BRIEF EXCERPTS FROM ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD AND CHARLES HARTSHORNE
BRIEF EXCERPTS FROMALFRED NORTH WHITEHEADANDCHARLES HARTSHORNE
(Selection of quotations, slight simplifications of style, bolding of type, and material in brackets by Alan Anderson)
Atomism, the belief that everything is made up of invisibly small, indivisible particles, was anticipated in the East
by Jainism some time after 800 B.C.E., but Western atomism originated in ancient Greece with Leucippus and
Democritus, as a mediating position between the views of Heraclitus, who maintained that everything is changing,
and Parmenides, who held that change is impossible. In the early modern world, Galileo (1564-1642) and others
revived atomism. Ordinarily, atomism is associated with materialism, but both science and philosophy have shown
that the atomistic nature of reality need not be of a material nature, at least as matter usually is conceived. By the
end of the 19th century, science had found that there are smaller units than the atom. The first of these to be
discovered, by J. J. Thomson in 1897, was the electron. Energy is recognized as coming in momentarily-existing
bursts or packets, quanta, discovered in 1900 by Max Planck. Einstein discovered the equivalence of matter and
energy. Energy usually is considered essentially lifeless, and life a curious accident in the midst of the gigantic
accident that the universe commonly is thought to be. Earlier belief in the discreteness of things is replaced by
recognition of things as interrelated aspects of fields of force. This scientific view still is essentially materialistic.
Materialism has been defined as "the denial that the most pervasive processes of nature involve any such psychical
functions as sensing, feeling, remembering, desiring, or thinking" (Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of
Great Thinkers [1983], p. 17). Perhaps the greatest single step in recognizing atoms as psychical, rather than
physical, was taken by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz realized, in the words of Hartshorne:
If pebbles or other perceptible inert solids are really swarms of imperceptible active singulars, it is
absurd to try to describe the true and active singulars in terms of inert, hard, solid objects . . .
Rather we must describe the imperceptible units in terms of the only active singulars we perceive
as such: ourselves, other animals, and perhaps--though here Leibniz hesitates slightly--also plants.
(Hartshorne emphasizes the importance of Plato's recognition of the soul as self-moved,
self-changed.)
In other words, Leibniz was the first very great philosopher to combine (1) the atomistic insight . .
. that the basic forms of change in the world are too subtle to be perceptible to direct vision or
touch, with (2) the central Platonic insight that the principle of change or of dynamic unity is
psychical, involving at least some of the inherently active functions of thinking, feeling,
remembering, perceiving, willing. The seemingly inert masses of physical stuff Leibniz takes to be
myriads of lowly souls (monads ), imperceptible as distinct individuals, which perceive only in
extremely primitive fashion. . . . This was one of the greatest of intellectual discoveries, far indeed
from being adequately appreciated after three centuries (Ibid., p. 131).
WHITEHEAD ON CONSIDERING NATURE AS LIFELESS AND AS ALIVE
FROM WHITEHEAD'S MODES OF THOUGHT (1938), (MT), LECTURE 7, "NATURE
LIFELESS":
[MT 128] Nature, in these chapters, means the world as interpreted by reliance on clear and distinct
sensory experiences, visual, auditory, and tactile.
[MT 129] The common-sense notion of the universe, which [was forming about 1500] [MT
130] expresses large, all-pervading truths about the world about us. The only question is as to
how fundamental these truths may be. In other words, we have to ask what large features of the
universe cannot be expressed in these terms. We have also to ask whether we cannot find
some other set of notions which will explain the importance of this common-sense notion, and
will also explain its relations to those features ignored by the common-sense notion.
[MT 131] The main principles of the old common-sense doctrine, which even today is the
common doctrine of ordinary life because in some sense it is true[, are:]
[1] There are bits of matter, enduring self-identically in space which is otherwise empty.
[2] Each bit of matter occupies a definite limited region.
[3] Each such particle of matter has its own private qualifications, such as its shape, its motion, its mass, its colour,
its scent.
[4] Some of these qualifications change, others are persistent.
[5] The essential relationship between bits of matter is purely spatial.
[6] Space itself is . . . unchanging, always including in itself this capacity for the relationship of bits of [132] matter.
This is the grand doctrine of nature as a self-sufficient, meaningless complex of facts. It is the
doctrine of the autonomy of physical science. It is the doctrine which in these lectures I am
denying.
[MT 130][Over the past few centuries] the development of natural science has gradually
discarded every single feature of the original common-sense notion. Nothing whatever
remains of it, considered as expressing the primary features in terms of which the universe is to
be interpreted. The obvious common-sense notion has been entirely destroyed, so far as concerns
its function as the basis for all interpretation. One by one, every item as been dethroned. . . .
[Yet] this common-sense notion still reigns supreme in the workaday life of mankind. It
dominates the marketplace, the playgrounds, the law courts, and in fact the whole sociological
intercourse of mankind. It is supreme in literature and is assumed in all the humanistic sciences.
