemporal and actual, mediating between the two sets.

Whitehead may have tried to see how far his concept of God as constitutive of every actual occasion (Religion 88-90) could be exemplified in the various world religions. As the principle of rightness it was exemplified In most. He had no difficulty finding it exemplified in eastern religions, but western theism was more of a challenge, to which the fourth chapter was devoted. This is not a metaphysical endorsement of an individual transcendent God as an exploration of that hypothesis. On the assumption that God is personal, this is how that concept can be understood as compatible with God as formative element. In this way Whitehead could show how a rationalized Western theism illustrates his more abstract concept of God.

Now, if God is to be both personal and nontemporal, God must be nontemporally subjective. While Whitehead himself conceived God in nonsubjectivist ways, thinking that the nontemporal must be like eternal objects, he allowed for the possibility of nontemporal subjectivity in this fourth chapter. But as his theory of concrescence developed, this possibility became more and more unfeasible. For concrescence was seen to be inherently temporal, and the contrast between subjectivity and objectivity could be understood as the contrast between present immediacy and past determinateness. The rejection of nontemporal subjectivity meant that the project of Religion and the Making was at least a partial failure.

From the perspective of the final concept, it seems an easy step to infer that if God cannot be nontemporally subjective, perhaps God could be temporally subjective. It seems, however, that Whitehead resisted that solution for a quite some time. The brief mentions of God in what I have called the first version (basically all but the final chapter and insertions) are silent on the question of divine subjectivity.

At that time actuality was understood purely in terms of the concrete determinateness which an occasion had achieved, not in terms of its concrescence. This is seen most clearly in the original formulation of the ontological principle. It does not appear in Process and Reality, but was presented to his Harvard students at the outset of the Fall 1928 term.⁵ I present it according to the categoreal scheme, in order to emphasize (by italics) the portion which was not yet there:

In the first version only determinate actualities can serve as reasons. They must be either concretely determinate, excluding all contingent alternatives, or in the case of God, excluding all impossibilities.

(3). Process 32: Sometime later Whitehead came to realize that becoming was just as real, if not more so, than the being achieved by becoming. In the first flush of these realization, he concluded that concrescence alone was fully actual, and that therefore the ontological principle, referring reasons to actualities, should be formulated solely in terms of the formal reality of concrescence:

Hurtubise and I both recognize this to be an insertion. It is very loosely attached to its present context by mention of relevance in the penultimate sentence of the preceding paragraph, but nothing prepares us for a discussion of how unrealized forms can be relevant. Since nearly all the material of this chapter on "Derivative Notions" (1.3) consists of passages originally belonging elsewhere but later displaced, not to be simply discarded but to be assembled here,⁸ Hurtubise sees this particular passage as originally belonging to the account of the Category of Subjective Harmony (Process 27). Yet this makes no mention of relevance, realized or not. More importantly, if this had been its original location, why should it have been displaced from there?

I think it originally belonged to the discussion of the Category of Conceptual Reversion (Process 249f), and was bumped by the paragraph announcing abolition of reversion. Reversion had been Whitehead’s key theory for showing the relevance of novelty or unrealized possibility; and our paragraph grounded that relevance in the formal constitution of God. When he realized that later notions of subjective aim and hybrid prehension of God could adequately account for novelty, he determined to abolish reversion as superfluous. The paragraph abolishing reversion was then placed as close as possible to the main statement of the theory, and this meant replacing the paragraph in question, displacing it to its present location in (Part I, chapter 3.)

Once actuality is ascribed preeminently to concrescent becoming rather than to concrete being, it became urgent how to construe God’s actuality. Since he had rejected nontemporal subjectivity, God had been formulated solely in terms of being. But if God were only being, God would be derivative from something greater. By this time Whitehead had articulated his theory of concrescence and could apply it to the divine instance. The multiplicity of eternal objects could be ordered into a well-structured realm, and that ordering by actuality could serve as the reason why each eternal object is what it is and is definitely related to all other eternal objects.

This conceptual realization is given several different names, but never concrescence. Though this theory is clearly fashioned after the concrescence of the many into one, concrescence had two intertwined connotations for him which made it unacceptable. A concrescence was seen to be temporal, to have a contrast between an earlier multiplicity and a later unity. As temporal it meant the present immediacy of subjectivity, and Whitehead at this time saw no necessity to ascribe subjectivity to God. The glowing final chapter of Religion in the Making merely indicates how his minimal theory could be applied to Western theism, and was in any case vitiated by his growing doubts about nontemporal subjectivity.

Thus this divine "concrescence" was qualified in two ways. Concrescent unification was applied to its limiting case in which there could be no temporal lapse between the initial multiplicity and consequent unity. At best this could be expressed in counterfactual conditionals: apart from divine activity, these eternal objects would have been unordered. Moreover, it is a process which does not require the subjectivity of any divine mind contemplating the forms. "Concrescence" thus offered a way in which "the complete conceptual realization of the realm of ideal forms" (Religion 154) could be reintroduced, for it need not connote the difficulty of nontemporal subjectivity.

In the passage at hand the ontological principle refers to actuality solely in terms of becoming: "The ontological principle can be expressed as: All real togetherness is togetherness in the formal constitution of an actuality" (Process 32). Later he comes to realize that both being and becoming can be forms of actuality, and thus formulates the principle as quoted above, now including the italicized phrase (Process 24)¹⁰

Also in this passage Whitehead somewhat incautiously uses some terms for conceptual realization that might suggest subjectivity, or at least "concrescence." Consider: "Such a primordial superject of creativity achieves, in its unity of satisfaction, the complete conceptual valuation of all eternal objects." I once seized on these terms to ascribe a theory of nontemporal subjectivity to Whitehead.¹¹ While in many ways I regard that essay as one of my best achievements, its general premise was wrongheaded. It is noteworthy that in all subsequent mentions of the middle concept Whitehead seems to be at pains to avoid all hints that he is describing a "concrescence," let alone one that could be nontemporally subjective.

Now the ease with which subjectivity could be excised from the nontemporal counterpart of concrescence may well have alerted Whitehead to a deficiency in his own theory of subjectivity as so far developed in part three (apart from later insertions). At this juncture subjectivity was simply understood in terms of the general categoreal obligations, somewhat like Kant’s analysis of the Understanding. These categories ought to apply to the divine conceptual valuation, and yet he found no subjectivity there. In addition subjectivity required particular decision, and none was forthcoming from the action of the categories alone.

Whitehead’s theory of becoming placed stresses upon his theory of subjectivity that substantialist alternatives could avoid. For it is only at the satisfaction that the subject has come into being as the feeler of all its feelings. On the other hand, the subject is required in some form from the very outset as that which brings the various feelings together. Only if the subject is somehow active in the process can it make the decisions it must to exercise in freedom and self-creativity Thus the subject must be operative within concrescence, and yet can only come into being at its conclusion.

As a step towards meeting this problem Whitehead introduced the notion of a "subjective aim." It is important to realize that "subjective aim" did not mean all that we now ascribe to it. The earliest mentions may not mean anything more than the aim of the subject (Process 277, 278, 279; 102, 104). He appreciates that a common aim will bring the various feelings together, but that aim’s place among the feelings is problematic. Then he recognizes that the subjective aim is "the basic conceptual feeling of subjective aim" capable of having its own phases of modification (Process 224). Even so, the subject and the subjective aim were still treated as distinct, such that the subjective could only be one feeling among others. Here see the extraordinary sentence:

"Subjective am" is here ranged on the side of efficient causation in order to contrast it with "the final reaction." It is not yet conceived as the subjective means by which that final reaction is to be made. "The final reaction can only refer to the subject making its own free self-creative decision, and yet Whitehead describes the subject in extravagant terms. Here we must bear in mind that terms like "the universe" are token-reflexive terms, vet his intent would have been clearer had he said: "the self-creative unity of [its] universe." The unity of its universe, that is, its initial multiplicity, would be the final subject. This extravagant circumlocution seems to be an elaborate way to avoid to the term "subject," either because he did not wish to contrast it with "subjective aim," or because he was uncertain just how the subject should now be conceived.

Subsequently Whitehead reduces this complexity by placing the subject in the subjective aim:

Rather than simply being the passive recipient of the feelings, the subject is inserted right into the concrescence itself as a privileged conceptual feeling affecting all the others. Thus we have both the subject in the making and the subject as made, reflecting the contrast between becoming and being. Objectively conceived, this subjective aim can be construed as an emergent essence. Unlike the traditional essence, which is invariant during the activity of the substance, this essence emerges from a bare possibility, to be determined in the course of concrescence as the form of its satisfaction. Subjectively considered, it is the transformative activity guiding the many prehensions into their final unity.

Though conceptual valuation, like concrescence, exemplifies various categoreal obligations,¹⁴ we should not expect subjectivity in the form of subjective aim to apply as long as God is conceived as purely nontemporal. One text suggests otherwise:

"Conceptual actuality," rather than "conceptual nature," indicates that God’s actuality as a whole is constituted solely Out of conceptual feelings. This section (Process V.2.2), however, has been edited from the standpoint of the two natures to fit into the final chapter, and I have indicated this editing by italics.

"Subjective unity of subjective aim" is grammatically a strange redundancy. We should have expected either "unity of subjective aim" or "subjective unity of aim." Even so, "their unity of subjective aim" would be an odd circumlocution, for how are the many feelings united by one conceptual feeling? I take the original wording to be "their subjective unity of aim," where aim is conceived as a common feature by which all feelings are ordered together.¹⁵ Note that the unity of aim is quite static, for the divine conceptual actuality is itself static.

The introduction of the two natures radically transforms Whitehead’s conception of God. Instead of purely nontemporal, it acquires a temporal and subjective side. These two features are inextricably interwoven, for in order to subjectively respond to particular circumstances, God must be capable of entering into temporal relationships.¹⁶

Now it becomes appropriate to introduce "subjective air" applicable to God, and not merely as a feature supplied to nascent occasions. If we think of this subjective aim simply as a conceptual feeling, or even as analogous to an ordinary subjective aim embracing its whole career, we apt to think of it as some very general ideal, necessarily vague in order to be all-inclusive. This would miss the dynamic subjectivity I believe Whitehead intended. For the subjective aim for God provides the conceptual means whereby divine temporal responsivity can be expressed.

Consider this parallel formulation:

Now, subjective aim cannot literally prehend other actualities, but it can serve as the basis whereby God’s physical feelings are harmonized together. God’s wisdom expresses itself in this process, for the divine conceptual imagination perfectly matches each physical prehension, enabling this harmonization. The subjectivity behind that wisdom is the divine subjective aim, which as a conceptual feeling is derived from the primordial nature.¹⁷

How can a single subjective aim direct every physical prehension to its proper place within the all-inclusive divine harmony? The more accommodating it would be, the vaguer it would have to be, and the less useful it could be to the proper needs of the particular physical prehension. I submit that this subjective aim, as the very subjectivity of a God alert and responding to every situation as it arises, must be conceived as multifaceted, modifying itself at every turn. It is one subjective aim in the sense that it is one continuous conceptual response. It is not the conceptual prehension of one single eternal object, although all the eternal objects it exemplifies are derived from an inexhaustible primordial nature.

We may sum up this line of thought by seeing that there is an important difference between divine conceptual valuation as it appears earlier (Religion 154) and later in the middle concepts for God. The earlier use presupposes subjectivity. The middle concept, based upon the theory of concrescence to be sure, is based on nonsubjectivity. Subjectivity requires subjective aim, which is not ascribed to God until the final chapter asserting the everlasting, temporal nature of God.

For the early and the middle concepts, God is a nontemporal actual entity. But the early concept restricts itself to the being of God. The middle concept sees the divine actuality primarily in terms of God’s becoming, although understood nontemporally.

If the conceptual contrast between God as being and God as becoming is kept firmly in mind, we should be able to discern insertions based on the middle concept (such as Process 40). An adequate account of Whitehead’s development of God cannot afford to leave home without all three concepts. Two will not do.

Notes

I See my essay, "Riddle" 42-50, which lists all known instances of the early concept (50, n14), the middle concept (50n13), and the final concept (49, n7).

2. See Ford "Growth" 21, n28.

3. I regard the last sentence, however, to be a still later insertion. It presupposes God as primordial and consequent. As we shall see, it was only then that God was deemed to be subjective. The notion of a "primordial mind" assumes subjectivity,

4. From the transcript A. H. Johnson made of a tutorial with Whitehead during the fall of 1936 (Explorations 8f.)

5. See The Emergence 323f. The third of these eight metaphysical principles is referred to at Process 212. See the editor’s notes to 212.37 of the corrected edition.

6. This formulation of the ontological principle vests all reason in becoming actualities, not (as previously) in actualities as being. His later formulations vest it in both (e.g., Process 24). See my "Perfecting" 122-49.

7. I omit the last sentence of this paragraph as a two natures addition.

8. Thus section 2 was replaced by Process II.3.5; section 3 by Zeno’s argument discussed at Process 69f. Section 4 has so far defied attempts to identify its original location, but its very presence is best explained as displaced material.

9. Never, that is, while the middle concept holds sway. Once, after the consequent nature has been introduced, we read: "The ‘primordial nature’ of God is the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings" Process 87f). By then, however, God is conceived of as temporal, at least in part.

10. See my "Perfecting."

11. See my essay "Non-Temporality."

12. In this case, the whole of this section (II.1.4) is an insertion (Process 46-48). Part III knows only of eight categoreal conditions, as they were then known. The ninth categoreal obligation was inserted here, I suspect, because Whitehead wanted to place this doctrine of intrinsic freedom as close as possible to the beginning of his philosophizing.

13. Again the whole section (III.3.1) is an insertion, as is the next.

14. Several categoreal obligations, however, would be inapplicable, e.g., conceptual reproduction, reversion and transmutation.

15. This notion of "aim" is a precursor of "subjective aim" in all of its permutations. See e.g. 222, 254f, 277-79, and my essay, "Subjectivity in the Making."

16. I have developed this theme extensively in The Transformation of Process Theism, particularly in chapter 4.

17. The same reasoning, that the physical prehensions are guided by the subjective aim derived from the primordial nature, is also present in the other mention of "subjective aim" in this final chapter:

Works Cited

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

____The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: State U of New York P, 1984.

____"Subjectivity in the Making." Process Studies 21 (1992): 1-24.

____The Riddle of Religion in the Making." Process Studies 22 (1993): 42-50.

____Perfecting the Ontological Principle." Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc. Ed. Paul A. Bogaard and Gordon Treash. New York: State U of New York P, 1993.

____"The Growth of Whitehead’s Theism." Process Studies Supplements vol. 1, Issue I (26Jan. 2000): 1-99 <http://wxvwctr4process.org/PSS/>

____The Transformation of Process Theism. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000.

Ford, Lewis S., and George L. Kline, eds. Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy. New York: Fordham UP, 1983.

Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan, 1925.

____ Religion in the Making New York: Macmillan, 1926.

____Process and Reality. 1929. Corrected Edition. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Transforming Process Theism examines an indispensable element in Whitehead’s thinking which apparently cannot be fully integrated with the rest. I refer to the fact that the consequent nature of God cannot be prehended, and cannot, therefore, affect us. Yet it must be able to influence us if God is to be a dynamic person, loving and responding to our particular situations.

The book is complex, for it is nearly three books in one: (a) a study of the three successive concepts of God Whitehead espoused in Process and Reality, vet even the last is ultimately incomplete, prompting the possibility of further developments beyond the text; (b) a survey of previous attempts to show that in one way or another that it is possible to prehend the divine life; (c) my own approach, which recognizes that God as consequent is imprehensible. To show that God is nevertheless effective I find it necessary to introduce the unfamiliar concept of the creative future, as distinguished from our ordinary created future. The created future is what we usually regard as future, either what is to come in the course of events, or the conditions, possibilities, hopes, fears, we project upon what is to come. The creative future is that divine element which makes renders novelty possible.

David Pailin’s masterful review poses more questions and objections than I can answer in short order. Fortunately, most can be conveniently grouped together under two headings: (1) Are the inconsistencies evidence of Whitehead’s confusion, or are they clues to his philosophical growth? (2) Is the notion of a future subjectivity credible?

I. The Importance of being Inconsistent

Whitehead makes a significant distinction between inconsistency and incoherence:

I find that Whitehead’s final vision is remarkably free from inconsistency, though it does suffer from one major incoherence. He writes, "Incoherence is the arbitrary disconnection of first principles" (Process 6). Two principles which should be necessarily connected are not. In Whitehead’s case, it is the lack of any effective connection between the consequent nature and nascent occasions. The consequent nature is needed in order to specify the particular appropriate aim, but only the primordial nature can be prehended (Process 245-47).

Thus I agree with Hartshorne that Whitehead’s theory must be modified, only not in the way he does it. He reconceives the notion of an everlasting concrescence as a series of divine occasions. Each divine occasion, like an actual occasion, affects others in terms of its past concreteness, and is prehensible by them. Mine is the opposite modification: I retain the notion of a divine concrescence, but radicalize the distinction between pure and hybrid prehension, so much so that hybrid prehension becomes the infusion of aim and creativity from the future.

Other interpreters believe that any appearance of incoherence can be overcome. Pailin would have us believe that they select from among inconsistent concepts. Not so. They all adopt Whitehead’s final concept and whatever other concepts they find consistent with it. In order to show that there is a real incoherence, I devoted chapter five to a critique of six attempts to show that no incoherence is involved.

As Palm indicates, there are numerous inconsistencies in the text.¹ For textual purposes, it is helpful to broaden the category of inconsistency to include not only formal contradictions but any anomalies, discrepancies, conceptual conflicts, terminological variations, faulty references, in short anything a careful editor would have corrected. Admittedly, these all get in the way in trying to understand the philosophical system Whitehead ultimately achieved. But they are extremely helpful clues in determining the various levels of Whitehead’s thought. Any particular level is largely consistent; the glaring inconsistencies occur between levels. For example, the divine actual entity in the final chapter (and the insertions based on it) is an individual. But God as a formative element (Whitehead, Religion 90), a notion I find persisting throughout the earlier chapters of Process and Reality, is a universal.

Formative elements are constitutive of every actual occasion. Eternal objects are widely recognized as universals, and creativity Whitehead explicitly termed "the universal of universals" (Process 21).² God is the third formative element and must be immanent within each occasion. It is true that Whitehead then thought that God could (not must) be transcendent as well (Religion, chap. 4). Later he appeared to have doubts on the matter.³ Thus he was reluctant to declare himself on that point until he had completed the bulk of his metaphysical cosmology. The earlier chapters were written so he could go either way. In any case, "the actual but non-temporal entity" (Religion 90) is an entity, but not an individual, even though later (in Process) all actual entities are actual individuals.

Sometimes conceptual rigor leads to textual inconsistency. Consider reversion. Whitehead came to see that his cumbersome explanation of novelty could be streamlined. Reversion replaced some concept derived from the past with a novel concept. But the relevance of the past concept with its cognate depended upon the primordial envisagement. Since the initial aim was directly derived from the primordial envisagement, it could serve as the explanation of novelty without reversion. "The Category of Reversion is then abolished" (Process 250). To avoid textual inconsistency, it would be necessary to eradicate every use and mention of "reversion" an irksome task Whitehead was unwilling to undertake.⁴

Inconsistency is significant as an indication of Whitehead’s philosophical growth, not his confusion. Though they get in the way of the systematic reconstruction of his position, these anomalies are invaluable clues to the understanding of his development. There are few, if any, major philosophers whom we can have such a detailed account of his creativity.

Yet if the final concept is quite consistent, why did Whitehead leave the text in such a confused and disordered state? We really cannot know. My hunch is that he wrote the vast bulk of the text for the Gifford Lectures, inserting fresh ideas along the way but not correcting it in any way. When later confronted with a huge manuscript, he found the task exceedingly irksome. Someone has said that a good author must be willing to be bored by his own ideas. If Whitehead was so excited by fresh ideas, it is reasonable to suppose that he was not willing to be bored by old ideas. In order to avoid the tedious process of correction he determined to use a device tried once before. In an earlier book he had inserted new passages and chapters while leaving the old material untouched (Science viii)⁵ The same method was applied here, with disastrous results. Whitehead’s philosophy is complex enough without unnecessarily burdening us with these difficulties.

Whether this is so or not is of secondary importance, as well as all a priori suppositions that Whitehead could not have written a disordered text. We must first face the fact that the text is in fact disordered, which can be readily ascertained by a close examination of the text. Theories about the text are dependent first on the state of the text itself. Pailin, however, proposes another way of understanding these anomalies. Whitehead "would only be satisfied if he affirmed a number of points that he could not at present see how to reconcile but none of which he was prepared to drop for the sake of simple . . . consistency."⁶ Thus if there is no textual inconsistency (since no one of his stature would allow an uncorrected text), there must be a conceptual inconsistency among the three concepts of God in Process and Reality. Those three concepts are: God as nontemporal and nonconcrescent, God as nontemporal but concrescent, God as temporal and concrescent. How are these concepts inconsistent?

The first two are so compatible that Denis Hurtubise argues we should see them as the same concept. But there is a definite inconsistency between the nontemporal actuality (or primordial actuality) and the primordial nature. In the first, nontemporality is actual in itself; in the second, it is merely an aspect of an otherwise everlasting actuality.

