Alfred North Whitehead for the Muddleheaded Alfred North Whitehead --Philosopher for the Muddleheaded The moment I was born, I knew that William James was right. The world of the new-born baby is indeed "All one great blooming, buzzing confusion". I was alarmed and baffled by the tumult that raged around and inside me. Intuition told me, "Here's something that matters greatly." Had I possessed language, I would have demanded "What the devil's going on here?" That's the primephilosophical question, and I've been trying out different answers ever since. I havecome to believe that Alfred North Whitehead can tell me what it's all about. In myview the writings of Whitehead point at the most hopeful and all-embracingphilosophy of all time. Whitehead aimed for nothing less than the refutation ofgloomy scientific materialism. He hoped to reconstruct the moral universe withoutdisrupting the beneficence of science. The structure he devised is not everything adevout religious believer would wish. Nor has his eloquence yet overswept Westernculture and conquered it. Nonetheless, when they become better known, his insightswill replace the nihilism, and correct the moral slackness of our times. Once youhave allowed Whitehead's powerful engine of hope to transform your attitude to lifeyou will never again need to consult another philosopher. Those sinister philosophicalmiseries of the 20th century--you know who I mean: malignant Heidegger, disjointedWittgenstein, cross-eyed Husserl, sour Sartre--you can consign their jeremiads to thefire. They failed to salute the quantum and relativistic earthquakes of our century andso they're dust, history, trash. Forget 'em.In one of his many definitions Whitehead frames philosophy as a rational system."Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of generalideas in terms of which every element of our experience--everything of which we areaware, which we enjoy, perceive, will or think--can be interpreted." And he adds, "Theteleology of the universe is directed to the production of Beauty". Whitehead says that the first thing you've got to understand is that science is deluded:the world isn't made of atoms, electrons, gravity, or whatever. There is only one kind ofentity; and even that perishes as soon as it comes into being. That entity is an aestheticmoment of choice, of feeling.There are no fundamental "things," or "objects" in the world of Whitehead. Whitehead's ontology, or parts-list of the universe, contains only processes. Life, the Universe and Everything consists of myriads oflittle emotions. Only feelings exist; no particles exist; and all the feelings have the same form: that ofthe human mind. Atoms, electrons, bodies and brick walls arise later. He onceremarked to a friend that Immanuel Kant had written his books in the wrong order: heshould have started with his aesthetic Critique of Judgment. Whitehead follows hisown advice. He founds his world on aesthetics, and treats physics as superstructure. Whitehead's cosmos suggests a musical performance; a free-wheeling jazz festival; anensemble of countless players, some good, some bad, all improvising as hard as they cango. They play, not for the glory of God, or to celebrate some spiritual ideal of Art; theyplay only because they enjoy it. Unfortunately the musicians don't always agree onwhich chords to strike, and they even disagree about what tunes they want to play. Andso ugly fights frequently break out amongst the artists, and they smash theirinstruments over each others' heads. Often they smash each others' heads. But risinglike a wraith among the screeches, squawks and thwacks, you will hear the cadences andcounterpoint of supernal music, almost too lovely to bear. It is the proper task of thetrue philosopher to lead you to experience that intangible beauty, to understand it, andto intensify it. The adventurous savantWhitehead lived the tranquil and cloistered life of asavant and sage. When he was teaching at Harvard during the 1920's--the age of TheGreat Gatsby, of jazz, of prohibition and Al Capone--he described himself as "a typicalVictorian Englishman". And the few photographs we have of him confirm hisself-image. His round face, heavy-lidded eyes, gold-rimmed glasses and wing collarssuggest a country solicitor; a clergyman's son, perhaps; or a respectable English middleclass murderer. When he was a young lecturer, his students at Cambridge called him"The Cherub". He was born in Ramsgate, Kent, England in 1861. That year sawthe death of Victoria's husband, Prince Albert; the American Civil War had moved intoits second year; and England was still quivering under the first shock of CharlesDarwin's Origin of Species. Christianity and its role in the nation's affairs loomedlarge in his early life. Whitehead's father was an Anglican clergyman, and his brotherHenry became Bishop of Madras. