Charles Hartshorne
A. Prehension and Peirce’s Secondness
The philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) is not (at least among philosophers) the most widely popular one of our time. But then, metaphysics, or, as he sometimes called it, speculative philosophy, is also not especially popular. However, interest in this type of metaphysics seems to be slowly but steadily increasing. To me it is really obvious that as metaphysician Whitehead has in this century had no superior, and I question if there has been even a close competitor. Moreover, the most plausible candidates, for example, Peirce (at the beginning of the century) or James, Bergson, S. Alexander, Heidegger (who claimed to have made metaphysics obsolete), or, among the living, Paul Weiss and John Findlay, have all had positions with considerable similarity to Whitehead’s. What is called process philosophy (or something significantly like it) is found, with various distortions or qualifications, in all these writers; but, unless I am badly mistaken, none of them equals Whitehead in conceptual clarity and relevance to our total intellectual situation.
My own philosophy (expounded in my doctoral dissertation of 1923) before I had heard Whitehead lecture or knew any writing of his except The Concept of Nature and his and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, I now see as a more or less systematized and energetically defended, but on the whole somewhat naive and best forgotten, form of process philosophy. And while I was assimilating Whitehead’s metaphysical works, beginning with Science and the Modern World, I was also assimilating and, with Paul Weiss, editing the writings of Peirce. In all this concern with two men of genius I was also working out my own view. Indeed, I began writing my first book, in which there was rather little of Peirce or Whitehead. With or without their influence I would probably have had beliefs somewhat like theirs, but much less well articulated and argued for.
Metaphysics as it has developed in this century is something rather new. It is ironical that, although criticisms of metaphysics as such are fashionable enough in our time, they rarely deal with the most characteristic twentieth-century forms of metaphysics. I rate this as cultural lag.
Process philosophy takes creative becoming rather than mere being as the inclusive mode of reality. Hegel had done this, and insofar he could be called a process philosopher. But the disciples of Hegel either went back to a philosophy of “being” (as Heidegger verbally, though I trust not really, also did) or else, with Marx, proclaimed a materialism that short-circuits speculation in the interest of a particular economico-political and, alas, military program.
Process philosophy takes becoming as creative in precisely that sense in which classical determinism denies creativity. Creativity is the production of new definiteness. It is the ultimate or universal form of emergence. For strict determinism, the definiteness of the world throughout all time is already settled and the future seems indefinite only because of ignorance. The notion of timeless truths about particular events has the same implication. For Whitehead, as for Peirce, James, Dewey, Bergson, or W. E. Hocking (who was influenced by James and, presumably, Bergson), reality is in the making and classical determinism is false. We human beings (in some degree all creatures) are helping to define a reality otherwise not fully definite. Ours is the freedom of partial indeterminacy. On this issue Weiss and Findlay are process philosophers. Here Hegel was at best unclear, and most Hegelians were if anything worse than Hegel. Nietzsche was a determinist.
Of all Whitehead’s conceptions, perhaps the most original is ‘prehension,’ or “the most concrete mode of relatedness.”1 No standard philosophical term current before his work is even roughly equivalent to it. ‘Perception’ will not do, for several reasons. First, prehension is as much involved in memory as in what is normally called perception. Second, ‘perception’ tends to refer not merely to what in Whitehead’s sense is prehended but also to what is understood as signified by the prehended data (as in, “I perceive that you are unhappy.”). Third, before Whitehead the temporal structure of perception was either left ambiguous or mistakenly taken to be that of simultaneity, whereas Whitehead holds that in principle the prehending experience temporally follows the prehended actuality.
To prehend is to possess or intuit a datum, a given. The metaphorical root meaning of ‘grasping’ is relevant. We could think of a ghost, even believe we were seeing a ghost; but for anyone to grasp or prehend a ghost there must be one. To intuit or in this sense possess, however, does not mean to consciously think or know that one is doing so. If we prehend (in any case, as we shall see, somewhat indirectly) something not a tiger, taking it to be a tiger, this seeing as or hearing as is a character of the prehending, not of the prehended. Hence the current fashionable denial of a cognitive given—meaning an absolutely secure grasp of truth about what is given—is compatible with Whitehead’s doctrine. There are no infallible bits of cognition; yet there is direct intuitive grasp of reality. To intuit or feel (a favorite word of Whitehead’s here) is one thing, to think or know that and what one intuits or feels is another. The value of the doctrine of prehension is not that it gives us infallible cognitions of reality but that it gives us reality in a subconscious or nonconceptual fashion. This is what some call the precognitive given.
