Whitehead and Process Theology
- Influences on Whitehead’s Thought
- Whitehead’s Metaphysics
- Process Theology
- Science and Modern World
- Summary
Influences on Whitehead’s Thought
Hegel’s Evolutionary Idealism
Let’s start with influences that shapes Whitehead’s thinking. The first is Hegel’s evolutionary idealism. They buy into the theory of evolution, but they are not metaphysical naturalists, they are idealists. Their point is while there are underlying realities of the nature of spirit, there are various degrees to which that an immaterial free creative spirit is been fully manifested in the phenomenon of nature and human existence and human history. So the evolutionary process, biological evolution, cultural evolution, is understood in terms the dialectical unfolding of the absolute, to a point where that freedom of spirit becomes self conscious rather than just implicit and unconscious. The self conscious expression of free creative spirit in culture is the zenith towards which the evolutionary process moves. That kind of the evolutionary thought was in an idealist context, so consciousness is the key. Obviously unfolding self consciousness is not substance, but process, so you have change in the basic notion of reality, from the changelessness of some basic stuff, to some dialectical process. Like Hegel, Whitehead does a phenomenology of the process, of consciousness. And process is not a mechanistic thing, but the model is more organic than mechanistic. The ingredients are not atomistic in the sense of no relationships with anything else, but they are rather relationships. All of this translates to Whitehead expect the idealism. He is going to be an evolutionary naturalist.
Bradley speaks of appearances and qualities, the substance quality distinction as being shear abstraction, not concrete reality by themselves and Whitehead agrees. The thing that he disagrees with Bradley’s is idealism. Bradley maintains that the empiricism of the classic sort that came from John Locke is guilty of all sorts of faulty abstractions, the primary secondary quality distinction, the substance quality distinction, which Berkeley shows that is an abstraction because how do you know what the substance there is if you only know the qualities. The space time distinction while certainly in modern physics it becomes an abstraction. Representational knowledge, ideas that represents something else are abstractions. Bradley talks about the degrees of reality in the world of appearances, which is precisely the language Whitehead likes. There are various degrees to which what is the basic nature of things is explicit in the hierarchy of being.
In that evolutionary idealism in 19th century, there is another note that is less explicit in Hegel, that is the romanticism of the 19th century. I’m not sure Whitehead got this from Hegel as he did from Wordsworth. Wordsworth is seeing the philosophical content of the romanticist reaction against the mechanistic science and the rationalism of the Enlightenment.
Modern Science
Whitehead was first of all a mathematician and scientist, he cooperated with Bertrand Russell in a work that introduces symbolic logic into the 20th century. The book is called Principles of Mathematics showing that mathematics is reducible to formal logic. Therefore introducing mathematical symbolism in formal logic, so as to eliminate the ambiguity of variables and made possible the formalized deductive systems. He was very interested in logic and therefore the philosophy of science. During his stay at University of London, he published three works in theoretical physics. How does modern science influences philosophy? One is developmental biology, both at the macro level, evolutionary theory and micro level, genetics. You’ll find he talks about the philosophical significance of three developments of modern physics. First of all, electromagnetic field theory, whereby we think in terms of force fields, rather than of bodies of gravitational pulls. Second, quantum physics, where the basic unit are units of energy, rather than solid palates of matter. And third, Einsteins’ relativity theory, including space time relativity. Whitehead also weaved it into his metaphysics. He is a naturalist rather than an idealist. He is interested in modern physics, he is going to be scientific realist, taking science as telling us in a provisional way about reality, the idealist had a phenomenal view of science, Whitehead has a realist view of science. Yet both of them have the same ends, namely preserving a romanticized view of life, nature and insisting that there is no ultimate separation between fact and value, the world of nature is value-laden. The idealist wanted to say that and therefore rejected the scientific account of reality. Whitehead wants to say that but he accepts the scientific account of reality, how come? Because of the change of modern science. He maintains that developmental biology and energistic physics and relativity theory enable us to say that the physical facts of mundane existence are loaded with value, meaning, purpose. He’s coming back to a teleological interpretation of a scientific universe, so he is going to be a philosophical naturalist, who’s going to find moral aesthetic value inherent in things. He talks about science in his writing and takes it that philosophy has a two fold function with regards to science. One is to critique scientific abstractions, the abstractions which takes theoretical notion like equality, for being ultimate reality, a mistaken abstraction. And he critiques mechanistic science. The second function is to engage in what he calls flights of speculative imagination based on modern science, in other words, to extrapolate from science into a speculative metaphysical scheme and likens those flights of speculative imagination to what plane travel was like in the 1920s. Flights of philosophical speculation always taking off from and returning to the facts of science and ordinary experience, concrete experience. Not the abstractions of an empiricist like Locke, but the sort of experience that we can phenomenologically describe introspectively. Self-consciousness is the window of reality.
