SOURCE: “The Nature of Nature: Kant and Whitehead,” in Metaphysics as Foundation, edited by Paul A. Bogaard and Gordon Treash, State University of New York Press, 1993, pp. 42-58.

If Whitehead's philosophy of organism marks the beginning of either a revival of concern for the philosophy of nature or a substantiative contemporary metaphysics, then it is quite true that from its outset this movement has been intimately concerned with the problem of how nature is conceived. Neither is it an exaggeration to suggest that by the time he wrote Process and Reality a large part of Whitehead's undertaking was defined by his reliance on a sharp distinction between how the philosophy of organism understands nature and what he repeatedly insists is the conception of nature that dominates in modern thought. This modern conception is that nature, its objects and its laws, are “constructs” or, in even more contemporary terminology, “models” framed by individuals or by the members of a school, but not representations of a system or world that is independent of subjects. Whitehead was convinced that such a conception of nature is perverse and must be avoided, as almost the first page of Process and Reality makes plain. In the book's preface he lists nine “prevalent habits of thought” that will be repudiated in the course of the ensuing discussion. The seventh of these, and the only one associated with a single thinker is, “The Kantian doctrine of the objective world as a theoretical construct from purely subjective experience.”¹ The contrast between the Kantian conception of nature and the one proposed by Whitehead's thought is sharpened in the chapter on “The Order of Nature” when he explains that: “For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world …”²

Whitehead's strategy is to argue that two conceptions of nature are possible, the one proposed by the philosophy of organism and the modern or Kantian doctrine, and that only one of the two can be true. Nature cannot simultaneously be what emerges from the subject or a “theoretical construct from purely subjective experience” and whatever it is from which the subject emerges. So, if the philosophy of organism is true in its major assertions, the alternative doctrine must be false. Similarly, should the Kantian conception of nature be accepted, nothing of the illumination provided by the philosophy of organism can be sustained.

The accuracy of Whitehead's historical allusions, especially to Locke and Hume, have been subjected to close examination, but for the most part students have been content to accept his evaluation of Kant at face value. In the first section of the present discussion I will argue that it is incorrect to suggest that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between Kant's doctrine and Whitehead's own position. Rather, in terms reminiscent of the solution of the first and second antinomies, neither the assertion that, “The objective world or nature is primary in both the epistemological and the ontological sense and the subject is secondary to this objective world” nor its contrary, “The objective world or nature is not ontologically or epistemologically primary, but depends upon the subject” can be thought true without certain vital qualifications.

That Whitehead was not a very careful Kantian would be worth no more than a critical footnote. However, to pose the question in these terms has the advantage that it highlights the ambiguity of what a subject is, and that ambiguity is fundamental to the discussion. There can be little question that Whitehead's perspective is through and through ontological. He undertakes to describe the subjects from which all existences are constituted, and the subject is inevitably that unit of experience which he terms the actual entity or the superject. Kant, by contrast, begins with the cognitive subject. He is concerned to delineate the principles by which not only human cognition, but any thought significantly like human intelligence, proceeds. At first that description seems to suggest that Whitehead was entirely correct to object to any version of the Kantian program because it begins from a perspective diametrically opposed to his own. However, as will be shown, the difference is not an ultimate one, and in fact there are highly important ways in which the two positions reenforce one another. This is apparent when the epistemological implications of the critical program are developed as they are by the first two sections of the paper, and when these reflections are extrapolated to the world conceived by the natural sciences as Kant does extrapolate them in a work which has attracted far too little attention, the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Discussion of this is undertaken in sections three and four, and in this portion of the discussion the importance for Kant of the ontological rendering of subjectivity becomes apparent.

SUBJECTS, OBJECTS AND NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

Textual justification exists for describing the modern conception of nature, according to which it is only a system of concepts or a “model,” as Kantian. In the first edition version of the transcendental deduction, for example, Kant described nature as “… a conceptual whole (Inbegriff) that is nothing in itself, but rather a collection of the mind's representations …”³ It follows of course that, “The order and regularity of appearances that we term nature we ourselves introduce, and we would not be able to find them there at all had we, or rather the nature of our minds, not originally put them there.”⁴