Peirce’s Secondness, as I argued in a previous chapter, is one-way dependence of phenomena on other phenomena. As I remarked, Peirce hesitated between a symmetrical and a one-way form of dependence as the primary form, whereas logically the symmetrical form, like all symmetry, is a special or derivative case. Whitehead never, I think, labels his prehension as a one-way relation; but his definitions and explications of the term imply this. Even where the prehended is inside the subject’s own body, as is most obvious in aches or pains, Whitehead says that the prehended physiological process occurs just “before,” not simultaneously with, the prehending experience. Moreover, Whitehead takes the subject-object relation in prehending to be an effect-cause, not a cause-effect, relation. Effects follow their causes, which are always in the past of the effect. Also Whitehead as a relativist in physics denies interaction or symmetrical causality between contemporary occasions or experiences.
How did Whitehead come to this theory of a one-way causal and temporal relation of experience to things experienced? There was obviously the fact of physics that what we see or hear outside the body must already have taken place for the stimulus to have reached us. For science it is a truism that the perceived is in the past, except perhaps when the perceived is in the body. Whitehead decided not to admit this exception. Partly, I think, he was following his bent, as imaginative mathematician, to try to generalize wherever possible.
But there were other reasons. For Whitehead, perception is only one form, and in a way not the most significant form, of intuitive possession or givenness. The other form is memory. To my mind it is not Whitehead whose thinking is odd here but nearly everyone else’s. What is memory if not our present experience of our own previous experiences? It is experiences prehending previous experiences in the same personal succession or stream of awareness.
Whitehead implies that we should take the experience of past experience in memory as the paradigm or privileged sample of givenness even more than the experience of physical realities in perception. He does not argue the point, but arguments are not hard to supply. In perception we have a relation of experience to what seems as different as possible from experience. The vast gulf between human subjectivity, an extremely exceptional form of reality, and apparently inanimate nature must be spanned if we are to understand perception. The whole mystery of “matter”—which physics, after twenty-five centuries of inquiry, still presents as a mystery—is included. Moreover, in taking perception rather than memory as the paradigm of givenness, we are likely to fall into the illusion of simultaneous relations where the exact sciences strongly suggest that the relations are really those of before and after.
Generalizing from physics and from the temporal structure that is most obvious in memory, we arrive at the idea that what is experienced is always temporally prior to the experiencing. This opens the door to interpreting the givenness relation as causal. We can even define the prehended as that which comes before and in principle (though sometimes to an insignificant degree) causally conditions the prehending experience.
Whitehead’s prehension is then unambiguously, though not emphatically or in these words, explicated as asymmetrical dependence. The dependence cannot be symmetrical since only the past is definitely prehended and “there are no occasions in the future” to be prehended. The future is prehended only as the necessity that the actualities already given must come to be prehended by some suitable successors or other, where ‘suitable’ means, “able to prehend the given actualities.” This necessity is a metaphysical principle, or law, and is part of the meaning of Whitehead’s “creativity,” the “form of forms.”
If subject X prehends an earlier subject Y, then Y does not prehend X; Y is insofar independent. But only insofar. For Y itself as subject or actual occasion prehends, and thus depends upon, still earlier actualities, and these prehend even earlier ones. Thus all prehension embraces an unlimited number of actualities. Only by arbitrary abstraction can one speak of prehension of a single presupposed actuality. Peirce’s stress on the number of items on which something depends seems rather unimportant to a Whiteheadian. What is important is the asymmetry inherent in Secondness as well as in prehension. But a Whiteheadian can also see, with Peirce, that the nondefinite necessity of future occasions is neither simple dependence nor simple independence, neither Firstness nor Secondness. It is a Third: creativity as the presupposition of all thought and all objects of thought, the beginningless and endless “creative advance” that (as Bergson said) “is reality itself.” Peirce’s tychism and “spontaneity” have similar implications. Relations to the future express the necessity of approximately definite kinds of events rather than altogether particular events or sets of events.