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald CampbellTait, often visited the Whitehead vicarage. "To have seen Tait," Whitehead wrote, "wasworth shelves of volumes of medieval history. He was the last of a line of great Englishecclesiastics that stretched from St. Augustine of Canterbury, through Anselm,Cranmer and Laud, to the days of Tait himself. For these men, the Church was thenation rising to the height of its civilization. They were men with vision--wide, subtle,magnificent. They failed." Public school andCambridge His educationadhered closely to the core of Western culture. In 1875, at the age of fourteen, heentered the great old English public school at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, where hestudied Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Sallust, Livy and Tacitus, interleaved withstretches of mathematics. He and his schoolmates read the Bible in Greek. "Nothing ofimportance could be presented in any other way", he remarked. "At school I neverheard anyone reading it in English. It would suggest an uncultured, religious, state ofmind. We were religious, but with that moderation natural to people who take theirreligion in Greek". It sounds like the proper abstract education for a philosopher,but Whitehead also did well as the leading school jock. In the authoritative biography,Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Victor Lowe tells how rugby footballmade an impact on Whitehead's philosophy. Contact sports knocked Bishop Berkeley'sidealism out of him. According to Lowe, in 1934, when Whitehead was casting aboutfor some paradigm of The Real, he mused to a friend, "Compulsion--symbolized by thetraffic cop? No, this is still too intellectual. Being tackled at Rugby, there is The Real! Nobody who hasn't been knocked down has the slightest notion of what The Real is". Throughout his life he adhered to Dr. Johnson's kick-the-stone view of reality. Hepassed his Cambridge scholarship exams so well that Trinity College offered him a shotat either mathematics or classics. Whitehead chose to aim his Cambridge career at theMathematical Tripos. (The Tripos is the Cambridge final examination). His fatherseems to have tilted him in that direction: "Mathematics," declared the Vicar ofRamsgate, "now there's a discipline!" Although his formal studies in math werestern, he enjoyed boundless intellectual freedom at Cambridge. "Looking backwardsacross more than half a century," he wrote, "the conversations have the appearance of adaily Platonic dialogue. That was the way Cambridge educated her sons. We discussedeverything--politics, religion, philosophy, literature. It was a replica of the Platonicmethod. By 1885 I nearly knew by heart parts of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason". In the math tripos, Whitehead won the high rank of Fourth 'Wrangler'. In 1884 hewas invited to join the brilliant circle of "Apostles", a select discussion group that hadboasted Tennyson amongst its numbers, and would soon include Bertrand Russell. Half a century later, in the 1930's, the Apostles would be taken over by Kim Philby,Anthony Blunt and other Stalinist moles. The earthquake ofthe Modern Naturalphilosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries suffered the cataclysms thatchallenged him to develop his mature philosophy. Reflecting on his Cambridge years,he later told a Boston journalist "Who ever dreamed that the ideas and institutionswhich then looked so stable would be so impermanent? Yet, since the turn of thecentury I have lived to see every one of the basic assumptions of science andmathematics set aside. Why, some of the assumptions which we have seen upset hadendured for more than twenty centuries. This experience has profoundly affected mythinking. To have supposed you had certitude once, and then to have had it blow upon your hands into inconceivable infinities has affected everything else in the universefor me." He didn't remark that his own work in mathematical logic contributed to thegeneral destruction. According to Russell, who was his most intimate friend formany years, "Whitehead was at all times deeply aware of the importance of religion. Asa young man, he was all but converted to Roman Catholicism by the influence ofCardinal Newman". He never took that step, but would take a final bite at theCatholic apple after he had married Evelyn Wade, a high spirited, convent-educateddaughter of an army officer. Whitehead family gossip reports that she oncehorsewhipped a man. Whitehead proposed marriage to her in the smugglers' cavehidden beneath the garden of his father's Vicarage. His mother was concerned byEvelyn's convent schooling, but his father approved. He feared that Alfred's retiringnature would lead him to join a contemplative order, and he seems to have thoughtthat Evelyn was the kind of lively wench his son needed. They were married in thesummer of 1891. Whitehead wrote later, "Her vivid life has taught me that beauty,moral and aesthetic, is the aim of existence". He also said, "By myself I am only onemore professor, but with Evelyn I am first-rate". Under the spur of romance,Whitehead, now 30, buckled down to his first scholarly work: Treatise on UniversalAlgebra, the first volume of which appeared in 1898. The title itself suggests thatWhitehead hoped for a universal, rational system that could unify all the sciences. Thebook foreshadows Whitehead's mature style as a philosopher: he specialized in theconcatenation of obscure, abstract generalizations. One learned reviewer complained,"Mr. Whitehead should have illustrated his discussion more copiously with simple andconcrete examples". On his thirtieth birthday, Whitehead gave his wife a copy ofThomas a Kempis's Of the Imitation of Christ. The two together undertook a carefulreading of the Fathers of the Church, histories of Councils (especially Paul Sarpi'sHistory of the Council of Trent), Aquinas, Hooker and other divines. Six or sevenyears later, he made his decision: he did not move towards Rome, but, as he put it, "inthe other direction". He renounced Christianity, signed on with the free-thinkers, andremained in their fold for a quarter-century. The Whiteheads' marriage boundtogether two strong- willed souls. Whitehead himself was outwardly calm, although hewas given to strange behaviour under stress. According to Bertrand Russell, "He used tofrighten Mrs. Whitehead by mutterings in which he addressed injurious objurgationsto himself. At times he would be completely silent for days, and Mrs. Whitehead