However, it is not necessarily the case that such characterizations of nature lead univocally to the position Whitehead describes as Kantian, and there is good reason for doubting that they do so. Should the Inbegriff terminology be pressed to the point of regarding the world of objects which collectively we term nature as merely a theoretical construct from “purely subjective experience,” the result is not transcendental but rather Berkeleian subjective idealism;⁵ and Kant was not confused this way. He knew perfectly well that no experience is subjective without qualification, even though all experience is the experience of the subject that enjoys it and certainly is “subjective” in that sense. That is a truism from which nothing of the slightest importance follows. What Whitehead begins Process and Reality with is the far stronger assertion that nature can be understood as entirely derivative from, and dependent upon, the intellectual life of any particular cognitive subject, and there is no textual justification for reading Kant that way, even if the laws of nature are introduced by the nature of our minds and nature is a conceptual whole, an Inbegriff.

The first Critique insists strongly upon the dramatically opposed rendering of experience. It, Kant insists, “rests on the synthetic unity of appearances, that is on a synthesis of an object of appearances in general according to concepts, without which it would never be knowledge but a rhapsody of perceptions …”⁶ If this is granted then the object is manifestly not adequately described as something entertained by an individual subject, unique to that subject and incapable of repetition, so that in more blunt terms it is not a part of the objective world. The Critique undertakes to understand the complex nature of experience, and the analysis involves not only the experiencing subject (or the transcendental unity of apperception) but the elements which are given to the subject and the means by which these elements are brought into a coherent unity. Without the categories or rules for its coherent organization, whatever is given to the subject would amount only to what Kant calls a chaotic rhapsody of perceptions and be without cognitive content. But it is equally true that in the absence of anything given there is no knowledge of objects and no objective cognition. “If a cognition is to have objective reality, that is pertain to an object, and have meaning and sense in respect to this object, then the object must be able to be given in some way or the other. Without that concepts are empty and although something has been thought in this way nothing is known through such thought. There is, rather, only a game played with representations.”⁷ None of this is more than a slight expansion of Kant's insistence on the first page of the Transcendental Logic that, “Thoughts without content are empty. Intuitions without concepts are blind.”⁸ It does, however, provide strong evidence that the description of Kant's position as one that regards the objective world or nature as the product of each knowing subject's cognition, is seriously incomplete, and that Kant knew that the relations that exist between subjects and objects such as to make each possible is far more complex than such subjective or Berkeleian idealism permits.

It is essential to the first Critique and Prolegomena that we can adequately characterize our cognition or knowledge only insofar as the given and the conceptual are each realized as being primitive and as irreducible components of any thought about the world. Neither those thinkers who had attempted to reduce human knowledge to sensation, as Locke and his followers did, nor those who with Descartes undertook to derive all our knowledge of the world from thought alone, were able to offer more than half of the truth. In these half-formulations the hope of framing a coherent account of either the world or our knowledge of it is lost. For, without the conceptual element nothing is organized and accordingly there is no order and no nature. The order of nature is the order achieved by this conceptualization. However, a sensible given is equally essential, and without it there is nothing to be thought or cognized.

It is an important indication of what Kant intends that the rules essential to thought about objects are explicitly called categories, and “are named after Aristotle's categories, since our intention is identical to his, although it is certainly quite far removed from his in its execution.”⁹ Moreover, the absolute necessity of these, and only these, categories is a direct consequence of their close connection to the principles of general logic.¹⁰ The categories are the principles by which all rational beings endowed with an intelligence anything at all like our own are able to apprehend the world. They are what makes it necessary for any rational being to think or to cognize the sequence in which one ball on a billiard table strikes another so that the second one moves in a thoroughly predictable fashion as an event. This elementary experience and judgment exemplifies the synthesis of what is given with what the understanding contributes in all cognition of the world. The subject judges and enjoys the experience of causality, but that subject stands under a double constraint. It is constrained by what is given to it, and, further, it is constrained by the rules for cognizing, or thinking about, what is given.

