Preface
This paper was written in April 2005 and read at the annual conference of the Heythrop Postgraduate Philosophy of Religion Philosophy Circle – although intended as a simple introduction to the very difficult subject of Whitehead’s metaphysics, I suspect some of the audience still found it hard going, for which I apologise.
1 Historical context
For over 2000 years, metaphysics in mainstream Western philosophy has consisted of developments of Aristotle’s conceptual scheme. Indeed the term ‘metaphysics’ means simply ‘the subjects discussed in the books that follow the books on physics (τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά) in the sequence of Aristotle’s collected works established after his death’. As a consequence, almost all subsequent philosophers have accepted that the primary category of being is ‘substance’. That is, reality (or at least the material world) consists primarily of ‘things’ which have some stability, can be identified and defined, of which a wide range of properties can be predicated. In Aristotle’s scheme, a thing’s substance defines what it is (τὸ τί ἐστι)[1] – a rock, an oak tree, a human being, or possibly a number, a form or a soul. And a defining characteristic of animate substances is that (with limited exceptions) they reproduce themselves – an oak tree begets an oak tree, a human being begets a human being. That a particular substance is large or small, white or brown, in this place or in that place, is secondary, ‘accidental’. Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’, separated material substances from spiritual or mental substances, such as the thinking mind or soul, thereby facilitating the development of the physical sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries. For example, the detached observer could derive universal laws of motion from the positions of the stars and the orbits of the planets that had remained unchanged since the day God created them; he could delve deeper and deeper into the structure of brute matter knowing that there were no random elements in the laws of Nature and that his act of observing could not influence the results of his observations; the botanist could permanently classify the living world into phyla, genera and species without having to consider that the extinct common ancestors of different modern species could not by definition be included in that classification. But this conceptual scheme became increasingly difficult to reconcile with the scientific theories emerging in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Occasionally, philosophers have suggested alternatives to this ‘substance-metaphysics’. Even before Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus of Ephesus seems to have proposed a scheme which recognised that the world is continually in flux. Hence his famous dictum ‘You never step into the same river twice’[2]. The scientist and philosopher Leibniz (a contemporary of Isaac Newton) questioned the reality of matter: ‘The objects of perception, and all compounds or what one might call artificial substances, are in a flux, and in a state of becoming rather than being.’[3] The idea of process was fundamental to Hegel’s philosophy, based, like that of Heraclitus, on the dynamic interaction of opposites (thesis and antithesis). Thus, in The Science of Logic, he starts with the bare notion of existence or being, and argues that it has no content at all and so must be nothing; being and nothing are constantly moving in and apart from each other, and must be brought together under the synthesis, ‘becoming’. The American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, and the French philosopher Henri Bergson, towards the end of the 19th century, were much influenced by the theory of evolution as well as by Hegel, and their metaphysics emphasised process and creativity as against timeless stability. But the process philosophy I want to focus on in this paper is that elaborated by Alfred North Whitehead in the 1920s and 1930s.
Born in 1861, the son of an Anglican clergyman in Kent, Whitehead read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and stayed on to teach mathematics. One of his pupils, Bertrand Russell, collaborated with him over a period of ten years to write the massive and ground-breaking work Principia Mathematica. In 1914, Whitehead was appointed to the chair of applied mathematics at Imperial College, London, and began to explore more fully the philosophy of science. In 1924, at the age of 63, he accepted a five-year appointment as Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, and continued working in that post until 1937. In 1927-28 he set out a new metaphysical scheme in a series of lectures at Edinburgh – the Gifford Lectures – which he published as the book Process and Reality in 1929. This large and demanding volume is the source book for what he called ‘the philosophy of organism’, but what his followers have named ‘process philosophy’. He also wrote a number of less technical and more accessible works developing aspects and implications of this philosophy, most notably Religion in the Making in 1926, Adventures of Ideas in 1933 (reflections on the philosophy of civilization), and Modes of Thought in 1938. He died in 1947.