[REPLACING EARLY MODERN BELIEFS WITH SOME CONSTITUTING WHAT
CURRENTLY IS CALLED PROCESS THOUGHT, PANEXPERIENTIALISM, AND
CONSTRUCTIVE POSTMODERNISM]
[MT 132] The state of [recent] modern thought is that every single item in this general doctrine
is denied, but that the general conclusions from the doctrine as a whole are tenaciously retained.
The result is a complete muddle in scientific thought, in philosophic cosmology, and in
epistemology.
[MT 135] A dead nature can give no reasons. All ultimate reasons are in terms of aim at
value. A dead nature aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the
intrinsic reaping of value.
[MT 136] The unexpected result has been the elimination of bits of matter, as the self-identical
supports for physical properties.
[PROCESS]
[MT 137] [In the 20th Century] matter has been identified with energy, and energy is sheer
activity; the passive substratum composed of self-identical enduring bits of matter [atoms, as
originally understood] has been abandoned, so far as concerns any fundamental description.
[MT 145] [The] change of view occupying [the last] four centuries, may be characterized as the
transition from [1] space and matter [more broadly, substance], as the fundamental notions to
[2] process conceived as a complex of activity with internal relations between its various factors.
[LIFE]
[MT 147] How do we add content to the notion of bare activity? [We recognize it as living.]
[MT 152] [T]he characteristics of life [as understood by Whitehead] are [1] absolute
self-enjoyment, [2] creative activity [fusing the past and the possible in a new unity, a new
creation], [3] aim. [MT 167, an additional definition of life, distinguishing it from mentality:] the
enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. It is the enjoyment of
emotion which was then, which is now, and which will be then. This vector character is of the
essence of such entertainment. The emotion transcends the present in two ways. It issues from,
and it issues towards. It is received, it is enjoyed, and it is passed along, from moment to
moment. . . . In so far as conceptual mentality does not intervene, the grand patterns pervading
the environment are passed on with the inherited modes of adjustment. Here we find the patterns
of activity studied by physicists and chemists. In the case of inorganic nature any sporadic
flashes [168] are inoperative so far as our powers of discernment are concerned. The lowest
stages of effective mentality, controlled by the inheritance of physical pattern, involves the faint
direction of emphasis by unconscious ideal aim. The various examples of the higher forms of life
exhibit the variety of grades of effectiveness of mentality. In the social habits of animals, there is
evidence of flashes of mentality in the past which have degenerated into physical habits. Finally
in the higher animals and more particularly in mankind, we have clear evidence of mentality
habitually effective. In our own experience, our knowledge consciously entertained and
systematized can only mean such mentality, directly observed.
[SCIENCE]
[MT 154] Science can find no individual enjoyment in nature: Science can find no creativity in
nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of natural science. They are
inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of physical science lies in the fact that
such science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. [Science]
examines the . . . superficial, and neglects the . . . fundamental.
The disastrous separation of body and mind which has been fixed on European thought by
Descartes is responsible for this blindness of science. In one sense the abstraction [consideration
of some things apart from other things] has been a happy one, in that it has allowed the simplest
things to be considered first, for about ten generations. [continued immediately below, without
break]
[ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE BODIES, IN RELATION TO THE GIVE AND TAKE OF FEELING (PREHENSION, RECEPTION) AND EXPRESSION, THE TWO SIDES OF ANY EXPERIENCE]
[MT 20]
[I]mportance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite.
But expression is founded on the finite occasion. It is the activity of finitude impressing itself on its environment.
[21] The laws of nature are large average effects which reign impersonally. Whereas, there is nothing average about expression. . . .
We think of ourselves as so intimately entwined in bodily life that a man is a complex unityþbody and mind. But the body is part of the external world, continuous with it. In fact, it is just as much part of nature as anything else thereþa river, or a mountain, or a cloud. . . .
[FIRST DEFINITION OF A LIVING BODY]
[22] The human body is that region of the world which is the primary field of human expression. . . .
Wherever there is a region of nature which is itself the primary field of the expressions issuing from each of its parts, that region is alive.
[SECOND DEFINITION OF A LIVING BODY]
In this second definition, the phrase "expressions issuing from each of its parts" has been substituted for the phrase "human expression," as used previously. The new definition is wider than the former by extending beyond human beings, and beyond the higher animals. Also it will be noticed that these definitions involve the direct negation [23] of any extreme form of Behaviourism. In such behaviouristic doctrines, importance and expression must be banished and can never be intelligently employed. A consistent behaviourist cannot feel it important to refute my statement. He can only behave.
There are two sides to an animal body of the higher type, and so far we have only developed one of them. The second, and wider, definition enables us to find the distinction between vegetation and animal life. This distinction, like others, refuses to be pushed to meticulous exactness. In the animal, there is the one experience expressing itself throughout the animal body. But this is only half the tale.
