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A. N. Whitehead and the Concept of Metaphysics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
W. E. Hocking has written recently that Whitehead's descriptive generalization of concrete fact, namely, his actual occasion, is “… not a term of description in the direct sense. It is an hypothesis. It cannot be kept in place by pointing to its presence as a datum: it can only hold its own if it proves to be a valuable conceptual tool.” I further advance the thesis that all generality is hypothetical, and holds it own only if it proves to be conceptually useful. This is in accord with Whitehead's statement, the full implications of which have not been taken seriously enough, that metaphysical categories are not dogmatic statements of the obvious; they are tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities. But when these tentative formulations prove conceptually useful or are conceptually employed, they lose their “hypothetical air,” and often pass into what Whitehead calls a false state of “sober obviousness:”
“An old established metaphysical system gains a false air of adequate precision from the fact that its words and phrases have passed into current literature. Thus propositions expressed in its language are more easily correlated to our flitting intuitions into metaphysical truth. When we trust these verbal statements and argue as though they adequately analysed meaning, we are led into difficulties which take the shape of negations of what in practice is presupposed. But when they are proposed as first principles they assume an unmerited air of sober obviousness.”
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References
1 W. E. Hocking, “Whitehead on Mind and Nature,” The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (P. A. Schilpp, Ed.), p. 394.
2 Process and Reality, p. 12.
3 Ibid., p. 20.
4 Apparently among modern physicists it has again lost its obviousness.
5 P. 67.
6 Process and Reality, p. 12.
7 Philosophy, Vol. XVIII, No. 71, (Nov. 1943), p. 230.
8 I note this restriction in defense against those critics who base their dismissal of metaphysics upon the ill-success of particular systems. The argument here put forth is in no way dependent upon the validity of the philosophy of organism. However, the remarkable way in which Whitehead's metaphysics flows from these basic considerations, and penetrates their abstractness, has led me to occasionally refer to that system in the footnotes, as well as to note some fallacious criticisms concerning it.
9 P. 180.
10 Process and Reality, p. 114.
11 Adventures of Ideas, p. 142 (italics not in original text).
12 “The Philosophy of Whitehead,” The, Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (P. A. Schilpp, Ed.), pp. 657–8.
13 E. g., the law of causation, which is a scientific generality, has no “character” apart from some exemplification in an organic or inorganic order.
14 P. 142.
15 The novel entity in its selective process is a grasping into unity of certain forms of definiteness, and hence an exclusion of other incompatible forms: there is an elimination of forms. This is precisely Whitehead's negative prehension of eternal objects. Cf. Process and Reality, p. 366: “An actual entity in the actual world of a subject must enter into the concrescence of that subject by some simple causal feeling [This is the definition of Internal Relations], however vague, trivial, and submerged. … In the case of an eternal object, there is no such necessity. … The actualities have to be felt, while the pure potentials can be dismissed. … The one is stubborn matter of fact; and the other never loses its ‘accent’ of potentiality.”
16 C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (N. Y.: Appleton, 1881), p. 144.
17 Ibid., p. 146 (italics not in original text).
18 Adventures of Ideas, pp. 146–47.
19 Cf. Process and Reality, Pt. II, Ch. III, Sec. II.
20 Whitehead, in accordance with traditional terminology, has called this stable actuality “God.” His Primordial Nature is the non-temporal valuation of eternal objects providing the cosmological “lure,” the evocation of intensities by the envisagement of relevant alternatives; his Consequent Nature enters mutually into the relational complex– – –he is the “fellow-sufferer who understands.”
I do not say that Internal Relations thus demand a concept of “God,” but certainly, if order is admitted, the doctrine seems to necessitate some notion of a non-temporal, “supranatural” actuality “mutually implicated with the remainder of things.”
21 This necessary “governing principle” is the grounds for the (i) and (vii) of the Categorical Obligations in the philosophy of organism. These catergories of Subjective Unity and Subjective Harmony are simply obligations that must follow upon any epochal or atomic concept of becoming. There is an “aim” presupposing the possibility of synthesis as well as the final satisfaction. But philosophers steeped in a tradition of External Relations and substantial entities, mistake the “satisfaction” which is the divisible “superject” for the subject which is the whole atomic process, and thus suppose that Whitehead contradicts himself when he calls the how of feelings constitutive of the subject, “‘subjective’ form.” For instance, George Gentry writes (“Eternal Objects and the Philosophy of Organism,” Philosophy of Science, Volume 13, Number 3 [July 1946], pp. 257–9.): “In so far as he [Whitehead] is consistent in his conception of physical feeling, he cannot conceive of the feelings of a subject as initiating in that subject, or as presupposing that subject as a condition of their occurrence. …” Therefore he concludes, “The conception of subjective form and the correlated interpretations … are not intelligible, except on an orthodox conception of the subject.” By “orthodox” Gentry apparently means a subsisting substance—i.e., External Relations.
