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PHILOSOPHY A.N. WHITEHEAD'S PROCESS AND REALITY Victor Suchar, Member, on 4 September 2001 Introduction Whitehead's " Process and reality" is a highly complex work that covers a vast territory, hence the many approaches one can take to giving an account of it. The speaker does not claim that his is anything else but a mere simplification, and in his attempt to find a path through Whitehead's thought will follow the following format: • A short biographical note, to situate Whitehead in his period • What kind of philosophy?, to situate Process and Reality in the history of 20th Century philosophy • Speculative Philosophy- excerpts from the first chapter of the book, which constitute a central document on the subject, and which in the speaker's opinion remains as most relevant to philosophy today.
A. N. Whitehead (1861- 1947), mathematician, logician, philosopher of science, metaphysician. Educated at Sherbourne School, Dorset, then Trinity College, Cambridge. Became fellow at Trinity in 1910. Russell was first his student, then his friend and colleague at Trinity. Each has written a first book- volume one only- Whitehead, "Universal Algebra"- which won him election in the Royal Society- Russell, "Principles of Mathematics", then discovered that they overlapped and decided to collaborate in writing a book which was to take one year to complete. The book was the ground breaking 3 vol. Principia Mathematica , which took more than a decade to complete, and launched symbolic logic in its modern form. The publication of the first volume of this book in 1910, ended Whitehead's first phase, as logician, of his extraordinary intellectual career. The period 1910- 1924, was his second phase, as mathematician and philosopher of science. He was Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, Dean of the Faculty of Science at University of London and Chair of its Academic Council. In this period he published An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature and the celebrated The Principle of Relativity, which won him the election as a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1924, at age 63, when most people write their memoirs, Whitehead made a decisive move- geographically and intellectually, to launch the third phase of his career. Never having formally studied philosophy, he agreed to become Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, a position he held until retirement in 1937 at age 76. The intellectual shift was from philosophy of science to metaphysics. His magnus opus, Process and Reality was published in 1929 at age 69. The book is considered as the central document in "process philosophy" although Whitehead refers to it as "philosophy of organism".
In the course of the last century, a large contingent of English and American philosophers were persuaded to abandon the traditional conception of philosophy as a process of reflection about the grounds upon which knowledge, value and action and their link become possible. This conception was replaced with one or another of two naturalist conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as therapy designed to cure the linguistic illness of which philosophy itself is the cause, and the philosophy as an a posteriori discipline within natural science.. Expressing the former naturalist conception, Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus (1922): "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science- i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy- and then whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions." This conception remained with him throughout his life. In the Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein articulates his therapeutic form of philosophy in the famous passage: "Philosophical problems are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognise those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them The problems are solved not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language." Rudolf Carnap's Logical Construction of the World, published in 1928, and a central document of analytical philosophy was built on the foundations laid out earlier by Russell and Wittgenstein. The "Logical Construction" presents a logically ordered constitutional system that is meant to show that all scientific concepts can be constituted from an experiential basis and that no metaphysical concepts can be so constituted. In effect, Carnap's book has been viewed as the high water mark of good old fashioned empiricism. In contrast, Whitehead's philosophy of organism, published only one year later, is first of all related to Plato's philosophy, then to Spinoza's metaphysical thought, and seems to approximate some strains of Indian and Chinese thought which make the process rather than the fact ultimate. In some remarks on Process and Reality at a Symposium held at Harvard in honour of his seventieth birthday, Whitehead said "You must cut across new way, you know. Get your religion into physics, and your physics into aesthetics." Furthermore, he said: "Of course, anybody who has any sense who writes on philosophy knows, or ought to know, that the world is unfathomable in its complexity, and that anything you put together must be open to criticism— ought to be open to criticism if it is any good at all. It should be a platform from which it is worth while to make criticisms." As Dorothy Emmet said in her Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism: the difficulties of Whitehead last work are largely due to the fact Carnap's conception of philosophy, which was the subject of the speaker's talk of September 1999, and Whitehead's philosophy of organism, the subject of this session, are built on very different foundations, and in one sense they are diametrically opposed, even incompatible. But at one level, that of the intellectual history of the 20th.century, which should be stressed, they have something in common- they are both systematic constructions of the world, and perhaps, the last attempts at building an all encompassing world view. The question is not the adequacy of their ideas as they stand, but whether it is possible to say that they provide a platform from which it is worth while to make criticisms, and whether they open new vistas for creative thought. Process and Reality is a highly complex work, which can be presented in the time allowed in this session only in a very simplified manner.