The other half of the tale is that the body is composed of various centres of experience, imposing the expression of themselves on each other. Feeling (in the sense here used), or prehension, is the reception of expressions. Thus the animal body is composed of entities, which are mutually expressing and feeling. Expressions are the data for feeling diffused in the environment; and a living body is a peculiarly close adjustment of these two sides of experience, namely, expression and feeling. By reason of this organization, an adjusted variety of feelings is produced in that supreme entity which is the one animal considered as one experiencing subject.
Thus the one animal, and the various parts of its body considered as themselves centres of experience, are in one sense on a level. Namely, they are centres of experience expressing themselves vividly to each other, and obtaining their own feelings mainly by reason of such mutual expressions.
In another sense, the animal as one centre of experience is on a higher level than its other bodily centres. For these subordinate centres are specialists. They only receive re[24]stricted types of emotional feeling, and are impervious beyond such types. . . .
In the case of vegetables, we find bodily organizations which decisively lack any one centre of experience with a higher complexity either of expressions received or of inborn data. A vegetable is a democracy; an animal is dominated by one, or more centres of experience. But such domination is limited, very strictly limited. The expressions of the central leader are relevant to that leader's reception of data from the body.
Thus an animal body exhibits the limited domination of at least one of its component activities of expression. If the dominant activity be severed from the rest of the body, the whole coordination collapses, and the animal dies. Whereas in the case of the vegetable, the democracy can be subdivided into minor democracies which easily survive without much apparent loss of functional expression.
It is evident that our statement is oversimplified. . . .
[25] [A]n animal body in its highest examples is more analogous to a feudal society, with its one overlord.
This final unity of animal intelligence is also the organ of reaction to novel situations, and is the organ introducing the requisite novelty of reaction. Finally, the overlord tends to relapse into the conventionality of routine imposed upon the subordinate governors, such as the heart. Animal life can face conventional novelties with conventional devices. But the governing principle lacks large power for the sudden introduction of any major novelty. . . .
[HUMANITY]
When we come to mankind, nature seems to have burst through another of its boundaries. The central activity of enjoyment and expression has assumed a reversal in the importance of its diverse functionings. The conceptual entertainment of unrealized possibility becomes a major factor in human mentality. In this way outrageous novelty is introduced, sometimes beatified, sometimes damned, and sometimes literally patented or protected by copyright. The definition of mankind is that in this genus of animals the central activity has been developed on the side of its relationship to novelty. This relationship is twofold. There is novelty received from the aggregate diversities of bodily expressions. Such novelty requires decision as to its reduction to coherence of expression.
Again there is the introduction of novelty of feeling by the entertainment of unexpected possibilities. This second side is the enlargement of the conceptual experience of mankind. The characterization of this conceptual feeling is the sense of what might be and of what might have been. It is the entertainment of the alternative. In its highest development, this becomes the entertainment of the ideal. It emphasizes the sense of importance . . . And this sense exhibits itself in various species, such as, the sense of morality, the mystic sense of religion, the sense of that delicacy of adjustment which is beauty, the sense of necessity for mutual connection which is understanding, and the sense of discrimination of each factor which is consciousness.
Also it is the nature of feeling to pass into expression. Thus the expression of these various feelings produces the [27] history of mankind as distinct from the narrative of animal behaviours. History is the record of the expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity.
. . . In mankind, the dominant dependence on bodily functioning seems still there. And yet the life of a human being receives its worth, its importance, from the way in which unrealized ideals shape its purposes and tinge its actions. The distinctions between men and animals is in one sense only a difference in degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. The Rubicon has been crossed.
[FOUR KINDS OF COLLECTIONS OF EXPERIENCES]
Thus in nature we find four types of aggregations of actualities: [1] the lowest is the nonliving aggregation, in which mutual influence is predominantly of a formal character expressible in formal sciences, such as mathematics. The inorganic is dominated by the average. It lacks individual expression in its parts. Their flashes of selection (if any) are sporadic and ineffective. Its parts merely transmit average expressions; and thus the structure survives. For the average is always there, stifling individuality.
[2] The vegetable grade exhibits a democracy of purposeful influences issuing from its parts. The predominant aim within the organism is survival for its own coordinated individual expressiveness. This expressiveness has a large average character. But the nature of this average is dominated by the intricacies of its own bodily formation. It has added coordinated, organic individuality to the impersonal average formality of inorganic nature. What is merely latent potentiality in lifeless mater, has awakened into some realization in the vegetable. But in each instance of [28] vegetation, the total bodily organism strictly limits the individuality of expression in the parts.
[3] The animal grade includes at least one central actuality, supported by the intricacy of bodily functioning. Purposes transcending (however faintly) the mere aim at survival are exhibited. For animal life the concept of importance, in some of its many differentiations, has a real relevance. [4] The human grade of animal life immensely extends this concept, and thereby introduces novelty of functioning as essential for varieties of importance. Thus morals and religion arise as aspects of this human impetus towards the best in each occasion. Morals can be discerned in the higher animals; but not religion. Morality emphasizes the detailed occasion; while religion emphasizes the unity of ideal inherent in the universe.
