Charles Hartshorne
What has Whitehead contributed to the subjects of metaphysics and cosmology? By “metaphysics” I mean the study of the necessary, eternal, completely universal aspects of reality; by “cosmology,” the attempt, combining metaphysics and scientific knowledge, to discern the large, comparatively universal features of nature as now constituted. Cosmology is science running more risks than usual, or indulging in greater vagueness, in order to achieve a more complete and rounded picture; but the risks and the vagueness may be less if some clarity has been achieved as to what makes metaphysical sense, as opposed to the confusion that results when we attempt to escape the inescapable or necessary—the metaphysical—traits of being and process.
Whitehead was a metaphysician as well as a cosmologist, and in my opinion supremely great in both roles. Indeed. I see no one since Leibniz to compare with him, and no one at all to compare with him in the adequacy of his conclusions. This of course does not mean that I believe there are no defects in his thinking or writing. (Once, when asked why he did not write more clearly, he replied, “Because I do not think more clearly.”) Accurate definition of the merits of a philosophy seems indeed logically impossible without indication of how they are limited or bounded by errors—such as human beings can scarcely avoid. Nevertheless, for good or evil, this essay is written almost solely in praise, rather than criticism, of Whitehead. On this occasion, I am trying to outline some reasons that can be given for the above-suggested high estimate of his importance:
1. Whitehead is a rationalist who formulates and even practices a rational method! Rationalism is the search for views that are of necessity true because, owing to their absolute generality, they have no rational alternative. But the only way to be sure of this is, in every case, to explore the possibility of formulating an alternative. The “rationalists” of the past failed to do so. Leibniz assumes as rationally necessary the view that what a true elementary proposition describes must be an enduring individual, such as a human self; but there is the obvious alternative that what is described is an event, such as a human experience. Leibniz also assumes that the basic properties of a subject are nonrelative ones, those not containing other subjects as constituents, as A’s relation-to-B contains B; but there is obviously the alternative that every subject must have relative properties, and so possess other subjects as constituents. Again, Descartes assumes that mind is to be defined as inextended, leaving the necessity for a not-mind to explain extension; but, as Leibniz partly perceived and James, Peirce, and Whitehead have shown, it is conceivable that the web of relations between minds, or rather experiences, is extension. Again, the older rationalists assume that God must be conceived as at once supremely actual and supremely nonrelative, “absolute,” or independent of becoming; whereas it is conceivable that the supreme actuality is precisely the supreme example of becoming and relativity.
On all these issues and many others, Whitehead is much more aware than his predecessors of the alternatives that may (with greater or less coherence and consistency) be held. If he asserts that events and experiences are the ultimate subjects of predication, it is not because it has never occurred to him to regard “things” and “persons” in this light; but because he believes he sees that two thousand years of persistent effort to achieve rational coherence by this method have failed and were bound to fail. These are just some of the ways in which Whitehead is more of a rationalist than his predecessors.
2. In spite, or because, of his genuine rationalism, Whitehead is also an empiricist who actually describes experience—and not some pseudo-rationalist myth about experience. Locke and Hume and Mill, for example, treat experience as though it were something assembled primarily (but not too successfully) for the mere purpose of cognitive mirroring of the world around the human body, rather than an enjoying, striving, sympathetic (yet partly antipathetic), responsive (yet partly self-creative) activity, whose primary intuitive data are its own past states, its intentions for the future, and the processes within its “body.” Again, earlier empiricists treat memory and anticipation as secondary, as at most mere ways in which we know that existence is successive, instead of as constitutive features of our only intuited examples of that very successiveness itself. They speak also of experience as a duality of subject and object, of experiencing and what is experienced, but never quite identify the two terms of this duality, since their “ideas” or “impressions” or “mental states” are equivocal in this regard. Or again, Hume contrasts self-interest and sympathy, but does not observe—what is certainly the case—that self-interest is a sort of sympathy whose objects are past and future experiences of the same human person. Nor did the “empiricists” (or Kant either) realize that, as Croce says, all direct intuition is expression of feeling or that the basic principles of immediate awareness are aesthetic. Whitehead matches and surpasses the introspective subtlety of Bergson, Croce, and William James, and embodies the living process of experience in his philosophical description.
3. As a result of this descriptive accuracy, Whitehead is enabled to be perhaps the first realist who escapes from the egocentric predicament and shows how he does it. R. B. Perry did not quite explain his own escape from the dilemma: either a thing is unknown to me or known to me; in the latter case, its being-known-to-me is apparently one of its properties, and hence, if I wish to know what the thing would be were it not known to me, I find myself trying to know without knowing.