1.`Actual entity' is the central concept in Whitehead's system. This system is atomistic- i.e., like Democritus, Whitehead conceives of the world as composed of a vast number of microcosmic entities. But while Democritus is a materialist and views atoms as bits of stuff, Whitehead presents an organic philosophy- each of his atoms, termed `actual entities' or `actual occasions', is an organism that grows, matures and perishes. The whole of Process and Reality is concerned with the characteristics of, and the inter-relationships between, actual entities- their being and becoming. They are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find something more real. They differ among themselves - God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial staff of existence ie far-off empty space. In the philosophy of organism, as developed by Whitehead, God's existence is not generically different of other actual entities, except that he is `primordial.' 2. `Concrescence' is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity. An actual .occasion is nothing but the unity to be ascribed to a particular instance of concrescence. This concrescence is thus nothing else than the `real internal constitution of the actual occasion in question'. The process itself is the constitution of the actual entity. This is a theory of monads; but it differs from Leibnitz's in that Whitehead's monads change. In the organic theory they merely become. Each monadic creature is a mode of the process of `feeling' the world, of housing the world in one unit of complex `feeling', in every way determinate. Such a unit is an `actual occasion'; it is the ultimate creature derivative from the creative process. Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. The objectification of other actual occasions form the given data from which an actual occasion originates. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. It is a process of `feeling' the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual satisfaction. 3. `Feeling' is a mere technical term, but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which concrescent actuality appropriates the datum as to make it its own. A feeling appropriates elements of the universe, which in themselves are other than the subject, and absorbs these elements into the real internal constitution of its subject by synthesising them in the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity. Feelings are `vectors', for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. We could say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feeling. 4.'Prehension' The philosophy of organism is a cell- theory of actuality. The cell is exhibited as appropriating, for the foundation of its own existence, the various elements of the universe out of which it arises. Each process of appropriation of a particular element is termed a `prehension'. Whitehead adopted the term prehension to express the activity whereby an actual entity effects its own concretion of other things. There are two species of prehensions, the positive species and the negative species. A `feeling' belongs to the positive species of prehensions A negative prehension is the definite exclusion of an item from positive contribution to the subjects internal constitution. A positive prehension is the definite inclusion of an item into positive contribution to the subject's own real internal constitution. This positive inclusion is called its `feeling' of that item. All actual entities in the actual world relative to a given actual entity as `subject' are necessarily `felt' by that subject. A `feeling' cannot be abstracted from the actual entity entertaining it. This actual entity is termed the `subject' of the feeling. 5. `The Ontological Principle' The importance of the concept of an actual entity is emphasised by what Whitehead terms the ontological principal. 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 the process of 6. The Fallacy of Mis-placed Concreteness. It is possible to see two sides throughout all Whitehead's work: an interest in formal schemes of logical relations, built on the scheme of mathematical postulates, and an interest in the concrete many sidedness of experience. The second, made him a critic of the `Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness', of the tendency to reify any scheme of abstract relations as it could replace the richness and variety of the concrete flow of experience. But what is the place of the formal scheme? Formal schemes. If Whitehead's interest into the many sidedness of experience of actual experience- what he calls its unfathomable complexity- made him attack `The Fallacy of Mis- placed Concreteness', his interest in the formal schemes made him hold to the belief that such schemes had more than a pragmatic significance (i.e. that they organise data), and that in the end it should be possible to show not only that certain types of event can be related under certain types of abstraction, but also that there can be a general scheme of formal relationships defining the logical structure of all that exists. In other words, that there should be not only formal patterns relevant to particular types of experience, but that there should be a general formal pattern, defining the logical structure of all possible experience and all possible worlds. This is one side of his view of `uniform relatedness', which is part of his `justification of induction' and it is linked with what he holds to be a persistent religious intuition of `permanence amid change.' Primordial Entity. The general scheme describes the logic of a primordial entity- God- which unites it with an aim towards the intensification of experience in the general conditions which the logical framework allows. The process of the world is then described as the supplying of empirical values to the general scheme. In Process and Reality, God makes the realm of possibility coherent with that of actuality, and therefore is the reason as to why certain things exist rather than others. Whitehead endeavours to assimilate the formal characterisation of God with every other actual entity and calls God `non-temporal' in contrast to the temporal world. Values are then empirically discoverable fillings supplied to the variables of the scheme in the actual process of events (on analogy with the supplying of values to a propositional function). Value, according to Whitehead, is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event. On the other hand, there is ambiguity here, since there is the suggestion that the process itself should aim at `Value', in the sense
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