Similarly, some things which we think with perfect clarity cannot be part of any world of objects, and it has been a great error of philosophers to imagine that they can. Our selves or souls, as immortal beings, and God are two such thoughts which we cannot avoid entertaining even though neither refers to an object. It follows that such thoughts cannot possibly entail the synthesizing activity which, as Kant insists, is ingredient in our cognition of the world. Yet even although such thoughts have no sensible objects, and in that sense are not objective, they are not merely the products of unrestrained or free conceptualization. Kant repeats twice, and in nearly identical words, that such thoughts are “ideas” and subject to something quite similar to the transcendental deduction that establishes the necessity of the categories. “No genuine objective deduction such as we could accomplish for the categories is possible for these transcendental ideas. For in fact they have no relation to any sort of an object which could be given as congruent to them just because they are ideas. But we can undertake a subjective derivation from the nature of our reason, and in fact that is accomplished in the present section [The Transcendental Dialectic].”¹¹

Thus, there are two reasons why it is wrong to ascribe a Berkeleian or a subjective idealism to Kant. It is incorrect, in the first place, because Kant insisted so strongly upon the element of what is given. Where nothing is given, nothing is ever known or cognized. There is merely empty categorization, which can reveal nothing of nature or of the objective world. In the second place, Kant is no Berkeleian or subjective idealist, constructing worlds by reference only to predilection, because he insisted so strongly that what the mind does with what it is given is rule-directed, indeed rule-dominated. These rules are so powerful that even thought which is not tied to objects is not free from their sway.

Nature, it follows, is grounded exclusively in neither the subject nor the object; so the contrast with which Whitehead begins between nature as subjectively grounded and the subject as derived from nature is just that, a contrast, and not a formal contradiction. It cannot be argued then that Kant must be in error whenever Whitehead is correct, or conversely that the transcendental philosophy must perforce exclude any positive connections to the insights embodied in Whitehead's thought. For the present discussion this means that despite the textual reservations it is plausible to treat him with Kant in exploring the status of nature, and that the two are not merely diametrically opposed systems related only by their opposition.

NATURE IN RELATION

A further consequence of the previous section is that neither the epistemological issue of how subjects come to know nature nor the ontological one, focused upon how nature is to be conceived, can be adequately addressed in itself. Process and Reality itself provides striking justification of this, for Whitehead's treatment of Kant is not exhausted by the description that was crucial to the previous section. At the end of part II of the book he refers to a passage from Norman Kemp Smith's Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason. Kemp Smith had described the objective as what, “… lays a compulsion upon our minds, constraining us to think about it in a certain way. By an object is meant something which will not allow us to think at haphazard.”¹² Whitehead freely accepts this adding that, “There is of course the vital difference, among others, that where Kemp Smith, expounding Kant, writes ‘thinking’, the philosophy of organism substitutes ‘experiencing.’”¹³

Whitehead finds in Kant, or in Kemp Smith's Kant, the assertion that objects of nature stand in a constitutive and synthetic relation with the cognizing subject. This is considerably stronger than the modest assertion that objects are things which the mind apprehends. In this stronger formulation they are objects because they stand in relation to the cognizing subject, and only whatever does stand in such a relation is an object. No object of nature can be adequately understood as simply inert or merely as extension. As an object in nature it is necessarily in relation. The billiard balls, then, are not merely spheres of so much extensive magnitude. They are objects, and claim objective reality, because and only so far as they constitute objects for the subjects that encounter them, and in this case encounter them as events or as the constituents of an event. This means that they are objects just because, for any rational subject, the motion of the one is the cause and that of the other is the effect in the event. Their objectivity is the result of this relation to any possible cognizing subject. Of course, similar requirements exist for objects characterized by the first and third analogies of substance and reciprocity as well. Neither substances nor things in reciprocal relation are objects except inasmuch as they are objects for human intelligence or for an intelligence that is similar in significant ways to human intelligence.

This result stands in sharp contrast to the naive materialism that was prevalent through the modern epoch and which insisted that the fundamental attribute of any natural object is its extension, or its mass, so that per se it is inert. Materialism of this sort had figured in Newton's conception of nature and, consistent with the success of his physics, had dominated thought about nature in the modern era. Critical philosophy begins by demonstrating that such materialism is impossible from an epistemological perspective, but this perspective opens out for Kant as it did for Whitehead. At the very least, it insists none of these objects may be cogently thought as being merely inert units of extension. If so, Kant's thought presages Whitehead's rejection of what he terms vacuous actuality. As he had explained early in Process and Reality, “The term ‘vacuous actuality’ … means the notion of a res vera devoid of subjective immediacy.”¹⁴ If actual objects are the things which do in fact compel any subject to experience in this fashion rather than in any other, manifestly they cannot be “devoid of subjective immediacy.” What they are is partially determined by what the experiencing subject makes of them, and indeed they are objective only because of their relation to the subjects who enjoy the experience provided in such relation to objects.