You’ll find in the light of that, he is always denouncing certain fallacies, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and the fallacy of simple location. If concrete is the opposite of abstract, you can tell what the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is, assigning concreteness to shear abstraction, it’s the fallacy of taking abstractions to be real. He’s always accusing mechanistic science of that. The other is the fallacy of simple location, of assuming that there are fixed points in a uniform space and uniform time in a Newtonian thought. Failing to see that motion is in both place and time, relativity of spatial relationship to time and consequently the notion of a simple location just is an abstraction that may be useful at some levels but useless at others.
The Alexandrian Church Fathers
Whitehead is trying to buy the logos doctrine from the Alexandrian Church Fathers. He is very much impressed by middle Platonism which develops the logos concept in talking about the ordered structure of nature. To begin with, just as a Hegelian would want to say that all of the subsequent philosophy as a series of footnotes to Hegel, Whitehead says the whole history of philosophy is a series footnotes to Plato and you begin to see that the thing he appreciates about Hegel is the view of the processes of nature being basically of the nature of spirit created, but with a dialectical logos structure. What appeals to him is the logos conception and the idea that in the emanations a from God the good. In the emanations from God the good, that logos structure transfers to every finite manifestation. That way of accounting for the ordered-ness of nature, the goodness of nature which appeals particularly as a way for finding a basis for value in a world of fact.
Whitehead’s Metaphysics
Category of the Ultimate
He’s a naturalist rather than idealist, but is influenced by 19th century idealist and romanticist, how is he going to describe what is the ultimate? He doesn’t say the ultimate reality as if the ultimate reality is one reality and there are many others as well. That would be a theist’s language, the ultimate reality is God and there are all sorts of lesser realities. The ultimate reality for Whitehead is something that pulses through everything. It’s creativity, that is not a thing, it’s a property. It’s not a substance metaphysic to have the ultimate as a thing. Creativity is a process of the emergence of novelty and that’s what’s ultimate in all of novelty and creativity. This creativity is not God. For Bradley, God is simply the highest manifestation of the absolute. For Whitehead God is simply the highest manifestation of creativity. How are you going to describe the process of creativity? Idealists are looking through the lens of self-consciousness of the larger screens, the reality. So Whitehead tries to look at some creative event that we know by immediate experience and respectively. The simplest thing is the experience of sense perception, that’s precisely where Hegel begins his Phenomenology of Mind, subjective spirit, sensation and perception. In as much as he is describing this experience of sense perception introspectively, he is giving us a phenomenological description, phenomenological method like in Hegel.
Three Modes of Perceptual Experience
He distinguishes in the perceptual experience three modes. The first is perception in the mode of causal efficacy, second is perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, third is perception of the mode of symbolic reference. As he develops it, it’s always in contrast to John Locke’s theory of perception. In John Locke’s theory, ideas comes first. And for Whitehead it’s utterly mistaken, he calls it a fallacy of the primacy of presentational immediacy, the cognitive content, the idea. Causal efficacy is affective rather than cognitive consciousness. His point is if we consider the perceiver to the entire psychosomatic unity, the entire human organism, then from a phenomenological standpoint in terms of consciousness of the initial thing is the causal efficacy, there is some effect casually that is felt. And mislead by the clarities of sense perceptions, Locke talks otherwise, but even in visual perception, if the light is sufficiently bright, it’s felt first. In John Locke, the idea comes first, then the question what caused it. And you have to have a cause effect argument of purely intellectual sort. From the idea, which is thought to what caused us to think the idea. The ideas are representation and what it is out there that causes it we don’t know for sure. This means our knowledge of reality is always indirect, it has to be logically inferred. But for Whitehead, in that experience of causal efficacy, there is a direct experience of that cause affecting me. What we have then is, on this basis, a direct knowledge of the existence of a real object. Contrary to David Hume that we only know constant conjunctions, he’s arguing we do experience causal connections, Hume is wrong. Hume stumbled on the fallacy of the primacy of presentational immediacy. This awareness of causal efficacy has nothing to do with constant conjunctions. The presentational immediacy provides a hypothetical idea, what you do is to take that idea and refer it to the cause of stimulus, notice that idea is not a representational copy, it’s a symbol. We take an idea and use that as a symbol in referring to. We have an indirect knowledge of the essence of an object. The essence is what it is. The existence is that it is. So you have a direct awareness of that something is and an indirect awareness of what it is.
