Whiteheads Concepts
Healing
A process understanding of reality has great implications in relation to healing. The cumulative nature of experience is vital to understanding healing, of any sort. The current past cannot be changed, but moment by moment the past grows larger. It is modified by the character of each new experience that becomes part of the past. To the extent that we make ourselves more rather than less like what God offers to us, we enrich the positive nature of the past. In this way, we reduce the contrast between the past and the initial aims offered by God in the future. This reduction of contrast is what we do in any treatment, whether by prayer, surgery, medicine, or whatever. The less the contrast between past and perfect, the easier it is for upcoming experiences to accept the perfect, and the perfect always is healing--whole-making--in some sense. This is why we can promote the healing of others by healing our own consciousness in recognizing them as perfect expressions of God. Conversely, negative thinking, contrary to God's offers, increases the contrast between past and perfect and makes acceptance of God's offers proportionately more difficult, although never impossible. . . .
Recapitulation
Now it should be clear why the divine job description provides for God to start everything, to finish nothing, and to keep everything, while your job description calls for you to start nothing, to finish very quickly what God starts for you, and to realize that you can't keep anything for more than a moment.
Reconceptualizing New Thought in process terms includes the substitution of impartial for impersonal and constant for changeless in speaking of God, and abandoning Law in favor of the all-sufficiency of divine Love. We are left totally, thrillingly, dancingly dependent on the completely reliable, persistent, dynamic ultimate Love that offers only the best to everyone and everything. This Love forever cherishes the completed experiences from all visible and invisible dimensions of the universe. God inspires and lovingly preserves everything. Each freely choosing burst of life produces a unique perspective that forever enriches the always-growing God.
Below we have summed up the co-creative process (all creation is, and always has been, co-creation) of continuing, ever-new divine contracting or covenanting in a formula. . . .
Creativity Formula
Past + Divine Offer + Choice = Co-Creation
Prehension
Alan Anderson
through Whitehead's category of prehension, the nonsensory sympathetic perception of antecedent experiences, we are able to reduce several apparently very different types of relations to one fundamental type of relation. [It] explains not only memory and perception, . . . but also temporality, space, causality, enduring individuality (or substance), the mind-body relation, the subject-object relation in general, and the God-world relation. David Ray Griffin, "Charles Hartshorne," in David Ray Griffin, John B. Cobb, Jr., Marcus P. Ford, Pete A. Y. Gunter, and Peter Ochs, Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 209. Griffin's writing in this book is quoted extensively in "Charles Hartshorne's Psychicalism".
Sorry, those of you who got here from A Practical Spirituality: Process New Thought; avoiding prehending is impossible. It is not the whole story to say that that page or anything else is powered by prehension, but no actuality can exist without it, and it may suggest more of a sense of power than the other ingredient in any act of co-creation: intelligent free selection from among the two types of realities prehended (felt, taken in, appropriated): (1) the completed experiences that constitute the past and (2) the perfect possibilities provided by God for newness. Prehension is the basic, extrasensory awareness, or grasping, that all experiences have of all earlier experiences. One might call it the super intuition on which all conventionally recognized extrasensory perception and sensory perception are built.
If it seems as if too much emphasis is given to experience, that is because there is nothing actual but experiences. Process thought, or process philosophy, sometimes is called panexperientialism--all is experience. Alfred North Whitehead wrote that apart from experiences "there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness [Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 254, corrected ed. p. 167]." What we take to be solid things are, as science recognizes, only collections of bursts of energy, or activity or process, which Whitehead interpreted as living experiences (occasions of experience, actual entities). Even souls are rapid successions of experiences, rather than some enduring nonmaterial substance that has experiences.
Charles Hartshorne says of Whitehead's theory of prehension:
In a single conception it explains the spatiotemporal structure of the world, the possibility of knowledge, and the reality of freedom. It is, in my opinion, one of the supreme intellectual discoveries. Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970, p. 127.
The word "prehension" is created by dropping the first syllable from "apprehension." Prehension is a part or aspect of the more or less complex whole which is an act of awareness. It is the element of pure givenness in this act; experience as the having of an object. An experience for Whitehead is a unitary event or process termed an "actual entity" or "occasion [of experience]." Every concrete thing which is given to or prehended by an entity is a prior event or actual entity, or a group of such entities. Contemporary events are not, strictly speaking, prehended, nor are occasions subsequent to the act of prehending. Thus memory and perception are alike in that the object of both is in the past. This assimilation of perception to memory is a highly original element in the doctrine. Ibid., p. 125.
It is amazing how many questions are answered at one blow by accepting the doctrine of prehension. Are there internal relations of events to other events? Yes, for so far as events prehend others, they are constituted by their relations to these others. Are there external relations? Yes, for so far as events are prehended by subsequent events which they do not themselves prehend, they must be independent of these; also, so far as events, being mutually contemporary, are without prehensions running either way, there is mutual independence. Is there causal connectedness? Yes, first, because the occurrence of events strictly entails that of those events which they prehend; second, because process is bound to go on, and subsequent events must have enough in common with their predecessors to be suitable prehendors for these, in order to objectify, or "pastify" them (so to speak). Finally, is there any freedom of indeterminacy in reality? Yes, and in all cases, since events never strictly depend upon or imply their precise successors. And here Whitehead furnishes perhaps the neatest, strongest argument for freedom ever proposed. The subject prehends not one but many prior actualities. (Otherwise the world would have temporal but not spatial structure.) "The many become one and are increased by one [Whitehead, Process and Reality p. 32, corrected ed. p. 21. Hartshorne refers to this as "Whitehead's Novel Intuition," in an article with that title in Whitehead's Philosophy, pp. 161-170, reprinted from George L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, pp. 18-26]. A single new actuality contains as its data the previous many actualities; but how could the many unambiguously prescribe their own unification into a new unity? There must be an emergent or creative synthesis, to constitute not merely that but how the many are made into a new one. Determinism, I suspect, cannot get around this difficulty. The that is necessary, causally fixed, but not the how.