This denial of vacuous actuality is closely tied to another seriously misleading predilection of modern thought that Whitehead termed the sensationalist principle or the presupposition that, “… the primary activity in the act of experience is the bare subjective entertainment of the datum …”¹⁵ This element of Whitehead's thought is also sustained by critical philosophy. Kant often uses the terms ‘receptivity’ and ‘spontaneity’ to distinguish between the ability to receive impressions and the activity of cognizing those impressions.¹⁶ Neither of these two elements, neither receptivity nor spontaneity, is adequate alone to produce cognition because the act of experience is not merely the reception of what exists independently of any act of subjectivity. Objects, as Whitehead says explicitly invoking Kant, are the result of the relation that must obtain between the two factors. Natural objects, it follows, must be understood then as products and not simply as primitive givens to which all experience and all thought are subject.

That result is achieved by concentrating on the elements which must be recognized in order to complete the account of how human beings understand nature. As has been true of significant statements about human knowledge and understanding since Plato's, it is pregnant with ontological implications and in particular it has an immediate application to the objects that are conceived as constituting nature. It shows how inadequate any conception of nature as consisting of nothing more than bits of extension, or bits of matter, is. Once that epistemological consequence is taken seriously, it has the further consequence that nature requires to be recognized as involving essential forces or as dynamic, and to that degree as not essentially and only extended mathematically.

OBJECTS AND ACTIVITY

Kant was keenly aware that the heightened importance of the dynamic aspect of nature was a consequence of his critical or the transcendentally idealistic interpretation of natural knowledge. In the first part of his discussion of the antinomy of pure reason, for example, he set the dynamic aspect of nature in sharp contrast with the merely quantitative or mathematical. Two terms can be employed to refer to the totality of objects that occupy the attention of men both in their everyday lives and as natural scientists. These are the expressions ‘world’ and ‘nature.’

The former signifies the mathematical whole of all appearances, and the totality of their synthesis in large dimensions as well as in small ones, which [synthesis] is in the continuation of both composition and division. But the very same world is termed nature insofar as it is seen as a dynamic whole inasmuch as this whole is not concerned with an aggregation in space or in time, in order to synthesize it as a magnitude, but rather insofar as one is concerned with it as a unity of appearances in existence.¹⁷

Nature is dynamic and is not merely something extended that can be measured mathematically, and Kant is completely consistent with that description when, at the end of his note on the third antinomy of reason (concerning human freedom), he describes nature as the “coherence of appearances necessarily determining one another according to universal laws …”¹⁸

This description of nature as dynamic—in contradistinction to the world as mathematical—is striking evidence of how strong a connection there is between Kant's critical philosophy and the work he had completed earlier, and especially before the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 on the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World. This is not difficult to explain historically. At the middle of the century German philosophy was preeminently Wolffian, and Wolff had, or claimed to have, direct connections with Leibniz. It is easy enough for philosophers late in the twentieth century to caricature Wolff. He was graceful neither as an author nor as a colleague, and the esteem in which he expected to be held bordered on the idolatrous.¹⁹ Nonetheless it was he who almost single-handedly brought a positive professionalism to German thought, and it was he who first taught Germans that it was quite possible to philosophize in German. More specifically, it was because of his influence that subsequent generations of German philosophers were exposed to a version of Leibniz's dynamic conception of nature, rather than imbibing undiluted Newtonian materialism. Kant lectured for more than twenty years from the textbooks prepared by an active Wolffian, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Baumgarten had developed a conception of nature that is Leibnizean to the extent that it proposes that active monads, which by their very nature exert force, rather than indivisible bits of solid matter, are the foundation and ground of nature.