In every grade of social aggregation, from a nonliving material society up to a human body, there is the necessity for expression, and of average reception, that the average activities of merely material bodies are restrained into conformity with the reigning laws of nature. It is by reason of individual expression and reception that the human body exhibits activities expressive of the intimate feelings, emotional and purposeful, of the one human person. . . .
[30] A tree sticks to its business of mere survival; and so does an oyster with some minor divergencies. . . . [T]he life aim at survival is modified into the human aim at survival for diversified worthwhile experience.
[LAWS OF NATURE]
[MT 154] Now these simplest things [dealt with by science] are those widespread habits of
nature that dominate the whole stretch of the universe within our remotest, vaguest observation.
None of [the] [155] laws of nature gives the slightest evidence of necessity. They are the modes
of procedure which within the scale of our observations do in fact prevail. . . . They exist as
average, regulative conditions because the majority of actualities are swaying each other to
modes of interconnection exemplifying those laws. . . . [T]o judge by all analogy, after a
sufficient span of existence our present laws will fade into unimportance. New interests will
dominate. In our present sense of the term, our spatio-physical epoch will pass into the
background of the past, which conditions all things dimly and without evident effect on the
decision of prominent relations.
[FROM LECTURE 8, "NATURE ALIVE" (PURPOSE, KINDS OF LIFE, BODIES, SOULS)]:
[MT 155] All explanations of the sociological functionings of mankind include aim as an
essential factor in explanation. . . . In fact we are directly conscious of our purposes as directive
of our actions.
[MT 157] There is [1] animal life with its central direction of a society of cells, there is [2]
vegetable life with its organized republic of cells, there is [3] the large-scale inorganic society of
molecules with its passive acceptance of necessities derived from spatial relations, there is [4] the
infra-molecular activity which has lost all trace of the passivity of inorganic nature on a larger
scale.
[MT 161] There is no definite boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature
ends.
[MT 161] The one individual is that coordinated stream of personal experiences, which is my
thread of life or your thread of life. It is that succession of self-realization, each occasion with its
direct memory of its past and with its anticipation of the future.
[RELATIONS OF THE WHOLE AND THE PART]
[MT 163] [I]n one sense the world is in the soul. . . . [But] the soul itself [is] one of the
components within the world. . . . [My] present experience is what I now am. . . . The soul is
nothing else than the succession of my occasions of experience, extending from birth to the
present moment. Now at this instant, I am the complete person embodying all these occasions.
They are mine. On the other hand it is equally true that my immediate occasion of experience, at
the present moment, is only one among the stream of occasions which constitutes my soul.
[IMMANENCE AND CAUSATION]
[MT 164] Thus, as disclosed in the fundamental essence of our experience, the togetherness of
things involves some doctrine of mutual immanence. In some sense or other, this means that
each happening is a factor in the nature of every other [later] happening. . . . The whole
antecedent world conspires to produce a new occasion.
[MT 165] The only intelligible doctrine of causation is founded on the doctrine of immanence.
Each occasion presupposes the antecedent world as active in its own nature. . . . It is the reason
for the transference of character from occasion to occasion. It is the reason for the relative
stability of laws of nature . . . Mere existence has never entered into the consciousness of man,
[166] except as the remote terminus of an abstraction in thought. Descartes' "Cogito, ergo sum"
is wrongly translated, "I think, therefore I am." It is never bare thought or bare existence that we
are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets,
valuations of alternatives, decisions--all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active
in my nature. My unity--which is Descartes' "I am"--is my process of shaping this welter of
material into a consistent pattern of feelings. The individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of
a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is
myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world. If
we stress the role of the environment, this process is [1] causation. If we stress the role of my
immediate pattern of active enjoyment, this process is [2] self-creation. If we stress the role of
the conceptual anticipation of the future whose existence is a necessity in the nature of the
present, this process is [3] teleological aim at some ideal in the future. This aim, however, is not
really beyond the present process. For the aim at the future is an enjoyment in the present. It thus
effectively conditions the self-creation of the new creature.
[PHILOSOPHY]
[MT 168] Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its
best, the wonder remains. There have been added, however, some grasp of the im[169]mensity of
things, some purification of emotion by understanding. . . . Existence is activity ever merging
into the future.
[VALUES EXPERIENCED AS DESIRED]
With references to MT, David Ray Griffin, in his Parapsychology, Philosophy, and
Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (Albany: SUNY, 1997), p. 275, writes as follows:
Why is it not sufficient to believe that this universe contains objective values which we,
through nonsensory perception, can directly apprehend? By thinking of such objective values
as "Platonic forms," why could the spiritual life not be adequately supported by such a purely
Platonic religion? (I use the term "Platonic" for this view only for convenience; Plato himself,
at least in some of his writings, spoke of an actual deity.)