Thus, Whitehead's view of givenness not only solves certain epistemological problems; it also gives an answer to Hume's skepticism about causal connections, and yet it avoids the contrary extreme, absolute idealism's denial of contingency and freedom. [At this point he gives the two sentences quoted at the beginning of this Hartshorne material]. Whitehead's Philosophy, pp. 126-27.
Victor Lowe, in his Understanding Whitehead, p. 349, says:
The past has had its chance at becoming; it transfers the opportunity to the next runner. The past is now there to be apprehended, but not to grow and change. The present is creatively active but is not apprehended.
In his An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics, p. 12, William A. Christian writes:
A prehension is an operation in which an actual entity "grasps" some other entity (actual or nonactual [see "eternal objects" on the terminology page]) and makes that entity an object of its experience. . . . A prehension is a "concrete fact of relatedness." It has a subject (the prehending actual entity), an object or datum that is prehended , and a subjective form. The subjective form of a prehension is the particular manner in which that subject prehends that object. Subjective forms are forms of emotion, consciousness, purpose, etc. A prehension need not be conscious--indeed, most prehensions are not.
There are positive prehensions and negative prehensions. Negative prehensions "eliminate" their data, so that these data do not make a positive contribution to the experiences of the subject. A positive prehension is generally called a feeling.
The "becoming" of an actual entity consists in a concrescence (from concrescere), a "growing together" of various details of experience into a unity. This process of concrescence is organized teleologically by the subject's subjective aim at unity of experience. The satisfaction of an actual entity is the "concrete" unity of experience which the concrescence achieves. The living experience of an actual entity is its subjective immediacy.
Prehension of one actual entity by another means the objectification of the former for the latter. The former is then said to have "objective" existence. It exists and functions as an object, not as an experiencing subject. . . . The objective existence of an actual entity is its objective immortality.
In the alphabetically arranged Glossary of his A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality (Macmillan, 1966), Donald W. Sherburne writes:
Prehensions are defined as "Concrete Facts of Relatedness [PR 32]. Prehensions are the vehicles by which one actual entity becomes objectified in another, or eternal objects obtain ingression into actual entities; they "are 'vectors'; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here" [PR 133].
Prehensions are what an actual entity is composed of: "The first analysis of an actual entity, into its most concrete elements, discloses it to be a concrescence of prehensions, which have originated in its process of becoming" [PR 35]. The very nature of a prehension reveals its relational character: "Every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the 'subject' which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the 'datum' which is prehended; (c) the 'subjective form' which is how that subject prehends that datum" [PR 35].
Physical prehensions are prehensions whose data involve actual entities; conceptual prehensions are prehensions whose data involve eternal objects. Both physical and conceptual prehensions are spoken of as pure; an impure prehension is a prehension in a later phase of concrescence that integrates prehensions of the two pure types. A hybrid prehension is the "prehension by one subject of a conceptual prehension, or of an 'impure' prehension, belonging to the mentality of another subject" [PR 163]. A positive prehension (also termed a feeling) includes its datum as part of the synthesis of the subject occasion, but negative prehensions exclude their data from the synthesis.
"The perceptive constitution of the actual entity presents the problem, How can the other actual entities, each with its own formal existence, also enter objectively into the perceptive con-stitution of the actual entity in question? This is the problem of the solidarity of the universe. The classical doctrines of universals and particulars, of subject and predicate, of individual substances not present in other individual substances, of the externality of relations, alike render this problem incapable of solution. The answer given by the organic philosophy is the doctrine of prehen-sions, involved in concrescent integrations, and terminating in a definite, complex unity of feeling" [PR 88-89].
Whitehead acknowledges an indirect debt to Leibniz in his use of this term. Leibniz employed the terms perception and apperception for the lower and higher ways, respectively, that one monad can take account of another, can be aware of another. While needing a set of terms like this, Whitehead does not wish to utilize the identical terminology, for as used by Leibniz the terms are inextricably bound up with the notion of representa-tive perception, which Whitehead rejects. But there is the similar term apprehension, meaning "thorough understanding," and, using the Leibnizian model, Whitehead coins the term prehension to mean the general, lower way, devoid of any suggestion of either consciousness or representative perception, in which an occasion can include other actual entities, or eternal objects, as part of its own essence.
Peter Farleigh, in his "Whitehead's Even More Dangerous Idea", says:
Having established in general what Whitehead's 'actual occasions' are, some explanation of their nature needs to be made. It might be thought that such an explanation is to be found by starting at the bottom and working up from there. In fact, the place to start, and the place that Whitehead wants us to start, is at the level of human experience. For two reasons: first, because human experience at any moment is itself, an actual occasion, and the occasion we know better than any other, and known from the inside. Second, because high-level occasions are themselves highly coordinated societies of low-level occasions, certain features of human experiential events can be generically applied to more primitive occasions.
Consider the act of perception. It is by perception, and this involves cognition, intentionality and affective tone, that we take account of our environment. I look at a pencil in front of me, for example. I have an immediate sense of its overall look-its shape, its length, its color. The pencil is set against a background of my desk and other things in my field of vision, but not things I am at that moment acutely aware of. Also I am only vaguely aware of my body and its relation to the desk and pen. In seeing the pencil, too, whole streams of associative memories are stirred. All of these perceptions and memories are gathered together into the unity, which is this single percipient event-a 'specious present'. The focal point or center of this event being my body. The pencil and the background, as well as the memories, are all internal constituents of my experience, and are therefore causally efficacious of that experiential event. They are said to be internally related to this event. Those objects at that moment are unaffected by my act of perception and so are said to be externally related to the event.
The act of perception then, establishes the causal relation of a subject to the external world at that moment. Perception and memory recall for Whitehead are high level instances of a more general concept, which he calls prehension. Most simply, for a subject to prehend an object, it is to experience it, perceive it, feel it, or 'take it into account,' though not necessarily in a conscious or reflective way. An object can be a physical object, like a pencil, or a conceptual object like a memory. Prehension is also a feature at lower levels of nature. Single cells 'feel' or take account of their environment (which is often other cells). Within a series of sub-atomic events, each event prehends its antecedent event, and is almost entirely determined by it.
