Leibniz, Whitehead and the Metaphysics of Causation

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Leibniz, Whitehead and the Metaphysics of Causation

Also by Pierfrancesco Basile EXPERIENCE AND RELATIONS: AN EXAMINATION OF FRANCIS HERBERT BRADLEY’S CONCEPTION OF REALITY CONSCIOUSNESS, REALITY AND VALUE: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF T. L. S. SPRIGGE (coeditor with Leemon B. McHenry) SUBJECTIVITY, PROCESS AND RATIONALITY (coeditor with Michel Weber)

Leibniz, Whitehead and the Metaphysics of Causation Pierfrancesco Basile

© Pierfrancesco Basile 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–58061–9 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–58061–0 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Anna and Susanne

We have in ourselves experience of a multiplicity in a simple substance ... (G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, §16) ... we shou’d in vain hope to attain an idea of force by consulting our own minds. (D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 633) ... the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects. (A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 166)

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements

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1 Introduction: From Leibniz to Whitehead

1

2 The Conception of Substance: Whitehead, Russell, and Leibniz Introduction Actual entities The relatedness of actualities Revisionary metaphysics and the language of process Russell on Leibniz’s conception of substance Russell’s critique of Leibniz Conclusion

7 7 7 12 17 24 26 30

3 The Relevance of Leibniz: Ward’s Theory of Monads Introduction A Cambridge philosopher: James Ward Materialism and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness Back to Leibniz: idealism, panpsychism, and evolution Lotze on pre-established harmony and monadic interaction Lotze as a process philosopher Ward on substance and intermonadic causation Ward on mind and the order of nature In search of a new theism Conclusion

32 32 32 33 35 41 47 49 54 58 61

4 The Phenomenology of Causation: Whitehead and Hume Introduction: Whitehead, Leibniz, and Hume Perception in the mode of causal efficacy Whitehead on Hume’s empiricism Whitehead on Hume on causation Hume on the vulgar notion of causation Conclusion: Kant on monadism and causation

63 63 66 68 70 77 80

5 The Metaphysics of Causation: Whitehead, Hume, and James Introduction Whitehead on Hume’s theory of the mind

84 84 84

vii

viii

Contents

James, Whitehead, and the specious present 91 Understanding causation through metaphysical generalization 95 Whitehead’s answer to Leibniz 98 Sprigge on Whitehead on ‘objectification’ and ‘prehension’ 100 Conclusion 104 6 The Reality of Forms: Whitehead’s Theistic Argument Introduction The argument from the reality of the eternal objects The threat of Spinozism: are there unrealized possibilities? The ontological principle The divine vision and the independency of the forms The principle of relativity A final doubt

106 106 108 111 113 114 118 122

7 The Final View: The Dipolar Conception of God Introduction God, creation, and the order of reality The consequent nature of God God and the world Open questions Conclusion

125 125 126 128 134 138 142

8 Epilogue: Is a Leibnizian Metaphysics Still Possible Today?

144

Notes

148

Bibliography

160

Index

169

Preface and Acknowledgements

The most un-Greek thing that we can do, is to copy the Greeks. For emphatically they were not copyists. (A.N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 274) The philosophy of Whitehead has had a difficult reception. He was highly esteemed during his lifetime and a teacher to contemporary classics such as Russell and Quine; today, he is unanimously recognized as the greatest speculative metaphysician of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, comparatively few philosophers are acquainted with his works. Paradoxically, his philosophy is neglected because of its virtues: the originality of his thinking makes it appear inaccessible. Like other truly independent minds of the recent past, such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, Whitehead developed a philosophy that cuts across the analytic–continental divide. He shares common concerns with both traditions, but does not belong to either. At the same time, and despite the fact that he often introduces his views by way of criticism of such thinkers as Aristotle, Plato, Locke, Hume, and Kant, it is not immediately obvious how his speculations relate to those of these great masters. As a consequence, he appears an eccentric figure, strangely isolated from mainstream Western philosophy. Biographical events support this image as well. The circumstance that late in life he moved from England to America, where he eventually flourished as a philosopher, evokes the picture of a man ‘with no land of his own’. Without wishing to deny the originality of Whitehead’s philosophy, the present study attempts to show that this image is mistaken. Whitehead’s metaphysics deals with questions about the nature of causation originally raised by the philosophy of Leibniz. These questions, which had been kept alive by post-Kantian philosopher such as Hermann Lotze, had become acute again at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth century and were hotly debated in the Cambridge philosophical milieu in which Whitehead informally served his philosophical apprenticeship. Specifically, the present essay argues that Whitehead’s philosophy is an attempt at rehabilitating Leibniz’s theory of monads by recasting it in terms of novel ontological categories. As such, it is firmly rooted ix

x


in Western philosophical history and is not to be viewed as an idiosyncratic – and therefore negligible – deviation from it. *

*

*

One does not have to be a student of Whitehead, whose philosophy of organism emphasizes the mutual dependence of all things, to recognize that every individual achievement requires a supporting environment. A grant provided by the Swiss National Foundation made it possible to begin thinking on the issues of this book and to pursue postdoctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, where I greatly profited from the generosity of Prof. Theodore Scaltsas, and at the Center for Process Studies, Claremont, California, thanks to the interest of Professors John Cobb, John Quiring, and David Ray Griffin. I am particularly indebted to Prof. Griffin for his early encouragement and for his writings, which have always proved a source of inspiration. Over the years, I have also contracted debts of various sorts to many teachers and philosophical friends, but especially to Jonathan Delafield-Butt, Anna Marmodoro, Pauline Phemister, John P. Wright, and Michel Weber. The greatest intellectual debt I am conscious of is to the late Timothy L.S. Sprigge (1932–2007), former Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh and heir to a long tradition of British idealist metaphysicians. Since the first time we met, Leemon B. McHenry has been a sympathetic but not uncritical interlocutor, as well as helpful in more than one way. A previous version of this study was accepted as my Habilitationsschrift at the University of Berne, Switzerland, in Spring 2008. I wish to thank the two external referees – Professors Galen Strawson and Michael Hampe – for their generous and helpful comments, and Prof. Eduard Marbach for his constant support and expert advice. Now, as many other times before, I owe a special word of thanks to Prof. Andreas Graeser, a truly Socratic teacher. Some of the chapters of this book include materials from previous publications: portions of Chapter 3 were published as ‘Rethinking Leibniz: Whitehead, Ward and the Idealistic Legacy’ (Process Studies, XXXV, 2006), while portions of Chapter 5 derive from an article entitled ‘Whitehead, Hume and the Phenomenology of Causation’, which originally appeared in a book I coedited with Michel Weber (Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2007). Lastly, an earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as ‘The Reality of Forms: On a Leibnizian Argument for the Existence of God in


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Whitehead’s Metaphysics’ (Chromatikon: Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, III, Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2007). I wish to thank the previous editors and publishers for permission to reprint these sections here. This book is dedicated to my daughter Anna, who has grown up to become a little proud girl while this book was under way, and my wife Susanne, for her unfailing support and healthy skepticism. Pierfrancesco Basile Berne, November 2008

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1 Introduction: From Leibniz to Whitehead

In Modes of Thought, Whitehead expresses his admiration for Leibniz with the following words: Leibniz inherited two thousand years of thought. He really did inherit more of the varied thoughts of his predecessors than any man before or since. His interests ranged from mathematics to divinity, and from divinity to political philosophy, and from political philosophy to physical science. These interests were backed by profound learning. There is a book to be written, and its title should be, The Mind of Leibniz.1 This is hardly a mere rhetorical tribute. Among contemporary philosophers who have been influenced by Whitehead and have continued to pursue those metaphysical questions so unfashionable in the last century, Charles Hartshorne and Nicholas Rescher especially have underscored the similarities between Whitehead’s thought and Leibniz’s. 2 But even a brief survey of their main works suffices to reveal the affinities between their philosophical outlooks and cast of mind. Leibniz and Whitehead defended speculative metaphysics as an important human enterprise and as indispensable to civilized human society. As mathematicians, they were skilled in the practice of analysis, but were equally able to master a wide variety of apparently disconnected topics, striving for that synoptic view that makes a person able to see things from a larger perspective, thereby valuing them more fully and appropriately. Like Leibniz, Whitehead engaged in the task of framing new concepts and theories; drawing on many sources, he avoided the dangers of eclecticism and constructed a novel system that bears the signs of his distinctive individuality. Lastly, Whitehead too wrote 1

2


extensively, and on many disparate subjects: on the logical foundations of mathematics, on the theory of relativity, on the philosophical foundations of natural science, on the theory of education, on theology, on intellectual history – and on metaphysics, the topic of this essay. But Whitehead lived in troubled times, and was deprived of a son during the First World War. Although he held a version of Leibniz’s theory of monads, the doctrine that the ultimate constituents of reality are mind-like centers of force and activity, he abandoned the doctrine that lies at the very heart of Leibniz’s philosophy: the notion that ours is the best of all possible worlds and that monadic intercourse is rooted in God’s pre-established harmony. The metaphysical concept of a perfect God plays no role in his thinking and he regarded the doctrine of preestablished harmony as an artificial construction no one with a healthy sense of reality could believe. Whitehead aimed at a philosophy that could stand the test of everyday experience and could be of help in shaping our thinking as well as our attitude towards life and its challenges. The final end of speculation is a form of practical wisdom eventually leading to what he called ‘peace’ – a concrete sense of being in tune with the larger totality of things.3 He viewed the world as a continuous process of creation and dissolution in which elements of both order and chaos alternate and coexist, generating new values and destroying old ones, creating the conditions for the achievement of the greatest goods and for the perpetration of the greatest crimes. This complexity he took at face value, and reflected upon what is required for the emergence of harmonious, ordered systems that could implement and sustain high forms of civilization, rather than postulating the reality of a God-given metaphysical harmony.4 The present study cannot be, and makes no claim to be, a comparison of the encyclopedic systems of Whitehead and Leibniz. Its objective is to clarify the philosophical grounds for Whitehead’s adoption of a theory of monads, and to elucidate his alternative to pre-established harmony. The focus is on the problem of causation – in its two ramifications of intermonadic causation and divine agency. A narrow focus of attention is always dangerous, and especially so in the case of Whitehead. He was one of the truly systematic thinkers of the twentieth century, and rejected the idea of a piecemeal approach to philosophy; rather, he sought to work out a unified scheme capable of answering many questions at once. However, a selected focus is necessary in order to find a way of entrance into his system. But there is a clear advantage in focusing upon the problem of causation, as this

Introduction 3

approach makes it possible to provide a coherent and plausible account of Whitehead’s systematic relation not solely to some of his contemporaries, most notably Russell and Ward, but also to some main figures of modern philosophy, such as Leibniz, Hume and Kant. This is a littleknown story that deserves to be told. *

*

*

The intricacies of Whitehead’s philosophy are likely to appear daunting to the uninitiated, since the complexity of his thought is of the same order one encounters in Hegel’s Logic. But philosophical systems are always answers to questions, so that one’s appreciation and evaluation of a philosopher’s theory stands or falls with one’s grasp of the underlying problems. The first two chapters of this study, ‘The Conception of Substance’ and ‘The Relevance of Leibniz’, are meant to introduce some of the most basic ideas of Whitehead’s philosophy and to explain why Leibniz, and specifically the problem of causation, could play such a significant role in his thinking. ‘The Conception of Substance’ explains why Whitehead tried to reform the traditional metaphysics of substance and why he believed that the sort of metaphysical enterprise he was engaged in, revisionary metaphysics, was not doomed to failure from the start. The chapter also lays much emphasis upon the little noticed fact that Russell, in his book of 1900, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, had urged well before Whitehead that the traditional conception of substance stood in need of revision. ‘The Relevance of Leibniz’ centers upon the metaphysics of the idealist philosopher James Ward, a teacher of Russell and a colleague of Whitehead in Cambridge. From the perspective of the philosophical standards today, Ward may appear a negligible figure. Although probably not a first-rate philosopher, he was nonetheless able to show how Leibniz’s theory of monads, if appropriately modified, could provide a philosophy of nature in accordance with the theory of evolution, the emergent quantum physics, and belief in God. In spite of the fact that there has been a widespread perception of the similarity between Whitehead’s worldview and Leibniz’s among specialists, little or nothing has been done to clarify the historical connection between the two philosophers: this chapter identifies in Ward, and in his German teacher Hermann Lotze, two mediating links. With the exception of a brief passage in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, Whitehead never mentions Ward in his

4


works.5 Charles Hartshorne makes occasional references to Ward, for example at the beginning of his well-known paper ‘Whitehead’s Novel Intuition’, where he writes: It may seem that Whitehead’s system is not particularly new. Thus he is a theist, an epistemological realist, a pluralist, an indeterminist, a metaphysical idealist or psychicalist ... and have there not been many theists, realists, pluralists, indeterminists, psychicalists? Even this combination of doctrines is not altogether new. For instance, Fechner, Varisco, James Ward, and Bergson approximated it.6 Hartshorne’s implicit acknowledgement of a connection between Whitehead’s philosophy and Ward’s metaphysics is too brief to be really informative. To the best of my knowledge, the relevance of Ward’s ‘combination of doctrines’ for Whitehead’s metaphysics, and for process thought in general, has yet to be appreciated. The next two chapters are respectively entitled ‘The Phenomenology of Causation’ and ‘The Metaphysics of Causation’. They are meant to clarify how Whitehead tried to solve one main problem left open by Ward; indeed, Ward was only able to present a general sketch of his worldview, so that it was left to Whitehead to work out the details. One of Ward’s most important theses was that the reasons adduced by Leibniz against monadic interaction depended upon the assumption of mistaken ontological categories. This was entirely consistent with Russell’s critique of the metaphysics of substance in his book on Leibniz and reopened the problem of intermonadic causation, which Whitehead tried to solve by introducing the notion that the ultimate constituents of reality are not insulated monads but have ‘windows’. On Whitehead’s theory, a monad is capable of influencing another in virtue of the fact that the latter prehends the former. The notion of prehension is crucial to Whitehead’s metaphysics but it is not easy to grasp. Whitehead comes to it through a critique of the way modern philosophers have dealt with the issue of causation. Here Whitehead’s main antagonist is Hume. ‘The Phenomenology of Causation’ discusses Whitehead’s critique of Hume’s empiricism and theory of causation. The following chapter, ‘The Metaphysics of Causation’, provides an account and critical evaluation of Whitehead’s explanation of causation in terms of the notion of prehension and of his novel conception of the monad, which is now resolved in a causal series of momentary experiential wholes – those short-lived, fleeting individuals that Whitehead alternatively calls ‘actual entities’ or ‘actual occasions’.

Introduction 5

Another main problem left open by Ward was that of understanding how God could be related to the world and causally operative in it. Although Ward believed in the existence of God, he rejected all ways in which that relation had been understood by theists, deists and pantheists. Whitehead’s account of the God–world relationship is the topic of the last two chapters, respectively entitled ‘The Reality of Forms’ and ‘The Final View’. The former chapter discusses Whitehead’s version of Leibniz’s argument in the Monadology – that abstract possibilities require God as their ontological foundation. Several important features of Whitehead’s conception of the deity are highlighted in the course of this discussion, which serves as the basis for a conclusive assessment of Whitehead’s account of the God–world relationship in the last chapter. This also provides a more general evaluation of Whitehead’s philosophy, since certain intrinsic limitations and uncertainties in his method and in his basic ontological commitments come most clearly to the fore in his explanation of divine agency. In A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Russell remarked that, even after protracted study of the works of the German thinker and of commentaries about them, he still felt that ‘the Monadology was a kind of fantastic fairy tale, coherent perhaps, but wholly arbitrary’.7 Eventually, Russell was able to dispel his doubts by the alleged discovery that all the main tenets of Leibniz’s metaphysics could be deduced from his logic. An analogous sense of displacement is felt by many on approaching Whitehead. There is no single key to his philosophy, yet the hope is that the present essay might succeed in opening up a perspective from which to appreciate some of his main ideas. Some might protest that such an attempt would be an empty exercise if Whitehead’s philosophy were a mere anachronism, if it failed to address philosophers’ present concerns. The reply to this sort of charge is that a philosophy doesn’t have to be fashionable in order to be interesting. There is much one could learn from studying the great masters of the past; at the very least, the effort required to grasp alien mentalities is likely to bring about a broadening of one’s philosophical imagination. Such an objection would also seem to presuppose that there is such a thing as progress in philosophy, so that it is in relation to our present standpoint that the value of past thinkers is to be assessed. This is not an unusual procedure in the history of philosophy – Aristotle’s evaluation of his forerunners in the first book of the Metaphysics or Hegel’s in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy are notable examples – but the notion that there is progress in philosophy is surely controversial. Moreover, and although it is true that the sort of worldview

6


advocated by Whitehead has its roots in a remote past, it is equally true that it is relevant to contemporary thought, since many of the problems it is meant to solve are still hotly debated. In the context of a discussion of Leibniz’s theory of monads, William James made an important plea for philosophical tolerance by remarking that ‘one cannot afford to despise any of these great traditional objects of belief. Whether we realize it or not, there is always a great drift of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in their direction.’8 This is the right attitude to take when considering philosophical systems that, like those of Leibniz and Whitehead, may seem to fly in the face of commonsense. It is the burden of the following pages to persuade the skeptic of the reasonableness of their insight that the ultimate principles of reality are centers of force and activity of the nature of the mind.

2 The Conception of Substance: Whitehead, Russell, and Leibniz

Introduction Whitehead is usually regarded as the advocate of process-philosophy and as the arch-enemy of substance-metaphysics. And yet he writes in The Concept of Nature that ‘Aristotle asked the fundamental question, What do we mean by “substance”?’1 Surely, we do not expect a revolutionary thinker to recognize that his predecessors have asked the right question, but to deny that the question needs to be raised in the first place. This introductory chapter aims at avoiding the risk of oversimplification by distinguishing those ways of understanding the concept of substance that Whitehead rejects from those that he accepts. The first two sections provide a sketch of the concept of an actual entity (or actual occasion) by presenting it as the upshot of Whitehead’s characteristic method of metaphysical generalization, without attempting to explain that concept fully or evaluate it. The following section explains, and to some extent defends, Whitehead’s belief that the sort of enterprise he is engaged in – revisionary metaphysics – is not one that is doomed to failure right from the start. Lastly, the philosophical roots of Whitehead’s dissatisfaction with some main aspects of the traditional understanding of substance are traced back to Russell’s early critique of the metaphysics of Leibniz.

Actual entities Whitehead’s problem is the same as the early pre-Socratic cosmologists’: What is the nature of the ultimate principles of reality, the archai – the elements of which anything else is composed? Whitehead’s answer 7

8


to this question is based upon two main assumptions. First, he holds that the ultimate constituents of reality are all identical in type, that is, that there is a basic continuity between all elements of reality. Second, he takes our minds to be as real as anything else is. These commitments ground his methodology: if the only part of reality we access from within is our own conscious experience, and if this is continuous with the rest of reality, we might then hope to achieve a general understanding of the nature of substances by generalization from our own mentality. This procedure immediately leads to a theory of monads. We must deny other actualities the possession of many properties we ascribe to ourselves (for example the ability to solve mathematical problems), but we must conceive all actualities as being in some sense subjects of experience or sentient things. In this way, the method of metaphysical generalization leads to a view of reality as comprised of a plurality of centers of experience and to the parallel rejection of what Whitehead calls the doctrine of ‘vacuous actualities’ – the materialistic doctrine that reality is made up of insentient bits.2 In Process and Reality, Whitehead summarizes this reasoning and the conclusion to which it leads with the following words: The philosophy of organism, in its scheme for one type of actual entities, adopts the view that Locke’s account of mental substances embodies, in a very special form, a more penetrating philosophical description than does Descartes’ account of corporeal substance ... On the whole, this is the moral to be drawn from the Monadology of Leibniz. His monads are best conceived as generalizations of contemporary notions of mentality.3 Needless to say, there is much in this line of reasoning that is highly speculative. One might wonder, for example, why we should adopt a procedure that so clearly prejudices the case in favor of an idealistic conception of reality. The reasons for approaching the problems of metaphysics in this way are complex and will be clarified in the following chapter; as will be shown there, metaphysical generalization emerges as a viable procedure, and even as the only possible one, only after several alternatives of making sense of reality have been considered and rejected. Even if this approach is regarded as legitimate, however, some skepticism is likely to remain. If we have no direct insight into the inner nature of other actualities, how do we know whether a feature of our experience is distinctively human? We need be able to compare several

The Conception of Substance

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instances in order to reach the common kind; since we can inspect only our own mentality, how can we tell which aspects can be generalized? Undoubtedly, these questions point to a source of difficulties in Whitehead’s philosophy. One reply is that in the construction of his theories the metaphysician can avail himself of other sources besides the direct inspection of his own experience. The view that all substances are centers of force, for example, can find support in modern quantum physics as well as in the sense we have of ourselves as spontaneous agents: ‘the key notion from which such construction [the one attempted in metaphysics] should start is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life.’4 The objection that the method of generalization does not exclude the possibility of serious errors also reveals a concern for certainty and finality that is entirely foreign to Whitehead, who thinks we will never know whether we have rightly answered the question as to the nature of substance. The best we can do is to develop a reasonable account by way of generalization, compare it with as much empirical evidence as we can, and then revise it and start the entire process again. Knowledge is not perfected by the discovery of a method that insulates from falsification; on the contrary, all our theories are fallible and, in principle, revisable. Thus, one way to look at Whitehead’s theory of actual occasions is to take it as a grand cosmic hypothesis, with some initial grounds of plausibility, but such that it eventually stands or falls with its capacity to improve our understanding of the experienced world. Metaphysical generalization requires a basis from which to start: the ‘basis of all experience’, Whitehead writes, ‘is this immediate stage of experiencing, which is myself now’.5 Whitehead’s presystematic understanding of a moment of human subjectivity is stated most forcefully in the following passage: It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions – all of them subjective reactions to the environment as active in my nature. My unity – which is Descartes’ ‘I am’ – is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings. The individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment.6 This passage is meant to provide a vivid description of the way we ordinarily experience ourselves; as it stands, it aims at nothing else

10 Leibniz, Whitehead and the Metaphysics of Causation

than at providing an accurate phenomenological characterization of our psychic life. This initial depiction, however, quickly develops into the notion of the actual occasion as a unit of existence that begins life by incorporating (prehending) aspects of other actualities in the external world, emotionally reacting to them (each prehensive act is said to have a subjective form), and integrating influences and subjective reactions into a unified moment of experience (the synthesis occurs in the course of a process called concrescence, and issues in the occasion’s satisfaction). In order to account for the spontaneity that is so pervasive a feature of our experience, Whitehead furthermore endows his actual occasions with a capacity for envisaging the possible forms that the final synthesis could take (the envisagement of a form is called a conceptual prehension, the envisaged form an eternal object) and for evaluating them freely (the actual occasion is said to exert a decision). Whitehead lays much emphasis upon the fact that each actual occasion is dipolar. Considered with respect to its capacity for taking account of past actualities, each occasion has a physical pole; considered with respect to its capacity to envisage abstract possibilities, each has a conceptual pole. This distinction is important, but the language in which it is formulated is misleading. In particular, Whitehead is not using the terms ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ as they are ordinarily understood. Since the physical pole is an occasion’s capacity to experience other actualities and the mental pole is its capacity to grasp eternal objects or forms, the distinction between the two poles is not a distinction between kinds of substances or properties, but between two different kinds of sentient acts or mental functions. Specifically, Whitehead’s is neither a dual aspect theory in which the mental and the physical are conceived as two radically different kinds of properties, nor a form of neutral monism in which the basic reality has physical and mental properties, while being itself neither physical nor mental. It is really a form of panpsychistic idealism that straightforwardly identifies the ultimate constituents of reality with mind-like, wholly experiential entities. This view finds implicit confirmation in Whitehead’s repeated statements to the effect that a physical prehension is an act of experience, but it is also explicitly advocated in Symbolism. Whitehead argues here that ‘it is a matter of pure convention as to which of our experiential activities we term mental and which physical’.7 This makes it wholly clear that the distinction is one we draw within the broader category of experience; it is not a distinction between the mental or experiential on the one side, and the physical or non-experiential on the other.


11

Whitehead explains that he prefers ‘to restrict mentality to those experiential activities which include concepts in addition to percepts’,8 but he also emphasizes that one must never lose sight of the fact ‘that there is no proper line to be drawn between the physical and the mental constitution of experience’.9 In the passage expressing Whitehead’s presystematic understanding of a moment of human experience, he also notices that the process of reacting to external influences is one main way we are engaged in interacting with the world. The reactive nature of the mind is thus one of its most salient features and Whitehead acknowledges the significance of this fact even when discussing issues that falls outside the field of metaphysics: ‘The mind is never passive’, he says in Aims of Education, ‘it is a perpetual activity, delicate, receptive, responsive to stimulus.’10 We interact with an external world in ever new ways, which forces us to take account of novel influences and create new syntheses. This recognition leads Whitehead to view each realized synthesis as only a momentary achievement. Our psychic life is best characterized as a series of momentary units of existence – ‘occasions of experience’ – each of which lasts for a brief moment before being superseded by a novel one. In Process and Reality, he makes the point as follows: ‘an experiencing subject is one occasion of sensitive reaction to an actual world.’11 On this basis, the ultimate constituents of reality are not to be conceived as thing-like particles, but as temporary occurrences or unitevents rapidly succeeding each other. Admittedly, these notions are not easy to grasp and it is the burden of the following pages to make them clearer. What has been said only shows the close correspondence between Whitehead’s notion of an actual occasion and what he takes to be a correct account of human subjectivity. But there is a difficulty here. That account seems plausible enough, yet it seems possible to cast into doubt its metaphysical neutrality. When we reflect upon our experiences, we interpret them in terms of our everyday concepts. Moreover, which features of reality we notice in a certain situation may vary, according to our purposes at the moment of observation. Thus, one objection that is likely to arise here is that the starting point for metaphysical generalization is never neutral, but is already an interpretation in terms of a certain scheme of concepts and pragmatic ends. This is a serious difficulty. As against it, one might want to reply that these worries are justified with respect to our knowledge of the external world, but they make little sense when what is at stake is not knowledge of an external, distinct reality but of oneself. But although there

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is some truth in this reply, the two cases are not as different as it might look at first sight. To recognize this, one has to recall a well-known difficulty concerned with what usually passes for introspection. The report we make to ourselves or to others of our psychic life is already a new moment of our subjective experience. It is, in other words, only retrospectively that we can become reflexively aware of what we have just gone through. There is a gap between the description and its object in the case of so-called introspection as much as between a description of an external event and that event’s actual occurrence. This allows for the possibility that our conscious descriptions might be mistaken, as all descriptions can be, even when they refer to something we know so intimately as our own psychic life. Whitehead addresses some of these concerns at the very beginning of Process and Reality. His solution consists in arguing that we should start with what seems to us the best account and then apply our generalizations to experienced reality in a process of constant correction: ‘The true method of discovery’, he says, ‘is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of speculative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.’12 Still, one might ask why a given description appears to be sufficiently adequate, such that it can be taken as the basis for a first round of metaphysical generalization. Whitehead does not seem to address this question directly, but his belief that experience provides both the starting point and the ultimate court of appeal for philosophical theories involves a crucial assumption about the nature of our experience. Specifically, Whitehead thinks that we have an immediate, nonconceptual encounter with reality. This does not happen in ordinary sensory perception, but at a more primitive experiential level. This basic mode of experience (a topic to be discussed in Chapter 4) provides us with a non-negotiable sense of what we are, of what reality is like and – to put it in Heideggerian language – of what it means for us to ‘be-in-the-world’.

The relatedness of actualities Besides providing the matrix from which to deduce the main features of an actual occasion, the passage quoted in the previous section also includes an interesting reference to Descartes. Whitehead implies that Descartes was exactly right in identifying the conscious thinker as the substance of which we have the most intimate knowledge. The


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passage also suggests, however, that Descartes spoiled his important discovery by failing to acknowledge the essentially dynamic, reactive nature of subjectivity: ‘like Columbus who never visited America, Descartes missed the full sweep of his own discovery.’13 Instead of conceiving of the self as an active process, Descartes conceived of it as a static substance, as the underlying bearer of qualities. ‘It is never bare thought or bare existence that we are aware of,’ Whitehead says in the above depiction of what it is for a human subject to be, clearly alluding to the notion of the self as a substratum – as a naked, bare particular. Whitehead never tires of emphasizing that the notion of the self as a substantial thing fails to square with the sense we have of ourselves as active living agents, capable of spontaneous reactions to our environment: The doctrine of the enduring soul with its permanent characteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem which life presents. That problem is, How can there be originality? And the answer explains how the soul need be no more original than a stone.14 Accordingly, what Whitehead calls Descartes’s ‘subjectivist principle’ – the assumption that the self is our paradigmatic instance of substantiality as well as the thing-like bearer of perceptions – stands in need of replacement with a ‘revised subjectivist principle’, in which the notion of the bearer is abandoned. Whitehead explicitly, and repeatedly, refers to his theory as a ‘theory of monads’,15 the reason being that in both cases the basic constituents of reality are modeled on the basis of our conscious experience. But there are significant differences as well. A major one is that, instead of being ‘windowless’, incapable of being affected by the outside, an actual occasion has a capacity for grasping, incorporating, prehending into itself aspects of previous actualities. As Whitehead strikingly puts it, ‘[e]ach 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’.16 The designation of Whitehead’s metaphysics as a relational monadology that has been recently suggested by Peter Simons seems therefore entirely appropriate.17 At the same time, the actual occasion resembles the Leibnizian monad in that the final synthesis, which is achieved as the climax of the concrescing process, defines a ‘perspective’ upon the world. Each moment of experience is a definite way of assembling and relating a

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plurality of prehended data. But here too there is a significant difference, for an actual occasion perceives the immediate past stage of the world (the influences we have to reckon with originate from what has just happened, rather than from what is happening now), whereas for Leibniz each momentary perspective is of the world as it is at that very moment. On a first hearing, one is struck by the strangeness of Whitehead’s concepts and of his terminology. Before discussing the problem of the obscurity of his philosophy, however, let’s here consider wherein the appeal of the theory might lie. Whitehead refers to his theory as a form of atomism: ‘the philosophy of organism’, he says, ‘... is an atomic theory of actuality.’18 One way to see why a process view could look interesting to the metaphysician is by comparing Whitehead’s doctrine of actual entities with more orthodox versions of atomism. Eventually, this comparison will shed some light on the novelty of Whitehead’s actual occasions, as well as the sense in which he can be said to reject the traditional understanding of substance. A paradigmatic illustration of the atomistic worldview is provided by Democritus’s materialism. Here reality is composed of enduring simples that enter into a variety of combinations, so as to generate the vast plurality of worldly things. The simples are conceived as externally related items, that is, as being absolutely independent from one another. Atoms can enter into or separate from aggregates, but this has no bearing upon what they are. In order to allow for the possibility of the atoms’ interaction, moreover, ancient atomism postulated the reality of an empty space, conceived in a quite commonsense fashion as the great container of everything. Process philosopher Charles Hartshorne has pointed out that Western philosophy has been characterized by an ‘exaggerated esteem for symmetry’.19 Relations, Hartshorne explains, have been conceived as being either purely external, that is, as making no difference to the natures of their terms, or as purely internal, that is, as affecting their intrinsic natures. This opposition reflects the divide between atomistic and monistic views of reality that cuts so deeply throughout Western philosophy. On the conception of relations as external, the simples are free to wander into empty space and to form and break connections. On the conception of relations as internal, the many have no independence; they are integral to a larger system rather than self-subsistent beings. The fundamental problem that now confronts the metaphysician is how to reconcile the variety we experience in the world with its equally evident unity, the fact that all things partake of the same world. One


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wants a conceptual scheme capable of accounting for both sides of experienced reality. Spinoza provides a particularly clear statement of this problem in his Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well-being, where he says that ‘[i]t will be marvelous, indeed, if this should turn out to be consistent: that Unity agrees with the Diversity I see everywhere in Nature: For how could this be?’20 On the view that all relations are either internal or external, however, it would seem that all we will ever be able to achieve is either a pluralism of externally related simples that downgrades the universe’s unity, or a monistic view in which the overarching system is the true reality and the many have lost any claim to independence. While external relations yield too much ‘Diversity’, internal relations yield too much ‘Unity’. In Process and Reality, Whitehead formulates Spinoza’s very same question in terms of the distinction between internal and external relations: It is evident that if the solidarity of the physical world is to be relevant to the description of its individual actualities, it can only be by reason of the fundamental internality of the relationships in question. On the other hand, if the individual discreteness of the actualities is to have its weight, there must be an aspect in these relationships from which they can be conceived as external, that is, as bonds between divided things.21 Now, Whitehead’s notion that an actual occasion is capable of prehending aspects of previous occasions involves a rejection of the symmetrical view. The basic principles of reality are conceived as being internally related to the past prehended actualities (which become constituents of their being), and externally related to all future ones (which, being future, cannot affect them). Whitehead’s atomism thus differs from Democritus’s paradigmatic formulation of the doctrine – and likely from all previous formulations of the theory as well – in that it abandons the thesis of the sheer externality of relations, which are now conceived as being internal at one end and external at the other. How does this solve the problem of accounting for the unity and the diversity, the dependency and the independency of things? The answer is that each occasion is dependent upon the past actualities that it prehends, but that it also achieves a measure of independence insofar as it is capable of unifying the data in an original, novel synthesis: ‘The many’, Whitehead says, ‘become one, and are increased by one.’22

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The many actualities of the past ‘become one’ in the synthesis of the novel occasion; they are ‘increased by one’ because the novel occasion becomes itself a new element of reality. Whitehead’s conception of the nature of the relations between actualities has one important implication for his understanding of the nature of substances. We have seen that Whitehead rejects the notion of substance as a static bearer of qualities; occasions are temporary existents, not enduring static things. But another criterion for a thing to qualify as a substance has been traditionally identified in a thing’s self-sufficiency. Again, Spinoza provides a helpful illustration; at the very beginning of his Ethics, he defines substance as follows: Def. 3: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed.23 There are two sides to this definition, for substantiality is here characterized in terms that are both ontological (‘what is in itself’) and epistemological (‘and is conceived through itself’). Ontologically, a substance does not require anything else in order to exist and to be what it is; epistemologically, a substance provides an explanatory anchor for other things, but does not itself require any such anchor. Clearly, Whitehead’s theory of actual occasions involves a rejection of this understanding of substance. Since actual occasions are constituted by their prehensions of past actualities, reference to other actualities is now necessarily a constitutive feature of their being. Otherwise stated, an actual occasion’s existence would not have been possible without a past to prehend, which means that the requirement of ontological self-subsistence is not satisfied. At the same time, full knowledge of an actual occasion requires an understanding of the way it relates to its past, which means that actual occasions are not epistemologically independent either. According to Spinoza, only one being satisfies the above definition of substance – and this is nothing less than God. Whitehead is so consistent in his rejection of the notion of ontological independence that he denies that Spinoza’s notion can be applied to God; even God needs other actualities in order to be.24 Whitehead did not indulge in any revolutionary pose, which might be one of the reasons why his philosophy has not received the attention it deserves, but this denial gives a precise idea of how radical he meant his break with traditional modes of thought to be.