There are two problems with this type of Platonic religion. In the first place, as
intimated above, the idea that the forms, ideals, or norms as such, having a purely ideal
existence, could exist on their own is dubious. There has been a widespread agreement,
shared by thinkers as diverse as Whitehead and Thomas Aquinas, that they can exist only as
entertained by something actual, by a mind. We can believe that values exist objectively (to
the human mind), then only if they exist subjectively--as entertained by a cosmic subject. Such
a subject of cosmic scope is what is here meant by "God." Whitehead's suggestion,
furthermore, is not only that values exist in "the primordial mind of God," but that they exist
there as appetitions. God prehends truth, beauty, and goodness with the appetition that they
be actualized in the world of finite beings. This is Whitehead's explanation as to why we feel
values as ideals, that is, as important, as possibilities that should be actualized [reference to
MT 102-13]. We do not, therefore, with our nonsensory perception simply prehend these
values directly; we prehend them by prehending God. Whitehead says, accordingly, that our
"experience of ideals--of ideals entertained, of ideals aimed at, of ideals achieved, of ideals
defaced . . . is the experience of the deity of the universe"[reference to MT 103].
A second problem with the attempt to have a purely Platonic religion is that the
fundamental religious desire is the desire to be in harmony with the supreme power of the
universe. It is hard to see the trinity of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, for all its grandeur, as
the supreme power of the universe. We can accept as the supreme power only that which is
the source of the stars above and the earth below as well as the call to truth, beauty, and
goodness within. The supreme power can only be that which is responsible for the fine-tuned
order of the physical constants of the universe, for the emergence of life, and for the human
form of life.
For these two reasons, the kind of religion . . . according to which we use the term
"God" for a cluster of values we have chosen to honor, will not work. We need to believe
that the values we serve are discovered, not invented, and therefore we need an actual, not
merely an ideal or "as-if," God [end of quotation from Griffin].
[WHITEHEAD ON VALUE AND MORALITY]
[MT 102] Finally [after Whitehead considers time and space], there is deity, which is that
factor in the universe whereby there is importance, value, and ideal beyond the actual. It
is by reference of the spatial immediacies to the ideals of deity that the sense of worth beyond
ourselves arises. . . . There must be value beyond ourselves. Otherwise every thing
experienced would be merely a barren detail in our own solipsist mode of existence. We owe
to the sense of deity the obviousness of the many actualities of the world, and the obviousness
of the unity of the world for the preservation of the values realized and for the transition to
ideals beyond realized fact.]
[MT 110 Whitehead says that the division of experience into self and other] is primarily based
on the sense of existence as a value experience. Namely, the total value experience is
discriminated into this value experience and those value experiences . There is the vague
sense of many which are one; and of one which includes the many. Also there are two senses
of the one--namely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the
many. . . .
[MT 111] The basis of democracy is the common fact of value experience, as constituting the
essential nature of each pulsation of actuality. Everything has some value for itself, for
others, and for the whole. This characterizes the meaning of actuality. By reason of this
character, constituting reality, the conception of morals arises. We have no right to deface the
value experience which is the very nature of the universe. Existence, in its own nature, is the
upholding of value intensity. Also no unit can separate itself from the others, and from the
whole. And yet each unit exists in its own right. It upholds value intensity for itself, and this
involves sharing value intensity with the universe. Everything that in any sense exists has two
sides, namely its individual self and its signification in the universe. Also either of these
aspects is a factor in the other.
[MT 11] . . . one characterization of importance is that it is that aspect of feeling whereby a
perspective is imposed upon the universe of things felt. In our more self-conscious
entertainment of the notion [of importance], we are aware of grading the effectiveness of
things about us in proportion to their interest. In this way, we put aside, and we direct
attention, and we perform necessary functions without bestowing the emphasis of conscious
attention. The two notions of importance and perspective are closely intertwined. . . .
Importance is a generic notion which has been obscured by the overwhelming prominence of a
few of its innumerable species. The terms morality, logic, religion, art, have each of them
been claimed as exhausting the whole meaning of importance.
[MT 13-15; cf. PR 23 (15)] Morality consists in the control of process so as to maximize
importance. It is the aim at greatness of experience in the various dimensions belonging to it.
. . . Morality is always the aim at that union of harmony, intensity, and vividness which
involves the perfection of importance for that occasion. The codifications carry us beyond our
own direct immediate insights. They involve the usual judgments valid for the usual occasions
in that epoch. They are useful, and indeed essential, for civilization. But we only weaken
their influence by exaggerating their status. . . . What is universal is the spirit which should
permeate any behaviour system in the circumstances of its adoption. . . . It does concern the
general ideal which should be the justification for any particular objective. . . . Whether we
destroy or whether we preserve, our action is moral if we have thereby safeguarded the
importance of experience so far as it depends on that concrete instance in the world's history.
[EXCERPTS FROM Whitehead's PROCESS AND REALITY (1929), (PR, in page citations,
followed in parentheses by the page citations for the 1978 corrected edition edited by David Ray
Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne)]
[SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY]
[PR 4 (3); practically the same words are used in Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 222; at MT 22
Whitehead says, "Philosophy can exclude nothing." ] Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to
frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of
our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of 'interpretation' I mean that everything of
which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a
particular instance of the general scheme.