The concept of prehension does sound a lot like the more familiar concept of intentionality. Indeed, Nicholas Gier has examined in depth the relations between the two concepts. Gier points out their similarities: "Both prehension and intentionality describe the relationship of a subject and an object in such a way as to overcome this subject춐bject split. In the same way that intentionality is always 'consciousness of an object,' prehension is always 'feeling of' some datum. This means that any prehensive unification or intentional act is codetermined by the respective data." (Gier 1976) One major difference is that intentionality is only discussed in terms of human consciousness, while prehension is extended far beyond the human realm. Both affirm a doctrine of internal relations so that consciousness is never simply 'there' without content or object, but with phenomenology the relationship of consciousness and its object is not considered a causal one. Whitehead had solved this problem of causation with his doctrine of asymmetrical relations between a present event and its past. Lewis Ford sums up the comparison by stating "Rather than being simply identical with intentionality, prehension generalizes both intentionality and causality, thus unifying both phenomenology and science." (Gier 1976 [Gier, N. 1976 "Intentionality and Prehension," Process Studies Vol. 6 No. 3])
In his Science and the Modern World, pp. 101-106 (paperback edition 69-72), Alfred North Whitehead writes:
The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word apprehension, even with the adjective cognition omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive.
. . . For Berkeley's mind, I substitute a process of prehensive unification. . . . In the first place, note that the idea of simple location has gone. The things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and now, are not the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but are the castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint , in space and time, of the prehensive unification. In other words, it is the castle over there from the standpoint of the unification here. It is, therefore, the castle, the cloud, and the planet which are grasped in unity here. You will remember that the idea of perspectives is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am toning down his monads into the unified events [in later Whitehead writings, actual entities or occasions of experience]in space and time. . . . In the analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation . . . Thus, concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events.
. . . The difficulties of philosophy in respect to space and time are founded on the error of considering them as primarily the loci of simple locations. Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification, or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension. The actual world is a manifold of prehension; and a 몆rehension' is a 몆rehensive occasion'; and a prehensive occasion is the most concrete finite entity, conceived as what it is in itself and for itself, and not as from its aspect in the essence of another such occasion. . . . For space and time are simply abstractions from the totality of prehensive unifications as mutually patterned in each other.
[In answer to Berkeley's claim that the reality of nature is] the reality of ideas in mind [Whitehead maintains that nature is] a complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time exhibit the general scheme of interlocked relations of these prehensions. You cannot tear any one of them out of its context. Yet each of them within its context has all the reality that attaches to the whole complex. Conversely, the totality has the same reality as each prehension; for each prehension unifies unifies the modalities to be ascribed, from its standpoint, to every part of the whole. A prehension is a process of unifying.
. . . The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature.
David Ray Griffin, in his Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration helps to explain prehension by reference to more widely recognized extrasensory perception and religious experience:
As to what kind of perception is primary and what is derivative from it:
The fact that religious, moral, and aesthetic knowledge is based primarily on nonsensory perception should not make it seem less empirical (experientially based) than scientific knowledge, for two reasons. First, nonsensory perception is our fundamental mode of perception, so that science, insofar as it is based on sensory perception, is based on a derivative mode of perception. Second, science is also directly based on nonsensory perception, in two ways. On the one hand, insofar as science is based on both mathematics and logic, it is based on things whose status in the nature of things is similar to that of moral and aesthetic values and principles and must be known in the same way: through nonsensory perception--which we often call "intuition." . . . On the other hand, although natural science's explicit data (aside from its mathematical data) are based on sensory perceptions, the categories it uses to interpret them--such as an actual world, causality, and time--are based on nonsensory perception, as pointed out in Chapter 3. Accordingly, in terms of nonsensory and sensory perception, the differences between theology (or philosophy of religion), ethics, and aesthetics, on the one hand, and the natural sciences, on the other, is only a difference of degree. . . .
In any case, parapsychology, by giving evidence of nonsensory perception, sometimes quite dramatic evidence, provides scientific disconfirmation of the sensationist theory of perception, which has been one of the two major bases for assuming that we can have no perceptual knowledge of values (the other basis being the assumption that values have no objective existence in the nature of things). Parapsychology thereby proves itself to be not only, as J. B. Rhine suggested, religion's science, but ethics' science and aesthetics' science as well. pp. 284-85
On how evidence of telepathy contributes to theology:
[It provides an analogy to our having] a direct experience of the mind or soul of the universe. [since any telepathy is experience of one mind by another]. In our experience of God . . . there would be no "distance" involved, assuming as do both traditional theism and panentheism, the all-pervasiveness of God. p. 286.
About the relationship between parapsychological and other experiences:
Parapsychology . . . provides an analogy for suspecting that they represent merely an extreme form of experience that is being enjoyed all the time. What is usually called "extrasensory perception," accordingly, is probably unusual only in that occasionally this constant direct nonsensory prehension of other minds or things rises to the conscious portion of one's experience. By analogy, we would be having direct experiences of the Holy Reality all the time. Those very rare experiences in which we have a religious experience in the strong sense, a numinous experience, would be unusual only in rising, in those rare moments, to consciousness. The constant but generally unconscious experience of God could account, then, for our presupposition, even if we consciously affirm otherwise, that there is something of ultimate intrinsic worth. This idea, incidentally, would fit with James's thesis that the kinds of experiences reported in The Varieties of Religious Experience are simply extreme versions of experiences common to everyone.