Whitehead solves the problem by pointing out that real relatedness is given only as prehension—feeling or awareness of—and that the prehended does not prehend its prehender and hence is not really related to it. Thus in memory we prehend and are really related to past experience; but this does not relate the past experience to the present memory, for we certainly do not remember the past as having anticipated or prehended or in any way referred to this present memory of itself. Nor does present experience refer to any particular future memory of itself. Memory is thus the givenness of a relatedness that runs one way only, that has no actual converse. Accordingly, whereas Perry and C. I. Lewis say that the relation of being known by a certain subject is at any rate not important to a particular concrete object, Whitehead can say that it is (in a large class of cases, at least) simply nothing to the object. If this is realism, Whitehead is an absolute realist.
4. In spite, or even because, of this radical realism, Whitehead’s theory is a thoroughgoing “idealism,” if this means the doctrine that subjectivity is the principle of all being. Prehension being the actuality of relatedness, it is on the one hand established that to know a thing is to find, not to create, it—for we prehend actualities that do not prehend us—but on the other hand, since the actuality we know must have some relatedness to its world, it must prehend that world. Every singular actuality (for Whitehead, as for Leibniz, perceived extended things are collectives) must be related to—in other words prehend—a world of antecedent actualities. In this regard, the actuality is a subject whose object is a world of antecedent subjects. But also, every actuality adds itself to the evergrowing totality of the real, which through it acquires a new member. In this regard, the actuality is a subject about to become object for subsequent subjects. An experience expects to become past for some new present, and this feeling of being about to become past (i.e., prehended by subjects not in the world of the initial subject) is constitutive of all experience. Every actual occasion thus is, and feels itself to be, a potential for objectification in future occasions. But this potentiality, like all potentiality, need not be actualized in just this way, or in just that way, by this subject rather than by that, so long as it is actualized somehow.
Or we may put Whitehead’s discovery here as follows: That an object is a potential for objectification “blurs” the distinction between universal and particular.1 For potentiality is universality. Any entity, O, involves the possibility, “some subject or other, any subject, prehending O”; but any-subject-prehending-O is a universal, of which this-subject-prehending-O is a particular instance. Now, although no universal can imply how it is to be particularized in a given instance (for then it would be particular and not universal), nevertheless, as Aristotle maintained, the universal can have being only as it is concretized somehow. Accordingly, that the object must be object for some subject rather than none (though it need not be so for this subject rather than that) illustrates the Aristotelian principle. (There can be fictitious or unembodied universals, but they are complex and derivative from embodied universals. “Prehension of O” is not complex in the relevant fashion—just as “about to become past” adds nothing to “present.”) I can indeed know what the thing known would be though I myself did not know or feel it; but I cannot possibly know what it would be were it now unknown and unfelt; any more than I can know what an existent Platonic form would be were there nothing concrete to embody it. All being is prehended as indifferent to the particular prehension, but nothing is or could be prehended as indifferent to being prehended at all, for this would mean indifferent to being contained in any world at all, term of any real relatedness, past for any present. It is true also that there must be a divine present to endow an actuality with adequate objectivity, whereby with all its being it is immortally past—but this divine subjectivity (as here required) is not any particular subject.
This point will become clearer when the next three paragraphs have been read.
5. Whitehead is, in the Western world at least, the first great philosophical theist who, as a philosopher, really believes in the God of religion. (This statement may seem startling; it assumes that Socinus and Tertullian were not great philosophers; perhaps it is unjust to Fechner and the later Schelling.) The God of religion is a supreme person capable of relations to other persons, or at any rate—for the word “person” is not the point—one who knows, loves, and wills with regard to others who know, love, and will. A person is given not as a particular actuality, but as a principle of sequence of actualities. The principle is the personality or character of the individual, the actualities are the states, experiences, or acts expressing that character.
