Whitehead and Philosophers
Whitehead and Descartes
Descartes held, with some flashes of inconsistency arising from the use of ‘realitas objectiva,’ the subjectivist principle as to the datum. But he also held that this mitigation of the subjectivist principle enabled the ‘process’ within experience to include a sound argument for the existence of God; and thence a sound argument for the general veridical character of those presumptions as to the external world which somehow arise in the process.
Whitehead and Spinoza
- Causa Sui, and considers its essential attributes and its individualized modes, i.e., the ‘affectiones substantiae.’ The gap in the system is the arbitrary introduction of the ‘modes.’ And yet, a multiplicity of modes is a fixed requisite, if the scheme is to retain any direct relevance to the many occasions in the experienced world
- The philosophy of organism is closely allied to Spinoza’s scheme of thought. But it differs by the abandonment of the subject-predicate forms of thought, so far as concerns the presupposition that this form is a direct embodiment of the most ultimate characterization of fact. The result is that the ‘substance-quality’ concept is avoided; and that morphological description is replaced by description of dynamic process. Also, Spinoza’s ‘modes’ now become the sheer actualities; so that, though analysis of them increases our understanding, it does not lead us to the discovery of any higher grade of reality. The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of anyone actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.
- In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiment, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident.* In monistic philosophies, Spinoza’s or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed ‘The Absolute.’ In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought.
- Philosophy of organism is pluralistic in contrast with Spinoza’s monism; and is a doctrine of experience prehending actualities, in contrast with Hume’s sensationalist phenomenalism
- The organic doctrine is closer to Descartes than to Newton. Also, it is close to Spinoza; but Spinoza bases his philosophy upon the monistic sub stance, of which the actual occasions are inferior modes. The philosophy of organism inverts this point of view.
- Whitehead on God
- This latter becoming is the immediate actual process. An actual entity is at once the product of the efficient past, and is also, in Spinoza’s phrase, causa sui. Every philosophy recognizes, in some form or other, this factor of selfcausation, in what it takes to be ultimate actual fact. Spinoza’s words have already been quoted. Descartes’ argument, from the very fact of thinking, assumes that this freely determined operation is thereby constitutive of an occasion in the endurance of an actual entity. He writes (Meditation): ((I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it
- Descartes in his own philosophy conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker. The thinker is the final end whereby there is the thought. In this inversion we have the final contrast between a philosophy of substance and a philosophy of organism. The operations of an organism are directed towards the organism as a ‘superject,’ and are not directed from the organism as a ‘subject.’ The operations are directed from antecedent organisms and to the immediate organism. They are ‘vectors,’ in that they convey the many things into the constitution of the single superject. The creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private individual to the publicity of the objectified individual. The former swing is dominated by the final cause, which is the ideal; and the latter swing is dominated by the efficient cause,t which is actual.
Whitehead and Hume
The philosophy of organism accepts the man’s statement, that the flash made him blink. But Hume intervenes with another explanation. He first points out that in the mode of presentational immediacy there is no percept of the flash making the man blink. In this mode there are merely the two percepts-the flash and the blink-combining the two latter of the three percepts under the one term ‘blink.’ Hume refuses to admit the man’s protestation, that the compulsion to blink is just what he did feel. The refusal is based on the dogma that all percepts are in the mode of presentational immediacy-a dogma not to be upset by a mere appeal to direct experience. Besides, Hume has another interpretation of the man’s experience: what the man really felt was his habit of blinking after flashes. The word ‘association’ explains it all, according to Hume. But how can a ‘habit’ be felt, when a ‘cause’ cannot be felt? Is there any presentational immediacy in the feeling of a ‘habit’? Hume by’ a sleight of hand confuses a ‘habit of feeling blinks after flashes’ with a ‘feeling of the habit of feeling blinks after flashes.’
Whitehead and Kant
The Critique of Pure Reason describes the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world. The philosophy of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction.
Thus, in the organic philosophy Kant’s ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ becomes a distorted fragment of what should have been his main topic.
The datum includes its own interconnections, and the first stage of the process of feeling is the reception into the *responsive conformity of feeling whereby the datum, which is n:ere potentiality, becomes the individualized basis for a complex unity of realization.
But Hume, Kant, and the philosophy of organism agree that the task of the critical reason is the analysis of constructs; and ‘construction’ is ‘process.’
it must be remembered that an ‘apparent’ objective content is the end of Kant’s process, and thus takes the place of ‘satisfaction’ in the process as analyzed in the philosophy of organism. In Kant’s phraseology at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, this ‘apparent’ objective content is referred to as ‘objects.’ He also accepts Hume’s sensationalist account of the datum. Kant places this sentence at the commencement of the Critique: “Objects therefore are given to us through our sensibility. Sensibility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions become thought through the understanding, and hence arise conceptions.
This last statement the philosophy of organism is in agreement with Kant; but for a different reason. It is agreed that the functioning of concepts is an essential factor in knowledge, so that ‘intuitions without concepts are blind.’ But for Kant, apart from concepts there is nothing to know; since objects related in a knowable world are the product of conceptual functioning whereby categoreal form is introduced into the sensedatum, which otherwise is intuited in the form of a mere spatio-temporal flux of sensations.
Knowledge requires that this mere flux be particularized by conceptual functioning, whereby the flux is understood as a nexus of ‘objects.’ Thus, for Kant the process whereby there is experience is a process from subjectivity to apparent objectivity.
The philosophy of organism inverts this analysis, and explains the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity, namely, from the objectivity, whereby the external world is a datum, to the subjectivity, whereby there is one individual experience. Thus, according to the philosophy of organism, in every act of experience there are objects for knowledge; but, apart from the inclusion of intellectual functioning in that act of experience, there is no knowledge.
