Alfred North Whitehead

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Whitehead's Philosophy

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SOURCE: “Whitehead's Philosophy,” in Problems of Men, Philosophical Library, 1946, pp. 410-18.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1937, Dewey examines the basic method of Whitehead's philosophy.]

Mr. Whitehead's philosophy is so comprehensive that it invites discussion from a number of points of view. One may consider one of the many special topics he has treated with so much illumination or one may choose for discussion his basic method. Since the latter point is basic and since it seems to me to present his enduring contribution to philosophy, I shall confine myself to it.

Mr. Whitehead says that the task of philosophy is to frame “descriptive generalizations of experience.” In this, an empiricist should agree without reservation. Descriptive generalization of experience is the goal of any intelligent empiricism. Agreement upon this special point is the more emphatic because Mr. Whitehead is not afraid to use the term “immediate experience.” Although he calls the method of philosophy that of Rationalism, this term need not give the empiricist pause. For the historic school that goes by the name of Rationalism (with which empiricism is at odds) is concerned not with descriptive generalization, but ultimately with a priori generalities from which the matter of experience can itself be derived. The contrast between this position and Mr. Whitehead's stands out conspicuously in his emphasis upon immediately existent actual entities. “These actual entities,” he says, “are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities. They are the only reasons for anything.” The divergence is further emphasized in the fact that Whitehead holds that there is in every real occasion a demonstrative or denotative element that can only be pointed to: namely, the element referred to in such words as ‘this, here, now, that, there, then’; elements that cannot be derived from anything more general and that form, indeed, the subject-matter of one of the main generalizations, that of real occasions itself.1

Mr. Whitehead's definition of philosophy was, however, just given in an abbreviated form. The descriptive generalizations, he goes on to say, must be such as to form “a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience may be interpreted. Here ‘interpretation’ means that each element shall have the character of a particular instance of a general scheme.”2The wording of this passage suggests a point of view nearer to that of traditional Rationalism than the conception just set forth. If it means that philosophers should proceed as logically as possible, striving to present findings that are coherent, that are even ‘necessary’, if the necessity in question be that of close-knit relation to one another without omissions and superfluities in the generalized descriptions of experience that are obtained, the empiricist need not dissent. The statement is, however, open to another interpretation, and to that I shall later return.

I first wish to dwell upon the complete extension of Mr. Whitehead's conception of ‘experience.’ It is customary to find the application of the term confined to human and even to conscious experience. Denial of this restriction is fundamental in Mr. Whitehead's thought. Everything that characterizes human experience is found in the natural world. Conversely, what is found in the natural world is found in human experience. Hence the more we find out about the natural world, the more intellectual agencies we have for analysing, describing, and understanding human experience. We cannot determine the constituents of the latter by staring at it directly, but only by interpreting it in terms of the natural world that is experienced.

The completeness of the correspondence between the elements of human experience and of nature is exemplified in each one of Whitehead's ultimate generalizations. I mention five of these correspondences by way of illustration. (1) Change is such a marked trait of conscious experience that the latter has been called, rather intemperately, a mere flux. Every actual entity in the universe is in process; in some sense is process. (2) No two conscious experiences exactly duplicate one another. Creativity and novelty are characteristic of nature. (3) Conscious experience is marked by retention—memory in its broadest sense—and anticipation. Nature also carries on. Every actual occasion is prehensive of other occasions and has objective immortality in its successors. (4) Every conscious experience involves a focus which is the centre of a determinate perspective. This principle is exemplified in nature. (5) Every conscious experience is a completely unitary pulse in a continuous stream. The continuity of nature includes atomicity and individualizations of the ongoing stream.

I do not mean to imply that Whitehead arrived at the generalizations, of which those just cited are examples, by instituting directly such a set of one-to-one similarities. But unless I have completely misread him, the correspondences are there and are fundamental in his method and his system. As he himself says: “Any doctrine that refuses to place human experience outside nature must find in the description of experience factors which enter also into the description of less specialized natural occurrences. … We should either admit dualism, at least as a provisional doctrine, or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science.”3

I now turn to the other aspect of the correspondence: the utilization of the results of natural science as means of interpreting human experience. A noteworthy example is found in his treatment of the subject-object relation. In this treatment, it stands out most clearly that his denial of bifurcation is not a special epistemological doctrine but runs through his whole cosmology. The subject-object relation is found in human experience and in knowledge because it is fundamentally characteristic of nature. Philosophy has taken this relation to be fundamental. With this, Whitehead agrees. But it has also taken this relation to be one of a knower and that which is known. With this, he fundamentally disagrees. In every actual occasion the relation is found; each occasion is subject for itself and is reciprocally object for that which ‘provokes’ it to be what it is in its process. The interplay of these two things “is the stuff constituting those individual things that make up the sole reality of the Universe.” There are revolutionary consequences for the theory of experience and of knowledge involved in this view of the subject-object relation.

