Events, Individuals and Predication: A Defence of Event Pluralism
Charles Hartshorne
A statement, capable of being true or false, correctly describes or characterizes something. Philosophies may differ in the class of entities which they suppose to be the basic descripta, those which all true characterizations correctly, and at least indirectly, describe. Aristotle codified one answer: what is described is the substance or enduring individual. However, since he also held that only the species, not the individual, is truly knowable, his answer was somewhat ambiguous; for it seems that the knowable truth is truth not about the individual but about the species or form, even though this is real only in individual cases.
There are difficulties with this view. (1) Why not say that the genus rather than the species is the truly knowable? Individuals are special cases of the species; are not species special cases of the genus? And, as no one can exhaust what is peculiar to this or that individual, so no one can exhaust what is peculiar to a species. As individuals are constantly changing and being replaced by others, so are species. Aristotle did not admit all this, but here he was mistaken. Species, like individuals, are inexhaustibly subtle and ultimately impermanent entities.
(2) The species is more determinate or definite than the genus, the individual than the species; but so is the event more determinate than the individual. It is indeed possible to use the word ‘events so that this is not so; thus a shift in the weather could be called an event, and the shift, as one is likely to identify it, is not as rich in determinations as an individual entity. But suppose by event we mean a minimal temporal unit, or cross section, so to speak, of some actual process, such as the process of experiencing in a certain human being. Thus, all my experience at this moment — the moment when I wrote ‘moment’. This is more definite than is Charles Hartshorne. For that might mean only, eldest son of F. C. Hartshorne and Marguerite Hartshorne, indifferently whether at age one hour, or 72 years, indifferently whether awake or asleep, and so forth.
There is here a dilemma. (a) One may, with Leibniz, hold that by so and so one means all that occurs in the specified individual between birth and death, or beyond if there is a beyond. In this case we do not know who anyone is until he is dead, if even then. This is plainly not the commonsense meaning of individual person. Identity is not normally defined in terms of the total definiteness of a person’s life. If it were, it would be contradiction to say that a person could have acted and experienced otherwise than he has. Determinists may like this implication, but it is not what we normally mean by individuality. According to this normal view, it is sheer fact, not logical necessity, that ‘P have experienced or done this instead of that on such and such a date. There are other objections to Leibnizianism.
(b) One may hold, with Aristotle, that self-indentity (sic) involves essential as opposed to contingent determinations or ‘accidents’. But then the accidental state in which one is at a given moment is more definite than that in which one is simply by being oneself, since the state includes both essential and contingent properties. Yet this is like the relation between individual and species, or species and genus: a species has what is essential to the genus plus something; an individual has the specific essence plus some arbitrary addition; but so, finally, we come to the momentary state (‘event’ in the concrete sense) which has the character of the genus, and that of the species, and individual identity plus arbitrary additions at each moment. This final dose of arbitrariness alone gives fully definite and concrete reality. If this is so, and for non-Leibnizian substantialists it must be so, then Aristotle should not have stopped either with the species or with the individual, but he should have gone on to the event-state, in his search for the determinate or concrete unit of reality which true statements correctly, and at least indirectly, describe.
I see no escape from this conclusion, provided it be agreed that Leibnizianism is unacceptable. The logic which drives us from genus to species to individual is the very logic which should drive us still further, to the event, or momentary state, of the individual process in question. If truth is finally about individual rather than species, or species rather than genus, is this not because the individual is more definite (richer in determinations) than species, and species than genus? We think of an abstract property, like animality, and we ask, What entities, more definite than just bare ‘instances of animality’, actually have this property? ‘Animals’, merely as such, are neither large nor small, neither aquatic, terrestrial, nor aerial, neither of one colour nor another. But North American crows are black, and this crow has in addition a broken wing, or is tame and has learned to say ‘Hello’. But similarly, this crow just now has further characteristics, no less arbitrary with respect to its being this crow than is its special ability to say ‘hello’ with respect to its being a crow. The definiteness of truth (this is Leibniz’s profound principle of ‘in esse’) is due precisely to the definiteness of individual as compared to species, or species as compared to genus (or some still more abstract qualification or classification). But is not the full definiteness of truth due to the definiteness of event, as compared even to individual?
To know all events in the history of an individual is to know all there is to know of that individual and is incomparably more than simply to know which individual it is. For the latter is, in principle, knowable at birth, but not the former. Again Leibniz denies the distinction, but anyone who follows him here implicitly accepts some of the most extreme paradoxes of the Monadology.
My conclusion is simply that the most analytically complete way of speaking is event-speaking, not thing- or substance-speaking. The latter is a simplification or shorthand, which is indispensable for much the same reasons that led Aristotle to say that really the species, rather than the individual, is known. If the human ‘present’ has as its maximal length about 1/10 of a second, then obviously we must normally think together in a few bundles the hundreds of thousands of events in each person’s experience in a single day; and for many purposes the identity of the event-sequence to which these events belong, that they constitute the life of a certain person with a given proper name, is much more important than most of the peculiarities distinguishing one event in the sequence from another. Similarly, for many purposes of naturalists, it is more important that what one observes is a crow instead of a raven than that it is this crow rather than that. So we speak of ‘the voice of the crow’, ‘the song of the skylark’, though what we hear is this crow, this skylark. Similarly, we take all the events of a man’s life as describable aspects of one entity, so and so. Yet really the determinate entities to be described are not this single entity itself from birth to death, any more than it is the species rather than its members which is the ultimately determinate entity which the naturalist is studying.
We say, the man ‘is’ sick. Yet his bare identity does not embrace the sickness (unless perhaps he has never been well). Predication is in this respect an ambiguous procedure. (a) It may refer an abstract or logically weak characterization, such as ‘animality’, to something less abstract, logically stronger, such as the class of ‘birds’. Thus ‘birds are animals’. In this case, what makes the statement true is that the more definite or less abstract entity includes ‘animality’ among its determinations. But (b)so and so ‘is’ sick not only has not this structure, it has precisely the opposite form. The identity of ‘so and so’ is less definite than his actual state of sickness and does not include it —quite the contrary. Here the ‘subject’ fails to perform its primary function of furnishing the definiteness of truth. Only ‘so and so now’ yields the required definiteness; but it does this, not by virtue of a date on a calendar, but by virtue of perceptual observation, and observation not just of so and so, but of a definite event-sequence (not implicated by X’s being so and so plus the date), which we observe to occur. This sequence is an arbitrary addition to the conjunction of the individual and the date.
The old language of ‘essence’ and ‘accident’ among predicates is thus deeply misleading; for it conceals the reversal of meaning which ‘predication’ itself here undergoes. Just as one may say either that so and so is sick, or that sickness is in him, so one may say that crows are black or that the colour black ‘is’ in crows. Nevertheless the logical subject, in the sense of the more determinate, less abstract or less general entity, is not black but crows, and by the same logic, the least abstract entity in ‘so and so is sick’ is not so and so, nor yet sickness, but the actual event-sequence going on now and (somewhat arbitrarily) prolonging the event-sequence which from his birth has been identifiable as the life of so and so. Leibniz was right in demanding that truth be in esse; determinateness can be correctly ascribed only because there is something whose definiteness includes the predicates in question. But his error was in supposing that the self-identical individual was the most definite something. Rather it is the event, or event-sequence, and this is fully determinate only retrospectively.