2 An Outline of Whitehead’s Philosophical Scheme
Whitehead’s philosophy, as set out in Process and Reality[4], is not easily accessible to students approaching it for the first time. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, his concepts are subtly different from those we are familiar with in mainstream philosophy, so that there is no direct read-across from one metaphysics to the other. Secondly, rather than use common philosophical terms which have acquired meanings and associations through their use by other philosophers, Whitehead coins many neologisms such as “concrescence” and “prehension”; and he uses everyday words, such as “feeling” and “society”, as terms of art with specific meanings very different from those they have in common language. And thirdly, as Donald Sherburne points out, “further difficulty, the straw-that-breaks-the reader’s-back sort of difficulty, is occasioned by Whitehead’s mode of exposition [in Process and Reality]. As [Whitehead] states in his preface, ‘… the unity of treatment is to be looked for in the gradual development of the scheme, in meaning and in relevance, and not in the successive treatment of particular topics.’ This statement is a warning to the reader that he will not find a linear development in Process and Reality, a beginning, a middle and an end. Rather he will encounter a web-like development that presupposes the whole system at the very beginning and recurs again and again to individual topics with the aim that ‘in each recurrence, these topics throw some new light on the scheme, or receive some new elucidation.’ The result is a book that in richness and suggestiveness is unsurpassed, but in opacity is monumental.”[5] Sherburne himself addresses this last point fairly successfully in his Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, in which he extracts about 40% of Whitehead’s text and rearranges it to provide a “successive treatment of particular topics.”
The fundamental elements of Whitehead’s scheme are what he calls “actual entities” or “actual occasions” – fleeting events that can be linked together in various ways. Each actual entity is formed by a process of becoming, called “concrescence”, in which it is influenced by, experiences, or “prehends”, other earlier actual entities. Indeed, with a greater or lesser intensity it prehends all the actual entities that preceded it, though it has a positive prehension (called a “feeling”) of only some of them, and it draws data from these, whilst it has a negative prehension of others, shutting out any influence from them, because they are in some way incompatible with those it has accepted. In each of the positive prehensions or feelings, the concrescing actual entity is seen as the “subject” of the feeling and the “objective datum” or “object” of it is another feeling within the predecessor actual entity. The way in which the subject reacts to the feeling, how it feels the objective datum, is called “the subjective form” of the feeling, of which there are many varieties – such as emotions, valuations, adversions, aversions, consciousness, etc. – and it permits novelty to enter the process. There are several stages to this process, in which both physical and formative elements are “felt”, and at the end the actual entity which has been concrescing consists of its constituent feelings. At this point the process is complete; the actual entity terminates its becoming in one complex feeling involving a completely determinate bond with every item in the universe, the bond being either a positive or a negative prehension. This termination is called the “satisfaction” of the actual entity. The actual entity ceases to be an experiencing subject and becomes a potential object for every subsequent actual entity as it concresces. In Whitehead’s language, it achieves objective immortality in the future beyond itself.
What are these actual entities or actual occasions? Although the description above is intended to be more generally valid, the universe known to science (what Whitehead calls “our cosmic epoch”) appeared to him to be “characterized by electronic and protonic actual entities, and by yet more ultimate actual entities which can be dimly discerned in the quanta of energy”[6] – that is, moments in the life of electrons, protons and quarks. You may think that there is little point in giving such a complicated description of a microscopic entity of momentary duration. But an essential aspect of Whitehead’s scheme is the way in which actual entities, the building blocks of the universe, group themselves into the aggregates, termed “nexūs” and “societies”, which are the macroscopic entities of the world we live in, such as molecules, crystals, rocks, trees, houses, and people. A “nexus” (plural “nexūs”) is a set of actual entities which are united by their prehensions of each other: for some purposes a nexus of many actualities can be treated as though it were one actuality. For example, a tree is a complex nexus. At any given moment it is composed of a generation of actual occasions spatially related in a three-dimensional pattern. But the total nexus of a tree has a temporal dimension also: it consists of generation after generation of actual occasions succeeding one another. The most important type of nexus is one with “social order”, termed a “society”. In a “society” there is a common element of form which is passed on from one generation to the next in all the members of the nexus, so that the society is self-sustaining. Thus all enduring objects, such as Aristotelian substances, are societies. But there is no society in isolation. Every society must be considered with its background of a wider environment of actual entities which also contribute to shaping that society. In the real world there are a bewildering variety of societies, and in particular innumerable examples of a “structured society”, that is, a society which includes subordinate societies and nexūs with a definite pattern of structural inter-relations. Material bodies, which react to changes in their environment by largely ignoring them, belong to the lowest grade of structured societies, including crystals, rocks, planets and suns. Such bodies are easily the most long-lived of the structured societies known to us, capable of being traced through their individual life histories. But other types of complex structured society respond to novel elements in their environment by originating matching novelty in their actual occasions: to the extent that this is an important aspect of their survival, they are termed “living” societies. In the case of the higher organisms, this conceptual initiative amounts to thinking about their experiences of the environment.