What is it which is the cause of the perceptual experience, that creates the experience, the perception. First there are objective givens that affect the present state of consciousness. Second, these are what he calls eternal possibilities, ideas are simply possibilities come to mind. Third factor is decision. The decision is selecting from the eternal possibilities proposed by stimulus.
His point is in every experience, every event, in the entire cosmic process, there is first causal efficacy, real causal process, there is secondly the entertaining of possibilities. And there is the decision. Whitehead’s basic question is what’s the source of all those eternal possibilities. God the logos, who is not a creator in any sense of ex nihalo, and isn’t the causal force. God is just the orderer, the Providence, the logos. That’s why he’s not a theist, not a deist, or pantheist. He doesn’t fit into classifications.
The objective data are simply other events, other space time events which causally affect the present status of this stream. The eternal possibilities he calls the eternal objects, not objects in the sense of substance, but in the sense of objects of thought, ideas. Events he sometimes calls actual entities. His metaphysics is the one where actual entities comprising a space time process with eternal objects which are logical possibilities of what could be and decisions which account for the individuality of things, what makes this an individual perception. A decision which in every case brings satisfaction, not necessarily a motive satisfaction, but in a sense that the causal stimulus is assimilated in some way into the self. So it becomes an ingredient in the ongoing of individuality. So the process involves individual things causally related to other individual things, out of which there is room of all sorts of creative possibilities, only some of which are actualized and those are actualized by virtue of decisions.
This kind of event is the paradigm and that’s where we can understand gradualism. While in perception it’s a conscious thing and you have consciousness of all three of things, but in other degrees of reality, it may not be conscious, so that there is a low grade analog to decision, which is not conscious, and in which nobody is deciding but it’s the cutoff point in which the confluence of events, certain possibilities is to be sure.
Process Theology
Metaphysics(Review)
I want concentrate particularly on Whitehead’s conception of God, but in order to do that, we have to have understanding on his overall philosophical scheme, particularly his metaphysics because it goes without saying I suppose that how one conceives of God and God’s relationship to nature is really going to be dependent on the metaphysical scheme but God concept is system dependent in that sense. Because how you conceive God in relationship to nature depends on how you conceive of nature. For Whitehead that basic constituents of all reality are not substances with an enduring unchanging identity but rather events, events can be momentary. He tends to call those tiny events actual occasions and reserves the word event and sometimes the word entity for more large-scale events. No matter what event you are talking about, all events can be described in three constituent elements. The three factors are the objective data which amount to the efficient causes, eternal possibilities and the decision. And I repeat this simply because it’s very important to understand it so that if you conceive of a process going along, what initiates a new event, but what initiates a new event is the intersection of two processes, so that the objective data of the second process intersects with the existing state of affairs of the first process, so that at that point of intersection there are objective data and they’re going to make a difference. Let’s say cause effect mechanism.