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Revisionary metaphysics and the language of process In his influential book Individuals, Peter Strawson has drawn an important distinction between two forms of metaphysics: ‘Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned with producing a better structure.’25 On the basis of what has been said so far, a worldview such as Whitehead’s is to be classified as a form of revisionary metaphysics, which is indeed how it has been usually understood. Strawson would seem to acknowledge the value of revisionary metaphysics: The products of revisionary metaphysics remain permanently interesting, and not only as key episodes in the history of thought. Because of their articulation, and the intensity of their partial vision, the best of them are both intrinsically admirable and of enduring philosophical utility.26 But in spite of this apparent recognition of the value of revisionary metaphysics, Strawson qualifies the relation between the two by subordinating revisionary to descriptive metaphysics: ‘This last merit [their enduring philosophical utility]’, he goes on to say, ‘can be ascribed to them [the systems of revisionary metaphysics] only because there is another kind of metaphysics which needs no justification at all beyond that of inquiry in general.’ ‘Revisionary metaphysics’, he concludes, ‘is at the service of descriptive metaphysics.’27 Unfortunately, Strawson fails to explain what he means by ‘being at the service of’. On a moderate reading, he might be taken to say that, by way of comparison with revisionary attempts, the contours of our normal scheme will emerge more clearly. But on a more radical interpretation he might be taken to mean that revisionary metaphysics is useful only because it shows the absurdities in which clever philosophers lose themselves when they try to transcend the normal scheme (Descartes, Berkeley and Leibniz are his examples of revisionary metaphysicians). This second interpretation is suggested by Strawson’s remark that descriptive metaphysics ‘needs no justification at all beyond that of inquiry in general’, which can be read as implying that revisionary metaphysics stands in need of justification, that it is indeed a questionable enterprise. On this second interpretation, revisionary metaphysics would be, except for the important lessons we might learn from its failures, a


worthless enterprise. The scheme of categories descriptive metaphysics aims at discovering would, in a Kantian fashion, set the limits within which all possible thought about reality has to take place. But what is this scheme? According to Strawson, this is a massive central core of human thinking which has no history – or none recorded in histories of thought; there are categories and concepts which, in their most fundamental character, change not at all. Obviously these are not the specialties of the most refined thinking. They are the commonplaces of the least refined thinking; and are yet the indispensable core of the conceptual equipment of the most sophisticated human beings.28 Such a ‘massive core’ does not lie on the surface of ordinary language, but lies submerged and requires subtle philosophical work to be recovered.29 This hardly clarifies whether Strawson thinks that revisionary metaphysics is possible, yet his contention that there are categories which form ‘the indispensable core of the conceptual equipment of the most sophisticated human beings’ suggests that it is not. Strawson contends that material things and persons, understood not as disembodied souls but as ensouled bodies, that is, as material things possessing mental features, are the basic particulars in terms of which everything else is conceived. Specifically, process and activities have no claim to ontological priority within our conceptual scheme, for the only way to identify them is by way of connection to one or more of the basic individuals.30 If Strawson is right, the attempt to develop a process-metaphysics along the lines indicated by Whitehead would be wholly misguided. What is a ‘thing’ for Whitehead? What is a material object such as a chair, for example, in a world of actual occasions? It is nothing but a cluster of micro-processes (a society of actual occasions), related in such a way as to sustain the structural pattern that is characteristic of the object chair. On Whitehead’s view, the basic particulars are the event-like actual occasions, not material things. Interestingly enough, Strawson considers the possibility that the basic individuals might be process-like instead of thing-like. This option, however, is one he dismisses without much hesitation: ‘the category of “process-things” ’, he says, ‘is one that we neither have nor need.’31 Strawson does not mention Whitehead and merely ascribes the process-view to ‘some philosophers’, yet Whitehead’s ontology clearly falls within the scope of his critique. In sum, what Strawson would seem to be saying on a radical interpretation of his book is that our


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ordinary scheme is not revisable; since in this scheme the category of process plays a secondary role, Whitehead’s metaphysics is another misguided attempt at transcending the limits of human thought. Note that in the passage just quoted Strawson does not solely say that the category of process-thing is one we do not ‘have’, but also that it is one we do not ‘need’; this leaves little doubt as to what he thinks of the prospects of process metaphysics. (It must be admitted, however, that he does not say that this category is one we cannot possibly have.) Not surprisingly, philosophers in the process tradition have felt an obligation to reply to what has been taken to be an attack. An interesting response to Strawson has been provided by Nicholas Rescher.32 One point he makes is as follows. How does Strawson reach the conclusion that bodies and persons are more basic than processes? According to Rescher, Strawson assumes that epistemic identifiability provides a reliable criterion of ontological independency. On this understanding, particulars of kind 1 are ontologically prior to particulars of kind 2 if and only if particulars of kind 2 can be identified only by reference to particulars of kind 1. Since processes can be identified only by being tied to material objects or persons (for instance, a battle is identified by reference to the men who fought it), processes have no claim to ontological primacy. As against this, Rescher observes that it is all but clear that epistemic relations can be taken as a guide to ontological dependency. After all, we identify persons by names, but this does not make names ontologically prior to persons; analogously, we identify not-visible stars by specifying their position with respect to visible ones, but this does not make the visible stars ontologically prior to the non-visible ones. What Rescher is calling into question is Strawson’s implicit attempt to reduce ontology, the study of what there is, to epistemology, the study of how we think about existing things.33 It is impossible to do justice to the sophistication of Strawson’s argument within the limits of the present chapter. For present purposes, the really important question is as follows: even granted that Strawson is right in holding that, within our normal conceptual scheme, processes are secondary to thing-like entities such as material bodies, why should this scheme not be revisable? Strawson does not seem to have any clear answer to this question. In particular, he does not explain what he takes a concept or a conceptual scheme to be. On the face of it, however, this is the question on which everything turns. Whether or not we will regard our conceptual categories as revisable ultimately depends upon our philosophical theory of the nature of human thought.

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Whitehead’s persuasion that our conceptual schemes are revisable owns much to his scientific training. As a witness to the development of quantum physics at the very beginning of the twentieth century, he regarded conceptual revision as taking place all the while; it was for him something one could hardly deny. At the quantum level, we do not have things or even thing-like particles, but rather fields of interacting activities.34 As a matter of fact, this is another reply that has been made by process-oriented thinkers against Strawson: conceptual revision is science’s everyday business, and it is only by a dogmatic decision that the philosopher can arrogate to himself the power to define the limits of human thought.35 A philosopher who takes science seriously does not arrogantly seal himself off from other academic disciplines and will continue to believe in the possibility of framing ever new categories. Whitehead’s reasons for thinking that conceptual revision is possible are also rooted in his radical commitment to the theory of evolution. Whitehead does not regard conceptual structures as a Kantian would, as an a priori framework of categories that sets a limit to our understanding. The evolutionist Herbert Spencer said that human concepts are a priori for the individual and a posteriori for the species, and this is pretty much Whitehead’s position. If one takes the concept of evolution seriously, our intellectual faculties must be viewed as means for dealing with a hostile environment, as fundamentally plastic and capable of adaptation. The concepts of substance and quality have been capable of providing sufficiently accurate descriptions of an environment filled with middle-sized objects like rocks, trees, and human bodies, and have consequently been useful tools for dealing with it. But nothing makes them intrinsically incapable of revision; it is an accident that they originated and other ways of conceptualizing the world might have proved equally successful. Whitehead makes the point nicely in Adventures of Ideas: ‘It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is that factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature.’ In the same book, he reverses Strawson’s analytical approach: he acknowledges that ‘in philosophy linguistic discussion is a tool,’ but argues that it ‘should never be a master’. The justification of this view is again provided in evolutionary terms: language cannot be a basis for ontology because it ‘is incomplete and fragmentary, and merely registers a stage in the average beyond ape-mentality’.36 Still, a philosopher skeptical of the prospects of a revisionary metaphysics could grant that our ordinary modes of thought have an evolutionary origin, while at the same time contending that they have so


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deeply permeated our language that now, at the particular evolutionary stage in which we find ourselves, it has become virtually impossible to escape their grip. The problem of how to escape the limitations of language is one to which Whitehead devotes much thought. Indeed, he thinks that, insofar as it is revisionary, metaphysics will have to create its own new language: ‘Every science’, Whitehead writes, ‘must devise its own instruments. The tool required for philosophy is language. Thus philosophy redesigns language in the same way that, in a physical science, pre-existing appliances are redesigned.’37 One first remark is that, like our conceptual structures, language too has an evolutionary origin, so it should not be impossible in principle to modify it, in such a way as to make it apt to convey or suggest novel categories: ‘Primitive men were not metaphysicians, nor were they interested in the expression of concrete experience. Their language merely expressed useful abstractions.’38 Most importantly, Whitehead does not think that language has a complete hold on thought; rather, language and thought develop dialectically: an advance in intuition might lead to an advance in verbal phrasing, and vice versa a fortunate verbal construction might suggest a novel idea. There is a danger here, for if the philosopher has to redesign language he runs the risk of creating one that nobody else will understand. Whitehead makes abundant use of metaphors, creates neologisms (such as the already introduced terms ‘actual occasion’ and ‘prehension’), employs traditional philosophical terminology in a new way – all this in the hope of stumbling upon a fortunate linguistic creation capable of engendering a shift in our intuitions, to spark a ‘leap of the imagination’. In an early, very critical review of Process and Reality that appeared in Mind in 1930, Susan Stebbing complained that ‘the difficulty [of that book] is undoubtedly increased by the obscurity of Prof. Whitehead’s style, by its queer choice of words, and by his failure to provide definite examples elucidating his views.’39 ‘Whitehead’s indefensible use of language becomes nothing short of scandalous when he speaks of God,’40 she also wrote, just before drawing the drastic conclusion that the book is likely to be ‘the product of thinking that is essentially unclear but capable of brief flashes of penetrating insight’.41 One need not be particularly hostile to Whitehead’s enterprise to acknowledge the strangeness of his language, and even that at times it is exceptionally obscure. But it is important to recognize that this is not due to any shortcomings or negligence on his part. On the contrary, the problem of language is one that any revisionary metaphysics will have to face; Whitehead’s outstanding merit is to face it squarely.

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Lastly, there is a less philosophically loaded and hence less controversial way to challenge the legitimacy of an enterprise such as that which Whitehead attempted. From a historical perspective, skepticism with respect to metaphysics is not the consequence of adopting a Kantian view of the mind. On the contrary, philosophers first turned skeptical and then tried to account for the failures of metaphysicians to achieve their goals by elaborating complex transcendental arguments that were meant to disclose the necessary conditions underlying rational thinking, or meaningful talk, about reality. Otherwise put, we might not know whether revisionary metaphysics is possible, but we can appeal to the empirical argument that the history of philosophy – with its endless debates, its alternation of enthusiasms and delusions, and its ever disappointed promises – gives strong reasons for thinking that it is not. The worry is that, in his ambitious project of developing a ‘big picture’ of reality, the metaphysician might end up mistaking private dreams for concrete realities; in the worst case, he may appear to be utterly ridiculous by talking non-sense. Whitehead is keenly aware of this risk: ‘Speculative boldness’, he writes in the very first chapter of Process and Reality, ‘must be balanced by complete humility before logic, and before fact.’42 ‘It is a disease of philosophy’, he also says, ‘when it is neither bold nor humble, but merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities.’43 Whitehead addresses the problem of how to prevent philosophy from degenerating by setting down explicitly what he takes to be the requirements that must control the free play of the speculative imagination. This he does, at least in part, in that he canvasses the ideal form that any metaphysical system should take. Having characterized speculative metaphysics as ‘the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted’,44 he specifies four main criteria that any system of metaphysics must try to satisfy: ‘the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate.’45 By logical consistency, Whitehead means the usual standards of rationality, such as absence of internal contradiction; coherence stands for the mutual implication of the parts, which must form an organic whole rather than a mere assemblage; by applicable, Whitehead means that there must be some portions of experience that can be interpreted in terms of the scheme’s general philosophical notions, a result that is secured by the adoption of the method of metaphysical generalization; lastly, the ideal system must be adequate, in that it not only correctly


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characterizes the empirical basis of descriptive generalization but can be applied to all other regions as well. There are two sides to this ideal, a rational one, which is expressed by the criteria of coherence and consistency, and an empirical one, which is reflected in the criteria of applicability and adequacy. The rational side of the speculative ideal should be considered with care. In the first place, the criterion of logical consistency is the weakest of the requirements. Should a discrepancy arise between a logically consistent system and one’s experiences, then it is consistency that will have to be renounced. Although a logically inconsistent system cannot be wholly true, it could nevertheless grasp more of the nature of reality than a logically consistent system that simply refuses to acknowledge the very existence of contrary empirical evidence. Inconsistency might be the result of an honest effort to take account of all aspects of reality, while consistency by itself is not a virtue. Second, while the validity of the other requirements is fairly uncontroversial, it is all but clear that a correct theory of reality needs to satisfy the criterion of coherence, which requires nothing less than the mutual implication of all of a system’s fundamental notions. Whitehead addresses this problem in the following passage: It is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from each other. In other words, it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe.46 Now, what is striking in this passage is the sudden shift from the conceptual to the ontological level, as if the reason why a system’s fundamental notions cannot be abstracted from one another were that no entity can be divorced from the system of the universe. Apparently, the criterion of coherence is grounded in the view that reality is an organic whole. But why should one start one’s investigations with such a strong metaphysical commitment? Surely, it is not evident that reality includes no independent existing entities. Strangely enough, this is not Whitehead’s view: his theory, he claims, explains ‘the obvious solidarity of the world’ [my emphasis].47 The criterion of coherence thus differs from the others in that it is not ontologically neutral. Be that as it may, it is by reference to these requirements that Whitehead thinks that any metaphysical theory must be tested. An analogous set of criteria is provided in The Function of Reason: again, they are explicitly laid down with the aim of preserving speculation


from any ‘elements of folly’.48 But it is immediately clear that no system can ever hope to realize such an ideal. The problem is represented by the requirement of empirical adequacy: the range of experiences to be taken into account is one nobody can exhaust, for one thing, because it changes and expands continuously as humankind evolves. Hence, there is no hope of finality in philosophy. The work of framing new concepts and testing them against the bedrock of experience must be done and redone, the acquisition of knowledge being a matter of progressively approaching an infinitely remote end. Doesn’t this turn metaphysics into a paradoxical task? The answer is that there might be partial insights to be achieved along the way, as even a critic as hostile as Susan Stebbing eventually acknowledged when she wrote that Whitehead’s thought was ‘capable of brief flashes of penetrating insight’.

Russell on Leibniz’s conception of substance But even granted that revisionary metaphysics is possible, why should we embark on the enterprise? Whitehead’s dissatisfaction with the traditional understanding of substance can be traced back to a variety of reasons. One of these has been already hinted at above, namely his belief that contemporary science requires an ontology of events rather than of thing-like particles.49 Others are clearly stated – long before Whitehead began constructing his system of revisionary metaphysics – in Russell’s 1900 book A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Russell’s book is not solely an outstanding study of the thought of a key thinker, but also a philosophical critique of the traditional conception of substance. This double reading is made possible by Russell’s procedure of taking Leibniz’s philosophy as exemplifying a general type of worldview. As Russell explains, the fact that Leibniz was such an outstanding thinker is what enables the commentator to detect the limits of a certain type of philosophy to which, because of his genius, Leibniz was capable of giving the most brilliant exposition. The critique of Leibniz’s philosophy thus becomes a critique of a larger family of connected philosophical positions. It is not the object of this section to evaluate the historical or textual adequacy of any of Russell’s interpretations. The focus here is on understanding what philosophical lesson Russell thought he could derive from his study of Leibniz. To this end, it is best to start with an exposition of his appraisal of Leibniz’s conception of substance.


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According to Russell, Leibniz’s conception of substance is the outcome of the Aristotelian doctrine that ‘every proposition is ultimately reducible to one which attributes a predicate to a subject’.50 A philosopher who holds this view will be misled into seeing the world as constituted by things and their qualities: the logical doctrine that all propositions are subject/predicate in form has its counterpart in the ontological doctrine that whatever exists is either a substance or a property of a substance. In Russell’s lights, all the several components of Leibniz’s theory of substance can be traced back to this logico-ontological paradigm, which that theory presupposes as its necessary foundation. In the first place, Russell ascribes to Leibniz the Aristotelian view that a substance is the logical subject of predication: ‘When many predicates can be attributed to one and the same subject, while this subject cannot be made the predicate of any other subject, then the subject in question is called an individual substance.’51 Secondly, Leibniz conceives of a substance as the subject of change: ‘Change implies something which changes: it implies, that is, a subject that has preserved its identity while altering its qualities.’52 According to Russell, this second component of Leibniz’s conception of a substance is a direct consequence of the first; it is nothing else than the notion of the logical subject applied to what is in time. This does not yet exhaust Russell’s reconstruction of Leibniz’s theory of substance. Russell gives considerable emphasis to Leibniz’s doctrine that all the predicates of a substance are contained in a substance’s ‘complete concept’, this being a concept that comprehends at once all the predicates that, if created, a substance would possess at different moments in time. If this doctrine were true, Russell observes, then someone who had a grasp of a created substance’s complete concept would have an understanding of why that substance changes the way it does, that is, why it does have a predicate at a certain instant in time and a different predicate at another instant. Russell is trying to derive the whole of Leibniz’s metaphysics from his logical theories and he now appeals to this doctrine as a way of explaining Leibniz’s denial of a direct causal interaction between the monads. Since the reason why a created substance has the predicates it has lies in that substance’s nature as this is specified in its complete concept, there is no need to appeal to external agencies to explain the changes within created substances. As Russell explains: A substance, we have seen, is a subject which has predicates consisting of various attributes at various parts of time. We have also seen


that all these predicates are involved in the notion of the subject, and that the ground of its varying attributes is, therefore, within the substance, and not to be sought in the influence of the outside world. Hence there must be, in every state of a substance, some element or quality in virtue of which that state is not permanent, but tends to pass into the next state. This element is what Leibniz means by activity.53 On this interpretation, the logical doctrine that all the predicates of a substance are analytically contained in its complete concept leads to the rejection of direct causal interaction. The reason is not that causal interaction is impossible in principle, but that it is not required to explain why a created substance changes. (There is more to Leibniz’s denial of direct causal interaction than what is grasped by this explanation, however, as will become clear in Chapter 3.) Furthermore, Russell holds that this denial of causal interaction leads Leibniz to a novel insight as to the nature of substances. Since changes occur in created substances but are not caused by external agencies, such substances must be themselves the causes of their changes. Otherwise put, they must be endowed with the capacity of propelling a transition from a perceptual state to another. This means that, in addition to being conceived as the logical subject of predication and the enduring subject of change, a substance must be conceived as an active force or principle. As Russell says, ‘[i]t is in this activity that the very substance of things consists’.54 Having clarified what he takes to be Leibniz’s conception of substance, Russell then proceeds to evaluate it critically. It is at this juncture that his examination of Leibniz’s philosophy most clearly transcends its significance as a mere historical study and becomes an independent philosophical inquiry.

Russell’s critique of Leibniz Russell advances several objections against the metaphysics of substance. In what follows, attention will be devoted only to those aspects of his critique that have a particular bearing upon Whitehead’s philosophy. One of Russell’s main criticisms is that the metaphysics of substance fails to recognize that relations form an irreducible ontological category. Russell clarifies this point in the course of a discussion of a passage from Leibniz’s correspondence with Clark in which Leibniz himself seems to be on the verge of recognizing that relations cannot be reduced either


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to substances or to adjectives of a substance. The passage is long, but deserves to be quoted at full length: The ratio or proportion between two lines L and M may be conceived three several ways; as a ratio of the greater L to the lesser M; as a ratio of the lesser M to the greater L; and lastly, as something abstracted from both, that is, as the ratio between L and M, without considering which is the antecedent and which the consequent; which the subject and which the object ... In the first way of considering them, L the greater is the subject, in the second M the lesser is the subject of that accident which philosophers call relatio or ratio. But which of them will be the subject, in the third way of considering them? It cannot be said that both of them, L and M together, are the subject of such an accident; for if so, we should have an accident in two subjects, with one leg in one, and the other in the other; which is contrary to the notion of accidents. Therefore we must say that this relation, in this third way of considering it, is indeed out of the subjects; but being neither a substance, nor an accident, it must be a mere ideal thing, the consideration of which is nevertheless useful.55 At the end of this passage, Leibniz acknowledges that a relation is ‘neither a substance, nor an accident’, and concludes that it ‘must be a mere ideal thing’. How does Leibniz reach this conclusion? And what is it for something to be an ideal thing? Consider the proposition ‘L is greater than M.’ We could try to analyze it as (i) ‘L is greater than M’ or as (ii) ‘M is lesser than L’, in the attempt to exclude any reference to a relation. But what kind of predicates are greater than M and lesser than L? As Russell notices, they are inelegant ways of saying that M and L are related in a certain way. Alternatively, we could analyze the proposition into (iii) ‘M and L are such that greater than holds of them together.’ On this analysis, the predicate greater than would have two subjects; to say of a predicate that it has two subjects, however, is to admit that it is not a predicate, but a relation. As Leibniz has it, ‘we should have an accident in two subjects, with one leg in one, and the other in the other; which is contrary to the notion of accidents’. The conclusion of this line of reasoning is that none of these analyses56 is capable of showing that we can dispense with relations in our ontology. Russell thinks that this is entirely correct and that Leibniz should therefore either (a) abandon the doctrine that the only fundamental categories are those of substance and property and acknowledge

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the reality of relations as an independent category of being, or (b) deny the reality of relations. In the above passage, Leibniz seems to lean towards this second option, for he says that a relation is ‘a mere ideal thing’. But what does he mean by calling relations ‘ideal’? In his discussion of this passage, Russell sarcastically remarks that ‘[i]f he [Leibniz] were pushed as to this “ideal thing,” I am afraid he would declare it to be an accident of the mind which contemplates the ratio’.57 According to Russell, the view that relations are ideal is the view that the monads can stand in relation to each other only if they are perceived by an overarching Mind. Without a cosmic observer for whom their relations exist, the monads would not form one universe, but a multiplicity of utterly disconnected beings. On Russell’s interpretation, Leibniz did not honestly face the dilemma of choosing between a plurality of disconnected monads and the rejection of the metaphysics of substance. If he had thought through the consequence of his own reasoning, Russell suggests, he might even have ended up being a Spinozist. The appeal of reducing in a Spinozistic fashion the entire universe to an accident of the divine Mind lies in the fact that this solution does not require (a) the admission that relations have a reality of their own, or (b) the blunt denial of their existence. If we allow for this possibility, however, then the options open to a philosopher who holds an ontology of substance are either a radical form of monadism in which the many are wholly disconnected, not being capable of forming one world, or an equally extreme form of monism, in which nothing is fully real but the one Reality. Since it is difficult to deny that the universe possesses some sort of a unity, Russell concludes, Spinozism is the proper outcome of Leibniz’s logico-ontological assumptions. It is a leitmotif in Russell’s interpretation that the pluralism of the many monads conflicts with Leibniz’s ontological premises. Leibniz should either reconsider one of his two basic assumptions – the unity of the world and the ontology of substance and property – or embrace Spinozistic monism. In The Principles of Mathematics, the above passage by Leibniz is discussed again, this time with the sole aim of illustrating what he takes to be a fundamental but commonly overlooked philosophical point. Russell makes it clear that there are only two forms any metaphysics of substance might take: It is a common opinion – often held unconsciously, and employed in argument, even by those who do not explicitly advocate it – that all propositions, ultimately, consist of a subject and a predicate. When this proposition is confronted by a relational proposition, it has two


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ways of dealing with it, of which one might be called monadistic, the other monistic ... the first is represented by Leibniz and (on the whole) by Lotze, the second by Spinoza and Mr. Bradley.58 Is either monadism or monism a reasonable way of accounting for the world? Russell clearly thinks that this is not so. He concludes therefore that the best course for a philosopher to take is to abandon the logical assumption leading to this metaphysical impasse – the exclusivist principle that whatever exists is either a substance or the predicate of a substance. The importance of this critique for Whitehead’s own philosophy can be scarcely overemphasized. In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead repeats it almost word for word: Some schools of philosophy, under the influence of the Aristotelian logic and the Aristotelian philosophy, endeavour to get on without admitting any relations at all except that of substance and attribute. Namely all apparent relations are to be resolvable into the concurrent existence of substances with contrasted attributes. It is fairly obvious that the Leibnizian monadology is the necessary outcome of any such philosophy. If you dislike pluralism, there will be only one monad.59 And, in Process and Reality, he states that if we take the concept of substance as fundamental, then ‘the only alternatives are, either Bradley’s doctrine of a single experient, the absolute, or Leibniz’s doctrine of many windowless monads’.60 Since he thinks that each alternatives ‘stamps experience with a certain air of illusoriness’, he concludes that what is needed is a revision of our basic ontological categories. As these passages show, in his rejection of the metaphysics of substance Whitehead entirely follows in Russell’s footsteps. But it is important to note that there are two sides to this critique. On the one hand, the claim is that the obvious artificiality of both monadism and monism constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the metaphysics of substance. On the other hand, the claim is that the logical basis of the metaphysics of substance is flawed, for there are propositions (such as ‘L is greater than M’) that do not lend themselves to an analysis in terms of subject and predicate. In sum, the metaphysics of substance is neither empirically nor logically adequate. Before bringing this section to an end, there is another aspect of Russell’s critique that deserves consideration. Having rejected the notion


of substance as the holder of qualities, Russell remarks that Leibniz would have been better advised to abandon the notion of a substratum and to resolve the monad into the causal series of its perceptions. On this view, each monad could be identified with a stream of experiences: ‘All the predicates of a given substance form one causal series; this series might, therefore, be taken as defining what we are to mean by one substance, and the reference to subject and predicate might be dropped.’61 Russell thinks that Leibniz comes close at times to holding this doctrine (which he ascribes to Hermann Lotze, a thinker who will play a central role in the following chapter), but ultimately Leibniz’s belief that all propositions are subject-predicate in form prevailed and made him unable to free himself from the idea that the monad’s perceptions require a substratum. Certainly, the notion that the monad is one causal series rather than an enduring thing anticipates Whitehead’s contention that at the bottom level of reality we do not find thing-like particles, but series of momentary occasions of experience rapidly superseding each other. One could see his position as a refinement of an idea already advanced by Lotze – and perhaps even by Leibniz himself. In the correspondence with the Dutch physicist De Volder, for example, Leibniz approximates to the process view, as when he writes that ‘[n]othing is permanent in a substance except the law itself which determines the continuous succession of its states’.62 But the necessity to embrace a process view of reality is more than simply adumbrated by Russell, who thus explains what he takes to be the upshot of his discussion of the philosophy of Leibniz: Spinoza, we may say, had shown that the actual world could not be explained by means of one substance; Leibniz showed that it could not be explained by means of many substances. It became necessary, therefore, to base metaphysics on a notion other than that of substance – a task not yet accomplished.63 The task so clearly indicated by Russell is precisely the one that the doctrine of actual entities is designed to fulfill. Although this is not usually recognized, it is Russell’s early study of the philosophy of Leibniz that paves the way for Whitehead’s metaphysics.64

Conclusion In Process and Reality, Whitehead writes that in the philosophy of organism ‘[t]he notion of “substance” is transformed into that of


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“actual entity” ’.65 We began this chapter by saying that the thesis that Whitehead rejects the metaphysics of substance needs to be considered with care. This claim can now be further clarified, for in the course of the above exposition several meanings of the term ‘substance’ have been distinguished. Specifically, the term might stand for: (1) that which truly is; (2) that which is always a subject of predication and never a predicate; (3) that which is ontologically self-sufficient; (4) the underlying bearer of properties; (5) the enduring subject of change; (6) that which is capable of action. Whitehead denies that the conception of substance has any metaphysical validity if taken in any of the senses (2), (3), (4) or (5), but his actual occasions are certainly substances in the senses (1) and (6): they are the ultimate constituents of reality and these are intrinsically active, capable of reacting to the external world and of influencing one another. Thus, the meaning of ‘substance’ is ‘power’ and it is now the task of the philosophy of organism to elaborate on this fundamental intuition. Whitehead acknowledges that the notion that substances are intrinsically active is a theme running through the whole history of philosophy. As he notices in Adventures of Ideas, ‘[i]t was Plato in his later mood who put forward the suggestion, “and I hold that the definition of being is simply power” ’.66 In spite of the many elements of novelty introduced with the concept of an actual occasion, his is not a complete break with the tradition; it is better viewed as an attempt to revitalize what he takes to be most valuable in it.

3 The Relevance of Leibniz: Ward’s Theory of Monads

Introduction In his book on Leibniz, Russell offered a sustained critique of the traditional notion of substance. Russell came to think that the traditional understanding of substance was grounded upon an erroneous logical theory and that it was empirically inadequate. The overall conclusion of Russell’s argument is that some main ideas traditionally associated with the metaphysics of substance are of no use in metaphysics and have to be abandoned. Since Whitehead appears to have been persuaded by Russell’s arguments, this explains why he will try to develop a system of revisionary metaphysics in which the notion of substance as the underling holder of properties is replaced by the notion of the actual entity as an occasion of experience organically related to all other occasions. What remains to be explained is why Whitehead could have come to see in Leibniz’s metaphysics an anticipation of his own philosophy – going even so far as to claim that the philosophy of organism ‘is a theory of monads’.

A Cambridge philosopher: James Ward Michael Dummett remarked that at certain historical periods ideas are ‘in the air’, meaning by this that ‘at a certain stage in the history of any subject, ideas become visible, though only to those with keen mental eyesight’.1 It is not solely because of his superior mental eyesight that Russell wrote a book criticizing Leibniz’s conception of substance, however, for one of Russell’s teachers at Cambridge, James Ward (1843–1925), was studying Leibniz with the hope of drawing inspiration from his philosophy. 32

The Relevance of Leibniz

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Ward is unknown to the majority of philosophers today, but this neglect stands in striking contradiction to his high reputation during his lifetime. An article on ‘Psychology’ (1886) that he wrote for the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica gave him an authority comparable to that of the great American psychologist William James (1842–1910).2 Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899), a book based upon a series of Gifford Lectures, was perceived as the definitive criticism of the various forms of scientific materialism that were current in the second half of the nineteenth century. According to the British idealist A.E. Taylor, who reviewed the book in Mind in 1900, ‘one may assert without much fear of contradiction that Prof. Ward’s Gifford Lectures are the philosophical book of the last year’.3 If Ward’s book is unknown today, this is solely because it was extremely successful in liberating the field of philosophical debate from the ideas it criticized; the book perished with the ideas it had so effectively attacked. Ward had the honor of being invited to deliver a second series of Gifford Lectures. Since Naturalism and Agnosticism is primarily critical of other philosophers’ positions, the invitation provided a welcome occasion for a more constructive attempt at metaphysics. In these lectures – published in 1911 as The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism – Ward presented a theory of monads largely based upon the teachings of Leibniz; by way of affinities and contrasts, Ward’s metaphysics is also indebted to the philosophy of Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), with whom Ward had studied in Germany and to whom he probably owes his first appreciation of Leibniz’s philosophy.4

Materialism and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness No brief summary can hope to do justice to Ward’s first series of Gifford Lectures, Naturalism and Agnosticism. Here Ward provides a very detailed critique of an impressive number of materialistic theories of his day. This led him to the conclusion that materialism is so beset with difficulties that the real question is not so much whether it is true, but why it has come to be held in the first place. Ward’s answer to this question provides strong evidence in support of the thesis that he was an important influence upon Whitehead’s philosophy. Ward traces the origin of belief in materialism in the mind’s tendency to mistake abstract conceptions for concrete realities. At the beginning of any scientific investigation we are faced with the concrete whole of our experiences. We focus our attention upon certain selected aspects of that whole and proceed to the construction of theories that

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explain some of its features. This is a well-known procedure. There is a sense in which medicine is concerned with the study of men as much as sociology, psychology and economics are, yet these disciplines consider their object from a different perspective, each emphasizing some aspects at the expense of others. Likewise, the natural scientist focuses upon those features of nature that lend themselves to measurement in abstraction from nature’s qualitative, aesthetic aspects. Ward urges that there is nothing wrong with this procedure; without abstraction and simplification no science could ever hope to get hold of reality. Nevertheless, he is keen to point out that serious mistakes are likely to be committed if the scientist loses sight of the empirical basis upon which his abstract concepts are grounded and regards his notions as if they were those very things of which they are partial representations. The scientist should not ‘confound his descriptive apparatus with the actual phenomena it is devised to describe’.5 As Ward puts it: [the scientist] is not entitled to let this abstract simplification harden into concrete fact ... if such unwarrantable concreting of abstracts is to lead logically to a mechanical theory of the universe, we do well to take note of it.6 This is a striking anticipation of what in Science and the Modern World Whitehead calls the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ – a fallacy which he there characterizes as the ‘error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete’.7 Like Ward, Whitehead argues that the fallacy lies at the root of materialistic conceptions of reality. But neither Ward nor Whitehead denies that the cutting of reality into distinct atoms is a strategy worth pursuing for certain scientific purposes, for example if one’s aim is that of describing the behavior of everyday physical objects. Whitehead emphasizes that ‘it does not follow [from his denunciation of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness] ... that the science of the seventeenth century was simply wrong’, for ‘by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply-located bits of material’.8 The notion of reality as constituted of independent bits might turn out to be wholly inadequate if used for explanatory purposes different from those for which it was originally devised – for example, if it is applied to the description and explanation of phenomena that occur at the microscopic levels of reality, or if the scientist turns philosopher and takes his material atoms for the ultimate metaphysical principles.


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Whitehead observes that ‘[t]he disadvantage of exclusive attention to a group of abstractions, however well founded, is that, by the nature of the case, you have abstracted from the remainder of things. In so far as the excluded things are important in your experience, your modes of thought are not fitted to deal with them.’9 The view of man as homo oeconomicus that so deeply pervades contemporary modes of thought – the view of man as animated solely by egoistic motives and whose rationality is supposed to be exhausted by his mechanical ability to calculate costs and benefits before choosing a course of action – is another illustration of this fallacy as well as of its potential dangers outside the realm of pure speculation.10 There is little doubt that Ward and Whitehead have identified an important source of error in human thinking – indeed, the source of many category-mistakes. Since we cannot think without abstractions, however, the question arises as to how we can hope to avoid committing this fallacy. Ward does not seem to be much worried by this problem, whereas Whitehead accepts it as a shortcoming with which we must learn to deal. The only way to avoid the fallacy from leading us into serious theoretical and practical errors is to be aware of the intrinsic partiality of all conceptual schemes. One way in which philosophy can be of service to humanity is by constantly reminding us of the unavoidable insufficiency and limitations of all abstract thought.