Whitehead frequently refers to Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant to show where his views are in accord with theirs and where they differ. A major area of difference is Whitehead’s account of perception. He distinguishes three modes of perception. The first mode, which Descartes and Hume took as the model of all perception, is what he calls “presentational immediacy” – our clear and conscious impressions of the world around us at this moment, as an extensive continuum with spatial relations between objects defined by our own perspective, derived from sense-data transmitted by the organs of our body (though they may prove delusive). However, as Hume demonstrates[7], such impressions by themselves give us no evidence of cause and effect in the world; indeed, as he says: “As to these impressions which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason.”[8] And these impressions of the here and now cannot, by themselves, tell us anything about the past or future. Whitehead therefore emphasises the more primitive and ubiquitous mode of perception, that of “causal efficacy” – where one’s hand feels the weight and hardness of the stone, and one’s eye sees its grey shape. In this mode, the subject (which need not be a conscious or even particularly advanced organism) feels directly if indistinctly aspects of the external world through a causal relationship – indeed it prehends other actual entities. We may observe such perception not just in the reaction of the worm to the spade or the flower to the sunlight, but in that of the single cell to the temperature of its environment: though we do not call it perception, we see a similar causal relationship between ambient temperature and inorganic compounds. In this mode of perception we prehend nexūs with a temporal dimension, objects with a history and (at least potentially) a future.
Conscious human perception is normally through a combination of these two modes, in which we map our perceptions in the mode of presentational immediacy onto those in the mode of causal efficacy, and vice versa, to interpret the world around us as filled with solid objects in spatial relationships to one another and to ourselves. This mixed mode of perception, called “symbolic reference” is so natural to us that we do not usually have to think about it – it is how we normally experience the world. But because it involves interpretation, it is open to error.
My description above of concrescence, the process by which an entity becomes actual, focussed mainly on the physical elements of prehension, though I mentioned in passing “formative elements”. There are three types of formative element. The first is creativity. The principle of creativity is presupposed by all other aspects of the philosophy of organism, and enunciates the following relationship between “many” and “one”: (firstly) at any instant the universe constitutes a disjunctively diverse many; (secondly) “it lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity; (thirdly) the novel one that results from this unification, this concrescence, is truly novel – that is, it stands over against what has been unified and as such is disjunctively diverse from the items it has unified; and (fourthly) there is here the same situation from which the process began (a disjunctive diversity), and it therefore repeats itself “to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature.”[9] The second type of formative element is what Whitehead calls “eternal objects” – rather like Platonic forms, they are not actual entities but non-temporal potentialities of definiteness for any actual entity, which would be indeterminate without them. (When eternal objects are positively prehended or “felt”, the prehensions are called “conceptual feelings”.) When actual entities are linked in nexūs or societies, the eternal objects defining them can be merged into “patterns” which characterise those societies as things, similar to Aristotelian substances. The third formative element is an actual entity which is non-temporal, but which Whitehead insists is not an exception to all his metaphysical principles but their chief exemplification. This actual entity is called “God”.
Any actual entity has a threefold character. Firstly it has the character ‘given’ for it by the past, the objectively immortal actual entities in the actual world, which are the efficient causes out of which that actual entity arises. Although God has no past, what Whitehead calls his “primordial nature” is the concrescence of a unity of conceptual feelings, that is, feelings the data of which are all eternal objects. Secondly, any actual entity has a subjective character aimed at in its process of concrescence: the “subjective aim” at “satisfaction” constitutes the final cause, or lure, whereby there is determinate concrescence. The concrescence of God’s primordial nature is directed by the subjective aim of constituting the eternal objects into lures of feeling for all realisable basic conditions. Therefore, in every concrescence, the initial subjective aim is derived from God’s primordial nature – God is the initial “lure to feeling” in every actual entity – but the subjective aim develops as the subject makes valuations and decisions on the conceptual feelings it incorporates into itself as the concrescence progresses. Then, God’s “consequent nature” is the physical prehension by God of the actualities of the evolving universe. Every completed actual occasion is absorbed into God in such a way that the discordant multiplicity of actual things becomes an harmonious unity in his consequent nature. Thirdly, an actual entity has a “superjective” character, the pragmatic value of its satisfaction, as an object to be prehended by other entities, in the creative purpose of the universe. God’s “superjective nature” is the character of the pragmatic value of his specific satisfaction qualifying the transcendent creativity in the various temporal instances.
Although there is not space here to develop these concepts as fully as they deserve, the closing paragraphs of Process and Reality give some idea of how God is integral to the temporal world.
“There are thus four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality. There is first the phase of conceptual origination, deficient in actuality, but infinite in its adjustment of valuation. [This is the primordial nature of God.]