was inperpetual fear that he would go mad". If Mrs. Whitehead failed to get her way in amarital clash, she would fall to her sofa with a pseudo-heart attack. Victor Lowecomments, "She was a sofa lady who always had just enough strength to be wonderful".Principia mathematica Around 1900, Whitehead and Russell joined forces for theircollaboration on the Brobdingnagian, three-volume Principia Mathematica. Manythink Russell did most of the work, but he later wrote "There is hardly a line in allthree volumes which is not a joint product." The publication of Principia marked oneof the death spasms of Victorian optimism. Many Victorians had cherished the proudhope that they could soon dissolve all the world's problems in a blaze of universalscientific reason. Principia was conceived as a step toward that noble result: Whiteheadand Russell set out to prove that the whole of mathematics can be deduced from logic.But they proceeded under the dark threat posed by Russell's eponymous paradox. Russell discovered his paradox shortly before the work on Principia began. The problemhad slept for 2,500 years, like a cerebral aneurism waiting to burst within the skull ofmathematics, ever since Epimenides the Cretan had declared that all Cretans wereliars. Was Epimenides himself a liar? "Nobody treated that as anything but a joke,"wrote Russell; but he found that this hoary parlour puzzle struck at the very root ofarithmetic. He had the bright idea of applying Epimenides's reasoning to logicalclasses, which form the basis of numbers. In particular, he ruminated on the class ofthose classes that are not members of themselves. To his dismay he found both that itbelonged to itself, and that it didn't: an intolerable result. He later said that hethought at first there must be some error in his thinking. He "inspected it under alogical microscope", without finding any mistake. In the end he mailed the bad newsto Whitehead, who scrutinized it, and replied with a cheerless telegram, quotingBrowning: "Never glad confident morning again". Russell also informed GottlobFrege, the venerable German scholar who was putting the final touches to his completeexplanation of all arithmetic in two massive volumes. With his life's work in ruins,Frege bravely replied, "Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatestsurprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which Iintended to build arithmetic. The sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem tovanish". And with them vanished perfect human trust in the universal word of logic. A witty paradox had shattered the bedrock of pure reason. "Humiliate yourself,impotent reason!" wrote Pascal. Russell toiled for six years to devise an ad hoclash-up to defang his paradox, but the problems posed by it will always bedevilphilosophers. Whitehead drew from it the metaphysical lesson that we must neverstretch an idea beyond its proper scope. But how are we to decide what the proper scopemight be? If pure reason ties itself in knots at its limits, we'd be unwise to lean toomuch on moral reason, either. Pascal, perhaps, offered the soundest advice for bothmetaphysicians and moralists when he declared, "Two excesses: to exclude reason, toadmit nothing but reason". Principia Mathematica took ten years to complete.Thereafter the friendship between Russell and Whitehead cooled, but Whitehead neverquarreled with anyone. He did, however, remark, "Bertie says that I am muddleheaded, but I say that he is simple minded". Russell recalled that Whitehead said tohim once, "You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; Ithink it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deepsleep". Russell thought Whitehead's notion "horrid, but I could not see how to provemy bias was any better than his". Russell perceived the world in hard edges and points:"It is more like a heap of shot than a pot of treacle," he believed. Mid-life course change After twenty five years at Trinity, in the summer of 1910,Whitehead suddenly resigned his lectureship and moved to London. He had no job insight. With this adventure, he entered the second phase of his life: he became an elderof the London professoriat. In London, he became a power in the corporate halls ofLondon University. Russell recalled, "He had practical abilities, a kind of shrewdnesswhich was surprising, and which enabled him to get his way on committees in a mannerastonishing to those who thought of him as wholly abstract and unworldly". In the lastmonths of the First World War his younger son, an aviator, was killed. Russellcomments, "This was an appalling grief to him. The pain of this loss had a great deal todo with causing him to seek ways of escaping from belief in a merely mechanisticuniverse". In 1924, at the age of sixty-three Whitehead accepted an invitation tojoin the philosophy department of Harvard University. Not until then did he beginhis seven major philosophical works. When the British Order of Merit was awarded tohim in 1945, President Conant of Harvard reminded Whitehead that "the first lecturein a course on philosophy which you had ever attended was the one given by yourself".Whitehead retired at the age of 76, and two years after the end of the Second WorldWar he died, aged 86. The philosophy of solidarity andenjoyment The doctrine ofThe Jewel Net of Indra forms the core of Hua-Yen Buddhism. It teaches that thecosmos is like an infinite network of glittering jewels, all different. In each one we cansee the images of all the others reflected. Each image contains an image of all theother jewels; and also the image of the images of the images, and so ad infinitum. Themyriad reflections within each jewel are the essence