Classical theism also conceived of God as nontemporal yet fully actual. But it could never admit any temporality into God, since God was wholly immutable. In Whitehead’s case it was possible because God was conceived as a formative element which was both fully actual and universal. This idiosyncratic view meant that Whitehead provisionally did not regard concrete individuality to be an essential attribute of actuality. The notion of an actual formative element follows from his earlier claim: I believe there is continuity between his earlier assertion, "God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality" (Science 178), and the formative element. Thus God, as a component of all concrete actual occasions, is actual as determining their actuality.

Process theism really stems from the recognition that God as primordial is really "deficiently actual" (Process 343). Then Whitehead could shed his idiosyncratic notion of a divine formative element that was both actual and universal. This retains all the formal features of the primordial envisagement. The addition of the temporal, contingent side made it possible to conceive of God as an individual having a primordial aspect.

There is textual inconsistency, for Whitehead did not alter his previous writing. But in the end there is no conceptual inconsistency, which would be the more serious charge. The evidence indicates that Whitehead was likely to have been too bored to correct his manuscript than that he was confused on basic points.

In his final paragraph Pailin suggests that the final chapter of Process and Reality may be taken as edifying remarks which if taken seriously would require "a serious revision of some of his earlier remarks." All that need be revised is the impression that the primordial nature was not an independent actuality by itself. I do think that something like this is the case for the fourth chapter of Religion in the Making.⁷ Having conceived of God as a formative element, Whitehead sought to show how Western theism could be conceived in ways compatible with his notion of God. But he then did not have reason of his own to think that God is personal. Now he did: if God is temporal, then individual, then subjective and personal. The whole of the last chapter follows with rigor as the notion of God as everlasting is explored.

II. God as the Subjectivity of the Future

Though this is a major theme of the book, the reviewer makes remarkably little mention of it. He may have wanted to avoid what many may regard as a strange and unintelligible notion. Omitting it, however, leads to serious distortions. For example, consider the way the divine creative influence impacts upon the present, which I have described in impersonal and pantheistic terms, for that influence permeates all occasions (Transforming 286). The reviewer objects: "Thirdly, if the divine creative influence on the processes of reality is impersonal and indeterminate. . . , it is a creative action that is presumably neither conscious nor intentional."⁸ So it would be, if it were in fact purely a present activity.

We need to distinguish between influence and activity. God’s activity is future, so only finite actual occasions are active in the present. There is no divine activity in the present. God’s influence derived from future activity, however, is felt throughout the present. God transcends the world as pure subjectivity, while influencing all present occasions. Except for the way it affects us, and transposing it from present to future, I fully adopt Whitehead’s notion of the divine concrescence. God (as future) can be personal, even though the divine spirit present in the world is impersonal.

This approach challenges the prevalent notion that the notions of past, present, and future are completely distinct domains. Whitehead redefined past and present by designating what others regard as the objective component of our immediate awareness of the present as the "immediate past" (because fully determinate). If the immediate past can be part of the present, so can the future. There is one caveat, though: for him, only the present can be active.

I extend Whitehead’s ontological interpretation of the present to apply to an active future. The divine future is creative, because it provides the conditions for creation (aim and power). Present concrescence is creation. Whitehead describes it as self-creation, but it is also becoming in the most radical sense, i.e., the bringing into being of that which had not yet being. Then what is created is the past.

Pailin’s critique against divine impersonality is well-taken, but I don’t see how it applies to me, once future subjectivity is taken into account. It is somewhat ironic to be charged this way, since I developed these ideas because I found insufficient allowance for God’s personhood elsewhere. Whitehead depends too much on impersonal nontemporal valuation as the source of initial aims. I define a person as a dynamic, responsive source of value. Nontemporal valuation is clearly a source of value, but it is not responsive to each particular situation as it arises. Future subjectivity can be both.

The future influences us differently; not like the past. The past is concretely determinate, having a locus different from ours. We prehend it. The future which influences us has the same locus as we do. Before the initiation of our becoming, this locus was part of the divine activity determining alms for the emerging world. At the initiation of our becoming, it constituted the aim (the valued possibilities) guiding our actualization and the power whereby we could prehend the past and integrate our prehensions. The past lies outside us, the future within, though not of our own making.

I see God as that which is future because the other alternatives seem to be inadequate. Traditionally, God has been taken to be timeless, but a timeless God is insufficiently active, if the timeless abstracts from time. Whitehead’s concept of God is halfway between nontemporality and temporality, but he has shown that divine power can be reconceived as divine persuasion rather than omnipotence, making it possible to think of the divine power in terms of the future.

If God is temporal, most have thought that God is effective as past, in the same way that actual occasions are. Following Hartshorne, God is conceived as an infinite series of occasions, active as present, but effective as past. This poses a series of technical difficulties, particularly with respect to relativity physics (Transforming 187-205). For our present purposes, however, let us consider only one: God should be primarily experienced as creative, but Hartshorne’s proposal means that God is prehended only as created. The creative lure is overlaid and obscured by layers of the created order derived from the world.

On my view God’s influence is like the past, however, in one respect: it comes from what is earlier than the occasion. It differs in providing the necessary conditions for the occasion, in terms of which it can prehend past occasions occupying different loci from itself. To be sure, this sense of earlier is rather different than the usual, because it derives from the phases of becoming.

To be sure, the "time" of concrescence is not physical time (Whitehead, Process 283). Many have concluded that it is not in time at all, but I see concrescence as the more primordial form of time.⁹ Ordinary coordinate, physical time is constructed out of the results of concrescence. In so far as the extensive continuum extends beyond the actual, it is simply projective. The continuum is derivative from physical time, which is itself derivative from concrescence.

Physical and concrescent time order time inversely. For physical rime, the past is earlier than the present, the future later; it is not yet, being merely possible. For concrescent time, however, the future is earlier. It is earlier because it is less determinate than the earliest, the initial phase of concrescence. The immediate past attained by the concrescence in its satisfaction, is not part of the concrescence (Whitehead, Process 85), and should be regarded as later than it.

It is true that I wrote that "God is not an actuality," but the qualifier I added is crucial: "in the way in which past actualities are actual" (Transforming 316). While past actualities are determinate and finite,¹⁰ Whitehead saw that (present) concrescences were also actual (see Process 32). Traditionally actuality has meant either concrete determinateness or activity. Whitehead has found a way to affirm both meanings by modal differentiation. This may stretch the meaning of "actual"; I stretch it a bit further to apply to the future: God as active is also actual, though in a different sense from the way the past is actual.

I find that when moving into uncharted territories our semantic fields must be altered. Novel concepts often need new terms, e.g., prehension" and "concrescence." If not new terms, we sometimes need new meanings to old terms such as "future." If I question whether creativity is simply inherent within actuality without question, I must have some way of describing how that creativity can come from another. Sometimes, I must admit, I have been elliptical. Instead of "the future as yet has no being" (Transforming 244), I should have clarified: "that which is future has as yet no being."

Pailin objects that I have seriously tampered with the ontological principle. It’s not so much the principle, namely, that actualities are ultimately the only reasons, but the meaning of "actuality" that I have modified. He paraphrases the principle differently: "what is not cannot act," noting that for me "the future as yet has no being" (Transforming 244) and so cannot act now.

Here the distinction between becoming and being is essential. Concrescence is an activity of unifying the many, but it does not yet have the oneness of being. Becoming is not being, although it results in being. ¹¹ As applied to God, Tillich is correct: God is not a being, but the ground of being.¹² Since both becoming and being are actual, though in different senses, that which is actual but not a being can act. This is somewhat ambiguous, since acting has two aspects: activity, and influence on others. Only becoming has creative activity, only being is effective. Thus actual occasions as concrescences are active, although only their determinate outcomes can affect others.

There is a real but qualified sense in which God is active now: God is in unison of becoming with present occasions. This is true for the divine occasions Hartshorne proposes as well, although it is only as past, as concretely determinate, that any divine occasion influences actual occasions. In my case God influences the present from the future rather than from the past.

There is a real difficulty in talking about both God and occasions acting now, if acting means decision, rendering things determinate. If there were several activities of determination with the same occasion, there could be several determinate outcomes of the same being. But any being can only have one determinate character.¹³ While objectified occasions are present in concrescences, no concrescence can be present in another concrescence. If it were, the larger concrescence would be divisible into smaller concrescences, contrary to the atomicity of the act of becoming.

Whitehead resolves the issue among actual occasions by arguing that only past actualities, those no longer acting, can be effective. Contemporary occasions are in unison of becoming, and so can be said to be acting now, but they are not effective; they cannot be prehended.

This solution cannot apply to God, who is ubiquitous. God is either aspatial, as Whitehead implicitly seems to hold, or omnispatial, as John B. Cobb, Jr. has proposed.¹⁴ If aspatial, the problem of effectiveness is acute. If omnispatial, then there is double determination. Hartshorne avoids it by distinguishing between the acting of the present divine occasion and the effectiveness of the previous one. I avoid it in the opposite way. Instead of understanding God’s effectiveness as in terms of the determinate past, I see it as coming from the indeterminate future.

Pailin suggests that my basic position could be regarded as Alexander’s, if it were deity that was forever future (cf. Transforming 299), and God active in the present. Alexander’s future deity might be described as the unity of all ideals, contrasted with God who acts in the world straining towards deity. He assumes with most that all activity must be present activity, so ‘God’ in pantheistic fashion names the activity of the world insofar as it is ordered toward this ideal deity. Yet Whitehead held, and I concur, that the actualization of the unity of all ideals is impossible: "Tennyson’s phrase, ‘one far-off divine event, To which all creation moves,’ presents a fallacious conception of the universe" (Process 111). All determinate actualization is finite, and some perfections exclude others (see Whitehead, Adventures 276). Alexander’s God is a present acting based on a future au-encompassing ideal. Mine on the other hand is a future acting which is influential in the present in terms of particular ideals. To this extent each position is the reciprocal of the another.

"Acting" and "activity" refer to a single actuality in a substance metaphysics of efficient causation. The cause acts to bring about the effect. But dynamics and influence must be distinguished in process metaphysics; the prehender actively prehends the causal factor. The present activity of concrescence is effective in the immediate past it produces. I am extending this paradigm to explain future activity, which is active in future concrescence but influential in present occasions.

Notes

1. See Transforming Process Theism, chapter two. The evidence on which chapter two is based is incomplete, but may be found on the web: "The Growth of Whitehead’s Theism," Process Studies Supplements vol. 1, item 1 (1-99), 26 Jan. 2000 <http://www.ctr4process.org/PSS/>.

2. The notion that creativity is an eternal object is based on the faulty assumption that only forms can be universals. Since creativity applies to every actuality without exception, it is just as universal, without being a form. In many ways it is diametrically opposed to form.

3. See my "The Riddle of Religion in the Making."

4. If Whitehead had a computer with a search key, the text could easily have been cleansed of textual anomalies. This would have been a great boon to most readers, but it would have deprived us of precious clues for genetic analysis.

5. See my book, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Chapter One.

6. Pailin then suggests that Hartshorne’s dipolar analysis of the panentheistic God "identifies a critical breakthrough in solving" some of these problems. It’s more likely just the other way around. Hartshorne’s early work (e.g., his dissertation of 1922) appears to have been immensely clarified by Whitehead’s distinction of the two natures of God. See Lewis S. Ford, ed. Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead, 5-8, and especially Lad Sessions’s essay, 10-34.

7. See note 3.

8. This objection is specifically addressed in Transforming Process Theism 320ff.

9. See my essay, "On Epochal Becoming: Rosenthal on Whitehead."

10. Neglect of the distinction between kinds of actuality is at the root of the charge by some Thomists that Whitehead worships a finite God. Determinate being is necessarily finite, but for that reason I argue that God is not a being, but infinite becoming (everlasting concrescence).

11. Hartshorne and others hold becoming to be (a kind of) being, but other interpreters of Whitehead argue convincingly that "being is constituted by becoming" (Process 23) means that it is produced by becoming: Jorge Luis Nobo, "Whitehead’s Principle of Process."

12. See my "Notes Toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich."

13. Aristotle also argued that no substance could be present in another substance. Whitehead notes that his "principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum," which holds that "an actual entity is present in other actual entities" (Process 50).

14. See Cobb’s Christian Natural Theology, 192-96.

Works Cited

Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1965. 192-96.

Ford, Lewis S. Transforming Process Theism. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000.

____"The Riddle of Religion in the Making." Process Studies 22 (1993): 42-50.

____The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: State U of New York P, 1984.

____"On Epochal Becoming: Rosenthal on Whitehead." Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 33 (1997): 973-80.

____"Notes Toward a Reconciliation of Whitehead and Tillich." Union Seminary Quarterly Review 39 (1984): 41-46.

Hurtubise, Denis. "One, Two, or Three Concepts of God in Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality? Process Studies 30.1 (2001): 78-100.

Ford, Lewis S. Ed. Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead. American Academy of Religion: AAR Studies in Religion, number 5, 1973.

Nobo, Jorge Luis. "Whitehead’s Principle of Process." Process Studies 4 (1975): 275-84.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. 1933. New York Free Press, 1067.

____. Process and Reality. 1929. Corrected Edition. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York Free Press, 1978.

____. Religion in the Making. 1926. New York: Fordham UP. 1996.

____.Science and the Modern World. 1925. New York: Free Press, 1967.

Ordinarily, we think of subjectivity in terms of consciousness. It pertains to our own conscious experience both of the external world and our own inner feelings, and by extension to the conscious experience of others.

Although we know what we mean, further analysis seems impossible. Consciousness seems quite sui generis.

Perhaps we can get at the nature of subjectivity a bit by treating consciousness as a contingent feature of much subjectivity. Then we may see subjectivity as pertaining to the activity of an organism taken as a whole. Particular elements within the organism, as well as external efficient causes, also affect that activity. Unless the subject is a mere spectator and not a contributor, however, these factors cannot completely determine the activity. In order for there to be subjective contribution, there must be some element of self-determination in addition to all partial or external causes. If that is so, then there must be alternative ways in which the partial and external causes can be unified. If subjective decision is not completely random, these alternative possibilities must be differentially valued. Subjectivity is then the capacity to be affected by differing alternative possibilities with the power to decide between them.

In this essay we shall primarily be concerned with the ontological basis for subjectivity by recounting Whitehead’s various theories about it. What is it that provides for the being of the subject and its feelings? One theory is rejected from the start: that the subject is an enduring substance. This theory was replaced by one which will be strange to those schooled in Whitehead’s philosophy: that the being of the subject stemmed from an original datum, containing all the physical input, from which concrescence starts. Because of the shift effected by his later philosophy, this model was abandoned for that of a (nontemporal) subject, itself displaced by a theory of the superject. Finally Whitehead concluded that subjectivity was not a being at all, but sheer becoming.

This final theory has two momentous consequences: (1) Becoming could not be adequately understood on the model of a ‘leaf becoming green’, where there is some being sustaining the activity of change. (2) In all traditional theory being is the primary existence, which means that becoming can only have a derivative existence. Whitehead’s analysis inverts all that, making becoming (and subjectivity as well) primary, with being derivative as the outcome of becoming.

This essay is primarily a voyage of discovery, explaining the way in which Whitehead tried on different theories for size before finally hitting upon the theory of becoming just described. By examining the background and the emergence of the concept ‘subjective aim’, we can get some purchase on his understanding of subjectivity. Such a history of ‘subjective aim’ is possible only because of a compositional idiosyncrasy of Whitehead’s: although he revised his position many times, he tried very hard to preserve the texts of earlier positions in the final version, often by insertions designed to persuade the reader to interpret such texts in the light of later positions. At any rate, it is possible to isolate earlier strata and to determine the order of composition.¹ This gives us the necessary context for tracing particular concepts throughout the corpus.

Compositional analysis seeks to determine the various strata and insertions in Process and Reality, and to arrange them in the proper sequence. It is also an endeavor in hermeneutics. Instead of taking the whole of Process and Reality as the unit of interpretation, let alone some larger unit, it seeks to determine the smallest unit of interpretation. On the principle that Whitehead does not yet know what he has not anticipated, it seeks to limit our interpretation to a given stratum and prior strata.

Since our usual understanding of Whitehead is based on his final views, the earliest strata will seem most foreign to us. Also they will seem rather unsatisfactory, precisely because Whitehead found reason to reject them. Nevertheless they are milestones in the quest for a satisfactory resolution of these problems.

The bulk of this essay provides the texts and other justifications for Whitehead’s reflections ordered in eleven steps. While the conclusions are naturally based upon this evidence, some can be stated in summary form, which I present here to give the reader a preliminary orientation. What then follows is an account of the detailed evidence on which these conclusions are based, together with some further reflections of my own.

Summary Overview

P.² Substance: substantial unity. The theory of an enduring substance with essential properties underlying accidental properties was developed primarily for objects, yet could also be extended to subjects. Although objects and subjects differ in many ways, both were conceived as beings. (P0) Since subject-substances were conceived as enduring identically over time, they could only be externally related to their accidents.

Q. Datum: dative unity. The notion of a datum grounding the concrescence seems to be the one Whitehead first develops in Process and Reality, mainly in part II. It is the natural outgrowth of earlier conceptions.

Whitehead’s initial theory of prehension (in SMW) was crafted with the concerns of the events of nature primarily in consideration, but he did want to allow room for mind. Events were constituted by their internal relations or prehensions of all other events. After an abortive attempt to explain mind in terms of objects’ or characteristics of events, he proposed to explain it in terms of the supersession of physical occasions by mental occasions. As concrescence became restricted to the synthesis of mental feelings, his project became one of analyzing the concrescence from its own perspective. From that perspective, the datum presupposed by concrescence, what I shall hereafter call the ‘original datum’, is simply the old physical occasion, which had simply been designated the ‘actual occasion’ (in SMW).

These statements give something of the flavor of this early theory: "the first stage of the process of feeling is the reception into the responsive conformity of feeling whereby the datum, which is mere potentiality, becomes the individualized basis for a complex unity of realization" (PR 113C).³ Or, later, "The objectified particular occasions together have the unity of a datum for the creative concrescence" (PR 210C).

As long as Whitehead had confidence in the adequacy of his early theory of prehension (in SMW), the datum theory of an occasion’s unity held. It provided the being of the occasion, from whence the subject grew. It is becoming based on being, the prior being of the datum. But Whitehead also thought of subjectivity in terms of an experiential synthesis of many feelings, which generated a tension. The datum needed to be determinate enough to provide the unity of being, yet indeterminate enough to allow subjectivity to make further determinations. Or again, the datum must be one datum, yet somehow contain many feelings.

The original datum was intended to account for the physical side of things, concrescence for the mental or subjective side. The more the determinateness of the original datum was stressed, the less scope there could be for the concrescence itself. It could interpret and give meaning to the process, but it could not alter the constitution of a datum already determined, even if not completely so.

On this theory we may suppose the subject to acquire its own unity and being from the original datum, and then be able to persist through the concrescence. It differs from the substantial model, however, in that the feelings affect their subject. They are internally related to it.

The process is understood to be telic (Q1). Since there must be some source, the notion of an ‘objective lure’ was devised from which the occasion could select its Ideal of itself’ (Q2). (At this time it was assumed that the subject had the power to select.)

Once the unity of the original datum was given up, prehension could be interpreted in terms of physical feeling as one element in concrescence which could now be reordered in its final phases. This shift is perhaps the most important to take place within Process and Reality. Roughly, it marks the difference between parts II and III. But it meant that the ontological basis for subjectivity had to be completely rethought.

R. Subject: nontemporal unity. In part III, concrescence begins with many physical prehensions of past actualities, and all conceptual feelings derived from those physical prehensions. The unity and being of the subject can no longer be justified in terms of any single unified datum. It is supposed to be the unity of a whole, yet what is so deemed to be unified is simply a multiplicity of feelings derived from many actualities.

The concrescence is a many becoming one. The problem of the subject was the status of the being (or unity) that the concrescence possessed along the way.

The superject was then conceived as the basis for unity. If the whole process is a many becoming one, then only that which emerges at the end could have unity. It also has the being to affect superseding occasions. The superject could confer secondary being on the process provided only that we do not understand the process overly temporally. For then that which is earlier would lack that which is later. So concrescence is understood, implicitly at least, as nontemporal.

One text (R3) dramatizes how Whitehead must find his way to a new theory of the self in the wake of the shift occasioned by giving up the unity of an original datum. The original eight categoreal conditions seem to be have been propounded before Whitehead devised subjective aim’, so these are scrutinized for their understanding of subjectivity. The first categoreal condition (R4), with its insistence upon strict compatibility of the feelings by virtue of the unity of the subject, makes best sense on the assumption of nontemporality.

Conceptual reproduction (R5) dissolves the ‘objective lure’, for now any conceptual unity must be the result of derivation and synthesis. The importance of the ‘objective lure’ lay in its standing at the outset of concrescence. Reversion indicates that Whitehead had not yet conceived of God as the nontemporal concrescence of all eternal objects. Once he had so conceived God there is part of a paragraph added to revise reversion accordingly. The rest of that paragraph, including the final abolition of reversion, occurs later (T10).

The seventh categoreal condition, and perhaps the eighth, provide the basis for the term ‘subjective aims’ (R6 ).