So far in this section we have made the assumption that truth as a whole, the totality of truths, consists in the correct characterization, not of a single subject or descriptum, but of many subjects. In a broad sense, we have assumed a ‘pluralistic’ ontology. This is the normal commonsense view; it is also the view of most philosophers in our Western tradition. However, Parmenides, the Stoics, Spinoza, and, perhaps one should add, the German idealists, as well as their Anglo-American disciples, such as Bradley, have appeared to hold the monistic alternative. All statements describe (or misdescribe) but one subject:
Substance, Reality, or ‘the Absolute’. The main stream of the Hindu tradition may also be associated with this view. It is, indeed, a significant fact, in my opinion, that ancient India produced both the most radical of monisms and the most radical of pluralisms. On the one hand, the Hindu said that all things and all persons were in reality, or apart from the ‘Maya’ correlative with ignorance, simply the Person, Self or unutterable spiritual mystery; on the other hand, the Buddhist said that even the unity through time of a physical thing, animal, or person covered an ultimate multiplicity of momentary states or ‘flashes’ of reality. Here, and not in Heraclitus, was the emergence of a radical philosophy of process. (For one thing, from the Greek we have some epigrams, from Buddha and his followers, a library. Our provincial Western neglect of this great tradition is out of keeping with the global responsibilities of our time.)
Is it merely accidental that radical monism and radical pluralism first achieved wide acceptance in the same part of the world and at nearly the same time? Perhaps not; for, suppose one attempts to combat mystical monism in behalf of the commonsense pluralism of things and persons. One will argue: if one man says ‘I’ and another man uses the same word, they cannot mean the same self, since their thoughts, beliefs, actions, experiences, are by no means the same and will often be manifestly contradictory. If I believe p and you believe not-p, ‘wet cannot constitute an identical believer. Why not, objects the monist, since, as you must admit, even the same man may at different times hold contradictory beliefs? Ah, replies the commonsensist, but the law of non-contradiction only says that the same thing cannot at the same time have contradictory predicates. Monist: Very well, but then why may I not amend the law in my favour so that it runs: the same thing may not, at the same time and in the same place, have contradictory predicates? Thus Brahma thinks both my thoughts and yours (so far as they are real), but he thinks my thoughts in that manifestation of himself which is ‘here’ and is me, and he thinks your thoughts in that manifestation which is there and is you. Contradictory predicates, you must agree, are all right so far as there is a distinction of ‘respect’, and why should not a temporal respect and a spatial respect be on the same footing?
One may, of course, object that this is just the difference between space and time, in that, while what is here must be one thing and what is there another, what is earlier and what is later can be the same thing. In short, spatial divisions are substantial, temporal divisions only adjectival. Indeed, space and time have sometimes been characterized by saying that whereas the first is the order of things whereby it is possible for different subjects to have identical predicates, time is the order whereby the same subject can have contradictory predicates. There are the following defects in this contention: (1) It requires us to renounce the Leibnizian ‘Identity of Indiscernibles’, for which there are respectable reasons. (2) If different leaves here and there in the same tree can be exactly alike at a given time, why could not two leaves from different seasons, perhaps in the ‘same place’, be so? Thus it seems that time could transcend the Leibnizian principle if space could. (3) The doctrine assumes a unity of the subject which is more or less independent of its quality, and this is at best a vague idea. How far independent? (4) One thing could have contradictory predicates by virtue not of temporal but of spatial diversity. The box is red and not-red, red on the sides but not on top. It could even be red-topped and not red-topped, if one part of the top was red and the rest not. (5) The decisive objection is that both space and time are being characterized by the theory in merely symmetrical terms, and this means, as we shall see later (Chapter X), superficially. A thing can be red and not red either at different times, or in different spatial parts; any one-way order among the parts or the times seems, in so far, irrelevant. Diversity of times, diversity of places, suffice for the law of contradiction. So far, space and time are on the same footing. Yet space and time are not the same.
The distinctive character of time consists, not in that what is red at t may be not-red at t1, but in this, that the earlier members of an event-sequence contain only a more or less indefinite specification of their successors, while the successors are essentially successors of the very members they succeed. Asymmetrical dependence, or (the same) asymmetrical independence, this is the temporal order. Space, on the other hand, is the symmetrical aspect of dynamic relatedness, the aspect of mutuality, whether mutuality of dependence or (and here it is not the same) of independence. Space is how we have ‘neighbors’, time, how we have ancestors and descendants; but whereas one may say that A and B are neighbors (one of another), we cannot unambiguously say, C and D are descendants (or ancestors) one of another. The ancestral relation discriminates between its terms, the neighborhood relation as such does not.
If one wants to reconcile contradictory predicates with the unity of a single subject through time, it must be in terms of this asymmetry. Otherwise one might as well be talking about space. The ‘same mans can be an innocent child and a sophisticated adult, meaning, however, that whereas only the potentiality of the sophistication was in the child, the prior actuality of the innocence (the ‘having been’ innocent) together with the actual sophistication is in the adult. The directional order is lost if one insists that just as the adult ‘has been’ innocent so the child ‘will be’ sophisticated. The child may never even be an adult; but the adult has been a child and just that child which he was. In my presence two well-known scientists, one an astronomer, one an atomic physicist, agreed upon this: the past but not the future is in principle (apart from human limitations) knowable in detail.
I believe this is part of the very meaning of temporal versus spatial distinctions. If the child is only potentially, i.e., somewhat indefinitely, destined to become an adult, but the adult has perfectly definitely been such and such a child, then to call the child and the adult the identical concrete entity is erroneous. Identity is directionless, symmetrical. The adult is more determinate, and in this reasonable sense more concrete. The more can contain the less, the less cannot contain the more. Hence the subject which really ‘has’ the contradictory predicates is only the later, not the earlier one. The two belong in the same ordered sequence, but they are not one identical concrete reality. It is one thing to say that the same concrete entity is both in pain and not in pain (in pain in a tooth, say, but not in digestive organs) by virtue of spatial distinction of parts; and another and much more ambiguous thing to say that the same entity is both in pain and not in pain by virtue of a temporal distinction. For the spatial diversity of parts can be possessed together by the individual, but the temporal diversity is so possessed, if at all, only in the later phase. Hence the genuinely concrete or inclusive unity, the determinate subject, is a new creation each moment. Only in this way does time relate itself distinctively to the law of non-contradiction.
There is another difficulty with the view we are combating. If the temporal order is essentially that of combining incompatible predicates in identical subjects which endure throughout the succession of predicates, then all change should be ‘accidental’ rather than ‘substantial’, and substances should be incapable of creation or destruction. Leibniz accepted this implication, weakly adding that God by a miracle can either create or destroy substances. Some philosophers have been willing to be more consistent, and have declared all substances to be eternal. This view is so replete with difficulties that I refrain, at least here, from mentioning them. In any case, it is not a commonsense position; and a good part of the appeal of substance philosophy is its apparent agreement with common sense. On the other hand, if substantial change — i.e., creation —is admitted, this greatly weakens the idea that substance is a final term of analysis. For what is the difference between (1) saying that, while the first step in the formation of a child consists in the jump from no child to child, the subsequent steps consist merely in altering what has been produced, and (2) saying that, while the first step initiates (by producing its first member) an event sequence not previously represented in nature, the second step merely prolongs the sequence by producing its second member, and so on — what difference except that the second mode of speech is freer from ambiguity and misleading suggestions? If to arrive at the barest minimum of a child means ‘creation’, then getting from that practically mindless beginning to adult consciousness must a fortiori be a creative step, or innumerable such steps, many of them perhaps far greater than the first step. To have a conceptually clear theory, one should either give up creation or generalize it to cover all change, admitting that in many cases the aspect of novelty may be trivial enough. Thus we admit frankly the relativity of our ideas, instead of proclaiming pseudo-absolute distinctions as though they could be taken literally.