Back to Leibniz: idealism, panpsychism, and evolution Besides materialism, in Naturalism and Agnosticism Ward also rejects Cartesian dualism, on the ground that it makes causal interaction impossible, and agnosticism, on the equally familiar ground that the postulation of an unknowable Thing-in-itself is self-contradictory: if we really have no knowledge of it, then we do not even know that it exists. But if all these theories are unsatisfactory, how is reality to be conceived? In the second series of Gifford Lectures, The Realm of Ends, Ward argues that a modification of Leibniz’s monadism might turn out to be the most viable theory. Since his metaphysical views are largely influenced by the teachings of Lotze, in the following two sections attention will be devoted to the latter’s philosophy, especially to his critique of Leibniz; this will pave the way for a discussion of Ward’s theory of monads and of his theology. But before entering into a consideration of these points, the question needs to be raised as to why it was possible for Ward to look at Leibniz’s Monadology as a living philosophical option in the first place.


Part of the answer has to do with the internal development of ‘NeoIdealism’ or ‘Neo-Hegelianism’, which at the time of Ward’s writing was the dominant philosophical movement in Britain. All the major figures of this current – philosophers such as Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882), Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) and Bernard Bosanquet (1848– 1923) – were monists: reality was conceived as a unified experience existing outside of time and space, a cosmic consciousness embracing all temporal and spatial events at a single glance. Hegelian modes of thought originated in Britain as reactions to the theory of evolution. Darwin showed that the admirable adaptation between an organism and its environment does not require an appeal to God, for it can be accounted for solely in terms of natural processes. The general idea that the order of nature does not necessarily require an ordering mind was not new, having been advanced by Hume in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Insofar as they were purely philosophical, however, Hume’s arguments could be easily ignored. But Darwin was now able to support his theory with a large amount of empirical data and with a general explanation of the mechanism that powers evolution: random variations in particular individuals could be advantageous in the struggle for life; such individuals would have a better chance to survive and to transmit the advantageous features to their descendents. Thoughtful Victorians could not avoid recognizing the force of Darwin’s theory. Hence, they were faced with a difficult problem: how to preserve the belief that life has a meaning, if the world is ruled by blind natural processes and not by God’s providence? James Allard has recently provided a survey of several ways in which British idealists tried to accommodate evolutionary theory within a Hegelian metaphysical framework.11 Three main argumentative strategies can be identified. One first strategy, exemplified by James Hutchison Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel, is to argue along Hegelian lines that the natural world is an externalization of God’s Thought. On this view, there can be in principle no conflict between science and religion, for the study of nature is the study of the structures of the divine Mind. Should a conflict between science and religion originate, science must have committed some fundamental mistake. To all effects and purposes, this strategy amounts to a rejection of whatever contradicts religion, in this case the theory of evolution, on the assumption that Hegel’s philosophy provides a true account of the nature of what there is. Another strategy is to argue that there is no real conflict between evolution and a Hegelian view of reality. William Wallace, for example, advocated the view that there is no contradiction between belief in the Absolute Spirit


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and belief in evolution, for the theory of evolution of the species developed by Darwin and the dialectic of the categories described by Hegel in the Logic are just two faces of the same one process. Lastly, there is the strategy exemplified by Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Drawing a clear-cut distinction between the world of appearance and the world of reality, he contends that reality is evolving sub specie temporis but unchanging sub specie aeternitatis. These solutions assume a monistic view of reality as a unified whole. Among idealist philosophers, signs of discomfort with absolute idealism are clear in Andrew Seth’s Hegelianism and Personality (1887). If reality is a unified totality, what is the individual self? If the past, the present and the future are real for the absolute, wherein lies our freedom? If reality is eternally perfect, what is the point of our moral struggle? The doctrine of the Absolute is here perceived as putting at risk the very notion it was supposed to defend – the notion that human life has a meaning. Seth’s book concludes with the following words: ‘The point of my criticism [of Hegelianism] has been that in its execution the system breaks down, and ultimately sacrifices these very interests to a logical abstraction styled the idea, in which both God and man disappear. Nor are these interests better conserved by the Neo-Kantianism or Neo-Hegelianism, which erects into a god the mere form of self-consciousness in general.’12 None of this is philosoph ical argument, yet nobody believes a philosophical theory solely on rational grounds. Lack of emotional appeal is a powerful reason for going in search of an alternative: to philosophers unsatisfied with both materialism and absolute idealism, Leibniz’s theory of monads had much to offer, because it could be regarded as a pluralistic form of idealism. Ward could see Leibniz’s philosophy as inspiring because of his willingness to take science, and especially biology, more seriously than absolute idealism had done. Evolution, conceived as a real struggle in the course of which novelties emerge, cannot be easily reconciled with the idea of the Absolute. This is especially clear in the case of Bradley. On the one hand, all process is divested of full reality and must be regarded as an ‘appearance’ of the One. On the other hand, there cannot be any genuine novelty from the standpoint of the Absolute, which comprises all moments of history in an eternal standing ‘now’. Of course, novelty must be problematic for Leibniz too, given the doctrine of pre-established harmony, yet Ward thinks that the theory of monads needs to be modified in more than one respect in order to yield a satisfactory metaphysics.

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The doctrine that evolution is only apparent, moreover, fails to answer the pressing questions of whether evolution has an end and whether the world is increasing in perfection. To confine perfection to a transcendent realm does nothing to ease Victorians’ anxieties as to the meaning of the evolutionary process in which we are involved. Are evolution and human history leading anywhere? And if they are leading us towards an end, what is this end? And who is the leader? But the theory of evolution also raised a more specific question with regard to the origin of human consciousness. If all there is to physical existence are bits of insentient matter, how could consciousness have emerged? What is at issue here is the possibility of making sense of the notion of emergence; what is needed is a way of understanding the puzzling fact that organisms endowed with mentality could be sustained by systems of inert matter. Although this is not always recognized today, except by a relatively small group of historically oriented scholars and by thinkers who could not be persuaded by the idea that philosophy should leave its history behind, towards the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth there was a widespread consensus that the emergence of mind out of inert matter could not be understood. Many grew skeptical of the traditional notion of matter as constituted of insentient bits and various forms of panpsychism – the theory that some primitive form of experience already exists at the very bottom of things – rapidly increased in popularity. And since Leibniz had argued that the ‘real atoms of nature’ and ‘elements of things’ are subjectlike monads,13 one easily sees why his metaphysics should have been looked upon with interest by a naturalistically oriented thinker such as Ward. The metaphysics of Leibniz had one significant advantage over competing idealistic or panpsychistic theories of reality. If we take evolution seriously and deny the possibility of the brute emergence of the non-physical out of the physical, it would seem that we will have to postulate the existence of a minimum of experience at the very bottom of things. William James gave a clear statement of the problem in the Principles of Psychology: ‘In a general theory of evolution’, he wrote, ‘the inorganic comes first, then the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, then forms that possess mentality, and finally those like ourselves that possess it in a high degree.’14 As James concisely made the point, as evolutionists we are committed to the principle of continuity, yet ‘with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos’.15


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In a paper entitled ‘On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves’, a very influential version of evolutionary panpsychism was put forward by William K. Clifford, who postulated that each atom of matter was associated with a quantum of experience, a small piece of ‘mind-stuff’. This piece of mind-stuff was conceived as an atom of experience amounting to something less than a complete thought or feeling. Clifford held that thoughts and feelings could be constituted simply by way of combination. ‘When molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous system of a vertebrate’ – he wrote – ‘the corresponding elements of mind-stuff are so combined as to form some kind of consciousness.’16 Analogously, he argued that ‘[w]hen matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition’.17 In this way, Clifford believed, it would be possible to explain why the genesis of complex material structures in the course of evolution was accompanied by the parallel emergence of higher forms of sentience and of mental activity. In one interpretation of it, Clifford’s theory can be viewed as a dual aspect theory in which the ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ are regarded as the opposite sides of the same natural event.18 Such a theory raises problems of different sorts. One first difficulty is that the theory assumes the possibility of there being experiences that are not owned by any subject, such as the smallest pieces of mind-stuff will have to be. Secondly, it is doubtful that anything is explained by arguing that the mind is ‘the other side’ of matter or that ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are aspects of the same event; after all, these are just metaphors waiting to be cashed in, in terms of clear-cut concepts. Thirdly, it can be questioned whether the notion of ‘unconscious experiences’, which would seem to be implicit in the idea of small quanta of experience not owned by any subject, is really an intelligible conception. In the Principles of Psychology, James raised against Clifford a fourth, powerful objection: Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the ‘spirit of the age’, and the ‘sentiment of the people’, and in various ways we hypostatize ‘public opinion’. But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several


individuals whom the words ‘age’, ‘people’, or ‘public’ denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind.19 Replace ‘men’ with ‘neurons’ in this passage and you have the problem: how could the experiences of the neurons coalesce so as to form the unified experience that constitutes the human mind at any one moment? As Thomas Nagel has recently made the point, we seem to lack any understanding of how the concepts of ‘part’ and ‘whole’ could be applied to the human mind.20 Although this objection, sometimes referred to as ‘the composition problem’, is strong against Clifford’s position, many philosophers mistakenly believe that it also amounts to a conclusive refutation of panpsychism per se. James did not think, however, that the composition problem proved that all versions of panpsychism are false; he urged the objection only as a critique of Clifford’s mind-stuff theory. ‘All the “combinations” which we actually know’, James also wrote, ‘are effects, wrought by the units said to be “combined,” upon some entity other than themselves.’21 James’s idea here is that it is possible to make a positive use of the notion of ‘combination’ as the conjunct effect of many causes by thinking of the mind as numerically distinct from the cells in the brain and at the same time as capable of collecting their experiences by being causally affected by them. Otherwise put: it is not necessary to think of the mind as a N + 1 experience which somehow emerges out of the N experiences in the neurons, nor is it possible to reduce it to the mere aggregation of the N original experiences; however, it is possible to conceive of the mind as being one of the N experiences in causal interaction with the others. James fails to discuss this alternative version of panpsychism in the Principles of Psychology, for in that book he wished to avoid metaphysics as far as possible. If he discusses Clifford’s theory, this is not in order to provide a solution to the mind–body problem, but solely to deny that a moment of human experience could be thought of as being constituted piecemeal. For James, the mind at any one moment is a holistic whole whose contents have no independent existence apart from the whole to which they belong. Nevertheless, James is aware of the existence of alternative versions of panpsychism, which he refers to as forms of ‘Leibnitzian [sic] monadism’ or ‘spiritualism’.22 According to these doctrines, it is possible to solve the mind–body problem by postulating the existence of a ‘soul’ or ‘dominant monad’ standing in causal interaction with the lesser ‘souls’ or ‘monads’ in the brain cells or in the body at large. With regard to theories that


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acknowledge the reality of a soul, James goes so far as to say that ‘to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance’.23 A theory of monads along Leibnizian lines avoids the composition problem, but opens up the vexed question of monadic interaction. Within the framework of a theory of monads, the problem of explaining the relation between the mind and the body is just a special form of the larger metaphysical issue of monadic causation. The search for an idealistic alternative to absolute idealism, the theory of evolution and the need to avoid the composition problem thus combined in bringing Leibniz’s monadology – and its metaphysics of causation – to the very centre of the philosophical battlefield.

Lotze on pre-established harmony and monadic interaction Even today the theory of evolution tends to be associated with materialistic views of reality, but if the notion of brute emergence is unintelligible (as it might turn out to be) then evolution supports an idealistic rather than a materialistic worldview. The point is forcefully made by Ward in a remarkable passage from his important essay ‘Mechanism and Morals’: It is interesting in this connexion to notice that in the support which it lends to pampsychist [sic] views the theory of evolution seems likely to have an ultimate effect on science the precise opposite of that which it exercised at first. That was a leveling down, this will be a leveling up. At first it appeared as if man were only to be linked with the ape, now it would seem that the atom, if a reality at all, may be linked with man. 24 And in the Principles of Psychology, James too acknowledges that monadism might have a future: ‘a theory which Leibnitz [sic], Herbart, and Lotze have taken under their protection’, he says, ‘must have some sort of a destiny.’25 Although they are almost forgotten today, Herbart and Lotze were two of the most influential thinkers in the nineteenth century, both in Germany and elsewhere. Herbart drew a distinction between a contradictory world of appearances and a noumenal world, which he conceived as a static world of simple and unrelated monads. Herbart’s philosophy was quite influential in Britain, where it helped to shape

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the metaphysics of Francis Herbert Bradley,26 but it is Lotze who had the greatest impact and the most interesting things to say about Leibniz. In his Metaphysics (1879), Lotze reaches his view on the nature of reality by way of critique of Leibniz’s theory of monads and of his pre- established harmony. In Leibniz’s philosophy, objects of ordinary perception such as chairs and tables are not the real individuals: what we perceive as ‘one’ is an aggregate of more basic units, the monads. Since we do not perceive the monads directly, however, how can we gain knowledge of their intrinsic nature? On an idealistic interpretation of Leibniz’s metaphysics, an example of a genuine individual is provided by our own mind, which at any one moment is a simple unity comprising a manifold of perceptions. Each perception can be distinguished from all others, but cannot be detached as if it were an actual constituent. Although we can identify them, perceptions have no independent existence – they are less of an individual than the whole to which they belong. Since the mind is our sole example of genuine individuality, Leibniz concludes that we are forced to conceive of the ultimate building blocks of reality as mind-like centers of experience. This traditional interpretation of the monad as a mind-like entity finds support in the initial sections of the Monadology, where Leibniz writes that ‘[w]e have in ourselves experience of a multiplicity in simple substances, when we find that the least thought of which we are conscious involves variety in its object’.27 Here Leibniz would indeed seem to be saying that the human mind provides the clearest paradigm of a simple substance. The stronger thesis that all monads are soul-like is stated in a later paragraph, where he explains that ‘[i]f we are to give the name of Soul to everything which has perceptions and desires in the general sense which I have explained, then all simple substances or created Monads might be called souls’.28 Leibniz furthermore gives an original twist to the traditional idea of a Great Chain of Being by postulating that reality is filled with an infinite number of such centers, hierarchically ordered according to the clarity of their perceptions. There are lower and higher monads, yet each one has a grasp of the totality of the universe and embodies a perspective upon it: all monads have a more or less clear awareness of the other monads (perception), whereas the higher ones also enjoy a self-reflective consciousness (apperception). All possible perspectives upon the universe find their niche within the Great Chain of Being, but no two monads are identically alike. According to Leibniz’s ontological interpretation of the principle of continuity – the thesis that


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nature ‘makes no leaps’ – reality is a plenum of monads, some of which differ from each other only infinitesimally. There is a sense in which this line of reasoning is not so different from that of the absolute idealist. Two points of contact are worthy of emphasis. In the first place, both the absolute idealist and the monadist argue that the mind provides us with the sole clue as to the nature of what there is. To be ‘real’ in an ontologically fundamental sense is to be a genuine ‘individual’, a whole that cannot be reduced to more simple units; this is a criterion that only the human mind, which cannot be cut into parts, seems capable of satisfying. Within an idealistic framework, therefore, the fundamental point of divergence is whether we should recognize one or many mind-like individuals. Secondly, both the absolute idealist and the monadist conceive of reality as a plenum of sorts. The former views reality as a single Experience or unbroken experiential continuum, whereas the latter atomizes the continuum into an infinite multiplicity of distinct monads. In the Realm of Ends Ward emphasizes this similarity between monadism and absolute idealism; at one point, he formulates his problem as follows: ‘All ontology alike ... has to begin with the question: What is reality? And nowadays pluralist and singularist [absolutist] alike answer: It is Experience.’29 In order to understand the unfolding of Lotze’s reasoning, Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony needs to be briefly recalled. In our experience of reality events occur in an intelligible fashion; events do not merely happen, but their occurrence can be traced back to one or more causes. The world in which we live is a cosmos, not a chaotic succession of events. Surely, a theory of monads must help us to understand this aspect of the world, which means that it must be possible to explain the order of the phenomenal world as a function of the monads’ behavior. To this end, a theory of monadic interaction is needed. At the very beginning of the Monadology, Leibniz considers one possible model for understanding direct interaction between any two substances. This is the scholastic doctrine of physical influx, according to which, in order for a substance A to be the cause of an effect in another substance B, a state or property of A must be transferred to B. It is important to see that, according to the view of causation held by Leibniz, the term ‘influx’ is to be taken quite literally, as implying a real flow of contents from A to B. On this view, the causal transactions between any two substances involve a real transmission of contents between the active term and the passive one. Quite rightly, Leibniz regards this theory as unintelligible. States or properties, he argues, cannot exist unless as inhering in substances, yet in passing from one substance


to another the communicated property would have to exist for itself. Leibniz concludes that ‘there is no way of explaining how a Monad can be altered in quality or internally changed by any other created thing’. As he forcefully puts it in the Monadology: The Monads have no windows, through which anything could come in or go out. Accidents cannot separate themselves from substances nor go about outside of them, as the ‘sensible species’ of the Scholastics used to do.30 Having rejected the doctrine of physical influx, Leibniz is led to consider the occasionalist doctrine that God mediates between created substances. Each time a change occurs in a substance A, God brings about a corresponding change in another substance B. On this theory, direct causal interaction is ruled out, but the appearance of an orderly world is saved. Among other things, Leibniz condemns occasionalism on the ground that it forces us to think of God as constantly intervening in worldly affairs, performing perpetual miracles. It is more consonant to his wisdom to suppose that in creating the world God had envisioned and preprogrammed all courses of events, in such a way that modifications in one substance are automatically accompanied by modifications in all others. The realm of monads is thus ruled by a pre-established harmony: what looks like interaction is really a synchronism. Lotze now agrees with Leibniz in holding that there is a realm of subject-like monads as well as in rejecting physical influx and occasionalism. He also rejects, however, Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony. His criticism is of the greatest interest and deserves to be considered with care. Lotze begins his discussion by observing that Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony would seem to turn ordinary discourse about causation into meaningless speech. His objection centers upon the notion of creation: The whole content of the Universe and of its history is supposed to be present to the divine understanding at one and the same time as a system of elements mutually and unalterably conditioned in manifold ways, so that what appears in time as following an antecedent is not less the condition of that antecedent than is any antecedent the condition of that which it precedes. Thus Leibniz could say that not merely do wind and waves impel the ship but the motion of the ship is the condition of the motion of wind and waves.31


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Lotze’s point here is that, according to Leibniz’s theory of preestablished harmony, the series of worldly events is present in God’s eternal vision in a synchronic fashion. What is in itself an order of copresent events is translated as an order of succession through the act of creation. But if the series of events in the world is nothing but a translation of what is intrinsically a non-temporal series, there is no reason why we should take a prior event to be the cause of a later one, instead of taking the latter to be the cause of the former. This objection can hardly be regarded as having any force against Leibniz’s position. Indeed, Leibniz could easily admit that no metaphysical necessity compels us to say that the wind impels the ship and not vice versa. Nevertheless, since in the temporal world these events are presented to us in a certain order it is still possible to make a significant use of the language of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. We have experienced the constant association of blowing winds and moving ships, but we have not equally experienced the association of moving ships and blowing winds: on the contrary, we have seen ships proceeding by rows in calm seas. As against Lotze, Leibniz can be seen as providing a metaphysical clarification of what is meant by the language of cause and effect, without however urging us to abandon ordinary language as meaningless. While leaving us free to use ordinary language in the usual way, Leibniz simply provides a metaphysical account of the meaning of ‘cause’, showing that the connection between the event we call ‘cause’ and the one we call ‘effect’ is grounded in God’s pre- established harmony. But it is also possible to read the above passage as being just a way of introducing the real criticism Lotze wants to make. This is that, if Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony were true, then it is not clear why the actual world should be created at all. If the world exists in God’s mind, already defined even in the smallest detail, what is gained by creating its temporal replica? The problem can be stated in terms of Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, according to which identical things have identical properties. Since God is perfect and cannot make mistakes in the realization of the divine plans, what differentiates a merely ideal substance from a created one? One could argue that they differ simply because the former does not exist while the latter does. Such a reply presupposes that existence is a property, one required in order to increment the universe’s perfection; after Kant’s critique of the ontological argument, however, scarcely anyone accepts this explanation.

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Another reply is that created objects exist in time whereas objects in God’s mind are outside time altogether, but this is just to restate Lotze’s objection, for what is the additional value of existence in time? Lotze remarks that creation could be justified, if in the course of the temporal process some good emerged that could not have been otherwise attained. Such a view, however, is incompatible with pre-established harmony, for it requires God to sacrifice part of his power in favor of the monads, which would have to be regarded as directly responsible for the creation of that good. As Lotze has it: This advantage of realization is one that Leibnitz [sic] could not have had in view, since his theory of the Pre-establishment of all that is contained in the world had excluded the possibility of anything new as well as the reciprocal action from which alone anything new could have issued.32 As will be shown below, this view of God’s relation to the world, which Lotze entertains here merely for argumentative purposes, is the one Ward explicitly endorses. Most interestingly, Lotze’s objection shows how careful the pluralist must be in developing a theory of creation. The implication of Lotze’s criticism is that, if consistently carried through, Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony leads to monism. If creation involves God having a complete intuition of the world, nothing justifies the creation of a duplicate: the world may well exist as an internal articulation of God’s mind; all existing things could just be his ‘ideas’ or ‘thoughts’. Lotze does not solely contend that, within the framework of Leibniz’s conception of God as eternally contemplating all possible worlds, the notion of creation does not make sense. In that framework, Lotze observes, God should abstain from creating the world, for through the act of creation evils that have only an ideal existence become actual. Thus, not solely is nothing gained with the fulfillment of the act of creation, but something is positively lost; from a moral point of view, a universe in which evils have real existence is surely worse than one in which evils are only imagined. Moreover, one could add that Leibniz’s theory has a rather strange theological consequence – as if existence in God’s mind were not good enough. It is true that the problem of the reality of evil equally arises in a monistic universe in which all finite beings exist as internal articulations of the divine mind, for here ideal and real existence eventually coincide, but this only helps in bringing into focus the real upshot of Lotze’s critique: what needs to be


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abandoned is the idea of divine omniscience – the notion that God has a synoptic vision of all possible individuals and of all the details of their possible histories. Another interesting objection raised by Lotze against the theory of pre-established harmony, one discussed by Russell in his book on the philosophy of Leibniz, concerns the speed of the monad’s psychic life. According to the theory of pre-established harmony, Lotze explains, ‘two states a and b of the Monads A and B, which observation exhibits to us as apparent products of a reciprocal action, must occur in the separate courses of development of the two beings at the same moment’.33 This seems to require that the inner life of all monads must unfold at a uniform speed, which can be disputed without absurdity. It is certainly plausible, and perhaps even likely, that the psychical streams of any two different individuals progress with different speed. As Russell notes, this objection brings to the light a possible weakness of Leibniz’s theory, for ‘it is evident that the monads, if each of them mirrors the present state of the universe, necessarily keep pace with one another’. 34 But if monads are psychical individuals, it is not clear that this is so. Lastly, Lotze remarks that pre-established harmony is inconsistent with belief in freedom of the will and with the idea of an open future. True, it is possible to deny the reality of freedom without logical contradiction. However, the point of this criticism is to complete the attack on Leibniz by emphasizing that the theory of pre-established harmony involves us in a pragmatic contradiction between what we hold in theory and what we believe in practice: ‘that history should be something more than a translation into time of the eternally complete content of an ordered world’, Lotze says, ‘this is a deep and irrepressible demand of our spirit, under the influence of which we all act in life’.35 Clearly, this passage suggests that Lotze adopts the same evaluative standard as Whitehead’s: a system of philosophy can be regarded as satisfactory only if it is not felt to be artificial – only if it does not conflict with our immediate, pre-reflective sense of what it is to be in the world.

Lotze as a process philosopher Does Lotze’s own philosophy live up to this standard? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to consider the upshot of Lotze’s discussion of the problem of monadic interaction. With the rejection of the theory of pre-established harmony, Lotze’s own speculation would indeed seem to have reached a dead end. If the interaction between the monads is neither direct (as in physical influx), nor supervised (as

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in occasionalism), nor preprogrammed (as in pre-established harmony), why is there order in nature? Why does the world appear as if things were acting upon one another in a regular fashion? In order to answer this question, Lotze takes the surprising step of abandoning the original pluralism and reconceptualizing the monads as ‘modes’ or ‘manifestations’ of a larger whole: ‘There cannot be a multiplicity of independent Things’, he says, ‘but all elements, if reciprocal action is to be possible between them, must be regarded as parts of a single and real Being.’36 On this view, changes in the experienced world are not due to the interactions of a plurality of monads, but express the internal revolutions of the all-embracing One. When I move the pen on the paper and the ink seems to flow out of it, this is not due to the pressing of the pen upon the paper; the movement of the pen on the paper and the flowing ink are just two parallel aspects of the evolving life of an underlying Absolute. This solution is hardly consistent with the overall tone of Lotze’s critique of Leibniz. Lotze reproached Leibniz for the incapacity of his theory to account for the monads’ freedom, but if the monads are modes of a larger One then his theory faces the same difficulty. The fact is that Lotze’s theory is a form of pre-established harmony in disguise; as G.F. Stout pointed out in God and Nature: ‘For both of them [Leibniz and Lotze], the connexion [sic] of finite individuals is due to a central all-embracing mind and is unintelligible on any other view.’37 As a matter of fact, Lotze himself seemed to have been unsatisfied with his final view. Having reduced the monads to manifestations of the Absolute, he still continues to speak of them in a language that suggests ontological independency. As more than one critic has pointed out, the ontological status of the monads remains unclear in Lotze’s philosophy. One such critic was Francis Herbert Bradley, who in Appearance and Reality wrote: ‘The attentive reader of Lotze must, I think, have found it hard to discover why individual selves with him are more than phenomenal adjectives. For myself I discern plainly his resolve that they have got to be more. But I do not find that he is ever willing to face this question fairly.’38 In spite of these shortcomings, the subtlety of Lotze’s criticisms and their significance cannot be overestimated. As a matter of fact, Lotze has already taken a great step towards a process-oriented view of the universe. He anticipates important theses of Whitehead’s philosophy, such as the idea that an adequate philosophy should square with our pre-reflexive sense of what it is to be in the world, and he explicitly advocates a process-view of things, holding that they are nothing but


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the cycle of their phases. Even his Absolute is conceived as in constant process. Although his view of reality is monistic, he does not declare that the world of change is an appearance. The One is itself in constant process and our momentary psychical states are just momentary aspects of its larger but ever-changing Life: ... every single thing and event can only be thought as an activity, constant or transitory, of the one Existence, its reality and substance as the mode of being and substance of this one Existence, its nature and form as a consistent phase in the unfolding of the same.39 Lotze is a process philosopher ante litteram and his role as a precursor of Whiteheadian modes of thought has yet to be appreciated.40

Ward on substance and intermonadic causation Ward does not follow Lotze on the monistic path. Pluralism is our natural standpoint; it is the position of science and commonsense, and therefore all effort must be made to safeguard the reality of the many. To reject so natural a presupposition would indeed create a gap between our practical and our theoretical beliefs. Moreover, nothing is really gained by embracing monism, for we end up facing the question of why the One manifests itself in the form of a multiplicity. Most importantly – and surprisingly enough – Ward argues that both Leibniz and Lotze missed the significance of their own discovery that the ultimate constituents of reality are not ‘physical atoms’, but ‘monads’. In order to understand Ward’s point, one has to recall that causal interaction between the monads was denied by Leibniz on the ground that the doctrine of physical influx is unintelligible. On that model, direct causal interaction was rejected because states or properties cannot exist unless as inhering in substances, yet in passing from one substance to another the communicated property would have to exist for itself. Now Ward urges that, since the theory of physical influx categorizes the terms of a causal relation as substances to which qualities inhere, the monads are implicitly conceived as if they were things. ‘Monads’, he says, ‘are conative, that is are feeling and striving subjects or persons in the widest sense, not inert particles or things.’41 It follows that, if we fully realize the implication of the idealist insight that the real individuals are of the nature of mind – if we become aware of the obvious fact that monads are not things but subjects – then the reasons


provided by Leibniz for denying the possibility of causal interaction turn out to be invalid. Ward gives the clearest statement of his view in a section of the Realm of Ends significantly entitled ‘Category of Substance inadequate’: Let us then make bold to regard our self-conscious life, not as a flux of accidents pertaining with we know not what all beside to some substratum or other, but as the actions and reactions of a thing per se or rather of a subject in a world of such, as the intercourse of such a subject with other subjects. Instead of regarding all souls as substances we have proceeded rather on the spiritualistic interpretation of all substances as souls.42 Ward does not solely argue here that the concept of substance is inadequate to grasp the nature of the self (‘instead of regarding all souls as substances’) and that the ultimate principles of reality must be soul-like (‘the spiritualistic interpretation of all substances as souls’). Only a few lines later in the same passage, he also repeats his fundamental thesis that the concept of substance precludes the possibility of reaching an understanding of the nature of causality. The concept, he says here, is ‘too indeterminate and empty to admit of either individuality or causality being deduced or dialectically developed from it’.43 What precisely makes the philosophical concept of substance empty? This is nothing but its abstract character; what we truly experience is a perpetual activity, but what we abstract from it is a static notion of individuality that has lost all intrinsic connectedness to the ideas of force and activity. As Ward has it: ‘Between the abstract category of substance and what we may call the real category of things or substances, from which it is abstracted, there is a world of difference.’44 The claim that the category of substance is inadequate to the nature of the self is a convincing one and has a long tradition within British philosophy. However, it seems natural to urge against Ward at this point that the main reason for denying direct causal interaction between the monads is not so much that they are conceived by means of inadequate ontological categories, but rather what would seem to be the simple recognition that our minds do not act directly upon one another. The belief in the privacy of mental contents is not the result of thinking by means of inadequate categories, but something we immediately notice and are constantly aware of in the course of our life. Doesn’t the difficulty we encounter in communicating our deepest feelings bear witness to this fact?


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Ward does not mean to deny that there is a part of our psychic life that is our own private possession. He contends, however, that our normal social intercourse provides innumerable examples of feelings transmitted from one person to another, of a change in one mind bringing about a corresponding change in another: If the Leibnizian assumption, that there are no beings entirely devoid of perception and spontaneity ... is otherwise sound, then the objections to transeunt action between things become irrelevant. For these objections do not apply to personal interaction based on mutual rapport ...45 This amounts to saying that monadic interaction is a form of sympathy. The reality of sympathetic transference of feeling cannot be denied since it is a fact we are all acquainted with: that a caring father has an immediate grasp of his child’s sorrow is something that no theory of pre-established harmony can ever hope to sweep away. Hence, reverting Leibniz’s famous phrase, Ward writes: ... all monads have windows – more literally stated ... presentation is a relation among monads not a subjective state in a single monad. And this ... is so much the simpler hypothesis – if that can be called a hypothesis which claims to be the bare statement of the facts.46 At this point, one would expect Ward to explain what sympathy amounts to and how the monads have to be conceived, if not as substances to which qualities inhere: ‘The precise details of this psychical intercourse’, Ward surprisingly writes, ‘the pampsychist [sic] is unable to specify.’47 Accordingly, his ‘solution’ of the problem of monadic interaction can only be regarded as a promising starting point. Having argued to his satisfaction that there is a way of explaining causal interaction between the monads, Ward goes on discussing a special case of causal interaction, that between the mind and the body. Ward draws a distinction between aggregates of monads without a controlling centre and complexes with a dominant monad. In such complexes, a higher-grade monad functions as the ‘mind’ of the whole and we are entitled to ascribe a sentient life to the entire complex as well as to each single monad. Ward is aware that panpsychist theories such as his are usually dismissed as plainly absurd, on the ground that they ascribe some form of sentient life to objects such as sticks and stones. Such an objection, he rightly argues, fails to distinguish between the


sentience of the parts and the sentience of the whole: all the experience in a rock is in its constituent parts, that is, in the monads severally considered; in the absence of a controlling centre there is no such thing as the experience of the rock, that is, of the monads taken collectively. To argue either that the experience of the parts implies the experience of the whole or, vice versa, that the absence of experience in the whole is a sign of an absence of experience in the parts is to be guilty of the fallacy of composition. Pluralism assumes that the whole world is made up of individuals, each distinguished by its characteristic behaviour; but of course it does not find its real individuals in the rough and ready way of popular impersonation: it would not regard a mountain or a river as a person.48 And in the already mentioned ‘Mechanism and Morals’, he goes so far as to say that ‘to think to nonplus the pampsychist [sic] by asking how stones or chairs can be alive, is only to betray ignorance and incapacity’.49 Interestingly enough, this is process-philosophy’s typical reply to the charge that panpsychism is intrinsically absurd – a point that has been emphasized by Hartshorne, and whose relevance to contemporary philosophy of mind has been recently and forcefully illustrated by David Ray Griffin.50 Although the notion of the dominant monad has its roots in Leibniz’s philosophy, Ward’s contention that the monads are capable of direct causal interaction makes more plausible. On Leibniz’s theory of preestablished harmony, it is not clear why only organisms with a relatively complex degree of organization should possess a soul or why a soul should be associated with a body. The only explanation is metaphysical: the association of mind and body is required for our world to be the best possible – ‘best’ in the Leibnizian sense of being both most various and most ordered. On Ward’s theory of sympathetic rapport, on the contrary, the complex ramified organization of the body is necessary in order for the soul to possess a rich and articulated mental life. This presupposes the gathering and integration into one unified experience of a myriad of smaller perceptions derived from the monads constituting the body. Ward is also in a position to interpret literally the notion of dominance, which is not simply a matter of the greater perspicuity of the dominant monad’s experience as in Leibniz’s philosophy, but its actual capacity to exert power or causal efficacy upon the subservient monads.


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Still, not all is clear on Ward’s theory: ‘our sensations’, he writes, ‘correspond ... to complexes or syntheses of the elemental sensations or “petites perceptions” of Leibniz.’51 Granted that the dominant monad gathers and integrates into one unified experience a plurality of unconscious perceptions derived from the monads constituting the body (and especially the brain), how does that gathering and integration take place? How do the many unconscious perceptions turn into the conscious experience of a human being? Since Ward lacks the conceptuality in terms of which to analyze monadic interaction, these questions remain unanswered. But the following difficulty also arises: since the mind interacts directly with other monads in the brain and indirectly with objects in the external world, why do we perceive the latter and not the former? Ward hesitates between two different explanations here, neither of which turns out to be very satisfactory. A first answer is that the relation between the dominant monad and the subordinate ones is merely functional: like instruments that we use but to which we do not attend, they only exist for us as vehicles of impressions. One could think of a surgeon and of his lancet: ‘To the tyro, his instrument is at first a foreign object and nothing more; but as he masters it, he becomes less conscious of what it is and attends only to what it does. The surgeon, for example, while operating, feels not his sound, but what it is probing.’52 The analogy is imperfect, since the relation between a person and his instrument is a relation between a subject and an object, whereas the relation between the dominant and any subordinate monad is one of subject to subject. But the real problem is that Ward’s reply just rephrases the original question: what needs to be explained is not whether the relation of the dominant centre to the subordinate monads in the brain is a functional one, but how directly interacting monads or subjects might come to stand to each other in relations that, being purely functional, do not make them aware of each other. Even less satisfactory is Ward’s attempt at clarifying the relation between the dominant and the subordinate monads in terms of analogies drawn from ordinary social intercourse. Ward observes that we make use of, say, the post office, yet we are not interested in the technical details pertaining to its workings.53 Strangely enough, Ward overlooks that in entering a post office we gain some appreciation of its workings, whereas the brain is entirely shut from our direct conscious apprehension.