S. Superject: superjective unity. Since the being of the subject could not be vested in any original objective unity, Whitehead transferred that being to the superject. The superject is "thrown beyond" the concrescent unification of feelings; it is its concrete unified outcome, capable of causally influencing subsequent occasions. The superject undeniably has being, but it was not at all clear how it could bestow any being upon its own antecedent concrescence.

What we have termed the "subject" theory (R) also depended on the superject, either by the subject’s being merging nontemporally with the being of the superject, or with the subject having a sort of proleptic being capable of persisting through the concrescence. At any rate, the assumption underlying his theory seems to have moved imperceptibly from the nontemporal to the temporal, leading to the problematic the ‘subjective aim’ was designed to overcome.

The ‘subject-superject’ (S7) stressed both their identity and the difference. Insofar as the subject differed, it must come before the superject. Implicit here, perhaps not yet fully worked out, is the subject as the occasion in its present becoming, occupying its spatiotemporal region as present, just as the superject, as the past being affecting subsequent occasions, occupies that same region as past.

If so, subject distinguished from superject can only be pure becoming, for it has not yet reached its being. Insofar as the unity has not been achieved, there can only be the many feelings without any subject towards which they aim. But how can they aim at a common subject without any common coordinator? The subject had been that coordinator, but now Whitehead sees that the subject, so carefully specified in the categoreal conditions, cannot come into being until the end of concrescence.

This means that the notion ‘the subject aims’, had to be given up as the common coordinator. To resolve these difficulties, however, Whitehead was able to introduce the ‘subjective aim’ as one of the conceptual feelings of the concrescence (T8). It persists throughout the entire concrescence and is capable of influencing all other feelings to direct them towards a common goal. By successive modification the aim can transform itself into the very goal both sought and actualized. Finally it is the form of the unity of the many feelings constituting that concrescence.

T Becoming: subjective unification. With the subjective aim resolving any immediate difficulties, Whitehead could embrace the notion of ‘subject-superject’. Both sides are essential to his concept. The occasion has being only as superject, but its becoming constitutes that being. The subject is now understood as only one aspect of the subject-superject. The subject is no longer conceived as being but as sheer becoming, not as a unity but as a process of unification.

In this revision Whitehead gives up the attempt to ground concrescence in any final unity, for the subject need not be a being in any sense. This also leads to an important shift in ontological weight, for it becomes possible to conceive of becoming as that which primarily exists, for being can now be derived from becoming, even though being alone affects others.

Yet if the subjective aim is present from the very beginning, where did it come from? Not from prehensions of past actualities, individually or collectively, as the aim is designed to unify that multiplicity. It must come from God (T9).

The prehension of God was unproblematic at the time Whitehead devised nontemporal synthesis of all eternal objects. Shortly, however, he introduced the consequent nature of God, meaning that God’s everlasting concrescence was imprehensible.

It was not until he devised the ‘hybrid physical prehension’ (TJO) that Whitehead felt he had resolved that problem. Such hybrid prehensions were originally devised to explain originality with continuity in living persons, but they also provided the means whereby occasions could directly prehend divine conceptual feelings. They also rendered conceptual reversion superfluous, be-cause each occasion could prehend unrealized eternal objects in God, so the category of reversion, already weakened, was abolished.

Evidence

The doctrine of substance as an explanation of change is rejected by Whitehead throughout Process and Reality:

An actual entity does not change but becomes. Once attained, it always retains the being which it is. Dynamism on the most basic level is not vested in change (the difference between successive occasions), but in becoming, the process resulting in that being. How this process of becoming (concrescence) is to be conceived will be central to this essay, as it is conceived differently at different times.

One difficulty with substance theory is that the substance is externally related to its qualities. This becomes acute when the subject is conceived as a kind of substance. Then feelings inhere in a subject the way qualities inhere in a substance. If the subject-substance is then externally related to its changing feelings, then there would be no way for it to be affected by them. This is clearly a problem for classical theism, yet it also extends to every subject. On the substance view, however, the subject must be externally related to its feelings. Otherwise how could it maintain any self-identity over time?

Whitehead sought for an alternative to this model. Yet it had one clear strength: the subject-substance provided the primary being, and the feelings enjoyed a secondary, derivative being as its feelings. Any alternative must provide a similarly functioning primary being:

The concrescence is the process of becoming the subject, but this becoming is based on a primary being, the original datum, as proposed by his early theory. This unity of the past world in one datum had to be at the outset of the concrescence in order to provide all the concrescent feelings with their secondary being.

Q1.⁴ The Original Datum and its Ideal

Initially, in the Gifford’s Draft, the name we shall give to Whitehead’s writings, largely from part II, which conceive the subject as the subjective aspect of the datum from which concrescence begins,⁵ a few anticipations of subjective aim can be discerned.

On an early theory, there are "four stages constitutive of an actual entity": "datum, process, satisfaction, decision" (PR 149fC). Datum’ here entails dative unity: "the new concrescence starts from this datum" (PR 150C). ‘Decision’ is not a subjective activity pertaining to the concrescence, but means an objective determination of the datum by its world. It looks back to the constitution of an actual occasion by other actualities in terms of internal relations (prehensions) in Science and the Modern World and forward to ‘transition’ (PR 210C).

‘Process’, however, is telic: "Process is the growth and attainment of a final end. The progressive definition of the final end is the efficacious condition for its attainment. The determinate unity of an actual entity is bound together by the final causation towards an ideal progressively defined by its progressive relation to the determinations and indeterminations of the datum. The ideal, itself felt, defines what ‘self’ shall arise from the datum; and the ideal is also an element in the self which thus arises" (PR 150C). Thus ‘self’ is understood as the subjective side of the final satisfaction.

In his analysis of order at the outset of "The Order of Nature" (II.3.1), Whitehead observes that "There is not just one ideal ‘order’ which all actual entities should attain and fail to attain. In each case there is an ideal peculiar to each particular actual entity, and arising from the dominant components in its phase of ‘givenness’." (PR 84C). That is, from the original datum given by the past. The words, "dominant components," do not lead us to expect that God is solely, or even primarily, the source of that ideal.

Q2. Objective lure

While most of our insights concerning the objective lure come from later passages, it seems to be introduced in this careful passage from the chapter on "Propositions" (11.9):

The datum of the primary phase is the datum from which the concrescence starts, being constituted by past actual occasions. It is described as "multifold," however, indicating its complex character. The objective lure is its counterpart. In the final sentence we have the initial suggestions that will result in the principle of conceptual reversion, which are illustrated in the next paragraph concerning the Battle of Waterloo. No mention of the ideal, or its relation to the objective lure, is included.

The other early mention of ‘objective lure’ is from the same chapter. "A proposition is an element in the objective lure proposed for feeling, and when admitted into feeling it constitutes what is felt" (PR 187C, italics his). As yet, however, the possibility of ‘propositional feeling’ (E) has not been mentioned. While the ‘lure for feeling’ is more broadly used, it particularly pertains to propositions, where this quality is more central than truth. Hence, it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true (PR 184fC).

Later the subject will select the ‘ideal of itself’ from the ‘objective lure’, which is the original fund of values and eternal objects it can draw upon. In the meantime, Whitehead provisionally coins the term ‘private ideal’, as in this passage anticipating the incorporation of external data within concrescence.

The private ideal is gradually shaped in the process itself, but what shapes it? The subject? If so, does it have being throughout the process, or reflect the being of the datum?

This theory can be only provisional in the long run, however, because it proposes two successive acts of unification, the first of mere reception, the second of ideal transformation. This is contrary to the argument for the atomicity of becoming.⁷

While the other main texts on the objective lure stem from an earlier chapter on "The Order of Nature" (II.3C), closer scrutiny suggests that they belong to a single insertion, made during the transitional period (C+) before Whitehead reconceived concrescence in terms of the prehension of past occasions.⁸

In the following passage from this insertion Whitehead tells us about an "origination of conceptual feeling," but as in the previous passage and in one to come (R3), he does not specify any datum from whence it is derived. The eternal objects of the conceptual feelings are all interrelated to constitute the objective lure, the source of the ideal of itself.

Since no other way is specified, the subject is tacitly endowed with the power of selection. Note that the objective lure and the subjective ideal of itself are both objective, despite their contrasting designations, since both are prehended by the subject. The ideal of itself may be thought to be more intimately connected to the subject, however, because it is the outcome of the subject’s endeavors, and describes the subject’s ideal of itself.

Earlier in this same passage the constitution of the objective lure is spelled out:

An eternal object’s relevance is determined by the data, thereby determining the objective lure. But the ‘ideal of itself’ selected from this lure is the result of the self-activity of the occasion. The objective lure itself seems to be constituted from the sum total of eternal objects found in the data from the past occasions. At this point the actualities themselves form a mere multiplicity, but the interrelatedness of the associated forms brings them into a natural unity.

Such an objective lure, however, will not account for novelty, nor for the imaginative penumbra surrounding the sober historical facts of the Battle of Waterloo (PR 185C). So Whitehead is concerned to expand the scope of the objective datum. In the prefatory remarks to the long quotation from Hume about the missing shade of blue, Whitehead calls attention to eternal objects, "unrealized in the datum and yet constituent of an ‘objective lure’ by proximity to the datum" (PR 86C+). Clearly, unrealized eternal objects cannot be realized and hence cannot be part of the datum, but relevant ones could be incorporated into the objective lure.

Consider his description of "the actual world of any actual entity as a nexus whose objectification constitutes the complete unity of objective datum for the physical feeling of that actual entity" (PR 230D). In his final theory physical theories receive their complete integration in the very last phase of concrescence, but this intermediate theory follows naturally enough from earlier concepts in which mental occasions superseded physical ones.

Whitehead further relates the concept of objective lure to the concept of ‘potential difference’ in physics: "In the comparison of two actual entities, the contrast between their objective lures is their ‘potential difference’" (PR 87C+). Again, "[t]he ultimate fact in the constitution of an actual entity which suggests this term [‘potential difference’] is the objective lure for feeling." Is this an ‘objective lure’ pertaining to feeling or simply an ‘objective lure’ of feeling? The first quotation points to the former, but Whitehead’s language shows the close proximity of these two ideas.

R3. Causal Feeling

In the chapter on "Primary Feelings" there is a section (III.2.2) evidently belonging to an earlier stratum than its surroundings. With much fanfare, the first section (III.2.1F) introduces the ‘simple physical feeling’, which is mentioned later in the same chapter, but not in the very next section. Instead, the term used is ‘causal feeling’. Causal feelings and conceptual feelings are both primary, neither being derived from the other: "In each concrescence there is a twofold aspect of the creative urge. In one aspect there is the origination of simple causal feelings; and in the other aspect there is the origination of conceptual feelings" (PR 239D).

From the fact that this section knows nothing about conceptual reproduction, I had earlier concluded that it must belong to the Gifford’s draft (EWM 185). But the text avoids assigning any explicit source for these causal feelings; they simply "originate," without telling us whether they are derived from some original datum which is the basis of that concrescence (as in C) or from the many past actualities of its actual world (later theory). Here Whitehead is being cautious in a sense reminiscent of Hume, who declared that impressions come from he knew not where.

I suspect he was being very cautious because the foundation of his theory of concrescence, the original datum as basis of concrescence, had been shattered. He recognized that it needed to be reconceived in terms of a single act of unification of many prehensions, but just how that revision should proceed may not have been immediately clear. This section is more a minimal statement of what elements he could salvage from the old theory than an attempt to reconstruct a new one.

We may suppose ‘causal feeling’ to be an antecedent term for ‘physical feeling’. ‘Causal’ aptly describes derivation from actuality, and the efficient causation these feelings express, but was apparently deemed not a suitable contrast to conceptual feelings. Physical feelings also have the advantage of relating more readily to the physical pole they constitute, although then it is not clear why we do not have ‘mental feelings’ designated in parallel fashion. The term ‘physical feeling’ seems to be absent from "The Theory of Feelings" (III.1), except for one section (III.1.9), which could be a later insertion.⁹ Sometime during or just after writing "The Theory of Feelings" we may infer that Whitehead introduced the notion of ‘causal feelings’ (III.2.2), which was then overruled by the more developed theory of ‘simple physical feelings’ (III.2.1).

Just as we are not told the source of causal feelings, we are not told the source of conceptual feelings; they simply "originate." We cannot know whether they derive from the objective lure; moreover, it seems possible that Whitehead was no longer sufficiently certain of that theory to be explicit about it. Alternatively, this section (III.2.2) may antedate the ‘objective lure’ passages and thus have no knowledge of that concept.

This section may have originally contained one more passage than it presently has, which would have belonged between the second paragraph, which introduces the contrasting physical and mental poles, and the third paragraph (at PR 239.35):

Presently that passage is situated in the next chapter (III.3.3) as part of the explanation of the category of conceptual valuation. There are tensions between the insertion and its present surroundings. The insertion is much closer to ‘causal feelings’ in not (explicitly, at least), deriving conceptual feelings from physical ones, when that is the whole purpose of conceptual reproduction. The insertion speaks of physical and mental poles (otherwise not part of III.3.3), while its surroundings talk of individual feelings.

The problem for Whitehead, expressed in the insertion, is that the mental le was conceived as the subject. The subject was the subjective side of objective being, but what is the being of the whole now that the original datum has been shattered into a multiplicity of data? If the mental pole were derived from the physical pole, what would be the role of the subject with respect to that pole (or those physical feelings) considered by itself?

A provisional answer may be found in the claim "for the subject is at work in the feeling, in order that it may be the subject with that feeling" (PR 224F). This somewhat paradoxical understanding of ‘subject’ as the becoming of what it will be enables Whitehead to assert that all feelings, including physical feelings, have their subjects.

What theory of the ontological basis for subjectivity does Whitehead espouse at this point? This is extraordinarily difficult to say. The safest answer would be that he has no theory, now that the datum theory has been undercut. I provisionally classify it as an anticipation of the ‘subject’ theory, to which we now turn.

R4. The first categoreal condition

On the datum theory (Q), the concrescence had its underlying unity in terms of its initiating datum, and the subject was the subjective aspect of this objective datum (early sense). Since this initiating datum was reconceived in terms of many past actual occasions, the unity and hence the underlying objective being for the concrescence was removed. Whitehead was required to find some other unity of the whole for concrescence, which could only be found in the final satisfaction. If so, how does this final being provide any being for the concrescence which comes before it? Here it seems he resorts to an implicitly nontemporal approach (R). To be sure, this is only made explicit once (R5).

Our study of selected categoreal conditions is intended to draw out some of their implications for the nature of ‘subject’ they presuppose. (For the sake of convenience, we shall distinguish between the ‘categoreal conditions’ as they are called in the chapters on "The Theory of Feelings" [III.1] and "The Transmission of Feelings" [III.3], and the ‘categoreal obligations’ as they were later formulated in "The Categoreal Scheme" [I.2].)

Rather surprisingly, the first categoreal obligation is worded identically (PR 26). In terms of the final theory, however, we should have expected it to end "by reason of the subjective aim,"¹² or even to say:

Our final theories of subjectivity (R, S and T) place being first in the final superject. There is no subjective being which endures throughout the concrescence, for this presupposes temporal differentiation (R). In the final theory, becoming is not a species of being, for being is first produced by becoming (7)¹⁴ Yet when the first categoreal condition was formulated (R), becoming was conceived as a kind of being.

The many feelings must be compatible for every phase, according to the theory of subjective unity Whitehead held when the first condition was formulated, by reason of the unity of the subject. If the physical data was changed in any way from phase to phase, there would be a temporal progression. Since they must be compatible for unity at the end, they must possess this identical compatibility at the start. Thus "the supervention of the later phases does not involve elimination by negative prehensions; such eliminations of positive prehensions in the concrescent subject would divide that subject into many subjects, and would divide those many subjects from the superject" (PR 240F).¹⁵

If the subjectivity of the concrescence is conceived nontemporally, "no feeling can be abstracted from its subject. For the subject is at work in the feeling, in order that it may be the subject with the feeling" (PR 223fF). In a teleological process of self-production, which entails aim’, the final subject is one with each feeling, working to obtain its final satisfaction. (It must be admitted, though, that teleological conceptions are more naturally temporal.) The aim, which is what the subject aims, is the precursor of ‘subjective aim’ but is not yet an individual conceptual feeling. We shall encounter it later in terms of categories seven and eight (C6).¹⁶

From the vantage point of Whitehead’s final theory, it is very difficult to see how the original datum as conceived in the Giffords draft could ever be significantly modified by the ensuing concrescence. And if it were not, then what could the concrescence achieve by way of being? Now that he has been persuaded that concrescence should initiate from a radical multiplicity of past actualities, it is not readily apparent that his formulation of the first categoreal condition has progressed very far beyond the original datum theory. The first category imposes a compatibility so strict as to insure a virtual unity of data, an objective unity which is necessary to protect the underlying unity of the subject during all phases of concrescence.

Note that subjective unity differs from the substantial unity Whitehead rejects. The subject is internally related to its data, in contrast to the substance which can only be externally related to its attributes. In that sense the subject is not an undifferentiated endurance. On the other hand, all the (fully compatible) data are permitted to do is to achieve greater integration. There seems to be no room for any free determination of alternative ways of ordering the initial objective data which would fashion those data differently from the way they are given in the initial situation.

If in the end Whitehead revised his theory, why did he not revise this statement in the first categoreal obligation, as he did in other instances?

I suspect the answer lies in the ambiguity of ‘compatible for integration’. Strictly, as in the theory of subjective unity, this means ‘compatible for integration’ at every phase, but it can mean simply ‘that which will be made compatible in the final unity’ which is all that is needed for the final theory. I believe Whitehead later on chose to interpret it in the latter sense so the formulation would not require any modification.

R5. Conceptual Reproduction and Reversion

In the absence of any actual unity prior to the end of concrescence, any possibility of an ideal unity at the outset becomes very significant. Also the derivation of that ideal becomes quite essential, particularly as it cannot simply be derived from the original datum, although it can still be said to arise "from the dominant components in its phase of ‘givenness’." (PR 84C). Whitehead can still draw on his concept of ‘objective lure’. He does not say so in so many words, but the objective lure seems to be constituted of all the eternal objects making up the various past actual occasions physically prehended, as these eternal objects are mutually interrelated.

Objective datum and objective lure are clearly parallel notions in the earlier theory. Avoiding all talk of derivation, the objective lure is the ideal counterpart of the factual datum. Once that datum is pluralized as data, it can no longer serve as the ontological basis for the concrescence. For a while there, it appears as though Whitehead may have fashioned a theory of a virtual unity’ unifying the initial data received into an objective datum to which, perhaps, conceptual feelings could then be applied.¹⁷

On the other hand, the term ‘objective lure’ disappears once Whitehead makes the shift from datum to data. This is noticeable in the early passage drawn from "The Primary Feelings" (III.2.2: see R3) now imbedded in the account of conceptual reproduction (PR 248). We learn of the ‘ideal of itself’, but not of the ‘objective lure’ from which it is selected. As we shall see, it no longer has a role.

If the occasion begins with a plurality of physical feelings, then the most efficient way to introduce conceptual feelings in terms of which the occasion can actively respond, is to derive them from the former. Moreover, this may be seen as in accord with Hume’s principle, although he recognizes that the empiricists, in their insistence upon representationalism, really neglect physical feelings (PR 248), deriving ‘ideas’, one set of conceptual feeling, from another.

If so, there is no room for a unified objective lure at the outset. The occasion must first derive conceptual feelings, then integrate them. If it is to be self-creative, it must have a hand in fashioning its own ideal. A unified ideal can only emerge at the end, as an ‘ideal of itself’.

Then the ideal cannot serve as that which exists all along to insure the being of the process. Whitehead still talks of an enduring subject, as in his previous theory, but the ontological basis of this subject becomes increasingly problematic.

In the discussion of this category Whitehead appears to have inserted a passage of earlier vintage (III.2.2: 248.21-30 and.34b-41a), which we have considered above (R3). The insertion examined the origination of the mental pole, whereas the discussion of the fourth category concentrates on individual physical and conceptual feelings.

Whitehead appears to have written his basic account quite apart from the insertion, which may have been introduced later. Notice the continuity of the last paragraph if the inserted material (34b-41a) is omitted: "Thus the conceptual registration is conceptual valuation; and conceptual valuation introduces creative purpose. […] The integration of each simple physical feeling with its conceptual counterpart produces ..." (PR 248F).

It may seem unusual to transpose an insertion from one place to another, but Whitehead transposed several others, most notably with respect to "The Ideal Opposites" (V.1.2)¹⁸ Why should he have done so in this particular case? Its wording is somewhat ambiguous, and he may have remembered it as deriving the mental pole from the physical pole, thus endorsing the particularization of that doctrine with respect to individual feelings.

There are too few clues to determine how these sentences fit into Whitehead’s text, but their meaning is quite appropriate to the "nontemporal" understanding of concrescence that was required by the identification of subjective with superjective unity. If feelings were to have temporal adventures in their incomplete phases, they would be bereft of the subject towards which they aim.

Whitehead accounts for time in terms of the data of physical feeling, which is set as compatible for final synthesis from the outset. In contrast, the mental pole, meaning all further stages of concrescence, is deemed to be nontemporal.