This experience of the divine experience, analogous to telepathic experience of other finite minds, may also be important for moral experience beyond the way mentioned abave. There I spoke of our prehension of God's appetitive envisagement of values, what Whitehead called God's "primordial nature." Abraham Heschel has suggested that the Hebrew prophets spoke out of an experience of the divine "pathos," God's suffering with the poor and opressed. This idea corresponds with Whitehead's suggestion that we can also have a prehension of God's "consequent nature," which is God's sympathetic response to the world: God's delight in the joys of the creatures and compassion with their sufferings. Parapsychologists can allow us to take Heschel's suggestion more seriously than we otherwise might. . . . pp. 286-87.
Whiteheadian Terminology
Alan Anderson
This is a collection of statements that may help to clarify a comparatively small number of terms employed by, and generally originated by, Alfred North Whitehead. I have tried to arrange them in a way that would lead from one topic to another, rather than alphabetically, but I doubt that the arrangement makes much difference. I have put my extreme simplifications of some terms in parentheses immediately after their listing.
Actual entities (The living bursts of energy that are feelings that make up the universe; in my simplified terminology, experiences. See panpsychism.)
William A. Christian writes in his An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (Yale, 1959), pp. 12-13:
Actual entities are the real things (res verae of which the universe is made up. An actual entity is an experiencing subject and is constituted by its experience. Its experience is its real internal constitution. . . .
The term actual entity applies either to God or to an actual occasion. God and actual occasions are alike actual entities. God differs from actual occasions in two important ways: (a) The data of the conceptual prehensions of actual occasions are abstracted from the data of physical prehensions. Thus every actual occasion originates "physically." God's conceptual prehensions, on the other hand, are underbid or primordial and constitute his primordial nature. This is his timeless "envisagement" of the multiplicity of eternal objects. God's physical prehensions are his experience of concrete actual occasions and constitute his consequent nature. Whitehead means to say God is one concrete actual entity, not two actual entities, for either "nature" considered apart from the other is an abstraction. (b) Every actual occasion is of limited duration. It is literally an occasion. When its concrescence has been completed it "perishes" or ceases to exist as an experiencing subject. God, however, does not "perish." He exists at all times as an experiencing subject. That is to say, God is everlasting. [However, Charles Hartshorne and some other process thinkers believe that God is a succession of experiences, as we are, in what I call "serial selfhood"]
Donald W. Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality (Macmillan, 1966), Glossary (arranged alphabetically, and containing many more terms than are given on this site) from which all Sherburne quotations below are taken.
Actual entity--" 'Actual entities'--also termed 'actual occasions'--are the final real things of which the world is made up" [P(rocess) (and) R(eality) 27]. Like the atoms of Democritus they are microcosmic entities, aggregates of which, termed societies or nexus, form the macrocosmic entities of our everyday experience--trees, houses, people. But whereas the atoms of Democritus are inert, imperishable, material stuff, Whitehead's actual entities are vital, transient "drops of experience, complex and interdependent" [PR 28]. To hold that the final real things of which the world is made up are drops of experience is not to imply that consciousness permeates inanimate nature; for consciousness can characterize only extremely sophisticated actual entities, and actual entities have the potentiality for the sophistication productive of consciousness only when they are members of extremely complex societies such as the society we call the human brain. . . .
Actual entities, then, are units of process, and the title Process and Reality is meant to indicate that for Whitehead these microcosmic units of process are the final realities--" there is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real" [PR 27-28]. On the other hand, to mistakenly consider an aggregate of actual entities as a final reality is to commit the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness [see below]; Descartes was guilty of this fallacy when he identified mind and matter as two distinct kinds of reality.
An actual entity is "the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence" [PR 323]. A concrescence is a growing together of the remnants of the perishing past into the vibrant immediacy of a novel, present unity. An actual entity endures but an instant--the instant of its becoming, its active process of self-creation out of the elements of the perishing past--and then it, too, perishes and as objectively immortal becomes dead datum for succeeding generations of actual entities. The concrescence of an actual entity begins with a passive, receptive moment when the givenness of the past is thrust upon it; it then completes its becoming through a series of creative supplemental phases that adjust, integrate, and perhaps modify the given data. In simple actual entities there is mere reiteration of the given; they are "vehicles for receiving, for storing in a napkin, and for restoring without loss or gain" [PR 269]. Sophisticated actual entities enjoy a complex inheritance as a result of their social involvement, and this complexity of inheritance begets originality in the supplemental phases as the means for achieving integration and unity.
Actual occasion--For all practical purposes the phrases actual occasion and actual entity are interchangeable. Whitehead notes only one difference: the word occasion implies a spatio-temporal location. God is the one nontemporal actual entity. Hence Whitehead observes that "the term 'actual occasion' will always exclude God from its scope" [PR 135]. It is true, however, that even though "the term 'actual occasion' is used synonymously with 멲ctual entity' "[PR 119], the use of actual occasion should alert one to the likelihood that the "character of extensiveness has some direct relevance to the discussion, either extensiveness in the form of temporal extensiveness, that is to say 'duration,' or extensiveness in the form of spatial extension, or in the more complete signification of spatio-temporal extensiveness" [PR 119].
Eternal objects
Christian, p. 13:
Eternal objects are pure potentials. They are in fundamental contrast with actual entities. In themselves they do not determine in what actual entities they are ingredient. This is what is meant by saying that they are "pure" potentials. They are merely possible forms of definiteness. Prehensions of eternal objects are called conceptual prehensions, in contrast with prehensions of actual entities, which are called physical prehensions.
Sherburne:
Eternal object--"Any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an 'eternal object'" [PR 70]. Eternal objects are forms of definiteness capable of specifying the character of actual entities; they are "Pure Potentials for the Specific Determination of Fact" [PR 32]. An actual entity's process of becoming is a process of acquiring definiteness by a series of decisions to select or reject various forms of definiteness (eternal objects). "The determinate definiteness of each actuality is an expression of a selection from these forms. It grades them in a diversity of relevance" [PR 69]. It is the actual entities that do the selecting and rejecting: "an eternal object is always a potentiality for actual entities; but in itself, as conceptually felt, it is neutral as to the fact of its physical ingression in any particular actual entity of the temporal world" [PR 70].