By the time he came to write his first book in 1746, Kant was familiar enough with the Leibnizean tradition to undertake a correction in the way that school had of computing the living force which was so significant to Leibniz. The correction is interlaced with criticism of Leibniz, but remains firmly within the Leibnizean ambit. The received procedure of computing living force is defective, the young Kant had insisted, and requires to be replaced with a more accurate one. Such a revision is neither sensible or even possible, however, if the leading tenets of Leibnizean thought are not accepted. Of course, the most important of these tenets was the conception of nature as dynamic and active because it consists of dynamic units or substances: without that assumption there are no living forces to be computed. Kant does not use the term ‘monad’ in his first book, but the conception is very close to the surface indeed. Except for Aristotle, he argues at the outset, all philosophers before Leibniz had attempted to explain motion as imposed upon entities from an external source. External imposition of motion is inadequate because it requires that the source of motion be thought as a motive force. But, he argues, such motive forces explain nothing at all. They simply repeat that motion has obtained, and this vacuity insures that any attempt to ground an explanation of the world on them is doomed. In fact, motion must be explained as a consequence of the substances' fundamental forces, which is what permits them not only to move but to fill space. This force is intrinsic to each substance and is what explains both the motion apparent in the physical world and the extension of bodies. So, far from being reduced to mere extension, a natural entity is active in such a way as to result in extension. The important aspect of Kant's first book here is that in manifest affinity to Leibniz he argues that instead of explaining motion as a consequence of extension, extension is to be explained in terms of the primitive forces characteristic of each substance and that these forces also initiate motion. An intriguing aspect of this early essay is constituted by its suggestion that these fundamental forces may well act in ways requiring descriptions in terms other than those provided by three-dimensional or Euclidean geometry.²⁰ That hint is not developed further, but it is significant because it is an immediate consequence of the essay's strong insistence that extension, and even more immediately geometry as the science of extension, both are dependent upon how the fundamental beings or substances act upon one another and are not fundamental properties of physical beings in and of themselves.

Ten years after his first work Kant published an essay in Latin, which he hoped would lead directly to his appointment to the chair of logic and metaphysics that had fallen empty upon the death of Martin Knutzen. The full title of the work itself is significant: The Use In Natural Philosophy of Metaphysics Combined with Geometry, Part One, Physical Monadology.²¹ In this disputation Kant undertook to combine geometry with metaphysics and, as the title promises, to achieve a result that will be useful to natural philosophy, philosophia naturalis. The essay develops themes that had appeared in the first book on the living forces, and here Kant uses the term ‘monad’ in a positive and constructive fashion for the first time. It is unnecessary to follow the entire argument of the dissertation in order to establish the book's significance for the philosophy of nature. This significance lies in its contention that rather than impenetrable and indivisible units of mass it is units of force which are the foundation of all physical being. These units of force are what he now designates as the ‘physical monads.’ Like the units of mass which the Newtonians had postulated, the physical monads are indivisible. Unlike the atoms, however, the monads are characterized by their activity. Because they are the elementary parts of any physical body the monads' activities—which consist in attraction and repulsion—are the reason for the physical body's being the way it is. Their ability to provide the explanations of physical bodies is what makes the monads physical ones.

This marks a significant divergence from Leibniz who had posited the parallel but separate realms of monadic activity and physical being so that bodies are properly explained in purely physical terms. “… Bodies act as if there were no souls (to assume an impossibility), and souls act as if there were no bodies, and both act as if each influenced the other.”²² Kant's monadology, by contrast, argues that the monads explain and are the reasons why physical bodies are what they in fact are. Physical bodies are determined by their constituent monads, and he argues at some length that the degree to which they fill space and how they fill space, which is manifestly one of the leading characteristics of body, can be shown to follow from monadic activity alone.

With this Kant obviates the need for the preestablished harmony that Leibniz had been required to postulate between the physical world of bodies and the internal world and life of the monads. Physical bodies are not merely phenomena—even well-founded ones as Leibniz had insisted that they are in the correspondence with de Volder. They are the derivatives from, and the results of how, the monadic substances act. Significant as this difference is, it does not obscure the close agreement of Kant's early philosophy of nature with Leibniz insofar as each understood nature as dynamic and posited active units as the basic elements from which nature, and the objects of nature, are constituted.

A CRITICAL DYNAMISM?

If the preceding description of Kant's early monadology is accurate, it is however, still only an account of an earlier phase of his philosophic development which, it might be suggested, is rendered obsolete by what he accomplished in the critical period. That critical system, as Kant never tires of explaining, restricts the objects of knowledge to the objects of possible experience, and although it is necessary that certain things be cognized as substances or as events with their appropriate causes, only substances or events that may possibly be encountered in experience—either the experiences of ordinary life or the experiences contrived by empirical laboratory scientists—can be characterized by such necessary rules. Neither Leibnizean monads, nor the monads of Kant's early essay can plausibly be proposed as objects of possible experience; they must be thought as no more than the vestiges of a dogmatic metaphysics and as such can play no part in a critical philosophy of nature.