In human consciousness, the objective data are we’re aware of them through what he calls physical prehension(prehension is the shorted version of apprehension or comprehension). To prehend something is simply to accept it, to be aware of it, for it to affect you. He points out that there can be positive and negative prehension, but the new event by virtue of objective data that are physically prehended and that is an affective kind of experience, not a cognitive experience. So he criticizes the representational theory knowledge in people like Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Kant by saying that they give primacy to the cognitive, primacy to the concept, the idea, but the first initiating thing in the perceptual experience, a perceptual event is not the idea but the causal stimulus, the affective, not the cognitive. So even in unconscious being there is a low grade equivalent to physical prehension, namely the cause effect mechanism. Eternal possibilities are simply abstract logical possibilities which are brought to bear by virtue of the objective data, what’s going to be effect of this objective data of this new experience can go various ways and those eternal possibilities in conscious experience of course are ideas which are apprehended by what he calls conceptual apprehension which plainly is cognitive. So the idea is not the primary thing as if an experience you’re just bombarded with ideas, Hume was more on target, its forceful and vivacious impressions and the ideas follow, it’s the affective first rather than cognitive. He recognizes that if there are logical possibilities, there are objective logical possibilities, that is to say, in the very nature of things there are these logical possibilities, they’re not something we invent. We may actualize or recognize the possibilities but we don’t create them. So in that sense the possibilities are there whether we know it or not. So you find him in his later writings calling these eternal objects. In response to this causal stimulus of this objective data, there arise all sorts of possibilities which in conscious processes we are aware of and unconscious process they are still there. And from those possibilities what determines the future is what he calls the decision, in human consciousness it’s often a conscious decision. But even in unconscious processes, biological, physical, there’s a cutoff point, a selectivity that’s involved, where not all possibilities can be actualized and so some are in the natural course of events. This decision is what provides, what he calls a subjective aim because in the decision the possibility which is selective become the goal at which you aim. The initial subjective aim is that which is presented by the natural causal process. And in any process that’s determined, then the initial subjective aim is simply the subjective aim of this new event, subjective in the sense that it becomes some intrinsic end for the new event by virtue of the new data which has been absorbed into it. Notice that he’s got a teleological explanation of everything, it’s not a mechanistic universe, it’s a teleological one. In the case of beings with consciousness, that initial subjective aim can become a modified subjective aim, so that you might resist the affect of something upon you and handle the new input in some other way. This is the way it is for all events. There is a graudalism in varying degrees and this is conscious or unconscious across the whole range of things in heaven and earth. The notion of the subjective aim is teleological, which leads to the completion of the event. It’s as if there is a genetic process so that you’ve got a conception not in the cognitive sense, but in a biological sense because of the causal stimulus, you have the developmental process with possibilities of merging and being selected during embryonic development if you like until the birth of the new event with the decision and the achievement in maturity, his subjective aim, and then the mature event gradually subside the data. We can also view this as thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which got from the influence of the Hegelian tradition. The whole world process has the dialectical structure. In the synthesis the objective data are preserved but transcended by the new possibilities that they provide. The completion of the event then leads to what he calls satisfaction and again notice that’s a term drawn from conscious perceptual experience, it’s the paradigm. And in perceptual experience is the satisfaction when you rarely see as you have opportunity to absorb it. It is for Whitehead an aesthetic satisfaction, which is initially in a continental Germanic sense of sensory satisfaction, but it’s also aesthetic in the English language sense of it. How do you describe this aesthetic satisfaction which is the culmination of the experience? It’s that everything in the event, all these three elements come together to provide a unity so that the event is one feeling. This satisfaction is an ordered unity, harmony of the opposites, contrasts of actuality and possibility, the intensity of feeling, that’s associated with the ordered harmony of the opposing ingredients within the overall experience. That’s the way some people explain, describe the experience of beauty in the arts, a contrasts harmonized in that final moment where the symphony brings it all together, and he uses those aesthetic analogies. In those events, the good is what contributes to that satisfaction, the good is instrumental towards beauty, explicitly for Whitehead. His ethic is a utilitarian ethic, good a means to aesthetic ends and evil is the fragmentary transitory opposition to that harmony, either by virtue of resisting the merging aim with its synthesis or by virtue of sheer triviality that gets to be boring. You see then this kind of characterization of events like perceptual experience is the characterization of a person’s life, of all cosmic history and remember his category of the ultimate that says the ultimate explanatory category is creativity, the way in which novelty emerges out of the conflict of opposites, how one event gives birth to another event, in dying we live. If this the nature of the world of process, the creative process, what does he say about human being? He says that human being is essentially what David Hume said about personal identity. Personal identity as we know it in consciousness is simply a bundle of perceptions, a present memory of past experiences is the only personal identity you can describe. Whitehead brings out of those perceptions over a period of time, but it’s the continuity of the experiences which gives identity. But the human self he says is simply a society of events with a unifying structure.