The Buddhists are in the stronger pluralistic position. For they can say that contradictory predicates simply do not apply to the same subject. Successive events are not mutually coexistent parts. The coexistence is at most retrospective, and requires a new subject each moment. If I change my beliefs —and in subtle ways they are ever-changing — this means that there are really successive believers, all belonging, to be sure, to the same personal sequence, and readily distinguished from any member of the sequence constituting a different human life history. Buddhism was the first, and for many centuries the only, great tradition which, in a consistent fashion, took space-time, rather than just space, as the principle of plurality. (Some philosophers of Islam had a partially similar doctrine.) A unit of concrete or determinate reality is not merely something here, in contrast to something there; it is something here-now, in contrast to something there-then; it is an event or experience, not a thing or person.
The objection that ‘without an enduring subject of change there can be no change’ is rather trifling, though often proposed as conclusive. (1) The Buddhist or radical pluralist can simply say that ‘change’ in a single ‘thing’ is shorthand for the succession of a number of contrasting events, where the sequence of events has some connectedness and continuity of character which lead us to verbalize it as the history of a single enduring ‘individual’. (2) Moreover, the radical pluralist may point out the undeniable fact that nothing is commoner than to speak of change where even the substantialist does not suppose an enduring substance as subject of the change. Thus the ‘weather changes’, ‘public opinion changes’, ‘the situation changes’, the sunset glow on the clouds changes, the rainbow changes, a forest fire or storm changes — and who thinks of these as substances? It is thus vain to try to disprove event pluralism from the uses of the word change. What ‘change’ commits us to is only the becoming of novelty; it remains to decide whether this means new adjectival states of one and the same entity, or new adjectival aspects of new entities. If an identical entity can have new properties (on the face of it a severe paradox), then certainly a new entity can do so! For ‘new property’ here simply means, different from any properties previously embodied, whether in the ‘thing’ or in the event-sequence. If yesterday ‘it’ rained all day, and today ‘it’ is brilliantly clear, certainly ‘it’ or the weather has changed, or there has been a ‘change in the weather’, substance or no substance. Thus the talk about ‘subjects of change’ is merely question-begging, as argument for substantialism. Aristotle and many another have been confused at this point.
An old Hindu argument against event-pluralism ran: how could ‘I’ remember ‘myself’ doing such and such in the past if the self remembering and the self remembered were not the same? One remembers ‘oneself’, not another self, as doing, feeling, thinking, perceiving, such and such. This is a subtler objection than the previous one. Still, it too begs the question. For no Buddhist denies that my sequence of past experiences is distinct from yours or any other human being’s; and why should not ‘myself’, as in the past, refer to the special continuity of character connecting the experiences in question with the remembering one? Moreover, to explain the possibility of memory through identity overshoots the mark, for if I now can remember the past ‘I’ because the two egos are identical, then why did not the past self foresee the present one? Identity is symmetrical and directionless, while memory is not. More than that, to ‘explain’ the relation of memory between later and earlier experience by connecting both to an identical subject merely adds two more relations to those requiring explanation; for now, besides the relation of event or experience E1 to event we have the relation of each to the ego. And we have really done nothing to solve the original problem, how E1 can relate itself to E. For it is in E1, in present experience, that the relation must obtain. It does not obtain in E, for E is (was) unaware of E1. But if both E and E1are related to the identical ego, and this is how the later is related to the earlier, why does the relation run but the one way? Mere identity cannot be the explanation of an asymmetry!
You may say that what we have here is not ‘mere’, but ‘genetic’, identity. Very true, but the correct logical analysis of this concept is precisely the question at issue. I have yet to read a substantialist, old or new, who gave an account of this relation which was, at the same time, both clear and clearly distinct from the neo-Buddhistic account which I am recommending.
Much recent, and no doubt much old, controversy on the substance question suffers from a lack of clarity as to what is denied by the event-pluralist. It is not, if the latter is sensible, the propriety of ordinary uses of personal pronouns and nouns. Of course from birth to death I am I and not any other human person. I have never been and never will be Paul Weiss, or my second cousin Hugh, or anyone else but Charles Hartshorne. Nor have I ever been a tree or a lion. This means (for one thing), that the series of experiences of which I have intimate memory contains no members of the series of which you have (or a lion has) intimate memory; and for another thing, that the series of states which are referred to as the history of a certain human organism or body, called mine, contains no members belonging also to the series referred to as the history of someone else’s body, or of a tree or a lion. Events have the relations which they have, whatever our language; and the event language need deny none of these. A lot of effort could be saved if people would stop supposing that, whereas substantialists sagely recognize the intimate relations of memory and persistence of character traits involved in certain event-sequences, event-pluralists, as such, must be more grudging in their recognition of these facts. Genetic ‘identity’, simply as fact, is not in dispute; only its analysis or logical structure.
Let us recall, too, that the real issue concerns the concrete or most determinate level of reality, in contrast to the more abstract or less determinate. Of course, in some sense I am always numerically the same person, but of course also in some sense I am different — even numerically different, since I am actual by virtue of a numerically different ‘state’ at each moment. It remains to learn which is the fully concrete reality, myself now, as partly new and different, or myself as always the same. Only Leibnizianism can clear-headedly affirm that the identical self is concrete. For if there is real novelty of qualities each moment, then it is the different self which includes the self that was there all along, not vice versa. The contrast between my present reality and my past reality includes this past reality, for ‘contrast of B to A’ includes A. But it is my present which contrasts itself with my past, not the other way; hence one cannot use the reverse argument, that the contrast between the old reality and the new includes the new. The old reality enjoyed or suffered no contrast with what came later; life is cumulative, and hence asymmetrical in its relatedness. Thus the self as numerically the same is an abstraction, the latest self as new is the total concrete reality containing the former.
The failure of substantialism to be really clear about this asymmetry is written large over its entire history. For example, Aristotle had quite a theory about the future as ‘potential’ in the present; but was he so explicit about the mode of reality of the past in the present? The present is actual, the future, potential. Is the past actual, potential, or a third modality? And medieval Aristotelianism, by making the divine perspective timeless, in principle attributed perfect symmetry to the temporal order. All events are co-present to deity. This means, in effect, that in the divine mind the order of the universe sinks to a lower level! For co-presence, like other mutual relationships, is, in so far, unordered. (See Chapter X.)
The greater concreteness of states, compared to things or persons, is expressed in the common mode of speech, ‘x is in a state of. . . .’ Substance theory should say, the state is in the man; but ordinary speech is apparently wiser! Of course the state is in ‘the man now’, but this is only saying, the state is in itself. For the state of the man, or the man now, what is the difference? Aside from his present state of experience and body, the man now is nothing actual or determinate. But though the state is in the man now, it is by no means in the man as always the same, and as already existent at birth. To assert this would be the Leibnizian paradox. Rather the identical man is ‘in’ one new state after another.