As we saw in a previous chapter, Peirce defines Firstness too abstractly or absolutely, and indirectly he admits as much. He implies that no actual phenomenon is literally a First. Rather, Firstness is for him an ideal limit, for instance, of a series of experiences in which Secondness (or reaction or dependence) approaches a minimum, as in an experience where there is almost no memory, thought, or object felt. He says that a First is a pure possibility. But this is to lead away from the professed phenomenological goal of the whole inquiry. We are looking for instances of the categories in actual experiences, not in some hypothetical extreme possibility. Given a (for our knowledge at least) beginningless series of actualities, it is arbitrary to select a certain actuality as first, if that means absolutely first. It is not arbitrary but literally correct if it means, first so far as a directly following second is concerned. Relative firstness can be perfectly definite and actual rather than merely possible.
Peirce says that we cannot think about Firstness without tarnishing it, making it dependent upon our thinking. This frustrating conclusion recalls Bergson’s doctrine that logical discourse cannot be applied to immediate experience. Whitehead’s view is that in all prehension other than divine there is limitation, partial abstraction, from the fullness of the prehended. He calls this limitation “negative prehension.” But this does not mean that the prehending tarnishes the purity of the prehended. The prehended is a First, absolutely independent of its prehendor (though not of actualities that it does itself prehend).
Two other complications should be mentioned. One is that while the prehending depends asymmetrically upon the prehended, the two ideas, prehending and asymmetrically depending, are not simply equivalent. Not all one-way dependencies are prehensions. If proposition P entails proposition Q, then P depends for its truth upon that of Q, while the converse dependence of Q on P may not, and normally does not, obtain. Yet a proposition does not literally prehend; only subjects, which are concrete actualities, do that. Prehension is one-way dependence as holding of subjects or experiences relative to whatever they have as strictly given. It is the form that dependence takes when it holds of a subject in relation to other entities. The prehensive relation is “the most concrete form of relatedness,” as Whitehead aptly puts it.
The other complication is that if relatedness must be either prehension or a mere abstraction, then there is a problem resulting from relativity physics with its denial, accepted by Whitehead, of influence between contemporary events. This implies “spacelike” relations of coexistence between concrete actualities; yet these relations are not prehensions. The inconsistency, as it seems to me to be, has troubled me for many years. Prehensive relations are one-way influences, while contemporaneity is defined as mutual lack of influence.2
Quantum theory has recently been shown to imply a qualification to the limiting of influences to the forward light cone. It seems that there are positive influences, which, though they cannot convey messages, are not limited by the speed of light. This qualification of physical relativity is known as Bell’s Theorem, and seems well established. Henry Stapp, a physicist who has studied Whitehead and also Bell’s discovery, has proposed what he calls a “revised Whiteheadianism” that removes the difficulty by a bold theory that all events whatever form a single well-ordered series, each member of which is influenced only by its predecessors in the series. In the absolute sense of contemporaries there would be none. If this proposal were able to meet all empirical tests, it would eliminate a great difficulty in process philosophy. It would also partly justify Peirce’s view of Secondness as dependence on just one other entity. We need only qualify the dependence as ‘direct,’ to make Peirce’s doctrine compatible with Stapp’s revision of Whitehead. Apparently, empirical tests can at best show that Stapp’s view is permissible, not that it is uniquely correct. In view of my limitations, I leave this issue for others to consider.
Although, as we have seen, the nearest that traditional ideas come to anticipating the idea of prehension is in terms like ‘data’ or ‘givenness,’ the approximation is far indeed from being close. For one thing the term ‘given’ suggests vaguely an act of the object, or something behind the object, upon the subject, whereas prehending is the act of the subject intuiting the object—the act whereby the subject freely comes into being, utilizing available (past) subjects in its self-formation. The only action of past subjects is or was their previous coming to be. Moreover, givenness has had for most writers either no clear, or the wrong, temporal structure. Also, it was thought of as peculiar to perception rather than memory, whereas memory and perception are the two forms of givenness, and both alike give the past. Finally, givenness tended to mean, “consciously detected or detectable so as to furnish indubitable and infallible premises for inference,” whereas prehension has no such implication. How far the subject can consciously and securely detect the prehended depends on the level of consciousness an experience attains (low in infants and subhuman animals) and other factors. Only divine prehension infallibly detects its data.
In sum, prehension is one of the most original, central, lucid proposals ever offered in metaphysics. And its meaning can be sharpened by the use of Peirce’s insight into the basic contrast between independence and dependence, or Firstness and Secondness. This can be done in such a way as to improve greatly upon the clarity of Peirce’s own system of ideas. Thus my analysis pays tribute to both philosophers.