Gentry proposes a further criticism of Whitehead, namely, that the doctrine of physical feeling is “a literal passing on of the content of causal entity to the effected entity,” and is thereby “theoretically incompatible with a genuine epigenetic theory of such form and quality,” and must “fall back on the doctrine of the ‘ingression’ of eternal objects” to account at all for novelty. Such a complete confusion of Whitehead's philosophy, including apparently a complete ignorance of Whitehead's concept of the elimination and patterned intensities between the “initial” and “objective” datum in the physical feeling, as well as the varied modes of reception of the objective datum itself (cf. Process and Reality, p. 361), not to mention the (iv) category of obligation, would suggest that Whitehead has been criticized before he has been read.
22 Process and Reality, pp. 168–69.
23 This is apparently what Hocking has in mind when he writes (op. cit., p. 403):“Telos (ϑ'∊λos) ought not to be identified with aberration. Rather, telos is the whole, and causation is its instrument and organ. …
“… there is a complete causal story of the world and at the same time a complete purposive story which is history. …”
There is no escape, I think, under Hocking's assumption, from a universe of fully determined entelechies; individual freedom (causa sui) is sacrificed for God's all-embracing purposes. But whether my criticism be mistaken or not, Hocking misrepresents the Whiteheadian concept of order when he suggests Whitehead identifies telos with aberration. Hocking writes (ibid., p. 399): “If all is organism, no organism can act without effecting organism; and what is ignorant and crude in our molar relations to the infinitely sensitive galaxies of elementary occasions about and within us can only be conceived as blindly destructive.” The criticism entirely neglects the whole notion of compatibility among orders. Complexity can arise only within and upon an environment which has attained sufficient stabilities to permit as well as foster further integration. Our “molar relations” are dependent upon the “infinitely sensitive galaxies,” not conversely. Let Hocking not forget that the wages of sin is death.
24 Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge (Scribners, 1938; Trans. by B. Wall and M. R. Adamson), pp. 36–7.
25 Ibid., p. 37.
26 Jacques Maritain, “Reflections on Necessity and Contingency,” Essays in Thomism (R. E. Brennan, O. P., Ed.), pp. 29–30.
“It is the task of philosophy to work at the concordance of ideas conceived as illustrated in the concrete facts of the real world. It seeks those generalities which characterize the complete reality of fact, and apart from which any fact must sink into an abstraction. But science makes the abstraction, and is content to understand the complete fact in respect to only some of its essential aspects. … A philosophic system should present an elucidation of concrete fact from which the sciences abstract. Also the sciences should find their principles in the concrete facts which a philosophic system presents.” 29
27 The word “transgress” must remain incurably abstract apart from some scheme of ultimate generalities which forms the basis for order and disorder. Whitehead's doctrine of conformal and non-conformal propositions provides the way in which the philosophy of Organism resolves the abstraction. Cf. Process and Reality, pp. 284–5: “When a non-conformal proposition is admitted into feeling, the reaction to the datum has resulted in the synthesis of fact with the alternative potentiality of the complex predicate. A novelty has emerged in creation. The novelty may promote or destroy order; it may be good or bad. But it is new, a new type of individual. …”
Actually the “law” is a formulation of the defining characteristic of the society, and does not account for the idiosyncrasies of the particular subordinate societies within it. Cf. Adventures of Ideas, Ch. XIII.
28 Maritain's world is apparently like a room in which innumerable mechanical toys, constituting the “determinate series,” and determined by their particular structure (what Maritain calls “essential nature”), are let loose to create the clash and confusion of a contingent world. The toys, with their determinate natures, exemplify causality. However, science is not content with this concept of causality. There are geometrical laws, laws of force, gravity, sound, etc., which would as well render the clash determinate. The notion of contingency apart from some element of freedom is nonsense. Of course Maritain introduces a “free agent,” but the point is, that he attempts to account for contingency apart from this introduction.