Any given actual entity does not make its decisions with utter freedom. "An actual entity arises from decisions for it and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it" [PR 68]. The past, from which it inherits, presents it with certain forms of definiteness that it is compelled to reiterate. "Some conformation is necessary as a basis of vector transition, whereby the past is synthesized with the present. The one eternal object in its two-way function, as a determinant of the datum and as a determinant of the subjective form, is thus relational. . . . An eternal object when it has ingression through its function of objectifying the actual world, so as to present the datum for prehension, is functioning 'datively'" [PR 249].
To be an individual, concrete fact each actual entity must assume some determinate form; this it does by means of its decisions as to which eternal objects it will permit, and which eternal objects it will not permit, to become ingredient in its con-crescence. The process, the becoming involved in the decision of an actual entity is one with its very being; eternal objects, on the other hand, are essentially aloof from change in that it is of their essence to be eternal. But they are involved in change in the sense that the very process of becoming that is any given actual occa-sion is the process of determining, via selected eternal objects, the specific character, the kind of definiteness, that will make that actual entity what it will be. "The actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or 'participation') of other things which constitute the potentiali-ties of definiteness for any actual existence. The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal" [PR 63].
This sounds Platonic, and to a degree it is meant to be. Whitehead distinguishes between eternal objects of the subjective species and eternal objects of the objective species, and explicitly states that "eternal objects of the objective species are the mathematical platonic forms" [PR 446]. These forms are objective in the sense that they are "an element in the definiteness of some objectified nexus, or of some single actual entity which is a datum of a feeling" [PR 445]. An eternal object of the subjective species is subjective in the sense that it is "an element in the definiteness of the subjective form of a feeling. . . . It is an emotion, or an intensity, or an adversion, or an aversion, or a pleasure, or a pain" [PR 446]. Whitehead's scheme is not Platonic in that it does not allow an eminent reality to the realm of eternal objects. The ontological principle assigns to actual entities reality in the fullest sense of the term, and here Whitehead embodies Aristotle's protest against Plato's "other worldliness." But, by the ontological principle, "everything must be some-where; and here 'somewhere' means 'some actual entity.' Accord-ingly the general potentiality of the universe [i.e., the realm of eternal objects] must be somewhere; since it retains its proximate relevance to actual entities for which it is unrealized. . . . This somewhere' is the non-temporal actual entity. Thus 'proximate relevance' means 'relevance as in the primordial mind of God'" [PR 73]. . . .
Creativity (The fact that endlessly the past is blended with the possible in order to make new units of reality.)
Christian, p. 13:
Creativity is Whitehead's term for the most fundamental character of actuality. Creativity is not an individual thing and has no status apart from actual entities. By saying that creativity is "ultimate," Whitehead seems to mean at least two things: (a) He means that any actual entity, whether God or an actual occasion, is not altogether derived from something else. There is an underived element in every actual entity. Every actual entity, not only God, is in some degree self-creative or causa sui. (b) He means that every actual entity is in some degree novel. The novelty of a actual entity is the uniqueness which results from its self-creativity. It is an essentially new unity of experience. Having in mind both of these meanings, it seems fair to say that an alternative expression for creativity might be "originality," in the fullest and most radical sense of the word.
Sherburne:
Creativity is one of three notions involved in what Whitehead calls the Category of the Ultimate; this category expresses the general principle presupposed by all other aspects of the philosophy of organism (Whitehead's name for his own position). The other two notions involved are many and one.
Whitehead's philosophy is a process philosophy, and the notion of creativity is crucial to an understanding of process. The basic presupposition of the whole system is ongoingness: generation after generation of actual entities succeeding one another without end. Creativity expresses that ultimate fact about actual entities that makes ongoingness intelligible.
The principle of creativity enunciates the following relationships between many and one: (1) at any instant the universe constitutes a disjunctively diverse many; (2) "it lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity" [PR 31]; (3) the novel one that results from this unification, this concrescence, is truly novel뾦.e., it stands over and against what has been urnfied and as such is disjunctively diverse from the items it has unified; and (4) there is here the same situation from which the process began (i.e., a disjunctive diversity) and it therefore repeats itself "to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature" [PR 347]. "The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction" [PR 32].
Whitehead's understanding of creativity does not do violence to the ontological principle; creativity is not, nor does it point to, some kind of entity or being more real than actual entities. It is, rather, descriptive of the most fundamental relationships participated in by all actual entities. "'Creativity' is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact" [PR 311]. . . .
Concrescence
Sherburne:
Concrescence is the name given to the process that is any given actual entity; it is "the real internal constitution of a particular existent" [PR 320]. Concrescence is the growing together of a many into the unity of a one. (See CREATIVITY.) The initial phase of a concrescence is composed of the separate feelings of the disjunctively diverse entities that make up the actual world of the actual entity in question. Subsequent phases effect the growing together, the concrescence, of these many separate feelings into one unity of feeling, which is termed the satisfaction of that actual entity. "Concrescence' is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the 'many' to its subordination in the constitution of the novel 'one'" [PR 321]. With the attaining of its satisfaction an actual entity is completed and perishes--i.e., it becomes a datum for fresh instances of concrescence. . . .
Prehension (The connective tissue of reality; the feeling, inclusion, of one mind [experience] by another.)
Objective immortality (The endless status of a completed experience, after it has finished constituing itself and no longer is aware, but is an influence on experiences that develop after it did.)
Sherburne:
Objective immortality--"The attainment of a peculiar definiteness is the final cause which animates a particular process; and its attainment halts its process, so that by transcendence it passes into its objective immortality as a new objective condition added to the riches of definiteness attainable, the 'real potentiality' of the universe" [PR 340].
Simple location (Nothing is isolated, simply being in itself, as it would be as if there were simple location.)
Peter A. Angeles, The HarperCollins Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed., 1992.
simple location, fallacy of a phrase coined by Whitehead to refer to what he regarded as fallacious: the belief that reality consists of bits of matter isolated from each other at give locations in space and time.
Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead (Johns Hopkins, 1962), p. 227:
. . . no element in our perceptual knowledge has the characteristic of being "simply located" in space and time (this "simple location" being the defining characteristic of matter, and being "the very foundation of the seventeenth century scheme of nature" [Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 81].
Whitehead, Process and Reality, Macmilan, 1929, p. 208; corrected ed., Free Press, 1978, p. 137:
This presupposition of individual independence is what I have elsewhere called, the 'fallacy of simple location.'
Charles Hartshorne, "Panpsychism," in Vergilius Ferm, A History of Philosophical Systems (Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 443:
[A]s Whitehead has most clearly seen--individuals generally are not simply outside each other (the fallacy of "simple location") but in each other, and God's inclusion of all things is merely the extreme or super-case of the social relativity or mutual immanence of indviduals.
Fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Mistaking the abstract for the concrete.)
Angeles:
concreteness, fallacy of misplaced the phrase coined by Alfred North Whitehead to refer to what he considered the fallacy of taking an abstract characteristic and dealing with it as if it were what reality was like in its concrete form.
A. H. Johnson, in his Whitehead's Theory of Reality, pp. 150-51:
Misplaced Concreteness
In criticizing the work of previous thinkers, Whitehead points to a persistent tendency on the part of many to perpetrate the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. This, as the title indicates, consists in mistaking the abstract for the concrete. More specifically it involves setting up distinctions which disregard the genuine interconnections of things. For example, (a) the old-fashioned "faculty psychology" discussed mere awareness, mere private sensation, mere emotion, mere purpose뻛ach a separate and distinct faculty. (b) Another general illustration of this error is the fallacy of Simple Location. This fallacy occurs when one assumes that in expressing the space and time relations of a bit of matter it is unnecessary to say more than that it is present in a specific position in space at a specific time. It is Whitehead's contention that it is absolutely essential to refer to other regions of space and other durations of time. Whitehead expresses this idea more clearly and briefly by stating that simple location means a mutually exclusive "individual independence." (C) A third general illustration of the fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness is the Substance-Quality concept. This is the notion that each real entity is absolutely separate and distinct from every other real entity, and that the qualities of each have no essential relation to the qualities of others.
As has been said, Whitehead objects to these three variations of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness because they involve a "break up" of the real continuity of experience. He admits the practical usefulness of these fallacies. His objection is to the use of these patterns of thought without recognizing their serious deficiencies. Whitehead suggests that this approach is useful in metaphysical speculation only with reference to the "subjective form." If the notion of simple location is taken seriously (in general) the reality of temporal duration is denied. Memory and induction become hopeless mysteries. If the subject (substance) - predicate (quality) notion is accepted uncritically the subject is confined to a private world of experience. Solipsism is inescapable. Whitehead also notes that frequently the substance-quality form of thought involves the notion of "vacuous actuality"; that is, there is a denial of subjective experience to the ultimate realities.
See Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, Macmillan, 1925, ch. 3, esp. pp. 75 and 77; Free Press pp. 51 and 52.
Metaphysics
Sherburne:
Metaphysics, or Speculative Philosophy, "is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. By this notion of 멼nterpretation' I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. . . . The true method of philosophical construction is to frame a scheme of ideas, the best that one can, and unflinchingly to explore the interpretation of experience in terms of that scheme" [PR 4, x].
Whitehead uses the adjective metaphysical when discussing characteristics of actual entities that are completely general. "The metaphysical characteristics of an actual entity--in the proper general sense of 'metaphysics'--should be those which apply to all actual entities" [PR 138]. There is no hint of dogmatism in Whitehead's attitude: "It may be doubted whether such metaphysical concepts have ever been formulated in their strict purity--even taking into account the most general principles of logic and of mathematics. We have to confine ourselves to societies sufficiently wide, and yet such that their defining characteristics cannot safely be ascribed to all actual entities which have been or may be. . . . In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dog matic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly" [PR 138-139, x].
Ontological principle
Sherburne:
Ontological principle--The ontological principle asserts that "every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance, has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence. . . . According to the ontological principle there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere" [PR 36, 373]. God is a part of the actual world of every actual occasion, and he includes in his primordial nature the realm of eternal objects. "By this recognition of the divine element the general Aristotelian principle is maintained that, apart from things that are actual, there is nothing뾫othing either in fact or in efficacy. . . . Thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of 'existence,' are derived by abstraction from actual occasions" [PR 64, 113].
BRIEF EXCERPTS FROM ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD AND CHARLES HARTSHORNE
(Selection of quotations, slight simplifications of style, bolding of type, and material in brackets by Alan Anderson)
Atomism, the belief that everything is made up of invisibly small, indivisible particles, was anticipated in the East by Jainism some time after 800 B.C.E., but Western atomism originated in ancient Greece with Leucippus and Democritus, as a mediating position between the views of Heraclitus, who maintained that everything is changing, and Parmenides, who held that change is impossible. In the early modern world, Galileo (1564-1642) and others revived atomism. Ordinarily, atomism is associated with materialism, but both science and philosophy have shown that the atomistic nature of reality need not be of a material nature, at least as matter usually is conceived. By the end of the 19th century, science had found that there are smaller units than the atom. The first of these to be discovered, by J. J. Thomson in 1897, was the electron. Energy is recognized as coming in momentarily-existing bursts or packets, quanta, discovered in 1900 by Max Planck. Einstein discovered the equivalence of matter and energy. Energy usually is considered essentially lifeless, and life a curious accident in the midst of the gigantic accident that the universe commonly is thought to be. Earlier belief in the discreteness of things is replaced by recognition of things as interrelated aspects of fields of force. This scientific view still is essentially materialistic. Materialism has been defined as "the denial that the most pervasive processes of nature involve any such psychical functions as sensing, feeling, remembering, desiring, or thinking" (Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers [1983], p. 17). Perhaps the greatest single step in recognizing atoms as psychical, rather than physical, was taken by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Leibniz realized, in the words of Hartshorne:
If pebbles or other perceptible inert solids are really swarms of imperceptible active singulars, it is absurd to try to describe the true and active singulars in terms of inert, hard, solid objects . . . Rather we must describe the imperceptible units in terms of the only active singulars we perceive as such: ourselves, other animals, and perhaps--though here Leibniz hesitates slightly--also plants. (Hartshorne emphasizes the importance of Plato's recognition of the soul as self-moved, self-changed.)