He seems genuinely perplexed by the relation between concrescence and time, venturing only the affirmation that concrescence is not in physical time (PR 283M), the time appropriate to the events of nature, analyzable by physics and chemistry. This leaves open whether some other form might be appropriate to concrescence. If Whitehead in later theory allows for elimination within concrescence, then there is a succession of progressively more determinate phases. While every phase called ‘later’ may not be really later (e.g. conceptual reproduction), phases of increasing determinateness would be. We may call this con-crescent time to distinguish it from physical time, which is the succession of equally determinate events.¹⁹

We have already seen anticipations of reversion in Whitehead’s discussion of the imaginative penumbra surrounding the bare facts of the Battle of Waterloo (Q2: PR 185C), the incorporation of relevant alternatives to the datum in the objective lure, and the account of Hume’s missing shade of blue (Q2: PR 87fC+). There is probably even an earlier anticipation in his account of the "multiplicity of Platonic forms" which is ‘given’ for a particular actual entity: "This ordering of relevance starts from those forms which are, in the fullest sense, exemplified, and passes through grades of relevance down to those forms which in some faint sense are proximately relevant by reason of contrast with actual fact" (PR 43fC).

(This is the one mention of ‘subjective aim’ in the categoreal conditions [category 8 will be examined later in R6]. I hope to show that all mention of ‘subjective aim’ in the discussion of these categories can be understood as belonging to later insertions. ‘Aim’ at contrast expresses the purposeful activity of the subject, but it is not yet individualized as a specific feeling. From these considerations I also infer that the italicized portion above is also an insertion.)

The cognate relevance of unrealized eternal objects is essential to Whitehead’s explanation of novelty. If there were only the derivation of possibilities from physical feelings, possibility could never rise over achieved actuality. The justification for any relevance extending beyond actuality would have to depend upon the internal relatedness of the eternal objects ordered as a realm, The occasion incorporates these new elements in forming its "ideal of itself by reference to eternal principles of valuation."

As William A. Christian recognized, however, Whitehead abandoned the notion of ‘realm’ for a mere ‘multiplicity’ of eternal objects.²⁰ Yet we must recognize that the question occasioning this shift was not whether the eternal objects were ordered, but what was the justification of that ordering, given the ontological principle. In either case they are interrelated by their relational essences. The ontological principle requires that they be ordered by some actuality, and that would be impossible for pure eternal objects among themselves.

Such an actuality would have to be nontemporal to encompass all eternal objects, so God is conceived as the nontemporal concrescence of all eternal objects. This is a conception of God stronger than the simple principle of the early writings of Process and Reality, but not yet the ‘consequent nature’ of the later writings.²¹

The final paragraph of this section is strongly at variance with the rest, since it purports to abolish the category of reversion just established. Unlike the preceding discussion, which assumes that the ordering of eternal objects needs no grounding, it explains that ordering by reference to God’s conceptual feeling. Thus eternal objects are mere ‘multiplicities’ apart from their divine ordering. It seems that after the category of reversion was formulated, Whitehead came to reconceive God as the nontemporal concrescence of eternal objects.²² Since all possibilities can now be derived from God, reversion becomes superfluous.

R6. The Subject Aims

It is very short step linguistically from ‘the subject aims’ to ‘the subjective aim’. This is clearly the origination of the term, Conceptually, however, there is an important leap. As long as the subject aims’ at its ideal, and even participates in the shaping of that ideal, the specific means whereby that aiming is accomplished has not yet been clarified. ‘Subjective aim’, on the other hand, points out a definite conceptual feeling, present throughout concrescence, affecting the subjective forms of all its feelings in order to bring them into a final unity.

The doctrine of ‘the subject aims’ was held briefly, transitionally, primarily in the formulation of the seventh and eighth categoreal conditions.

The last five words give the passive equivalent to ‘the subject aims’. The ‘aim’, which the subject entertains, has already been mentioned in the account of the first categoreal condition: "The feeling is an episode in self-production, and is referent to its aim. This aim is a certain definite unity with its companion feelings" (PR 224: R4). Here the aim does not seem to be a feeling. It is really more akin to the final satisfaction, that which is aimed at.

The aim is also considered in terms of the ‘aim at contrast’ with reference to the category of reversion. Here Whitehead seeks to articulate the ultimate creative purpose towards novelty whereby there can be some effective contrast with that which is, at least in some instances. We shall encounter the subject’s aim further with respect to the eighth categoreal condition.

That this ‘aim’ is not yet the subjective aim is suggested by the later formulation in the corresponding seventh categoreal obligation which substitutes for the italicized words above "congruent with the subjective aim" (PR 27).

In terms of Whitehead’s later understanding of the relation between subject and superject (S7), one formulation in this account is very significant:

Whitehead had distinguished between subject and superject many times before, but not, I believe, with respect to the categoreal conditions. As long as concrescence is (implicitly) understood to be nontemporal, this model will work. Yet if it were to take on a temporal significance, however, it would become problematic. What would be the being which the not yet fully definite subject possesses during the process of concrescence?

As we turn to the eighth categoreal condition, some adjustment of the text is needed. As it is given in the original Macmillan version, it is not even grammatical, let alone fully intelligible:

On analogy with ‘the subject aims’ as expressed in the seventh categoreal condition, relying also upon the major role of ‘balance’ in Whitehead’s ensuring account, I reconstruct this as having possibly read:

There follows what appears to be an insertion of two paragraphs (PR 278.6-3 l).²⁴ At the outset it refers to the Category of Subjective Intensity as if it were "the final Category of Subjective Aim."²⁵ But its ending is particularly instructive. Whitehead could think of no more graceful way to effect transition to the body of his text than the clumsy words, "But there must be ‘balance’, and . . ." (PR 278.32). This insertion contains perhaps the first mention of ‘subjective aim’, here meaning no more than the aim of the subject.

There may be further insertions beyond this, but we shall provisionally consider it as one unit.²⁶ To be sure, it mentions ‘subjective aim’ twice, but I suspect that these are later emendations of ‘aim, which we already encountered in the accounts of categories one and five, and which appears here, by itself, three times. Thus "the rule that what is identical, and what is reverted, are determined by the aim at a favorable balance. The reversion is due to the aim at complexity as one condition for intensity" (PR 278). It is the subject which aims at balance and complexity; the notion of a conceptual feeling of ‘subjective aim’ is yet to come (in T8).

S7. The Subject-Superject

At least as early as the Giffords draft, Whitehead had appreciated the role of the superject: "The operations of an organism are directed towards the organism as a ‘superject’ and are not directed from the organism as a ‘subject’" (PR 151C). The nontemporal theory of subject, as we have just seen, leads to their identification: "For the superject which is their outcome is also the subject which is operative in their production. They are the creation of their own creature" (PR 255).

Now in an inserted section (III. 1.3),²⁷ Whitehead coins the term ‘subject-superject’ for this intimate connection, which is introduced here apparently for the first time. Subject and superject are identical in being, but only at the completion of concrescence. Besides this identity there is a difference to be reckoned with. The subject presides over, or perhaps better, is the process resulting in the being which the superject is. Just as earlier there had been a temporal distinction between the original datum and the ensuing concrescence, so there must be a temporal distinction between the subject in concrescence and the resultant superject. To some extent, at least, concrescence must be understood temporally.

To be sure, where Whitehead wrote ‘subject’ I have inserted ‘superject’, but in the very next paragraph he observes that he has retained ‘subject’ as more familiar. "But it is misleading. The term ‘superject’ would be better" (PR 222). For some of these sentences would be very misleading if we understood ‘subject’ in contradistinction to ‘superject’: "It is in virtue of its subject that the feeling is one thing. Feelings are usually individuated in terms of their data. Here by ‘one thing’ Whitehead does not so much mean ‘one feeling’ as the fusion of all feelings into one being, the superject. These feelings cannot be one in the concrescing subject. "It is in virtue of its [superject] that the feeling is one thing."

Here we see that Whitehead’s identification of subject and superject has relocated the subject at the end of the concrescence, as the recipient of all the feelings of the concrescence. In its immanent role, the superject acts as subject, for it is only as superject that the subject has any being -- on this theory at least, although only provisionally held. Transcendently that same subject acts as superject with respect to superseding occasions.

The central role of the superject as being is effectively brought out by the fourth category of explanation:

If we adopt the subject-predicate logic, by which Whitehead means the substantialist view of the self, by which feelings are externally related to the subject, then the feelings would be ultimately accidental and could only be externally imposed upon the subject.

This is an enigmatic saying that will resist clarification as long as we think of some other subject outside the occasion as doing the aiming. By ‘external agency’ I believe Whitehead meant a subject for that occasion that was not strictly identifiable with the superject. This subject operative within the concrescence could be thought to aim the feelings at the subject-superject. This was precisely Whitehead’s theory up to this juncture, but then the feeling would belong to the concrescing subject and not to its final cause, the superject.

But if this is so, what makes all the feelings, in aiming at their superject, aim together? If the subject only exists at the end, for it has being only as superject, what coordinates the feelings during concrescence? And if there should be no coordination, why should there be any final synthesis achieving unity?

One answer to this problematic presented itself in terms of an insertion referred to above (R4) in conjunction with the first categoreal condition (see note 16):

This comment presupposes the strict identity of subject and superject, seeing the subject as the final end. Where we should expect ‘subject’, Whitehead has written superject’: present in the process determining the feelings. Thus he is investing superjective being retroactively, as an activity having a secondary being borrowed from that which is yet to come into being. This is a highly questionable undertaking, requiring the later to cause the earlier.

The way feelings are conditioned by other feelings is stated in a reckless manner. It would certainly be satisfactory for earlier feelings to influence later ones, but no such qualification is made. What about the reverse? What sense are we to make of later feelings influencing earlier ones? Yet it would seem that Whitehead needs some such theory in order to have all feelings interact in order to aim at a common superject.

T8. Subjective Aim (III.1.5 ad)

We have examined the first three paragraphs of this section above (R4), which discussed the subject’s "aim" at "a certain definite unity with its companion feelings" (PR 224F). This brief commentary on the category of subjective unity was expanded by a response to the problematic just rehearsed (S7). Evidently Whitehead deemed it (III.1.5) to be the next available place for such a response (to III.1.3). This long insertion (224.5-225.21G)²⁸ also introduces the term ‘subjective aim’ as a conceptual feeling for the first time, and hence will repay our close attention.

If subjective being were located solely in the outcome, the many feelings of the concrescence have nothing to guide them to this superjective end. Each feeling in process was supposed to converge on that common end, but how could they do this, except accidentally? How can they influence each other, since they are all contemporaries?

Instead of resorting to the somewhat opaque notion of a ‘subject’ which can somehow ‘aim’ these feelings, Whitehead devises a new ‘feeling’ to be understood in terms of the principle he has proposed for feelings. Since what it is directed at is as yet only a possibility, he introduces "a conceptual feeling of subjective aim" (PR 224G). While drawn from earlier language of "the subject aims," ‘subjective aim’ names a feeling rather than the subject. This feeling coordinates other feelings by directing them toward a progressively defined ideal, thereby achieving whatever aiming it achieves for itself.

In order that the aim be active and effective with respect to all the feelings of concrescence, Whitehead "requires that in the primary phase of the subjective process there be a conceptual feeling of subjective aim" (PR 224G). This leads to a conundrum: The categoreal conditions leave the distinct impression that only physical phases belong to the first phase and that all conceptual feelings are derived in a second phase. What is a conceptual feeling doing in the first phase?

While the category of conceptual reproduction derives a conceptual feeling from every physical feeling, it does not consider any underived conceptual feelings. The first phase is a phase of simple reception, which by this passage Whitehead is enlarging to include conceptual feelings.²⁹

In order to insure interaction between the subjective aim and other feelings, Whitehead invokes consideration of "the successive phases of the concrescence (PR 224G). For each phase there corresponds a particular modification of the subjective aim, the ‘subjective end’ of that phase.³⁰ The modification results from the way antecedent feelings influence the subjective end, and that subjective end in turn influences successor feelings. In that way the subjective aim and concrescent feelings reciprocally influence each other without violating the ban on contemporaneous interaction.

Since the subjective aim is required at the outset, it cannot be derived from any inner-concrescent feeling. Nor can it be derived from any one or more actual occasions, for it means to provide the way in which all these prehensions of past occasions can be unified together. Since God is the unity of all ideal possibilities, God would be the natural source. "Each temporal entity ... derives from God its basic conceptual aim,³¹ relevant to its actual world, yet with indeterminations awaiting its own decisions" (PR 224G).

He immediately recognizes that "in this sense, God can be termed the creator of each temporal actual entity. But the phrase is apt to be misleading (PR 225G). With all the qualifications, this is a remarkable admission. His turn to theism in 1925 had only been possible when he recognized in the principle of limitation a legitimate meaning to God which did not entail that God was the creator of the world. To be creator meant to be omnipotent determiner of all that is. Now in a qualified sense God had to be recognized as creator, yet creating by means of the still small voice of divine persuasion.

T9. Provision of Aim (III.3.1)

This theme of God as the source of initial aims, mentioned heretofore more or less as an afterthought (T8), warrants expansion in its own section.

First, we need to recognize the restraint that Whitehead exercises in specifying the connection between God and the individual occasion. God does not "provide" the aim nor does the occasion prehend God. Instead we have several formulations: (a) "But the initial stage of its aim is an endowment which the subject inherits from the inevitable ordering of things, conceptually realized in the nature of God....Thus the initial stage of the aim is rooted in the nature of God" (PR 244G). (b) "God is the principle of concretion, namely, he is that actual entity from which each temporal concrescence receives that initial aim from which its self-causation starts" (PR 244G).

At this juncture, I believe, Whitehead does not anticipate any difficulty working out the particulars as to how God could influence the world, but then he has not yet proposed the consequent nature with its everlastingness that will pose the major problem (1). The primary reason for restraint, I believe, is to avoid the issue of God as creator, which he may have felt he had sufficiently dealt with (T8). Thus a more impersonal description of God is chosen: the principle of concretion. To be sure, it is given a deeper meaning. Originally as the principle of limitation, the principle of concretion determined which of the eternal objects would be actualizable in the world, now each occasion actualizes itself in terms of God’s gradation of values.

The initial aim is recognized as the initiation of subjectivity, and concrescence is understood in terms of an enlargement of subjective aim: "The subject completes itself during the process of concrescence by a self-criticism of its own incomplete phases" (PR 244G).

The concern for the derivation of subjective aim leads to reflection upon the ontological principle, prompting Whitehead to acknowledge that "the subjective aim limits the ontological principle by its own autonomy" (PR 244G). This limitation is by no means evident in terms of the ontological principle as we know it from Process and Reality, but it was very real in terms of the ontological principle Whitehead was then working with: "That every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason in the character of some actual entity whose objectification is one of the components entering into the particular instance in question" (EWM 323f).

By this formulation reasons are vested solely in actualities, but not "in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence" (PR 24). Here we see the beginnings of that reformulation, for everything "is either transmitted from an actual entity in the past [which serves as its reason] or belongs to the subjective aim of the actual entity to whose concrescence it belongs" (PR 244G). The subjective aim ought to serve as a reason, together with its modifications, so the ontological principle is subsequently revised.

One sentence links God’s provision of aim with Whitehead’s reconception of God as the nontemporal concrescence of eternal objects: the creativity for the nascent occasion "is conditioned by the relevance of God’s all-embracing conceptual valuations to the particular possibilities of transmission from the actual world" (PR 244G). Those conceptual valuations can only result from God’s inclusive ordering of eternal objects.

It is difficult to conceive, moreover, without some sort of conceptual elaboration as the nontemporal concrescence, how God could serve as the source of the initial aims. They might come directly from the unrealized eternal objects themselves, perhaps by means of conceptual reversion.

I have italicized two words, "particular possibilities," to indicate that Whitehead at this time saw no particular difficulty in connecting God’s very abstract alternatives with the particular concerns of concrescing actual occasions. This particularization could not then have depended on the then unanticipated consequent nature. If it had been, we should expect "conceptually realized in the primordial nature of God" instead of the simple "nature" (PR 244G).

This section mentions subject-superject’ three times. This formulation stresses the identity of subject and superject, although in such a way that while the two concepts are identical in being, ‘subject’ indicates the becoming that leads up to that being. The two must in some sense be identical in order for there to be self-creation, yet the hyphen points to some differentiation. Since the being is lodged in the superject, the subject is free to be the becoming, and the becoming the subject.

T10. Hybrid Physical Feeling (III.3.2)

The justification for the provision of aims is worked out in "The Transmission of Feelings" (III.3.2). "A [simple physical] feeling belonging to this special case has as its datum only one actual entity, and this actual entity is objectified by one of its feelings" (PR 245). The satisfaction is not specified as objectified, or that only feelings belonging to the satisfaction can be objectified. So likewise for hybrid prehensions.

Nor is there here, interestingly enough, any talk of the hybrid physical prehension of the primordial nature of God. Only talk concerning divine conceptual feelings.

We seem to have two different solutions as to how God influences the world, depending on how we understand objectification. If it simply means the influence of one actuality upon another, then the conceptual feelings within God’s on-going concrescence can supply the aims that creatures need for the inner subjectivity. If only that which has achieved being can influence successors, then only that part of God which has being -- the primordial nature -- can be prehended. This seems possible only if the notion of a prehensible partial satisfaction is defensible.

Yet either solution labors under severe difficulty. If the consequent nature cannot participate in the provision of aims, it is very difficult to see how God provides for our particular concerns. To be sure, God can have foreseen every conceivable alternative for the world’s further actualization, matching it with the most appropriate possibility, but such responsiveness would only be apparent, on a par with how the eternal God of classical theism appears to intervene in temporal affairs. What is the point of process theism if its temporal dimension is so ineffective?

Also, it is very puzzling how the nascent occasion -- just coming into being and powerless to make any kind of selection or response -- can select just the sort of aim which is most suitable to it out of the immense complexity of the primordial nature. To be sure, "Those of God’s feelings which are positively prehended are those with some compatibility of contrast, or of identity, with physical feelings transmitted from the temporal world" (PR 247), but how can they possibly be selected? The occasion is too young to do so, and God’s temporal activity seems to be debarred from doing do.

The final paragraph sheds light on how hybrid prehension of God renders the category of reversion superfluous:

Although this passage is written much later (F), it was placed in the section just before that on reversion (III.3.3G). So Whitehead could not very well abolish it three pages before it was to be introduced. But if all conceptual feelings could be derived from physical feelings, the category of conceptual valuation would suffice.

Whitehead’s derivation of subjective aim from God thus both accounts for its origination and for any further reversion, but also provides a way in which finite subjectivity could be understood. The earlier doctrine of subject-superject tended to identify the two, at least with respect to their being, still assumed to be its ontological foundation. For any notion which retroactively conferred a secondary being upon the subject-in-process seemed very suspect. The subjective aim was able to take over many of the functions of the subject-in-process, however, and it had the advantage of being present throughout the entire process, affecting every feeling in the process.

Eventually Whitehead comes to recognize that the subjective aim is the occasion’s subjectivity: "The concrescence is dominated by a subjective aim which essentially concerns the creature as a final superject. This subjective aim is the subject itself determining its own self-creation" (PR 69G.+).³²

Subjectivity can now be understood as becoming, or better, as the unified directing of the becoming. It is the one focus, at each stage of concrescence, which affects all other feelings with respect to its final goal. On the other hand, it is itself undergoing continual modification, itself being in the process of becoming. Since the becoming results in a determinate actuality capable of affecting other occasions, it is now possible to identify becoming with subjectivity, being with objectivity.

Philosophers conceive being as all-inclusive. Being omits nothing which has the slightest existential claim. Moreover, being is regarded as having a primary, non-derivative ontological status. Yet if becoming results in being, and it doesn’t work to confer ‘being’ retroactively on becoming, the primacy and all-inclusiveness of being is called into question. Whitehead’s theory forces a reconceptualization of our notions of ontological priority. Originally being was Whitehead’s inclusive category for every event considered in the earlier philosophy of nature. But it doesn’t include subjectivity understood as becoming. Whitehead contrasts ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ in order to maintain the principle of relativity, that "it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming"’ (PR 22).

Being as ontologically prior alone fully exists, while all other "entities" only have derivative existence dependent upon such being. The dynamics of concrescence, however, will not permit concrescence to be dependent upon any being of the whole which only emerges at the end. This would require a retroactive bestowal of secondary being from the superject. This is not really possible because the superject does not yet exist when it is needed.

Just because becoming has (as yet) no unified being does not mean that it is therefore nothing. It has a very qualified being as the multiplicity of past beings it has inherited. At any stage in its process of concrescence, it has many beings held in a tentative propositional unity. But only by means of the completion of the concrescence can it become one unified being.

To make this work, becoming must have primary existence, being the derivative existence. Yet it must also be recognized that primary existence is incurably private, and is only effective upon others in terms of the being it produces.

Notes

1. Here see my book. The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1925-1929 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984). (Hereafter EWM).

My present conclusions stand at considerable variance from those made in the book. Many more texts have been examined since then. In particular, I had not recognized the importance of the insertions to III.1.5 as the initial locus where Whitehead introduced ‘subjective aim’, nor the role of III.1.3 in setting up the problematic to which III.1.5 was the response.

2. The various theories of subjectivity have been labeled P, Q, R, S. T, in order not to be confused with the various compositional strata (A-M) of Process and Reality outlined in EWM.

The eleven steps have been numbered 0-10, and prefaced by the symbol indicating the theory of subjectivity to which it is seen to belong. The initial step is labeled PO because the substantial subject was never affirmed by Whitehead.