[THE FALLACY OF MISPLACED CONCRETENESS]
[PR 11 (7)] [T]he 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' [is confusing the abstract with the concrete;
see Whitehead's Science and the Modern World, pp.75-82, 85, paperback edition p. 51-55, 58].
[PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION]
[PR 23 (15)] Philosophy frees itself from the taint of ineffectiveness by its close relations with
religion and with science, natural and sociological. It attains its chief importance by fusing the
two, namely, religion and science, into one rational scheme of thought. Religion should connect
the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence
in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents. Religion
is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular
purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating
particularity. Philosophy finds religion, and modifies it; and conversely religion is among the
data of experience which philosophy must weave into its own scheme. Religion is an ultimate
craving to infuse into the insistent particularity of emotion that non-temporal generality which
primarily belongs to conceptual thought alone. In the higher organisms the differences of tempo
between the mere emotions and the conceptual experiences produce a life-tedium, unless this
supreme fusion has been effected. The two sides of the organism require a reconciliation in
which emotional experiences illustrate a conceptual justification, and conceptual experiences
find an emotional illustration.
[BASIC METAPHYSICAL PRINCIPLES]
[PR 32 (21)] The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to
conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity
is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive
'many' which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the entities which it synthesizes.
The many become one, and are increased by one. ["Whitehead's novel intuition," as
Hartshorne noted; see below.]
[PR 37 (24)] [The] ontological principle means that actual entities [units of experience] are
the only reasons; so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities.
[PR 254 (167)] [A]part from the experiences of subjects [actual entities, occasions of
experience] there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.
[PR 340-41 (223)] Each task of creation is a social effort, employing the whole universe. Each
novel actuality is a new partner adding a new condition.
[PLATO'S INFLUENCE]
[PR 63 (39)] The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it
consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which
scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas
scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a
great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by
excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.
[GOD]
[PR 519 (342)] When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered . . . The
brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. . . . [PR 520 (342)]
[T]he deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman
imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged
exclusively to Caesar.
[PR 520 (342-43)] [Various] strains of thought . . . fashion God in the image[s] of [1] an
imperial ruler, . . . [2] a personification of moral energy, . . . [3] an ultimate philosophical
principle [, and (4) the Whiteheadian process-relational-organic view, which] does not
emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon
the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds
purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it
unmoved; also it is [520 (343)] a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future;
for it finds its own reward in the immediate present.
[PR 521 (343)] God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to
save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.
[PR 522 (344)] [God] is the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire. His particular relevance
to each creative act as it arises from its own conditioned standpoint in the world, constitutes him
the initial 'object of desire' establishing the initial phase of each subjective aim.
[PR 523, 525 (345-46)] [God is both] [1, God's primordial side or pole] the principle of
concretion--the principle whereby there is initiated a definite outcome from a situation otherwise
riddled with ambiguity [and, 2, God's consequent side or pole] . . . judgment on the world. He
saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness
which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in
the temporal world is mere wreckage. [PR530 (349)] The consequent nature of God is the
fulfillment of his experience by his reception of the multiple freedom of actuality into the
harmony of his own actualization. It is God as really actual, completing the deficiency of his
mere conceptual realization of them
[PR 526 (346)] [God] is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of
truth, beauty, and goodness. [Griffin and Sherburne not that In Whitehead's copy he crossed
out leading, and wrote in the margin both persuading and swaying.]
[PR 532 (351)] . . . God is the great companion--the fellow-sufferer who understands.
[EXCERPTS FROM Charles Hartshorne's "The New Pantheism" (NP) in THE CHRISTIAN
REGISTER, May 20 and 27, 1936, (various omissions and combinations not noted), various
writings in THE ZERO FALLACY AND OTHER ESSAYS IN NEOCLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY
(1997) (ZF) "Whitehead's Novel Intuition," in George L. Kline (ed.) , Alfred North Whitehead:
Essays on His Philosophy and in Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays,
1935-1970, OMNIPOTENCE AND OTHER THEOLOGICAL MISTAKES (1984) (OO), and THE
PHILOSOPHY OF CHARLES HARTSHORNE (PCH) (1991).]
[GOD]
[Until otherwise noted, the following quotations are from NP.] A man has some awareness of the
actions of his bodily cells; but what these cells do individually the man as a whole does not do,
but only what these cells do in concert or together. We are cells in the body of God; for the most
general bearing of our collective acts God is responsible, but not for our individual choices as
such. . . . Omnipotence in the legitimate sense means all possible power over all things, but it
does not mean "all the power in the universe as the power of one thing." [T]he problem of evil is
met in part by admitting a real division of power between God and finite creatures. To say that
we are parts of God is . . . only shorthand for saying that God feels our feelings (the same applies
to our relation to our cells, except that our intuition of cellular feelings is vague and imperfect).
Sympathy is the very meaning of unification in a truly spiritual philosophy.
