Whitehead

Whitehead reacted as Bergson had, against the analytic mode of thought which assumed that facts exist in isolation from other facts. His main theme was that “connectedness is the essence of all things.” What science tends to separate, philosophy must try to see as an organic unity. Thus, “the red glow of the sunset should be as much a part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomena.” The function of natural philosophy, he thought, is “to analyze how these various elements of nature are connected.” Describing Wordsworth’ romantic reaction against the scientific mentality, Whitehead says that “Wordsworth was not bothered by any intellectual antagonism. What moved him was moral repulsion.” He was repulsed by the fact that scientific analysis had left something out, “that what had been left out comprised everything that was most important,” namely, moral intuitions and life itself. Whitehead, agreeing with Wordsworth, went on to say that “neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fused them together as essential factors in the composition of really real things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.” And, he says, “it is important therefore to ask what Wordsworth found in nature that failed to receive expression in science. I ask this question in the interest of science itself.” Whitehead was convinced that “the status of life in nature … is the modern problem of philosophy and science.” Although he shared these same problems with Bergson, Whitehead brought a different intellectual background to their solution and produced therefore a different and novel speculative metaphysics.

The Error of Simple Location

Whitehead was convinced that Newtonian physics was based upon a fallacy, consisting in the doctrine of simple location, and he called it the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Newton had followed Democritus in assuming that the nature of things consists of individual bits of matter existing in space. What is fallacious about that? Whitehead says that “to say that a bit of matter has simple location means that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations it is adequate to state that it is where it is in a definite region of space and throughout a definite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.” Against this view, Whitehead argues that “among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience, there is not element whatsoever which possesses this character of simple location.” The concept of an isolated atom, is the product of intellectual abstraction. By a process of abstraction we can, he admits, “arrive at abstractions which are the simply-located bits of material …” but these abstractions, by definition, represent the lifting out of a thing from its concrete environment. To mistake the abstraction for the concrete is the error that Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Such things as instants of time, points in space or independent particles of matter are helpful concepts for scientific thought, but when they are taken as descriptions of ultimate reality, they are distortions of concrete reality. 

When it came to giving his own account of concrete reality, Whitehead developed a novel form of atomism. He sought to draw out the implications of the recent developments in quantum physics, the theory of relativity, and evolution. His units of reality differed from the atoms of Democritus and Newton in two ways, namely, in their “content” and in their “relations” to each other. Whitehead discarded the word “atom” because historically this term meant that the content of the atom is hard, lifeless matter and that being hard, atoms never penetrated each other; hence their relations to each other are always eternal. For the term “atoms,” Whitehead therefore substituted the term “actual entities” or its equivalent “actual occasions.” Unlike lifeless atoms, Whitehead’s actual entities are “chunks in the life of nature.” As such, they never exist in isolation but are intimately related to the whole field of life that throbs around them. Whereas atomistic materialism gives us a mechanical view of nature, Whitehead’s actual occasions permit us to view nature as a living “organism.” Thus, whether we speak of God or “the most trivial puff of existence,” there is the same principle of life in all things, for “actual entities – also termed actual occasions – are the final real things of which the world is made up.” 