Whitehead on God
Now you look the three ingredients of all events, keep in mind God for Whitehead is not an exception to these metaphysical generalities, but is an example. So God is conceived in the image of perceptual experience but put it in another way God is understood in terms of the experience of being God, the self consciousness is the lens projected on the ultimate. He says there are three phases in the nature of God, if you like the three fold nature of God with respect to any event. The three fold nature of God is simply another example of a threefold event. In other words, the being that we call God is, like any other being, an event, an everlasting event. What he talks about in the threefold nature is the primodial nature of God, his consequent nature and the superjective nature. The superjective nature of God means a God as it were give something to nature, to the world. The consequent nature of God means God get something from the nature. And you have to start with the primodial nature of God to know what God begins with and how and event affects God and what God gives back to event. What’s everlasting is the primodial nature of God and consequent and superjective nature are changing. Primodial nature is the ordered harmony of all eternal objects of eternal possibilities. In other words, you have to think of God as the sum total of all logical possibilities, and then see how it echos the past. For St. Augustine, those eternal forms are their conceptual possibilities, archetypes in the mind of God. That’s what Augustine got from those Alexandrian church fathers, from that logos tradition in the early church that was so influenced by the middle Platonism. What Whitehead is doing is picking up the Platonic theory of forms as it was translated from the middle Platonism into the logos language of the Stoics that the Christian church adopted and applied to the creator God and the incarnated logos. As nature itself, development takes place, natural events God who is all experiencing experiences the world and he can be touched with the feeling of what’s going on in the world. So God feels what’s going on. So here is then a conceptual prehension of possibilities, here is physical prehension of objective data of what’s going on and God experiencing in that very affective sense, what’s going on in the world while knowing conceptually all sorts eternal possibilities for harmonizing. In his superjective nature, he offers possibilities to the world process. It’s God who provides the initial subjective aim, God, not some blind mechanistic force. And of course in human experience, human beings have freedom to resist the will of God, freedom to modify what God in his goodness offers those aim. God’s primodial corresponds to the second ingredient in a natural event, God’s consequent nature corresponds to the first ingredient in a natural event, God’s superjective nature corresponds to the third. As the next event comes in the pipeline, the primodial nature of God incorporates some all possibilities for this new situation. It’s a God who orders the universe, God is the principle of order, or to use his term, God is the principle of concretion. Concretion is his synonym for the word concrescence which means growing together. It’s God who keeps the growth going into that harmony of the symphony. Notice that God doesn’t originate it, the category of the ultimate is the creativity, there’s always been creativity and primary example is God. Whitehead seems to think that there are natural processes going on one or another going all the way back and there’s no reason in Whitehead that God was the first such process. Nor does he think him as God who is the terminator. In other words he doesn’t have an eschatology. The harmony is being created all the time and it’s an everlasting harmony. He doesn’t think history has some terminus towards which it’s moving. He also calls the God as the principle of limitation. Because by virtue of his superjective nature there are only limited possibilities available. The world process is not going to self destruct, it couldn’t if that’s not in the possibilities. His emphasis is on the creativity of God, exercised with loving care in providing initial subjective aim in any event in the entire world process. It’s not pantheism, not traditional theism in any sense that God is a creator. Some theologian see it a kind of panenthism, everything goes on within the experience that is God. This is a process philosophy, not substance philosophy, so don’t look for a substratum, an entity, a thing that thinks and feels, but thinking and feeling, that’s what’s real. In his major work “Process and Reality” there is a section on God and the world. In the great formative of theistic philosophy which ended in the rise of Mohammedanism, three streams of thought emerge. First God in the image of an imperial ruler, second God as a personification of a moral energy, third, God as an image of an ultimate philosophical principle. These can be associated respectively with the divine Caesars, the Hebrew prophets and Aristotle. The history of theistic philosophy exhibits various stages of combination of these three diverse ways of entertaining the problem, however, there is the Galilean origin of Christianity, that doesn’t fit well with any of the three main strands. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world which slowly and in quietness operates by love. And it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom that is not of this world. It doesn’t look into the future but find its reward in its immediate presence. He talks of leading by love and he has a long disposition about love which he takes to be eros, not agape. Eros is the Platonic word for love, which is a love for good. It’s in this overarching a love for good that God has, a desire for good and it’s that which in the initial aim that God gives the initial subjective aim is being spread abroad. God’s relationship to the world for Whitehead is formal cause and final cause but not the efficient cause, which means God does not act, if by act you mean what is meant in biblical history, the mighty acts of God in the history of Israel, in the incarnation and second coming. And his underlying nature his metaphysics precludes God from acting. The reason that God can not act is that Whitehead’s God is essentially a Hegelian God, a God of Schleiermacher, who is more a ground of being than a personal agent. So these agency categories of acting don’t apply. So just as in the liberal theology of the 19th century you have no special revelation, it’s all imminent from within, you have no supernatural act, it’s all natural process by virtue of the divine creativity within.