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Ward on mind and the order of nature The most interesting part of Ward’s philosophy is perhaps his philosophy of nature. Ward argues that, if we credit each monad with a degree of spontaneity, we can use the distinction between two kinds of unities to understand why it is so difficult to describe the behavior of living beings by means of strict deterministic laws, whereas the behavior of inorganic objects is wholly predictable. Ward’s teaching is that, in those aggregates of monads that constitute the real essence of inorganic objects, the anomalous behavior of a single monad is either precluded from happening or compensated for by the uniform behavior of all other monads. Only if there is a monad with controlling power will the whole be capable of initiative and of original reaction to external circumstances. The uniformity and constancy of inorganic objects are not solely a matter of structural organization, however, but depend essentially on the particular nature of the monads that enter into them. Like Leibniz, Ward ascribes to each monad a capacity for perception and for appetition; appetition comes either as a desire for self-conservation, for enduring in a condition that the monad experiences as particularly satisfying, or for self-development. In the monads that constitute the elements of inorganic objects the desire for self-preservation is stronger than that for self-realization, and so it comes that such monads will not attempt to break loose from the bounds of the object within which they are embedded. These lower monads may be compared with boring people who, because of laziness or fear of taking risks, monotonously stick to a particular way of conduct that once proved satisfactory: [A]s there are some individuals who are restless, enterprising and inventive to the end of their days, so there are others who early become supine and contented, the slaves of custom and hidebound with habits, individuals whose chief concern is to avoid disturbance and let well alone.54 In this way, supine monads form structures that reinforce their natural tendency to repetition, which explains the fixity and immovability of inorganic nature: ‘The simpler their [the monads’] standard of wellbeing and the less differentiated their environment the more monotonous their behaviour will be and the more inert they will appear.’55 One main implication of this view is the (very Whiteheadian) recognition that only the monads with a strong tendency towards self-realization


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are ultimately responsible for evolution and the introduction of novelties into the world: adventure in the form of the monad’s primordial craving for novelties and self-realization is an ultimate feature of being without which nothing of value could be produced. Ward’s account of how there could be inert objects in a world that is ultimately constituted by conative subjects is the same as Whitehead’s. Most interestingly, Ward’s distinction between self-conservation and self-development finds a parallel in Whitehead’s idea that each occasion of experience is dipolar. Whitehead argues that in the occasions entering into the constitution of material objects there is a predominance of the physical over the mental pole; such occasions do not transform the inherited contents in any significant way and thereby contribute to the preservation of the existing structures. Whitehead’s conception of an actual occasion can be seen as a philosophical elaboration of Ward’s description of the monad – with the mental pole being now the locus of novelty and creative advance, the physical pole the locus of repetition and self-preservation. Hence, for example, Whitehead writes: ‘All physical experience is accompanied by an appetite for, or against, its continuance: an example is the appetition of self-preservation. But the origination of the novel conceptual prehension has, more especially, to be accounted for.’56 In view of a comparison with Whitehead, it also needs to be emphasized that Ward’s interpretation of nature is throughout based on an analogy with human societies. One interesting feature of human societies is that they are self-organizing wholes: social order is brought about by the reciprocal interaction of the society’s members; it is not imposed upon them by any superior entity. Although societies are composed of individuals capable of spontaneous behavior, moreover, they display as wholes a measure of order and stability. This insight grounds Ward’s view that natural laws are statistical generalizations that record how certain societies or groups of monads tend to behave, rather than deterministic laws that apply to members of the whole considered in isolation: The constants and uniformities, with which his [the panpsychist’s] analysis ends, are ... simply statistical results, such as frequently hide the diversity and spontaneity of animated beings when they and their actions are taken en masse.57 On this theory, natural laws hold for the whole rather than for each single component. The element of ‘indetermination’, ‘spontaneity’ or ‘freedom’ (terms which Ward uses as synonymous) that everywhere


pervades reality at its bottom level can coexist with a virtually complete determinism at the higher levels, provided of course that we are dealing with a social organization devoid of a dominant monad. The theory that physical objects are societies of monads also enables Ward to provide an evolutionary account of the order of nature, for on that account natural laws emerge when groups of monads have found a satisfactory modus vivendi. The analogy between Ward’s understanding of natural laws and Whitehead’s is really striking. Not solely does Whitehead acknowledge that natural laws are statistical in nature, he also explicitly links the emergence of certain natural laws with the formation of certain societies of actual occasions. Hence he writes that ‘a system of “laws”... gradually rises into dominance; it has its stage of endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates’.58 It is possible to object that Ward has only shown that natural laws are dependent upon psychological laws, so that an evolutionary theory of monads still assumes the existence of an ultimate order of reality not capable of further elucidation. Although this is true, there is no denying that Ward is making a strong philosophical point. Cartesian dualism recognizes the distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings, but mistakes it for an ontological distinction between kinds of things: having thus divorced mind and matter, it cannot explain their interaction. Materialism, according to which the ultimate constituents of reality are insentient atoms, cannot explain why there should be, and how there can be, mental phenomena. By interpreting the ordinary distinction between sentient beings and material objects as a distinction between modes of organization achieved in the course of evolution rather than an ontological distinction between kinds of substances, a theory of sympathetically interacting monads has a better chance of explaining their coexistence within one universe and must be endorsed because of its superior explanatory power. Another outstanding Cambridge philosopher, C.D. Broad, neatly captures the logic of Ward’s reasoning by summarizing it as follows: ... it seems quite impossible to explain the higher types of mental fact materialistically, whilst it does not seem impossible to regard physical and chemical laws as statistical uniformities about very large collections of very stupid minds.59 It is noteworthy that Ward’s ascription of a component of spontaneity to the ultimate constituents of reality is not based upon the


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interpretation of any particular scientific result, but upon the purely philosophical consideration that only on the indeterminist assumption is it possible to construct a theory capable of accounting for the order as well as for the contingency that are both given in our experience of the world. From this perspective the fact that science might provide reasons for believing in indeterminism constitutes a supplementary confirmation, but it is not the ground upon which the case for indeterminism rests. In The Analysis of Matter (1927) Russell writes that ‘so far as quantum theory can say at present, atoms might as well be possessed of free will’.60 Although this approximates to Ward’s view, Russell’s argument is somewhat stronger, for Ward does not even mean to suggest that science provides any evidence in support of the freedom of the will. Ward’s only point – and all he needs to support his case – is that contemporary science is compatible with freedom of the will. As it stands, however, important questions remain open in Ward’s account of the physical world. A brief comparison with Berkeley’s metaphysics might be helpful. Ward’s monadology differs from Berkeley’s idealism in two main respects: first, Ward recognizes the existence of non-human monads, such as those entering into the constitutions of inert objects, whereas Berkeley’s philosophy apparently recognizes only human subjects and God; secondly, in Ward’s monadology physical objects have an independent existence as aggregates or societies of monads. Nature is literally composed of monads whose existence is independent from that of a perceiver, whereas in Berkeley’s view nature would seem to exist only as represented within a soul. In other words, Ward’s idealism is metaphysical (to be is to be a mind), whereas Berkeley’s is also epistemological (to be is to be a mind or an idea). Now, precisely because nature is granted an objective reality, an explanation is needed of how groups of spiritual subjects or monads can appear in the form of spatially extended objects. Such an explanation is all the more urgent, for many of the notions used by Ward, especially the idea that physical bodies are aggregations of monads, are suggestive of images misleadingly evoking a spatial meaning. There are at least two main sides to this problem: first, Ward needs to provide a theory of perception in order to explain how an aggregate of monads can appear as a single object; secondly, he should provide a theory of the nature of space. Since none of these points is dealt with by Ward in any detail in The Realm of Ends, his philosophy of nature remains sketchy and incomplete.


In search of a new theism The problem of the nature and existence of God is particularly acute for Ward, for if a system of interacting monads is sufficient to account for the order of the phenomenal world, why should we postulate that God exists? Ward’s further admission that Kant has conclusively refuted the ontological, the cosmological and the design arguments makes the situation all the more difficult. When stripped of all of Ward’s unnecessary sophistications, the reason why we ought to postulate God’s existence would seem to be our need to believe that the universe is moving towards a state of increasing cohesion and harmony: ‘without such spiritual continuity as theism alone seems able to ensure, it looks as if a pluralistic world were condemned to a Sisyphean task.’61 ‘Without the idea of a Supreme and Ultimate Being’, he also says, ‘... the world may well for ever remain that rerum concordia discors, which at present we find it.’62 Ward develops his conception of deity in explicit opposition to Leibniz: Every system of thoroughgoing pluralism accepts the Leibnizian principle of continuity, at least to the extent of maintaining that there is no infinite gap, no complete diversity between, one monad and another, a principle against which the Leibnizian theology itself offends.63 Ward is here repeating an objection raised by Russell in his early book on the philosophy of Leibniz. What is the scope of the principle of continuity? Does it apply to the realm of created monads, or does it include God as well? Leibniz is unclear on the question whether God is itself a monad. Certainly, the view that God is a monad is problematic; as Russell notices, the principle of continuity would seem to imply that there is a plurality of monads that differ from God only infinitesimally. Ward takes a clear position on this issue; since God is in some sense the creator of the world, there is an ontological gap between him and the other monads. But granted that God cannot be a primus inter pares – only a monad among other monads – in what sense can God be said to be the world’s creator? Creation does not mean for Ward a beginning in time but God’s continuous act of supporting the world’s existence: God is the cause of the world in the sense of being its ratio essendi, its ontological foundation. Since this is not a claim the monist would deny, the question


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arises as to what distinguishes Ward’s understanding of the God–world relationship from that of the absolute idealist. Although this is a crucial point in his antimonistic argument, it is here that his system breaks down. Ward contends that ‘nobody ever has, nobody ever will, derive the categories of substance, cause, end, or any other concept concerning reality, from any source altogether independent of experience.’64 The upshot of this empiricist assumption as to the origin of our ideas is that we can never form a conception of the relation between God and the world: accordingly, Ward finds himself unable to explain how his theism differs from pantheism. Ward goes even so far as to write: ‘the idea of creation, like the idea of God, we admit is altogether transcendent.’65 This is a quite surprising statement; what does the proposition ‘God exists’ amount to, if the word ‘God’ is one to which we can assign no meaning? One would expect that a philosopher concerned with proving the existence of God would want to argue that God is indeed present in our experience. In stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, most notably William James (and to a lesser extent Whitehead, as will appear below), Ward never rests his case upon any analyses of religious experience. The problem of accounting for the relation between God and the world is made worse by Ward’s further desire to differentiate his position from deism. God does not merely maintain the world in existence but actively enters into it, so that his relation to the world must be such as to involve an aspect of immanence as well as of transcendence. How could God be both immanent and transcendent? Ward tries to illustrate how this could be possible by the analogy of the relationship between the artist and his work of art: We may discern perhaps a faint and distant analogy ... in what we are wont to style the creations of genius ... the immortal works of art, the things of beauty that are a joy forever, we regard as ... the spontaneous output of productive imagination, of a free spirit that embodies itself in its work, lives in it and loves it.66 Thus God recognizes himself in the world much in the same way in which an artist recognizes himself in the products of his work. But clearly the analogy of God as ‘the World-Genius’67 makes Ward vulnerable to the same objection Lotze had raised against Leibniz. Why should God, now conceived in the guise of an artist, create a world that will be just a replica of his ideal plan? Instead of helping him out of a

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crucial impasse, the image of God as the ‘artist’ and of the world as his ‘work of art’ makes the case stronger for the absolute idealist. But Ward is clear as to the fact that he wants to resist the identification of God and the world: ‘The only Absolute ... that we can admit is the Absolute which God and the World constitute’.68 As already pointed out, Ward’s own account of the nature of God is strongly influenced by Lotze’s discussion of the problem of novelty in his critique of Leibniz. In particular, Ward accepts the suggestion that novelty can be generated only by the interplay of genuinely free agents. Hence he conceives of God as limiting himself in the exercise of his power, so as to let the monads free: ‘Unless creators are created’ – he says – ‘nothing is really created.’69 Having renounced omnipotence, God cannot have knowledge of a future he does not control anymore, which means that the notion of divine omniscience – which in the case of Leibniz takes the form of the doctrine of complete concepts – must be abandoned. God does not know which course of action a monad will choose. Nevertheless, he is aware of all the possibilities open to a monad at any moment of his career, so that the future will never come to him as unexpected. As Ward has it: ‘God, who knows both tendencies and possibilities completely, is beyond surprise and his purpose beyond frustration.’70 Clearly, such a God is not the immutable God of Leibniz and of classical theism, but a developing, changing God whose knowledge of the world increases with the unfolding of cosmic history. One may illustrate the contrast by reference to Leibniz’s idea that God possesses a ‘complete notion’ of a substance, that is, an exhaustive knowledge of an individual’s career. On Ward’s theory, this notion must now be abandoned. In what sense, then, does God have knowledge of the world? Although he is not explicit, the answer must be that God’s notion of an individual is not independent of that individual’s life-history being actually unfolded, but is formed in God’s mind as that individual’s life-history develops. At any given moment, God is omniscient, in the sense of knowing all that can be known – the realized past, the present and the not yet actualized possibilities open to each creature. Yet this sort of omniscience is compatible with the possibility of acquiring further knowledge: contrary to a long-standing philosophical tradition, improvement is not taken to be a sign of a previous imperfection. The difficulty arises, however, as to how God could be a warrant that evolution will not degenerate or come to a stop, for if the monads are free they may well make the wrong decisions. Ward rules out the possibility of ‘special interferences’, that is, occasional acts of divine intervention


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that alter the ordinary course of events. In his view, God’s activity must be conceived of as ‘general’, although he acknowledges that ‘the modus operandi ... here as in creation, is to us inscrutable’.71 In sum, Ward is in search of a conception of deity that is neither deistic (God is the indifferent creator of the world), theistic (God is the creator of the world and an active presence in it) or pantheistic (God and the world are one and the same). What he needs is a panen-theistic conception – a way of explaining God’s pervasive and active presence while at the same time preserving the world’s independency. He wants God to penetrate everywhere, like water in a sponge, without, however, swallowing the sponge. Ward’s failure to clarify how this can be possible is just a consequence of his philosophy’s incapacity to answer a more fundamental question: how can God be both immanent and transcendent?

Conclusion Ward’s significance for Whitehead can hardly be overemphasized; in The Realm of Ends one finds Whitehead’s philosophy of nature and philosophical theology in nuce. In Process and Reality Whitehead integrates all basic ideas of Ward’s pluralism within his own system and at the same time tries to reconcile a pluralistic outlook with a revised form of theism. Among the fundamental doctrines Whitehead shares with Ward are: (i) the view that sympathetic experience is the key towards the understanding of intermonadic causation; (ii) the recognition that the terms of the causal nexus are subject-like individuals whose nature cannot be adequately expressed in terms of the categories of substance and attribute; (iii) the view that the theory of the dominant monad provides an adequate solution to the mind–body problem; (iv) the view that inorganic objects can be conceptualized as aggregates of subject-like individuals, as ‘societies of monads’ whose functioning can be grasped by way of analogy with human societies; (v) the notion that natural laws are statistical in nature, a fundamental idea for reconciling the spontaneity of the ultimate constituents of reality with the determinism of what is usually referred to as the ‘material’ world; (vi) the fundamental insight that there is an ultimate creativity in the nature of things, a striving towards further achievements that powers evolution;


(vii) the recognition that a place for God in an evolutionary universe can be found only at the price of abandoning the traditional notion of an unchanging, omnipotent and omniscient God and by conceiving of deity as developing along with cosmic history. Some of these theses will be discussed more fully in the following chapters, where attention will be devoted to Whitehead’s attempt to answer two of the many questions left open by Ward. They are both concerned with the metaphysics of causation: what is the nature of intermonadic causation? And how can we conceive of God’s causal agency in a world of free monads? The next two chapters discuss Whitehead’s answer to the first question, the last two his answer to the second.

4 The Phenomenology of Causation: Whitehead and Hume

Introduction: Whitehead, Leibniz, and Hume Despite Whitehead’s notorious characterization of the history of philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato, it is striking how often the name of Hume recurs in his writings. This is especially so in Process and Reality and in a little but fundamental book, Symbolism. It is not difficult to see why this should be so: if a theory of monads along the lines indicated by Ward has to stand, it must be possible to work out a theory of intermonadic causation. Whitehead asks: ‘What is the nature of causation?’ In Hume he encounters a philosopher who forcefully argues that this question cannot be answered. It might be helpful to begin the present discussion by distinguishing three different senses in which Hume could be interpreted as holding a skeptical position with regard to causation. There is much disagreement among Hume scholars as to whether Hume believes in the reality of causal relationships.1 Did he hold that all there is to causation is the regular succession of the events we identify as cause and effect? Or did he indeed acknowledge the reality of a nexus binding the cause and the effect, and merely argue that we can’t know anything about the intrinsic nature of that connection? The disagreement is as to whether Hume’s skepticism is ontological (there are no real links between a cause and its effects) or solely epistemic (we cannot know what that link is like). This intricate scholarly dispute cannot be settled in this study. For present purposes, it suffices not to lose sight of the distinction between the two skeptical claims; what truly matters is that, in both the radical and the moderate interpretation, causation turns out to be a relation or power in things about whose nature we know nothing. 63

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Hume’s epistemic skepticism – his belief that we lack any positive conception of the nature of the power in virtue of which a cause begets its effect – is a consequence of his empiricist belief that all ideas derive from experience, taken together with his further conviction that causal relationships never enter as components of our experience. The idea around which Hume’s argument turns is quite simple. If all ideas are copies of sensory impressions, and if it is true that connections between causes and effects are never experienced, then it is impossible for us to form any notion of causality. To say that events of a certain sort are causes of events of another sort can only mean that they have been regularly associated in the past. This means that Hume’s skepticism is partially, but essentially, dependent upon another form of skepticism, which might be referred to as phenomenological skepticism. This is the thesis that causal relations are never directly experienced, that is, that they are never integral components of our experience. It is important to observe that Whitehead endorses Hume’s overall empiricist outlook. Whitehead deploys for the analysis of experience a set of categories different from Hume’s, yet he never abandons the fundamental principle that all ideas originate with experience. The main point of disagreement centers on the phenomenological question. As against Hume, Whitehead argues that we are directly – and even constantly – aware of causal relationships in our most simple, ordinary experiences. In Whitehead’s light, our ordinary experience does furnish us with an immediate, reliable evidence of the existence of causal relationships; moreover, ordinary experience furnishes us with important clues as to causation’s intrinsic nature. While Hume is a phenomenological, an epistemic and (arguably) an ontological skeptic, Whitehead is a commonsense realist on all three accounts. Since in the present essay Whitehead’s philosophy is interpreted as an attempt to answer Leibniz’s denial of intermonadic interaction, it might be appropriate to highlight some significant points of contact between Leibniz and Hume with regard to the status of causation. In a radical interpretation of Hume as an ontological skeptic, Leibniz and Hume are at one in denying the existence of causal relationships and in reducing causation to sheer regularity. The difference is what they take to be its metaphysical foundation. For Leibniz the regular order of nature finds its explanation in God’s pre-established harmony; for Hume it is a brute fact for which we can give no ultimate explanation. (Broadly speaking, this disagreement might be viewed as stemming from a deeper disagreement between the rationalists and the empiricists, that is, between those who fully accept the principle of sufficient reason and those who do not.)

The Phenomenology of Causation

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On the more moderate interpretation of Hume as an epistemological skeptic, Hume and Leibniz would also seem to hold similar views. Quite trivially, since Leibniz does not believe in the reality of direct causal links, he would not say that we know their nature. Finally, Leibniz and Hume appear to be holding similar views as to causality on the interpretation of Hume as a phenomenological skeptic. In this interpretation, Hume denies that we ever experience the causal nexus. Since Leibniz denies the reality of causal relationships, one would reasonably expect him to deny the existence of genuine causal experiences as well. If one has an experience that seemingly suggests the reality of a direct causal connection – for example, a sensation of warmth when one is approaching a fire, which is most naturally interpreted as providing direct evidence of the fire’s actual power to burn a person’s skin – then this experience must be regarded as illusory. According to the theory of pre-established harmony, no direct action is indeed exerted by the fire upon the skin. Thus, it would seem that Hume and Leibniz would have to agree in denying that there are veridical experiences of the causal nexus – that is, experiences of external realities really acting upon us. The implications of Whitehead’s doctrine that the causal nexus is an object of experience cannot be overestimated. According to Whitehead’s reconstruction in Symbolism, the idea that causal relations are not among the data of experience is one main dogma of modern philosophy.2 Having found its most able advocate in Hume, the dogma was uncritically taken over by Kant, who reformulated it as the doctrine of causation as an a priori category. In this way, it was possible for Kant to conceive of nature not as a system of mutually interacting agents, as Whitehead takes it to be, but as a subjective phenomenon. Once this idea entered the history of philosophy, the way was open for the emergence of various forms of absolute idealism. Whitehead does not provide any detailed analyses to support this piece of historical reconstruction, yet his interpretation has some prima facie plausibility. Since Whitehead rejects Kantian and absolute idealism as fiercely as materialism, Hume’s phenomenological skepticism is for him one of the main junctures at which modern philosophy took a wrong turn. This is a powerful reason for taking Hume’s philosophy seriously and for trying to develop an alternative. Although in his characteristic lapidary style, Whitehead makes it also wholly clear that he regards the issues debated by early modern philosophers as still open and that this is due to an uncritical acceptance of some basic philosophical assumptions. It is significant in this

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respect that Process and Reality should begin with the following words: ‘These lectures are based upon a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended with Hume.’3

Perception in the mode of causal efficacy Whitehead’s contention that we are constantly aware of the causal nexus raises a fairly obvious question: if the causal nexus is given in ordinary experience, how could Hume have failed to notice this fact? And in what does his failure precisely consist? Although Whitehead is appreciative of many aspects of Hume’s analysis of experience, he charges him with the accusation of having neglected an important dimension of our ordinary experience. Whitehead’s critique presupposes a distinction between two different experiential modes, which he respectively calls ‘experience in the mode of presentational immediacy’ and ‘experience in the mode of causal efficacy’. The main difference between the two is that, whereas in perception in the mode of presentational immediacy the mind is acquainted with contents that can be consciously distinguished (e.g., visual sense data), in perception in the mode of causal efficacy we are vaguely yet intimately aware of the action of external things impinging upon us. According to Whitehead, the two modalities do not have the same status, since perception in the mode of causal efficacy is in many ways more fundamental; three aspects of this basic mode of experience need to be particularly emphasized. First, Whitehead holds that our contact with the world occurs in the mode of causal efficacy, with a blind reception of the action of external things. Only in a derivative stage are the deliverances of this primary mode converted into wholly discriminated contents that can be conceptualized in the guise of, say, Russell’s sense data or Hume’s impressions of sensations: sense data, Whitehead holds, ‘enter into experience in virtue of the efficacy of the environment’.4 Our encounter with the world begins with a confused awareness of an external world; it is only when some aspects of this felt whole are consciously focused upon that they become distinct, crisply delineated sensations. Since this perceptive modality does not convey any distinct content, but rather a sense that there is an external world with which we are interacting, perception in the mode of causal efficacy explains why mankind’s outlook with regard to the external world is so naturally realistic and anti-skeptical. Secondly, perception in the mode of causal efficacy is not limited to human beings and the higher animals. Whitehead emphasizes that


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‘sense-perception is mainly a characteristic of more advanced organisms; whereas all organisms have experience of causal efficacy whereby their functioning is conditioned by their environment’.5 This means that perception in the mode of causal efficacy is a creature’s own awareness of being internally related with, and in a very real sense both limited and constituted by, the surrounding world. This reinforces the point that experience in the mode of causal efficacy is more fundamental than perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, which appears to be a more refined form of experience confined to the higher animals. If one had to say what the experiences of the lower animals could be like, the best guess would be that it is a vague sense of participation in a wider environment. Thirdly, Whitehead emphasizes that perception in the mode of causal efficacy lies at the bottom of that sense of intensity and adventure that gives significance to human life. Although our sense of causal efficacy never totally vanishes, Whitehead argues that there might be cases in which the deliverances of this mode of perception are fainter; in this case, the contents of presentational immediacy become dominant and the emotional tone of our entire state of mind is altered: ‘In some tired moment there comes a sudden relaxation, and the mere presentational side of the world overwhelms with the sense of its emptiness.’6 Independently of any reference to an external world, mere presentation of sense data is uninteresting. We need the pressure of our natural environment in order for our life to be meaningful, much in the way in which in the social realm we need to tease, and to be teased by, other people. One could say that perception in the mode of causal efficacy is primitive, not so much in the order of time but because it is presupposed by perception in the mode of presentational immediacy; that it is pervasive, in the sense that it never disappears, but remains throughout as the basis of our more refined forms of experience; and that it is emotional, insofar as the awareness of a direct interaction with external causal agencies is accompanied by a subjective reaction (according to the nature of the case, this might be an animal sense of fear, anxiety, or excitement). Whitehead believes that Hume is not alone in committing the mistake of disregarding perception in the mode of causal efficacy. As a matter of fact, he thinks that the accusation could be extended to the whole tradition of modern philosophy. Nevertheless, this mistake is particularly serious for a philosophy such as Hume’s that purports to give an account of the origin of our notion of causation. It is indeed at the primitive level of perception in the mode of causal efficacy that

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those experiences are made which lead us to believe in the reality of causation. Since Hume’s account of causation is based upon a theory of the mind as acquainted with what he calls ‘impressions of sensation’, Whitehead argues that Hume is de facto restricting without justification the scope of his analysis to perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. In this way, he mistakes what is secondary and derivative (the clear-cut experiences of our wakeful moments) for what is prior and fundamental (the vague sense of the world’s causal efficacy). In his analysis of experience, Hume is thus charged with the fallacy known as hysteron-proteron – a reversal of a natural or logical order. The failure of Hume’s attempt to provide an adequate account of the notion of causation is therefore only to be expected, as Whitehead not solely contends but also sets out to prove.

Whitehead on Hume’s empiricism It may be good to review some basic ideas of Hume’s theory of experience, before considering his account of causation and Whitehead’s criticism of it in the next section. According to Hume’s classification in A Treatise of Human Nature, all of the mind’s perceptions are either impressions or ideas. The former concept refers to ‘all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul’, the latter to ‘the faint images of these [the impressions] in thinking and reasoning’.7 Since impressions always precede and give rise to ideas, it is possible to arrange different sorts of perceptions according to their genetic occurrence: (1) impressions of sensation (sensations such as ‘heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure and pain’) give rise to (2) ideas of sensation (ideas ‘of pleasure and pain’); these are followed by (3) impressions of reflection (emotions such as ‘desire and aversion, hope and fear’), which may be copied by (4) ideas of reflection (the ideas of such emotions).8 As a way of illustrating these distinctions, consider the case of a person who has lost his way and is forced to spend an awful night in a wood. The person has painful experiences associated with the night’s darkness, the humidity of the air, and the frightening cries of wild animals. These sensations are all impressions of sensation. The night having been awful, it is likely to be memorable. Hence his memory will retain ideas of the sensations had: these are all ideas of sensation. Sometime later, that person may tell his unfortunate adventure to a friend. It is to be expected that the recalled ideas will be accompanied by an emotional reaction, for example by feelings of aversion: such emotions are impressions of reflection. These emotions are themselves something it is


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possible to think about: the ideas involved in such reasoning are ideas of reflection. Whitehead’s response to this account is twofold. On the one hand, he criticizes the view of the nature of emotions involved in Hume’s explanation. As already pointed out, emotions do not arise at a later stage of our experience after ideas of sensations have been formed; on the contrary, perception in the mode of causal efficacy is already emotionally charged: emotions antedate both Hume’s ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ of sensation and are certainly not dependent upon them. ‘Experience’, Whitehead observes, ‘has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have [sic] been made to follow upon Hume’s impressions of sensation.’9 According to Whitehead, emotions are not secondary elements in experience, but primary receptive modalities that color in a unique way our primitive acts of relating to the world. On a positive note, Whitehead recognizes that, in the above account of how different mental contents originate, Hume has already made a very significant step away from the traditional conception of the mind as a static substantial soul. In particular, Whitehead observes that Hume provides a genetic as opposed to a morphological account, for as a matter of fact he is describing the mind as a process of derivation of higher forms of experience (represented by ideas) from lower ones (represented by impressions).10 Hume’s perceptions are either simple or complex. A faculty called ‘imagination’ has the power to combine ideas in novel ways and to create ideas of things never perceived. Hume writes: ‘I can imagine to myself such a city as the New Jerusalem, whose pavement is gold and the walls are rubies, tho’ I never saw any such.’11 In its constructions, however, the imagination has to make use of simple ideas, which ultimately refer back to simple impressions. Such is the idea of the color gold, which Hume could not possess had he never seen it. The distinction between simple and complex perceptions having been drawn, Hume is now in possession of all the concepts needed to state in a precise form the empiricist intuition that all knowledge depends upon experience. Hence he lays down the principle that ‘all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent’.12 Can this principle be regarded as valid? Notoriously, Hume himself discovered an exception. Imagine an observer confronted with the scale of all shades of a given color, ordered according to their relative intensities, and complete except for one position. The observer would still


be capable of framing an idea of the missing shade, filling the empty space in his imagination. Like most commentators, Whitehead rightly disagrees with Hume’s evaluation that ‘the instance is so particular and singular, that ‘tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim’.13 Hume has not solely provided a counter-example to his own principle; it is not even true that ‘the instance is so particular and singular’ as Hume would like to have it. As Whitehead observes, the experiment could be repeated for all shades of all colors, as well as for other classes of sensations. In his discussion of the missing shade Hume is already conceding too much, for it is not obvious that one could really frame an idea of the missing shade without the corresponding impression. If this were possible, however, then the counter-example would show something of great significance about the human mind. The fact that we can form an idea of the missing shade by reference to the other shades would then indicate that the different shades are not entirely detached but form a systematic whole, that is, that they are internally related one to another. It is possible to acquire knowledge of a not experienced part on the basis of our knowledge of an experienced part only if the relations between them are constitutive of their natures. Hume would therefore be wrong in conceiving of his impressions as if they were distinct substances – atom-like entities wholly independent from one another.