3. Letters after PR citations indicate the probable stratum to which this passage is assigned. C represents the largest stratum, the Giffords draft, intended for deliverance but heavily revised for the Gifford Lectures. C+ stands for relatively late passages in C which prepare the way towards his major revision (conceiving of the initial phase in terms of the multiplicity of past actual occasions), while D through M are the various stages in this revisions.

4. In our classification, letters refer to the kind of subject Whitehead is considering, according to our preliminary sketch. Numbers indicate differences in the objective content which the subject entertains.

We start with B, since A, substantial unity, is a concept he rejects.

5. This theory is analyzed in EWM, chapter eight.

6. Whitehead had an earlier (unfamiliar) meaning for ‘objective datum’ besides the later, more usual one.

After two passages in which he anticipates himself strongly (PR 65C, 152C), White-head adopts the term ‘objective datum’ to designate the datum from which concrescence starts (PR 164C, 212C). If this seems perverse, it must be remembered that there was as yet no contrast with initial feelings, nor indeed any application to feelings at all. Of course this first designation disappears with the overthrow of the Giffords draft theory. By III.1.2, 8-11, we find the customary, second sense of ‘objective datum’ as pertaining to individual feelings.

See EWM 201f, 189-91.

7. While lodged in the chapter on "The Extensive Continuum" (II.2.2), PR 68.2-69.26 seems to be a later insertion, either leading to, or resulting from reflection on, the major shift to D. It replaces four paragraphs, now displaced to PR 3Sf (1.3.3). (69.27-70.4 is a later addition, mentioning ‘subjective aim’.)

8. All these mentions of ‘objective lure’ in II.3.1 seem to come in one insertion. This passage may well include the extensive quotation from Hume on the missing shade of blue, since ‘the principle of relevant potentials’ (86.23), Which Hume’s discussion is meant to illustrate, can only refer to "The relevance of an eternal object in its role of lure as a fact inherent in the data" (PR 86.7). Since one cannot easily refer to a passage not yet contemplated, all of the passage, not just those parts referring to ‘data’ or ‘subjective form (PR 85) should be regarded as a single insertion. The boundaries of the passage seem to be 85.17-87.35, leaving room for several more additions to the section such as 87.35-39, 87.40-88.30. The final paragraph on Kant may belong to the original section, though even it probably has its own insertions.

Our inserted passage has a brief insertion of its own, 85.21b-24, designed to identify the ‘ideal of itself’ with the ‘subjective aim.’

It is somewhat difficult to ascertain what stratum our insertion belongs to. It mentions ‘physical feeling’ and ‘data’, usually reliable signs that this is D or later. I suspect, however, that ‘physical feeling’ does not here mean the prehension of past occasions, such that the term is being used in a less technical sense. Moreover, these are ‘derived data’ (PR 85.28), presumably derived from the datum mentioned at PR 86.24 speaking of unrealized eternal objects which are "unrealized in the datum and yet constituent (by extension] of an ‘objective lure’ by proximity to the datum." Thus I assign it to C+ as inserted in C.

9. There are two mentions of ‘physical feeling’ in the antecedent stratum of C+: 84.4, which is part of a C+ insertion in C, may be a non-technical use of the term before the technical contrast between various physical and conceptual feelings was introduced. 164.14 has "(ii) in conformal physical feeling," while using ‘conformal’ in the surrounding passage at 164.27, 29, 30 and 165.9. It seems likely that Whitehead while later revising this passage added the single word ‘physical’ to conform with his later usage. As it stands ‘conformal physical’ is a bit redundant.

(214.2 might be thought to belong to this, or even an earlier stratum [II.10.4C], but 214.1-2 is most probably a later insertion. Note the continuity of its surroundings without this passage: in this phase, private immediacy has welded the data into a new fact of blind feeling. [. . .] But ‘blindness’. . .")

10. PR 248.24-30 is essentially a digression, which could have been composed when the fourth category was introduced, or later, but it is not likely part of III.2.2 because of its mention of ‘physical feeling’.

11. This last phrase. "physical objective datum," might suggest that this belongs to the Giffords draft as an early designation of the original datum. There does not appear to be, however, any obvious location where this insertion could have been otherwise placed.

I suspect that Whitehead’s first move after the shift to an initial phase of many actual occasions was to resituate the datum as the unity of whole from the beginning to the end of concrescence, and to place it in the satisfaction. So 225.2D, 233.12D (implicit). The ‘satisfaction’ is both the unity of the whole and an individual feeling, from which it is but a short step to apply it to individual feelings.

"Physical objective datum" in its original context probably meant the physical side of the final satisfaction.

12. Compare the seventh categoreal obligation (PR 27) with the seventh categoreal condition (PR 254f).

13. So I reformulated it in "Efficient Causation within Concrescence," Process Studies 19/3 (Fall 1990), pp. 167-80, at p. 175.

14. So Jorge Nobo, "Whitehead’s Principle of Process," Process Studies 4/4 (Winter 1974), pp. 275-84.

15. Although the chapter on "The Primary Feelings" is mostly assigned to E, mention of the seventh category of subjective harmony in this section (III.2.3) suggests that it belongs to F.

l6. I regard the PR 223.36-44 as a later insertion. Note that categories 2 and 3 have only a short one-paragraph explication. 224.5-225.21 is a series of ‘subjective aim’ insertions, to be discussed in terms of T8. The one paragraph explication could be maintained for category I by regarding only the third paragraph (PR 223f) as belonging to it originally.

The doctrine of the third paragraph is more hesitant, vague, yet its claim that "the subject is at work in the feeling" could be developed into the fuller doctrine of paragraph two, claiming that each of the feelings is conditioned by the other feelings, and not qualified against the possible teaching that later feelings could influence earlier ones. We shall see this teaching further concerning the subject-subject (D7).

17. In "Efficient Causation with Concrescence," ibid., pp. 172-75 (section II), I argue further for this notion of ‘virtual unity’. Its first stage corresponds to those stages leading up to T; while the second stage concerns the implications following from T.

18. See the forthcoming study in Process Studies by Denis Hurtubise on the original version of PR, part V.

19. See my essay, "On Genetic Successiveness: A Third Alternative," Southern Journal of Philosophy 7/4 (Winter, 1969-70), pp. 421-26.

20. An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 258f.

21. See my essay, "When did Whitehead Conceive God to be Personal?", Anglican Theological Review 72/3 (Summer 1990), pp. 280-91.

22. The principal texts proposing, and drawing the implications of, God’s nontemporal concrescence are 40.3-32, 167.7d-12d, 344.3b-12; 31.4-18a, 22-32.3, 32.21-40a; 247.20-27, 257.7b-15, 206f, 244f. Later these ideas are fused with ideas of the consequent nature.

23. ‘Balance’ is not mentioned in the formulation we have, yet its role is evident from Whitehead’s subsequent discussion of this categoreal condition.

24. It, in turn, may include a secondary insertion based on the primordial nature of God, first introduced at I (PR 278.17-27).

25. Whitehead later changed his mind and added a "ninth categoreal obligation," situating it in II.1.4 (PR 46). This is a particularly well marked instance of his rearranging the text by insertion.

26. There is at the end one further insertion, 280.7-37, comparing physical and conscious purposes.

27. The core of this chapter on "The Theory of Feelings" (III.1) seems to be the analysis of the first three categoreal conditions (1.4-7), prefaced by the pivotal section in establishing the shift from datum to data as the starting point of concrescence. 1.3 seems to have been inserted in order to qualify the category of subjective unity (1.5, 1.4 being an introduction the categories). Both are centrally concerned with the question of the unity of an occasion.

28. This insertion itself (G) contains a further insertion, 224.44-225.11, which introduces the later notion of ‘hybrid physical feelings’. Note the way it begins: "But this statement in its turn requires amplification" (PR 224f), the insertion itself providing the necessary amplification. Note also the continuity without the insertion: "Each temporal entity... derives from God its basic conceptual aim. . [. . .] In this sense, God can be termed the creator of each temporal actual entity." We shall be concerned solely with the first insertion in this section.

29. This problem (intensified by means of ‘hybrid physical feelings’, which have not yet been introduced), permits an elegant and rather extreme solution by Jorge Nobo. He takes the subjective process" (PR 224G) to be a distinct process, superseding "the dative phase lacking subjectivity, but consisting of transition, conformal feeling, and conceptual reproduction. Thus the start of the second process corresponds to the phase just beyond conceptual reproduction, where the subjective aim is first needed, for it is needed for the responsiveness to novelty, whereas the initial process automatically unfolded itself. See his Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), esp. p. 149.

I understand "the subjective process" to be simply another description of the one process of concrescence. Rather than, as usual, assign the hybrid prehension of God to the first phase, with the conceptual derivation in the second phase (which would deprive the initial phase of simple physical feeling of any guidance by the subjective aim), we should think of these two terms as referring to the same feeling. It is a ‘hybrid physical feeling’ with respect to its source in the divine actuality, but it is a conceptual feeling with respect to the possibility it contemplates.

30. Although ‘subjective end’ is obviously meant as a technical term, it is not used outside of this passage.

31. This turn of phrase indicates that ‘subjective aim’ has not yet become his commonplace designation, and that his grasp of the "basic conceptual aim" is still fluid and new.

32. I quote here from a G+ insertion 69.27-70A. which is an alternative conclusion to II.2.2C, developing the significance of the argument from Zeno. Although there are no definite indicators, this insertion probably comes from a much later stratum.

For many, the riddle is how to make sense out of chapter three. The other chapters of Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making (1926) are quite straightforward, but this metaphysical sketch is practically impenetrable, particularly if one has a good grasp of Process and Reality (1929).

Yet this riddle may be of our own making. The more we treat both books as expressing roughly the same metaphysical position, the more difficulty we shall encounter. The third chapter of Religion in the Making is not so much an abbreviated version of the final system, as a particular stage in the trajectory of Whitehead’s metaphysics in the making. This trajectory begins roughly with the background metaphysics of the core chapters of Science and the Modern World (1925). Its theory of divisible events was dramatically transformed into a theory of atomic occasions in the chapters on "Abstraction" and "God" also included in that same book,¹ which launched Whitehead into an intensive metaphysical inquiry culminating in the final chapters of Process and Reality.

Chapter three of Religion in the Making adds to the notion of the (SMW) actual occasion the idea of a mental occasion. (The [SMW] actual occasion is strictly a physical occasion, except in the final qualifying paragraphs of the chapter on "Abstraction.") The mental occasion provides for the possibility of novelty, unobtainable in the simpler model of purely physical actual occasions, but it also means that actualization may require two successive unifications, one physical, one mental. Process and Reality, beginning with part III, dissolves the initial physical unification into a simple multiplicity of physical prehensions. Then the unification of the various conceptual feelings is conceived as a means for the unification of the physical feelings. Instead of an initial physical occasion superseded by a mental occasion, there could be a single concrescent movement.

As the difficulties of the third chapter resolve themselves by patient attention to its intermediate status in Whitehead’s development (EWM, ch. 6), I do not see them as particularly constituting the riddle. The riddle lies elsewhere, not within the book, but in Whitehead’s use of the book in Process and Reality: why is so little of its rich personalistic theism used in the (early stages of the) next book?

Many would say that there is no issue here: "After Religion in the Making, nothing really new is added to the doctrine of God" (CNT 149).² Of those arguing for the continuity between Religion in the Making and Process and Reality, few have been so forceful as David Ray Griffin (PS 15/3)³

He concedes that the consequent nature in the narrow sense as the explicit attribution of physical feelings of the temporal world comes later, but "Whether or not RM contains the consequent nature in the broad sense depends on whether it moves beyond SMW’s doctrine of God as an impersonal principle of concretion (or limitation) to the later idea that God is affected by and knows the world" (PS 15: 1980. There can be intermediate stages. I take Religion in the Making, at least in chapter four, to present God as personal and subjective, but while this could be justified in terms of Western religious theism, it is not justified conceptually. Whitehead’s intuitions seem to outrun any philosophical framework he had erected.

The question is not whether the six passages I quote can be interpreted in terms of the later theory of divine temporality (EMW 140-47). Obviously they can; otherwise they would not have been chosen. The question is rather whether Whitehead himself, at the time he wrote them, intended such temporalistic connotations.

Let us consider the passage Griffin quotes (PS 15:199), which is a perplexing passage to interpret:

From the standpoint of Whitehead’s final theory, as interpreted in terms of Hartshorne’s distinction between God’s abstract nature and concrete totality, it is quite natural to interpret the last sentence as Griffin does: "The passage does not say that God as a whole must be unchanging; it only says that God’s nature must remain self-consistent" (PS 15:200). But does Whitehead use the term in this way? Later he refers to the everlasting dynamic concrescence of physical feeling as the consequent nature. There is nothing abstract about that. The abstract nature for most process theists is the primordial nature, but here God’s nature is described as also containing "the world as qualified by the forms."

Quite apart from this nature/totality issue, Whitehead elsewhere describes "God," and not simply the divine nature, as ‘above change" (RM 95). What is most perplexing, then, is how an unchanging God can include the world.

Basically the word "aspect" here has been ignored. It has been ignored in the first part of the second sentence because we have too hastily identified it with the primordial envisagement of all forms. This need not be the case. All that need be included are not the forms but the aspect of the forms pertaining to actualities.⁵

That aspect could be provided by the principle of limitation, for it limits the scope of eternal objects to those which could possibly ingress into actual occasions (SMW 178). The principle of limitation does not contain or synthesize all the eternal objects. Because it is actual, the principle of limitation is not itself an eternal object. As "the actual but non-temporal entity" (RM 88) God provides the way in which eternal objects are related to actual occasions in general.

As mediating between the actual and the ideal the principle of limitation also includes "that aspect of the world [=actual occasions in general] as qualified by the forms." By selecting forms to be relevant to the world God has thereby partially ordered the world. (If the world had all forms, there would be "indiscriminate modal pluralism," a very fancy name for chaos.) As structured by those forms selected for the world, the world has its basic order, even if it is not totally ordered.

I deem it methodologically sounder to interpret this passage in terms of views that Whitehead had clearly once held (and might be expected to continue to hold) than in terms of views which he might not yet hold, even though they are essential to the final view he came to hold. At least this is so if our purpose is not so much to weave an inclusive synoptic interpretation as to show as precisely as possible how he came to hold those views. We may be excited by process theism, but it is much more likely that Whitehead originally became some sort of classical theist who thought his way into process theism than that he had been a process theist all along.

We must realize the abstract character of this description of God in chapter three. This may be a description of the general metaphysical description prior to the categorical limitation God introduces (SMW 178). On the general metaphysical level it is not yet determined whether God is personal or not. In chapter four that determination is made on the basis of Western theistic experience, or Whitehead’s own intuitions, but not on the basis of the metaphysical scheme.

Thus far we have been considering the different interpretations of this passage Griffin quotes. If we step back from this particular passage, and attend to our different hermeneutical strategies, we shall see that most of the continuity we discern between these books will depend upon the interpretative unit we select for Process and Reality. For most of us that has been the whole book, interpreted in terms of those parts making the most sense, i.e. parts III and V, especially V.2. Insofar as possible. Religion in the Making is read in terms of that interpretation.

If we proceed genetically, however, in terms of the stages of Whitehead’s own development with respect to the theory of God, a different picture emerges. I believe there is warrant for three different conceptions: (1) The original level depicts God as nontemporal and nonconcrescent. (2) The middle level conceives God as a nontemporal concrescence of all eternal objects. (3) The final level presents God in terms of both primordial and consequent natures. Also we must attend to issues of justification, for the appeal to religious experience is largely absent from Process and Reality (except for PR 343).

In order to sort these issues out, it will be necessary for me to show how the three conceptions can be found within Process and Reality. In most books, only the final view is evident, for authors seek to revise earlier positions to conform with the final one.⁶ All three notions are present in the text, however, for Whitehead in revising did not erase all traces of his earlier formulations. In fact, there is evidence that he did not revise anything, seeking rather through insertions to persuade readers to interpret earlier texts in the light of his final view.

The riddle based on discontinuity properly applies to the first stage only: why is Whitehead’s concept so minimal at this stage, rarely going beyond what can be inferred from the bland assertion that God is the nontemporal actual entity? Why does he not exploit the comparative riches of his concept of God in Religion in the Making? In its final chapter God is conceived as personal and as nontemporal. Some would also interpret God to be temporal. In the initial stage of Process and Reality, however, God is not clearly personal or impersonal, and is strictly nontemporal.

We can best get at this first stage by putting the others to one side. The whole account of the consequent nature of God, which originated process theism, seems to have been added, possibly to resolve a problem concerning consciousness. According to Whitehead’s sophisticated theory, consciousness requires both physical and conceptual feelings (PR 266f). God, if heretofore conceived as having only conceptual feelings, would then be unconscious (PR 343). Thus the introduction of God’s physical nature, so eloquently expressed in the final chapter (V.2), does not seem to have arisen before the final chapter of part III (III.5).

But, you may object, the ‘consequent nature of God’ is mentioned quite early (e.g. PR 12f, 32). And if not this term, then the contrasting term ‘primordial nature of God’ is (e.g. PR 31-33, 44). (In earlier contexts, where there was no contrast Whitehead speaks of ‘the primordial actuality’ or ‘the non-temporal actual entity.’) Mention of either contrasting terms would indicate that Whitehead had it in mind throughout composition of his book, reserving detailed presentation until the end. It would, if these were not later insertions. Yet scrutiny of the mentions of ‘primordial’ and ‘consequent natures’ shows that all can be plausibly construed as later insertions.⁷

Consider, for example, Whitehead’s discussion of the three-fold character of an actual occasion:

This passage probably comes from the original text of "The Order of Nature" (II.3.IC) as part of the 9 1/2 chapters Whitehead wrote in the summer of 1927. Shortly before he delivered the Gifford Lectures in June 1928 he may have added this comment:

At this point no mention is made of the ‘consequent nature,’ nor of any contrasting ‘primordial nature.’ In place of the ‘primordial nature’ we have ‘the primordial actual entity’ as a designation of the whole divine being. If God were then conceived as having physical prehensions of the temporal world, ‘the primordial actual entity’ would be a strange and inexact way of referring to the God of process theism. God is described solely in terms which later would refer only to the primordial nature, as "the ideal realization of conceptual feelings."⁹

Still later, however, Whitehead inserts a second comment, reconciling his position on God more with the first passage:

The juxtaposition of these two comments on the threefold character of an actual occasion indicates that Whitehead expressed at least two different conceptions of God in Process and Reality, and at least some of the passages depicting the final concept are insertions.¹¹ It turns out that all of them can be so construed, except for the main text (V.2.3-6) which Whitehead reserved for the end.

Another passage makes this same point. The italicized portion is a partial depiction of the middle concept in which the whole of God is conceived as an infinite totality of conceptual feeling; the part in ordinary print indicates how this account could be revised, by means of insertion, to accord with Whitehead’s final view.

While the final concept appears in insertions, it is quite possible that the earlier conception of a nontemporal concrescence of conceptual feeling is part of the original text. Yet at least one passage illustrating this earlier conception can be seen as an insertion, if we attend to the different meanings of ‘transcendent decision’ it uses:

In the original text (here italicized) ‘transcendent decision’ refers to transition in contrast to the ‘immanent decision’ of concrescence.¹² But because ‘transcendent’ is so closely identified with the divine, Whitehead uses this occasion to introduce his notion of nontemporal concrescence.

The middle concept is also expressed in the next passage (which initiates III.3.3). This insertion is more complex, however, containing a further insertion [marked in brackets] within itself:

The italicized context first announces Hume’s principle, as Whitehead applies it to his own philosophy, and then proceeds to justify it prior to articulating the fourth category of Conceptual Valuation (PR 248). Later (in the nonitalicized text, minus the sentence in brackets), when Whitehead has developed the notion of God as unfettered conceptual valuation, he realizes that divine conceptual feelings, since many pertain to unrealized eternal objects, cannot possibly be derived from physical feelings. Moreover, the divine concrescence is nontemporal, occurring only once.

The bracketed portion indicates that Whitehead returned again to this passage, now with the concept of hybrid physical prehension in mind. All conceptual feeling for finite occasions could now be derived from physical prehension, including the hybrid physical prehensions of God. What is ignored in this emendation is the status of God’s own conceptual feelings, which even in the final concept cannot all be derived from physical feelings. God’s own experience is exempt from Hume’s principle.

These two passages presenting the divine nontemporal concrescence can plausibly be construed as insertions, as can all other passages introducing the idea or examining the implications thereof.¹³ As we have seen, the passages concerning the consequent nature can also be considered insertions (except for the final chapter). On the other hand, very few if any of the passages mentioning God in the rest of the text can plausibly be thought to be insertions.¹⁴ From these considerations we may conclude that Whitehead wrote most of Process and Reality before he discovered either the primordial envisagement or the consequent nature. This includes everything except some preliminary materials (1:2-3), the ninth categoreal obligation (II.1.4), the living person (II.3.5-11), strains (II.4.9, IV.4, 5.1), and coordinate division (IV.1): (here see EWM 233-44). The material on the primordial envisagement was then added by various insertions, as was the material concerning the subjective aim (PS 21/1).