29 Adventures of Ideas, p. 187 (italics not in original text).
A. E. Murphy writes in criticism of this passage (“Whitehead and the Method of Speculative Philosophy,” The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, P. A. Schilpp, Ed., p. 357):
“Speculative philosophy is in search of those generalities which apply to everything that is actual, or that actually exists. But it does not reach such generalities by observing what everything that we elsewhere take to be ‘actual’ is like and achieving a formula which applies in the same sense to all such entities. Its generalizations apply not to all ‘facts’ (as we should more usually understand them) but to the final or ultimate facts, and to others insofar as they can be shown to be abstracted from, or appearances of, those taken to be fundamentally and completely real.”
Murphy has seemed quite pleased with this criticism which forms the central argument of his polemic against metaphysics (He restates it in the “Symposium: Can Speculative Philosophy Be Defended?”, W. T. Stace, Ralph M. Blake, Arthur E. Murphy, The Philosophical Review, Vol. LII, 1943.), and it is unfortunate that no one has taken the time to point out its conspicuous self-contradictions.
The generalizations of speculative philosophy do “apply” to all “facts,” as we more usually understand them, whether they be molecules, stones, organisms, minds, ad infinitum; the validity of the scheme, or any generality, is tested solely by its “applicability.” But, if Murphy's criticism is in any way meaningful, he does not employ the term “apply” in this sense. He apparently means that the ultimate generalities are not descriptive of all the “facts,” as we more usually understand them, but that they are descriptive only of “final fact;” at any rate, this is Whitehead's position. But this simply means that they are descriptive of the concrete elements, “‘final” for any philosophy of Internal Relations, in experience. Thus Murphy conceives the “facts,’ as we should more usually understand them,” to be abstractions; and obviously the generality, which is formed solely in an attempt, by application, to resolve these abstractions, cannot be descriptive of them as abstractions. Murphy should reflect carefully upon Whitehead's statement: “Philosophy is explanatory of abstractness, and not of concreteness.” Further, Speculative Philosophy certainly doesn't reach its generalities by “observing what everything that we elsewhere take to be ‘actual’ is like,” if Murphy insists, as above, that what we take to be actual are necessarily abstract notions.
Thus, once one penetrates the ambiguity of Murphy's words, his assumption that experience is not “of the real” becomes evident. This also explains his religious awe towards the mysterious “essential inner nature” of the world (cf. ibid., p. 362). But it is unfortunate that Murphy does not make the admission, deny Internal Relations, and thus save such fruitless wadings within his verbiage.
30 Process and Reality, p. 162.
31 Adventures of Ideas, p. 262.
32 Process and Reality, p. 9.
33 Ibid., p. 5 (italics not in original text). The “indefinables” are philosophy's intuitional footholds. But this is no plea for irrationalism. Subjectivity in se indefinable and thus communicable only in terms of its vivid accidents, is not thereby irrational, if rationality means knowledge of the real and not merely predication.
34 The term abstraction does not here refer to the necessary suppression of irrelevant details within an adequate metaphysics.
35 Ibid., p. 27 (italics not in original text).
36 Cf. Aristotle's criticism of Plato and the Pythagoreans (Metaphysics, A, 987b, 11–14):
37 Process and Reality, pp. 4–5.
38 Modes of Thought, p. 168.
39 Ibid., p. 169.
40 Ibid., p. 170–71.
41 Ibid.
42 Process and Reality, p. 13.
43 Mathematics and the Good,“ The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (P. A. Schilpp, Ed.), p. 681 (italics not in original text).
44 Cf. Science and the Modern World, p. 65: “You will observe that I do not hold Induction to be in its essence the derivation of general laws. It is the divination of some characteristics of a particular future from the known characteristics of a particular past. The wider assumption of general laws holding for all cognizable occasions appears a very unsafe addendum to attach to this limited knowledge.” See Process and Reality, Pt. II, Ch. IX, Sec. VI, for a more detailed study of how induction presupposes Internal Relations.
45 Process and Reality, p. 7.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid., p. 13.
48 Ibid., p. 11.
49 Ibid., p. 12.
50 Process and Reality, p. 6 (italics not in original text).
51 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
52 “Mathematics and the Good,” The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (P. A. Schilpp, Ed.), p. 679.