of the jewel itself, without which itdoes not exist. Thus, every part of the cosmos reflects, and brings into existence, everyother part. Nothing can exist unless it enfolds within its essence the nature ofeverything else. The same thought runs through Whitehead's philosophy,although he avoids the gorgeous imagery of the Orient. He prefers to present his ideasin obscure, grey, academic terminology. He calls his version of the Jewel Net theDoctrine of Internal Relations, or Solidarity; and he claims he got it from John Locke. He states that the cosmos is a network of 'actual occasions', which are pulses of feelingand acts of choice. Every factor of experience must call on all the others in order toexpress itself. Each occasion is a process which perishes as soon as it has asserted itself. Once dead, it forms the base, and sets the limits, for the deeds of its successors. Thenodes of Whitehead's solidarity network are active, and the pattern never ceases tochange. Whitehead's sober view, and the vivid Jewel Net, both illustrate thebootstrap model of reality. In a turmoil that never ends, the entire cosmos renewsitself, instant by instant. It is a self-actuated circuit: what mathematicians call arecursive process. It calls to mind Ouroboros, the worm of myth, which thrives byconsuming its own tail. Whitehead calls himself an empiricist, by which he means aphilosopher who takes all of human experience into account, including vague,primitive experiences, such as sleepiness, as well as the clear experiences, like a lightningflash. He sets out to illuminate the enigma of reality; but most of it is incurably vague."In its advance, philosophy must involve obscurity of expression, and novel phrases. In human experience, the philosophic question can receive no final answer. Humanknowledge is a process of approximation. There are always questions left over. Theproblem is to discriminate exactly those things which we know only vaguely". A problem indeed: to make it clear where to draw the sharp border at which the rule ofvagueness begins to prevail. Whitehead's first assumption, that process is theultimate reality, has become a commonplace, even among scientists. But the oldAristotelian error, that the world is made of static substances which carry universalqualities, still dominates our everyday view of things. That's not surprising, fordividing the world into substances and qualities is the clear, commonsense way to copewith everyday life. Science today grants that 'substance' is a dubious concept: our minds, for instance areabstract patterns drawn by moving atoms. But the atoms themselves are also patterns,woven by subatomic particles. And the sub-particles--the electrons, muons andquarks--they are patterns, too, but patterns in what? Positivistic science refuses to let usask. Our curiosity insists that we do. We seem to be running into an infiniteregress of patterns. In order to stop the rot, Whitehead proposes a primordial FirstStuff. He sets up a Category of the Ultimate; and he names just three members of theultimate: The Creativity, the Many and the One. 'Creativity' is his name for theultimate process. It's the wave of goings-on that turns everything into something else. The Creativity has no properties of its own. His creative ultimate is the bare desire toenjoy something new. Creativity is passion, but as yet without a pattern. Whiteheadputs it this way: "'Creativity' is the principle of novelty. It is the universal ofuniversals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by whichthe many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, whichis the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter intocomplex unity. The many become one and are increased by one. This Category of theUltimate replaces Aristotle's category of 'primary substance'". An example:consider the picture on your TV. A TV picture isn't a static object: it's a process that'salways changing. It's made by a spot of light that scans back and forth to form a grid oflines. Now, take away the picture, take away the lines, and take away the spot of light. You have reduced the image to the inquisitive scanning process itself, without thepicture, without the lines and without the spot of light. That's akin to Whitehead'sabstract process of 'creativity', which underlies everything. Or imagine the CheshireCat, without the smile and without the cat: just the cheeky aliveness of it. That's the'creativity'. Creativity is the bare desire to advance towards greater beauty, probingeverywhere. It is pure feeling: it is curiosity, alertness, aliveness and ardour; but withoutshape. It seeks satisfaction indiscriminately. But until it's got a blueprint or recipe towork on, it is nothing at all; it's not even space or time; it's mere formless yearning. Itneeds a direction, or it will get nowhere; it must take instructions, or be nothing. "Creativity is without a character of its own," Whitehead writes, "exactly in the samesense in which the Aristotelian 'matter' is without a character of its own. It is thatultimate notion of the highest generality at the base of actuality". There's yourprimary substance, the stuff that makes up the world, the aliveness that makes thingsgo. Provables and unprovables When Bertrand Russell was eleven he craved certainty. Because he had heard that geometry proved things beyond doubt, he asked his brotherto teach him Euclid. His brother began with the usual self-evident axioms but youngBertrand quite properly refused to accept them. He demanded to know their proofs. His brother firmly told him that there are some things in life you have to acceptwithout any proof, and if Bertrand didn't go along with it, the lesson