That is a serious historical objection to the attempt to argue that for Kant, as for Whitehead, there is a compulsion to think about nature as dynamic or that nature is a “dynamic whole.”²³ On the positivist reading of the first Critique, which provides the basis for that objection, any dynamic elements are restricted to the mode of experiencing natural objects. Even though they may be experienced as dynamic, and as involving mutually influencing moments, this description authorizes no conclusion as to how nature is in and for itself, or what the foundation of these experiences is. If that is all that can be established, there may be some similarity between Kant's dismissal of merely extended and vacuous actuality and Whitehead's thought. But since Kant denies all knowledge of the actualities by which nature is constituted the analogy is rendered highly superficial.

The most important refutation of that historical objection is provided by Kant. In an essay first published in 1786, and accordingly one that is indisputably critical, entitled Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaften), he admits that the monadology, “… does not at all belong to the explication of natural appearances but is a Platonic concept of the world completed by Leibniz. This concept is correct in itself insofar as the world is regarded not as an object of the senses but as thing in itself, i.e., merely an object of the understanding which nevertheless lies at the basis of the appearances of the senses.”²⁴

It is vital to insist that the description of the monadology as “Platonic” does not perforce assign it to the dustbin of idle and useless speculation. Although his knowledge of the texts was not extensive (and was mediated by J. J. Brucker) Kant held Plato in extremely high regard, as the section of the first Critique entitled “On Ideas in General” makes abundantly plain.²⁵ Ideas are the media of thought, in contradistinction to categories which are the media of understanding and experience, and thought is an inescapable aspect of our intellectual functioning. If that is so, the passage from the Metaphysical Foundations is strong evidence that Kant had not only recognized that the monadology must be admitted as correct within its proper shere but, more significantly, had insisted that this monadology is the foundation of appearances. Whatever appears is in some way connected with and depends on the monads even although neither the nature of this connection nor the monads is an object of cognition or knowledge.

That renders it inadequate to dismiss the monadology as a matter of Kant's “private metaphysics,”²⁶ insofar as such a description suggests that Kant accepted a body of opinions which were immune from attack because they were not categorical cognitions, and thus made no categorical claim about the world. Applied to the dynamic interpretation of nature that would mean Kant continued a somewhat irrational attachment to the monadology and to the dynamic understanding of nature which was only a private and personal predilection that played no part in his serious philosophy. In such a case the most that could be claimed would be that it did not contradict any of the leading principles of the critical philosophy.

If, on the other hand, the ideas of dynamic nature based upon fundamental forces, which forces are themselves not categorized, are admitted to be essential in significant ways, another difficulty emerges. For, although as the first Critique develops the theme, it is possible to derive ideas from the nature of our reason,²⁷ a monadology or a dynamic foundation of the world is not included among the ideas treated in that way. At the least a further constraint on the reason to think the physical world as grounded in the monadology is required. Although it is never explicitly proposed as a conclusion of the work, such a constraint is the indirect result of the Metaphysical Foundations. This was a book designed to provide the basic material for physics without itself actually engaging in the discipline itself. More precisely, as a metaphysical foundation for physics it was intended to uncover those “universal laws of thought,”²⁸ which are not derived from experience but are pure or a priori and as such requisite for all physical science. What is particularly significant about the work from this perspective is its unequivocal dynamic interpretation of matter. “… All that is real in the objects of our external senses and is not merely a determination of space (place, extension, and figure) must be regarded as moving force. By this principle, therefore, the so-called solid, or absolute impenetrability, is banished from natural science as an empty concept, and in its stead repulsive force is posited.”²⁹ More succinctly, “The concept of matter is reduced to nothing but moving forces …”³⁰ Finally Kant concludes with the bald assertion that, “… A merely mathematical physics pays for the advantage [of working with extension and empty space alone] doubly on the other side, in that it first of all must lay at its foundation an empty concept (that of absolute impenetrability), and secondly must give up all the proper forces of matter.”³¹

The objects of nature, or of natural science, are first conceived or cognized under the concepts or categories requisite to all coherent thought about objects. They are a subgroup of those objects because each is material or involves matter. It is fully consistent with this and, as Kant argues, precisely what is to be expected, that the more intense examination of the notion of matter makes it plain that the material, or matter, is not solid impenetrability alone. Rather, it must be conceived as the result of repulsive and attractive force. Force, not extension is the notion fundamental to matter, even if that foundation cannot itself be apprehended, or in Kant's terminology, its possibility understood.