If these are indeed insertions, and there is good reason to think that they are, then it is the original text, as so reconstructed, that we ought to compare with Religion in the Making. If there is continuity between the conceptions of the two books, it should be in terms of the original text, before Whitehead introduced those ideas which revolutionized his philosophy to create process theism. In that case we not only find little continuity but a distinct impoverishment in the theistic conceptions used.

The original level of Process and Reality (except for V.1) was not directly concerned with God, as Whitehead was primarily developing his metaphysics. Even so it is peculiarly abstract and meager. We may summarize its affirmations as holding that God is a nontemporal actual entity, transcendent, immanent, eternal, cause of itself, the basis for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and possibly the source of the eternal principles of value. By studied omission it remains quite neutral as to whether God is personal or impersonal. The idea that God could be conceived in terms of concrescence is not considered. Most of these properties can be inferred from what is required for a nontemporal actual entity.

These statements are more than typical of the mentions of God scattered throughout over two hundred pages of Whitehead’s Gifford lectures in natural theology. They are important in their own right, but they hardly reach the level of insight expressed in this passage:

This excerpt (and others like it) proposes a richer conception of God than Whitehead permits himself throughout most of Process and Reality, compositionally regarded. Why? What happened to cause Whitehead to draw back from this magnificent portrayal of God? This is the real riddle of Religion in the Making.

We also have independent confirmation that Whitehead felt it necessary to start all over again as if that fourth chapter (of RM) had never existed. In conversation with A. H. Johnson, he pronounced "his Religion in the Making a complete failure" (EWP 9). The relative poverty of Whitehead’s theism in the early composition of Process and Reality certainly seems to reflect this judgment. Yet we are still left in the dark. Why did Whitehead deem the earlier book "a complete failure"?

References

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

EWM -- Lewis S. Ford. The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1925-1929. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

EWP -- Explorations in Whitehead’s Philosophy. Ed. Lewis S. Ford and George L. Kline. New York: Fordham University Press, 1983.

PS 15/3 -- David Ray Griffin. Critical Review of The Emergence of Whitehead ‘s Metaphysics. Process Studies 15/3 (Fall, 1986): 194-207.

PS 21/1 -- Lewis S. Ford, "Subjectivity in the Making." Process Studies 21/1 (Spring, 1992): 1-24.

Notes

1. See my essay on "Whitehead’s First Metaphysical Synthesis," International Philosophical Quarterly 17/3 (September, 1977), 251-64, or the first chapter of EWM.

2. I doubt whether Cobb now would assent to this claim without considerable qualification. I cite it here only as a succinct expression of this position.

3. With respect to any internal development in RM (re Griffin, pp. 200f), I now find that any shift from an impersonal monism in chapters one and two to a pluralism sustaining a personal theism in chapters three and four to be rather unlikely.

I still maintain, however, that Whitehead is a classical theist throughout Religion in the Making, conceiving of God as the nontemporal actual entity (RM 88).

4. That is, a synthesis. See RM 90: "Thus an actual entity is the outcome of a creative synthesis. . ."

5. Just as the aspect provided by God is general, so the actual occasion renders that aspect particular: "In the concretion the creatures are qualified by the ideal forms, and conversely the ideal forms are qualified by the creatures. Thus the epochal occasion, which is thus emergent, has in its own nature the other creatures under the aspect of these forms, and analogously it includes the forms under the aspect of these creatures" (RM 90f, emphasis added).

Here is another use of ‘nature’ to signify the totality of the composition of an actuality.

6. In this case, God would be conceived as having both primordial and consequent natures. Such a God is both nontemporal and temporal, or more properly, everlasting.

7. Here is a list of known passages mentioning ‘primordial’ or ‘consequent nature of God’:

12.38-13.6=18.36-19.12. 1+ insertion into l.l.5C. cng

31.4-21=46.4-27. 1+ insertion into 1.3.1G.

31.22-32.3=46.28-47.20. 1+ insertion into 1.3.1G. cng

32.4-9=47.21-27. 1+ insertion in 1.3.1G.

33.38-50 few 1+ adds to I.3.l G

44.l9-27. 1+ insert in I1.l.3C

87.40-88.11=134.21-135.5 1+ insertion in II.3.IC.

88.12-26=135.6-25. 1+ insertion in II.3.IC.

88.27-30=135.26-30. 1+ insertion in II.3.IC.

189.4-17=287.21-33. 1+ insertion at end of II.9.IC.

207.27-45=315.16-316.4. 1+ in II.9.8C+.

230.45-231.19 1+ in III.l.9D. cng

257.7-15 1+ (probably only 257.9) in 278.27 1+ in III.5.8F

Decimal points refer to lines, marking the bounds of the insertion. Where there are equal signs (=), the second notation indicates where these passages can be found in the original Macmillan 1929 edition of PR.

1+ means passage from 1 or from a later stratum. On strata A-M, see EWM.

8. Denis Hurtubise first recognized this passage as belonging to the middle concept.

9. Griffin proposes "that Whitehead began PR with the idea of God as dynamically primordial, i.e., as a primordial actuality which knows and interacts with the world. We could then suppose that when Whitehead developed the idea of the consequent nature in the narrow sense, he created the "primordial nature" as a contrasting term This hypothesis would make sense of the present text of PR without supposing that Whitehead began working on the Gifford Lectures only with a noninteractive God little different from the abstract principle of concretion of SMW" (PS 15: 200).

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be the evidence for any primordial actuality which knows the world prior to the development of the final view, except possibly PR 349, which I once took as pertaining to the earlier conception, but which I now regard as the first expression of the final concept.

There is no indeterminate notion from which the primordial/consequent contrast could emerge. Rather we have first the primordial nature, narrowly conceived, existing by itself, to which the consequent nature is added.

10. Following the punctuation of the original 1929 edition. The corrected edition has ‘superjective nature,’ assimilating this instance to ‘primordial nature’ and ‘consequent nature,’ overlooking its specific difference.

Although there is ample mention of the ‘primordial nature’ and the ‘consequent nature, this is the only mention of any ‘superjective’ nature. Note that Whitehead’s formulation is identical with the superjective character of an actual occasion. It seems that Whitehead was able to present a threefold character in appearance only, signaled by the single quotation marks around the ‘superjective’ nature.

See my note, "Is There a Distinct Superjective Nature?," Process Studies 3/3 (Fall 1973), 228.

11. Another passage to consider is PR 31. It is primarily a text introducing the nontemporal concrescence as "the unconditioned conceptual valuation" of the eternal objects. The inserted words modifying the passage in the direction of the final concept are readily apparent.

12. Whitehead writes in terms of his earlier theory of concrescence whereby concrescence, the immanent decision, starts from the datum provided by a prior transcendent decision effected by transition (EWM 189-198; cf. PR 150).

13. Here is a list of the passages presenting the nontemporal concrescence of eternal objects:

3l.4-18a=46.4-27. 1.3.IG.*

31.22-32.3=46.28-47.20 1.3.IG.

32.21-40a=48.14-33. 1.3.1G.

33.38-50 1.3.1G.

40.3-32 G insertion in II.1.IC.

44.19-27 G insertion in II.l.3C.

46.4-12 G insertion in II.l.3C.

65.17-21, 29-39 G insertion in Il.2.2C.

164.7-12=248.30-37 G insertion in II.7.4aC+.

244.14-16, 31-35 G elements of III.3.1Gb.

246-247.15 G section III.3.2 in F

247.21-25=378.5-10. G insertion in III.3.3F.

249.43-250.11 G insertion in III.3.3F

257.7-15 G insertion in III.4.IE [connected to 256.33-35]a

343.35-39, 344.3b-14a G elements in V.2.2.1

Decimal points refer to lines, marking the bounds of the insertion. Where there are equal signs (=), the second notation indicates where these passages can be found in the original Macmillan 1929 edition of PR.

*I.3.l is basically a section devoted to the nontemporal concrescence. It seems to have been originally placed at V.2.3, but was then replaced by the new account of the consequent nature.

14. God is mentioned in the original texts, that is in the material not including purported insertions, at 18, 19, 74, 75, 93, 95, 110, 111, 144, 190, 208, 222, 248, 256, 325. 7.19-22 may be an insertion; if so, it most likely belongs to the middle group.

15. Many believe that this divine knowledge of evil, pain, and degradation is not possible apart from the actual physical prehension of the actualities of the world as they happen. Also, how is the fact united with God unless God integrates that physical feeling into the divine concrescence? While the technical concepts may be missing, many insist, the thought must be already there.

On the other hand, the evidence of compositional analysis suggests that Whitehead first introduces the notion of a nontemporal divine concrescence after most of Process and Reality was written, and the notion of adding physical prehensions to this concrescence comes even later. The means for an understanding of God as temporal is absent from the first two levels, which regard God as the nontemporal actual entity.

If so, this passage should be interpreted non-temporally. To do so requires the discipline of trying to read Religion in the Making on its own terms, and not to read into it ideas derived from Process and Reality. Everything depends on its conception of divine knowledge. The "synthesis of omniscience" is described as including "all possibilities of physical value conceptually, thereby holding the ideal forms apart in equal, conceptual realization of knowledge" (RM 147). Nothing is said about omniscience including any direct prehension of actuality.

Judged by the later standards of Process and Reality, this understanding of omniscience may well be insufficient. Yet it is quite appropriate to a strictly nontemporal deity. God’s knowledge of evil, pain, and degradation is then "the ideal vision of each actual evil" to which God has an alternative ideal which can "issue in the restoration of goodness," or so Whitehead hopes.

A persistent problem Whitehead bequeathed to his followers concerns the interaction of God and the world. In particular, how does his consequent nature affect the provision of initial aims? Various promissory notes are given (PR 32/ 47), such as the sole explicit discussion of "the ‘superjective’ nature of God" (PR 88/ 135; but see PS 3:228f), and the famous "fourth phase" of the last two pages of Process and Reality, which proposes a "particular providence for particular occasions." There is no doubt that Whitehead wanted to employ God’s temporal experience in the specification of initial aims. If there were only a derivation from the primordial nature, the particular conditions of each nascent occasion could not be taken into account. The aims would have to be as general and as vague as the Platonic forms. Yet every discussion, precise enough to enable us to see the mechanisms at work, vests the derivation of initial aim solely in the primordial nature.

Other features in Whitehead’s scheme militate against any easy solution. Taking advantage of special relativity physics, whereby only what is past can be objectified for another, Whitehead has protected the privacy of subjectivity by identifying it with present becoming. If God always enjoys present immediacy, then she is everlastingly becoming and never in being. But if not in being, then she cannot be objectified to provide initial aims. In all other cases, what is becoming (subject) cannot at the same time be being (object), and Whitehead refused to make any exceptions. Two present beings are contemporaries, which by definition cannot causally interact.

The failure to integrate God’s two natures in interaction with the world may explain Whitehead’s decision to introduce only that primordial nature throughout the bulk of Adventures of Ideas, under the name "the Divine Eros." The consequent nature is briefly, and poetically, introduced in the very last section as "an Adventure in the Universe as One" (AI 380). Its relationship to God is not made fully clear.

Given these difficulties, many years ago Charles Hartshorne proposed a modification in Whitehead’s philosophy many, if not most, process theists have adopted. He proposed that God could be reconceived as a personally ordered society of divine occasions. Instead of God being purely subjective and never objective, he is alternately subjective and objective. Since each divine occasion achieves objective being, it is capable of interacting with the world. Let us characterize Whitehead’s own view of God as an everlasting concrescence in terms of "God as present" with respect to its problematic interaction with finite actualities. Then the modification which treats God as a society of occasions shows how "God as past" can interact with the world. This is a very natural modification, since it is the same way finite occasions interact with one another. This is not to deny the present reality of God in each concrescing divine occasion, but simply indicates the way God influences the world.

This proposal has its own difficulties, which we shall not fully enumerate here. The most persistent has been the challenge from relativity physics, which John Wilcox first announced in 1961.¹ This is peculiarly a problem for Hartshorne’s modification, and not necessarily for Whitehead’s own position, because that modification calls for a divine occasion that is almost instantaneous and yet fills all space. John Robert Baker has shown just how brief these divine occasions must be in order to interact with all worldly occasions (PS 2:201-08). Every such divine occasion necessarily defines a privileged meaning of simultaneity contrary to relativity physics. It is as if, having accepted an infinite space which has no center (or has "centers" everywhere), we are told that God sits at "the" center. No one has been more concerned with this problem than Hartshorne himself, who has lately adopted the desperate strategy of Henry Pierce Stapp, in which all events are simply serially ordered in terms of before and after (PS 7:183-91). To be sure, Stapp may be proven correct in the end, but that would entail the overthrow of the special theory of relativity. It would seem to be conceptually less costly to retain special relativity and to abandon the societal model for God.

Another difficulty with the society model lies in its excessively static view of the primordial nature. Eternal objects, being purely atemporal, are conceptually entertained by God (conceived as a single everlasting concrescence) at any time, not necessarily at all times. They are prehended only whenever needed or relevant. On the societal model, however, the primordial nature becomes the defining characteristic of the divine person. Each and every divine occasion must then fully exemplify the primordial nature, and with it the entire realm of eternal objects. Thus the eternal objects must always be in existence as always exemplifying the divine society. This view appears to many to accord too much ontological ballast to the realm of forms. If, with Hartshorne, we pare away at this excess by limiting ourselves to that which must be exemplified at all times, the abstract nature of God, we rob ourselves of the means of achieving divine persuasion by the provision of initial aims.

Also, the societal model presupposes that the realm of eternal objects can be completely objectified, in order that each divine occasion can exemplify it. In that case there would be some single complex eternal object containing all others as its proper subsets. But such an alternative contravenes G6del’s Incompleteness Theorem (cf. PS 7:56-59).

For these and other reasons some scholars have abandoned Hartshorne s emendation and have sought to adhere strictly to Whitehead’s own description of God as a single everlasting concrescence. This is William A. Christian’s procedure in his magisterial study, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, which makes no use of any modification on this point. All of my own essays pertaining to God’s interaction with the world, up until the past year or so, have championed the everlasting concrescence model in more or less explicit opposition to the societal model. Here perhaps the essay on "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead’s God" (IPQ 13:347-76) is the most pertinent. By exploring the implications of the reversal of the mental and physical poles in God’s case, Marjorie Suchocki is able to marshal a strong case for the alternative of a single concrescence (PS 5:237-46). Most recently, Bowman Clarke has used the claim that genetic succession is not in time in any sense to undermine John Cobb’s basic argument (CNT 185-89) for the societal view (JAAR 48:563-79).

In many ways these proposals offer attractive alternatives to the society model, but they labor under two insuperable difficulties. (1) Despite some very ingenious efforts to resolve or to avoid the problem, the central difficulty remains: in Whitehead’s philosophy two concurrent conscrescences cannot prehend each other. If God is an everlasting concrescence, it is difficult to see how it could influence present concrescences. (2) These proposals are put forward as interpretations of Whitehead’s philosophy, not as modifications. But, as a genetic study of Whitehead’s philosophical development would show even more clearly, this is precisely the point at which his system does need modification. He did not hesitate to modify his own philosophy by introducing subjective aim or the consequent nature of God or hybrid physical prehensions when these were needed (PS 8:145-56). We are simply carrying the trajectory of modification one step further in order to surmount one clear problem remaining. On this point the proponents of the societal model are clearly correct: the philosophy cannot simply be interpreted, it must be changed. But whether it must be changed in their direction is another story. Some other alternative needs to be found.

There are not very many alternatives, once we take note of the various temporal modalities involved. The everlasting concrescence model conceives of God as a present activity in causal independence of other activities. The societal alternative sees God as past, insofar as past divine occasions causally affect occasions. Unless we agree with those Whiteheadian nontheists that God’s activity with the world is conceptually incoherent, we are left with only one alternative. God must be conceived in terms of some activity of the future.

Now this phrase, "activity of the future," is intrinsically ambiguous. Is it an activity "now" taking place? If so, why do we speak of its future aspect? Or is it some activity in the future which has "not yet" occurred? I distinguish between two factors: (a) Each event has a unique, constant spatiotemporal locus independent of actualization. Relative to any given concrescing occasion, this locus is either future, present, or past. (b) There is also the moment of concrescent activity relative to any given present occasion, according to which another concrescence has "not yet" occurred, is happening "now," or happened "then." Actual entities in unison of becoming are becoming now together.

Ordinarily we consider actual entities in unison of becoming to be contemporaries, to belong to the domain of the present of the other. That is how Whitehead defined them (PR 12Sf 192), and undoubtedly how he understood God to be "in unison of becoming with every other creative act" (PR 345/ 523). Moreover, I fully subscribe to this principle with respect to finite activities terminating in determinate concreta. This account, however, needs to be modified in the case of God. God’s concrescence is everlasting and does not terminate in any concreta, which is why he cannot be properly prehended. Instead of actualizing a determinate past, which is the basic activity of present activities, I propose we conceive God to be a future activity creating the conditions of the present. As an activity located in those spatiotemporal regions lying in the future of present occasions, God could nevertheless be in "unison of becoming" with them. God then influences" them when her future activity passes over into their own present activity.

On this view, God prehends every actual occasion as it becomes past from every future standpoint. Her prehensive viewpoint is not restricted to some one particular future locus, but includes all loci from which God actively unifies her experience of the past. Moreover, she unifies all these physical prehensions (insofar as they are compatible) in every way that they can be unified. Each of these alternative unifications is felt with divine valuation (either adversion or aversion). Note, however, that God cannot effect the final determinate unity of that particular multiplicity. For this requires the arbitrary, finite decision of particular actualities, deciding for this rather than that. Only the finite can ultimately produce the determinate. So, when God has fully prehended the past actual world for a particular standpoint, and unified it in all the alternative ways it can be unified, she bequeaths that prehensive activity to the nascent occasion, which alone can effect its determinate actualization. That particular standpoint is then no longer future, but has now become present. God on the verge of the present pluralizes his own concrescent activity into the many atomic occasions of the present. (The inexhaustibility of God is not thereby affected. As he transfers portions of his creative activity to the present, he is continuously creating himself anew in the distant future.)

In this transference God is not objectified for the present creature as something to be prehended. Instead he grants it the power of prehending, for it is from God that the occasion receives its prehending of the past, and its future, i.e., the specific ways in which that given past may be unified, and the creative activity of unification. The occasion is a brief present space in which past and future are reconciled. In fact, we may say that the way the present is subjective lies in its capacity of being affected by the future. Once objectified, the actual occasion has lost its future, and with it, its subjective immediacy.

In her prehensive unification of the past God is creating real possibility, not actuality. Only finite occasions are capable of actualizing, i.e., of reducing the manifold alternatives of what might be to one single determinate fact. Only the present can become past. That which is future cannot. It can only become present in that its creativity can be atomized into the many present occasions. If the present occasions are to have their full share of freedom over against the future, the future must be the domain of real possibility in the sense of containing all that could or might be, as yet undetermined as to what will be. Conversely, present actuality accomplishes for future divinity what she cannot do herself: the final determinate unity of the world for that standpoint. Infinite concrescent activity creates only that which is infinite (the domain of real possibilities, which is infinitely diverse for every occasion), and requires the finite to create the finitely determinate, which is the final terminus of the creative thrust. For that reason the creative drive that the many should become one spills over from the future to the present.

For many, this talk of several temporal modalities in the present makes little sense. They suppose, for example, that if the past becomes effective in the present, it is simply transformed into the present. That assumption underlies the frequent proposal that we should limit the effective past to those immediately past occasions which directly impinge on a given occasion. Any more distantly past occasions, insofar as they are effective, are assumed to have been already transformed into these immediately past occasions, when they were present. Except as so transformed, the distantly past occasions are no longer available for prehension. Since this proposal runs counter to Whitehead’s own usage (e.g., PR 226/345,284/435), we are led to think that for him past actualities do not lose their pastness simply upon being taken up into the present. The structure of a physical prehension bears this out: it is a present, subjective appropriation of a determinately unified actuality, which must be past in order to be fully determinate. This is also the structure of memory (the present experiencing of something past), which is an instance of physical prehension. We do not merely experience a present replica of something remembered, but that past event itself, as past.

If in the occasion we say that past and future are reconciled, we have in mind the particular past and future of that occasion. Its past is the entire multiplicity of actual occasions it physically prehends. Its future consists in the entire range of alternative ways that given multiplicity can be unified, for better or worse. Concrescence, in processes of finite actualization, consists in the progressive reduction of these alternatives to one form, which is actualized by the matter derived from the past. Alternatively, the many material Components acquire unity from that final form. Thus past matter and future form coalesce into a single present satisfaction.

Now in all this we may be simply playing a variation on a theme by Whitehead: the provision of initial aims. We need to rehearse some of the reasons for preferring this alternative to Whitehead’s:

(1) First and foremost, is God, as a present everlasting concrescence, ever prehensible? If, on our modified view, God as immediately future is pluralized as nascent occasions, the question of the prehensibility of God is bypassed. The occasions do not prehend God, but what God was just prehending at that same spatiotemporal location.

(2) On Whitehead’s own view, the initial aim is derived from a hybrid physical prehension of God. On the societal model, in particular, this means that the occasion’s own future, given in its subjective aim, must be derived from the past. Hybrid physical prehension, especially in this particular instance, is a somewhat exceptional use of physical prehension. Physical prehension was introduced, in conjunction with conceptual valuation, in order to maintain the empiricist dictum that there is nothing in the intellect which was not first in the sense. As used by Thomas Aquinas in his revived Aristotelianism, it was to exclude Augustinian divine illumination theories as championed by Bonaventura. Now Whitehead smuggles in that divine illumination through the backdoor of hybrid prehension.