No great philosopher before Whitehead put this manifest fact of experience in clear technical terms. Personality is the “defining characteristic” of a “society of occasions” in linear temporal (“personal”) order, these occasions being the successive experiences actualizing the individual in question. The defining characteristic is less concrete or particular than its expressions; it has a certain abstractness or neutrality with respect to alternative possible experiences and acts. Philip drunk or Philip sober is still Philip, but obviously not the same determinate or particular actuality. The extreme contrast to the universal or general is not the individual but the particular. The individual is intermediate, semiabstract, partially unparticular or indeterminate. If it were otherwise, a man’s character at birth plus his environment would entail all his future actions, and he would be in the iron grip of determinations effected before he could do anything about them. Also, we would not know who John Jones was unless we could predict all his future experiences. The very function of proper names would be nullified. The traditional view of God as identical in his actuality with his character or “essence” entirely deprives him of freedom, personality, or individuality, and makes him either a meaningless universal embodied in nothing concrete, or a meaningless particular expressing no character, purpose, or individuality.
Whitehead, by distinguishing between the primordial essence or personality, and the consequent state or actuality (he probably should not have called it “nature”) of deity is almost the first to deal seriously with the individuality of God. The primordial essence is absolute, independent, abstract, and (like everything abstract) neutral with respect to particular determinations. The essence is “infinite” and nonactual. All personal character, indeed, is abstract, neutral, free from wholly determinate limits, and is a principle or potency of actualization, rather than any actual entity; but divine personality is unique and transcendent in quality by being absolutely (instead of only relatively) abstract, infinitely (instead of only finitely) free or indeterminate, with respect to particularization.
But, whereas earlier metaphysicians generally stopped here, leaving deity a mere unlimited essence, totally devoid of definite actuality, a power totally divorced from expression or achievement, Whitehead adds the other side of the divine portrait. The “consequent” actuality of deity is the sequence of determinate, contingent experiences expressing both the essence of deity and the de facto content of the world God experiences at a given moment. Whereas the divine essence is “absolute,” impassive, the consequent actuality is “relative” and passive, with a supreme sensitivity or responsiveness that is, without equivocation, love itself in unadulterated purity.
This is the first clearheadedly honest intellectualization (for Schelling’s and Fechner’s analyses are less clear) of what religion has always intuitively meant by “God.”
6. Whitehead, more than any other, has really “answered Hume.” By his account of memory and physical purpose, generalized in his “reformed subjectivism,” by his explanation of order in terms of aesthetic drives, focused in God, Whitehead gives causality a uniquely adequate grounding. He furnishes the “impressions” of causal connectedness that Hume calls for, and at the same time, by showing the subtlety of these impressions and the complexity of the problem of causality and induction, which is only solved (as Hume indeed suspected—see his Dialogues) when all main factors, including God, are reckoned with, Whitehead justifies Hume’s refusal to be satisfied with solutions then available.
7. Whitehead is the first to embody modern relational logic in a fairly complete metaphysical system. (Peirce perhaps came nearest to anticipating this achievement.) Logic has discovered itself to be the study of relational structures as involved in meanings. Metaphysics ought to be the study of relational structures as embodied in reality as such, or taken generically. Instead of focusing on the meager, arbitrarily limited question of how particular actualities are related to universal properties, how an S is P. we need to focus on the general case of how actualities, as such, are related to actualities of the past, and to potentialities for future actualization; or how a subject is self-referent to other subjects, in both their particular and their universal aspects. This is what the theory of prehensions effects. By the ontological principle (perhaps sometimes forgotten in Whitehead’s exposition), relationship to other actualities includes all relationships and is the general case. This is what the Aristotelian doctrine of the universal-only-in-the-particular comes to, when we face the necessity that things must have relative properties.
The Philosophy of Organism here retains the old truth that properties must actually qualify something actual, some subject, but adds the new truth that we must recognize relational properties—those by which some portion of the system of particular things enters into the nature of each thing, and thus there is “immanence” of one thing in another. Yet Whitehead avoids the modern error of Absolute Idealism which would impose no limitations upon this immanence and make all things constituents of each thing. At this point, Whitehead follows the sound lead of G. E. Moore and William James in defending the thesis of “external” relatedness,2 but without forgetting—as Moore at least did forget—that every real relation must be “somewhere,” in some actuality, internal to some term, though by no necessity to all terms. Thus, undeterred either by the specious simplicity of the ancient subject-predicate logic, or by the current logical fiction that “every relation has a converse,” Whitehead seeks and finds the ways in which a thing may be self-referent to another thing, without the second thing having any reference to the first, so that aRb is an actual relatedness, while bRa is not. In this way, he arrives at the objective analogue of the relational structure of meanings, in a theory of partly self-creative, partly caused or derivative atomic creatures, self-referent to the world they are about to enrich.