would have toend. "At these words my hopes crumbled", Russell recalled. Russell's youthfulsearch for mathematical certainty led him to his collaboration with Whitehead. ButPrincipia Mathematica begins, as every logical scheme must, with unproven axioms.And if logic itself relies on brute assertions based on intuition alone, then so mustmetaphysics. Therefore we have to grasp the ultimate notions of philosophy withoutproof. The ultimate notions are like Euclid's axioms: self-evident but unproven. Wecan't know the roots of the world by reason; but only through our aesthetic sense. Asthe late Richard Feynman put it, physical science comes down to a question, not oflogic, but of taste. Whitehead's cosmology rests on an aesthetic set-up beyond reason,which makes sense of everything else. He said: "In all philosophic theory thereis an ultimate which is capable of characterization only through its accidentalembodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality. In the philosophyof organism this ultimate is termed 'creativity'; and God is its primordial,non-temporal accident". (In philosophy an 'accident' is a property or quality of asubstance which is not essential to our conception of it). I take him to mean thatGod is the blueprint, or recipe, or unconscious mind of the world. The ardent creativityis nothing without God, for it has no conceptual aim or purpose. To support thisassertion, Whitehead relies on Plato's definition of being: "I hold that the definition ofbeing is simply power". Without God, the creativity would twitch vainly, like afibrillating heart. God supplies the eternal, objective values that lesser creatures mustaim at. God is an accident; but since the creativity is nothing without him, he's anecessary sort of accident. This 'Primordial Nature of God', as Whitehead calls it(he likes to capitalize the names of his concepts), is a far cry from the omnipotentcreator and universal king of the Jerusalem tradition. Whitehead says: "In thisgeneral position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to somestrains of Indian or Chinese thought, than to western Asiatic, or European thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate". Whitehead'sdoctrine of the ultimate declares that God did not create the world on one occasion, exnihilo. The world goes on forming itself forever, always rising anew out of chaos. Towhat end? Whitehead gives a simple reply, "The teleology of the universe is directed tothe production of Beauty". Whitehead's God is not the same as the world, and nor isthe world a part of God, but they are both forms within the process of enjoyment anddesire. The primordial aspect of God, which Whitehead also terms 'the Realm ofEternal Objects', ranks logically prior to the lesser creatures; they choose their formsfrom it; and then they must perish and fade back into the infinitely complex wave ofprimitive feeling. Process destroys everything. All that endures is form; and formcomes from God, whose mind may change, though it never contradicts itself. Whitehead flatly denies that God is the omnipotent creator and tyrant before whommankind's first duty is to offer up fulsome metaphysical compliments. Though notomnipotent, God is necessary. Further, Whitehead asserts that God must be unique. What's more, Whitehead's God, although unique, appears to be not One, but Two. The first part of God is the Realm of Eternal Objects. I call this the Alpha-God, and itis unconscious, resembling Plato's world of ideal forms, Aristotle's world of potentia,and Steven Hawking's wave function of the entire universe. One is even tempted toidentify this Alpha-God with the Tao. The second part of Whitehead's God is the'Consequent Nature', the Omega-God, which is conscious, in the same sense that weare conscious. For Whitehead, the actual world we inherit, woven out of thecreativity, eternally perishes. God and the process are eternal, but the world is eternallyperishing. When Whitehead lays out this tangled relationship between God, the worldand the ultimate creativity, one fact stands out: the philosophy of organism is aone-substance doctrine. The process alone is reality. Most of us have learned to livewith the two-substance philosophy of Rene Descartes, who took mind and matter forhis two ultimate substances. Since then, people have been trying to show that theproperties of mind follow logically from the properties of matter; or else that minddoesn't exist at all. To deduce mind from matter continues to be the aim of somecomputer theorists, but it is a futile quest. In a Cartesian world, mind and matter mustforever remain distinct. In Whitehead's world, God is the agent that separates thesingle, beauty-seeking process of the world into mind and matter. If the Creativity didnot have God to teach it, it could have no power, and so would not exist. But equallyGod could not exist apart from the process that acts out his suggestions. God and theworld enjoy a state of mutual dependence: a bootstrap relationship. BertrandRussell pretended not to understand bootstrapping at all. Russell, you will remember,upheld the doctrine of logical atomism: the world is a heap of separate things, like apile of shot. Therefore an entity for Russell is exactly what it is, and it would still bethe same even if there were nothing else in the universe. A dog is simply a dog, andwould still be a dog even if crocodiles didn't exist. This is the Cartesian doctrine thatspeaks of "an existent thing which requires nothing but itself in order to exist". I simplycannot understand how such an introverted entity can enjoy itself, or anything else.Whitehead rejects Russell's position: In his view the essence of each entity isdetermined