Also, we need a sharper temporal distinction to distinguish God from the world. Whitehead has taught us how to differentiate self and world by means of the temporal modalities of present and past. God is different from both, and this difference can be marked by conceiving of God as the unified activity of the future, the self as the activity of the present, and the world as the totality of past actualities.

(3) Frequently the initial aim is conceived as providing a single ideal towards which the concrescence strives. Yet what is needed is the entire range of alternative ways of unifying that past actual world, as valued by God. For full freedom of decision, the occasion needs all possible alternatives, as conditioned by the past, including divine valuation. It also needs whatever novel alternatives it can derive from God, since these cannot be derived from the past. Whitehead seems to have been aware of this multiplicity within the initial aim in his second later account introducing hybrid physical prehension as a means for accounting for the derivation of initial aim (PR 245-247/ 375-377). Since all novelty can then be derived from God, conceptual reversion is no longer needed, so the category of reversion is abolished in Whitehead’s final statement of his system (PR 249f 382; see PS 8:151).

(4) A key difficulty with Whitehead’s theory of initial aim lies in its exclusive reliance upon eternal objects. They are pure forms which tell no tales as to their ingression. These are neither good nor evil in themselves, as they are simply the shapes which actualities might take under totally unspecified conditions. The circumstances are all determining. Water is necessary to life, but in violent times water can flood, overwhelm, drown. "Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil" (PR 223/ 341). It is the "season," i.e., the conditions under which an eternal object is actualized, and not its purely formal characteristics, which determine its goodness or evil. Nevertheless the only divine evaluation we hear about is the one primordial envisagement of all eternal objects. That nontemporal envisagement cannot possibly take into account the temporal conditions as they arise.

Instead of eternal objects as "pure possibilities," what we really need are what are often called "real possibilities," possibilities so rooted in that particular situation as to be actualizable. A pure form is simply a pure form, incapable of specifying its relevance to concrete actualization. What is really possible for a given actual world, however, is that range of forms capable of unifying that particular multiplicity of past actual occasions. Forms, by themselves, are purely atemporal, but when linked to the past, they generate the future.

It is these real possibilities and not simply eternal objects which need to be valued by God. Hence I have previously proposed that initial aims be derived from propositional feelings by God, whose logical subjects constituted the entire past actual world of a nascent occasion (PPCT 292n9; IPQ 13:350-52). But this solution has its difficulties. No plausible reason could be found why God’s physical feeling should not be as complete as possible from the start, nor why he should then abstract from this physical feeling the bare indicative feelings necessary for propositional feelings. Also, the very concept of indicative feelings needs further clarification. Instead of relying on divine propositional feeling, it seems better to have the nascent occasion simply take over the divine prehending the world, for God is unifying, and evaluating (in terms of his subjective forms) that world in every way which he can.

In this unificatory process unities are not only created; they create themselves. Finite actual occasions create themselves in the present, affecting supervening occasions as past.-God creates himself in creating real possibility, and the locus of this activity lies in the future. It is only from the future that such real possibility could be created, for that possibility consists in the many ways in which that particular actual world can be prehensively unified, and it can only be fully prehended from some standpoint which is still future.

One concept this theory requires is very counterintuitive: the subjectivity of the future. Whitehead has taught us to extend the notion of subjectivity to all present activities, defining objectivity in terms of pastness. The future is not clearly delineated in terms of subjectivity and objectivity. Eternal objects are objective, to be sure, but they are atemporal, not future. We do not experience the subjectivity of the future, but then we do not experience the subjectivity of any other activity as well; all must be inferred. It may be objected that real possibility, insofar as it is objectified, is a slight and puny thing, hardly evidence for the power of majesty of God. Yet it is through that still small voice that God is able to bring this wondrous universe into being; without God’s directing agency all would remain chaos. Strictly speaking, God is not objectified for us as possibility, for her subjectivity never passes over into objectivity as is the case with present occasions. Rather, a portion of her (future) subjectivity becomes ours. Her prehending, and ways of unifying her prehensions, become ours. Possibilities, as we know them, are discrete objectifications of a very few of these many ways of unifying our experience, apprehended intermittently in its higher phases.

Whitehead’s own analysis of the future is quite different from ours. He did it all from the standpoint of the present: "The future us immanent in the present by reason of the fact that the present bears in its own essence the relationships which it will have to the future. It thereby includes in its essence the necessities to which the future must conform" (Al 250). Thus the future concerns what must be, that invariant core contained in all the contingent might be’s, which alone invite decision and valuation. The future is something the present occasion determines for its successors, not something the occasion receives from what gone on before.

Nor does Whitehead allow the future to have any transcendent status. It is restricted to immanence in the present by virtue of the requirements of the ontological principle. Everything, including the future, must be somewhere, i.e., in some actual entity: "In the present there are no individual occasions belonging to the future. The present contains the utmost verge of such realized individuality. The whole doctrine of the future is to be understood in terms of the account of the process of self-completion of each individual actual occasion" (AI 247).

This argument is valid, but overlooks one possibility: that while all actual occasions belong to the present, the one actual entity which is not an actual occasion may belong to the future. Whitehead is surely correct that all the future we experience lies within present subjectivity, for the evaporation of subjectivity in pastness is also the evaporation of the alternatives the future offers. But the future for a present occasion does not consist in the necessities it generates to impose upon its successors; its future consists in the alternative ways of unifying it inherits to make its own self-decision.

So far we have been considering only the immediate future, for in it alone does God directly impinge upon present occasions. The creativity for the present, which resided in future prehending, becomes creativity in the present once the past actual world for that standpoint is completed. Then there is no further unifying God can do, and the prehensive activity is transferred to the present for finite determinate decision.

In the mediate future God prehends the past from all possible standpoints, but these standpoints necessarily correlate with incomplete pasts. For all the occasions which will happen between now and that future event must first take place before that particular standpoint’s past is complete.

Thus from each future standpoint God directly prehends each actuality once it comes into being. Since her concrescence is everlasting, including every prehending in the immediacy of her becoming, she can bequeath that direct prehending of that entire past to the nascent occasion. Thus the nascent occasion takes over a prehensive activity directly prehending the entire actual world, including the distantly past. This is consonant with Whitehead’s own views, as we have seen, but many have challenged this, arguing that only immediately past occasions directly affect the present.

This objection is based on two assumptions: that being exists only as ingredient in becoming, and that all becoming takes place in the present. For what keeps the distantly past actualities in existence if not the intervening concrescences, when they were themselves present? To my knowledge Whitehead never quite expressed the first assumption, though I think it is in accord with the deepest insights of his metaphysics. Traditional metaphysics treats being as primary, and becoming as only derivatively existent. Whitehead’s metaphysics reverses that relationship in most cases. Why not in all? Perhaps he was checked from claiming that all being depended for its existence upon becoming because this apparently denied the actuality of the distantly past. This would contravene his claim that all past occasions are prehended by the concrescent occasion. However, it is possible to reconcile Whitehead’s concern for direct prehension of the distantly past with the thesis that being exists only in becoming by modifying our second assumption. Becoming takes place not only in the present, but in the future. Such future prehension sustains the distantly past in being from the moment of its coming into being until now, as it sustains its being everlastingly.

Besides the immediate and the mediate future the remote future should be considered. How far does God reach into the future? In terms of eternal objects we may say that he reaches as far as the most distant standpoint he has made relevant by associating it with a specific eternal object (thereby perhaps making that eternal object first relevant). That eternal object is now relevant as a means for unifying divine prehending from that standpoint. But which comes first, the relevant form or the divine prehending? Perhaps we ought to conceive of the future extent of God so far as he chooses to project his prehending. That prehensive activity could generate all the possible ways that multiplicity could be unified. Real possibility is derivative from such activity and is not presupposed by it.

If we make pure possibility in the form of eternal objects fundamental, as Whitehead did, then it is possible to conceive of them as uncreated. But just because eternal objects bear no sign of their origin need not mean that they have no origin. Real possibilities, because they are the means of unifying particular worlds from particular standpoints, necessarily have origins. They come into being as God prehends the world. Pure possibilities can be understood as their formal components, abstractly derived. They may not be as fundamental as Whitehead supposed. However, this does not mean that we therefore espouse a nominalism, which would mean that possibility is a present projection on the future. Possibility is created in the future; we encounter it as already having its character independently of our desires.

With the concept of divine creativity as future we can push rationality one step further in questions of ultimacy. In analyzing the category of the ultimate, with its basic rhythm of the one and the many, Whitehead can only finally conclude: "It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity" (PR 211 31). So they must, if Whitehead’s analysis is to have full validity, but why? To that question he can only respond: "The sole appeal is to intuition" (PR 22/ 32). Yet we are in a position to give a reason here. "The many become one because they are drawn into unity by the unificatory activity of creativity, initiated by God, and completed by determinate occasions.

This reason is, on the surface at least, more plausible because many philosophers have supposed that God actively unifies all things in the end. What is new, however, is that while God can initiate this activity, its final determination can only be achieved by the world, and the very activity which strives for complete determinate unity (from a given standpoint) contributes to a resultant multiplicity, generating the endless rhythm of the many and the one that Whitehead foresaw.

Viewed in terms of one single standpoint, this is one single activity of unification, initiated by God in the future, and completed by the occasion in the present. Alternatively, thinking of God as a whole, as the one subjectivity of the future, we may say that this creativity pluralizes itself into the many present occasions, thus bequeathing to the occasions their powers of prehension and integration. In this it functions very much like the Thomistic God, which as infinite esse communicates to each actuality its own esse or act of being.²

In order to safeguard the intrinsic creativity of each occasion, Whitehead refused to identify God with (present) creativity. But if God is the only future activity, when creativity has not yet been pluralized the way it is in the present, God may be identified with the creativity of the future. This future exercise of creativity, however, does not encumber its present exercise, for that present exercise is decision amidst the possibilities received from the future. God as creativity in the future can be the source for all present creativity. If it were simply inherent within concrescing occasions, then it would seem to float into the universe from nowhere (contra PR 244/ 373). Concrescing actualities can be the reasons for their own decisions, but not for the creative activity whereby they make their own decisions.

As future, God is forever future. In this our proposal differs from that of Wolfhart Pannenberg, who also speaks of "the power of the future operative in the present. He conceives of God as now in the process of becoming, who at the end of history, however, will finally become fully actual. But the actuality of God in this sense, as unifying within himself all of history, necessarily marks the end of history as well. We conceive of history, and time, to have no end, so that God is always future, never present, thereby never becoming past. He is always subject, never object; always becoming, never being.

Strictly speaking, God cannot be properly characterized as an actual entity. As concrescent activity, he is actual in the sense of being active. But in the sense of being concretely determinate, he is not actual, for he never becomes an entity capable of objectification. On this view we can agree with Buber that God is pure Thou, or with Tillich that he is not a being. This does not mean, however, that God thereby transcends the categories. He fully exemplifies them, but Whitehead has transformed the categories of being into categories of becoming.

References

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

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

JAAR -- Journal of the American Academy of Religion, for Bowman L. Clarke, "God and Time in Whitehead," JAAR 48/4 (December, 1980), 563-80.

PPCT -- Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, edited by Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1971.

TPP -- Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead, edited by Lewis S. Ford. American Academy of Religion: Studies in Religion, 5, 1973.

Notes

1 John Wilcox, "A Question from Physics for Certain Theists," Journal of Religion 40/4 (October, 1961), 293-300. Wilcox posed this as a problem for process theism in general, but I sought to limit its applicability to Hartshorne’s emendation: Lewis S. Ford, "Is Process Theism Compatible with Relativity Theory?" Journal of Religion 47/2 (April, 1968), 124-35. Paul Fitzgerald then explores the problem in terms of a number of differing models: "Relativity Physics and the God of Process Philosophy," PS 214 (Winter, 1972), 251-76.

2 For this comparison between the pluralization of future creativity and the communication of esse, see my essay on God as the (future) source of becoming, forthcoming. See also W. Norris Clarke, S.J., The Philosophical Approach to God, A Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University, 1979), which has an excellent chapter on "Christian Theism and Whiteheadian Process Philosophy." He argues convincingly that creativity needs a source, butt seeks to understand the transmission of creativity by means of efficient causality. I have criticized this attempt in "The Search for the Source of Creativity," Logos 1 (1980), 45-52.

Although many of us find in Whitehead’s philosophical achievement a system nearly unparalleled for its balance, intricacy, and tight coherence, it cannot be gainsaid that many of his books leave much to be desired with respect to the order of presentation. The unity of the four parts of Adventures of Ideas is not fully apparent, and early reviewers of Science and the Modern World were disconcerted by the intrusion of the metaphysical chapters on "Abstraction" and "God" in the midst of lectures on the history of science. When it comes to Process and Reality, our difficulties multiply. Part two is about as disordered as the writings of the minor prophets in the Bible.

The secondary literature shows that Whitehead’s philosophy can be presented in an orderly fashion; why couldn’t Whitehead so present it? This, I submit, was the defect of his genius. To write a well-ordered philosophical treatise of any length requires considerable perseverance. Above all, one cannot become bored with one’s own ideas. It also requires knowing exactly where you want to end up. Whitehead was uncommonly adventuresome, always questing after new ideas. Had it been otherwise, half the book’s insights might never have been discovered. Yet every new insight has ramifications throughout the whole system. If the philosophy were to be well presented, it would have to be rewritten with every new insight. Since nearly every time Whitehead sought to revise some, this happened, the task must have seemed well nigh hopeless. This is the way he reported the final process to his son North on December 23, 1928:

This report, taken in isolation, might suggest that Whitehead wrote most of the book from lecture notes after he delivered the Gifford Lectures in June, 1928, but other evidence indicates that most of the book was composed beforehand. Whitehead did face a monumental task in getting it all straight and knew he was not well suited to this job of final revision. That was the real difficulty he faced.

One device he used repeatedly was to insert fresh material in texts composed from an earlier point of view, making minimum modifications in the original text, in the hopes that the new material would so reshape the whole context that it would be read from the new point of view. To a very large extent he was successful, for the standard interpretation today usually takes its cue from those inserted passages. Whitehead was none too rigorous in tidying up minor details. For example, we are told that the third phase in God’s interaction with the world is the final one (PR 349.44 / 530.37), while on the very next page Whitehead announces another, fourth phase. Or, again, the third part is constructed with only eight categoreal obligations (PR 222.35 / 340.9, 248.8/ 379.7), with the eighth as the final one (PR 278.6/ 424.16), but Whitehead thinks up a ninth, which he inserts in the first chapter of part II (II.1.4).¹

He had used that device once before, only not on so massive a scale, in Science and the Modern World. The philosophy he sketched there in the Lowell Lectures as an alternative to scientific materialism was primarily based on the familiar concepts of objects and events drawn from his earlier philosophy of nature. Instead of four types of objects, he now had just two, eternal and enduring, yet the function of these objects was basically the same. Events were the same events, assumed to be infinitely subdivisible. The philosophy sketched was a self-enclosed naturalism, with no hint of pansubjectivity. Before the lectures were published, however, Whitehead discovered temporal atomism and inserted some fresh material. The last ten paragraphs of chapter 7 on "Relativity" detail this discovery, while the last five paragraphs of the next chapter apply it to quantum theory. There are also three paragraphs inserted into chapter 6 on "The Nineteenth Century" (SMW 153-55), indicated by the fact that "these individual enduring entities" in the very next sentence refers back to the final sentence just before the inserted material.² Later new insights about eternal objects and God were added in the two metaphysical chapters, using the new concept of "actual occasion" for the first time. Taken as a whole, the book presents an early, as yet unfocused, account of the later philosophy, yet this was hardly the philosophy that imbued the Lowell Lectures as originally delivered in February, 1925.

In Science and the Modern World, there appear to be only three or four insertions within existing chapters, always three or more paragraphs in length. The amount of insertion in Process and Reality is much more varied and widespread. For example, at one point Whitehead decided that propositional feelings may, or may not, involve consciousness (PR 261/ 399). Presumably at that time he had not yet clearly differentiated between propositional and intellectual feelings. Once differentiated, propositional feelings are merely components of conscious feelings, and hence themselves unconscious, as Whitehead clearly announces in the first paragraph to that chapter (PR 256/391), a later insertion. Many passages were added in the wake of his discovery that God, the primordial actual entity, also has a temporal side to his being, requiring the distinction between the primordial and the consequent natures. It leads, among other things, to a new justification of induction, appended to that chapter (11.9.8). This change was made without bothering to place the footnote on Keynes (PR 206/ 314) at the end of the chapter or changing the comment indicating that only sections 5 and 6 concerned the justification of induction (PR 201.27/ 306.16).

One particular insertion utilizing the distinction between the primordial and the consequent natures deserves comment: the three paragraphs describing how God has the same three-fold character assigned to any actual entity (PR 87.35-88.30/ 134.15-135.30). In drafting that initial three-fold character, Whitehead apparently had actual occasions primarily in mind. In the meantime he became clearly aware of the difference between God and actual occasions, such that while God was an actual entity, he could not be an actual occasion. This passage then challenged Whitehead to spell out those similarities and differences in terms of this three-fold character. Since his God has only a "primordial nature" and a "consequent nature," he invented a third, "‘superjective’ nature" to meet the parallelism (cf. PS 3:228f). Moreover, he then realized that his entire discussion of the phases of concrescence in part III is inappropriate to God, since God does not initiate his concrescence from his physical pole. But he had already written part III in terms of actual entities, not actual occasions. Rather than change every instance of actual entity in part III to actual occasion, Whitehead simply stipulates: "In the subsequent discussion, ‘actual entity’ will be taken to mean a conditioned actual entity of the temporal world, unless God is expressly included in the discussion" (PR 88/ 135).

This method is quite transparent in the final paragraph added to the category of conceptual reversion abolishing it (PR 249/ 381f), probably one of the very last insertions made in the book. Since reversion is used repeatedly in the pages following this section, most Whiteheadians cannot quite believe Whitehead meant exactly what he said. Strictly speaking, however, conceptual reversion had outlived its usefulness, and only the difficulty of removing every instance of it from the text prevented Whitehead from dismantling it entirely. When first proposed, conceptual reversion was absolutely necessary, because Whitehead was then probably attempting to explain the emergence of subjective aim from the occasion itself, and some sort of explanation had to be given for its novelty. Once novelty is derived from God, this becomes unnecessary.

Detecting these insertions gives us our best clues as to Whitehead’s new insights, for it then becomes possible to read those passages without the insertions to determine what his view had originally been. Other methods are also possible. Once a sufficient body of texts have been dated relative to one another, it is possible to look for variations in usage. "Symbolic transference" seems to be an older term for "symbolic reference"; "objective lure" for "subjective aim"; "presentational" and "causal objectification" for "presentational immediacy" and "causal efficacy." "Categoreal obligation" may once have been "categoreal condition." Something can be determined often from the presence or, more often, the absence of some familiar systematic concept. Thus "subjective aim" seems to be absent from earlier strata, up through the summer of 1927.

Another method is to look for evidence that the text has been rearranged. The book was not written in a straightforward manner, as the outline below indicates. Whitehead seems td have arranged his chapters differently at different times. For these older arrangements, some clues may be discovered in various "ghost references," references which in the Macmillan text refer to erroneous or nonexistent sections. Thus at one point at the beginning of the final section of "Strains" (PR IV.4.5) he refers to "Section VI," but there is now no such section. There once was, namely the first section of the next chapter, before Whitehead had divided "Strains" and "Measurement" into two separate chapters (cf. PR 324.2/ 494.26, 325.15! 495.38). Or, again, Definition 23 of "Extensive Connection" (IV.2) is referred to as "Ch. III." This, to my mind, is no simple error, but indicates an earlier arrangement where "Extensive Connection" was the third chapter of a separate book. After Whitehead accepted the invitation to give the Gifford Lectures, he devoted the summer of 1927 to them, writing nine and one-half of the ten planned (SJP 7:333),³ intending to supplement these lectures with the materials he had been collecting for the book on metaphysics.

As another example of rearrangement note that the chapter on "Organisms and Environment" (now 11.4)-is twice referred to as "Part II, Ch. VIII" (PR 286.20/ 438.22,229.26/ 446.12), suggesting that once this part was so arranged that this chapter was in eighth place.

Besides these methods for interrogating the text to yield up indications of its probable development, we do have some external evidence to rely upon, meager and disappointing as it may be. Most of this has already been reported on by Victor Lowe, including the prospectus of the Gifford Lectures (SPJ 7:335f). George Burch’s notes of Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures, 1926-27" have been published (PS 4:199-206), and several other sets of notes from these formative years exist unpublished. The six principles of metaphysics Burch lists (PS 4:204) can be profitably compared with the categoreal scheme by means of the eight principles Whitehead presented in October, 1927 (see appendix). There is at least one trace of this second set in Process and Reality, when "the third metaphysical principle" is mentioned (PR 212.38/ 324.7). Later this third metaphysical principle (the principle of relativity) becomes the fourth category of explanation.