Science and Modern World
The first seven or eight chapters are about the historical relationship of science to philosophy, so it’s really science in the modern world, in relationship to modern philosophy. He sees philosophy as having a two fold task. There is a critical task and a speculative task. Criticism of theoretical constructs, to see if they are rationally coherent and empirically evident. In relationship to science, it’s the critiquing of scientific abstractions. In the first five or six chapters he is critiquing the theoretical abstractions of mechanistic science. The second speculative function is the positive function of philosophy, to propose a more consistent, more empirically evident speculative theories. This is the way it was in the first three decades of 20th century, after 1935 arises logical positivism, with the rejection of metaphysical speculation so only the first function remains which comes to spoken of as analytical function, so analytical philosophy, the analysis of arguments, concepts and theories for their logical structure and empirical adequacy. But with a demise of logical positivism, all we have now is ghost lurking behind other disciplines than philosophy and speculative metaphysics is now alive and well.
As you read the book, the first thing strikes you is the basic presupposition of science, which he calls the order of nature. In the second chapter he is discussing the mathematical order of nature. While he calls it a mathematical order of logical order he also calls it aesthetic order. He seem to have an aesthetic theory of value, and all values seemed ultimately to be reduced to aesthetic values. He’s saying that this is a value laden order of nature. Values are not simply utilitarian, it’s not something that we create or add, bring to nature, nature itself is value laden. So he speaks of the aesthetic order as being an ideal of the future. The process is directional, to the achievement of value. It’s a value achieving process. It’s that notion of value achieving natural order that makes Whitehead revolutionary in comparison with modern science and earlier philosophy. The general theme of the book will be to critique the kind of supposed natural order which is value free, bear blind fact, blind processes, causal mechanism without rhyme or reason, and at the same time tracing the developing case for the teleological view that he has. In both the critical and speculative function, he has not only criteria for judgment in terms of empirical adequacy and rational coherence, but he has two points of reference. One is developments of modern science, but he’s perfectly aware the modern science is simply dealing with further scientific abstractions. What makes the abstractions of modern science any better than the abstractions of mechanistic science. The other point of reference is concrete and naive experience, and that comes out in the example we are using in explaining the conception of event, where the example was simply the concrete experience of perceiving, and his phenomenological description of a self conscious perceptual event is the lens through which he is able to see everything else. That is why he has that delightful chapter on the romantic reaction that’s loaded with poetry, because he takes poetry is dealing with concrete human experience, not with theoretical abstraction, but it’s capturing the experience. He takes the romantic poets to react against that aesthetically sterile universe of mechanistic science.
Incidentally he speaks in one place of Christianity as a religion in search of a metaphysics, what he means is that the metaphysical systems which have been pressed into service are inadequate, what Christianity needs is a more adequate metaphysics. And I think that granted is his conception of Christianity which is that of the Galilean peasant, his metaphysic is a metaphysic for which Christian religion may be looking, which may account for the process theology that has come out of it.