Whitehead on Hume on causation Having laid down the empiricist principle that all simple ideas derive from a corresponding simple impression, Hume examines its consequences for our idea of causation, that is, the idea that a certain cause has the power to bring about a certain effect. What impression is the original from which the notion of causation derives? For the purposes of the present chapter, it is important to recognize that Hume answers this question in two different ways. Let’s begin by considering what may be called his ‘official account’, the explanation that is developed at great length in the Treatise, the Abstract and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, reserving a discussion of the alternative account for a later section. In the Enquiry, a concise statement of the official account is provided in the following passage: [A]fter a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist. This connexion [sic], therefore, which we


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feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion.14 This passage summarizes Hume’s conclusion in the Treatise. Hume begins his examination by providing an analysis of the notion of causation into the three components of succession, contiguity and necessary connection. It is with this latter idea that a difficulty arises; when we see one object acting upon another (recall the example of the two billiard balls), we do not experience a necessary connection between the cause and the effect. In this way, we seem to find ourselves in the puzzling situation that we have the idea of necessary connection without any corresponding impression. These considerations cannot be taken to prove that the empiricist principle must be given up, however. All they show is that the impression which gives rise to the notion of necessary connection is not an impression of sensation. Since we know on the ground of the empiricist principle that there must be a simple impression corresponding to any existing simple idea, we know that such an impression must be an impression of reflection. Hume’s long reasoning in the Treatise has the purpose of clarifying the nature of this impression. In the first place Hume observes that, when it has been perceived in a repeated number of cases that an object (or event) of kind A has been followed by an object (or event) of kind B, the mind acquires the habit of framing an idea of an object (or event) of kind B each time it perceives an object (or event) of kind A. Secondly, he points out that we do not solely anticipate the effect by entertaining its idea; we also believe that the effect will occur. How is belief, as opposed to the mere entertaining of an idea, brought about? Hume thinks that the difference between an idea that is merely entertained and one to which we give our assent has to be explained in terms of a difference in force and vivacity: ideas that are merely entertained are less vivid than those we believe in; in turn, these are less vivid than the impressions we derive from our senses. On this basis, Hume is in a position to argue that the reason why we do not solely conceive the effect, but also believe that it will occur, is that the vivacity of the perceived cause is transmitted to the conceived idea of the effect, a process which occurs in accordance with the fundamental principles of the mind and, in particular, of the imagination. Thirdly, Hume addresses the fundamental question as to the perceptual correlate of the idea of causation. The determination of the mind


to pass from a present perception to the conceived idea constitutes that ‘sentiment or impression’ from which our idea of necessary connection is derived: after a frequent repetition, I find, that upon the appearance of one of the objects [the cause], the mind is determin’d by custom to consider its usual attendant [the effect] ... ’Tis this impression, then, or determination, which affords me the idea of necessity.15 This passage raises a problem of interpretation of some importance in view of an evaluation of Whitehead’s criticism of Hume. Neither a ‘determination’ nor ‘a customary transition of the imagination’ can indeed be intelligibly subsumed under the category of impression as Hume describes it. One way to render Hume’s position more intelligible here is to read him as saying that the transition of the mind, from the perception of the cause to the conception of the effect, is accompanied by a feeling of compulsion. The mind experiences the necessity by which it is led to anticipate the effect: ‘After we have observ’d the resemblance in a sufficient number of instances’, Hume says, ‘we immediately feel a determination of the mind to pass from one object to its usual attendant.’16 Such a feeling of necessitation takes the place of the missing sensory impression of a necessary connection. There is, however, a further problem to be solved. If the necessary connection turns out to be an experience in the mind of the observer, more precisely an impression of reflection which accompanies the transition from a perceived cause to a conceived effect, why do we speak and reason as if that necessity existed in the external world? Hume’s explanation involves a reference to what he takes to be a natural projective tendency of the mind: a subjective feeling in the mind is projected onto the world and mistaken for an objective relation between external things.17 Having rehearsed Hume’s account of causation, let’s now turn to a consideration of Whitehead’s critique. Whitehead’s criticisms are scattered in several places of his works and can be grouped under two main heads. On the one hand, he advances philosophical objections aimed at questioning the intelligibility of Hume’s explanation. On the other hand, he directs our attention to some empirical evidence that stands in apparent contradiction to what he takes to be the implications of that account. To the former group of objections belongs the remark that ‘Hume seems to have overlooked the difficulty that “repetition” stands with regard to “impression” in exactly the same position as does “cause


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and effect” ’.18 According to Whitehead, Hume’s account of causation presupposes that a certain cause has been repeatedly experienced in association with a given effect. At least prima facie, however, it is as difficult to see from what impression the idea of ‘repetition’ derives as it is to identify the impression from which the idea of ‘causation’ arises. The objection could be raised at this point that Hume can certainly allow that repetition has the effect of determining the mind to form certain ideas without claiming that we must form an idea of repetition; as a matter of fact, he might think that at least non-human animals undergo a similar process.19 But Whitehead is not arguing that Hume is wrong in thinking that we need an idea of repetition in order to have an idea of causation. His critique is rather that Hume’s account is woefully incomplete. Because of his extensive use of the notion of ‘repetition’ in his explanation, Hume owes to his reader an account of the origin of the idea of ‘repetition’ just as much as he does of the idea of ‘causation’. Otherwise he could justly be accused of having explained obscura per obscuriora, that is, of having merely replaced the original puzzle as to ‘causation’ with a novel one as to ‘repetition’. The same considerations also apply to another notion that plays an important role in Hume’s Treatise, namely ‘habit’.20 The second set of critical remarks calls into question the empirical adequacy of Hume’s account. According to Hume, after the mind has experienced that a certain cause A is constantly followed by a certain effect B, it feels a determination to anticipate the effect B when perceiving A; this internal feeling of determination enters into our notion of causation and is eventually mistaken for a real connection between outward things. If this were true, Whitehead contends, repetition would be a necessary condition for our knowledge of particular causal relationships. Since according to Hume we have no direct perception of the causal link, we need to repeat the experience of a cause being followed by a certain effect in order to be sure that there really is a connection between them. As against Hume’s explanation, Whitehead points out that repetition is not in general a necessary condition for our knowledge of causal relations. Consider the case of reflex actions, such as the blink of the eyes when an electric light is turned on. Our knowledge that the sudden flash made us blink would seem to be immediate and to require no previous experiences of the same sort. In his discussion of this example, Whitehead writes that ‘the man will explain his experience by saying, “The flash made me blink”; and if this statement be doubted, he will reply, “I know it, because I felt it” ’.21 In other words, we do not merely


experience the flash and our blinking, but also that the flash made us blink; what we directly feel is the causal connection between the two events. Interestingly, Whitehead’s appeal here is not solely to our ordinary experience, but to our ordinary way of describing it; although he thinks that ordinary language is infected with the substance-quality mode of thought, he admits here that it might function as a repository of valid phenomenological insights. This happens when our verbal response to a situation is immediate, uncontrolled. Incidentally, this suggests that the way young children report their experiences might be a subject worthy of investigation for the phenomenologist interested in collecting philosophically neutral accounts of the way human beings experience their relations with their body and with the external world, for children are presumably not yet committed, either implicitly or explicitly, to any philosophical theory about the mind and its relation to the body. Whitehead’s interpretation of reflex actions runs counter to Hume’s interpretation of analogous experiences. One of Hume’s examples is as follows: [W]e remember to have seen that species of object we call flame, and to have felt that species of sensation we call heat. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any farther ceremony, we call the one cause and the other effect ... In all those instances, from which we learn the conjunction of particular causes and effects, both the causes and effects have been perceiv’d by the senses, and are remember’d.22 On Hume’s theory, our knowledge that fire burns requires repeated experience, yet one could ask whether a child really has to burn his hand more than once in order to learn that fire burns and provokes a sensation of pain. Explicitly put, Whitehead’s point is that, in those cases where we are directly involved in causal happenings, we do have a direct experience of the causal nexus, for we do not merely experience the pain and the heat of the flame, but also that these sensations are provoked in us by a certain object or external event. It should be said that Hume could easily acknowledge the possibility that one single instance might suffice to teach us that a certain cause is going to be followed by a certain effect. ‘‘Tis certain’, he writes in the Treatise, ‘that not only in philosophy, but even in common life, we may attain the knowledge of a particular cause merely by one experiment.’23 Hume makes it clear, however, that this could happen only when we


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have already learnt that there are regular associations between the objects of our experience. When we draw a conclusion on the ground of a single instance, this is not because we have a direct perception of a power in the cause, but because we interpret the present occurrence in the light of others of which we have had experience: once I have learnt that fire burns, that rain makes things wet, and that a heavy object falling on the foot hurts, I will have no need to repeat the experience in order to learn that a stone thrown on the windows will break it and that the slivers might cut me.24 But it seems difficult to make any progress on this point – whether or not there is a direct experience of the causal nexus – by means of arguments; each reader is asked to inspect the character of his own experience and to evaluate which of the two competing interpretations appears to be more accurate. Another unlikely consequence of Hume’s account of causation is that sensory perceptions, and in particular visual sensations, are necessary for our awareness of causal efficacy, an awareness which in that account would seem to be one and the same with the feeling of internal compulsion upon which the idea of causation is based. Hume contends that, once the mind has experienced a constant conjunction, a feeling of internal compulsion is experienced as soon as the cause is perceived. This account is difficult to reconcile with the fact that our awareness of causal efficacy seems to be stronger in the fading of the familiar sensory perceptions. ‘Most living creatures, of daytime habits’, Whitehead observes, ‘are more nervous in the dark, in the absence of the familiar visual sense-data. But according to Hume, it is the very familiarity of the sense-data which is required for causal inference.’25 The reason why such creatures are afraid in the dark is that they feel themselves at the mercy of unknown external forces: even though they lack the usual visual sensations, they retain an immediate awareness of the objective reality of independent casual powers. But if our feelings of casual force are activated by familiar sense impressions, as Hume’s theory implies, then this is not what should happen. Upon the whole, one cannot avoid thinking that Whitehead has noticed something important about our experience that has escaped his predecessor. Not that any of his examples suffice to conclusively establish the claim that we are immediately aware of causal relations. An experience of causal efficacy might indeed be illusory: when sitting in a train and looking outside the window, I might have for a brief moment the sense that my train has begun to move, while it is the train beside that is really leaving the station. In such a common experience, I might have a real sense of myself and of my body being


carried away by the moving train, although nothing of this sort truly happens. By itself, the fact that we have a vivid sense of powers acting upon us does not suffice to establish Whitehead’s contention that we do experience external causal agencies; and, granted that at least some experiences of causal efficacies are not veridical, there is always room for a skeptical doubt. Nevertheless, this does not seem to fully address Whitehead’s point, which is that a philosophically unbiased survey of our experience reveals that a realistic interpretation of the sort of phenomena he calls ‘experiences in the mode of causal efficacy’ is in general the most natural to take. The rejection of such an interpretation must therefore be based not upon empirical grounds, but upon some philosophical view as to the nature of experience. Hume, on the contrary, argues as if his understanding of experience were wholly uncontroversial. Whitehead is right in holding that there is in our experience a mysterious sense of participation in a larger world that is not captured by Hume’s atomistic analysis in terms of simple impressions. Whitehead’s image of a living organism afraid in the dark in the passage that has just been quoted is quite appropriate as a way of pointing to those many sorts of human experiences that do not lend themselves to any clear description. The evocation of a state of darkness functions as a metaphor of the vagueness of the information about the external world conveyed by perception in the mode of causal efficacy, as well as of the difficulty one encounters in providing a detailed description of what it is that one is experiencing at that deeper experiential level. This must be contrasted with the ‘brightness’ of presentational immediacy, where the mind is aware of neatly discriminated contents. In giving philosophical significance to what after all are well-known facts of our experience, Whitehead is making the point that Hume’s philosophy is not empiricist enough, but is vitiated by philosophical overintellectualism. This is the philosophers’ desire to explain all phenomena in terms of what is ‘clear and distinct’, a desire originating with Descartes and left as a legacy to the whole of modern philosophy. Whitehead’s following words refer to metaphysics, but they can be taken to have a more general significance: ‘The dilemma of metaphysics is that either you are clear, and leave much out, or else you are adequate – and muddled ... You come to a point where clearness is impossible.’26 In this case, the ultimate principles of explanation are Hume’s impressions of sensation, each of which is a definite item with boundaries that differentiate it from all the others. In Hume’s philosophy, ‘all our distinct


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perceptions are distinct existences’:27 there is no reason to assume, however, that what satisfies the intellect’s predilection for sharp contrasts will also deliver an adequate representation of the phenomenon under examination. The critique of intellectualism applies to all attempts at providing a systematic account of reality, including Whitehead’s own. We want our concepts to have sharp edges, yet clarity and precision will lead to falsification and distortion if the totality to be grasped is really a ‘buzzing world’, as Whitehead says borrowing William James’ famous expression,28 if it is intrinsically chaotic and fuzzy. Hence our difficulties in talking about experience; hence the somewhat perplexing, to the rationalistic mind very disturbing question: might it not be the case that, at least sometimes, the less clear account is the one closer to the truth? Nowhere does this clash of temperaments come more clearly to the fore than in a well-known, but still worth quoting anecdote by Bertrand Russell: [Whitehead] said to me once: ‘you think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon-day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.’ I thought his remark horrid, but could not see how to prove that my bias was any better than his.29

Hume on the vulgar notion of causation In his discussion of Hume’s account of causation, Whitehead acknowledges that Hume implicitly recognized the reality of a mode of perception different from presentational immediacy. Specifically, he quotes those passages where Hume uses expressions such as ‘we see with our eyes’ or ‘we feel with our hands.’30 Innocuous as they seem to be, such expressions record that there is more to our experience than sensory perceptions (a seen color, the coldness we feel when dipping the hand into the water): we also immediately feel that such impressions originate in a definite part of our body (the eye, the hand). Such an experience of derivation involves a feeling of passivity, of being acted upon, as well as the awareness of an intimate link between our mind and our bodily organs. This immediate sense of a profound connection explains why we have a tendency to identify with our body, to think of it as in some sense ‘ours’. Certainly, these visceral feelings are fundamental ingredients in our experience, but they cannot be analyzed in terms of Hume’s impressions of sensation.

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However, Whitehead is mistaken in thinking that Hume’s recognition of the facts of perception in the mode of causal efficacy is merely involuntary. Hume acknowledges the existence of what Whitehead would consider a deeper level of experience in two brief notes in the Enquiry. Here he advances an alternative explanation of the origin of our idea of causation that closely resembles Whitehead’s own account. Hume first denies here that our experience of effort, as when we try to exert a force upon a physical object, may provide us with an idea of power or causal efficacy, but only a few lines later he writes that ‘[i]t must ... be confessed that the animal nisus, which we experience, though it can afford no accurate precise idea of power, enters very much into that vulgar, inaccurate idea, which is formed of it’.31 This passage is interesting because Hume admits here the reality of a phenomenon different from the one he had discussed in the Treatise. The origin of our common notion of causation, he now writes, must be explained not by way of reference to an inner compulsion associated with an acquired habit, but by way of reference to ‘an animal nisus, which we experience’. This is the inner sensation of trying to overcome a resistance that is felt by all living creatures when acting upon the realities of their surrounding world. Hume also considers a problem involved with his official account, according to which we never have the experience of a force or principle connecting a cause with its effect, but only of their constant association and of our acquired internal compulsion to pass from the perception of the one to the idea of the other. But if we have no experience of such a principle, why are there so many words in ordinary language that apparently refer to it? Hume carefully tries to avoid the potential implications of this reflection, and writes that ‘[a]s to the frequent use of the words, Force, Power, Energy, &c., which every where occur in common conversation, as well as in philosophy; that is no proof, that we are acquainted, in any instance, with the connecting principle between cause and effect’.32 He also adds, however, that ‘[t]hese words, as commonly used, have very loose meanings annexed to them; and their ideas are very uncertain and confused’. 33 Once again, Hume virtually admits that there is a notion of causation different from the one he has discussed in his official account, even though this notion is ‘very uncertain and confused’, and that the words used to express it ‘have a very loose meaning annexed to them’. Even more interesting for the purposes of the present chapter is Hume’s explanation of the origin of this other notion of causation. According to Hume, the notion originates with the immediate feeling every living being has of himself as an active agent as well as a passive subject. The


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vulgar notion is based upon the awareness common to all living organisms of being causally related to an external world. As he puts it in a very significant passage: ‘No animal can put external bodies in motion without the sentiment of a nisus or endeavour; and every animal has a sentiment or feeling from the stroke or blow of an external object, that is in motion.’34 Hume also observes that, once we have formed the vulgar notion of causation, we apply it to all things whatsoever, animate as well as inanimate: ‘These sensations, which are merely animal ... we are apt to transfer to inanimate objects, and to suppose that they have some such feelings, whenever they transfer or receive motion.’35 As these passages show, what Hume refers to as the vulgar notion of causation is inextricably tied to our capacity to feel our inner effort when we try to act upon external bodies and to feel our passivity when they act upon us. Such a conception can therefore be meaningfully applied solely to living sentient organisms. This notwithstanding, commonsense does not notice the absurdity which is involved in using it in causal reasoning about insentient objects, misled as it is by the projective tendencies of the mind. Hume’s account of the vulgar notion of causation suggests that he is wholly aware of those phenomena Whitehead refers to as ‘perception in the mode of causal efficacy’. The differences between the two philosophers are here not so great after all. Hume recognizes that we have an immediate perception of ourselves as active agents when he talks of ‘the animal nisus, which we experience’. Most importantly, his example of the ‘sentiment or feeling from the stroke or blow of an external object’ finds a nice parallel in Whitehead’s remark that ‘being tackled at Rugby, there is the Real. Nobody who hasn’t been knocked down has the slightest notion of what the Real is’.36 Here what we experience is the force of independent powers acting upon us, rather than clearly distinct sense presentations. In view of these similarities, it is actually surprising that Hume gave so much prominence to the view of the mind as having a clear grasp of its content in his explanation of the formation of our concepts, for it does certainly look as if Hume would agree with Whitehead’s fundamental insight that ‘we find ourselves in the double role of agents and patients in a common world’.37 Of course, Hume would still deny that experiences of causal influence provide us with any impression of necessity, so that the problem of the origin of this idea remains unsolved. Nevertheless, given that in his official theory of causation he is ready to admit that an internal feeling of determination is sufficient to account for the empirical correlate of that idea, it is rather difficult to see now why he should not be ready to accept that our own sense of passivity,

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the feeling of ourselves as being at the mercy of external forces, could play the same explanatory role. But the notes in the Enquiry clearly show that the problem is not solely Hume’s intellectualism or his failure to take notice of the phenomena that for Whitehead are experiences of causal efficacy, but also a fear of anthropomorphism, for what sense would it make to ascribe ‘sensations, which are merely animal ... to inanimate objects’? This charge is a serious one, and one does not need to be particularly hostile to Whitehead’s enterprise to admit this. Since Whitehead’s method is that of philosophical generalization from our own experience, the danger of projecting onto reality features which are peculiarly human is real. This objection, however, cannot be discussed in the abstract; the plausibility of Whitehead’s metaphysical generalizations needs to be critically evaluated in each specific case. What needs to be emphasized here is that Hume’s passage makes it clear that at this juncture a radical choice must be made. If one wants to be a thoroughgoing empiricist, as both Hume and Whitehead try to be, either one abandons the speculative enterprise altogether and refrains from making any claim about the intrinsic nature of realities beyond ourselves, or one tries to understand them by reference to one’s own experiential life. Surely, each alternative comes at a price.

Conclusion: Kant on monadism and causation Hume is not the only modern philosopher who held important views on the nature of causation. In particular, one would expect a philosopher with a project such as Whitehead’s to provide a detailed criticism of the philosophy of Kant. Nevertheless, Whitehead says comparatively little on Kant, and what he does say is not always pertinent to the specific issue under discussion here. However, the philosophical alternative that has just been sketched – either adopt an agnostic position or understand the nature of reality by way of analogy with our inner life – is one Kant seems to have taken quite seriously, in both the precritical and the critical phase of his career. As a way of concluding this section and introducing the next chapter, it might be interesting to consider some interesting and to some extent unexpected opinions Kant held on the viability of a theory of monads. Kant’s sympathy for an idealistic interpretation of reality along Leibnizian lines emerges quite clearly in the first chapter of his short book of 1766, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer.38 Kant acknowledges an inclination to admit the existence of soul-like immaterial substances: ‘I confess


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that I am much inclined to affirm the existence of immaterial natures in the world’ – he writes – ‘and to place my own soul in the class of these beings.’39 Then, he raises the fundamental question as to how such immaterial beings could interact with matter, especially with the human body. If we postulate the existence of immaterial substances alongside material ones, ‘does not the community that exists between a spirit and a body become mysterious?’40 Although Kant recognizes the difficulty, he suggests that it could be solved by conceiving of matter as itself constituted of mind-like substances. If one sees this, then ‘Leibniz’s droll notion that we perhaps drink in our coffee atoms that are to become human souls would no longer be a laughing matter.’41 In an important footnote, Kant even defends such a theory from the charge of intrinsic implausibility. Those who condemn Leibniz’s philosophy as ridiculous, he says, would not have done badly if they had first considered whether a substance that is a simple part of matter would be possible without any inner state, and if they would not have excluded such a state, then it would have been incumbent upon them to invent some other possible inner state than the representations and activities that depend upon them. Everyone sees for himself that, if a faculty of obscure representations is granted to the simple, elementary particles of matter, it does not follow that matter itself has a faculty of representation; for many substances of this kind, connected into a whole, can after all never amount to a thinking unity.42 Granted that the ultimate constituents of reality must have some inner nature, Kant is here arguing, it is difficult for us to frame a conception of what that nature could be like if not by way of analogical generalization, hence by attributing them some capacity for sentience and activity. The alternatives are either to reject the idea that the ultimate constituents have an intrinsic nature, which seems absurd, for they must obviously be something, or provide an account of their nature in non-mental terms. The argument does not pretend to have the force of a demonstration, but raises a serious challenge for Leibniz’s critic. In the conclusive part of the passage Kant takes one further step, for he observes that the ascription of mental qualities to the ultimate atoms does not lead to the paradoxical conclusion that material objects themselves must be sentient or endowed with any of the mental qualities of their parts. An aggregate of minds (‘many substances ... connected into a whole’) is not a minded unit (‘a thinking unity’). It should be noted,


however, that this defense seems to close the way to any theory of monads that fails to recognize the reality of the human soul as a substance numerically distinct from the brain. The brain is itself a material thing and, therefore, an aggregate of monads. But if an aggregate of monads is not ipso facto a ‘thinking unity’, then such a theory cannot account for the existence of the human soul. This is the composition problem James had raised against Clifford and that has been discussed in Chapter 3. With respect to Kant’s critical period, a most interesting passage occurs in the Critique of Pure Reason. The object of Kant’s attention is one more time the mind–body problem. Kant first recalls that the mind–body problem is generated by the difficulties one encounters in trying to understand how substances of radically different kinds could interact; then, he goes on to speculate that a theory of monads would avoid this difficulty, for the interacting substances would be of one and the same ontological kind. Again, Kant makes the point that a theory of monads is not impossible in principle, for after all what we call ‘matter’ could be the appearance to us of a noumenal reality: The difficulty peculiar to the problem consists, as is generally recognised, in the assumed heterogeneity of the object of inner sense (the soul) and the objects of the outer senses ... But if we consider that the two kinds of objects thus differ from each other, not inwardly but only insofar as one appears outwardly to the other, and that what, as thing in itself, underlies the appearance of matter, perhaps after all may not be so heterogeneous in character, this difficulty vanishes, the only question that remains being how in general a communion of substances is possible. This, however, is a question which ... the reader ... will not hesitate to regard as likewise lying outside the field of human knowledge.43 As it emerges from this passage, Kant’s position differs from Leibniz’s in that he believes that the solution to the problem of causal interaction lies outside the reach of human knowledge, as he says in the final line. On the contrary, Leibniz takes the problem to have a very clear-cut answer, namely that direct causal interaction is impossible in principle. Whereas Kant is here suggesting a form of epistemological skepticism according to which the impossibility of understanding the nature of noumenal causation (as opposed to causation understood as a relation between phenomenal events) lies in our cognitive endowments, Leibniz’s skepticism is ontological, the impossibility being rooted in the very nature of things.


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It is surprising to discover that the thinker who revolutionized philosophy by declaring the impossibility of metaphysics as a science and introduced the notion of an unknowable thing in itself should have been ready to consider, although only in a hypothetical fashion, that some version of a theory of monads might be true. This fact did not pass unnoticed; in his influential ‘On the Nature of Things-in-Themselves’, for example, Clifford observed that already ‘Kant drew out a suggestion that the Ding-an-sich might be of the nature of mind’.44 And Ward himself remarks in The Realm of Ends that ‘a monadology of this sort [one in which the real substantial things are fundamentally experiential or mind-like] still haunted Kant’s speculation from his earlier days and was constantly cropping out in his later critical writings’.45 But, quite apart from their intrinsic interest, these passages bring into focus the challenge awaiting Whitehead. Granted that a theory of monads provides the best metaphysical framework, that causal interaction is real, and that it is not closed to our conceiving, how then is monadic intercourse to be understood?

5 The Metaphysics of Causation: Whitehead, Hume, and James

Introduction Having discussed Whitehead’s realism as to causation, his positive account of the nature of the causal link now needs to be evaluated. Within the framework of a theory of monads, the problem of causal interaction is the problem of understanding intersubjective transactions; accordingly, its solution stands or falls with one’s theory of the self. Whitehead develops his own doctrine of subjectivity by way of confrontation with previous philosophers. Among these, two play a prominent role in his thinking – Hume again, and William James. The present chapter begins with a discussion of those aspects of Hume’s theory of the mind that Whitehead rejects, before considering James’s description of human subjectivity and how it relates to Whitehead’s own account. This sets the stage for the explanation of Whitehead’s theory of causation, which is eventually defended from a powerful objection that has been raised against it.

Whitehead on Hume’s theory of the mind One of Hume’s most celebrated theses in the Treatise is that we lack direct experience of the self as an underlying principle of unity; given his empiricism, this implies that we cannot have any idea of it. Hume does not wish to deny that we have a conception of the self, if this is identified with a bearer of qualities in some very abstract way. Hume argues that ‘since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions, and since all ideas are deriv’d from something antecedently present to the mind’,1 it follows that it is impossible ‘for us so much as to conceive or to form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions’.2 84

The Metaphysics of Causation

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Nevertheless, he acknowledges that we can form ‘a relative idea’ of things ‘specifically different from our perception, without pretending to comprehend the related objects’.3 His point is that we cannot bring home to ourselves in any concrete fashion what such a bearer might be like. If the self is conceived as an underlying substance it is just a matter of definition that it cannot be experienced; in order to experience it we would need an impression, which is impossible if the self is the impressions’ underlying substratum – that which lies ‘beneath’ them. But if the notion that the self is a substance is not phenomenologically warranted, what is the self, as this is given in introspection? According to Hume, introspection only reveals the perpetual flow of our experiences. Hume does not use the expression ‘stream of consciousness’, which originates with William James, but the way he describes our psychical life is strongly suggestive of James’s metaphor. Hume writes: [S]etting aside some metaphysician of this kind [those pretending to have a direct perception of themselves as permanent substances], I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.4 Only a few lines later, he compares the mind to ‘a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations’.5 If we are willing to ascribe to Hume a bundle theory of the self, that is, the ontological view that all there is to the self is the complex of its related perceptions, then Hume can be seen as holding a process-view of the self, although one different from the one held by Whitehead, as will shortly appear. Whitehead is quite sympathetic with this aspect of Hume’s philosophy, yet he also charges Hume with incoherence. In spite of his recognition of the fluid nature of the self, Whitehead holds, Hume still conceives the mind as a self-identical, underlying substance. This accusation is forcefully stated in a passage in which Hume is presented as the paradigmatic example of modern philosophers’ fundamentally mistaken way of approaching the human mind. The passage is long but deserves to be quoted at full length, since most of this section will be an analysis of it: Hume continued to construe the functionings of the subjective enjoyment of experience according to the substance-quality categories.

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Yet if the enjoyment of experience be the constitutive subjective fact, these categories have lost all claim to any fundamental character in metaphysics. Hume – to proceed at once to the consistent exponent of the method – looked for a universal quality to function as qualifying the mind, by way of explanation of its perceptive enjoyment. Now if we scan ‘my perception of this stone as grey’ in order to find a universal, the only available candidate is ‘greyness’. Accordingly for Hume, ‘greyness’, functioning as a sensation qualifying the mind, is a fundamental type of fact for metaphysical generalization. The result is Hume’s simple impressions of sensation, which form the starting point of his philosophy. But this is an entire muddle, for the perceiving mind is not grey, and so grey is now made to perform a new role. From the original fact ‘my perception of this stone as grey’, Hume extracts ‘Awareness of sensations of greyness’; and puts it forward as the ultimate datum in this element of experience.6 It is difficult here to disentangle what is truly insightful from what is only the result of misunderstanding. As it has been argued in the previous chapter, Whitehead is probably right in his contention that Hume’s rationalistic bias tends to make him oblivious of the most primitive forms of experience. Hume’s analysis begins with, and remains confined to, relatively high-grade experiences, such as our awareness that the object we are looking at is an object of a particular kind (in Whitehead’s example, that it is a stone, and that it is grey). But Whitehead now suggests that Hume is guilty of another mistake. He does not solely restrict his attention to perceptual experiences, he also analyses them in terms of the substance-quality mode of thought. In Whitehead’s view, ‘my perception of a grey stone’ is taken by Hume to imply that a substance, the mind of the perceiver, is qualified by a property, the greyness of the perceived stone. The final result, Whitehead notices, is an ‘entire muddle, for the perceiving mind is not grey, and so grey is now made to perform a new role’. What is this muddle? Whitehead’s point is that, if the relation between the experiencing subject and the perceived object is conceptualized by means of the categories of substance and property, there is then no difference between inherence and intentionality – between having a property and having a capacity to reach out to an external world. Our experience is of grey; but if the mind is a substance and our perceptions are its qualities, then all we have is a grey mind. Whitehead sees in this momentous mistake the source of the vexed problems of skepticism and solipsism. If the mind is a substance and


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its perceptions are its properties, then the question arises as to how we know that there is an external world corresponding to our perceptions. Hume is said to be ‘the consistent exponent of the method’ used by modern philosophers to analyze our experiences precisely because of his readiness to admit that such a way of thinking of the mind leads to skepticism. In this respect, Hume compares favorably with other modern thinkers – and especially with Descartes, who can answer the skeptical challenge only by the arbitrary introduction of God. Whitehead’s critique is not a new one. The thesis that modern philosophers have been guilty of confounding inherence and intentionality was advanced by Moore in his paper of 1903 ‘The Refutation of Idealism’. Whitehead simply repeats that criticism, without any acknowledgement. Moore considers our perception of a blue object instead of a grey one, but the point is the same: Whether or not, when I have the sensation of blue, my consciousness and awareness is thus blue, my introspection does not enable me to decide with certainty ... But whether it is or not, the point is unimportant, for introspection does enable me to decide that something else is also true: namely that I am aware of blue, and by this I mean, that my awareness has to blue a quite distinct and different relation. It is possible, I admit, that my awareness is blue as well as being of blue: but what I am quite sure of is that it is of blue.7 The main difference between the two philosophers here is that Moore tried to solve the skeptical impasse by holding a theory of direct realism, according to which the mind is acquainted with independent existing objects. Moore follows Hume in believing that all sense experience is the awareness of sense data, however, so his theory has to face the problem of accounting for non-veridical experiences such as those we have in dreams, illusions, and hallucinations. Since these are also classified by Moore as acts of perception, in what sense can their objects be said to exist? Whitehead escapes skepticism by his theory of perception in the mode of causal efficacy, which is itself a realistic theory of experience, although it is not framed in terms of the notion of sense data. Incidentally, the fact that Whitehead repeats Moore’s point supports the thesis that at the turn of the century many thinkers in Cambridge were skeptical of the philosophical utility of the traditional conception of substance. There is little doubt that Whitehead’s (and Moore’s) general philosophical point is correct. The notions of substance and quality are inadequate as a way of analyzing human experience; whether the


metaphysics of substance has historically played the role they assign to it, however, is a quite different question. In Descartes’s Meditations, for example, all that is needed to evoke the specter of skepticism is that one can meaningfully ask questions of the sort ‘how do you know that you are not dreaming?’ One might think this is an idle question to ask, and Descartes himself provides much explanation to make us see that question – and the surprising hypothesis of a maligne génie – as worthy of any serious consideration. Hence, he tells his reader that, having been struck by the large number of falsehoods that he had accepted as true, he realized that ‘it was necessary, once in my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations’.8 This brief autobiographical piece is a rhetorical device meant to emphasize that the skeptical doubt is in the first instance a method for distinguishing knowledge from ignorance. In the Meditations, the skeptical impasse is not the puzzling outcome of a mistaken view of the nature of the mind but a problem that is raised with a purpose; far from being paradoxical, skepticism acquires a precise meaning within the framework of Descartes’s epistemological quest for certainty. An adequate reply to the skeptic would therefore require calling into question the legitimacy of Descartes’s wider epistemological project. Of course, Whitehead’s whole philosophy is a sustained protest against the idea that philosophy has axiomatic foundations from which conclusions about the nature of reality can be securely deduced. Philosophy is the search for the greater generalities, and Whitehead repeatedly states that it has been misled by the example of mathematics. But this does not overturn the present point, which is that Whitehead might be overemphasizing the negative role played by the conception of substance in setting the agenda of early modern philosophy. It is also misleading to suggest, as Whitehead does in the above passage and throughout Process and Reality, that all previous philosophers have been guilty of confounding the way properties are related to objects with the way objects of thought are related to the mind. In his Principles of Human Knowledge, for example, Bishop Berkeley is acutely aware of the distinction. Having argued that for a material object to be is to be perceived, he imagines a hostile philosopher challenging him with the following objection: if the being of matter is extension, and if it is true that for a material object to be is to be perceived, what prevents us from drawing the absurd conclusion ‘that the mind is extended and figured’? To this, Berkeley replies: I answer, that qualities are in the mind only as they are perceived by it, that is, not by way of mode or attribute, but only by way of idea;


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and it no more follows, that the soul or mind is extended because extension exists in it alone, than it does that it is red or blue, because those colours are on all hands acknowledged to exist in it, and no where else.9 This is a striking passage: pace Moore and Whitehead, by drawing a distinction between being in the mind ‘by way of mode or attribute’ or ‘by way of idea’, Berkeley shows that he could very well distinguish between inherence and intentionality. Another aspect of Whitehead’s critique that arouses suspicion is his claim that Hume conceives the mind as qualified by properties which are universals. The accusation is only alluded to in the above passage (Hume, Whitehead says there, ‘looked for a universal quality to function as qualifying the mind’), but elsewhere Whitehead is more explicit: ‘In Hume’s philosophy the primary impressions are characterized in terms of universals, e.g. in the first section of his Treatise he refers to the colour “red” as an illustration.’10 The emphasis is on the alleged universality of Hume’s impressions of sensation. Whitehead seems to believe that, since Hume reduces impressions to properties of a substantial mind, and since properties are universals, he must also think that impressions are universal in nature. Whitehead is here guilty of a serious misinterpretation. Hume spends much time in the very early sections of the Treatise to clarify that all of the mind’s contents are particular in nature. He even argues that, since all impressions are particular and all ideas derive from impressions, there cannot be abstract universal ideas. Hume’s account of general ideas is dispositional: all ideas are of individual things, yet in the appropriate circumstances they might be capable of evoking other ideas of the same kind and in this way function as signs with a general signification.11 Whitehead reinforces the point that Hume’s substantialistic account of the mind makes it impossible to explain our intercourse with an external world by means of a brief discussion of Hume’s account of memory. In accounting for memory, Hume can only appeal to the very limited conceptuality made available by his atomistic theory of the mind; hence he is led to the doctrine that memory is the awareness of an idea endowed with a certain degree of ‘force and vivacity’. Whitehead rejects this explanation, because it fails to grasp the peculiar character of memory, namely that it involves a reference to the past. On Hume’s account, he writes in Symbolism, ‘[e]ven memory goes: for a memoryimpression is not an impression of memory. It is only another immediate private impression’.12 To have a picture in front of one’s mental eye is


not to remember anything; at most, it is a way of thinking or imagining something vividly. Whitehead is indebted for this objection to Santayana’s Skepticism and Animal Faith. One reason why Whitehead regards it as important is that Hume’s flawed explanation provides a specific illustration of his more general failure to show how the mind can reach outside itself. If Hume’s theory of the mind were true, then the human mind would be filled with contents that bear no witness of an outer world – neither of a contemporary nor of a past one. Santayana speaks in this connection of the ‘solipsism of the present moment’, a mental state of absolute isolation in which one is merely aware of the present show of sensations and the mind is locked into a solitary presence. (Such a state resembles the one described in Chapter 4, when awareness of the world’s causal efficacy fades and the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy predominates.) The contradiction of thinking of the mind both as a substance and as a process is not the only one with which Whitehead charges Hume. In spite of his skepticism, Hume cannot help believing in the reality of an external world. Thus, a conflict arises between his philosophical beliefs and what he believes in practice: Hume, in so far as he is to be construed as remaining content with two uncoordinated sets of beliefs, one based on the critical examination of our sources of knowledge, and the other on the uncritical examination of beliefs involved in ‘practice’, reaches the high watermark of anti-rationalism in philosophy.13 Once again, this criticism is partly insightful and partly misguided. Hume argues in the Treatise that our belief in the external world is not based upon the senses or upon reason. Whitehead’s point is that, if he had recognized that there is more to experience than what falls under the senses, he might have come to recognize that we have immediate experience of external realities in perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Had he done so, no contradiction would have arisen between his philosophical and his commonsense views. This is a fair (and by now well-known) criticism of Hume’s philosophy, but the accusation of ‘irrationalism’ is quite unjustified. In the Treatise Hume does not merely argue that neither the senses nor reason provide sufficient justification for believing in an external world. He also asks why we are so prone to believe in the reality of external things, going at great lengths to describe the psychological mechanism that


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causes us to believe in the reality of the external world even in what he takes to be an absence of sufficient empirical evidence and rational justification. In his explanation, Hume appeals to the imagination as a faculty that helps us overcome the skepticism from which neither the senses nor the intellect can rescue us. Hume’s explanation of that psychological mechanism might be wrong, yet surely he does not ‘remain content’ with the contradiction between what we ought to believe on philosophical grounds and what we believe in practice. On the contrary, Hume’s theory of the imagination as the causal foundation of our most basic beliefs is an ingenious way of rationalizing precisely that contradiction. Why so many doubtful interpretations? The explanation is not to be sought in Whitehead’s limited knowledge of the history of philosophy, but in his proclivity to overemphasize the negative influence exerted by the metaphysics of substance. In dealing with the history of modern philosophy, he privileges the abstract interpretive scheme at the expense of the richness and variety of that history – thus falling prey to that same fallacy of misplaced concreteness of which he had so forcefully accused materialistic scientism. The final result is a bewildering mixture of insights, distortions, and sheer misunderstandings.