I mention these anomalies, "ghost references," and examples of rearrangement not in order to justify some one definitive order of composition but to indicate why I think the determination of that order is largely possible. It had been my intention in recent years to publish just such a study, but now I am persuaded this sort of analysis can best be pursued cooperatively. Thus in this essay I wish merely to propose a provisional outline of the stages in the composition of Process and Reality in the hopes that it might elicit alternate hypotheses, all of which need to be tested against each other. Specific suggestions as to insertions need to be scrutinized by minds more skeptical than mine, for while there may be some later insertions into the text, there need not be nearly as many as I am wont to imagine. This is an invitation for all those interested to contact me, whether or not they yet have any specific contributions to make. It may be possible to establish an informal newsletter or summer workshop with the eventual aim of publishing our results. Here is the tentative outline:

a. IV. 2-3 (except for elements in 3.5); 4.2 (in part), 4.3 (in part), 4.5; 5.2 (except for 323.22-35, 37/ 493.4-22, 24 [o]), 5.3-6. The theory of extensive connection (IV. 2-3), despite its complexity, is primarily an improvement on Whitehead’s earlier theory of extensive abstraction, made in accordance with Theodore de Laguna’s suggestion, accepted by Whitehead in private conversation the summer of 1926. This theory offers a definition of straightness independent of measurement that Whitehead could use in his developing theory of perception (IV: 4-5, in part).

b. II.1.7, 2.1-6. This second chapter on the extensive continuum largely trades on the doctrine of temporal atomicity, already developed in Science and the Modern World. The use of "presentational objectification," "causal objectification," and "symbolic transference" in both 1.7 and 2.1 suggests that they belong together, before (c).

c. II.4.5-8 (except for the last two sentences of 4.8, which belong in [o]), II.8. These two chapters form a continuous treatise on the nature of perception. The early philosophy of nature was based upon what was perceived in a duration of simultaneity (CN 4f, 53), i.e., what is later termed "presentational immediacy." This holds as long as Whitehead conceived of prehension as primarily (unconscious) perception, but became problematic once he started to conceive of prehension in causal terms. For by relativity physics, simultaneous events are causally independent. Hence Whitehead had to devise a theory of two modes of perception -- and their symbolic connection. The Barbour-Page Lectures on Symbolism, delivered at the University of Virginia in April, 1927, may have originally been intended to discuss the general themes considered in the third chapter. When Whitehead saw that his theory of perception required a symbolic connection, he may have reworked material from this treatise as the opening two lectures of Symbolism. The treatise seems never to have been intended for the Gifford Lectures proper, but for the expansion of these lectures for subsequent publication.

d. II.1.5-6; -II.5-6; 7.1-4. [ (d), (e), (f), (g), and possibly (h) probably form a continuous whole, composed the summer of 1927. They largely express a common viewpoint, but are here subdivided for convenience.]

e. II.3.2-4, 1.3.2 (see [n]), II.9.1-6. The first three sentences of II.3.2 belong with the inserted 3.1 (h), but 3.2 probably initially began with the first three sentences of 3.1 These sentences indicate that the "next chapter" will consider such problems as "induction" and "general truths" (PR 83/ 127). Since II.9.4 first discusses general truths in terms of metaphysical propositions, and II.9.5-6 induction, we infer that this chapter was the next in order of composition and that later Whitehead rearranged them in the present order.

f. III.1.3-10, except for 232.38-233.20/ 355.17-356.17 and inserted passages listed below; also III.2. I found this initially surprising, supposing only part II was composed the summer of 1927. But Whitehead tells us he completed nearly nine and one-half chapters of the intended Gifford Lectures during the summer of 1927 (SJP 7:333a), and there are not enough chapters in part II, if we exclude (c) above. If I am correct about the additional insertions, there is no mention of "subjective aim" in any of the strata before (i).

g. II.10, except 210.25-32/ 320.27-36. This is probably the half-chapter Whitehead had in mind, intending to complete its analysis of "flux" with a discussion of "permanence" to be found in God. The famous couplet summing up the polarity of "flux" and "permanence, "Abide with me; / Fast falls the eventide," is mentioned both here and in part V (PR 209/ 318, 3381 513). PR 11.19, particularly 10.1, may be profitably read as a preliminary draft of V.1. In accordance with Lord Gifford’s purpose, Whitehead may have been intending a final half-chapter showing how his cosmology had implications for natural theology. Perhaps he did not yet see how he could improve upon what he had already written in Religion in the Making.

h. II.3.1, except the first three sentences (part of [e] above), 85.21-24/ 130.29-33, and 87.27-88.30/ 134.4-135.30 (in part; see Em] below). This section introduces "objective lure," Whitehead’s first designation for what later becomes the "subjective aim." It may or may not have been composed during the summer of 1927, but Whitehead appears to have used neither "objective lure" nor "subjective aim" during his fall lectures on metaphysics at Harvard.

i. III. 3.3-5 (in part); 111.4-5, plus such insertions as 187.21-188.22/285.1-286.24. Here he works out categoreal obligations 4-8, initially as a way of deriving the subjective aim from the concrescent activity of the emerging occasion itself.

j. Whitehead comes to realize that an emergent theory of subjective aim will not do, for some sort of aim must guide even the initial phase itself. Hence such insertions as 107.36-108.2, 342.1-22, 343.5-21 (CPR 69.27-29, 223.37-224.16, 224.32-44). Then God is seen to be the source of this initial subjective aim: III.3.1.

k. At this point parts II-IV are substantially complete, as well as much of I.2-3. Whitehead returns to the question of natural theology for his cosmology and discovers the temporal aspect of God’s nature: part V.

l. Other material preparatory to giving the Gifford Lectures in June, 1928, principally I.1.

m. After Whitehead delivered the Gifford Lectures in June, 1928, there remained the task of getting the materials in shape for publication. Most of his efforts now were directed toward rearrangement and the inclusion of insertions, such as those which utilize the contrast between the primordial and the consequent natures, such as 103.29-104.27, 134.21-135.30 (CPR 66.32-67.21, 87.40-88.30); II.9.8.

n.Whitehead devised a new theory of the "living person" based upon hybrid physical prehensions of antecedent members, and so replaced I.3.2 (e) with II. 3.5-11, displacing I.3.2 from its original place in 11.3 to its present place in the introductory material. The notion of hybrid physical prehension was used to explain how God is the source of initial aim in 111.3.2 and such passages as 224.44-225.21/ 343.21-344.11 and to offer another explanation of induction: II. 9.7.

o. He came to realize that the "presented locus" and the termini of perceptual projection did not necessarily coincide and developed the theory of "strain-feelings" to address this problem: the last two sentences of II. 4.8; 11.4.9; IV. 4.1, 4.2 (in part), 4.4; 5.1, and 323.22-35, 37/ 493.4-22, 24. See (a).

p. IV.1 (and perhaps III.1.1) were added in order to introduce those parts.

q. Miscellaneous final additions, such as the ninth categoreal obligation in II.1.4 or the abolition of reversion 249.41-250.11/ 381.36-382.19 or the final section on the "fourth phase": V.2.7.

If this history of the composition of Process and Reality is reasonably correct, the most distinctive feature of Whitehead’s philosophy, the teaching of subjective aim, is the outcome of a fairly complex evolution. We may trace these stages: (1) At first, Whitehead is content to express the unity of an occasion in process of becoming simply in terms of the first three categoreal conditions (f). These are generic conditions, applying to any actual occasion.

(2) He then feels the need to endow each occasion with its specific, individual ideal, initially called the "objective lure" (h). The specific unity of the concrescing occasion is to be found in that towards which it aims. This highlights the importance of II.3.1 in its original form as the text where individual aim first makes its appearance.

(3) At first Whitehead tries to derive the subjective aim from the activities of the occasion itself, as it seeks to unify its multiple past in the light of the multiple interrelatedness of the realm of eternal objects (i.e., the nontemporal actuality of God objectified). Thus there is first conceptual derivation, then reversion to yield novel eternal objects which might serve as the basis for the new subjective aim. In short, categoreal obligations 4-8 are initially fashioned to explain how the subjective aim could come into being.

(4) Somewhere along the line Whitehead becomes dissatisfied with this approach, since some sort of unity is required even at the very outset. Otherwise this initial phase dissolves into a sheer multiplicity. Moreover, every unificatory activity within the concrescence must, by the ontological principle, find its reason in terms of the concrescent subject, and this is impossible for early stages if these have no subjective aim. Hence he is driven to posit the aim in the very earliest phases (j).

(5) The aim now needs a source outside the occasion, which cannot be provided by the multiple past actual occasions, either individually or collectively. Hence God becomes its source (j).

(6) Up until (k), God was conceived to be some sort of all-pervasive general actual entity, whose objective character as the realm of all eternal objects formed part of the generic make-up of all actual occasions and hence did not have to be specifically prehended. With the addition of a consequent nature, however, God became individualized. Now the way in which God was to be prehended became a problem.

(7) The theory of the hybrid physical prehension, devised by Whitehead to explain the "living person," was applied to explain how actual occasions prehend God: (n).

In some respects this evolution is incomplete. No role in the specification of initial aim is given to the consequent nature, save in a very sketchy way in the late addition of the "fourth phase" (V.2.7). Nor can Whitehead answer the question how God can be objectified without perishing. But this is as far as Whitehead developed the theory of subjective aim, and it may be up to us to see how this trajectory may be completed.

If this analysis is correct, Process and Reality was substantially complete before Whitehead discovered the consequent nature of God. This is perhaps one reason why the temporal experience of God plays such a small role in Whitehead’s philosophy in the provision of specific initial aims. In terms of Whitehead’s total philosophy the move toward a temporal nature of God seems easy enough, but it was such a novel departure from traditional Western classical theism that it is no wonder that Whitehead was so long blind to these possibilities. After all, God had been for him the "non-temporal actual entity."

It is sobering to reflect upon the role of accidental circumstance in the founding of "process theology," which lives in large measure from Whitehead’s discovery of the consequent nature of God. What if he had not received the invitation to deliver the Gifford Lectures? If Whitehead had persisted in believing that he had already said all he had to say, there may not have been any reason for him to devote a separate chapter to God in the book he was planning. The Gifford Lectures more or less required him to devote at least a half-chapter to natural theology. The exigency of prolonged rumination about what he was going to say in this part in the light of his growing metaphysics may have initiated the discovery. At first he had a simple contrast between the "flux" of temporal occasions and the "permanence" of nontemporality, but then it grew into a double problem requiring a consequent temporal nature for God as its solution.

It should be clear from these examples that the analysis of the composition of Process and Reality provides the means whereby White-head’s can be appreciated as a living and growing philosophy. Instead of one fixed position, it becomes refracted into a whole series of positions, each leading to the next. Sometimes this sort of analysis, however, is faulted as tending to undercut the systematic unity of the whole. Thus the work of Werner Jaeger on Aristotle or that of Hans Vaihinger and Norman Kemp Smith on Kant has been called into question.

However it may be with respect to Aristotle and Kant, I feel fairly confident the genetic analysis I have been describing will support rather than undermine such standard interpretations of Whitehead as those of Ivor Leclerc and William Christian. The crux of interpretation lies in finding those texts in terms of which other, more obscure texts are interpreted. By and large the texts chosen stem from the later strata of the book. Earlier texts are either ignored or systematically reinterpreted in terms of these texts. The systematic interpretation, as it is commonly understood, more or less coincides with that final position which (according to the genetic analysis) Whitehead eventually arrived at.

It should be recognized, however, that the standard interpretations rarely do justice to all the (systematically) relevant texts, even within Process and Reality. If we assume that this book presents one single continuous point of view, then we ought to be able to devise a theory which explains all the texts. This Jorge Luis Nobo sets out to do in his recent essay on "Transition: A Creative Process Distinct From Concrescence" (IPQ, September, 1979). Nobo reconciles many relevant texts by proposing that prior to the phases of concrescence governed by subjective aim there is a distinct phase of transition. In my interpretation of becoming, "the many become one" (PR 21/ 32) in that the many "initial data" to be felt become the one objective datum felt in the final satisfaction (PR 221/ 337f). Nonetheless, Nobo can point to many impressive texts which point to an initial, unified datum (constituted in a distinct phase of transition), which is then reconstituted in concrescence, texts which have hitherto been largely ignored (e.g., PR 149f/ 227f, 154/ 234, 155/ 235, 214f/ 326f). If we adopt a strict systematic stance, these texts have as much right to be taken into account in our explanation as any other texts we might use.

If our genetic analysis of the text is correct, however, there is good reason for questioning the continued validity of these texts. The ones just cited belong to chapters composed during the summer of 1927 (II.6 [d] or II.10 [g]). Both are prior to the discovery of subjective aim (h) and its being placed in the initial phase (j). Where Nobo sees two initial phases, one of transition apart from subjective aim, followed by one of concrescence with subjective aim, I see just one initial phase, originally modified to make room for subjective aim. We cannot say that the original initial phase implicitly excluded subjective aim, for at that time the idea of subjective aim was not even anticipated.

But mine may not be the proper genetic account, and Nobo has informally proposed an alternative. (Because all of the evidence has not yet been examined, his, like mine, must remain extremely tentative.) Nobo challenges my interpretation of the chapter on "Process" (II.10) as the last of the Giffords according to Whitehead’s original intention. Instead, it was perhaps a very early chapter of the theoretical part of Whitehead’s undertaking. After composing the theoretical part, however, Whitehead realized that it was quite abstract and difficult to grasp and so decided to preface it by the section on "Discussions and Applications" (PR II). With the exception of the material on perception (c), which Nobo agrees is quite early, part two (i.e., PR II.1-9) was composed after the theoretical parts (II.10, III, IV). In working up these sections of part two Whitehead borrowed heavily from the theoretical materials already written. For example, the analysis of sensa and pattern (11.4.3) may well have been excerpted from the discussion concerning the two species of eternal objects (IV.1.6). We agree that the chapter on "Process" is incomplete, but Nobo postulates an original, more complete version. many of whose parts have since been transferred to earlier parts of the book (PR I, II.1-9).

In particular, Nobo challenges my assumption that the chapter on "Process" is incomplete because Whitehead has not yet discovered the consequent nature of God. He sees no reason why that particular doctrine could not have been formulated shortly after Religion in the Making, which anticipates it in a number of remarkable passages (e.g., RM 80, 87, 98, 154f, 157, 159). The distinction between the two natures of God does not depend upon any of the intricacies of Whitehead’s metaphysics as developed in Process and Reality and may well antedate it. In fact, we might even find an implicit anticipation of God’s knowledge of temporal actuality in the 1922 essay on "Uniformity and Contingency" (ESP 134f). The fact that Whitehead makes so little use of the consequent nature in most of Process and Reality can be explained by his assumption this was not a topic for general metaphysics (depending upon the special insights of religious experience) and so could not be employed in any purely metaphysical investigation. In other words, Whitehead adopted the stance of the third lecture in Religion in the Making in working out his cosmology, reserving the special stance of the fourth lecture for the final part contrasting "God and the World" (PR V).

In Nobo’s judgment, the chapter on "Process" (II.10) and the final chapter (V.2) concern two different topics, resolved by the same set of ideas. "Process" addresses the general problem of reconciling flux and permanence in the temporal world. This is resolved by the discovery of two kinds of fluency, macrocosmic (transition) and microcosmic (concrescence). The final chapter addresses the more particular problem of ultimate permanence: does any part of the universe achieve absolute permanence, as opposed to the relative permanence found in the temporal world? In the preface Whitehead explicitly contrasts these two chapters, among others, as presenting a variety of experience explicable in terms of a single scheme. For "one test of success is adequacy in the comprehension of the variety of experience within the limits of one scheme of ideas" (PR xiv/ix).

Should Nobo’s genetic analysis of Process and Reality prove to be correct, then we cannot easily fault his systematic interpretation of transition on genetic grounds. Some of the texts proposing an initial unified datum come from the chapter on "Process" (II.10), to be sure, a chapter both of us take to be early. The other texts, however, do not. If these texts were formulated quite late in the composition of Process and Reality, then we would have to take them into account in formulating Whitehead’s systematic position.

At this stage in the discussion it would be quite premature to make any final judgment concerning these two proposals. Rather, the differences point to the necessity of shared, cooperative inquiry by philosophers of different persuasions concerning the sequence in which Whitehead composed Process and Reality. The matter is quite relevant to our estimation of the basic character of Whitehead’s final systematic position.

One additional benefit of this undertaking ought at least be mentioned. Philosophers sometimes complain that they find no arguments in Whitehead. I suspect what they mean is that they fail to find discussions of the problems they are most familiar with. Now in his earliest metaphysic embedded in Science and the Modern World Whitehead did address a problem common to philosophers of that period: how to find a workable substitute for space, time, and matter, the discredited notions of scientific materialism. After the discovery of temporal atomism, however, Whitehead was primarily concerned with those issues and problems his own peculiar approach caused him. Genetic analysis, I am convinced, can be very valuable in ferreting out just what those problems were, particularly those which Whitehead sought to surmount in the next stage of his development.

APPENDIX

[These eight metaphysical principles were presented by Whitehead in his classroom lectures at Harvard, October 1 and 4, 1927. They are excerpted from notes taken by Professor Edwin L. Marvin, formerly of the University of Montana. A typescript of the entire set of notes for 1927-28 is available at the Center for Process Studies.]

1. That the actual world is a process and that this process is the becoming of actual entities.

2. That in the becoming of an actual entity, the potential unity of many entities acquires the actual unity of the one entity -- the whole process is the many becoming one, and the one is what becomes.

3. That the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities is the one general metaphysical character attaching to all entities, actual or nonactual -- i.e., it belongs to the nature of a "Being" that it is a potential for a "Becoming."

4. That there are two primordial genera of entities: (a) eternal objects and (b) actual entities, and that all other entities are derivative complexes involving entities from both of these genera.

5. That an eternal object can only be described in terms of its potentiality for "ingression" into the becoming of actual entities and that its analysis only discloses other eternal objects.

6. That two descriptions are required for an actual entity: (a) one of them analytic of its potentiality for its "objectification" in the becoming of other actual entities and (b) the other analytic of the process that constitutes its own becoming.

7. That how the actual entity becomes constitutes what the actual entity is, so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. All explanation of an actual entity exhibits its process as the reason for its potentiality, and all description exhibits the realized objectifications of that actual entity as a partial analysis of its own process.

8. That every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason in the character of some actual entity whose objectification is one of the components entering into the particular instance in question (the ontological principle -- or principle of extrinsic reference).

Actual entities are the only reasons; to search for a reason is to search for an actual entity.

References

CPR -- The Corrected Edition of Process and Reality, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

IPQ -- International Philosophical Quarterly, for Jorge Luis Nobo, "Transition: A Creative Process Distinct From Concrescence, September, 1979.

SJP -- Southern Journal of Philosophy, for Victor Lowe, "Whitehead’s Gifford Lectures," 7/4 (Winter, 1969), 329-38.

Notes

1 II.1.4 Part II, chapter 1, section 4. Roman numerals refer to parts, the first Arabic numeral to chapters, the second to sections. When only one Arabic numeral is given, the chapter is intended. If no Roman numeral is given, it is the same as the previous part mentioned. In citing PR, the page and line of the corrected edition is given first, then the Macmillan 1929 page and line.

2 These three paragraphs overlap page 105 in the Free Press edition of SMW. For further details, see my essay on "Whitehead’s First Metaphysical Synthesis," International Philosophical Quarterly 17/3 (September, 1997), 251-64; and Victor Lowe’s rejoinder, "Ford’s Discovery about Whitehead," IPQ 18/2 (July, 1978), 223-26.

Those who are primarily sensitive to the continuities in Whitehead’s thought, such as Lowe, often see little need to postulate any basic "shift" in the course of its development. Like many others, I do see such a "shift," arising Out of his adoption of temporal atomism. This does not mean that Whitehead abandoned the temporal continuity expressed in the infinite divisibility of events in the writings on the philosophy of nature, but rather that this infinite divisibility was relegated to the domain of the potential in terms of the extensive continuum. Actuality, however, was conceived to be incurably atomic after March, 1925. In "Whitehead’s First Metaphysical Synthesis," I offer no fresh evidence for the "shift," so that those who are antecedently persuaded that there is no "shift" will see little reason to alter their opinions. The essay presupposes that there is a "shift" and argues for its relocation, in the received interpretation, the "shift" takes place some time before the composition of SMW; I argue in contrast that it takes place during the composition of SMW.

Lowe is surely correct about the paucity of external evidence as to how Whitehead composed either SMW or PR but need we discount so completely internal evidence drawn from the published text itself? Biblical source criticism is almost wholly based on such internal evidence. On face value, W. E. Hocking’s remark that when Whitehead arrived at Harvard "his speculative structure . . . was already well advanced in its main outlines" is a bit of external evidence against my hypothesis, but it may mean nothing more than that Whitehead was little influenced by the philosophical opinions and controversies of his American colleagues during these years, which seems very much to have been the case.

At bottom, our differences reflect two fundamentally contrasting hermeneutical strategies: does a given text make more sense when interpreted as part of the entire work to which it belongs or as interpreted as part of some particular stratum of that work?

3 Whitehead refers to his "book on Metaphysics," but on August 9. 1927, Evelyn Whitehead reported to Curtis Hitchcock at Macmillan that "9 of the 10 Gifford Lectures are written." I am indebted to my student Michael Hertzig for this information, which he found among the Macmillan correspondence with authors housed in the Archives of the New York Public Library.