I select, as illustration of these consequences, the relation of his philosophy to the idealism-realism problem. Simplifying the matter, idealism results when the subject-object relation is confined to knowledge and the subject is given primacy. Realism results when the object is given primacy. But if every actual occasion is ‘bipolar’ (to use Mr. Whitehead's own expression) the case stands otherwise. The terms ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ can be used only in abstraction from the actual totalities that exist. When we talk about the physical and the psychical as if there were objects which are exclusively one or the other, we are, if we only know what we are about, following, and in an overspecialized way, the historic routes by which a succession of actual occasions become enduring objects of specified kinds. Nor are these routes confined to institution of just two kinds of objects. Some are in the direction of those objects that are called electrons; some in that of astronomic systems; some in that of plants or animals; some in that of conscious human beings. The differences in these objects are differences in historic routes of derivation and hereditary transmission; they do not present fixed and untraversable gulfs. (I am obliged to omit reference to the complementary principle of societies or communities of these objects.)

I give one further illustration, without comment, in Mr. Whitehead's own words. “The brain is continuous with the body, and the body is continuous with the rest of the natural world. Human experience is an act of self-origination including the whole of nature, limited to the perspective of a focal region within the body, but not necessarily persisting in any fixed coordination with a definite part of the brain.”4 Just one more illustration will be given of the use of the findings of physical science in analysis of human experience. I do not see how anyone not familiar with modern field-theories in physics and who did not have the courage of imagination to apply these theories to the descriptive generalization of human experience could have arrived at many of the conclusions about the latter which Whitehead has reached: I mention, as a special example, the fallacy of simple location.

I have selected, I repeat, a few points in order to illustrate the method which to me is his original and enduring contribution to philosophy, present and future. I should be glad to continue in this strain, and to suggest how the results of this method, were it widely adopted, would assuredly take philosophy away from by-paths that have led to dead-ends and would release it from many constraints that now embarrass it. But I must return to that aspect of his thought which seems to imply that, after all, his method is to be understood and applied in a direction which assimilates it, with enormous development in matters of detail, to traditional Rationalism. I say ‘seems’; for it is a question I am raising. The issue in brief is this: Is it to be developed and applied with fundamental emphasis upon experimental observation (the method of the natural sciences)? Or does it point to the primacy of mathematical method, in accord with historic rationalism? I hope the word ‘primacy’ will be noted. This occasion is a highly inappropriate one in which to introduce bifuraction. The two directions are not opposed to each other. Mathematics has its own established position in physical science. But I do not see how the two can be co-ordinate, meaning by ‘co-ordinate’ being upon exactly the same level. One, I think, must lead and the other follow.

A mathematical logician proceeds, if I understand the matter aright, in some such way as the following. He finds in existence a definite body of mathematical disciplines. The existence in question is historical. In so far, the disciplines are subject to the contingencies that affect everything historical. Compared therefore, with the requirements of logical structure, there is something ad hoc about them as they stand. The logician has then a double task to perform. He has to reduce each discipline to the smallest number of independent definitions and postulates that are sufficient and necessary to effect logical organization of the subject-matter of that discipline. He has also to bring the various definitions and postulates of the different branches of mathematics into coherent and necessary relation to one another. There is something in the extended definition of philosophy, which was quoted earlier, that suggests that Whitehead would have us adopt such a mathematical model and pattern in philosophizing. On this basis a philosopher would set himself the aim of discovering in immediate experience the elements that can be stated in a succinct system of independent definitions and postulates, they being such that when they are deductively woven together there will result a coherent and necessary system in which “each element shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme.” In this case, it is not simply the philosopher who must proceed logically. The scheme of nature and immediate experience is itself a logical system—when we have the wit to make it out in its own terms.

Nevertheless, that which I have called Whitehead's basic method is capable of another construction. As far as experience-nature and descriptive generalizations are concerned, there is an alternative method open: that which I called that of the natural rather than the mathematical sciences. For in the former, while mathematical science is indispensable, it is subordinate to the consequences of experimental observational inquiry. For brevity I shall call this contrasting method ‘genetic-functional,’ though I am aware that ‘genetic’ in particular is exposed to serious misapprehension.5 Upon the mathematical model, the resulting generalizations, it seems to me, are necessarily morphological and static; they express an aboriginal structure, the components of which are then deductively woven together. Upon the basis of the other model, the subject-matter of the generalizations is distinctions that arise in and because of inquiry into the subject matter of experience-nature, and they then function or operate as division of labor in the further control and ordering of its materials and processes.