Self-Consciousness 

Whitehead saw in our own self-consciousness a good example of an actual occasion. He felt that the “direct evidence as to the connectedness of (my) immediate present occasion of experience with (my) immediate past occasions, can be validly used to suggest … the connectedness of all occasions in nature.” Because an actual occasion is not a material thing, it is best understood as an experience. These occasions do not exist, they happen. The difference is that merely to exist implies no change, whereas to happen suggests a dynamic alteration. Whitehead’s actual occasions represent continually changing entities, this change coming about through the input of entities upon each other. Consider what occurs when a person has an experience. We usually think that in this case there is, on the one hand, a permanent subject and then something “out there” that the subject experiences. Whitehead argues that the subject and the object are both in a continual process of change, that every experience the subject has affects the subject. If it is true, as Heraclitus said, that one cannot step into the same river twice, it is also true that no person can think the same way twice, because after each experience he or she is a different person. And this is true of all of nature as it consists of actual occasions or aggregates of actual occasions. Thus, if all of reality is made up of actual occasions, drops of experience, nature is a throbbing organism undergoing constant change throughout. “The universe is thus a creative advance into novelty. The alternative to this doctrine is a static morphological universe.”  The doctrine of actual occasions enabled Whitehead to account for the relation of body and mind and for the presence of feeling and purpose in the universe. Democritus had not satisfactorily described how it is possible to have sensation, feeling, thinking, purpose, and life in a universe consisting solely of lifeless material atoms. Nor could Descartes ever join together his two substances, thought and extension. Leibniz did recognize that from lifeless matter it was impossible to derive life, and so he described nature as consisting of monads, which, though they resemble the atoms of Democritus in some ways, were thought by Leibniz to be individual “souls,” or centers of energy. Although the Leibnizian monad was a somewhat more satisfactory concept than the atom of Democritus, Whitehead considered it inadequate. Leibniz had described the monads as “windowless,” meaning thereby that each monad was completely closed or locked up within itself, that its relation to other monads was purely external, that its behavior was determined by a pre-established harmony; and although the monad was thought to undergo change, this change did not signify any truly novel process, no evolution, no creativity, but only the running of its predetermined course. By contrast, Whitehead’s actual entities have no permanent identity or history. They are always in the process of becoming. They feel the impact of other actual occasions and absorb them internally. In this process, actual occasions come into being, take on a determinate form or character, and, having become actual occasions, perish. To “perish” signifies that the creativity of the universe moves on to the next birth and that in this process an actual occasion loses its unique character but is preserved in the flow of the process. Perishing, says Whitehead, is what we mean by memory or causality, that with the passage of time something of the past is perceived in the present. 

Prehension 

We do not ever experience a single isolated actual entity but only aggregates of these entities; an aggregate of actual entities Whitehead calls a “society” or a nexus in which the entities are united by their prehensions. These are some of the novel words Whitehead invented to explain his novel ideas. “In the three notions – actual entities, prehension, nexus – (says Whitehead) an endeavor has been made to base philosophical thought upon the most concrete elements in our experience … The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.” Whitehead visualized reality as a continual process in which actual entities are constantly becoming, a process in which what an actual entity becomes depends upon how it becomes. His emphasis is upon the notion of “creativity” as the fundamental characteristic of the process of nature. Creativity is the ultimate principle by which the many enter into complex unity. If we took each actual entity separately, we should have a disjointed universe, but the creative unity of the many constitutes the conjoined universe. And “the production of novel togetherness,” says Whitehead, “is the ultimate notion embodied in the term ‘concrescence’ …” But the meaning of the term concrescence is closely related to the activity that Whitehead calls prehension. 

Whitehead uses the term prehension to describe how the elements of actual entities are related to each other and how these entities are further related to other entities. Nothing in the world is unrelated; in a sense, every actual occasion absorbs, or is related to, the whole universe. Actual entities are brought together by the creative process into sets, or societies, or nexus. In this process of becoming, actual entities are formed through the concrescence of prehensions. Every prehension, says Whitehead, consists of three factors: first, the “subject” that is prehending; secondly, the “datum” which is prehended; and thirdly, the “subjective form,” which is how the subject prehends the datum. There are various species of prehensions: positive prehensions, which are termed feelings, and negative prehensions, which are said to “eliminate from feeling.” The subjective forms, or the ways data are prehended, are of many species, including emotions, valuations, purposes, and consciousness. Thus, for Whitehead, emotional feeling is the basic characteristic of concrete experience. Even in the language of physics it is appropriate, according to Whitehead, to speak of feelings, for physical feelings are the physicist’s idea that energy is transferred. Both physical feelings and conceptual feelings are positive prehensions, or internal relations of the elements of actual entities.