James, Whitehead, and the specious present In his writings, Whitehead is always appreciative of William James’s achievements and especially of his analysis of the stream of consciousness, as this is presented in The Principles of Psychology and, more briefly, in A Pluralistic Universe. In The Principles of Psychology James’s discussion of the nature of the self takes off from the very same point at which Hume had left it, namely with the recognition that the notion of the self as an underlying bearer of impressions has to be discarded. James acknowledges the validity of Hume’s critique of the spiritualistic doctrine that the self is an underlying substantial principle, before proceeding to a discussion of the associationist and the transcendentalist conceptions of the self. As against these doctrines, he argues that they either explain nothing or else involve a tacit appeal to the traditional notion of the self as an underlying principle of unity. In the associationist theory, for example, the mind is nothing but a bundle of perceptions: what keeps them together? What makes my perceptions mine? Associationism leaves this question unanswered or solves it by tacitly reintroducing the notion of the substantial self, as James tries to show by quoting passages from the works of several associationist thinkers.14

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Likewise, the transcendentalist postulates the reality of a pure Ego as the condition of the unity of the manifold of our sensations: if ‘transcendental Ego’ refers to an underlying principle of unity, how does it differ from the traditional soul? And if it does not refer to any such principle, why is it more than a way of designating what needs to be explained – the fact that in the mind different perceptions come as a unity?15 The common trait of all these theories is that they attempt to explain the unity of the mind on the assumption that there is a plurality of distinct sensations that need to be unified. James rejects this assumption as ungrounded, arguing that the simplest element concretely given in introspection is never a single sensation. Advocating a holistic approach in which the basic unit is the total state of consciousness, James contends that we reach a better understanding of the nature of our experience if we recognize that it is not made of atomic sensations, but that it comes in ‘pulses’ or ‘epochal wholes’ – total moments of experience, each of which has an internal complexity but is in itself entirely unified. We learn more about the nature of such pulses in a chapter entitled ‘The Perception of Time’, where James introduces the concept of the specious present. James’s thesis is that each total moment of experience comes as an extended unity or duration-block that conserves a fading echo of the immediate past while also having a sense of an incoming future: A simple sensation ... is an abstraction, and all our concrete states of mind are representations of objects with some amount of complexity. Part of the complexity is the echo of the objects just past, and, in a less degree, perhaps, the foretaste of those just to arrive.16 In our stream of consciousness successive wholes melt into each other, thus establishing the continuity of our psychical life. We can distinguish different elemental sensations within each duration-block, but they are just aspects of a more concrete unity and possess no independent existence. Whitehead seems to have arrived quite early, and independently of James, at his metaphysical conclusions. Nevertheless, in Science and the Modern World he indicates that the notion of the specious present provides a sound basis for metaphysical generalization.17 Like James’s specious present, an actual occasion is a temporal duration-block that retains some aspects of the past moments, while living in the


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anticipation of the moment about to come. In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead explains his position thus: we deny this immediately given instantaneous present. There is no such thing to be found in nature. As an ultimate fact [as opposed to a useful abstraction] it is a non-entity. What is immediate for senseawareness is a duration. Now a duration has within itself a past and a future ... What we perceive as present is the vivid fringe of memory tinged with anticipation.18 We never experience instantaneous points, but always larger units or durations. If the basis for metaphysics must be provided by what is given in our immediate consciousness, then the basic building blocks of reality must be conceived as being temporally extended. Our ordinary understanding of time as a linear series of instantaneous points is another instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. To believe that there is such a thing as ‘nature existing at an instant’ – or that all there is to time is a succession of temporal points – is to mistake an abstraction for a concrete reality. As concretely experienced, time comes in extended pulses or total extended moments, but ‘[t]he fallacy of “misplaced concreteness” abstracts from time this specific character, and leaves time with the generic notion of pure succession’.19 It is not even true that the duration of such pulses is uniformly the same; time, as concretely given, is quite different from the series of equidistant points we take it to be. The phenomenon identified by Whitehead and James is one many thinkers had cast their eyes upon in the second half of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth century, however differently they might have then analyzed it philosophically. In The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Edmund Husserl introduces two concepts that nicely capture the Janus-faced nature of the present, living moment of experience: retention, which refers to the echoing of the past in the present, and protention, which refers to an occasion’s anticipation of the incoming future.20 To the best of my knowledge, the word ‘retention’ occurs only once in Whitehead’s writings and with a meaning partially different from the one that is at issue here.21 Husserl’s terminology is particularly useful as a way of designating the psychological phenomenon Whitehead focuses his attention upon, however, and will therefore be occasionally used in the sequel. Before proceeding further and entering into a discussion of Whitehead’s account of causation, a question needs to be raised: is the


notion of the specious present a mere statement of facts or is it already a metaphysical theory? That our experience comes as a series of interlocked pulses can certainly be disputed. For one thing, it is strange that it would have taken so long for philosophers to recognize the epochal nature of our experiences if this were as evident a fact as James and Whitehead take it to be. One might see Whitehead as overemphasizing the extent to which philosophers are made blind by their adherence to mistaken modes of thought. After all, the notion that the self is a substance might simply be a wrong answer to a real problem, namely that of accounting for the fact that we do have a real sense of ourselves as an overarching, enduring presence. Most importantly, there is something abstract and intellectualistic about the reconstruction of our stream of consciousness as an interlocked series of extended duration-blocks. In spite of the fact that it can be broken, the continuity of our experience is by far the overwhelming feature of our psychical life. The artificiality of the analysis of the stream of consciousness in terms of epochal wholes of experience becomes clear as soon as we ask ourselves a very simple question: where do we draw the line between one epochal moment and the next? In the majority of cases, this would seem to be an arbitrary decision. In the case of experiences in which one suffers a shock or is momentarily surprised – such as, to use one of James’s examples, our hearing of a sudden thunder – there would seem to be real cuts in our experiential flux. At the same time, these are relatively rare cases, insufficient as a basis for establishing a general theory as to the nature of our experience. The notion that the stream of consciousness comes in pulses cannot be regarded as a pure phenomenological description; it already involves a metaphysical interpretation. This conclusion finds some further confirmation in Whitehead’s discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes of the Arrow and of Achilles and the Tortoise. Whitehead argues that the paradoxes are generated by the assumption that time is infinitely divisible. But if we recognize that real time is made up of epochal wholes that are not further divisible into other such wholes, the reasoning that leads to the paradoxical conclusions cannot even get started. In the context of the present discussion, this suggests a question: are we asked to believe in the epochal nature of temporal consciousness because this is how we experience it, or because as a philosophical doctrine it has the advantage of avoiding Zeno’s paradoxes? Surprisingly enough, Whitehead never addresses – and therefore never answers unambiguously – the question whether actual occasions are theoretical posits or realities of which we are supposed to be immediately aware.22


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Understanding causation through metaphysical generalization In order to grasp Whitehead’s procedure in achieving an understanding of the nature of causation, one must start with the recognition that actual occasions are organized into series. In the case of those series Whitehead calls ‘personal societies’ each occasion inherits a common character from its predecessor, which justifies treating each momentary occurrence as a moment in the life of an enduring individual. It should be noted that the term ‘personal’ carries no specific human or moral connotation. The term is used by Whitehead in a legal sense: all the members of a legally established institution can change and yet the institution remains the same as long as its defining characteristics are sustained by the new members. Likewise, all there is to a society at any one moment is a single occasion and over time a series of them. Since occasions are serially ordered and resemble each other in some basic respects, however, it is possible at a certain level of abstraction to treat the whole society as if it were a single enduring thing. One example of a personal society is the human mind, which is a single series of occasions of experience. Other societies have more complex structures, in that they are constituted by several strands of more simple personal societies. The notion that occasions are parts of larger societies makes it possible to distinguish between two kinds of causal relations. Whitehead holds that each occasion influences the following one within the series (or society) to which it belongs; thus, A1 acts on A2, which in turn acts upon A3. At the same time, Whitehead believes that different causal series are not self-enclosed: occasions of experience belonging to the series A1, A2, A3 ... are capable of influencing occasions belonging to other series, for example the sequence B1, B2, B3 ... . A distinction can therefore be drawn between two sorts of causal relations – causal relations holding between occasions within a causal series (say, the action of A1 upon A2) and causal relations holding between occasions belonging to distinct series (say, the action of A1 upon B2). The distinction at issue is one that arises in the philosophy of Leibniz as well. Although Leibniz denies the reality of causal relations between distinct monads, he conceives of the monad as endowed with the force to propel the transition from one perceptual state to another. On a process view of the ultimate constituents of reality as momentary occasions arranged into series, one is in a position to draw a distinction between immanent causation (which remains ‘inside’ the same series or monad)

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and transeunt causation (which holds ‘between’ distinct monads). Leibniz’s conception of the windowless monad amounts to a denial of transeunt causation, but his conception of the monad as an active principle is really an affirmation of the reality of immanent causation. Implicitly building on Leibniz’s distinction, Whitehead argues that – in a universe in which all occasions are of the same general ontological type, independently of the series to which they belong – we can hope to gain some understanding of the nexus that binds occasions of different series by means of our understanding of the nexus between occasions in the same series. In his view, immanent causation is the key to an understanding of transeunt causation. Roughly, the reasoning is as follows. (1) We have direct empirical knowledge of the nature of immanent causation, as well as of (2) the existence of an external world in which causal agents operate. On the assumption that (3) all occasions of experience are of the same ontological type, we can (4) use our immediate knowledge of immanent causation as the basis for framing a general notion of causation, which we can then apply to all kinds of causal bonds. This strategy is made wholly explicit by Whitehead, who explains it as follows: If we hold, as for example in Process and Reality, that all final individual actualities have the metaphysical character of occasions of experience, then on that hypothesis the direct evidence as to the connectedness of one’s own immediate present occasion of experience with one’s immediately past occasions, can be validly used to suggest categories applying to the connectedness of all occasions in nature.23 The point is repeated in Adventures of Ideas; having claimed that, within the series of interlocked occasions that constitute our own stream of consciousness, ‘there is an observed relation of causation between such occasions’, he goes on to say that ‘in so far as we apply notions of causation to the understanding of events in nature, we must conceive these events under the general notions which apply to occasions of experience’. As he also hastens to add: ‘we can only understand causation in terms of our observations of these occasions.’24 Whitehead is not claiming here to provide a cogent argument. His claim is weaker and amounts to the recognition that the method of generalization from one’s conscious experience is the sole procedure at our disposal if we want to say anything at all about the nature of causation. Of the four theses listed above, (2), (3) and (4) have been already discussed in the foregoing pages, and therefore require only little attention


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here. Thesis (2) is Whitehead’s realism as to the external world and as to causation. Its justification is provided by Whitehead’s analysis of experience and criticism of Hume, and its role in the above reasoning is to escape solipsism, so as to ensure that there is a real web of relations onto which our generalized notion of causation can be projected. Thesis (3) is a basic assumption of the philosophy of Whitehead, who characterizes his inquiries as an attempt to frame a cosmological ‘scheme for one type of actual entities’.25 Although ontological type-monism is thus true by hypothesis, it can be supported by the reflection that, if the basic constituents of reality were ontologically different in kind, then causal interaction would be impossible. On the contrary hypothesis we would have to admit a plurality of kinds of substances, so that one would immediately face problems of interaction analogous to those that arise with Cartesian dualism. Step (4) presupposes Whitehead’s method of philosophical generalization, but one should note that the method is now stretched to an unusual extent. It is one thing to generalize from one’s own awareness of the relation that holds between one’s moments of mentality to analogous relations that are supposed to hold between moments of mentality of other beings. Quite another thing, and one that involves a great speculative leap, is to generalize from an immanent to a transeunt relation. Whitehead can’t be conclusively shown to be wrong, yet his is not an obvious step to take: treating immanent and transeunt relations as of a kind involves the rather counter-intuitive claim that we are influenced by our own past in pretty much the same way in which we are influenced by the past of other actualities (this must be so, because otherwise we deny continuity between the two relations and generalization becomes impossible).26 Even more controversial is premise (1), Whitehead’s belief that we observe the workings of causation in our own personal consciousness. Whitehead’s suggestion here is that the way in which several moments of experience are interlocked to form a continuous stream might also be the way they act upon each other. The phenomenon of retention, the fact that the present moment of experience echoes aspects of the past one, is interpreted as an instance of causal influence. On this view, how the past survives in the present is how the present is influenced by the past. This doctrine is surprising on a first hearing, and Whitehead does not say much to justify his choice. But the point is touched upon in Symbolism, where it is first treated as an entirely obvious fact, immediately available to introspection: ‘The present fact’, Whitehead says, ‘is luminously the


outcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago.’27 Whitehead then illustrates his thesis by imagining that we are hearing a sudden explosion; how would the explosion affect our psychic life? Unsuspected factors may have intervened; dynamite may have exploded. But, however that may be, the present event issues subject to the limitations laid upon it by the actual nature of the immediate past. If dynamite explodes, then present fact is that issue from the past which is consistent with dynamite exploding.28 One way to grasp Whitehead’s meaning here is by considering what would have happened if the explosion had not occurred. Perhaps we were reading a book: in this case, there would have been little alteration in our stream of consciousness; each moment would have been continuous with the previous ones and largely conformal to them. Once the explosion occurs, however, there is a sudden break – but even here the break is not a total one, for the explosion is now felt as breaking the previous state. In order for this to be possible, however, in order for us to literally feel the break, the explosion must be felt within a moment of experience in which some elements of the past are retained. If this were not so, the explosion would simply catapult us into a new conscious state without giving us the sense of a sudden change or interruption. The implication is that the present is always, in some sense, a continuation of the past. What is now will in all cases condition the next moment of experience: ‘the present event issues subject to the limitations laid upon it by the actual nature of the immediate past.’29

Whitehead’s answer to Leibniz But even granted that we have an observed instance of immanent causation in the phenomenon of retention, how can we use this apparently minimal piece of knowledge to frame a general notion of causation? Whitehead’s theory is that a living moment of experience does not perish into nothingness when it has elapsed; rather, it loses ‘subjective immediacy’ and survives as ‘objectified’ in the novel one. As Whitehead puts it, All relatedness [between occasions] ... is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living – that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming.30


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On this theory, the present living moment of experience literally includes the past, which becomes one of its ‘real components’. Since the past is contained in the present in propria persona, and not merely by way of representation, the very same experiences are successively ‘owned’ by two different moments of subjectivity. One example might help to make this idea clearer. The notes I enjoy now while listening to the radio will keep resonating in the total experience of my next occasion of mentality, although they will have to be there not as presently felt but as just gone. According to Whitehead, what changes in this case is not the experience of the note itself, but the modality of that experience’s existence, which loses ‘subjective immediacy’ and becomes ‘objectively immortal’. On this view, aspects of our experience are capable of escaping the elapsing occasion so as to penetrate or ‘flow’ into the novel one, thereby prolonging their existence into a sort of immortality. Since present experiences are retained in later moments that will in turn become components of other moments, there is a sense in which the present includes all the past; the past does not vanish from existence, but goes on existing by being cumulated in future moments of existence. Whitehead formulates his metaphysical analysis of human temporal experience in terms of the category of ‘physical prehension’. The term ‘prehension’ suggests that the designated act is a special act of perception, which is precisely the claim Whitehead wishes to make. If the echoing of the past involves the real absorption within the present of partial aspects of previous occasions, then prehension is a way of being in touch with other actualities. On this conception, ‘objectification’ (causation) and ‘prehension’ (perception) are two ways of describing the same apparently paradoxical fact – the immanence of the transcendent past in the present. Whitehead’s doctrine that reality consists of moments of experience capable of merging into each other is fascinating, but not very easy to understand. Before discussing an objection that can be advanced against it, let’s consider in what sense it constitutes a reply to Leibniz’s argument against physical influx. Jonathan Bennett has observed that ‘like some of his contemporaries, Leibniz held that transeunt causation properly so-called involves transference of tropes or “individual accidents” from one substance to another’. Commenting upon Leibniz’s criticism of physical influx, Bennett makes the following remark: ‘This [Leibniz’s criticism] does not lead him to reconsider his views about what transeunt causation would be; rather, he infers that such causation does not happen.’31


According to Bennett here either physical influx is an intelligible conception or we abandon the general notion that causation involves a real contagion of a passive substance by an active one. Bennett is certainly right in holding that one possible response to Leibniz’s perplexity as to physical influx is to question the underlying general understanding of causation instead of bluntly denying that causation occurs. Whitehead tries to cut a middle path in this dilemma, for he does not question the Leibnizian understanding of causation. The conclusion he draws from Leibniz’s criticism is not that interaction in the guise of an influx is impossible in principle, but rather that a different sort of influx takes place than that envisaged by Leibniz. In Modes of Thought Whitehead says that ‘[t]he mere notion of transferring a quality is entirely unintelligible’,32 and in Adventures of Ideas he writes that ‘the present moment is constituted by the influx of the other into the self-identity which is the continued life of the immediate past within the immediacy of the present’.33 The ‘other’ entering the ‘immediacy of the present’ is not a ‘quality’ but the ‘immediate past’, yet this does not alter the fact that there is a real exchange of contents between the past and the present occasion. Although Whitehead does not mention Leibniz in these passages, it is remarkable that he should have used the term ‘influx’ to explain his views.34

Sprigge on Whitehead on ‘objectification’ and ‘prehension’ Can Whitehead’s doctrine of causation be intelligibly sustained? Timothy Sprigge is one of a handful of philosophers to have advocated panpsychism in the second half of the latter century. Sprigge goes along with Whitehead and James in holding that psychical reality is best understood in terms of occasions or pulses of experience, as well as in acknowledging the reality of the phenomenon of retention. He forcefully rejects, however, Whitehead’s doctrine of objectification: I find Whitehead’s solution unacceptable, since I can make no sense of a later experience containing an earlier as opposed to in some manner echoing it ... I don’t see how an experience which has lost subjective immediacy can be the same particular as an element in a later experience. Indeed, the very notion of loss of subjective immediacy seems unintelligible.35 According to Sprigge, to say that an experience changes its mode of being, which happens when an experience loses subjective immediacy


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and becomes objectively immortal, can only mean that that experience ceases to exist. The experience that is retained can be a copy of the one just gone, an item of the same general kind, but will have to be a different particular. The objection can perhaps be brought more sharply into focus by reformulating it as follows. Consider the previous example of our hearing a piece of music. The notes just heard will keep resonating in the next moment, yet once there they will have lost their character of ‘presentness’ and will have assumed a character of ‘pastness’. Otherwise put, the experience of the notes feels in a different way when the notes are felt as just elapsed than when they are felt as immediately present. Whitehead would now seem to be saying that an experience might display a different qualitative feel while remaining the very same experience. This raises a difficult question: what are the criteria for the identification of experiences? One reasonable assumption that could be made here is to say that for an experience to be is to feel in a certain way. In the Principles of Psychology, William James formulates this idea with characteristic force: ‘the essence of feeling is to be felt, and as a psychic existent feels, so it must be.’36 If this criterion is applied to the example of a piece of music, it follows that, since the retained notes have a different feel than the notes heard for the first time, these must be two different experiences. This objection could be countered by denying that the identifying feature of an experience is its qualitative feel. This is precisely what Whitehead’s repeated claim that there are unconscious experiences37 would seem to imply, for a way of feeling is always a way something feels to someone. Accordingly, if experiences have special, distinctive feels, they must be necessarily present to a subject, which in turn implies that they cannot be unconscious. New questions immediately arise: should we admit the reality of unconscious experiences – and if yes, why? If the proposed criterion for the identification of experiences is rejected, what is the right one? To answer these questions one would have to construct a complete theory of experience, including a theory of the unconscious. Fortunately, another approach to the present limited problem is possible, namely by asking whether Whitehead’s belief in the existence of unconscious experience really involves a rejection of the proposed criterion for the identification of experience. At first sight this would seem to be so, yet a closer look at Whitehead’s use of the term ‘conscious’ makes this uncertain. There is a risk of equivocation here, for Whitehead’s use is highly idiosyncratic and limited to those states in which a subject is aware that a present observed

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reality could have been different from what it is: ‘The general case of conscious perception is the negative perception, namely “perceiving this stone as not grey.” The “grey” then has ingression in its full character of a conceptual novelty, illustrating an alternative.’38 And again, he says that ‘[t]he triumph of consciousness comes with the negative intuitive judgment. In this case there is a conscious feeling of what might be, and is not’.39 As these passages suggest, ‘consciousness’ stands for a particular mental state whose content involves a comparison between reality and potentiality. On this understanding of the term, the affirmation of unconscious experiences is wholly compatible with the denial of the existence of experiences without a qualitative feel. It is all but clear that Whitehead is rejecting the criterion for the identification of experience that is presupposed in the objection at issue here; his position might therefore be vulnerable to Sprigge’s objection. Before drawing any definitive conclusion, however, it might be helpful to give a closer look at Whitehead’s analysis of the transactions between two occasions of human mentality. Whitehead does not solely link his notion of prehension with the phenomenon of retention, but also with that of sympathy. To recognize this is, in the first place, to recognize the continuity between Whitehead’s theory and Ward’s. Ward had argued that monadic interaction can be conceived as a form of sympathetic rapport, but was then unable to specify any of the details of this rapport. Whitehead’s revised doctrine of physical influx can now be interpreted as an attempt to fill this gap. Since the present occasion feels anew an experience that was originally felt by a previous occasion, there is a sense in which it can be said to have a sympathetic grasp of that occasion’s feelings: ‘The primitive form of physical experience is emotional – blind emotion – received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion.’40 And even more explicitly, Whitehead writes: ‘In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another.’41 Ward is not mentioned by Whitehead in these passages, but the similarity in the conception is evident. One difficulty here is that it is not clear how the same one notion, that of causation, could be modeled on the basis of two different phenomena such as those of retention and sympathy. On the face of it, they are so diverse that one wonders whether they can both be used as a starting point for metaphysical generalization. The problem is the same as with Sprigge’s objection: if the prehended experience has a different qualitative feel, in what sense is one justified in speaking of sympathy as a real


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sharing of experiences? An answer to this question might be found by considering more closely Whitehead’s technical account of the initial phases of an occasion’s life, which is part of what he calls the ‘genetical analysis’ of an actual occasion, namely his explanation of how an actual occasion comes into being. According to Whitehead, the life of each occasion begins with a ‘conformal feeling’ of the past. All prehensions have an object, which in the case of physical prehensions is a past actuality, and a subjective form, which is the particular way in which that actuality is felt. In the initial phase of the occasion’s life what is prehended is not the past actuality in toto, but selected aspects of it, for example one of its prehensions. Since this prehension has an object and a subjective form, it can be represented as [o]s – where ‘o’ refers to the object and ‘s’ to the subject ive form. What the novel occasion prehends is the whole [o]s; since this novel prehension too has a subjective form, it can be represented as [[o]s]s’. What is the relation between s and s’? Whitehead thinks this is one of identity, which enables him to talk of ‘conformal feelings’ and to appeal to the phenomenon of sympathy: the experience [o]s originally belonging to the past actuality is felt by the novel occasion in the very same way, namely with a subjective form s’ that is identical to s. Whitehead furthermore argues that the novel prehension [[o]s]s’ is integrated with a multiplicity of other prehensions, all of which have the same nested structure, until a final synthesis of prehensions is achieved in the satisfaction – the total moment of experience that constitutes one of the pulses of our psychic life. On this analysis, the very same element that was a component of the previous moment of experience, [o]s, is now integrated within the novel occasion. The important point is that the prehended element [o]s enters the novel occasion without losing the original subjective form s, which is even reduplicated by s’. Now, this account of an occasion’s early phases provides something of an answer to Sprigge’s objection. Reverting one last time to the example of our hearing of a musical piece, Whitehead’s analysis implies that the past experience of the notes enters the novel occasion with the original subjective feel, so that there really is a transmission of the same element between the two occasions. Why then do the retained notes feel differently in the novel occasion? Apparently, this must be because the original experience [o]s has been integrated with several others. What feels differently, in other words, is not the transmitted experience per se, but a larger complex of experiences in which it is now nested. Of course, Whitehead’s account of the initial phase of an occasion of experience is as speculative as the rest of his discussion of causation. The

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coming into being of a novel moment of experience is not something we can directly inspect. That process is the one in which our moments of mentality originate; since Whitehead rejects the notion of a self different from its perceptions and identifies it with his concrete experiential pulses, in the course of the genetic process no determinate self does yet exist that could observe what is happening there. In the present case, this means that it is impossible in principle to check whether there are such things as conformal feelings in Whitehead’s sense, namely prehensions of prehensions with a reduplicated subjective form. Whereas on a large scale it is possible to find some significant correspondences between Whitehead’s metaphysical notion of an actual occasion and our own conscious experiences, the possibility of establishing direct connections vanishes when the occasion is analyzed genetically. One has wholly left behind the level of phenomenological observation and is now practicing a form of metaphysics that might perhaps be called ‘constructive phenomenology’. In this sense, the designation ‘genetic analysis’ is misleading, insofar as it suggests that the datum to be analyzed, the coming into being of a moment of experience, is something that is actually given. Whitehead’s account of the initial phases of an actual occasion and of the mechanism by which causation operates is strong enough to resist Sprigge’s objection; because of its speculative character, however, it is such that it can be disbelieved without absurdity.

Conclusion Like most philosophical problems, the question of the nature of causation is a multifaceted one. The present chapter has focused upon what, in traditional Aristotelian terminology, goes by the denomination of efficient causation. While the general philosophical and historical significance of the problem is obvious, its centrality for Process and Reality’s speculative enterprise is made clear by Whitehead himself. A few years after the publication of his magnum opus, he commented upon that work thus: The notion of the prehension of the past means that the past is an element which perishes and thereby remains an element in the state beyond, and thus is objectified ... If you get a general notion of what is meant by perishing, you will have accomplished an apprehension of what you mean by memory and causality, what you mean when you feel that what we are is of infinite importance, because as we


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perish we are immortal. That is the one key thought around which the whole development of Process and Reality is woven.42 However, it is precisely this notion of ‘perishing’ – the idea of an experience’s survival despite its loss of subjective immediacy – that has proved so difficult to understand. Another way in which Whitehead breaks with modern modes of thought is in his rehabilitation of the notion of final causation. The subjects of experience that constitute the metaphysical backbone of the natural world do not merely affect one another; they are also animated by their own individual aims. The question of whether there are purposes in nature lies at the centre of the following two chapters, which explore God’s function within Whitehead’s overall metaphysical scheme.

6 The Reality of Forms: Whitehead’s Theistic Argument

Introduction The present discussion of Whitehead’s natural theology – and of his theory of divine agency – is divided into two parts. This chapter deals with Whitehead’s reasons in support of the existence of God; the next one considers his understanding of the relationship between God and the world of actual occasions. Whitehead is justly celebrated for his original conception of the nature of God, which he strips of many of the attributes orthodox philosophy ascribed to the deity and that rendered God’s existence hardly believable. Whitehead’s God is neither omniscient nor all-powerful nor the creator of the world, which means that traditional objections, such as those based upon the problem of evil and the reality of creaturely freedom, do not arise in his philosophy. A more traditional side of Whitehead’s thinking emerges in his attempts to prove the existence of God. Whitehead does not advance either the ontological or the cosmological argument, yet he offers a revised version of the design argument and several passages suggest that he holds the so-called ‘moral argument’, the Kantian claim that our experience of moral obligation can be made intelligible only by postulating the reality of God as an ultimate standard of value.1 The proof investigated in the present chapter receives no title in Whitehead’s metaphysics. Charles Hartshorne refers to it as ‘the Argument from the Ontological Principle’,2 but it could also be called ‘the Argument from the Eternal Objects’, since it bears some significant similarities with a line of reasoning developed by Leibniz and 106

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that Russell labeled ‘the Argument from the Eternal Truths’ in his early study of the philosophy of the German thinker.3 Like all proofs, in attempting to establish the reality of its object it conveys something about its object’s nature. Its examination will therefore provide an insight into Whitehead’s conception of the deity, although only a partial one. A word must be said at this point about the often-heard complaint that Whitehead fails to provide sufficient arguments for his views. Indeed, some might be surprised to hear that there is anything like a proof in Whitehead’s philosophy at all. In the widely read A Hundred Years of Philosophy, for example, John Passmore observes that ‘[t]here are those who would maintain that he [Whitehead] is the outstanding philosopher of our century’.4 He then immediately adds that ‘there are others who would dismiss his metaphysical constructions as obscure private dreams’.5 Passmore must have had some sympathy with the latter group, however, since he also says that Whitehead’s style produces in ‘the chronicler of contemporary thought a feeling of desperation’.6 Although there is some truth in Passmore’s accusation, it should be evident by now that the extent to which Whitehead fails to make explicit the grounds of his positions tends to be unduly overemphasized. His style and terminology have to be digested before one can begin to appreciate his philosophy’s argumentative structure. But in Modes of Thought Whitehead says, to the surprise of most of his readers and to the chagrin of hard-core analytical philosophers, that ‘in philosophical writings proof should be at a minimum’.7 The context makes it clear, however, that he only means to deny that arguments are the end of philosophical activity and recall what should be uncontroversial, namely that what truly matters is that we reach some understanding of the nature of things. Surely, if we could have an intuitive grasp of the truth, we would have no need for arguments. We do all see at a glance that 4 + 1 is equal to 3 + 2, but are we capable of judging with the same immediacy that 19 + 58 yields the same result as 31 + 46? Whitehead tells the story of the Indian Ramanujan, who was said to have had this sort of ability for the first 100 integers. As Whitehead remarks, most of us do not and need ‘to have recourse to the indignity of proof’.8 While explicitly downgrading the importance of philosophical arguments, Whitehead thus implicitly recognizes their significance for us; since we do not enjoy the privilege of divine insight, we do need arguments as an inroad to knowledge.


The argument from the reality of the eternal objects The proof in question is stated by Whitehead in an early section of Process and Reality: The scope of the ontological principle is not exhausted by the corollary that ‘decision’ must be referable to an actual entity. Everything must be somewhere; and here ‘somewhere’ means some ‘actual entity’. Accordingly, the general potentiality of the universe 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’. It is a contradiction in terms to assume that some explanatory fact can float into the actual world out of nonentity. Nonentity is nothingness. Every explanatory fact refers to the decision and to the efficacy of an actual thing. The notion of ‘subsistence’ is merely the notion of how eternal objects can be components of the primordial nature of God ... eternal objects, as in God’s primordial nature, constitute the Platonic world of ideas.9 The main thrust of the argument is clear enough: Whitehead is advancing a version of the Neo-Platonist and scholastic doctrine that abstract entities need an ontological foundation in God’s intellect. Its logical structure, its underlying premises and the specific import of the conclusion are not equally evident. In order to reach a clearer understanding, it might be helpful to begin by considering Whitehead’s contention in the final line that there is a class of entities – ‘the eternal objects’ – that bear important similarities to Plato’s Ideas. Specifically, in order to see how the argument works, it is necessary to illustrate two main questions that arise with regard to the eternal objects’ nature. Whitehead does not provide a complete inventory of the class of eternal objects in his works. A survey of the several passages in which they are mentioned makes it sufficiently clear that it includes mathematical entities such as numbers and geometrical figures as well as the universal properties of things. In The Function of Reason, Whitehead writes that the eternal objects are ‘the Platonic Forms, the Platonic Ideas, the medieval universals’.10 In Process and Reality he refers to a subclass of the eternal objects as ‘the mathematical Platonic forms’.11 For the purposes of the present chapter, the significant fact about eternal objects is that they include the possible forms of definiteness for the particular actualities of


the world: ‘An eternal object’, Whitehead says, ‘is always a potentiality for actual entities.’12 And even more clearly, he writes that ‘if the term eternal object is disliked, the term potentials would be suitable. The eternal objects are the pure potentials of the universe; and the actual entities differ from each other in their realization of potentials’.13 Actual occasions achieve determinateness by instantiating a form or complex pattern of forms (a complex eternal object). When the final state of full determinateness has been reached, the actuality is said to have achieved satisfaction. At this point, it ceases to exist as in process and becomes a definite, objective constituent of the world. The realm of eternal objects is the repository of all forms that can find ingression in such actualities and, by their means, in the world-process. Insofar as forms are the possible shapes of definiteness for the worldly actualities, they can be properly regarded as potentials for actualization. An ambiguity in Whitehead’s use of the term ‘potentiality’ needs to be cleared up. At any given moment, only a selection of the total realm of forms will be available to an actual occasion. ‘The actual world, in so far as it is a community of entities which are settled, actual, and already become, conditions and limits the potentiality for creativeness beyond itself.’14 My decision not too long ago to read a book instead of going to the movie is the settled past that now precludes me from enjoying visual experiences of a certain characteristic sort associated with the seeing of a movie. Since that decision is a precondition for imaginative experiences of a different sort to occur, my mind will come to be shaped in a different way because of it. Whitehead distinguishes in this connection between the general and the real potentiality of the universe. The former is straightforwardly identified with the realm of eternal objects. In his account of the latter concept, Whitehead oscillates between an understanding of real potentiality as the selected portion of eternal objects that become available to an occasion on account of the immediate past, and an understanding of real potentiality as being itself that actual past. The former interpretation is supported by the following passage: we have always to consider two meanings of potentiality: (a) the ‘general’ potentiality, which is the bundle of possibilities ... provided by the multiplicity of eternal objects, and (b) the ‘real’ potentiality, which is conditioned by the data provided by the actual world.15 Surely, if a real potentiality is ‘conditioned’ by the data provided by the actual world, it can’t be identical with the actual world. And yet,

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only a few lines earlier Whitehead had said that a real potentiality ‘is nothing else than the actual world itself in its character of a possibility for the process of being felt [that is, for a novel emerging actuality]’.16 This uncertainty does not affect the argument under consideration, yet it exemplifies that lack of clarity so often condemned in Whitehead’s writings. Having identified the class of eternal objects with the general potentiality of the universe, Whitehead goes on to raise two distinct but closely related questions. The first concerns the eternal objects’ ontological status. An unrealized possibility is by its very nature neither actual nor instantiated in any actual thing; nevertheless, there must be a sense in which possibilities are, for otherwise they could not be relevant to the actual course of things. This is the point behind Whitehead’s only apparently barren remark in his statement of the argument that ‘Nonentity is nothingness.’ His use of the philosophically loaded term ‘subsistence’ is just another way of emphasizing the problematical ontological status of possibilities, which are more than ‘nothingness’ but less than full ‘actualities’. Whitehead compares the realm of eternal objects with ‘the Platonic world of ideas’. That he raises a question as to the eternal objects’ ontological status suffices to show that this comparison is misleading in at least one fundamental respect. For Plato the forms are genuinely real and the particular individuals of the sensible world are the appearances possessing an equivocal standing between being and not-being. For Whitehead, on the contrary, the particular events taking place in the world-process are the genuine metaphysical entities, the ultimate building blocks of reality. Whitehead could not be clearer: ‘Actual entities ... are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real.’17 Insofar as they are mere possibilities, eternal objects possess a shadowy kind of being that calls for philosophical elucidation. This is Whitehead’s first problem. The second problem concerns what Whitehead calls the ‘proximate relevance’ of possibilities. We see novel modes of existence coming into being, forms as yet unrealized making their ingression in the world-process: what makes the forms thus capable of ingressing the concrete? Whitehead emphasizes that eternal objects have an essential reference to actuality: [T]he forms are essentially referent beyond themselves. It is mere phantasy to impute to them any ‘absolute reality’, which is devoid of implications beyond itself. The realm of forms is the realm of potentiality,


and the very notion of potentiality has an external meaning. It refers to life and motion.18 Whitehead’s second problem can be stated as follows: possibilities have a tendency or nisus towards existence and yet, precisely because they are mere possibilia, they are unable to bring about their own actualization. These two problems are linked in a straightforward way, for, unless we know what kind of being possibilities have, we cannot understand how they can be operative in the world. As Whitehead suggests, both problems can be solved by interpreting ideal forms as ‘components of the primordial nature of God’. In this way, two results are achieved: on the one hand, possibilities receive an unequivocal status by being interpreted as objects of the divine mind; on the other hand, a first step is taken towards an understanding of their relevance to the world-process, for they have now been anchored to a genuine causal agent.