“Second there is the temporal phase of physical origination, with its multiplicity of actualities. [This is the temporal world of actual occasions.] In this phase full actuality is attained; but there is deficiency in the solidarity of individuals with each other. This phase derives its determinate conditions from the first phase.
“Thirdly there is the phase of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity. [This is the consequent nature of God.] In everlastingness, immediacy is reconciled with objective immortality. This phase derives the conditions of its being from the two antecedent phases.
“In the fourth phase, the creative action completes itself. [This is the superjective nature of God.] For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands.
“We find here the final application of the doctrine of objective immortality. Throughout the perishing occasions in the life of each temporal Creature, the inward source of distaste or refreshment, the judge arising out of the very nature of things, redeemer or goddess of mischief, is the transformation of itself, everlasting in the Being of God. In this way, the insistent craving is justified – the insistent craving that zest for existence be refreshed by the ever-present unfading importance of our immediate actions, which perish and yet live for evermore.”[10]
3 The Relevance of Whitehead’s Philosophy and its Subsequent Development
Process and Reality is subtitled “An Essay in Cosmology”. Whitehead was familiar with the quantum theory of Planck and Einstein and its relationship to Bohr’s 1913 model of the atom, and he refers to the mathematical terms and concepts at least of the “new” quantum theory of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, Born, Dirac and others, though it was still at a formative stage when Process and Reality was published. In a recent book on quantum mechanics[11], Michael Epperson points out that, despite its great predictive power, we lack a descriptive theory of quantum mechanics that is as intuitively satisfying as the classical mechanics of Newton and Galileo that it replaced. For example, in relation to the problem of wave-particle duality, Einstein’s view that nature is fundamentally particulate wherein wave-like properties are an abstraction, Schrödinger’s view that it is fundamentally wave-like and particulate properties are an abstraction, and Bohr’s view that nature is incapable of fundamental characterisation at all but we merely characterise our complementary experiences of nature as wave-like or particle-like depending on circumstances, together with subsequent attempts to mediate between these viewpoints such as Bohr’s statistical interpretation, all rely on the classical ontology of mechanistic materialism, but so contort it as to undermine its relevance. Epperson finds Whitehead’s ontology a far more satisfactory basis, together with the “decoherence” interpretation of quantum mechanics adopted by Wojciech Żurek, Murray Gell-Mann, James Hartle, Roland Omnès and others in the 1990’s. In his own words, he provides “a narrow, phase-by-phase, concept-by-concept correlation of quantum mechanics and Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme”, showing for example how the Schrödinger equation maps onto Whitehead’s full account of concrescence.
The brief outline above does not convey the astonishing comprehensiveness and internal coherence of Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism”, which can accommodate the immense complexity of nature through its concept of structured societies, and in which everything is related by a web of causal connections to everything else. It is the ideal vehicle for the Darwinian theory of evolution and modern ecological thinking – for example, Daniel C Dennett’s explanation of consciousness[12] fits remarkably well onto Whitehead’s account of perception. Many of his Harvard pupils continued to develop his philosophy after his death, and the Whiteheadian school of process philosophy is still strongly supported in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Canada, Australasia, France, Belgium, Hungary, other countries of continental Europe, Japan and Korea[13]: in the UK it has been almost totally ignored. There is now also a growing academic output of Whiteheadian economics, politics, ethics, gender studies, psychology, education, etc.
But the field in which there has been most intensive development of Whitehead’s thought is that of process theology. Indeed, many of the centres of Whiteheadian studies are the theology schools of United States and other universities. The leading figure in this field for nearly seventy years was Charles Hartshorne. As a research fellow at Harvard in the late 1920’s he spent a year as an assistant to Whitehead, and he published books and articles on process philosophy and theology until close to his death in 2000[14]. He opposed the classical doctrines (as formulated by Aquinas, for example) of divine omniscience, divine omnipotence and divine immutability. Though God is the supremely excellent, all-worshipful and greatest conceivable being, he is still becoming greater and more perfect as he feels and absorbs more and more actual entities in his consequent nature as the universe evolves. Hartshorne’s belief was panentheistic – he believed that God is neither completely removed from the world, nor identified with the world (as in pantheism) but is world-inclusive in the sense that God cares for all the world and has sympathy for it, and all feelings in the world – especially suffering feelings – are felt by God. Hartshorne also followed Plato and Origen in seeing God as the world-soul – a theory sometimes called panpsychism.