In other words, Leibniz was the first very great philosopher to combine (1) the atomistic insight . . . that the basic forms of change in the world are too subtle to be perceptible to direct vision or touch, with (2) the central Platonic insight that the principle of change or of dynamic unity is psychical, involving at least some of the inherently active functions of thinking, feeling, remembering, perceiving, willing. The seemingly inert masses of physical stuff Leibniz takes to be myriads of lowly souls (monads ), imperceptible as distinct individuals, which perceive only in extremely primitive fashion. . . . This was one of the greatest of intellectual discoveries, far indeed from being adequately appreciated after three centuries (Ibid., p. 131).
WHITEHEAD ON CONSIDERING NATURE AS LIFELESS AND AS ALIVE
FROM WHITEHEAD'S MODES OF THOUGHT (1938), (MT), LECTURE 7, "NATURE LIFELESS":
[MT 128] Nature, in these chapters, means the world as interpreted by reliance on clear and distinct sensory experiences, visual, auditory, and tactile.
[MT 129] The common-sense notion of the universe, which [was forming about 1500] [MT 130] expresses large, all-pervading truths about the world about us. The only question is as to how fundamental these truths may be. In other words, we have to ask what large features of the universe cannot be expressed in these terms. We have also to ask whether we cannot find some other set of notions which will explain the importance of this common-sense notion, and will also explain its relations to those features ignored by the common-sense notion.
[MT 131] The main principles of the old common-sense doctrine, which even today is the common doctrine of ordinary life because in some sense it is true[, are:]
[1] There are bits of matter, enduring self-identically in space which is otherwise empty.
[2] Each bit of matter occupies a definite limited region.
[3] Each such particle of matter has its own private qualifications, such as its shape, its motion, its mass, its colour, its scent.
[4] Some of these qualifications change, others are persistent.
[5] The essential relationship between bits of matter is purely spatial.
[6] Space itself is . . . unchanging, always including in itself this capacity for the relationship of bits of [132] matter.
This is the grand doctrine of nature as a self-sufficient, meaningless complex of facts. It is the doctrine of the autonomy of physical science. It is the doctrine which in these lectures I am denying.
[MT 130][Over the past few centuries] the development of natural science has gradually discarded every single feature of the original common-sense notion. Nothing whatever remains of it, considered as expressing the primary features in terms of which the universe is to be interpreted. The obvious common-sense notion has been entirely destroyed, so far as concerns its function as the basis for all interpretation. One by one, every item as been dethroned. . . . [Yet] this common-sense notion still reigns supreme in the workaday life of mankind. It dominates the marketplace, the playgrounds, the law courts, and in fact the whole sociological intercourse of mankind. It is supreme in literature and is assumed in all the humanistic sciences.
[REPLACING EARLY MODERN BELIEFS WITH SOME CONSTITUTING WHAT CURRENTLY IS CALLED PROCESS THOUGHT, PANEXPERIENTIALISM, AND CONSTRUCTIVE POSTMODERNISM]
[MT 132] The state of [recent] modern thought is that every single item in this general doctrine is denied, but that the general conclusions from the doctrine as a whole are tenaciously retained. The result is a complete muddle in scientific thought, in philosophic cosmology, and in epistemology.
[MT 135] A dead nature can give no reasons. All ultimate reasons are in terms of aim at value. A dead nature aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value.
[MT 136] The unexpected result has been the elimination of bits of matter, as the self-identical supports for physical properties.
[PROCESS]
[MT 137] [In the 20th Century] matter has been identified with energy, and energy is sheer activity; the passive substratum composed of self-identical enduring bits of matter [atoms, as originally understood] has been abandoned, so far as concerns any fundamental description.
[MT 145] [The] change of view occupying [the last] four centuries, may be characterized as the transition from [1] space and matter [more broadly, substance], as the fundamental notions to [2] process conceived as a complex of activity with internal relations between its various factors.
[LIFE]
[MT 147] How do we add content to the notion of bare activity? [We recognize it as living.]
[MT 152] [T]he characteristics of life [as understood by Whitehead] are [1] absolute self-enjoyment, [2] creative activity [fusing the past and the possible in a new unity, a new creation], [3] aim. [MT 167, an additional definition of life, distinguishing it from mentality:] the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. It is the enjoyment of emotion which was then, which is now, and which will be then. This vector character is of the essence of such entertainment. The emotion transcends the present in two ways. It issues from, and it issues towards. It is received, it is enjoyed, and it is passed along, from moment to moment. . . . In so far as conceptual mentality does not intervene, the grand patterns pervading the environment are passed on with the inherited modes of adjustment. Here we find the patterns of activity studied by physicists and chemists. In the case of inorganic nature any sporadic flashes [168] are inoperative so far as our powers of discernment are concerned. The lowest stages of effective mentality, controlled by the inheritance of physical pattern, involves the faint direction of emphasis by unconscious ideal aim. The various examples of the higher forms of life exhibit the variety of grades of effectiveness of mentality. In the social habits of animals, there is evidence of flashes of mentality in the past which have degenerated into physical habits. Finally in the higher animals and more particularly in mankind, we have clear evidence of mentality habitually effective. In our own experience, our knowledge consciously entertained and systematized can only mean such mentality, directly observed.
[SCIENCE]
[MT 154] Science can find no individual enjoyment in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of natural science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of physical science lies in the fact that such science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. [Science] examines the . . . superficial, and neglects the . . . fundamental.