A marked advantage of Whitehead’s (or my) form of process philosophy over Peirce’s is in the concept of quanta of becoming. Not only is this congruent with the central doctrine of Buddhism and of some Islamic philosophers as well as with quantum theory— which would not have pleased Peirce with his “synechistic” bias— but it also furnishes what the theory of continuous becoming lacks, definite unit-actualities or single subjects prehending and also (subsequently) prehended. A continuum has no definite least parts. Peirce infers from this that we have no immediate, and hence no infallibly given, data, and this is one justification he gives for his fallibiism. But Whitehead arrives at fallibilism in another way, by denying, as Peirce also denies, the absolute distinctness of our intuitions. Such distinctness is a divine prerogative, as Leibniz held. There is no need to derive the principle of nondivine indistinctness from an assumption of continuous becoming.
To ward off a possible misunderstanding, let me say that when Whitehead or I refer to “objects” we are not committing the error, against which Dewey and others rightly warn, of making cognition the essential form of experiencing. Prehension is “feeling of (another’s) feeling,” and only in special cases is it also thinking of or knowing (another’s) feeling or thinking. The objects are immediately intuited or felt, whether or not they are in a pregnant sense known, explicitly judged in answer to explicit questions and with consideration of rival lines of evidence, or the like. Prehension merely as such is not theoretical grasping but just grasping, simply the intuitive having of antecedent realities. Theorizing may be present but does not increase the extent of what is prehended. It only explicates the nature of the given in verbal or other symbolic terms.
Both Peirce and Whitehead are implicitly committed to the idea of one-way dependence as pervasive in reality, although neither writer directly and clearly says so. Both suffer from this failure. Whitehead has misled many readers by some unguarded assertions, such as that “everything is (he sometimes says, “in a sense”) everywhere.” He also affirms internal relations and only much more rarely external relations, although each case of prehension involves both, since no relation to particular successors or particular prehenders of a given actuality is constitutive of that actuality. His (also Peirce’s) denial of “simple location,” if unqualified, seems to imply that an actuality has no localization at all and is indeed everywhere. William Alston in his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation argued that Whitehead’s system thus reduces to a monism like that of Bradley. So it does if one forgets the explications of prehension and the denial that actualities can be both definite and future or forgets the account given of “creativity.” But thus the system is ruined.
In a way Peirce comes closer than Whitehead to recognizing that one-way dependence is the general principle, and two-way dependence a special case. A genuine Second as such is dependent upon its First, not vice versa. Items in a directional series can of course be counted backward. But still the second act of counting gets its meaning from the first. The second edition of a book is influenced by its predecessor. A second offspring suffers or enjoys relations to the first from the outset; not so the first to the second. In another way Whitehead comes closer to clarity. For example, memory (prehension of one’s own previous prehensions) shows that prehension is the dependent, later effect, and the prehended, the independent antecedent cause. It was first there on its own, whereas memory as prehension presupposes the prehended.
It was Peirce, not Whitehead, who, to his lasting credit, made the concept of dependence and its negative explicitly constitutive of the very definitions of his categories. A First is what it is “regardless [that is, independently] of any other thing.” (He should have said, “of at least one other thing.”)
Peirce seems not to notice that both the “in” of ‘independence’ and the “less” of ‘regardless’ are privations, so that Secondness or dependence is the positive idea and Firstness, its negation. Obviously, prehending or intuiting is a positive act and one presupposed by the status of being prehended. In this sense, Firstness as such, the concept, is paradoxically second to Secondness as such. Peirce and Whitehead both see that the status of being a given object or datum presupposes that of being a recipient of a datum. Whitehead explicitly and Peirce implicitly make prehension the key to causal efficacy. Both philosophers are psychicalists, not dualists or materialists. And their categories support them in this, in ways too numerous to mention here. But if prehending, the experience-experienced relation, is the only form in which ontological dependencies, or what Hume called necessary connections, are given as such, and if these connections are what make reality a cosmos such that one part has implications for other parts, then what does not prehend, mere insentient matter, cannot be the universal explanatory principle. It is quite manifestly Hume’s ignoring of the one-way dependencies found in memory and perception, when he was purporting to look for ontological necessities, that explains the negative result of his search. The experience-experienced relation is “the most concrete mode of relatedness,” from which more abstract modes must be derived. This formula of White-head’s would perhaps have been acceptable to Peirce, though his “ideas tend to spread” is much vaguer and his synechism poses difficulties at this point.