Inherence here is comparable to that of genus ‘in’ species and species ‘in’ individual. Just so, the mere individual, the pure numerical unit of substance, is an abstract determination in something still more determinate or concrete.
Wilfrid Sellars tells us that no set of statements about events can be equivalent to statements about enduring individuals. With certain qualifications, he is right. Taking a purely extensional point of view, according to which a class or group is
identified simply by its actual members, it would be the Leibnizian paradox to identify a man with the sequence of his states. (So much the worse, perhaps, for the hope that extensional logic will suffice for philosophy.) We must identify the event-sequence partly intensionally. Once a man is born, or perhaps exists as a developed foetus, the particular events which prolong his existence are in details arbitrary additions to the sequence. The unique gene structure in his cells is not such an addition, and the unconscious memories of his earliest moments will always form part of his individual nature. But innumerable details of his life will be further determinations, not part of the definiteness of his mere identity as that human being and no other. With this understanding, the event and event-sequence language seems able to state the whole truth.
It may be thought that we have merely substituted ‘event sequence’ for substance, without any further alterations, in which case the issue is purely verbal. But the ‘merely’ is unjustified. In the first place, we get rid of the suggestion that a single event is adjectival, an abstracted aspect of something more concrete. We also make explicit the profoundly important truth that genetic identity is a special strand of the causal order of the world, and rests on the same principle of inheritance from the past as causality in general does. The problems of substance and of causality are essentially the same problem. We also take into proper account the truth that a first event in a series might have been the last, and then there would have been no sequence, no enduring individual, except as an unfulfilled potentiality. Finally we do justice to the truth that the latest event sums up the entire reality of the sequence so far. (The full explication of this, however, requires consideration of divine events.)
It seems necessary to deal with Strawson’s defence of the substance concept in explicit contrast to that of event in his book Individuals.1 The only carefully elaborated argument against event pluralism I can find here seems less an argument than a question-begging manoeuvre. By choosing examples of event calculated to produce the result aimed at he shows that mere sequences of events would not suffice to constitute a world in which there could be inter-subjective or linguistic agreement concerning what is being talked about. Spatio-temporal orientation requires more than events. Yes, more than the sorts of events his discussion takes into account, such as ‘flashes’ or ‘bangs’. A whole chapter is devoted to sounds, and it is shown that a merely ‘auditory universe’ would not make discourse possible. But sounds in the phenomenal sense here in question are not events in the concrete sense we have been discussing; nor are they events making up the actuality of ‘individuals’, i.e., forming highly integrated and well demarcated sequences. ‘Births’, ‘deaths’, ‘battles’, are also not concrete unit-events. Here the choice of examples derives from the conclusion, not the other way, so far as the conclusion concerns the validity of event-pluralism. Apparently, the main object of the author is not to refute this latter doctrine but to show, and for all I know he does show, (1) that such event sequences (he would not call them that) as constitute the actuality of human ‘minds’ can be identified only through association with sequences constituting human bodies, and (2) that unobservable particulars, theoretical constructs, such as the particles of physics, must be identified by ‘reference to those grosser, observable bodies of which perhaps, like Locke, we think of them [the particles] as the minute, unobservable constituents’.2 Now the physicists are quite clear that we do in fact detect invisibly small objects only in terms of their relations to observable objects, that the know-ability of the micro-world presupposes that of the macro-world. But this, of course, is not an argument against event-pluralism, nor is it intended to be. But what argument worthy of the name is given? I find none. Moreover, if we turn to what the physicists say about this problem, we find the following:
(a) The particles are precisely not ‘identifiable’ if this means that the ‘same’ particle can be conceived as moving about, or internally altering from one state to another. Strawson protects himself a bit by saying that at least groups of particles must be identifiable. But if this means, ‘groups whose members may be supposed to remain objectively identical through change’, then this is incorrect. Physical laws as now conceived entail that such identity is lacking. The category of substance does not strictly apply to events on the ultra-microscopic level. Schroedinger is particularly clear and explicit on this point.3 The particle events sometimes arrange themselves so as to make the substance idea a convenient (but still not literally true) approximation, but sometimes so as to make it radically false. Thus, whether or not there are substances in nature, it seems a result of our best physical knowledge that there are events additional to any which constitute states of substances. Thus the universal category is event, not substance. If Strawson knows that this is the upshot of physical theorizing, might he not have just mentioned the fact?
(b) The physicists know as well as anyone that we have to identify enduring physical things of the macroscopic kind in order to deal with the unidentical particles. But they also (or at least some of them) see that the macroscopic identity is not, in any perceptual or pragmatic way, distinguishable from an identity of form in an unbroken or quasi-continuous event-sequence.3 Here, as rather often, I have the feeling that the scientists are in some ways more philosophical than my fellow professionals. Schroedinger seems to show more, rather than less, sensitivity to the philosophical history of this problem than Strawson. Obviously one cannot demonstrate the invalidity of the event-philosophy by considering it only in extremely weak formulations. The physicists have learned in a hard school that it is the strongest, most intelligent version of an opposing theory one must refute. They would scarcely treat a fellow physicist as it is now fashionable in philosophy to treat Whitehead, namely by the ‘method of convenient ignorance’, or the substitution of a doctrine which differs from his in precisely those ways which make refutation easy — and irrelevant.
What Strawson shows is that if events did not form some relatively unbroken sequences with recognizably identical spatial and qualitative structures persisting from one event to the next through more or less long periods of time, as in the case of mountains, trees, or people, we could not find our way about or communicate even with ourselves in language. This assertion no Buddhist, nor Whitehead, has so far as I know ever wished to deny, nor has had any doctrinal reason to deny. When Strawson says that things not processes fill space-time, I reply that on the contrary in my experience processes do fill space-time. Granted that Caesar is not the same as his history; this is indistinguishable, by all perceptual tests, from some such statement as the following: People knew who Caesar was long before they knew anything of his history after a certain early date; moreover, it makes sense to say that Caesar, the same man, could have had a largely different history. But this in turn is only to say that at each moment an individual event-sequence confronts alternative possibilities within the limits fixed by its ‘defining characteristic’ (in Whitehead’s careful phrase). To insist that the recognizable sameness of form belongs to a thing or substance, not to an event-sequence defined (like the substance) by the formal sameness (and its unbroken continuance or ‘inheritance’ through space-time) is to play with words. For physics, all that matters, as Schroedinger lucidly points out, is the recognizable sameness of pattern in a sequence of happenings sufficiently unbroken for our perceptual and practical requirements. Happenings are discerned perceptually; persistence of quality and pattern is also observed, as are changes of quality and pattern, and persistence of past events in subsequent ones; but persistence of something additional, that is, thinghood or substance, who has observed that? Not I, at least, in more than forty years of philosophizing.
It is sometimes said that if substance is what has various qualities, the unitary subject of many predicates, then in this sense an event is a substance. It surely is, but this does not imply that the schema, identical subject with changing qualities, is equally correct. For here is just the issue: How does time or change affect identity? Mere universals cannot by snuggling up together form a concrete reality, granted. But still the search for the concrete subject must go not only beyond the species to the individual case, in the ordinary meaning of individual thing or person, but a step further, to the temporally as well as spatially individual case. This is the state or event.