The disastrous separation of body and mind which has been fixed on European thought by Descartes is responsible for this blindness of science. In one sense the abstraction [consideration of some things apart from other things] has been a happy one, in that it has allowed the simplest things to be considered first, for about ten generations. [continued immediately below, without break]
[ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE BODIES, IN RELATION TO THE GIVE AND TAKE OF FEELING (PREHENSION, RECEPTION) AND EXPRESSION, THE TWO SIDES OF ANY EXPERIENCE]
[MT 20] [I]mportance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite.
But expression is founded on the finite occasion. It is the activity of finitude impressing itself on its environment. [21] The laws of nature are large average effects which reign impersonally. Whereas, there is nothing average about expression. . . .
We think of ourselves as so intimately entwined in bodily life that a man is a complex unity?ody and mind. But the body is part of the external world, continuous with it. In fact, it is just as much part of nature as anything else there? river, or a mountain, or a cloud. . . .
[FIRST DEFINITION OF A LIVING BODY]
[22] The human body is that region of the world which is the primary field of human expression. . . .
Wherever there is a region of nature which is itself the primary field of the expressions issuing from each of its parts, that region is alive.
[SECOND DEFINITION OF A LIVING BODY]
In this second definition, the phrase "expressions issuing from each of its parts" has been substituted for the phrase "human expression," as used previously. The new definition is wider than the former by extending beyond human beings, and beyond the higher animals. Also it will be noticed that these definitions involve the direct negation [23] of any extreme form of Behaviourism. In such behaviouristic doctrines, importance and expression must be banished and can never be intelligently employed. A consistent behaviourist cannot feel it important to refute my statement. He can only behave.
There are two sides to an animal body of the higher type, and so far we have only developed one of them. The second, and wider, definition enables us to find the distinction between vegetation and animal life. This distinction, like others, refuses to be pushed to meticulous exactness. In the animal, there is the one experience expressing itself throughout the animal body. But this is only half the tale.
The other half of the tale is that the body is composed of various centres of experience, imposing the expression of themselves on each other. Feeling (in the sense here used), or prehension, is the reception of expressions. Thus the animal body is composed of entities, which are mutually expressing and feeling. Expressions are the data for feeling diffused in the environment; and a living body is a peculiarly close adjustment of these two sides of experience, namely, expression and feeling. By reason of this organization, an adjusted variety of feelings is produced in that supreme entity which is the one animal considered as one experiencing subject.
Thus the one animal, and the various parts of its body considered as themselves centres of experience, are in one sense on a level. Namely, they are centres of experience expressing themselves vividly to each other, and obtaining their own feelings mainly by reason of such mutual expressions.
In another sense, the animal as one centre of experience is on a higher level than its other bodily centres. For these subordinate centres are specialists. They only receive re[24]stricted types of emotional feeling, and are impervious beyond such types. . . .
In the case of vegetables, we find bodily organizations which decisively lack any one centre of experience with a higher complexity either of expressions received or of inborn data. A vegetable is a democracy; an animal is dominated by one, or more centres of experience. But such domination is limited, very strictly limited. The expressions of the central leader are relevant to that leader's reception of data from the body.
Thus an animal body exhibits the limited domination of at least one of its component activities of expression. If the dominant activity be severed from the rest of the body, the whole coordination collapses, and the animal dies. Whereas in the case of the vegetable, the democracy can be subdivided into minor democracies which easily survive without much apparent loss of functional expression.
It is evident that our statement is oversimplified. . . . [25] [A]n animal body in its highest examples is more analogous to a feudal society, with its one overlord.
This final unity of animal intelligence is also the organ of reaction to novel situations, and is the organ introducing the requisite novelty of reaction. Finally, the overlord tends to relapse into the conventionality of routine imposed upon the subordinate governors, such as the heart. Animal life can face conventional novelties with conventional devices. But the governing principle lacks large power for the sudden introduction of any major novelty. . . .
[HUMANITY]
When we come to mankind, nature seems to have burst through another of its boundaries. The central activity of enjoyment and expression has assumed a reversal in the importance of its diverse functionings. The conceptual entertainment of unrealized possibility becomes a major factor in human mentality. In this way outrageous novelty is introduced, sometimes beatified, sometimes damned, and sometimes literally patented or protected by copyright. The definition of mankind is that in this genus of animals the central activity has been developed on the side of its relationship to novelty. This relationship is twofold. There is novelty received from the aggregate diversities of bodily expressions. Such novelty requires decision as to its reduction to coherence of expression.
Again there is the introduction of novelty of feeling by the entertainment of unexpected possibilities. This second side is the enlargement of the conceptual experience of mankind. The characterization of this conceptual feeling is the sense of what might be and of what might have been. It is the entertainment of the alternative. In its highest development, this becomes the entertainment of the ideal. It emphasizes the sense of importance . . . And this sense exhibits itself in various species, such as, the sense of morality, the mystic sense of religion, the sense of that delicacy of adjustment which is beauty, the sense of necessity for mutual connection which is understanding, and the sense of discrimination of each factor which is consciousness.
Also it is the nature of feeling to pass into expression. Thus the expression of these various feelings produces the [27] history of mankind as distinct from the narrative of animal behaviours. History is the record of the expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity.
. . . In mankind, the dominant dependence on bodily functioning seems still there. And yet the life of a human being receives its worth, its importance, from the way in which unrealized ideals shape its purposes and tinge its actions. The distinctions between men and animals is in one sense only a difference in degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. The Rubicon has been crossed.
[FOUR KINDS OF COLLECTIONS OF EXPERIENCES]
Thus in nature we find four types of aggregations of actualities: [1] the lowest is the nonliving aggregation, in which mutual influence is predominantly of a formal character expressible in formal sciences, such as mathematics. The inorganic is dominated by the average. It lacks individual expression in its parts. Their flashes of selection (if any) are sporadic and ineffective. Its parts merely transmit average expressions; and thus the structure survives. For the average is always there, stifling individuality.
[2] The vegetable grade exhibits a democracy of purposeful influences issuing from its parts. The predominant |
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