That result corresponds to what Kant had said of the Leibnizean monadology in the first Critique's discussion of the second antinomy (concerned with problems of the simple). Such a doctrine, he recognized, would be correct if the objects constituting human experience were things in themselves instead of mere appearances.³² This concession is considerably expanded by the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. For, in the five years since publication of the first Critique, Kant had come to realize that in nature appearances are always the appearances of the fundamental forces that constitute matter. These fundamental forces are not cognizable objects of experience or appearances because they are—and must be thought as being—the basis of any, and of all, appearances in nature. Or equivalently, appearances of matter must be thought as grounded in the operation of forces.

This makes it appropriate to examine the reasons that justify a rejection of materialism. In the course of the discussion Kant cites substantially the same ones that led Leibniz to reject Newtonian materialism. In the first place, materialism requires postulation of empty space between the various bits of ultimate matter. It is apparent to Kant, and largely as a result of the critical insights, that the notion of an absolutely empty space is a conceptual monster. Indeed, it was the first perverse metaphysical proposition to be dismissed by the critical philosophy.³³ Materialism is further unacceptable inasmuch as it posits absolutely indivisible and impenetrable units of matter. Like the notion of empty space, these absolute units can signify nothing given in, or essential to, experience, and accordingly the phrases that employ them rest upon patently empty notions. Finally, atomism is incoherent, Kant argues in the Metaphysical Foundations, because it must surrender “all the proper forces of matter.”

The point Kant insists upon in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is not merely that the mind has, or may have, a propensity to think about nature dynamically and that this propensity is an individual or “subjective” and private inclination, grounded entirely in the peculiarities of the subject. The argument is, rather, the very much stronger one which insists that nature must be conceived dynamically by us as human cognitive agents. The reason it must be is because nature, as we encounter it, is such as to make urgent an explanation of motion, and yet that explanation is impossible for materialism. Thus, although there is no categorical cognition of the forces which stand as the basis of nature, because nature appears to us as dynamic those appearances can only be thought appearances of basic forces.

If so, Kant has argued that the dynamic understanding of nature which characterized his earlier or “pre-critical” philosophy of nature, when it is adapted by the Metaphysical Foundations to meet the requirements imposed by critical philosophy, provides the only coherent explanation of nature. In its critical recension it is not possible to demonstrate the existence of these forces in the way that things are demonstrated within the system which rests upon them. This, however, is only an index of how basic and how significant they are. The impossibility of explaining them further, or of schematizing them, is the other side of their function as the presuppositions upon which the conception of nature rests. For Kant, nature and the conception of nature are not radically diverse, and the exploration of this result reveals what it is that makes nature possible. The Metaphysical Foundations, expands the inventory of these elements from the schematized categories so that it includes unschematizable force. Thus, if it is to be cognized, known, nature must be thought as dynamic even though the force entailed is not an object of the categorical understanding.³⁴

CONCLUSION

There are, then, highly important, and largely ignored, affinities between Kant's thought and Whitehead's philosophy of organism. The conception of the relation between subjects and objects is similar, and so is the rejection of any conception of nature according to which its objects are adequately understood as units of extension. Yet despite the significant similarities, Kant's thought does not proceed to anything like the radical assertions of the philosophy of organism. It cannot do so because both early and late Kant was certain that any entity, monad or substance is complete in and for itself and related essentially only to God who is its creator. This renders it difficult, or impossible, for him to complete the description of nature as dynamic that figures so centrally in the critical description just sketched. For, conceived this way, that is to say as fundamentally independent and as related only accidentally, there is no reason to attribute activity to all actualities. On Kant's theory only those entities involved in relation with other beings need be active, and only some of the possible entities are in relation. This leads to a second difficulty. If even some actualities are active and dynamic, either that activity requires focus and direction or else the world is irrational at base. Just as Kant was incapable of understanding actuality as radically related, he was also incapable of fully explicating purpose and its appearance in nature. The third Critique is sharp evidence of how central purpose was to Kant's thought. However, it also makes plain that he did not, and almost certainly could not, progress beyond the purpose attributed by human subjects to some of the phenomena they encounter, to an explanation of the ground of this purpose. That is to allow the root notion to remain inexplicable.