Strawson points out that event, in the concrete sense which event-pluralism has in mind, is not a concept that we have in ordinary discourse. Thus, for instance, we do not ordinarily think of a ‘happening’ as having a spatial shape, as a tree or a man does. But since the man-now has a shape which varies at least imperceptibly with each new now, even though a fraction of a second later, and the man-now is the same as the set of mental and bodily events which presently prolongs his sequence, events can have shape. Is it of any decisive ontological significance that ordinary discourse deals with concrete events in somewhat wholesale fashion, or in terms of partial, abstract aspects of event sequences, such as a battle, a flash of lightning, someone’s birth or death, or meeting a friend? Ordinary discourse furnishes notions from which the ontological event-concept can be constructed, and through which it can be explained. What more is necessary? That events happen ‘to’ something or someone, means in the event language simply that they usually fit into well-ordered unbroken sequences of the sort we term things or persons. However, the physicists now claim to have shown that in the micro-realm we cannot dispense with the idea of events which do not fit neatly into any such sequences. In Whitehead’s terms these are events with a low degree of ‘social order’. But the existence of conscious minds consists in high degrees of such order, nor could such minds exist (the reasons seem quite definite) save in organisms themselves highly ordered. These in turn impose certain requirements upon their environment of the sort Strawson is talking about (using the substance rather than the event language, but saying, if I am right, nothing additional).
That the concept of substance, taken seriously and literally, is an intellectual prison can be illustrated in numberless ways. Recently, for example, there was a discussion of individualism in which a sociologist, Leslie White, held that it was unscientific to talk about the individual ‘in last analysis’ making culture, rather than culture making individuals. He had strong arguments. However, his hearers, of course, had difficulty with his doctrine. For what is culture if not certain things which individuals do to themselves and other individuals? But all parties were assuming ‘identity’ through time as unproblematic. To add ‘culture’, as identical — though also changing — through time, to the individuals as also persistent changing identities is not sufficient. What is really ‘in last analysis’ there in social reality is neither culture nor individual people, but certain rather highly-ordered sequences of events characterized by the high level of symbolic functioning and creative freedom that is found on this planet only in those event-sequences which we call human beings. Each such event is intimately dependent upon and, except for a final and in many respects minute aspect of self-determination, causally determined by, events which have gone before, including especially events of a similar human kind, resulting in language habits, also in such event-sequences as buildings, tools, books, totems, flags, and so on and so on. ‘The individual’ is indeed a product, something made, and the concrete making is not by ‘the individual’ itself but by de facto members of individual sequences. Individuality is not the last, most concrete term of analysis. Here White is right. But neither is culture, though it may for some purposes be a more useful abstraction than ‘individual’.
Our whole Western tradition is warped and confused by the concept of individual taken as ultimate. The results are ethical and not just theoretical. Nor is the issue irrelevant to the Cold War, as I have argued elsewhere. The ignoble side of our ‘noble individualism’ is very much with us, and is aided and abetted by metaphysical confusions about the relations of events to enduring things.
The individual who now acts creatively is not simply I, or you, but I now, or you now. I yesterday, you yesterday, did not enact and can never enact our today’s actions; only today’s selves can do that. And since there is a new agent each tenth of a second or so, the actual momentary freedom cannot be very large. At a given moment, we are almost entirely a product, not a producer. And what productive power we have would be totally vacuous without inheritance from past actions, our own and those of countless others.
Similarly transcendent of individual identity is any rational motivation. Even to want to be appreciated and loved is in part to value others for their own sakes. Would one wish to be praised by a robot? Also any future self, call it mine or not mine, which can benefit from my present act will be numerically a new and distinct unity of concrete reality. Hence self-interest has no privileged metaphysical basis whatever. No wonder, perhaps, that the event-philosophy is unpopular. Do we not prefer to cherish our ego-illusion? Only Buddhism, by specializing in combating this illusion through a whole way of living, could popularize its overcoming, and even then hardly in a whole society.
Alas, the metaphysical baselessness of selfishness does not mean that metaphysical truth makes saints of those who discern it. Ethical issues are more concrete than this. Absolute selfishness is nonsense; and it is worth realizing that this is so. But each person must still incline to take himself and his intimates more seriously than he takes human beings in general. Think of men continuing to advertise cigarettes, because one can always demand even more conclusive proof than is yet available that cigarettes are killing multitudes of men and women. Are these manufacturers merely selfish? They have families and employees they justifiably want to be able to provide for, investors to whom they want to yield a return, they have pride in their business success, they sympathize with people’s wish to smoke. One can scarcely live without some such concrete motivations as these. We could choose many other examples, and sooner or later the writer or the reader would be hard hit. Such is man, a monstrously confused mixture of motives. How would it help if purely theoretical inquiries such as metaphysics would stop giving aid and comfort to the actual (but at worst relative) selfishness of people? Who knows? But it might help some.
This subject is too sad and tragic for prolonged scrutiny, so far as I am concerned. If there is no ‘original sin’ there is something not obviously less awful, and it was never more apparent than now.
An argument that Strawson might have used, but so far as I can find did not employ, is this: Whereas substances are rather definitely bounded units: this man, that man, this tree, that tree, etc., we do not so readily divide a process into definite event-units. ‘There are six persons in the room’ can be a definite fact; but how many human events occur in the room during the time in question? Is not any assignment of number arbitrary?
We here confront one of the subtlest problems which event pluralism has to face, that of the apparent continuity of process, its apparent lack of distinct units. Dewey, Bergson, Peirce, all three careful thinkers much interested in the analysis of experience as such (and to them Husserl and Heidegger could, so far as I know, be added), found no definite discreteness in the becoming of human experience. And no process directly exhibited in human experience seems to come in clearly discrete units. Here is a splendid example of a seemingly strong (empirical) case for a philosophical view, a case which is nevertheless inconclusive, and indeed can be opposed by perhaps a still stronger though non-empirical case. No better example of the difficulty of philosophical issues is needed.
Before we deal with the empirical objection, let us dispose of a poor argument for the lack of discrete events. Bergson says that mental states observably ‘interpenetrate’. This is the sort of thing one learns to expect from anti-intellectualists, even great ones like Bergson. They repudiate concepts in principle, but use them — sometimes very badly — in practice. The symmetry which ‘inter’ conveys, if it conveys anything, is exactly what is out of place in Bergson’s own theory of becoming as creation and preservation, one-way cumulative establishment of the details of reality. Thus the term either says nothing or what it says is wrong, on Bergson’s own premises. Past states may penetrate into present ones, but never present ones into past.
Another slightly more subtle, but still poor, argument is that even the one-way penetration spoken of is incompatible with discreteness. Discreteness must mean mutually external units. But this amounts to the prejudice of symmetry raised to a dogma. There is no law of logic opposing the view that an event A could be taken into an event B as its past, and similarly B into C, and so on, without there being a continuum of actual events between the time of A and that of C. If ‘continuity’ is used loosely to mean any kind of intrinsic connectedness among events, of course becoming is continuous in that sense; but there is no logic in pretending to deduce the strict mathematical meaning of continuity, or anything much like it, from the far looser concept. Yet one meets apparently intelligent philosophers who solemnly go through this deduction.