[THE NATURE OF BODY]
Panpsychism [psychicalism] . . . abolishes the apparent implication of pantheism that God has a
body composed of mere or dead matter. His material body is simply the minds inferior to him (as
a man's cells to the man) collectively dominated by him, but also exercising influence upon him.
A body is the organization of one's immediate servants. All things are the immediate servants of
God, hence all nature is literally his body. But servanthood is limited by the principle of the
division of power, and the action of the master is subject to reaction upon the master. This
removes another paradox in the older theologies of a God upon whose action no counter-action
can be exerted.
[GOD UNCHANGING AND CHANGING]
As the world acquires new content with the happening of new events, the things with which God
sympathizes, the total contents of his sympathetic awareness, are added to and in this sense
changed. Thus ethically God is forever the same unstinted love, but esthetically he is the
ever-changing symphony of the world-process.
[CREATION]
[God is] creative in the only sense in which creation is given any meaning by our experience. To
create is to mold the course of events into correspondence with an idea. Men thus literally create
each other when they mold each other's character by education and friendship. Thus the
paradoxes of timeless purpose, together with those of non-sensitive ("impassive") love, and of
action without reaction, are done away with once for all.
[PERSONALITY]
Personality is the only principle of wholeness, of integration, on a complex level such as the
universe must involve, of which we have any experience. . . .[T]he scientist believes in a kind of
unity or integrity of nature which he does not analyze. What could this unity be? If nature as a
whole is a person of a supreme kind, then of course she will have certain ways of acting, for in
such ways does personality express itself. . . .
[THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD]
[The attributes, characteristics, of God] were posited because they were required for an
intelligible universe. . . . Atheism . . . declares that the world as a whole must forever be
completely unintelligible to us [and] that there is no ultimate standard by which life can be
ordered.
[RELATIONSHIP OF MIND AND BODY]
[OO 80] . . . our cells respond to our feelings (and thoughts) because we respond to their feelings
(and would respond to their thoughts if they had any). Hurt my cells and you hurt me. Give my
cells a healthy life, and they give me a feeling of vitality and at least minimal happiness. My
sense of welfare tends to sum up theirs, and their misfortunes tend to become negative feelings of
mine. I feel what many cells feel, integrating these feelings into a higher unity. I am somewhat
as their deity, their fond heavenly companion. They gain their direction and sense of the
goodness of life partly from intuiting my sense of that goodness, which takes theirs intuitively
into account.
[PSYCHICALISM AND INSENTIENT GROUPS OF ENTITIES]
[PCH 691] Of the dualities connected with psychicalism, the key one for me is, singular and
composite. Groups of sentient entities are not necessarily also sentient (fallacy of
composition), nor are members of a group that as a whole does not feel necessarily insentient
(fallacy of division). From whom did I first learn about this? It was not Whitehead but Leibniz,
who saw it with the clarity of genius nearly three hundred years ago.
[PSYCHICALISM AND THEISM]
[PCH 692] Not only did I reason to psychicalism from my theism, but the converse reasoning
also was important for me. If, without psychicalism, theism is incoherent, so, without theism,
is psychicalism. How can many psyches, each of whom (Plato) is to some extent self-moved as
well as moved by other self-movers, constitute an orderly cosmos [if there were no God]?
[GOD IS LOVE. See also the next section.]
[PCH 700] My ultimate intuitive clue in philosophy is that "God is love" and that the idea of
God is definable as that of the being worthy to be loved with all one's heart, mind, soul, and
entire being. This definition I owe to Paul Tillich. I conclude that therefore love in its most
generalized sense is the principle of principles. It is creativity, stressing one of its aspects.
Whitehead says that "Love, imperfect in us is perfect in God." It is with his help that I have been
able to generalize this to apply to nondivine actualities generally[;] Peirce hints strongly in the
same direction and so does Bergson.
["WHITEHEAD'S NOVEL INTUITION"]
Page references are to Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970.
[161] It may seem that Whitehead's system is not particularly new. Thus he is a theist, an
epistemological realist, a pluralist, an indeterminist, , a metaphysical idealist or psychicalist-in
the sense of denying any mere matter ("vacuous actuality") irreducible to mind or experience as
such-and have there not been many theists, realists, pluralists, indeterminists, psychicalists? . . .
[162] Pluralism is indicated by "the many." There are numerous realities, not just one . . .
But what pluralist [before Whitehead] ever clearly stated that it is the destiny of the many to
enter into a novel unity, an additional reality, which, since we are dealing with a principle, not
a mere fact, must in its turn be united with the others in a further unity, and so on without end?
We have here an admission not merely of emergence, but of emergent or creative synthesis as the
very principle of process and reality. . . . Each item of reality has the destiny of forming material
for endlessly compounded and recompounded acts of synthesis-producing new and more
complex realities.
. . .The many are not one, they become one. . . . First an item is, on its own, through its
own unification of its presupposed items; then it is included in, possessed by, subsequent items.
In other terms, relationships to prior entities are internal to the given entity, but not conversely. . .
.