This is the first theory of time worthy of the name. For it is the first that ascribes to time an intelligible logical structure, while allowing for a principle of flux or passage that transcends all fixed or already determinate structures, since it is an inexhaustible source of new relationships, extrinsic to reality as already actual.
8. Whitehead is among the first to see the philosophical generality inherent in the principle of evolution, the principle that the characters of things, as expressed in their ways of acting, are products of change, and to see that this enables us to dispense with the mythical notion of laws as eternally fixed, yet quantitatively definite, aspects of behavior. It is enough for us if nature changes sufficiently slowly in her more basic ways—those whose duration defines a “cosmic epoch”—for all our needs of prediction and mental reconstruction of the past. Whitehead also avoids the arbitrariness of Peirce’s view that the world gets more and more orderly. One order may change to another, but “more” or “less” orderly is an unwarranted, if not absurd, addition.
9. Most philosophers seem to regard the discovery of cells in biology as merely a tale told to them when they were young. For they speak of the body as though it were essentially one entity, one mass of stuff, or machine, or “material” aspect of one human individual. In fact, the body is a vast “society of cells,” none of which is a human being, and any of which could (with minor modifications) conceivably exist and live in a suitable medium outside of any human organism.
Whitehead seems to be among the first to see that all this renders imperative a generalization of the idea of “environment,” if that means, “the set of individuals with which a given individual interacts.” The body is nothing but the most necessary, inseparable, intimate portion of our social environment, or field-of-relationships with other living beings, each living its own life. Whitehead draws the consequence that the primary nonhuman (and nondivine) datum of human experience must be cellular activity, objectified without distinctness as to individual cells, and instinctively taken as an index of conditions outside the bodily system, an index whose general reliability is due to evolutionary adaptation.
The view appears to fit every known fact. And at one stroke it explains both how we know subhuman reality, and how we are causally influenced by such reality. For the subject could not be uninfluenced by what it directly, even though indistinctly, intuits. This is a part of Whitehead’s “answer to Hume.”
10. Who before Whitehead presented a clear, fully articulated reason for temporal atomicity, a special quantitative illustration of which is given by quantum mechanics? Or for the wave structure pervasive in nature, which for Whitehead illustrates (though it would not, unless in extremely generalized form, be deducible from) the aesthetic laws of contrast and repetition to which all appetition is subject?3
11. Whitehead seems to be the only philosopher to note the universality of societies in the cosmos, at all levels; also, and best of all, he is the first to see that what is called an individual in common life (and much philosophy) can only be understood as a form of sequence of particular actualities socially inheriting a common quality from antecedent members; and that personality itself is a special temporally linear case of such social—that is, sympathetic—inheritance. Thus the account of personal self-identity which modern psychology substitutes for the pseudo-simplicity of the “soul” is integrated into a comprehensive generalization that is superlative in its sweep—apparently too much so for pedestrian minds. The ethical problem of self-interest and altruism can, really for the first time, now be analyzed without radical ambiguity as to what “self” is in question. Self-interest, so far as looking to the future, is seen as a case of sympathetic projection, not radically different from some other cases of such projection.
12. Whitehead is among the first to see that empiricism means the necessity of generalizing comparative psychology and sociology downward to include physiology, biology, chemistry, and physics as studies of the more elementary types of sentient individuals and societies. Biology has already begun to follow this lead. Agar shows how embryology, for example, is best conceived as the study of the responsive behavior of cells under the stimulus of a highly specialized environment (in the womb).4
Some readers will of course feel that the foregoing estimate of Whitehead depends for most of its plausibility upon the assumption that the universe really is the sort of social process of “feelings of feelings” that Whitehead thinks it is. I venture three remarks here.
Whitehead certainly has not chosen this view because of inattention to its alternatives. He obviously knows why the idea of mere matter, or “vacuous actuality.” for example, has appealed to so many. Quite a portion of his life must have been passed in meditation upon this question, meditation focused upon the main facts of modern science and the main trends of modern philosophy.
Also, the sole way to refute Whitehead’s declaration—that we shall never succeed in elaborating an explanatory metaphysics until we have stopped trying to include in such a system the alleged concept of vacuous actuality—the sole way to refute this negative prediction is to produce a metaphysics which accepts vacuous actuality and which yet rivals Whitehead’s in coherence and width of applicability to experience.