The threat of Spinozism: are there unrealized possibilities? Apparently, the argument is a very simple one: (1) since there are unrealized possibilities, forms that have not yet found ingression in worldly actualities, and (2) only actualities have causal power and can affect the course of things, it follows that (3) unrealized possibilities must be rooted in an actual being, which must serve as their ontological ground as well as the foundation of their worldly relevance. Let’s begin by considering the first premise; this involves two subtheses: (a) forms (universals, eternal objects) exist as real aspects of things, and (b) there are unrealized forms. (a) To the best of my knowledge, Whitehead fails to support his realistic belief in universals by any argument against opposite views such as nominalism (there are no universals, but only general names) or conceptualism (universals only exist as ideas in the human mind). The basis for the recognition of the reality of universals is his adoption of an ontology in which events are fundamental. If we allow for the reality of forms, we can explain how there can be things that endure even in a world of process, namely by assuming that different events might display the same form over a longer period of time. There are no continuants in a world of actual occasions, yet for practical purposes a series of occasions all of which exemplify the same form can be regarded as a single enduring thing. A realistic position as to universals would thus

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seem to be required to explain how there can be any stability in a world of momentary occasions. (b) Whitehead’s process-view also grounds his belief that not all forms are yet realized. Whitehead strongly believes in the reality of a future that will not be a mere repetition of the past, which means that there are eternal objects that have not yet been actualized and that will (or at least might) find ingression in the world-process at some future time. Such a belief is never cast into doubt in everyday life. When it is, what is shaken is nothing less than our instinctive, healthy sense that life is worth living. But how can Whitehead be sure that there really are unrealized possibilities? Of course, it looks as if new things could come into existence at any moment – but can we claim to know this? The belief in the reality of unrealized possibilities is philosophically controversial. In particular, it stands in marked contrast to eternalistic views of reality according to which time is unreal and all worldly events – past, present and future ones – occupy a definite position in the universe, being parts of a single whole that embraces all of them as if in a single grasp. In such views, if we could ever attain to a vision of reality sub specie aeternitatis, we would recognize that nothing can be realized, for everything already is. Whitehead hints at Spinoza as a philosopher who held this sort of worldview, but his critique is most immediately directed towards absolute idealists such as Francis Herbert Bradley and Josiah Royce. In the World and the Individual, Royce writes that ‘the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past, and future. This knowledge is ill-called foreknowledge. It is eternal knowledge’.19 Royce appeals to the notion of the specious present to make this idea plausible. The aspects of the specious present that recommend it as an analogical term for the conception of an eternally standing reality are its ‘temporal thickness’, the fact that it occupies a certain temporal span, and that in such an extended present the mind seems to possess a sort of temporal ubiquity upon its contents. Comparing the Absolute to a cosmic symphony, Royce suggests that the whole temporal order could there be known at once as we know a brief rhythm. But in spite of its ingeniousness the analogy breaks down easily. The comparison implies that we stand to the eternal consciousness in much the same way in which our perceptions stand to our mind, which seems quite unintelligible, for surely our perceptions lack the sense we have of our own individual personality. Interestingly, in The Realm of Ends


Ward considers Royce’s doctrine of the universe as a cosmic specious present and rightly rejects it as a ‘psychological monster’. Eternalistic views of reality such as Royce’s are grounded upon reflections about the nature of time. There are unrealized possibilities only if there is an open future; but since at a deeper metaphysical level time is unreal, there is no open future and there are no unrealized possibilities. The crucial tenet in this line of reasoning is the belief that time is unreal. Whitehead must have been acquainted with philosophical refutations of the reality of time, but in his philosophy he assumes that time is real. When he argues for this conclusion, he discusses Zeno’s paradoxes rather than the more refined arguments of his contemporaries. Whitehead’s refusal to enter into a direct discussion of eternalistic arguments is unsatisfactory and shows why the accusation mentioned at the beginning of this paper is not entirely misguided. Nevertheless, there is much justification in support of the belief in the reality of time, for it is not easy to see how a universe in which all facts are eternally realized could be inhabited by creatures like us, who experience reality sub specie temporis: ‘How can the unchanging unity of fact’, Whitehead asks, ‘generate the delusion of change?’20 To this rather conventional objection against eternalistic views of reality, the following one could perhaps be added: if from an ultimate metaphysical perspective all past and future events are co-present in the universe, why do we remember the past and not the future? It is not easy to see why our experience of reality should be asymmetrical in this respect, if there is nothing that matches that asymmetry in ultimate reality. In the absence of a detailed examination of eternalistic arguments such observations are scarcely decisive; they point, however, towards difficulties that a satisfactory eternalistic theory of reality should be capable of answering.

The ontological principle The other fundamental idea at the basis of Whitehead’s argument is implicit in what he calls the ‘ontological principle’, ‘the general Aristotelian principle’ that ‘apart from things that are actual, there is nothing – nothing either in fact or in efficacy’. 21 Insofar as the ontological principle ascribes ‘efficacy’ only to actualities, it is virtually identical with the argument’s second premise. The principle may appear to be obviously true, for what else could act if not what is an actuality? But whether one will accept it or not ultimately depends upon how one construes the notion of actuality. By excluding forms from the domain of what is actual or fully real,

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the principle also excludes that forms could be genuine causal agents. Whitehead does not provide any reason in support of the principle: is it really so clear that forms are by themselves incapable of action? The difficulty is not that of understanding how a form could exert causal efficacy or have the power to ‘push’ another being into existence, which would indeed seem to be an unintelligible conception; rather, the problem is that of understanding how an existing form could act upon an existing actuality so as to ‘provoke’ it, so to say, to assume that form as its own. There is no denying that the thesis that eternal objects cannot act is a highly intuitive one. In the Timaeus Plato introduces a Demiurge to explain the sensible things’ participation in the realm of forms. In Whitehead’s philosophy, God is called upon to solve, in a way that will be discussed in the next chapter, the same sort of ontological perplexity: ‘The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal. The two sets are mediated by a thing which combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential. This final entity is the divine element in the world.’22

The divine vision and the independency of the forms It is the conclusion of Whitehead’s argument that the ideal forms must be ontologically rooted in some actual being, but that conclusion does not say how the forms are related to God, or the way in which they thereby acquire causal relevance. Let’s consider the first of these points by discussing Whitehead’s doctrine of God’s vision of the eternal objects. Whitehead holds that eternal objects are the objects of God’s experience: the ‘primordial nature’ of God ‘is his complete envisagement of eternal objects’.23 In advancing this thesis Whitehead is not solely paying homage to a long-standing philosophical and theological doctrine, but obeying the basic constraints of his metaphysics. Whitehead’s contention that all actualities must be of the same general ontological kind, together with his further contention that the only actualities we know from within are those constituting our own minds, compel him to argue that, like all other actualities, God must be an experience and the eternal objects his experienced objects. Whitehead’s use of such phrases as ‘grasping’, ‘feeling’ and ‘envisagement’ as qualification of God’s experience of the eternal objects is not without serious difficulties. Such phrases must possess an analogical meaning when they are applied to God’s grasping of the eternal objects. Occasions of human mentality recognize universals in given, presented


actualities. With God the situation is radically altered, for the eternal objects are not abstracted from any felt actuality but exist as originally partaking in the divine experience. Does this mean that the ideal requirement of a categoreal identity in the description of all actualities is violated? Whitehead would seem to admit as much: ‘God differs from other actual entities in the fact that Hume’s principle, of the derivative character of conceptual feelings, does not hold for him.’24 That God should turn out to be different from all other actualities can hardly be said to constitute a surprising result. But to admit that the idea of a divine conceptual experience is sui generis is to admit that the idea finds no real exemplification in human experience, which invites the skeptical remark that such an idea has no meaning at all. Although Whitehead is aware of the difficulties involved with his conceptuality, nowhere does he seem to be worried by this sort of challenge. He might be thinking that an imperfect example can still provide some basis for understanding the nature of an experience of a different sort: a blind person might have a general understanding of the concept of sight as a kind of experience, provided that he has some knowledge of what it is to experience anything; analogously, we could understand what a divine experience might be like by way of reference to our own experiences. True, a blind person’s conception of sight will remain vague, but it will not be an entirely empty one. The conclusion that the forms depend upon God for their existence deserves further consideration in light of Whitehead’s other contention that God does not create the eternal objects and that he depends upon the forms as much as the forms upon him. One straightforward way of making sense of this claim is by interpreting Whitehead as holding that God and God’s vision of the forms are one and the same. God does not turn his head, as it were, towards a panorama of existing beings; rather, he is the all-embracing vision of eternal objects. This interpretation finds confirmation in Religion in the Making, where Whitehead writes: This ideal world of conceptual harmonization is merely a description of God himself. Thus the nature of God is the complete conceptual realization of the realm of ideal forms. The Kingdom of heaven is God.25 Although Whitehead identifies God with his ‘complete conceptual realization of the realm of ideal forms’, the passage must not be read as entailing that God cannot be a vision of other things as well. For the purposes of the present chapter, there is no need to enter in a discussion

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of what else God might be aware of besides eternal objects. Specifically, there is no need to enter into a discussion of what Whitehead calls God’s ‘consequent nature’, the divine view of the actual, concretely realized world. Only two points are of importance here. The first is that God and the realm of eternal objects are not two distinct realities facing each other, for the eternal objects are constituents of God’s experience; the second is that God is not to be conceived of as a subject having an experience, but rather as himself being that experience. In his account of what he calls ‘God’s primordial nature’, Whitehead comes closer to thinking of God as a cosmic ‘state of mind’ rather than as a ‘person’ or an ‘individual’. The scholastic doctrine that ideal possibilities or the essences of things exist in God’s mind was held, among others, by Leibniz. Because of his personal acquaintance with Cambridge philosophers such as James Ward, Bertrand Russell and John Ellis McTaggart, all of whom were Leibniz scholars, and of course because of his own readings, Whitehead might have been aware of the following passage in the Monadology: It is farther true that in God there is not only the source of existences but also that of essences, in so far as they are real, that is to say, the source of what is real in the possible. For the understanding of God is the region of eternal truths or of the ideas on which they depend, and without Him there would be nothing real in the possibilities of things, and not only would there be nothing in existence, but nothing would ever be possible.26 The general line of argument and the conclusion to which it leads are the same as Whitehead’s: there must be a mind that houses the possibilities of all things, because these must exist as a precondition of created worldly actualities and hence independently of the latter. Like Leibniz, Whitehead holds that possibilities are not created by God, but merely ‘hosted’ by him. (There is perhaps even some stylistic resemblance between this passage and the one by Whitehead quoted at the very beginning of this chapter.) At least one substantial difference between the two thinkers needs to be pointed out: God’s primordial nature is his ‘envisagement’ of all abstract forms or universals, whereas Leibniz thinks of God’s intellect as populated by the complete notions of particular existents. These are to be conceived as a record of each individual’s life-history. A mind that is capable of fully grasping an individual’s complete concept would be capable of knowing all the facts concerning that individual’s


life a priori, merely by inspecting the concept and considering whether a certain predicate is analytically contained in it. This is the doctrine Lotze had so vehemently attacked and Ward had repudiated in the Realm of Ends. This characteristic Leibnizian position is problematic in many respects. From a logical point of view, it seems to imply that all truths concerning matter of fact are necessary, albeit they may appear to be contingent to minds incapable of grasping an individual complete notion. From a metaphysical point of view, it raises the question of the reality of human freedom, for how an individual life unfolds now appears to be predetermined by the reality of its complete concept in God’s intellect. This is a crucial distinction between Whitehead and Leibniz: conceived with respect to his primordial nature, Whitehead’s God has no knowledge of particular existents – neither of their past, present nor future states. At least prima facie, this rejection of the doctrine of complete concepts is a necessary condition for admitting that worldly beings bear some responsibility for the outcome of their existence, which is a thesis Whitehead is eager to secure. In his book on Leibniz Russell raised an interesting objection against the doctrine that possibilities have the ground of their existence in God’s intellect. Russell is concentrating on eternal truths in this passage, but the criticism can be easily extended to all kinds of abstract objects: Leibniz has to maintain that eternal truths exist in the mind of God. Thus we cannot say that God is subjected to eternal truths, for they form part of his very nature, to wit, his understanding. But again Leibniz speaks of them as the internal object of his understanding, thus suggesting by the word object, what the word internal is intended to deny, that the truths are something different from the knowledge of them.27 Russell is trying to force Leibniz into a dilemma, both horns of which have undesired consequences. Leibniz should either hold that eternal truths are the objects of the divine intellect, in which case they must exist outside God’s mind, or conceive of them as constituents of the divine intellect, in which case they cannot be that which God is thinking about. According to Russell, an object can be either God’s intentional object or a constituent of God’s mental state, but it cannot be both at the same time. As Russell suggests, the notion of an internal object is self-contradictory, for to call an apprehended content ‘internal’

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is to locate it within the mind while to call it an ‘object’ is to divorce it from the apprehending subject. At first sight, Russell’s point might seem to be entirely correct, for it is true that an experience is always an experience of an object and this seems to presuppose that there is a clear-cut distinction between an experience and what that experience is an experience of. But this view of the subject/object relationship is too crude and one is not forced to choose between the horns of Russell’s dilemma. Consider our experience of a pain, such as a toothache. There is a very clear sense in which it is correct to say that the felt pain is what we are experiencing; at the same time, there is an equally clear sense in which it is correct to say that the pain is a component of our experience, meaning by ‘experience’ nothing else than the total state of mind we are in at the moment we are feeling the pain, a state that includes much more than the present pain as it involves all our momentary sensations, thoughts, bodily feelings, volitions and so forth. If these considerations are sound, then it might be wrong to think that what is ‘internal’ to an experience cannot also be its ‘object’; the doctrine that the world-process requires a primordial cosmic experience as its foundation need not be vitiated by contradiction in the straightforward way suggested by Russell. Moreover, if Russell’s theory that experience requires a neat ontological distinction between the subject and its object were true, then all varieties of absolute idealism would have been refuted at one fell swoop. Given Whitehead’s admission that God’s vision has only a very imperfect counterpart in human experience, however, we do lack any clear understanding of the sense in which eternal objects can be said to exist ‘within’ God’s mind.

The principle of relativity A doubt may arise with regard to the argument’s validity. The premises require that an ideal form be rooted in some actual being: why can’t there be many divine minds, each of which thinks only a selected portion of the realm of the eternal objects? The view that there are many divine minds – each of which thinks some eternal objects and not others – might appear to be intrinsically implausible, but is consistent with the truth of the premises. Whitehead seems to have had this objection in mind when writing the following passage: In what sense can unrealized abstract form be relevant? What is its basis of relevance? ‘Relevance’ must express some real fact of


togetherness among forms ... [I]f there be a relevance of what in the temporal world is unrealized, the relevance must express a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a non-temporal actuality. But by the principle of relativity there can only be one non- derivative actuality.28 This passage suggests that Whitehead’s reasons for admitting the existence of only one God are linked with the idea that there must be ‘some real fact of togetherness among forms’. Now, in order for a complex eternal object to exist, its constituent parts must exist together. What if the eternal object in question is an unrealized possibility? In this case, no togetherness of its parts is realized in any worldly actuality. If complex unrealized eternal objects have ‘being’, their parts must exist together in the divine mind. As Whitehead has it, there must be ‘a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a non-temporal actuality’. Whitehead’s reasoning might be stated as follows. A relational complex R(A,B) is an eternal object expressing the possibility that a property A could be exemplified in reality as standing in the relation R with a property B. The complex eternal object R(A,B) is God’s abstract representation of all actualities in which a relation of kind R holds between A and B. But if eternal objects were distributed among several minds, then the range of what is possible would be drastically reduced: if A is rooted in the mind G1 and B in G2, then the eternal object R(A,B) isn’t rooted anywhere. Stated in less precise but more intuitive terms: if the divine mind G1 thinks only A and G2 thinks only B, then neither G1 nor G2 is thinking R(A,B). But if nobody thinks R(A,B), then the complex eternal object R(A,B) does not exist ‘anywhere’, which means that actualities of the form R(A,B) are not possible. One implication of this line of reasoning is that the relation between the number of combinations of eternal objects and the number of divine minds is one of inverse proportionality: monotheism is thus required in order to maximize the number of possible states of affairs. More simply, monotheism is the only hypothesis that can account for the realm of possibilities in its complete extension. There would be an explanatory gain in ascribing to Whitehead a reasoning of this sort, but the above reconstruction does not quite match his words in the quoted passage. Whitehead first calls God a ‘nontemporal actuality’ and then contends that the singularity of the divine mind follows from another of the cardinal principles of his system, the principle of relativity: ‘by the principle of relativity’ – he says – ‘there can be only one non-derivative actuality.’

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The principle of relativity is formulated by Whitehead in various ways; according to one of these, ‘it belongs to the nature of a “being” that it is a potential for every becoming’.29 Again, a comparison with Leibniz might be helpful to understand Whitehead’s position. In Leibniz’s Monadology, each monad is related to all others in virtue of the fact that all monads perceive, albeit with various degrees of clarity, the entire universe. Although the monads are incapable of direct interaction, it would be a mistake to interpret the metaphor of the windowless monad as implying the complete unrelatedness of the basic constituents of reality. On the contrary, the absence of causal relatedness is balanced in Leibniz by a principle of universal relatedness that finds its expression in the metaphor of the monad as a mirror of the universe: [T]his connexion [sic] or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.30 This sort of relatedness is mediated by God and his pre-established harmony, but is a sort of connectedness nevertheless. This point is sometimes expressed by means of a distinction between real and ideal relations. Although there are no real relations between the monads (that is, there are no relations of direct causal influence), they are still ideally connected. ‘But in simple substances’ – Leibniz writes – ‘the influence of one Monad upon another is only ideal, and it can have its effect only through the mediation of God.’31 Whitehead’s principle of relativity might now be interpreted as a version of Leibniz’s idea that each monad mirrors the whole universe, adapted so as to fit the categories of his own thought, and in particular his characteristic recognition that, contrary to what Leibniz believed, causal relations between the ultimate constituents of reality are both real and direct. But the important point is that the principle of universal relativity, if it has to be really universal, must hold for God as much as for worldly occasions. In Leibniz’s system, God’s pervasive presence in the world is manifest in several ways: for example, all created monads perceive the whole universe, but only God does this with full clearness and distinctness; moreover, God is responsible for the pre-established harmony. In the metaphysics of Whitehead, the idea of God’s omnipresence translates into the idea that God enters as a causal factor in the constitution


of all worldly actualities. One way to achieve this is by conceiving God as a permanent and easily accessible (in ways that require specification) reservoir of possibilities for all worldly actualities. God cannot therefore be conceived in the guise of temporal actualities as a fleeting ‘occurrence’ or momentary ‘occasion’. As Whitehead has it in the above quoted passage, possibilities must constitute ‘a fact of togetherness in the formal constitution of a non-temporal actuality’ [my emphasis]. At this point, it is not difficult to see how the principle of relativity plays a role in Whitehead’s explanation of why one has to postulate only one God. If eternal objects were distributed among several minds, then there could be a divine mind G that thinks A, but not B. Since the only reason to postulate the existence of a divine mind is to explain the reality and causal relevance of possibilities, G will have to be mentioned in any account of why an actuality of kind A comes into being, but would have no explanatory role to play in any account of the coming into being of an actuality of kind B. The occurrence of actualities of kind B would constitute a ‘becoming’ for which G cannot be ‘a potential’, which stands in open contradiction to the principle of relativity. To sum up, the reasons for believing in the existence of a single deity are, first (and arguably), that this is the only way to account for the totality of all possible states of affairs; secondly, that only monotheism satisfies the metaphysical requirements laid down by the principle of universal relativity. Ockham’s razor could be perhaps be added: since we can explain the coming into being of two actualities x and y of kind A and B by postulating the reality of a single divine mind, there is no reason why we should opt for a theory that posits a greater number of explanatory principles. This explanation would be the less significant, however, for it is based upon a general regard for explanatory parsimony that holds independently of the peculiarities of Whitehead’s ontology and of the particular issue at stake. Moreover, Ockham’s razor is questionable as a metaphysical principle. There is no apparent necessity that the universe shall not be overpopulated. We might simply be projecting our human preference for simplicity of explanation onto the cosmos at large: any appeal to the principle as a way of settling ontological issues could then be charged with anthropocentrism. Significantly enough, Ockham’s principle is not indicated by Whitehead as one of the four criteria – adequacy, applicability, consistency, and coherence – that a system of revisionary metaphysics must try to satisfy.32

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A final doubt Russell referred to Leibniz’s contention that possibilities require a foundation in God as ‘scandalous’.33 On the basis of what has been said in the foregoing pages, this evaluation cannot be shared. Whitehead’s conception of God as an eternal vision of all possibilities is baffling enough, but the argument that ideal possibilities require a single metaphysical ground is not flawed in any obvious way and its basic premises – the reality of unrealized possibilities and the ontological principle – are intuitively plausible, certainly more than their negations. Whitehead’s Leibnizian argument falls short of being a proof, but it cannot be easily dismissed as an entirely misguided attempt at securing the existence of God by rational means. A skeptical reader might want to argue that Whitehead’s is an appeal to a deus ex machina. There would be some irony in this, for this is precisely Whitehead’s critique of Leibniz’s version of the argument from design. Leibniz denied the reality of direct causal relations between the monads but could not avoid recognizing the reality of correspondences between things. Hence he concluded that such correspondences were not the outcome of direct interactions, but had their foundation in God as the source of the pre-established harmony. We know that God must exist as an ordering principle, because reality looks as if there were causal relationships between its constituent elements, but we also know that causal relations cannot be real. In the New Essays, Leibniz explains that his connected theories of the causal isolation of the monads and of pre-established harmony greatly improve the traditional argument from design, for they imply that God’s existence is metaphysically necessary: These beings [the monads] have received their nature ... from a general and supreme cause, for otherwise, ... being independent of each other, they could never produce that Order, Harmony, and Beauty, which is observed in nature. But this argument, which appears to have only a moral certainty, is brought to a perfectly metaphysical necessity, by the new species of harmony which I have introduced, which is the pre-established harmony.34 As we know, Whitehead’s reply is that this reasoning leads to a strikingly artificial account of reality, one that strongly contrasts with our healthy sense of what it is to be in the world. Here we find ourselves acting and reacting upon external realities, standing in direct and


intimate contact with external agencies and powers. Having observed that Leibniz’s doctrine of many windowless monads ‘stamps experience with a certain air of illusoriness’, Whitehead goes on to say that ‘[t]he Leibnizian solution can mitigate the illusoriness only by recourse to a pious dependence upon God’, concluding that this is ‘a device very repugnant to a consistent rationality’.35 As this latter accusation makes it clear, however, Whitehead is not simply denouncing the striking empirical inadequacy of Leibniz’s system. Why is Leibniz’s God a device repugnant to a consistent rationality? One way to make sense of this charge is to take Whitehead to be arguing that the notion of the causally isolated monad does not by itself imply, or in any way logically require, the notion of an ordering and causally powerful God. Apart from the necessity of making the system square with experience, there is no intimate connection between the two parts of Leibniz’s metaphysics – the theory of monads as the basic worldly constituents on the one hand, and the theology of the pre-established harmony on the other hand. Hence, and far from raising the argument from design to ‘a perfectly metaphysical necessity’, as Leibniz would like to have it, Leibniz’s appeal to God as the source of the pre-established harmony is ‘irrational’ in that it fails to satisfy the ideal requirement that any perfected metaphysical system must fulfill – the principle of internal coherence or of the mutual implication of the parts.36 The question now is whether Whitehead’s appeal to God as the locus of universals is not an analogous device, invoked only to save his own metaphysical principles, in this case in order to harmonize the two apparently conflicting claims that there are unrealized universals and that only what is actual, or exists through an actuality, is real. There is a general problem here: how is one to distinguish an appeal to a deus ex machina from a sincerely attempted proof? Certainly, Leibniz and Whitehead would have argued that they were trying to prove the existence of God, as indeed they were. One crucial consideration is that Whitehead did not limit himself to charging Leibniz with the accusation of introducing God as an ad hoc hypothesis, but tried to correct what he held to be wrong in Leibniz’s reasoning by providing an account of causal relations alternative to the Leibnizian one. Whitehead clearly saw that Leibniz’s argument left a heavy burden upon his critics, for rejecting that argument ultimately required explaining what causation amounts to. The same is now true of Whitehead’s doctrine that universals exist in mente dei: unless one is capable of providing an alternative and convincing explanation,

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this remains a possible way of accounting for the ontological status of abstract entities. But does Whitehead succeed in integrating his notion of God as envisaging all possible forms of definiteness with the metaphysics of the actual entities? The next chapter will consider to what extent he succeeds, and to what extent he fails, in accomplishing this difficult task.

7 The Final View: The Dipolar Conception of God

Introduction It is now time, in this concluding chapter, to address Whitehead’s solution to the second question left open by Ward. This is the problem of how to conceive of God’s agency in a world of spontaneous monads or actual occasions. More generally, it is the problem of providing an interpretation of the God–world relationship that could account for their mutual immanence as well as their mutual transcendence. Whitehead’s nat ural theology is also an attempt to understand how the general cosmological categories developed in the description of the natural world can be applied to the elucidation of some special aspects of our experience – namely ‘those elements which may roughly be classed together as religious and moral intuitions’.1 Whitehead’s assumption is that we have, at least at times, a vague sense of higher, transcendent realities. Those who do not share this sensibility will regard Whitehead’s theology as an idle speculation. They will see in his God the abstract God of the philosopher, a principle needed for the whole metaphysical apparatus to be set in motion rather than what Whitehead takes it to be: a God immediately present in our inner life. The fact that God is for Whitehead a felt presence does not imply that there is anything dogmatic in his discussion of God’s role in the world. In particular, Whitehead does not ally himself with any of the existing religious orthodoxies, nor does he try to found another one: ‘The secularization of the concept of God’s functions in the world’, he writes, ‘is at least as urgent a requisite of thought as is the secularization of other elements in experience.’2 In the same way in which the theory of knowledge needs to be liberated from the sensationalist mythology – the Humean notion that all experience comes in the form of awareness 125

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of sense data – philosophical theology needs to be liberated by traditional ways of conceiving God and his ways of being operative in the world. Otherwise put, the problem is not that of defending any specific tradition, but of clarifying humankind’s moral and religious experiences in the light of the general ontological commitments of the philosophy of organism. This point is worth emphasizing, because the rise of a vigorous school of process-theology in the works of such authors as John Cobb and David Ray Griffin may give the impression that Whitehead was engaged in the same sort of enterprise, namely to defend Christian belief by providing it with a new metaphysical basis. This would be a misinterpretation of Whitehead’s intentions; his sole aim was that of making sense of his own ways of experiencing reality. Whitehead’s conception of religion is entirely individualistic: ‘all collective emotions leave untouched the awful ultimate fact, which is the human being, consciously alone with itself, for its own sake.’ As he also puts it, ‘[r]eligion is what the individual does with his solitariness’.3 In spite of Whitehead’s systematic ambitions, moreover, his speculations often look like tentative sketches rather than like definitive statements of a fully worked out theory. At times, there is even something rhapsodic in his way of dealing with a given topic. One might then be inclined to look at his works as if they were collections of genial aperçus, but it would perhaps be more accurate to say that Whitehead retains a cast of mind similar to that of the scientist. What he provides are often experimental attempts at dealing with a problem rather than definitive solutions. Be that as it may, nowhere does the incomplete character of Whitehead’s thought come more clearly to the fore than in his natural theology. As he openly admits: ‘There is nothing here in the nature of proof. There is merely the confrontation of the theoretic system with a certain rendering of the facts.’4

God, creation, and the order of reality In order to understand Whitehead’s theory of divine agency, some preliminary remarks concerning his denial of traditional ways of understanding the relation between God and the world are in order. A first significant feature of Whitehead’s God is that he is not the world’s first cause. Whitehead does not address the question of whether the world has a beginning, but he simply assumes that it is infinitely extended with regard to both its past and its future. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued that, if the universe has no beginning, then

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the existence of each instant presupposes the completion of an infinite series of previous instants; an infinite number of instants needs to elapse before the present can be achieved, which for Kant was an impossible conception.5 The very same question is now suggested by Whitehead’s cosmological categories, for, if each occasion of experience requires the completion of a previous occasion in order to come into being, then the emergence of any one occasion requires the coming into being and passing away of an infinite number of previous occasions. As a mathematician, Whitehead might have had a theory as to the nature of series that could account for this; if he had such a theory, however, he never explicitly showed how it could be used to dispel Kant’s perplexities. Secondly, Whitehead’s God is not a cause of the world in the sense of being its sufficient reason. In Principles of Nature and of Grace, Leibniz grounds his belief in the existence of God upon the principle which affirms that ‘nothing takes place without sufficient reason, that is to say, that nothing happens without its being possible for one who should know things sufficiently, to give a reason which suffices to determine why things are so and not otherwise’.6 And once the principle is laid down, Leibniz explains, we are entitled to ask the question why something exists rather than nothing. Is there anything in Whitehead corresponding to Leibniz’s extreme rationalistic assumption? The closest approximation is the ontological principle, which in one of its formulations reads ‘no actual entity, then no reason’.7 The scope of the ontological principle, however, is limited to particular actual entities or worldly events. This means that, according to Whitehead, we can provide a partial explanation of why a certain particular event occurred by identifying its several causes, but we have no means to answer the far-reaching question as to why there is a world at all – why there is something rather than nothing. Nor can we explain why the universe is in the grip of creativity, why new occasions constantly emerge and disappear from view. The universe’s most general make-up is something we can hope to describe correctly, but not explain. Thirdly, Whitehead makes no appeal to the notion of emanation. Actual entities do not proceed from God in the way in which worldly individuals do in the philosophy of Leibniz. In the Monadology Leibniz maintains that ‘[m]onads are products and have their birth, so to speak, through continual fulgurations of the Divinity from moment to moment’;8 in the Discourse on Metaphysics, he claims that ‘created substances depend on God, who preserves them and who even produces them continually by a kind of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts’.9 There is a sense in which the doctrine of emanation is the

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very opposite of the doctrine that Whitehead maintains, and which is throughout based upon the theory of emergent evolution. If the God– world relationship is seen in terms of the concept of emanation, then the world is less perfect than its divine origin. But the concept of evolution involves the idea that the world does, or at least might, increase in perfection. On the assumption that a perfect God would not change his modus emanandi, however, it is difficult to see how the emanated world could display different degrees of perfection over time. The idea of the world’s perfectibility is an important aspect of Whitehead’s cosmology. Although he does not believe that the future will necessarily be an improvement upon the past, he does think that the world can be bettered. But what does ‘becoming better’ mean in this context? Whitehead does not articulate a theory of value nor does he state what he takes to be the ethical implications of his metaphysics. Nevertheless, he assumes an idealistic theory to the effect that all moments of experience have some measure of intrinsic value, with those experiences capable of holding together a plurality of data in a harmonious way possessing value in the greatest degree. This conception of value is directly linked to – if not necessarily entailed by – his panpsychist metaphysics. It is easy to think that nothing could be intrinsically valuable in a world of occasions of experience except a certain ‘quality’ or ‘intensity’ of feeling. Now, Whitehead believes that in the course of the world’s history higher forms of experience might come into existence. According to him, what makes the genesis of new forms of experiencing the world possible is the origination of new forms of social order. On a biological level, the experiences characteristic of human mentality require the body’s rich organization. Analogously, certain intellectual and artistic achievements and enjoyments would not be possible apart from certain sophisticated cultural and institutional environments. To understand God’s action upon the world is therefore to understand how he promotes favorable forms of social order in a world of which he is not the creator – neither in the sense of being its first cause, nor its sufficient reason, nor its emanative source.