Taking into account Peirce’s earlier birth, and the enormous intellectual changes that occurred in the three decades between the culmination of Peirce’s mental activity and that of Whitehead, I find honors somewhat evenly divided between the two great speculative philosophical logician-scientists in their treatment of the relation of experience to the experienced. No third writer, including the one who writes this, is comparable to either of them. They are the chief founders of process philosophy as a rational field of inquiry.
I shall now discuss briefly some theological applications of the concept of prehension. Since all knowing has its content from prehension, if we conceive a divine knower we must conceive divine prehending. But this immediately implies that (directly contrary to classical tradition, as found in philosophers and theologians from Augustine and earlier, to Kant) God is influenced by, and something in God derives its actuality from, the world that God knows. We influence God at every moment by furnishing data for the divine prehensions. Startling or even repulsive as this will be to some, it was clearly affirmed long ago, first by the Socinian sect in Italy, Poland, and Transylvania, later by Fechner in Germany and Lequier in France. William James would have gladly accepted it. Peirce somewhat hesitantly and perhaps inconsistently implies it. Bergson would surely have accepted it. There are others. For several centuries a new form of philosophical theology has been struggling to be born. It changes all the fundamental problems of theism, in ways that I have discussed in many writings.
If God infallibly knows all, God must directly prehend all; in addition to direct prehension there is only precarious inference from directly or relatively distinctly prehended portions of the world to the less directly and distinctly prehended ones. Thus, since to prehend something is to be influenced or conditioned by it, not only is God open to influence (precisely what the traditional attribute of impassibility was meant to exclude), but also God is the most universally open to influence of all beings. (I have argued elsewhere that this does not contradict the notion of divine ‘perfection,’ provided we reinterpret this term so as to avoid certain absurdities that are comparable to absurdities in the seemingly innocent phrase, “class of all classes.”) If God is the universally prehending Reality, it follows, Whitehead further implies, and I agree, that God is also the universally prehended Reality. The universal subject is also the universal object of experiencing. To prehend at all includes prehending deity. However, as follows from what has already been said, universally prehended does not entail universally known. All subjects feel God, but only some subjects think or know God.
Why must God be universal datum as well as universal subject of experiencing? Here I will only remark that, in process philosophy, for subject or experience X to be influenced by Y is for X to prehend Y; hence if God is to act upon all, influence all, God must become datum for all. Divine decisions could do nothing to creatures who did not prehend those decisions. Whitehead picturesquely intimates this remarkable doctrine by the blunt statement: “The power of God is the worship he inspires.” Both Plato and Aristotle had partly similar ideas of the divine ‘persuasion,’ and Whitehead learned from them. For this philosophical theologian, God does not coerce, bully, or bribe the creatures. Rather the beauty of the divine love intentionally charms them all into responding (however imperfectly) and derives further value from the responses. There is divine feeling of creaturely feelings. There has never before been a philosophical theology that so clearly and directly embodied the biblical saying, God is Love.
Any number of questions arise, and possible difficulties or objections will occur to many. What I could say about these difficulties or objections is mostly to be found in my perhaps too numerous writings. But in philosophy, even more than in science, the last word on a subject is beyond human competence to utter. We must remain always willing to make fresh efforts to learn or to impart the truth about these matters.
Notes
1. Whitehead’s account of prehension is found chiefly in two books, Process and Reality (corrected edition, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne [New York: Free Press, 1978]) and Adventures of Ideas (pb. edition, New York: The New American Library, 1955, 1964). Adventures, written after Process, gives the simpler and in some respects clearer formulation. See “Prehension” in the index of that book. For God’s prehensions of creatures, see Process, pp. 31, 345-346. In the index of Process, see “Prehension,” “Causality,” “Time.” In Adventures, see chapter 19, section III, for the reason “process must be inherent in God’s nature.” On prehension as the explanation of causal efficacy and the factor Hume overlooked, see Process, 123, 133-134, 140; also Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect. (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1927; Cambridge University Press, 1928), chapter II, section 1-4. Apart from the theological aspect, part three of Adventures is the most readable and eloquent account of the metaphysical system. For the theology, the great final chapter of Process is indispensable (Whitehead called this his most important essay). As introduction to Whitehead, his Modes of Thought is to be recommended (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1938). However, “prehension” does not occur in this book. Yet see p. 128 for the idea of divine prehension. God is presented as Deity on pp. 139ff.
2. Jorge Nobo has a book on Whitehead’s philosophy, to be published by the State University of New York Press, that offers a solution for the problem of contemporaries within the Whiteheadian framework. Nobo is a very scholarly writer.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy, pp. 103-113
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