by its relation to everything else. He called this the principle of relativity. If crocodiles vanished from the earth the essence of your dog would change, Whiteheadsays. The dog's status in the cosmos would alter; zoologists could devote to it theattention that once they squandered upon crocodiles; and the danger of being eaten bycrocodiles would no longer figure in its possible future. In essence you would have adifferent dog; moreover, you would be different too. Howthings connect One of thetargets of Whitehead's critical philosophy is the error he calls the Fallacy of SimpleLocation, the desolate answer, given largely by the geniuses of the seventeenth century,to the question posed by the Ionian thinkers of the fifth century BC: What is theworld made of? We tend to believe, after Sir Isaac Newton, that the simple locationof matter in space truly describes the world. Newton decreed that the world at eachinstant is made of hard, massy particles of 'stuff' set at definite places in an arena called'space'. If you take snapshots of space at various instants, the positions of the particleswill change from picture to picture. Reality is a heap of these snapshots as they presentthemselves one after another. We rely on a mathematical myth called 'gravity' to tellus which new places the particles will move to between the snapshots. However, there'sno logical reason why we should connect the pictures at all (even though instinctivelywe must, and do); and apart from the gravity myth there's no rule to determine whatorder the shots should be in (even though we know in our bones what the proper orderis). Newton forbade us to inquire where gravity comes from: "I don't fabricatehypotheses," he rumbled, in Latin. Whitehead insists that this is definitely wrong.According to him, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume saw that theidea of simple location must deny us the power to learn from experience. Whateversnapshot we start with, there's no way of deciding which one comes next. The law ofgravity doesn't help, because it begins by assuming that the snapshots are in factconnected. How do we know they are? Of course we know perfectly well they areconnected; but under the crazy rules in this particular philosophical court we're notallowed to admit that knowledge as evidence. Taken to its limit (and why not?) thisdoctrine forbids us to connect any two events at all, not even a punch in the eye and avision of shooting stars. We are denied all our memories, recent and remote, and wesink into an isolated condition that the Harvard philosopher George Santayana styled'absolute solipsism of the present moment'. That is to say, Alzheimer's disease. Whitehead put it this way: "The order of nature cannot be justified by the mereobservation of nature. For there is nothing in the present fact which inherently referseither to the past or to the future. It looks, therefore, as though memory, as well asinduction, would fail to find any justification within nature itself". The annoyingthing about this nonsense is, it works; and it works most wonderfully. It divides theworld into two neat, false categories: 'things' and 'space'. The instantaneous locationsof the things in space determine the forces between them; and the forces determine thenext locations in space. The scientific circle becomes impregnable: there's no place forheart and feelings to break in. This bleak doctrine remains the orthodox creed ofphysics. It permits us to predict the future and retrodict the past, with stunningaccuracy. It first triumphed with Halley's prediction of his comet's return. After that,the doctrine virtually destroyed metaphysics. It permitted Laplace to omit God fromhis system of the world, unwisely boasting to Napoleon, "Sire, I have no need for thathypothesis". Today we know that the doctrine of simple location is just plainwrong. Quantum theory predicts--and experiment confirms--that each and every'particle' exerts its influence everywhere and all at once. Our everyday idea of space hasevaporated. Einstein detested this principle of non-locality, this denial of space; andmost of the grand panjandrums of science still refuse to buy its implications, because it'snot dreary enough for them. Science detests enjoyment. Whitehead's argument isnot that space and time don't exist: they are simply secondary appearances, not themain feature of objective reality. In denouncing the fallacy of simple locationWhitehead is asserting that no entity, nor any man, is an island. Every time we move,or think, we disturb the whole universe. As St. Paul wrote, we are members of oneanother. That is what the Jewel Net of Indra means. It fits well with the quantummechanical view that the observer and the observed are entangled into one, even whilethey possess unique personal selves. The root of ethics Morality and civilization arise because occasions of action musttake account of future occasions in their decisions. In order to move from cosmology tomorality, Whitehead groups his occasions into 'societies'. The most typical 'society' ofhis occasions is the human soul, as it grows in time. One pulse of enjoyment followsanother, and, as their number grows, all the pulses form the serial society we call thesoul. It is like a growing pile of coins. Each pulse takes in all the frozen data from itspredecessors and adds novel feelings of its own. The occasion does not passively copy thepast: in the act of self-creation it refreshes the design of the past, thereby inventing itsnovel present, and preparing for its possible futures. Whitehead calls these takeovers'prehensions'. The verb 'to prehend' means to engulf, perceive and transform. Sothe soul of a man, or of