Again, the "many" are not existing individuals or substances, in the usual sense, but
"actual occasions" or unit-events. "Actual" is opposed to "potential," and in any individual thing
or person there are always both the actual individual past and the potential individual future. In
an occasion, however, there is only the actuality, so far as that unit of reality is concerned. It is
indeed a "potential" for subsequent becoming; but the actualization of this potentiality can never
be the possession of the occasion itself, but only of later occasions. The occasion is, it does not
have, the potentiality, and it is contradictory for a potentiality to be or have its own actualization.
In other language, it is not the items of actuality which change; change is merely
successive becoming . Here Whitehead takes a step beyond Leibniz . . .
[168] It is my conviction that in Whitehead Western metaphysics moved appreciably closer
than ever before to a technical language capable of formulating without inconsistency the content
of the ancient saying, "God is love." This could not be accomplished so long as the magnificent
achievements of the Greeks blinded men to the grave limitations and defects of the platonic (or
perhaps pseudoplatonic) exaltation of the fixed and impassible. The "many become one" only
because the new unity is one of "feeling of feeling," sympathetically appropriating the
feeling content of the previous entities. Experience is never merely of some insentient
"object," but is always experience of others' experience. But what is the root idea of love but
this, participation by one subject in the life of others? This is the very process of realization,
in Whitehead's system. . . .
Almost the whole of Greek ethics is based upon the notion of substances which never
overlap in their being. In one way or another the attempt is made to derive love from self-interest, for instance as a means of remedying deficiency by comparison with the absolute model
of beauty. But if value is essentially found in participating, in living the life of another, then
supreme value must be the supreme form of such integration of the many into one, and then
there cannot be an absolute case, for there can be no final stage. There can only be an
inexhaustible progress of the divine life as summing up ever anew the de facto actualities. . . .
[HARTSHORNE'S REALISTIC IDEALISM]
The following is from Charles Hartshorne, "The Synthesis of Idealism and Realism" in The
Zero Fallacy and Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy edited with an introduction by
Mohammad Valady (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 1997), pp. 138-39; originally published in
Theoria (Sweden) 15, 1949, pp. 90-107:
1. An "object," or that of which a particular subject is aware, in no degree depends upon
that subject. Principle of Objective Independence. "Common sense." Aristotle. G. E.
Moore, R. B. Perry, Whitehead.
2. A "subject," or whatever is aware of anything, always depends upon (derives some of
its character from) the entities of which it is aware, its objects. Principle of Subjective
Dependence. "Common sense." Aristotle, Whitehead.
(1) and (2) constitute "realism."
3. Any entity must be (or at least be destined to become) object for some subject or
subjects. Principle of Universal Objectivity. Berkeley, Whitehead.
4. Any concrete entity is a subject, or set of subjects; hence any other concrete entity of
which a subject, S1, is aware is another subject or subjects (S2; or S2, S3, etc.).
Principle of Universal Subjectivity. "Psychicalism." (I avoid "panpsychism," because
it has been misused.) Leibniz, Peirce, Whitehead, etc.
The doctrine of this article is that these four principles are not in conflict
or competition with each other, but are rather complementary or mutually
supporting. The theory which assets all four principles as forming a coherent
unity may be called, with Whitehead, "reformed subjectivism"; also
"societism," for it amounts to a social theory of reality.
From "Psychicalism and the Leibnizian Principles," in The Zero Fallacy (originally in Studia
Leibnitiana 8 (2), 1976, pp. 154-59), pp. 134-35:
The permanently valuable part of Leibniz's theory of matter can be summed up in what I
call the True Leibnizian Principles. There are four of them.
(a) Nature consists of active singulars;
(b) What seem to our perceptions mere masses of inert, continuous stuff are really composites or
assemblages of active singulars too insignificant, taken one by one, to register distinctly on our
senses;
(c) The only singular activity we can directly and distinctly experience as such is our own
subjectivity or experiencing;
(d) Consequently, our sole hope of understanding nature is to conceive it as a vast society of
active singulars, each of which has some analogy with ourselves as sentient individuals, to the
extent at least of possessing some form, however different from our own human form, of feeling
or experiencing.
From "The True Physicalism" in The Zero Fallacy, p. 150:
Generalizing the idea of mentality completely is the same as generalizing the idea of
actuality completely. . . . Mind (Peirce) is "the sole self-intelligible thing." Nothing can be
simply other than mind, but there are innumerable ways and degrees in which this mind or
experience can be other than that mind or experience. Language in no sense about mind is
language idling, doing no useful work. After three thousand years of trying to find something
simply other-than-mind to talk about why not try to talk adequately about mind in its
inexhaustibly various possible forms?
To Charles Hartshorne's Psychicalism
To Process Philosophy and the New Thought Movement, with links to other process sites.
To Healing in a Process New Thought Perspective
To New Thought Movement Home Page
URL of this page: http://websyte.com/alan/brief.htm
Created Feb. 2, 1997
by Alan Anderson
caa@gis.net
Phone: (727) 934-2585
Latest update Feb 6, 2002
 Visits since March 11, 1997
|
|