The real difficulties are two: the apparently given continuity of process, and the question how we are to relate a real discreteness of becoming with the mathematical concept of time as continuous, a concept too important and useful to be dismissed as a mere mistake or illusion.
Let us take the mathematical point first. The present view of geometry rules out once for all a simple deduction of physical or actual from mathematical continuity. Mathematics shows what is possible, never what is actual. (One of Kant’s antinomies fails to observe this distinction.) Indeed, it is a great deal too much to say that geometry proves even the possibility of an actuality continuous either in space or in time. For the continuity of points or instants implies nothing about even the possibility of a continuity of existing or actual things, unless one can make sense out of an existing or actual thing strictly correlative to a sheer point or instant. There is no mathematical need to assume that points are more than ideals of subdivision or than mere limiting concepts. Continuity is the system of all possible subdivisions; but it is a commonplace of modal theory that not all possibilities are compossible. Hence the sheer actualization of continuity is presumably impossible! Thus I hold that the mathematical argument really turns in favour of event pluralism. And when one considers the role which spatial discreteness has played in modern physics, one must be very suspicious indeed of the presumption that temporal discreteness is ruled out a priori by mathematics. With profound intellectual intuitiveness, physicists are increasingly searching for evidences of a basic discreteness of actuality both in space and in time.
The illicit inference from mathematics to physics or psychology is hard to banish. It keeps reasserting itself. People say, if there is a discrete series of events in a finite time, then each of these events, say E, occupies a lapse of time, and does this not imply sub-events within each single event? The answer is simply, ‘not physically real sub-events, only possibilities’.
It was, perhaps, Royce who first pointed out that since the human ‘specious present’ has a logically arbitrary time length, there may well be in the universe much longer and much shorter specious presents than the human. As in all cases of physical magnitude, size is comparative, and there is no purely mathematical meaning to spatial or temporal quantity. To say that a unit of human experience occupies something like 1/10 of a second is to say how many successive units of this kind would occur while the earth rotates once, or how many events of a specified kind on the atomic level could occur during a single human experience, and so on and so on. It is not to say anything about real parts (sub-events) of the human experience itself.
Perhaps we have disposed of the confusion between mathematics and physics (or psychology). There remains the argument from givenness. If there are discrete events, why are they not experienced? If there are atoms and molecules in all matter, why are they not perceived? Must the temporal aspect of reality be more distinctly experienced than the spatial? The hard fact, very hard indeed for man to admit, seems to be that direct conscious human perception reveals only certain of the gross outlines, vague in every spatial and temporal way as to exact details, of the world, including particularly that often forgotten part of the world, a man’s own nervous system. It is not that the objects of perception are ‘unreal’. This locution is a ‘red herring’. The point is rather that the objects are defined by perception only up to a point, beyond which perception is neutral, or indefinite. Perception is not wrong, but it is in large part non-committal. Yet, since the urge to interpret is overwhelming, the man often commits himself where ‘his senses’ do not. In principle this is, as Descartes said, the source of all perceptual error and illusion, even in dreams.
Is process given as continuous, or is it merely not given as discrete? There is all the difference, but the answer is often rendered with gay heedlessness. The answer which seems to meet all the essentials of the situation is that experience is merely vague as to any discreteness which may be there. This vagueness is misread as a revelation of actual continuity. Experience is at most quasi-continuous, or pseudo-continuous. To say more implies a fundamental error in theory of perception, of what it could possibly accomplish.
That we do not distinctly or consciously perceive atoms is not accidental. The utterly unmanageable complexity, calling for a radically superhuman intelligence to handle, which would thus be forced uselessly, and far worse than uselessly, upon our notice furnishes an altogether adequate evolutionary reason. Individual atoms are not biologically significant, hence not perceived. But likewise individual events, even on the human level, are also insignificant for ordinary purposes, hence they too are not clearly perceived. A unit event of human experience cannot occupy much more, rather less, than 1/10 of a second. But the important stages of thought or purpose which we normally need to distinguish and refer to as definite items succeed each other at a much slower rate.
Hence we do not normally think of our lives as consisting each day of tens of thousands of successive experiences, though in fact this is what they do consist of. But sheer continuity of experiencing would mean that ‘tens of millions of daily experiences’ would also make sense, and so would numbers astronomically vast. Obviously there is something wrong with the notion that continuity, in any strict sense, is given. Yet definite discreteness is also not given. The third possibility, which seems to fit the hard facts, is that a real discreteness is vaguely or approximately given. The spatial case is analogous. True enough, atoms are not even approximately given. But then the direct contact of experience with the physical world is in the nervous system, and here it is a question of cells, not just of atoms or molecules. Moreover, the number of least perceptible parts in the visual field is of a similar order of magnitude to that of the retinal cells. Thus, approximately and vaguely, cells are given, just as in retrospection the unit events of our own experiencings are approximately and vaguely given. We can almost introspect a single experience, most easily in special cases, such as in listening to music, or in ‘flicker’ experiments.
If the foregoing resolution of the difficulty concerning given-ness is valid, event-pluralism emerges with some very strong claims to our confidence. It is the most consistent and clear of all the forms of pluralism. For 1i) it has a common logic for all becoming, whereas commonsense pluralism, taken as ultimate, has to make an absolute distinction between substantial and adjectival change, though everything conspires to indicate the relativity of the distinction. Event-pluralism takes ‘change’ to mean becoming so far as exhibiting novelty in some respect. If an event is of the kind which can initiate a well-marked, quasi-continuous, and well-integrated sequence (perhaps with lively memory connections, certainly with clear-cut character inheritance from event to event), then the becoming of this event is ‘substantial change’. Its successors in the sequence will be merely ‘adjectival’, if you want to label things so. None the less, in both cases, as in all becoming, there is the creation of a new unit of definite reality, not the insertion of new predicates in an old unit.
(2) Event-pluralism treats spatial and temporal multiplicity according to a common formula: real plurality in space or in time is taken to mean real countable units. This was a basic intuition in Leibniz’s system, that if there are many things there are single things; groups must have members, collectives imply singulars. But — here Leibniz was careless or prejudiced — there are successive things as well as things coexisting (for Leibniz, only represented as) in space. It is important to realize here that in speaking of ‘things’ we are not talking about such abstract entities as ‘aspects’ or ‘thoughts’. There are many aspects of things, and many thoughts in people’s minds; this, however, need not imply strictly singular aspects or thoughts. For an abstraction is relative to an abstractive perspective, and is not wholly objective. Yet, if one is realistic at all, one must admit that, however we look at the world, it does contain many cells, many people, and that there must be definitely single cells and single people. Yet succession is as objective as spatial coexistence; it should then likewise involve a definite plurality, not relative to an arbitrary point of view. Only event-pluralism carries out the implications of this.
(3) Event-pluralism has a clear-cut version of the law of non-contradiction. It can simply say that no subject can have contradictory predicates — instead of having to treat a difference of spatial aspect in one way and of temporal aspect in another. And, after all, how can one believer believe contradictory assertions, even at different times? For to be one believer implies a unity of awareness which precisely ought to rule out clear and manifest contradictions. The distinction of times removes the difficulty only because it really means two concrete or definite unities of consciousness and not just one. But ‘subject’, in the strictest psychological sense, means one such unity.