53 This analysis of components abstracts from the concrescent unity out of which subjectivity arises. Thus science abstracts from the subjectivity of an entity, and so is left completely helpless in explaining the presence of emergence. The world of science is thus a world of “data” and the causal relation of these data in particular orders. When this order is mistaken for metaphysical order, the data become externally related, determined, and nature is reduced to mechanism. (Dualism is a subterfuge occasioned by the scientist's inability to abstract from his own subjectivity.) The whole atomic event in the act of synthesizing its multiplicity of relationships, is the “subjectivity.” Science demands a divisible continuity, but the actualization is atomic: there is a becoming of continuity but no continuity of becoming; i.e., “continuity concerns what is potential; whereas actuality is incurably atomic.” Cf. Process and Reality, p. 95.
54 A. C. Pegis, Introduction to the Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (A. C. Pegis, Ed.), p. xlviii.
55 Process and Reality, p. 239.
56 Thus Hume reduced causality to an “habitual anticipation of repetition.” Filmer S. C. Northrop writes (“Whitehead's Philosophy of Science,” The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, P. A. Schilpp, Ed., pp. 186–7): “But even if we grant the presence in sense awareness of the ”control“ and the ”power“ which Whitehead identifies with causality, this has no more to do with causality as it actually enters into physical science than has Hume's notion of an habitual expectation of repetition … the concept of causality in the science of physics is not given empirically as a deliverance of sense awareness.” Northrop has mistaken Whitehead's notion of “causal inheritance,” which is simply a generalization from experience, for the scientific “causal law,” which is a generalization from the observations of order in our epoch. Northrop's further trust (ibid.) in the causal law's predictory power over future behaviour, is a sheer faith in the stability of order; it goes beyond the initial generalization, and involves a metaphysical assumption. Northrop apparently posits the order as metaphysically ultimate, and so assumes External Relations, otherwise he would have recognized that Whitehead's metaphysical notion of causal inheritance was never meant to be confused with the scientific generalization from the cosmological stability of orders. The scientific law is of secondary importance: there is chaos; but the whole rational pursuit depends upon “causal inheritance,” upon experience of the concrete.
57 “Immortality,” The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (P. A. Schlipp, Ed.), pp. 694–5.
58 Ironically enough for philosophy, the greatest contemporary whose epistemology is based upon this principle, G. Santayana, is perhaps the least primitive of men.
59 Cf. Process and Reality, pp. 246–7:
When experience is limited by definition to this reaction, to mere “presentational intuition,” knowledge must be conceived as the entertainment of given data; but “mere data are mere ablata: ‘blind spots’ in the field of cognition.” The latter clauses just quoted I owe to H. F. Hallett. Cf. his excellent article (which shows the contemporary gravitation towards Whitehead) entitled “The Essential Nature of Knowledge” in Philosophy, Vol. XX, No. 77 (Nov. 1945). Hallett writes: “I think, however, that our naive acceptance of the presentational object as extrinsic is independent of categorical thought, and has a humbler and less satisfactory source in the psycho-physical constitution of the percipient as it is embedded in the constitution of his world … the whole situation is expounded as a complex of actions rather than as a relation of a mental action with a passive object. That such a situation is confused in a high degree is, of course, admitted—indeed, contended: in particular, the emergence of objective content from a relation of actions requires elucidation which is not easily forthcoming. But to take this as merely ‘given’ is no alleviation. … What is ‘given’ in knowledge, as given, is an epistemic privation: it can be given only as problem capable only of speculative solution.”
60 Cf. “Experience, Knowledge and Value: A. Rejoinder,” The Philosophy of John Dewey (P. A. Schilpp, Ed.) p. 533, footnote.
61 Process and Reality, p. 67.
62 The Unity of Philosophical Experience, p. 312. The undertakers of the dead “absolutistic” metaphysics are now being buried by a philosophy in which generality is accorded its proper status. The valid demand for a “systematic scheme as the basis for proper relevance” made by Absolutism, is established; but, by a dismissal of External Relations, the paralysis of nature, which followed from the old imposition, is exchanged for a qualitatively emerging nature.
63 Adventures of Ideas, p. 144.
64 Process and Reality, p. x.
65 Modes of Thought, pp. 147–8.
66 “Mathematics and the Good,” The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (P. A. Schilpp, Ed.), p. 681.
67 Process and Reality, p. 22 (italics not in original text).
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid., p. 14.