Notes

1. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, eds. D. Griffin and D. Sherburne, (New York: Free Press, 1978), xiii; cited hereafter as PR.

2. PR 88.

3. Critique of Pure Reason A114. The second edition employs similar terminology at B163. Citations from the Critique of Pure Reason will refer to either the first or the second edition, or where relevant both. Translations are my own.

4. Critique A125.

5. When he returns to discussion of the point in part 2 of Process and Reality Whitehead speaks of “subjective experience” without the further modifier.

6. Critique A156/B195, emphasis added.

7. Critique A155/B194.

8. Critique A51/B75.

9. Critique A80/B105.

10. Critique A79/B104-105.

11. Critique A336/B393. Emphasis added. A similar passage occurs near the end of the Dialectic, Critique A670/B698.

12. PR 215, fn.

13. PR 215.

14. PR 29.

15. PR 157.

16. Critique A50/B74 for example.

17. Critique A419/B447.

18. Critique A452/B480.

19. Cf. Lewis White Beck's Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), for a fuller although not very sympathetic, account of Wolff's Leben und Lehre.

20. §§9-10, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (KGS) I, 23-25.

21. Translated with an introduction by Lewis White Beck, Kant's Latin Writings, (New York: Peter Lang, 1986).

22. Monadology §81.

23. Critique A419/B447.

24. KGS IV, 507. The book has been translated by James Ellington, Kant's Philosophy of Material Nature (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 55. Translation altered slightly and emphasis added.

25. Critique A312-A320/B368-377.

26. As is suggested by Lewis White Beck, Kant's Latin Writings, 10, 111.

27. Critique A297/B354, A329/B386, A336/B393, A669-670/B697-698.

28. KGS IV, 473, Ellington 11.

29. KGS IV, 523, Ellington 77.

30. KGS IV, 524, Ellington 78.

31. KGS IV, 525, Ellington 78.

32. Critique A442/B470. This is, of course, a major reservation, but nevertheless it is strong evidence of how completely aware Kant was of Leibniz's metaphysics and how much sympathy he had for its systematic motivations. The “Amphiboly” with which the “Analytic” ends suggests much the same thing. During the five years that followed the first publication of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant transformed that sympathy into the conception of the Metaphysical Foundations.

33. It is first discursively because it occurs in the first major section of the Critique of Pure Reason, the “Aesthetic.” Chronologically it was the first inasmuch as it was rendered impossible by the interpretation of space offered by the Dissertation of 1770.

34. George R. Lucas, Jr., devotes the fifth chapter of his recent book, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), to an examination of the relationship between Whitehead and Kant. The chapter betrays surprising infelicities with regard to Kant's text. For example Lucas insists that “Only der Schein, however, has the connotation of ‘appearance’ in the sense of ‘pretence’ or ‘illusion’, as Bradley seems to mean by the term ‘appearance.’ And Kant never uses this term” (82). In fact, Kant uses der Schein, scheinbar, and the verb scheinen more than 130 times in the first Critique. Cf. Sachindex zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Subject Index for Kant's Critique of Pure Reason) edited by Gottfried Martin (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967) 241. However, despite such inaccuracies, Lucas's discussion is a useful contribution to the Kant-Whitehead discussion inasmuch as he argues that Whitehead was incorrect to ascribe what he calls Bradley's idealism to Kant and because he insists that he can “… rescue Kant's reputation as a systematic thinker possessed of a wider interest than merely conducting an anti-metaphysical epistemological polemic and to place this at the service of contemporary pluralistic and post-Critical systematic metaphysics in the aftermath of Whitehead” (87). Lucas concludes this chapter of his book by speculating that Whitehead might well have found Kant's treatment of moral and aesthetic experience in the third Critique “most welcome indeed” (92). That is a promising beginning, but although Lucas is aware of the limitations of positivist interpretations of Kant, he does not exploit fully the implications for metaphysics of some of the themes sounded here, and accordingly Kant's concern for the beautiful and good—and the purposive—will appear as though they were superadded to the epistemology of the first Critique rather than as being continuous with the primary concerns of that book, which concerns are by no means entirely epistemological.