(4) The charge that the temporal distinctness of events is arbitrary, or relative to the point of view, can be turned against substances fully as well as against events. When does a human individual life begin, with the fertilized egg, with the four-months or five-months-old foetus, with birth? When does it end, with absolute death, or with a coma from which consciousness will never be recovered? And if a human being is a conscious individual, does this individual, as such, actually exist in deep sleep? It is impossible, I submit, to give a strictly objective unique meaning to individual genetic identity. But a unit event is not similarly relative to arbitrary criteria. For a sufficiently penetrating perception, say the divine, it would simply be given in its discreteness. By contrast, not even God could make more than an arbitrary decision as to when ‘John Jones’ begins, or when he ceases to be. For there is no absolute meaning to the question. And during the division of one-celled animals, when does the one animal become two, and is there nothing in between? Or, with greatly advanced surgery and interchange of organs, when would one person become transformed into another? Such questions cannot have unique objective answers. With electrons and other particles, the machinery of substance thinking apparently breaks down altogether. The event language remains. It is the ultimate language, the final measure of things.
(5) An important advantage of event-pluralism is that it enables us to detect a subtle fallacy in arguments for ‘organic wholes’, taken as wholes which are implied by their parts, with the result — since of course parts are implied by their wholes —that every part must imply every other symmetrically, and a part and its whole must symmetrically imply each other. This is one source of Spinoza’s or ‘absolute idealism’s’ doctrine of universal necessity or interdependence. It exploits our intuition that in a living body the various organs could not be what they are, nor do what they do, without the other organs. What is overlooked is that it takes time for influence to pass from one organ to another, so that if, instead of heart, lungs, or brain, one takes the heart just now, the lungs or brain just now, it is no longer correct to speak of ‘interdependence’. The one organ now depends not upon the other organs now but upon the other organs as they just have been. Thus in terms of events or states one has dependence upon past, but independence of contemporary or subsequent, entities or parts. So we cut the nerve of a pernicious argument. But we do it, not in terms of substance but of ‘actual entity’, a reality which becomes rather than changes.
(6) Above all, and here I am heartily in agreement with Buddhists and Whitehead, but for reasons that in my life go back of any knowledge of either, event-pluralism cuts the nerve of even the subtlest form of argument for a self-interest theory of motivation. All interest in the future, so I have believed since before I was a philosophy major, is in a basic generalized sense altruistic, the concern of an actual reality for other and potential realities whose coming to be it is in a position to influence. It is a secondary question in what event-sequence these entities will fall. Buddhism discovered this long ago, Whitehead (presumably independently) rediscovered it, and some others in the West (none professional philosophers, so far as I know) have made the same point. We can love the other as ourselves because even the self as future is also another. The barrier to obeying the Great Commandment is then not metaphysical or absolute, but psychological and relative. On this ground alone I would not give up the event doctrine without the most rigorous proofs of its erroneousness.
The ethical argument for event-pluralism has, to be sure, been matched by ethical arguments against it. If, it is said, a person is a sequence of actualities, responsibility is lost. Why keep a promise if it was made by another actuality? Why does the incoming officer of an organization pay debts incurred by previous officers? Because they both represent the same ongoing society. Exactly, and each of my successive selves represents me as such a society. Whitehead uses the very word for an enduring individual. Each such self inherits purposes from its predecessors, and the more it can accept and execute these purposes, the richer and more harmonious will be its own content. But more than that. In my view a rational self, no matter how momentary, cannot be satisfied with less than a rational aim, and no aim short of some universal long-run good is fully rational. If it serves the general good that promises be kept (and of course, in general, it does), then any momentary self will make good on any promise it is in a position appropriately to make good on, unless there is a reason related to the general good why this rule should be broken. And this is the situation a rational person is in with or without event-pluralism. It is obvious that if rationality implies an interest in future consequences, and if the present self cannot benefit from any future good (since it is already all it ever can be), then a rational momentary self must in a generalized sense be unselfish. It must aim at a future good, although its own good is already complete. Aiming at this good which is not to be its own is indeed part of its own present good, but this is its only necessary share in the matter. If the present self must transcend its own good, why should it tie itself down to consideration only of future good for members of its own personal sequence? It is vastly more interesting to have less restricted objectives, and the inevitability of the cessation of one’s own sequence in death implies that the quest for a rational aim in the present but for the future will look beyond the fortunes of any mortal animals (see Chapter
XVI).
It is also urged that the feeling of remorse or repentance does not make sense, on the event analysis. Ah, but it does. First, a person in part is his past, since process is cumulative. If one could totally dismiss and disown one’s past experiences, present experience would be limited to bodily sensations for its content. Moreover, the additions which even a year of adult life makes to the apperceptive mass of background memories are, after all, minor. Still further, personality traits persist with much stubbornness. So, if a man says, not I but that past self did the deed, hence I need feel no guilt, he forgets that the relevant question is whether his present self is qualitatively better than the past self, as well as distinguishable from it. Is he even now free from the habits or dispositions which once led to his misdeed? If not, he had better repent before he commits another bad act. True, there is the question of making restitution. Here again, if the rule that restitution will be made by John Jones for what past selves in the John Jones society have done is favorable to the general good (and it is), the event-pluralism has as much reason to follow this rule as anyone can have. One may make restitution for what a parent has done, a friend, a child. Negroes say, with some cogency, that white society should make restitution to them for past mistreatment by white society.
The mere idea of the identity of various substances is just not the key to matters of value. Suffering is suffering, whether one says an identical entity or not an identical entity endures it, and happiness is happiness. He who does not in principle respond negatively to suffering and positively to happiness, no matter in what entity it is, is deficient in rational sympathy. And that same sympathy will incline one to keep promises, make restitutions, and do whatever else will increase happiness and diminish frustration and agony. To act on suitable occasions from enlightened self-interest, interest in the future of one’s own personal sequence, is merely one corollary from this. It has no absolute primacy or centrality. One’s future happiness is important because it is happiness, and of the human kind, and subject to influence by present actions. So, for the same reason, is someone else’s happiness important. It is the quality, degree, and level of the happiness that matters, not the thread of identity that does or does not connect it with a particular rational self.
There is a further point. If a person has really effectively repented, the old idea of forgiveness of sins becomes relevant. Remorse for adequately and effectively repented misdeeds is itself a misdeed, against oneself and deity. It is a new sin. One should be ‘born anew’, if possible, so that past guilt is simply not present guilt at all. One might very well go right on making restitution, for that is a helpful act which no one else may be in as good a position to perform. But remorse is not restitution, and remorse except as element in repentance, or in restoring broken social relations, is bad, as Spinoza said it was. I do not believe that punishment is ever rightfully an end in itself, even if it is self-punishment.
The ethical arguments against event-pluralism seem to me to be superficial, while the Buddhistic-Whiteheadian insight into the connection between self-interest theories of motivation and the metaphysics of not further analysable entities called substances or selves, I hold, goes very deep indeed into the ethical problem. To love oneself as identical with oneself and the other as not identical with oneself is not, whatever else it may be, to love the neighbor as oneself. Rather it is to put a metaphysical difference between the two loves. At this point (here I agree with Whiteman of S. Africa) Buddhism and a Christianity or Judaism that understands itself are at one. The difference between self-love and love of others is not metaphysical, nor anything absolute, but a relative matter.