an electron, or of a bacillus, is a sequence of prehensions, ortakeovers, each of which prehends all its predecessors. As it grows in time the sequencedefines the society called the soul. Your soul--your 'Self'--is a pathway of dead occasions,with one living occasion at the very tip, the growth point. Whitehead calls this kind ofsequence a 'personal society'. All societies display some mental qualities, becauseevery occasion seeks emotional delight. You stand little chance of catching a rock in aspontaneous act, though you may watch it for ages. The decisions of the rock's atomsare all chained together in the crystals; and even if a single crystal could make up itsmind to tunnel somewhere else, it would have to persuade all its fellow-crystals to gowith it. Most of the world appears to be dead because in non-living societies, themembers' mental desires cancel each other out. Non-sensoryperception A uniquepsychology of perception informs Whitehead's metaphysic. Most respectablephilosophers allow that only one kind of data enters our minds: the data that comesthrough sensory nerves, especially the optic nerve. Whitehead insists that we prehendtwo kinds of data: sensuous and non-sensuous. Whitehead asserts that memory is aform of perception: it's the non-sensuous mode in which we perceive our past. What'smore, we experience large, diffuse feelings that come through no sense at all: we feelanxiety, anger, amusement, elation, nostalgia, dullness, joy. These vague, primitivefeelings come down no nerve fibre, yet they account for the greater mass of ourawareness. It is the fallacy of simple location that tricks philosophers into ignoringthese massive facts. Whitehead calls the precise, digital kind of data that nervestransmit, 'perception in the mode of presentational immediacy'. The more visceral,vague data that flood the whole bodily system he calls 'perception in the mode of causalefficacy'. Because they are physical facts, we take these two types of data into our mindsby means of physical prehensions. They are always the data of the past, stubborn factsabout the world as it was. We can do nothing to change them. Alongside ourphysical prehensions, we perform another kind of take: we prehend concepts. Thesemake up the mental pole of an occasion of feeling. At the mental pole we prehend theinfinite world of what-might-be. Conceptual prehensions allow the objective scale ofvalues, given by the primordial nature of God, to enter our decision. In other words,our minds are in direct touch with God. In this mental function, Whitehead'spsychology revives the Christian concept of the synteresis: the divine spark at the coreof the mind. His doctrine also resembles Eastern thought, which teaches that Atman,the Self, is identical with Brahman, the spirit of the cosmos. Whitehead insists thatunless we take account of the absolute, final enjoyments, or values, volunteered by God,we cannot make sense of our objective experience. Every pulse of the mind gobbles upall the fixed, objective facts that have been, along with all the eternal values thatmight-be, and digests them. Whitehead pictures the mind as a society of free agents. Each agent, itself a society of lesser agents, specializes in a certain type of decision. In atimeless moment the whole society of mind (as Marvin Minsky calls it) weighs itsoptions, and satisfies its desires by choosing just one target. In so choosing, the subjectmust sacrifice an infinite number of might-have-beens. In their own waysub-atomic particles copy the action of the human subject. Quantum theorists describehow the electron consults its table of transition possibilities, chooses one actual value,and makes it real. The electron's decision, like the human being's, is free andunpredictable, although limited by objective fact. Just as non-local effects modify theelectron, so do non-sensuous and conceptual prehensions enter our own decisions. We have here two revolutionary notions. Whitehead asserts first, that the soul is apersonal society of serial occasions piled on one another; and second, that perception inthe primitive mode of causal efficacy, plus introspection, provides the only informationthat gives meaning, life and warmth to the dry digital data from the five senses.Together, they permit Whitehead to refute Hume's proof of the impossibility ofinduction; and they enable him to dismiss Immanuel Kant's doctrine of fixed forms ofintuition. Hume accepts the doctrine of simple location, and sees the mind as a merepassive substance. Its 'impressions', our snapshots, are its private world of accidents. Hecan't explain how we join our impressions together, so he slyly invokes 'habit' of mind;but that still doesn't explain how the habit persists from one occasion to the next. Kantbought Hume's arguments, and relied only on the bare snapshots, delivered by the opticnerve, to construct his cosmology. That error forced him to invent the category offixed, inborn forms of intuition, which could interpret the sense data, and produce theappearance of space and time. Whitehead, alone amongst thinkers, has finallyshown us why we can believe in induction, memory, and--most notably--other minds.The process, reality itself, is one seamless substance, an indivisible net of enjoyments. Sowe cannot help but know other minds, for we must build our unique souls out of theidentical stuff. In Whitehead's cosmos we can, and should, bend our actions to moralvalues; but to do so we have to rely on two sources of knowledge hitherto ignored byconventional philosophers: 1) the massive flood of primitive enoyments we acquirethrough the mode of causal efficacy; and 2) the pure potential values we extract fromour contact with