When he talks about 16th, 17th century, he says the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible root matter spread throughout space in a flux of configurations, in itself such material is senseless, valueless, purposeless, it just does what it does, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which don’t spring from the nature of its being. External relationship between A and B does not spring from the nature of a things being, in other words, they are artificial relationships imposed on A and B, incidental, which leaves A and B essentially the same as before. Classic example is Descartes’ mind-body relationship, mind with its own function is a separate entity from body with its mechanical functions. He’s going to be arguing for internal relations. Internal relations are relationships that pertain by virtue of the essential nature of A and B. He’s picking up on Hegel’s internal relationship within a process and transferring that into a naturalistic context. It’s this function, a valueless, purposeless, senseless matter following a fixed routine imposed by external relations, the mechanistic universe that I call scientific materialism. It’s an assumption I’ll challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation of which we have now arrived.
The faith in the order of nature, which is made possible the growth of science, is a particular example of a deeper faith. This faith in the order of nature can not be justified by inductive generalization. The inductive generalization beyond present experience involves the principle of causation which we have no empirical evidence. The faith springs from direct inspection of the nature of things disclosed in our immediate present experience. To experience this faith is to know that being ourselves we are more than ourselves to know that our experience dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depth of reality, to know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that they should find themselves in a system of things, to know that this system includes the harmony of logical rationality, the harmony of aesthetic achievement, to know that while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe as iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal, molding the general flux and its broken progress towards finer and subtler issues.
In chapter 2, the chapter of mathematics, he talks about the order of nature in the Platonic and Pythagorean tradition that was conceived to be a mathematical order as it was in Descartes and modern science. This notion of a mathematical order is what in the Greek tradition underlay the theory of forms, so that what you have is a notion of an eternal range of order, whereas the things in this world have only vibratory existence, meaning that they come and go. The unit of reality in his theme is event. The question is whether this vibrant existence has any meaning or not. He is going to change this picture from mechanistic picture to an organic picture. The model is not that of a machine, it’s that of an organism, where the parts of an organism are interdependent, they don’t have separate existence, they’re internally related in the sense that the one is define in its relationship to something else. He’s going to have an organic model with internal relationships rather than a mechanistic model with external relationships. You’ll find that he talks about atomistic philosophy.
Chapter 3 deal with the problem of induction. After talking of the difference between a mechanistic model and an organismic model, the difference between atomism with external relationship and atomism with internal relationships, he can now address the problem of induction. Why is that a problem? Because the moments of experience are unrelated one to another, they are atoms of perception that have no bearing on future experience, there are no internal relationships. So the association of ideas is by some psychological process but there is nothing intrinsic to any one which means that something else is around the corner. It was the theory of external relations in Hume’s atomistic view of ideas and impressions which means you do not have any impression of the casual connection between experiences, ideas or events. So you can not make inductive generalizations when the casual connection is unknown. So the problem he cited in the beginning, the order of nature, the uniformity of nature is a presumption that’s not empirically proven. He talks in terms of two fallacies: The fallacy of simple location and the fallacy of the misplaced concreteness. Fallacy of simple location is assertion that things have simple locations in space and time. That is you think of their location as abstracted from everything else, whereas in reality these locations are defined in terms of relationship to other things. There are no such thing as simple locations because of movement in time. Space is just a pattern of relationships. Secondly, misplaced concreteness is when you give concrete existence to an abstraction. His reason for this is they fail the test for empirical adequacy.
Chapter four critiques the 18th century thinking where the antithesis of mind and matter is another shear abstraction. Whitehead has a double aspect theory so that any event has both its physical and conceptual aspect. In his analysis of an event, to the idea of prehension, which is a way in which a process, objective data come into act by what he calls physical prehension, what in conscious perception is consciousness or physical stimulus and in addition to that it’s the way in which eternal objects, those eternal possibilities come into the act by conceptual prehension. Every event has on the hand internal relatedness to other events which are impending and has a relationship to the logical possibilities that poses, which are conceived possibilities. Therefore the mind-body dualism is a misplaced concreteness. All we empirically in concrete experience is the event and the two aspects of the event. He is critical of both Descartes’ dualism and metaphysical materialism where there is only one substance matter and metaphysical idealism, if that’s an idealism of spiritual substance as in Berkeley. So he repudiates any metaphysical substance because concrete experience is about events and we don’t have empirical basis for the other. In talking of whether atoms of events, the 18th century writers speaks of the separative character of space and time. He maintains that in addition to separative character, space and time also have a prehenive character, that is to say, prehension, whether it’s physical or conceptual is of the very nature of an event. So space time events are interrelated by physical prehension. The causal connectedness is intrinsic to the whole notion of an event.