It is hard for me to argue this patiently since it is not a topic about which I have had any uncertainty since in 1918 I came to see that sympathy cannot be derived from self-interest, but is a direct interest of present life in other life, sometimes in the same personal series, sometimes not (this is secondary). The chief thing is whether or not one is able to form a vivid idea of the other life, and whether one can harmonize this idea with other factors in present experience. For here is the central confusion in the self-interest argument: true enough, my action is bound to express my feeling, my positive action, positive feeling, negative action, negative feeling; so, it is inferred, the unselfish enjoy their unselfishness, and hence in a subtle or wise way are selfish after all. This is utter confusion. Present action expresses present feeling, no one denies that. But future feeling, my own or anyone else’s, moves me now only if it does move me — only if I happen to imagine, and care about it. And imagining is imagining, no matter whose future feelings are imagined. Here the supposed metaphysical difference between identity and non-identity shows itself to be irrelevant. My tomorrow’s suffering or pleasure that I do not now think of has no more to do with my present action than anyone else’s tomorrow’s feelings. As soon as I saw this, and some related considerations, as a private in the US Army Medical Corps, I was through with even the subtlest forms of self-interest doctrine. The present self has its present interests, but what it is interested in is not these interests, but their objects, and so far as the interests are ‘in’ future results they cannot be in the pleasure now realized by having the interests. For that pleasure is not a possible future result.
The following are to be avoided: the confusion between the pleasure of anticipating pleasure and the pleasure anticipated; the obviously false dogma that one takes pleasure only in anticipating one’s own pleasure; the non sequitur that since I am myself I must care about myself, in a sense in which, since I am not you, I cannot care about you (as though X being interested in X could really be a relation of sheer identity); finally, the arbitrary exaggeration of ordinary relative self-centredness into a metaphysical absolute. Beyond these mistakes, I see nothing in the notion, which has pervaded western philosophy from Plato to Aquinas, and from which Kant is not wholly free (Hume is in some ways superior here) that, as Hobbes put it, ‘of every voluntary act the object is some good to the man himself’, from which it was inferred that a rational ethics depends upon the possibility of showing that the good man is bound to be benefited in the long run by his own good acts. To mention only one objection, in the long run the man will be dead. This, too, seemed to me in 1918 obviously relevant. And I did not then and do not now accept the idea of heaven and hell as making it possible to rescue the self-interest argument from its obvious difficulty in view of mortality. This vicious misuse of speculation I cannot agree to condone. Mortality is to be faced by human reason, not explained away. And an obvious implication of mortality is that a rational aim must transcend one’s own fortunes altogether, including them only incidentally as constituting one temporary portion of the ‘good in the long run’, which is the only truly rational aim. Kant’s problem of the rational aim or summum bonum is a valid problem, but, alas, his solution makes most of the possible mistakes (see Chapter XIV). Only a philosophy of process in the form of an event-pluralism can entirely avoid these mistakes.
There are other ethical advantages of the doctrine. The twin statements that a person is numerically new in actuality each moment, a new concrete self, and that causality is strict or particular necessity, read backwards, but generic necessity (Chapter VI, Rule II) read forwards enable us to reconcile the elements of sense in the contentions: (a) acts must causally flow from (antecedent) character if a man is to be responsible for them, and (b) it must have been causally possible for the man in that situation with that past to have made a different decision.
(a) Each momentary actuality necessarily inherits causally from its past, and this inheritance necessitates that a certain class of possible successors to that past should not remain empty. That what happens falls within this class is not ‘chance’ at all. Moreover, there will be probability differences between various sub-classes of the possibilities then and there obtaining. A man’s settled character is expressed in these probabilities, as well as in the boundaries of decisions of which, under such and such circumstances, he is capable. Each new act of the man alters the character and shifts the probabilities in question, perhaps for good, perhaps for ill, perhaps neutrally to good and ill. So of course the man has responsibility for his actions. Those who think that probability is not enough here are, as it were, living in the stone age. Probability really is the guide of life, as a sagacious English bishop said it was. And of course very high probabilities have virtually all the practical meaning of certainties.
(b) Each new concrete self faces the task, not merely of prolonging a chain of causal necessities (concretely there are no such chains in the forward reading), or of continuing to express an antecedent character which, with circumstances, uniquely determines concrete actions (there are no such characters), but of freely creating a slightly new character, and thus establishing a new set of causal possibilities and probabilities. We can excuse Kant for not thinking in probability terms, but today when every scientist does so it is harder to excuse what one continually encounters in philosophical discussions of freedom and determinism. The rage for the absolute, for sheer (rather than approximate or stochastic) order, confuses everything in this topic. But besides the longing for absolute causality, the similar desire for absolute genetic identity also causes trouble. ‘Self-determination’ thus is taken to mean that John Jones, along with circumstances, determines John Jones, from birth to death. But it is John Jones now that acts now, not John Jones as in infancy. And if John Jones now is to be self-determined, then the John Joneses of the past must not, with circumstances, entirely determine what John Jones now is or does. One’s past self is subtly another, and even it must not be complete master of the new self. To take it to be that leads, as William James so well pointed out, to making the squalling infant (and circumstances) absolute master of the grown man, and then by the same absolute causal principle, one’s ancestors and the world at large master of oneself at all times.
If character, as distinctive matrix of probabilities, is to have much meaning, it is of course requisite that the range of possibilities at each moment should be narrow. And we have every reason to suppose that it is so. But the great point is that many times a second we are creating something additional, however slight, in the mass of memories and bodily habits which makes up character, and that always this addition is incompletely specified in advance by the prior causal conditions. Just now one is almost, but not entirely, the slave of causal necessities; yet by persistently leaning towards the better side of the causally open actions, we can — who knows how far — improve our character. We can do this. But we can also not do it. The idea that we always have at least a small range of possibilities can help us to take seriously the difference between using our little freedom well and using it ill.
It is quite true that determinism does not justify folding our hands and saying ‘there is no use trying’, since if we keep on trying the determinist can always hold that this, too, was determined. But who fails to see that this ex post facto use of determinism is no practical use whatever? In principle, determinism in the absolute sense, like so many absolutes, is useless. It does no harm only if it does nothing. Relative determinism, thinking in terms of futuristic outlines of possibility and probability, with boundaries of necessity, is indeed useful. More, it is what we all, determinists or not, unconsciously or not, live by. Nothing else is or could be lived by. The rest, as Peirce said, is make-believe, mere talk.
The arguments of this chapter are not intended to show that the ‘substance’ or enduring individual concept is simply wrong. In the normal everyday uses it is a perfectly acceptable, indeed scarcely dispensable, way of putting what the event-language analyses into event-sequences or Whiteheadian ‘societies’.
Only in science, philosophy, and theology do we need to look beyond this normal simplification of a fantastically complex reality. But in these subjects we do need to look beyond it, and, until this is more generally admitted, much avoidable confusion will continue to result from trying to force ordinary linguistic insight to yield what only extraordinary insight can provide. Convenient simplifications do not really simplify when pressed beyond their proper applications.
Notes
1. P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1959), p. 34.
2. Op. Cit., p. 34.
3 Ernest Schroedinger, Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 17-21.
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This essay appears in Hartshorne’s book, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, pp. 173-204.
HyC