As far as method is concerned, the only opposite I can find for ‘genetic’ is ‘intuitional.’ Generalized distinctions are there ready-made, so to speak, and after analysis has taken place, we just see and acknowledge them by a kind of rational perception which is final. The opposite of ‘functional’ is, of course, ‘structural.’ Somehow, when put together rightly, the various generalizations represent different parts of a fixed structure; they are like morphological organs when these are viewed in abstraction from differentiations of functioning activity. Thus we are led back to the question: Which aspect is primary and leading and which is auxiliary?

Adequate discussion of this issue would demand consideration of each one of Whitehead's ultimate generalities or categories, there being at least seven of them.6 Time forbids such consideration. I confine myself to the position of ‘eternal objects.’ The fact that the word ‘ingression’ is constantly used to designate their relation to actual entities suggests quite strongly the mathematical model. For ingression suggests an independent and ready-made subsistence of eternal objects, the latter being guaranteed by direct intuition. The conception of God in the total system seems to indicate that this is the proper interpretation, since some principle is certainly necessary, upon this premise, to act selectively in determining what eternal objects ingress in any given immediate occasion. The alternative view is that of the egression of natures, characters, or universals, as a consequence of the necessity of generalization from immediate occasions that exists in order to direct their further movement and its consequences. This capacity of intelligence performs the office for which Deity has to be invoked upon the other premise.

Upon the genetic-functional view, such objects (which are ‘eternal’ in the sense of not being spatio-temporal existences) emerge because of the existence of problematic situations. They emerge originally as suggestions. They are then operatively applied to actual existences. When they suceed in resolving problematic situations (in organizing otherwise conflicting elements) they part with some or most of their hypothetical quality and become routine methods of behavior.

Upon the basis of the generalized idea of experience of Whitehead, there is something corresponding to this in nature. There exist in nature indeterminate situations. Because of their indeterminate nature, the subsequent process is hesitant and tentative. The activity that is ‘provoked’ is incipient. If it becomes habitual, it is finally determinately egressive as a routine of nature, and it harmonizes the aggressively conflicting elements to which is due the indeterminacy of the original natural situation. When this routine-established mode of processive activity is observed it becomes the subject-matter of a natural law.

I am not affirming positively that this way of interpreting the basic conception of experience and the relations of its generalized descriptions to one another is necessary. It does decidedly appear to me to be a genuine alternative way. While my own preference is markedly in its favor, I am presenting it, as I have already said, for the purpose of presenting and making clear, as far as limits of time permit, a question.7 Upon the negative side, the absence of any attempt in Mr. Whitehead's writings to place the ultimate generalities in any scheme of analytic-genetic derivation points to his adoption of what I have called the mathematical pattern. Upon the positive side there is the rather complex intermediary apparatus of God, harmony, mathematical relations, natural laws, that is required to effect the interweaving of eternal objects and immediate occasions. I do not think that the difficulties found in reading Mr. Whitehead are due to his fundamental conception of experience. On the contrary, given a reasonable degree of emancipation of philosophic imagination from philosophic tradition and its language, that idea seems to me extraordinarily luminous as well as productive. The difficulties seem to me to arise from the intermediary apparatus required in the interweaving of elements; the interweaving being required only because of the assumption of original independence and not being required if they emerge to serve functionally ends which experience itself institutes.

Because Whitehead's philosophy is fraught with such potentialities for the future of the philosophizing of all of us, I have raised the question of basic method, instead of limiting myself to the more congenial task of selecting some one of its many suggestive developments for special comment. As currents of philosophy are running at present, it is altogether likely that its immediate influence will be mainly upon the side of what I called the mathematical model. Its enduring influence in behalf of the integrated Naturalism to which Whitehead is devoted seems to me to demand the other interpretation. There is, without doubt, a certain irony in giving to Mr. Whitehead's thought a mathematical interpretation, for that implies, after all, the primacy of the static over process, the latter, upon this interpretation, being limited to immediate occasions and their secondary reactions back into what is fixed by nature; as in the case of the change in Primordial God. The plea, then, for the alternative direction of development of his thought is in essence a plea for recognizing the infinite fertility of actual occasions in their full actuality.

Notes

  1. Process and Reality, pp. 27 and 37.

  2. Ibid., p. 4; Adventures of Ideas, p. 285.

  3. Adventures of Ideas, p. 237.

  4. Ibid., p. 290.

  5. Such misapprehension will occur if the idea of genesis is taken to be of a psychological order. It is meant in an objective sense, the sense in which the origin and development of astronomical systems and of animals is genetics.

  6. In Adventures of Ideas, these are connected, with appropriate modifications, with the Platonic scheme. See pp. 188, 203, 240, and 354.

  7. The point of the choice between alternatives would be clearer still if there were time to discuss immediate qualities (usually called sensory because of one of their causal conditions) which Whitehead regards as eternal objects; for upon the other theory they are just what gives actual occasions their unique singularity, so that there is no actual entity without them.

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