the realm of eternal objects. As we compare these two sources withsuch physical matters-of-fact as we choose to notice, we can aim at an aestheticachievement that is proper for us at that juncture. At the summit of the timelessmoment of experience and inner reflection, the subject settles on its satisfaction, andthe occasion perishes. The subjective pleasures of our specious present petrifies into astubborn fact, and the subject bequeaths that unchangeable object to the next pulse offeeling. No moral codeHow do we choose the moral doctrines we should follow? Whitehead offers no general ethical doctrine. No logical code can chart the realmsthat open before a member of the Jewel Net at each decisive moment. Instead ofethical prescriptions, Whitehead offers five prime qualities of Civilization for us to aimat. He calls his five targets: Truth, Beauty, Art, Adventure, and Peace. By Truth,he means the conformation of appearance to reality. Objective reality cannot be true:it is simply itself; but appearance can conform to reality to a greater or lesser degree, andin different ways. By Beauty he means the quality that arises when the members of asociety of occasions act so as to conform and contrast harmoniously with one another'spurposes. To create and enjoy beauty is the final cause and purpose of every society. Artis the unending human effort to produce the appearance of truthful beauty; and awork of art is a finite fragment of that effort. Our chief cause is to aim at and enjoytruthful beauty. He adds Adventure as a prime quality because he believes civilizationwill fade into tameness and vapidity unless we seek freedom, discord and risk in thesearch for novel enjoyments. His fifth value, Peace, deserves special comment. By'Peace' Whitehead means neither tranquillity, nor the absence of war. Whitehead'sPeace comes to us from the final element in his cosmos: the Consequent Nature ofGod. This is the Omega-God, personal and conscious. God is a unique type of actualoccasion. The Consequent Nature of God is the one subject that never perishes: he iseverlasting but never complete. His body is the sum of all the stubborn, brute facts thatwe, and the other worldly creatures, are forever laying down within our countlessoccasions. His soul is the eternal form of his primordial realm of ideal values. His giftis redemption. The Omega-God takes up the coarse patchwork of hopeful events webequeath to him; he marries them to his primordial realm of value; and he returns tous the intuition that, in the light of his providence, the deeds we offer up may becomebeautiful. That is the persuasive, transcendent vision of peace we should pursue. Sin and evil Evil, the solvent of values and scourge of enjoyment, hardly entersWhitehead's pages. In fact doctrines of good and evil are almost alien to his modes ofthought. Yet evil plays such a large part in the rough chorus of our experiences that Ifeel impelled to append to his elegant system two metaphysical constancies he ignored.I must insert (no doubt clumsily) the heartbreaking conflicts symbolized by Nietzsche'sclassical Dionysian and Apollonian deities. These presences embody respectively theprinciple of plenitude and the principle of parsimony. The principle of plenitudedecrees that the world must generate as copious a flow of beautiful and enjoyablemoments as possible. Plenitude is cosmic exuberance. The principle of parsimonydecrees that, in their flight from birth to death, events must follow the most elegantcourse, namely that of least action. Parsimony is the cosmic scalpel. Evil eruptswhen the miserly principle of elegance conflicts with the extravagant principle ofplenitude--and that is the conflict that gives rise to Darwin's pitiless rule of naturalselection. Yes, there are grave paradoxes embedded in the nature of things, whichinflict unbearable pain and hardship. The worlds need our help. We can and shouldconsider the relief of anguish as more than a command; in obeying it we can find asource for our most profound satisfactions. Whitehead gives us no advice forprayer, and suggests no scripts for ritual. Since he offers speculative philosophy and notscience, we can test his views only in the vast practical adventure of living and advancingour civilization. But he is aware that he is seeking to articulate the ineffable: "Themetaphysician is seeking, amid the dim recesses of his ape-like consciousness, andbeyond the reach of dictionary language, for the premises implicit in all reasoning. The speculative methods of metaphysics are dangerous, easily perverted. So is allAdventure; but Adventure belongs to the essence of civilization". Many criticscomplain that Whitehead's metaphysic is hard to understand. To me his writingsclearly describe a cosmic net of mutually creative moments. Every moment flows to itsown purpose; everything perishes; each spark of experience relies on the whole net forits value; the final cause of the cosmos is beauty in action. More about Whitehead and processphilosophy:New Thought Movement Home PageThe AustralasianAssociation for Process ThoughtThe Japan Internet Center forProcess StudiesClaremont centerfor process studiesWhitehead's evenmoredangerous ideaUnited Church of CanadaProcess-Philosophy Listserve An internet discussion list entitled Process Philosophy is up and veryactive. The list is FREE and open to the discussion of alltopics pertaining to the study of Process Philosophies. A certain focus inevitably fallson Whitehead and Hartshorne, but the possible topics are as inclusive as the interests ofthese two thinkers. To join, visitthe Process philosophy list page and follow the instructions |
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