Chapter five talks about romantic reaction. He gives three reasons for rejecting the subjective idealism of Berkeley. One reason rises from direct interrogation of our perceptual experience, in sense experience we know a way from and beyond our own personality. What he’s appealing to there is the recognition of intentionality. The second reason is that our historical knowledge tells us of ages past when as far as we can see no living being existed on earth tells of countless star systems, in other words, is good reason for something more. Third reason is based upon the instinct for action. Just as sense perception gives knowledge of what lies beyond individually so action seems to issue an instinct for self transcendence, acting beyond my subjective ideas. Here it seems the Whitehead’s argument is not in terms of empirical adequacy, Berkeley covers this sort of data. The argument is in terms of rational coherence: which gives more obvious unifying meaning giving explanation. The reality for other space time entities outside of any mind seems to make more sense with the concrete experiences that we have, of history, action and mental intentionality than it’s the case for Berkeley’s. Remembering the poetic rendering of concrete experience we see at once the element of value, of being an end in itself must not be omitted in any account of an event. Value is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event, the satisfaction achieved. Value is the element that permeates through the poetic view of nature, we’ve only to transfer to the very texture of realization in itself that value which we recognize so readily in terms of human life. Value is the outcome of limitation, of all the eternal possibilities value is achieved when those possibilities are narrowed down to what is actualized. There is a further element in the metaphysical situation, a required principle of limitation. Some particular how is necessary, some particularization of what is necessary, some principle of limitation, we must provide a ground of limitation, which stands among the attributes of substantial activity, this attribute provides the limitation for which no reason can be given. Why amidst the boundless possibilities is there one selected for actualization. All reason flows from this, God is the ultimate limitation, his existence is the ultimate irrationality in the senes that you can’t give reasons for God emerging, it is the existence of God that is the reason for the actual entities emerging to emerge. God is concrete, he is the ground of concrete actuality, no reason can be given for the nature of God because that nature is the ground of rationality. Remember the threefold nature of God, a God in his primordial nature is the unity of all hi conceptual possibilities, God is his consequent nature is that God is affected by all events which he prehends, God in his superjective nature is God holding out possibilities to new events in the world and by that superjective nature he is the principle of limitation.
Summary
We want to summarize the change that’s represented from what’s gone before, from classical metaphysics. Instead of substance being ultimate reality, it’s process and the ingredients of events which come and goes, there’s no enduring identity through extensive periods of time though there are enduring strings in long extended events, after all the history of cosmos is an extended event. The change is from the 18th century mechanistic model to the organic model, development biology, something other than mechanistic explanations of life and relativity physics and energistic physics breaking down the solidity of matter. It’s worth noting that Whitehead remains a quantitative pluralist, that is to say how many events are there, but qualitative monism, which means the same description of event applies to God and a particular sense perception. It seems that is the source of some of his problems, that he givens insufficient weight to qualitative distinctions between God and creation, between human person and natural phenomenon. It’s the qualitative monism which seems to over generalize and to bring everything into the same process. The mechanistic model had external relations as in the causal interaction of Descartes’ mind-body dualism. In the organic model, the relations are internal and are of the very nature in terms of the relationship. Because of the external relations, the 18th century was able to seek and claim complete objectivity of knowledge, the mind is a passive recipient of data. By the time you get to Whitehead, subject-object continuum, that is to say, in every knowing situation there is already what is contributed by antecedent events before the new data come in and in addition to that, there’s the decision that’s made in terms of eternal possibilities that are offered in the new event, so the subjective as well as objective contributing in this case. The major concern to Whitehead is the fact value separation in the mechanistic view which gives way in Whitehead to the unity of fact value and overall teleological nature. The mechanistic model may apply to somethings that do indeed operate quite mechanically and the organic model maybe an overarching thing with regards to the mechanistic phenomenon. There seems to a need for something else, a more personalistic model, and that’s something you find in personalistic existentialism, people like Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, trying to emphasize the category of person as distinct from anything else.