Whitehead’s account of God in Process and Reality was very compressed. The first generation of philosopher-theologians who developed it, such as Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, though all were Christians, did very little to explore specifically Christian subjects – it remained broadly theist. They tended to distinguish their views sharply from those of classical theists, such as Aquinas[15], and from postmodern deconstructivist philosophers such as Derrida[16]. Currently, however, Whiteheadian (or “neo-Whiteheadian”) scholars are beginning to look for process interpretations of mainstream Christian doctrines such as the Trinity[17] and Original Sin[18]; they are finding common ground also with Thomism[19] on the one hand and with Derrida, Marion, Chauvet, Gadamer and Habermas[20] on the other.
Apart from the philosophers and theologians working expressly within the tradition of Whitehead, process thinking has disseminated more widely. I will mention just one current example: the London-based social psychologist and priest of the Sacred Heart Missionary Congregation, Diarmuid Ó Murchú. His book Quantum Theology[21] is a brilliant but rather breathless amalgam of ideas from physics, cosmology, Sheldrake’s field theory, the Gaia hypothesis, and many other sources; in Evolutionary Faith[22] he provides a more focussed account of a theology of evolution. Though his process ideas may owe more to Teilhard de Chardin than to Whitehead, Ó Murchú is at pains to avoid the error of anthropocentrism – the idea that human beings represent the culmination of God’s plan for the universe. He would have us accept with humility and trust the possibility that we might at any time be wiped out like the dinosaurs, having played our part in God’s providential plan. In this respect he is closer to Whitehead, whose philosophy of organism has no anthropocentric assumptions, than to Teilhard in The Phenomenon of Man.
4 Conclusion
Because Whitehead worked out his metaphysical scheme with great thoroughness, it has been criticised as “too mechanistic”. It has been seen also as open to the postmodernist charges of “logocentrism” levelled at classical metaphysics. I believe the formidable apparatus of Process and Reality contains as much vision as the less systematic and more poetic philosophy of Teilhard, and I am optimistic that the current work of neo-Whiteheadians such as Joseph Bracken will defuse some of the postmodernist objections to any form of metaphysical scheme. I would hope also that the work of more populist authors such as Ó Murchú might reawaken interest in process philosophy even in the UK.
Notes
[1] Metaphysics Z.1 and passim.
[2] δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης Plato Cratylus 402a10
[3] G MacDonald Ross Leibniz, OUP 1984, p.88 (translating Erdmann ed. God.Guil.Leibnitii Opera Omnia, Berlin 1840, p. 445)
[4] Alfred North Whitehead Process and Reality – An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W Sherburne, The Free Press (Macmillan) 1978.
[5] Donald W Sherburne (ed) A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, University of Chicago Press 1981, p 2. (Note, where I am not quoting Whitehead directly, many of my explanations of his thought are based on Sherburne’s notes in this book..)
[6] Whitehead op cit, p. 91
[7] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section VI (in The Fontana Library edition, D G C Macnabb (ed)., Collins 1962, pp 133-140)
[8] Op cit, Book I, Part III, Section V (p. 130)
[9] Whitehead op cit, p. 228
[10] Op cit, pp. 350-351
[11] Michael Epperson Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Fordham University Press 2004
[12] e.g. Daniel C Dennett Kinds of Minds – Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1996.
[13] See the Center for Process Studies website Links page (www.ctr4process.org/links/CPSLinks.htm) – the UK link (Chapter for Applied Process Thought) contains only the message ‘Contact Dr Thomas Kelly at the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth.’
[14] His last book was The Zero Fallacy and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics, published March 1997.
[15] cf e.g. Hartshorne Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, State University of New York Press 1984, p 11, p 78.
[16] cf e.g. David Ray Griffin God & Religion in the Postmodern World, State University of New York Press 1989, p. x (part of the Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought)
[17] e.g. Joseph A Bracken SJ Society and Spirit – A Trinitarian Cosmology, Associated University Presses 1991; Joseph A Bracken SJ and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki (edd) Trinity in Process, Continuum 1997.
[18] Jerry D Korsmeyer Evolution and Eden, Paulist Press 1998.
[19] e.g. James W Felt Coming to Be – Towards a Thomistic-Whiteheadian Metaphysics of Becoming, State University of New York Press 2001.
[20] Joseph A Bracken SJ The One in the Many – A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship, Wm B Eerdmans Publishing Co 2001.
[21] Diarmuid Ó Murchú Quantum Theology – Spiritual Dimensions of the New Physics, Crossroads 1997, revised edn 2004.
[22] Ó Murchú Evolutionary Faith – Rediscovering God in Our Great Story, Orbis 2002.
Goodness Gracious 