The distinction between physical and conceptual feelings does not imply the older dualism of body and mind. It is of course still meaningful to use the terms “body” and “mind.” But Whitehead insists that to assume that these terms imply a basic metaphysical difference, as Descartes said existed between his terms “thought” and “extension,” is to commit again the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This fallacy, it will be recalled, is committed when one mistakes an abstraction for the concrete. Both body and mind are, for Whitehead, societies, or nexus – they are sets of actual entities. The only concrete reality is an actual entity, but actual entities can be organized into different kinds of societies, such as body and mind. But in each case, the actual entities possess the same characteristic, namely, the capacity for prehension, for feeling, for internal relations. Body and mind are both abstractions in the sense that their mode of existence, their reality, is dependent upon the particular organization of the actual entities; hence body and mind are not permanently or ultimately different. To speak of the body as an abstraction is similar to speaking of the “body politic” as an abstraction where only the individual citizens are the concrete reality. Whitehead insisted that “The final facts are, all alike, actual entities,” and all of these are capable of being interconnected in a stream of experience. 

Eternal Objects 

One might ask at this point just how Whitehead accounts for the underlying process of reality, the process of creativity, which brings actual entities into being and organizes them into societies and preserves what to our experience appears as the endurance of things. Here Whitehead’s thought displays a strong Platonic influence. What makes an actual entity what it is, he says, is that the entity has been stamped with a definiteness of character by certain “eternal objects.” These eternal objects resembling Plato’s Forms, are uncreated and eternal; they are patterns and qualities, such as roundness or squareness, greenness or blueness, courage or cowardice. An actual occasion acquires a definite character and not other possible characters because it selects these eternal objects and rejects those. Hence, an actual event is constituted by the togetherness of various eternal objects in some particular pattern. 

Eternal objects, says Whitehead, are possibilities, which, like the Platonic Forms, retain their identity independent of the flux of things. The relation between the eternal object and an actual entity is described as ingression, which means that once the actual entity has selected an eternal object, the latter ingresses, that is stamps its character upon the actual entity. Thus, “the functioning of an internal object in the self-creation of an actual entity is the ingression of the eternal object in the actual entity.” Simple eternal objects stamp their character upon actual entities, whereas complex eternal objects give definitiveness, or the status of fact, to societies or nexus.

To speak of eternal objects as possibilities required that Whitehead described how and where these possibilities exist and how they become relevant to actual occasions. Since only actual occasions exist, what is the status of eternal objects? Whitehead designated one actual entity as being timeless, and this entity he called God. For him God is not a creator, he is “not before all creation, but with all creation.” God’s nature is to grasp conceptually all the possibilities that constitute the realm of eternal objects. This realm of eternal objects differs from Plato’s system of Forms in that whereas Plato visualized one perfect order for all things, Whitehead’s God grasps virtually unlimited possibilities, “all possibilities of order, possibilities at once incompatible and unlimited with a fecundity beyond imagination.” What makes the creative process of the world orderly and purposive is the availability of eternal objects, of possibilities. These possibilities exist in God as his primordial nature. God, moreover, is the active mediator between the eternal objects and the actual occasions. It is God who selects the relevant possibilities from the realm of eternal objects. God does not impose the eternal objects upon actual entities. Rather, God presents these possibilities as “lures” of what might be. Persuasion, not compulsion, characterizes God’s creative activity. That God always presents relevant possibilities is no guarantee that actual entities will select them. When God’ persuasive lure is accepted, the result is order, harmony, and novel advance. When it is rejected, the result is discord and evil. God is the ultimate principle striving toward actualizing all relevant possibilities. What we experience as the stable order in the world and in our intuition of the permanent rightness of things shows forth God’s “consequent nature.” “God’s role,” says Whitehead, “lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it; or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty and goodness.”