We have now come to Kant, the great philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning, transforming subjectivity into objectivity, or objectivity into subjectivity; the order is immaterial in comparison with the general idea.
Development of cosmology has been hampered by the stress laid upon one, or other, of three misconceptions:
(i) The substance-quality doctrine of actuality. The sensationalist doctrine of perception.
(iii) The Kantian doctrine of the objective world as a construct from subjective experience.
Kant (in the Critique of Pure Reason) accepted the subjectivist principle, and rejected the sensationalist principle.
The sensationalist principle acquires dominating importance, if the subjectivist principle be accepted. Kant’s realization of this importance constituted the basis of his contribution to philosophy.
The history of modern philosophy is the story of attempts to evade the inflexible consequences of the subjectivist principle, explicitly or implicitly accepted. The great merit of Hume and of Kant is the explicitness with which they faced the difficulty.
The subjectivist principle is, that the datum in the act of experience can be adequately analysed purely in terms of universals.
The sensationalist principle is, that the primary activity in the act of experience is the bare subjective entertainment of the datum, devoid of any subjective form of reception. This is the doctrine of mere sensation.
The subjectivist principle follows from three premises: (i) The acceptance of the ‘substance-quality’ concept as expressing the ultimate ontological principle. The acceptance of Aristotle’s definition of a primary substance, as always a subject and never a predicate. (iii) The assumption that the experient subject is a primary substance.
The second premise divides qualities and primary substances into two mutually exclusive classes. The two premises together are the foundation of the traditional distinction between universals and particulars. The philosophy of organism denies the premises on which this distinction is founded. It admits two ultimate classes of entities, mutually exclusive. One class consists of ‘actual entities,’ which in the philosophical tradition are mis-described as ‘particulars’; and the other class consists of forms of definiteness, here named ‘eternal objects,’ which in comparison with actual entities are mis-described as ‘universals.’
Hume and of Kant: for both of them presentational immediacy was the primary fact of perception, and any apprehension of causation was, somehow or other, to be ,elicited from this primary fact.
Hume and Kant emphasized the fundamental, inescapable, importance which this doctrine possesses for any philosophy admitting its truth. The philosophy of organism does not admit its truth, and thus rejects the touchstone which is the Neolithic weapon of ‘critical’ philosophy.
Owing to its long dominance, it has been usual to assume as an obvious fact the primacy of presentational immediacy. We open our eyes and our other sense-organs; we then survey the contemporary world decorated with sights, and sounds, and tastes; and then, by the sole aid of this information about the contemporary world, thus decorated, we draw what conclusions we can as to the actual world.
No philosopher really holds that this is the sole source of information: Hume and his followers appeal vaguely to ‘memory’ and to ‘practice,’ in order to supplement their direct information; and Kant wrote other Critiques in order to supplement his Critique of Pure Reason.
But the general procedure of modern philosophical ‘criticism’ is to tie down opponents strictly to the front door of presentational immediacy as the sole source of information, while one’s own philosophy makes its escape by a back door veiled under the ordinary usages of language.
This repudiation directly contradicts Kant’s (First Analogy of Experience’ in either of its ways of phrasing (1st or 2ndt edition).
Whitehead and Hegel
It is now evident that the final analogy to philosophies of the Hegelian school, noted in the Preface, is not accidental. The universe is at once the multiplicity of res veraet and the solidarity of res verae. The solidarity is itself the efficiency of the macroscopic res vera, embodying the principle of unbounded permanence acquiring novelty through flux. The multiplicity is composed of microscopic res verae, each embodying the principle of bounded flux acquiring ‘everlasting’ permanence. On one side, the one becomes many; and on the other side, the many become one. But what becomes is always a res vera, and the concrescencet of a res vera is the development of a subjective aim. This development is nothing else than the Hegelian development of an idea. The elaboration of this aspect of the philosophy of organism, with the purpose of obtaining an interpretation of the religious experience of mankind, is undertaken in Part V of these lectures.
In any metaphysical scheme founded upon the Kantian or Hegelian traditions, experience is the product of operations which lie among the higher of the human modes of functioning. For such schemes, ordered experience is the result of schematization of modes of thought, concerning causation, substance, quality, quantity.
Whitehead and Bergson
- Thus in so far as Bergson ascribes the ‘spatialization’ of the world to a distortion introduced by the intellect, he is in error. This spatialization is a real factor in the physical constitution of every actual occasion belonging to the life-historyt of an enduring physical object. For actual occasions in so-called ‘empty space,’ there is no reason to believe that any duration has been singled out for spatialization; that is to say, that physical perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is negligible for such Occasions.
- On the whole, the history of philosophy supports Bergson’s charge that the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe’; that is to say, that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyze the world in terms of static categories. Indeed Bergson went further and conceived this tendency as an inherent necessity of the intellect. I do not believe this accusation; but I do hold that ‘spatialization’ is the shortest route to a clear-cut philosophy expressed in reasonably familiar language. Descartes gave an almost perfect example of such a system of thought. The difficulties of Cartesianism with its three clear-cut substances, and with its ‘duration’ and ‘measured time’ well in the background, illustrate the result of the subordination of fluency.
- We are closely concerned with what Bergson calls ‘intuition’-with some differences, however. Bergson’s ‘intuition’t is an ‘impure’ operation; it is an integral feeling derived from the synthesis of the conceptual prehension with the physical prehension from which it has been derived according to the ‘Category of Conceptual Reproduction’ (Categoreal Obligation IV). It seems that Bergson’s term ‘intuition’ has the same meaning as ‘physical purpose’ in Part III of these lectures. Also, Bergson’s ‘intuition’ seems to abstract from the subjective form of emotion and purpose. This subjective form is an essential element in the notion of ‘conceptual prehension,’ as indeed in that of any prehension.