Third, to the complaint (which Morris Cohen and others have expressed) that modem science, far from having eliminated the concept of matter, has rather arrived at a more subtle and adequate one, and thus has confirmed “materialism” instead of refuting it, the answer is that so far as matter means vacuous actuality, no such concept functions in science at all. In other terms, if “matter” means something alternative to experience (to subjectivity in the broadest sense), then precisely this alternative status, this definitely asserted possibility of no-experience, no-feeling, no-sociality, this alleged neutrality or possible vacuousness of matter, by which it was formerly contrasted to mind, is the very set of aspects, or pseudo-notions, that advances in scientific subtlety and adequacy have been eliminating, until, as Whitehead says, not one such aspect remains. Physics does, to be sure, need the notion of physical reality, reality with spatio-temporal characters, and this notion Whitehead accepts along with science and common sense. But since, according to his observations and analysis, experiences as such have spatio-temporal characters, and since no unmistakable samples of concrete actuality other than experiences are directly given or positively imaginable as actualities (with quality as well as relational structure, causal connectedness, intrinsic becoming, etc.), it is, he holds, meaningless to say that besides experiences there are also the merely physical realities. Experiences are physical realities, and our only way of positively generalizing the notion of “real” or “physical actuality,” beyond the specific traits of human experiences as sample realities, is to generalize the notion of experience itself so as to enable it to include a vast and indeed infinite range of possible types of non-human experience, not forgetting divine experience. If this cannot be done, then we are incurably ignorant of what can be meant by “real” or “process” in general, as we must certainly be of any positive characters distinguishing the parts of nature to which we deny the characters of experience.
A difficult concept in Whitehead is that of the Creativity, or the ultimate ground, or substantial activity. Is this a sort of God beyond God? I have some doubt whether all his utterances on this topic can be reconciled. But we are told that the creativity is not an actual or concrete entity. My suggestion is that we regard creativity or the principle of process as an “analogical concept” functioning in Whitehead’s system somewhat as “being” functions in Aristotelian theology. There are diverse kinds of being, according to Thomas Aquinas, with a major division between the necessary being of God and the contingent being of all else. So, for Whitehead, it is impossible simply to identify creative action with divine action, because every actual entity, as partly “self-created,” has its own action. (This, of course, is one aspect of the explanation of how evil results from action.) Moreover, the divine action is unique because, just as the divine being in Thomism was held to exist necessarily and eternally, so in Whiteheadianism the divine process, since it is, in its primordial aspect, the ground of all possibility (the eternal objects), is likewise necessary, in the sense that it is not a possibility that there should be no such process, and this distinguishes it from ordinary kinds of process. Thus creativity-as-such is no more a God beyond God in this system than being-as-such is in Thomism. The difference is mainly in the shift from mere being to process—as the ultimate analogical universal or form of forms.
My own conviction is that if there is anything in the passages dealing with this topic not capable of the foregoing interpretation, it probably ought to be discarded, and would have been discarded by Whitehead himself, had his attention been brought to bear a little more fully upon the question. My only alternative or supplementary suggestion is that one or two of the remarks about creativity might possibly be applied to God instead, on condition that they do not contradict the basic primordial-consequent structure attributed to deity.
In conclusion, one may say that the basic principles of our knowledge and experience—physical, biological, sociological, aesthetic, religious—are in this philosophy given an intellectual integration such as only a thousand or ten thousand years of further reflection and inquiry seem likely to exhaust or adequately evaluate, but whose wide relevance and in many respects at least comparative accuracy some of us think can already be discerned.
Notes
1. See Process and Reality, p. 76.
2. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), pp. 174-75, 223; Adventures of Ideas (1933), pp. 247-256; Process and Reality (1929), p. 470. It is true that Whitehead mainly emphasizes internal rather than external relations, partly because he is primarily combatting not Absolute Idealism (which has been somewhat out of fashion) but rather atomistic and other more or less extreme pluralisms. Also, I suspect, he inclines (as a rule, not always) to avoid the phrase “external relations” because, to say “relation to B is external to A” is really to say, “A has no relation to B.” (See chap. 2 of my The Divine Relativity, Yale University Press, 1948.) An entity’s relations are all internal to the entity, but it does not follow that X’s relations to Y must all be internal to Y. A relation may involve terms not all of which involve the relation. And Whitehead in effect holds that no actuality ever has relation to a particular actuality subsequent to it in time.
3. See Process and Reality, p. 426.
4. W. E. Agar, A Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism (Melbourne, 1943).
Source:
Lowe, Hartshorne & Johnson, Whitehead and the Modern World, pp. 25-41.