The consequent nature of God Whitehead’s cosmology is an attempt to develop a single system of ontological categories in terms of which all actualities should be understood. As Whitehead has it, ‘God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles ... He is their chief exemplification.’10 One

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main feature of an actual entity is that it is dipolar. An actual occasion has a physical as well as a mental pole, these being respectively a capacity for taking account of other actualities and for grasping eternal objects. In order to preserve cosmological uniformity, Whitehead now argues that God’s nature cannot be exhausted by his primordial apprehension of the forms. Like all other actualities, God must have a physical side as well. This is God’s ‘consequent nature’, which is constituted by his prehensions (or objectifications) of all the worldly actualities. On this view, God experiences the world-process, literally absorbing it into himself. Considered with respect to his primordial nature, Whitehead says, God is ‘actually deficient’.11 Only by prehending the world does he become an actuality; metaphorically speaking, the objectified world is God’s physical body. The notion of God’s consequent nature differentiates Whitehead’s conception of the deity from traditional ones. God has been usually conceived as the supreme example of a self-subsistent being. Spinoza is an obvious example, but this is so even in pluralistic philosophies. In the Monadology, Leibniz makes it clear that the created monads are substances only in a derivative sense, namely insofar as they are not dependent upon each other for their existence. According to Whitehead, on the contrary, God is essentially dependent upon the temporal occasions, for without them he would not be an actuality. It should be noted that God’s consequent and primordial natures are not to be conceived as distinct parts that could exist independently from one another, but as distinct aspects of a single reality. The distinction between them is only a distinction of reason. In his primordial nature God is solely his vision of the forms and is therefore untouched by what happens in the world; there would be no actuality to experience anything in the first place, however, if the world did not confer substantiality on God. God’s survey of the realm of forms is unlimited; there is no recess of that realm that he does not perceive; on the contrary, the occasions in the world never prehend all eternal objects. Analogously, in its consequent nature God takes full account of all actualities, whereas in a moment of human mentality the past is always retained under an abstraction. It is never the entire past that finds entrance in the living moment of experience, but only some features of it: ‘objectification relegates into irrelevance ... the full constitution of the objectified entity. Some real component in the objectified entity assumes the role of being how that particular entity is a datum in the experience of the subject.’12 In God’s consequent nature, on the other hand, ‘there is no


loss, no obstruction’:13 here all worldly actualities are objectified without omission of details, however slight and insignificant these might appear to be. Whitehead makes the point thus in the following, important passage: The wisdom of subjective aim [God] prehends every actuality for what it can be in such a perfected system – its sufferings, its sorrows, its failures, its triumphs, its immediacies of joy – woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling ... The consequent nature of God is his judgement on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgement of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgement of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage.14 As Whitehead points out at the beginning of Process and Reality, the doctrine that God’s consequent nature collects all worldly events bears some significant similarity with the absolute idealist’s view of reality as a cosmic experience that embraces all finite events. The similarity is even greater if one takes into account Whitehead’s further contention in this passage that in God’s consequent nature all finite moments of experience are somehow harmonized with one another, that is, that they are ‘woven by rightness of feeling into the harmony of the universal feeling’. Whitehead also draws a parallel between the idea of a harmonious experience and God’s function as a Redeemer; God, he says, ‘saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life’. Unfortunately, the notion of ‘harmonization’ is as unclear in Whitehead as it is in the works of the absolute idealists.15 The objectified occasions of experience are in some way altered by being brought into relation with one another, but apart from vague suggestions and images there is nothing in Whitehead that explains what sort of transmutation actual occasions undergo once they become components of God’s consequent nature. Whitehead himself acknowledges the insufficiency of his account, as when he writes that ‘the image – and it is but an image – the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost’.16 Whereas God’s vision of the eternal objects is immutable, the consequent nature is an ‘operative growth’. It is a ‘growth’, because new contents are constantly flowing into it with the advance of the world; it is ‘operative’, because the process of harmonization must be started all

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over at each stage of cosmic history. But there is no way to express this intuition, Whitehead suggests, except by way of images. The analogy with absolute idealism is imperfect in one fundamental respect. God’s consequent nature is a kind of cosmic memory that sums up and holds together all past actualities, preventing them from vanishing into nothingness. On the absolute idealist’s conception of reality, on the contrary, all moments of experience, including future ones, already have a place in the divine experience. Are these forms of immortality worth having? The answer might vary from person to person, yet neither Whitehead’s nor the absolute idealist’s view seems capable of satisfying the human craving for an afterlife. Arguably, the religious consciousness’s desire for immortality is more than the desire that the moments of our life will not vanish into nothingness; at the same time, it is not easy to see how the view that our life after death is taking place right now, only in another region of the Absolute, could be of any spiritual comfort. What one confusedly wishes, if one wishes anything at all, is simply to go on living – on another level of reality, but still pretty much in the same guise as one now does. The difficulty in understanding the notion of God’s consequent nature is not so much the vagueness of the concept of harmonization. The real problem is that what Whitehead says about it seems incompatible with what he says about the general functioning of an actual occasion. Consider the following passage, in which Whitehead compares the way actual occasions are related to one another with the way God is related to the world: An enduring personality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up their predecessors. The correlated fact in God’s nature is an even more complete unity of life in a chain of elements for which succession does not mean loss of immediate unison. This element in God’s nature inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future inherits from the past.17 Whitehead says here that God prehends actual occasions in the same way in which an occasion sums up his predecessors; this is what one would expect him to hold, for otherwise God would be an exception to the general cosmological principles. But now a problem would seem to arise: since an occasion of experience has real entry into the future


occasion that prehends it, how can that same occasion also have real entry into God? Otherwise put, how could a whole occasion be objectified in God, if some parts of it are objectified by another occasion in the world-process? Surely, a part of an occasion of experience cannot be at the same time an integral constituent of two non-overlapping experiential wholes – God on the one hand and the prehending occasion on the other hand. Note that causal objectification is for Whitehead the entry of elements of a past particular (the past occasion) into the constitution of a novel occasion, not merely the ingression of the same universal properties: ‘[a]n actual entity cannot be described, even inadequately, by universals; because other actual entities do enter into the description of any one actual entity’ [my emphasis].18 Accordingly, if the notion of prehension means that the past has a real entry into the present, then it can’t be applied to God and to the worldly occasion – it can’t be true, as Whitehead maintains in the above passage, that God’s consequent nature ‘inherits from the temporal counterpart according to the same principle as in the temporal world the future inherits from the past’. The doctrine that the world literally becomes a constituent of God’s consequent nature is the most obvious interpretation of many passages from Process and Reality in which the issue is touched. There is one place at the beginning of that book, however, that lends itself to a different interpretation. Whitehead writes: The Truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain adequate representation in the divine nature. Such representations compose the ‘consequent nature’ of God, which evolves in its relationship to the evolving world.19 Whitehead repeats here the all-important point that God is not a static being, that in his consequent nature he ‘evolves in its relationship to the evolving world’. What makes this passage remarkable is Whitehead’s use of the word ‘representation’, which suggests that God’s consequent nature takes a copy of the worldly occasion rather than directly absorbing the original. Is this Whitehead’s real view? This is unlikely. From a religious perspective, this view would be too weak for Whitehead’s purpose of providing new content to the traditional idea that God redeems the world. If the world does not truly enter into God, then no real redemption takes place, but only an ideal one. God would have an illusory experience of a redeemed world, for he would not be actually engaged in bettering it.

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From a metaphysical point of view, it is difficult to see how God could derive his actuality from the world, if he were not absorbing it within himself in some pregnant sense of the word ‘absorption’. Most importantly, the notion of prehension would now have one meaning when used with respect to God’s relation to the world and another one when used with respect to an actual occasion’s relation to another actuality. In the latter case ‘prehension’ would stand for a real influx, in the former only for a reproduction. If this were so, then the rule that the same set of categories should apply to all actualities would be obviously violated. Thus, the notion of God’s consequent nature is better interpreted as implying God’s literal inclusion of the world. This is a difficult notion, for if prehension means real entry, then how can the same occasion be prehended by God as well as by another actuality? On either interpretation, Whitehead’s doctrine of God’s consequent nature is hard to reconcile with his general account of the concept of prehension. A final doubt needs to be addressed before concluding this section. Whitehead holds that the final test for a cosmological category must be its capacity to elucidate experience. The notion of the consequent nature would seem to be only an abstract construction, one that is introduced only in order to be able to think of God as dipolar and thereby preserve a basic structural uniformity between all actual entities. On a first sight, this criticism might appear to be justified, yet there are a few passages in which Whitehead adumbrates that the notion of God’s consequent nature is empirically grounded: ‘What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world ... the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world.’20 Whitehead’s language is lyrical, but the idea is clear: the world first finds harmonization in God’s consequent nature; the result of that harmonization is then made available to the temporal occasions for prehension. Otherwise put, Whitehead speculates that God’s consequent nature may be something we experience, perhaps even all the time. In spite of the fact that it is at most only vaguely felt, God’s consequent nature acts as the ultimate standard in terms of which to judge our temporal achievements. The consequent nature is the ultimate source of our sense of personal satisfaction or dissatisfaction; as Whitehead has it at the very end of Process and Reality, it is ‘the inward source of distaste or of refreshment’.21 One needs a certain kind of sensibility to appreciate this idea, however, or even to make sense of it.22


God and the world Having explained Whitehead’s notion of the consequent nature, we are now in possession of all the elements required to explain his view of God’s agency. In Whitehead’s philosophy, God is called upon to perform three main functions with respect to the world. Accordingly, he refers to it alternatively as the ‘principle of novelty’, ‘the principle of concrescence’ and ‘the principle of order’. Let’s consider these functions in turn. (1) One of the problems touched upon in the previous chapter was how the forms, which are in themselves devoid of actuality, could be causally relevant. Whitehead’s answer is that they become operative in nature because they are prehended by the worldly actualities as features of God. Whitehead introduces to solve this problem the notion of a ‘hybrid physical feeling’. Whereas a pure physical prehension has as its object an actual occasion and a pure conceptual prehension an eternal object, in a hybrid physical prehension ‘the actual entity forming the datum is objectified by one of its own conceptual feelings’.23 Stated in traditional philosophical language, Whitehead speculates that each occasion is capable of seeing the forms as they are in God’s primordial nature. Our prehensions of the forms are acts of abstraction from God’s nature. We are not generally aware of being so closely connected with the deity, even though some mystical states could perhaps be explained as involving a temporary awareness of this fact. Insofar as they have found ingression in the world, forms are present everywhere in our environment. Whitehead therefore distinguishes between two types of hybrid physical prehensions, namely ‘those which feel the conceptual feelings of temporal actual entities’ and ‘those which feel the conceptual feelings of God’.24 Whitehead’s reason for thinking that this distinction is needed is as follows: if we could only prehend forms that are already instantiated, then it would be impossible to understand how novel modes of being could appear in the course of evolution. On the reasonable assumptions that forms are eternal – in the sense that they can neither be generated nor destroyed, but can only have or fail to have exemplification – and that there will be new ways of being, then God is required in his function of a principle of novelty. The assumption that in the future forms not yet experienced will find ingression in the world is Whitehead’s belief in emergent evolution. The past has witnessed the sudden coming into being of unexpected forms of life, and there is no reason to think that it should be otherwise in the

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future. The thesis is sometimes advanced that Whitehead should have allowed for the creation of novel eternal objects in his system.25 Within an evolutionary context, the traditional debate between the realist and the nominalist takes indeed a slightly modified form. Do universals possess an ante res mode of existence, independently of the actual course of evolution and of its specific development, as Whitehead holds, or do they exist in rebus, in the sense of being generated with the novel actualities brought about in the course of the evolutionary process? It is true that the latter option seems more thoroughly evolutionistic, while the former stands under the suspicion of being a form of crypto-creationism; nevertheless, both theories account equally well for emergent evolution, and there seems to be nothing in our experience one can appeal to in order to resolve the dilemma one way or the other. (Moreover, and as it has been shown in the previous chapter, Whitehead explicitly rejects the view that forms are created by God, so that the allegation of cryptocreationism is weaker than it might seem on a first hearing.) (2) The other main function God is meant to perform is that of being the principle of concrescence. Each occasion begins his career by prehending aspects of other occasions in its past, but how does the concrescing process get started? How does the occasion know how to unify its initial data? Whitehead’s answer is that God provides to each temporal occasion a ‘subjective aim’ – a form originally presented to the creature as an ideal to be realized. It is in conformity to the possibility of realizing this form that the multiplicity of prehended data must be synthesized. ‘God is the principle of concretion; namely, he is that actual entity from which each temporal concrescence receives that initial aim from which its self-causation starts.’26 Whitehead makes a significant effort to explain God’s action upon the world by applying the same principles in terms of which all natural activities are explained. The problem at this point is to understand how a form could look appealing to the nascent occasion. Whitehead holds that forms are in themselves devoid of intrinsic value; they become ideals because of God’s ‘valuation’ of them. There is an emotive reaction in God as he contemplates the forms; in virtue of this reaction, the forms are valued and, at the same time, ‘graded’ and hierarchically ordered. In apprehending new forms in God’s primordial nature, however, temporal occasions do not merely access the objects of the divine vision. A temporal occasion does not solely ‘see’ a form; it also sees it as God does. In other words, the temporal occasions sympathetically feel God’s evaluation of the forms. Since God only makes available to the temporal occasions the forms he wants them to realize, forms that


are seen in God are experienced by the nascent occasions as worthy ideals: ‘The novel hybrid feelings derived from God, with the derivative sympathetic conceptual valuations, are the foundations of progress’ [my emphasis].27 This is a fine idea whose intrinsic beauty must not pass unappreciated, but is it also metaphysically satisfactory? Here a doubt might be raised. Since a nascent occasion sympathizes with all the occasions in its past actual world, why is the form derived from God the only one capable of luring the concrescing process? The answer must be that there is something unique in the way the form is presented by God to the temporal occasion. The emotional intensity of God’s vision must be overwhelming. Occurring at the very first stages of an occasion’s life, it must be powerful enough to relegate into the background all of the occasion’s other sympathetic reactions. God must truly be, as in the Platonic–Christian tradition, the light of the soul; the vision of the God-chosen form (the Platonic Good?) must come as a shock to the occasion, so as to make it temporarily insensitive to all other influences. Otherwise, Whitehead’s explanation would not suffice to explain how God could fulfill his function as the principle of concrescence. (3) Lastly, God’s function as the principle of order remains in need of an explanation. Surprisingly enough for a thinker who takes evolution as seriously as Whitehead does, he provides nothing less than a revised form of the design argument: Apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world. The course of creation would be a dead level of ineffectiveness, with all balance and intensity progressively excluded by the cross currents of incompatibility.28 If temporal occasions were entirely free to pursue their ends, they would enter into competition with each other, and reality would become entirely chaotic; no order would ever emerge. Now, actual occasions are indeed free, yet the world is not a mere chaos, but rather a mixture of orderly and disorderly elements. The existence of elements of order points to the reality of an overarching mind. This must be capable of devising a general plan as well as persuading a significant number of actual occasions to follow it. Obviously enough, only a God could perform this ordering function on a cosmic level. The analogy with Leibniz’s view of God as envisaging a plurality of possible worlds is unmistakable, but there are some significant

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differences. In the first place, and as it has been already pointed out in the previous chapter, Whitehead’s vision of possible worlds is not as complete as Leibniz’s, for his God is only capable of envisaging abstract forms, and not complete concepts. Secondly, Whitehead’s God does not try to lead the world-process towards a conclusive end, a complete state of things that, if realized, would signify nothing less than the end of history. Rather, in his consequent nature, God is always aware of the present state of the world and updates his schemes according to what seems the best at that juncture of cosmic history. Thus there is no ‘best’ in any absolute sense, but the quality of each possible world is always to be determined anew with respect to the given historical situation. This is another way in which God’s dependency upon the world becomes manifest, for the world conditions God’s choice of the best world. The past is a stubborn fact that even God must take into account in devising his plans. By what criterion does God determine the best among the many worlds that could be realized at a given stage of cosmic history? Leibniz’s rationalistic God creates the world that displays the optimum balance of order and variety; Whitehead’s aims at the intensification of experience. Specifically, God’s aim for the temporal occasion ‘is depth of satisfaction as an intermediate step towards the fulfillment of his own being’.29 Thus God’s final purpose is that of bringing about a world that, once absorbed into his consequent nature, would lead to the most satisfactory experience. Surely, this passage cast a sinister light upon Whitehead’s God, who does not seem to be much interested in the well-being of the temporal occasions or be animated by any moral considerations. Leaving aside the question of the religious availability of Whitehead’s God, there remain some purely metaphysical questions concerning the functioning of God with respect to the world. Could he withdraw from presenting ideals to the temporal occasions if all possible outcomes of the world history were positively evil? Whitehead does not seem to address this issue, yet his whole tone and language suggest that the answer shall be negative: God does not create, in the sense of providing the occasion with subjective aims, in virtue of a free choice, but in virtue of a metaphysical necessity. Far from being above the general order of things, he is an integral aspect of the world’s general reproductive mechanism. In this respect Whitehead’s God is not so different from Leibniz’s, despite the fact that Leibniz would protest that God freely creates the world. But Leibniz’s God could not make mistakes in the choice of the


world to be created – he could not mistake the second-best for the very best – for he was conceived as omniscient. Now, Whitehead’s God is only endowed with knowledge of the forms and the world-process up to the present moment; how does he calculate which of the many possible worlds will lead to a maximum of experiential intensity? What guarantees that he will not make the wrong choice, presenting to the occasions of experience a scheme of ideals insufficient to that end? These questions do not find any answer in Whitehead’s philosophy; although they might sound bizarre, they are suggested by his account of the nature of the deity and bring to the light its incompleteness. Whitehead’s recasting of the traditional idea that God is a cosmic ‘architect’30 is so speculative that it is difficult to assess it. What is striking is that, despite the many elements of novelty that his philosophy undoubtedly contains, Whitehead is here imposing severe constraints upon the scientific notion that reality is a self-organizing whole, if not de facto rejecting it. His view closely approximates to one of the most conservative doctrines of traditional theism, for the temporal occasions would never be capable of achieving anything of enduring value and significance without divine aid. But the idea that God plays a role in drawing the world into higher forms of order must also be viewed in connection with Whitehead’s contention that the actual course of evolution cannot be explained purely in terms of Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest. ‘Why’ – he asks in The Function of Reason – ‘has the trend of evolution been upwards?’31 Whitehead does not wish to deny the reality of natural selection, a fact that is ‘obvious and stares us in the face’.32 His whole point is that natural selection alone does not explain evolution’s upward trend. This doubt cannot be taken lightly. In the fight for life, the winner is not necessarily the more civilized and refined among the competitors; in many cases, it is likely to be the most brutal and primitive. Other forces might therefore be at work in the evolutionary process besides the naturalistic mechanism identified by Darwin.

Open questions Quite apart from its theological implications, Whitehead’s account of divine agency is admirable for its ingeniousness and sophistication, but it also remains problematic in many respects. In the first place, if each occasion of experience begins his life by following God’s suggestion, then the question immediately arises as to why an occasion might ever fail to realize the divine ideal. Neither the efficacy of past actualities nor God’s presentation of ideals is conceived by Whitehead as a

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deterministic influence. Accordingly, one needs a factor that explains the concrescence’s particular outcome. Whitehead identifies this in an occasion’s capacity for selfdetermination. Each occasion is causa sui, in the sense that it freely chooses how to synthesize the many influences of the past world, God’s included. Whitehead occasionally refers to our experience of spontaneity and our sense of being responsible agents to illustrate the notion that an occasion is free to decide how to shape itself: ‘The point to be noticed is that the actual entity, in a state of process during which it is not fully definite, determines its own ultimate definiteness. This is the whole point of moral responsibility.’33 In this way, however, he reverses the correct order of explanation: instead of working out a concept and investigating our experience in its light, he makes an intuitive appeal to our experience to elucidate what is meant by an occasion’s freedom. Whitehead also notices that freedom is an ‘element in experience ... too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. It governs the whole tone of human life’.34 This is true but equally unsatisfactory, for no determinist has ever meant to deny that we experience ourselves as free; indeed, it is precisely the recognition of this fact and of its importance for our selfunderstanding that makes the problem of free will so painfully acute. Specifically, it remains wholly unclear in Whitehead’s philosophy how the element of spontaneity that is so essential a feature of an actual occasion could amount to freedom. For one thing, it is not clear how an occasion’s alleged choice of one form at the expense of another differs from a mere random event. It is true that, following Ward, Whitehead has created a metaphysical context that removes some of the traditional obstacles to freedom, such as the existence of deterministic laws (they are now only statistical in nature) and God’s knowledge of the future. Nevertheless, this by itself does not suffice to establish freedom’s reality. Moreover, I am certainly not aware of God’s presence at every single moment of my life – so in what sense can it be true to say that I am choosing or rejecting his proposal? A second problem is connected with Whitehead’s idea that God differs from all worldly actualities in that he never reaches satisfaction. Whereas all worldly actualities last for a brief moment and then exist as objectified in later actualities, God is ‘everlasting’ in the sense that he is constantly performing an integrating activity in His consequent nature. Since God’s consequent nature is what confers concreteness on God, God is never fully determinate, but always in the making. Whitehead’s language reflects this peculiar metaphysical condition, for God is said to be an actual entity, but not an actual occasion.

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Whitehead must maintain that God fails to achieve satisfaction in order to preserve the distinction between God and the world. If God were to achieve satisfaction, he would become a component of the world, a momentary, perishing actuality like all others. But the problem with this idea is that, if God ever fails to become anything determinate, it is unclear how it can be prehended. But if it is not prehended, how could he be the actuality from which the worldly occasions abstract novel ideals? Whitehead himself recognized the problem, but frankly admitted that he did not know how to solve it. 35 Lastly, the plausibility of Whitehead’s doctrine can be cast into doubt. The notion that God presents subjective aims to the worldly occasions is a metaphysical generalization from our moral experience of being inspired or lured by ideals. Are we now asked to believe that God presents ideals to all occasions, including those that enter into the constitution of such elementary particles as electrons and protons? This is hardly credible; if this were Whitehead’s claim, then the critique of anthropomorphism would be entirely justified. It should be noted at this point that there is a remarkable tension between Whitehead’s philosophy of nature and his natural theology. His panpsychist philosophy of nature requires that the experiences of non-human occasions be of a very low grade; indeed, such experiences must be of so low a grade that they are incommensurably different from the experiences of human beings. The movement here is decidedly away from positing human forms of experience at the lower levels of reality. On the other hand, the explanation of divine agency presupposes that one takes a step in the opposite direction: even the simplest occasions must now have an incipient sensitivity to ideals, if God has to be causally operative on them. Thus, opposite requirements would seem to be laid upon the concept of experience: the panpsychist philosophy of nature requires that experience be conceived in non-human terms, but in the natural theology all experience is now conceived in terms that are distinctively human. This is another way in which the tension between the theology and the philosophy of nature that has been observed in the previous discussion of the concept of prehension as applied to God’s consequent nature comes to the fore. But an analysis of Whitehead’s account of divine agency also makes clear that the root of the problem lies at a deeper level, and more specifically in the notion of conceptual prehension itself. If there is an experience that would seem to be characteristically human – or at least such that it can be attributed in a relatively uncontroversial way only to man and some of the higher animals – this is precisely the

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apprehension of a concept or form, but Whitehead ascribes from the outset a conceptual pole to all actual occasions. This is not an objection to panpsychism per se. On the contrary, the idea that experience is a pervasive feature of what there is can be defended with much plausibility. The previous discussion of Ward’s philosophy should have shown that panpsychism has considerable advantages over alternative theories such as materialism and Cartesian dualism. The objection is solely against Whitehead’s way of construing the minimal form of experience, namely as implying a capacity for grasping universals. There is also an unresolved ambiguity in Whitehead’s method of metaphysical generalization that clearly emerges in addressing the charge of anthropomorphism. What precisely are we asked to project from our conscious experiences? Should we project specific contents, so as to have some concrete grasp of the nature of realities beyond ourselves? Or should we simply extract from our experience a way of functioning, so as to have an abstract understanding of the way the basic units of reality operate? Surprisingly enough, Whitehead oscillates between these two possible ways of understanding metaphysical generalization. His uncompromising critique of the doctrine of vacuous actualities, the idea that reality is made of insentient bits, would be hardly intelligible if he had not meant that the ultimate constituents of reality are experiencing things in a quite literal sense. Nevertheless, he does at times suggest that his concepts are merely functional, for example in the following comment on his terminology: The technical term ‘conceptual prehension’ is entirely neutral, devoid of all suggestiveness. But such terms present great difficulties to the understanding, by reason of the fact that they suggest no particular exemplifications. Accordingly, we seek equivalent terms which have about them the suggestiveness of familiar fact.36 And again, Whitehead says that ‘[t]his word “feeling” is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own’.37 In these passages, Whitehead is most easily interpreted as saying that his terms denote ways of functioning rather than modes of being. Interestingly, these two ways of interpreting Whitehead’s philosophy are reflected in his appreciation of Leibniz’s significance in the history of philosophy. Hence, in Science and the Modern World he says

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that ‘Leibniz introduced the ... tradition that the entities, which are the ultimate actual things, are in some sense procedures of organization’,38 which clearly suggests the formalistic interpretation, whereas in Adventures of Ideas he ascribes to Leibniz – and in terms that must strike one as wholly familiar – a full-blown panpsychist conception of reality: Leibniz, he says here, ‘explained what it must be like to be an atom. Lucretius tells us what an atom looks like to others, and Leibniz tells us how an atom is feeling about itself’.39 Both ways of understanding metaphysical generalization encounter significant difficulties. If Whitehead’s language is to be taken literally, then some aspects of Whitehead’s theory are liable to the charge of anthropomorphism. If the projection we are asked to perform is purely functional, then the charge of anthropomorphism falls but the price to pay is that all the main concepts of Whitehead’s metaphysics become empty placeholders for operations of entities about whose intrinsic nature we know nothing. This is unsatisfactory in itself, for what are we to understand by ‘subjective aim’, if this is not an inspiring ideal, by a ‘physical prehension’, if this is not truly a form of feeling, or by ‘conceptual prehension’, if this is not the mental grasping of a universal form? But it would even be paradoxical for a philosophy like Whitehead’s, which is a sustained protest against mere abstractions in the name of more concrete ways of understanding the nature of reality. As he has it in Adventures of Ideas, ‘[t]he mere phrase that “physical science is an abstraction” is a confession of philosophic failure. It is the business of rational thought to describe the more concrete fact from which that abstraction is derivable’.40

Conclusion These critical remarks should not obscure the fact that, drawing from many different sources, Whitehead was able to develop a novel, really original account of the God–world relationship. This he summarized in the form of six antitheses: It is as true to say that God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent. It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many. It is as true to say that, in comparison with the World, God is actual eminently, as that, in comparison with God, the World is actual eminently.

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It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World. It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God. It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God.41 What has been said in this chapter should suffice to make the meaning of these antitheses clear: [1] God is permanent in his primordial nature, fluent in his consequent nature; the world is fluent apart from God, but permanent as objectified in God’s consequent nature; [2] God is one actuality, the world is constituted by many actual occasions; God is plural because he absorbs the many, the world is one as unified in God; [3] God is the eminent reality, because without his primordial nature temporal occasions could not come into being; the world is eminent insofar as God requires its absorption in his physical nature; [4] the world is immanent in God by way of objectification in his consequent nature, God is immanent in the world insofar as he provides each actual occasion with an initial subjective aim; [5] God transcends the world because he is a distinct actuality, the world transcends God for the same reason; [6] God creates the world by luring the concrescence; the world creates God by constituting his physical nature. Ward had written in the Realm of Ends that ‘the only Absolute ... we can admit is the Absolute which God and the World constitute’.42 The six antitheses are Whitehead’s way of articulating this intuition. They formulate a novel worldview in which God and the world, although distinct, are essentially related, mutually dependent upon each other. This involves a significant revision of the traditional philosophical theology derived from Aristotle – Whitehead’s God is still a mover, but not an unmoved one.

8 Epilogue: Is a Leibnizian Metaphysics Still Possible Today?

‘To be reasonably successful as a philosopher’ – Whitehead wrote in a retrospective assessment of Process and Reality – ‘is to provide a new platform; perhaps not a completely new platform, but a slight alteration of some older platform from which it is worthwhile to make criticisms.’1 According to the perspective adopted in the present work, Whitehead took Leibniz’s theory of monads as his starting point. The question now is whether his own alteration of that older platform is still worthy of consideration. To be sure, Whitehead is not the only one who tried to revitalize Leibniz’s theory of monads. Some main reasons of the renewed interest in the metaphysics of Leibniz in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century have been highlighted in Chapter 3, but the influence of Leibniz upon British philosophy still remains to be explored. For instance, one witnesses a revival of a speculative interest in the metaphysics of Leibniz not solely in the works of Ward and Whitehead, but also in those of John Ellis McTaggart and Herbert Wildon Carr. The former argued that reality is an eternal harmony of mind-like entities, while the latter brought together in an eclectic synthesis the metaphysics of Leibniz and that of Bergson.2 The philosophies that flourished in the aftermath of Process and Reality, however, show no sign of being indebted to the Monadology. Why did Leibniz, and Leibniz-inspired metaphysics, suffer such a merciless deposition? To understand how this could have happened, three moments in the overall intellectual tendency of the last century need to be taken into account. The first is the forceful rejection of psychologism: a theory that views human experience as the paradigmatic example of individuality is likely to look suspicious to philosophers interested in drawing a neat demarcation between psychology and philosophy. The second 144

Epilogue

145

is the materialistic doctrine of emergence: once biology had begun to understand the phenomena of life without the need of postulating an elan vital, it must have seemed equally possible to explain our conscious experiences on a purely physicalistic basis. Thirdly, there is the linguistic turn, with its uncompromising critique of traditional ways of conceiving of philosophy and its marked antimetaphysical, at times perhaps even antiphilosophical tendencies. None of these programs is unchallenged today. The idea that philosophy should seal itself off from other disciplines cannot be easily upheld in the philosophy of mind, where philosophers are forced to share their ideas with experts in other fields, including biology, computer science, neurology, and psychology. At the same time, few contemporary thinkers would claim that a solution to the mind–body problem is within sight. The phenomena of consciousness have proved difficult to incorporate into a materialistic worldview, which has led some to argue that an understanding of the mind’s place in nature would involve a conceptual revolution that is not yet within sight. 3 Lastly, there is a broad agreement today that analytic philosophy has failed to achieve its main goal of establishing a reliable philosophical method and that the term ‘analytic’ refers mainly to a stylistic commitment – basically to an emphasis on logic, rigor and clarity. These features, however, characterize many philosophies that cannot be classified as analytic in any genuinely interesting sense, such as Aristotle’s or Descartes’s. Thus, as it happens when old certainties are shaken, doctrines that seemed buried once and for all are now beginning to raise their heads: panpsychism has re-entered mainstream philosophical discussion, powered by the antiphysicalist arguments of authors such as Nagel and Chalmers,4 and metaphysical research has become fashionable again. Galen Strawson’s recent work is especially significant in this respect: having rejected the notion of substance as well as that of the emergence of the experiential out of the non-experiential, he defends a theory of interacting monads that shows great similarities with the one advocated by Whitehead.5 Most importantly, in rehabilitating the Leibnizian worldview, Strawson is consciously renouncing the idea that philosophy should be done piecemeal, preferably by setting up logical puzzles to be solved one after another.6 Whitehead explicitly rejected this methodological dogma, so fashionable in the twentieth century, and in Process and Reality he argued that ‘the movement of historical, and philosophical, criticism of detached questions ...’ needs ‘to be supplemented by a more sustained effort of constructive thought’.7

146


It is impossible to anticipate whether the sort of enterprise Whitehead and many of his contemporaries were engaged in – speculative metaphysics – will be vindicated in the future. It is conceivable, however, that the current sense of dissatisfaction with inherited solutions and methodologies may bring about a broadening of outlook and a re- evaluation of thinkers not currently included in the analytical (or, for that matter, in any other) canon.8 But is a Leibnizian metaphysics truly possible today? Nicholas Rescher has argued that a theory’s viability ‘should ... be construed in terms of consonance and compatibility with what the general run of relevantly well-informed people – professional philosophers in particular – think of as being at least a real option’.9 This remark is made in the context of a discussion of the form that a modern idealistic theory should plausibly take; specifically, Rescher appeals to it in order to reject traditional metaphysical versions of idealism that identify mind and reality, and as a way of introducing his own brand of ‘conceptual idealism’, this being the theory that the pivotal concepts we use in describing the world always contain some reference to mental operations, much in the way in which the concept of ‘book’ implies a reference to the concept of ‘reading’. It is surprising that precisely an author as unconventional as Rescher should make this sort of claim. Arguably, a straightforward acceptance of his suggested criterion would lead to a form of philosophical conformism and a very narrow limitation of the topics suitable for respectable philosophical discussion. The criterion is also hardly applicable, for where is such a thing as the ‘general run of relevantly well-informed people’ to be found in today’s fragmented, hyperspecialized philosophical world? Even if one adopts it, however, the above considerations suggest that a theory of reality along the lines indicated by Leibniz and Whitehead remains at least worthy of serious consideration in the present philosophical climate. But the point needs to be stressed that the question of a theory’s viability – not so much whether it is true or false, but whether it is worth considering in the first place – cannot be answered solely by reference to standards set within any circles of professional thinkers. Philosophical speculation involves an irreducible individualistic element, besides its equally ineradicable rational dimension. Ultimately, if philosophy has to be more than a sophisticated but self-contained academic exercise, each reader is called upon to judge a system’s adequacy and intrinsic interest by assessing that system’s capacity to shed light on his or her own personal experiences and concerns.

Epilogue

147

In recent years something of the greatest importance has become unclear, the nature and value of philosophy itself; no one with a love for the discipline can avoid feeling the force of Rorty’s provocative contention that ‘[p]hilosophy is an almost invisible part of contemporary intellectual life’.10 It is with respect to this truly fundamental issue that philosophers of the like of Leibniz and Whitehead have the most significant things to say. If we cannot take up their metaphysics as they stand, still we can – and should – try to recover some of the spirit of their speculative adventure. And indeed, what remains of philosophy if it abdicates its most humane concerns? And what do we lose if we renounce the task of making sense of the world and our place in it? The dreams of metaphysics might be the dreams of a spirit-seer, and it is important to be aware of this risk; at the same time, they are a challenge to all those forms of intellectual closure that make us blind to the mysterious complexity of life. As to Whitehead, he might have explained our experiences wrongly, but surely he was careful not to explain them away.

Notes 1

Introduction: From Leibniz to Whitehead

1. Whitehead (1938), p. 3. 2. Hartshorne (1975); from a Leibnizian perspective, see Rescher (2003). In Clayton (2000), Whitehead is said to be ‘Leibniz’s greatest twentiethcentury follower’ (p. 246). As will appear in the course of this study, however, Whitehead is as much a follower as he is a critic of Leibniz. Lastly, see the insightful Capek (1979): Whitehead’s metaphysics is here referred to as a variety of ‘neo-Leibnizian panpsychism’ (p. 100). 3. The concept of peace is discussed at length in the final chapter of Whitehead (1933); peace is here defined as ‘a quality of mind steady in its reliance that fine action is treasured in the nature of things’ (p. 274). 4. In this connection, see especially the final chapter, ‘Requisites for Social Progress’, of Whitehead (1925). 5. The passage from Whitehead (1919) reads as follows: ‘I have heavy obligations to acknowledge to Bertrand Russell, Wildon Carr, F.C. Schiller, T.P. Nunn, Dawes Hicks, McTaggart, James Ward, and many others who, amid their divergences of opinion, are united in the candid zeal of their quest for truth’ (p. viii). Although Whitehead recognizes here ‘heavy obligations’, the passage does not convey any precise information as to the extent of Ward’s influence. 6. Hartshorne (1963), p. 18. 7. Russell (1900), p. xiii. 8. James (1890), p. 181; see also the epilogue to the present study.

2 The Conception of Substance: Whitehead, Russell, and Leibniz 1. Whitehead (1920), p. 18. 2. Whitehead (1929a), p. xiii; for a denial of the reality of vacuous actualities, see Whitehead (1929c), pp. 30–1. 3. Whitehead (1929a), p. 19. 4. Whitehead (1938), p. 168. 5. Whitehead (1938), p. 117. 6. Whitehead (1938), p. 166. A description of the human mind strikingly similar to the one provided here by Whitehead is to be found in James (1890), pp. 287–8. 7. Whitehead (1927), p. 20. 8. Whitehead (1927), p. 20. 9. Whitehead (1927), p. 20. This is why the characterization of an actual occasion as ‘having both physical and mental aspects’ and in Whitehead’s doctrine as being a ‘kind of dual aspect theory’, to be found in Skrbina (2005), p. 132, is apt to be misleading. 148

Notes 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

149

Whitehead (1929b), p. 6. Whitehead (1929a), p. 16. Whitehead (1929a), p. 5. Whitehead (1929a), p. 159. Whitehead (1929a), p. 104. Whitehead (1929a), p. 80; see also p. 27. Whitehead (1929a), p. 80. Simons (1998). Whitehead (1929a), p. 27. Hartshorne (1997), p. 3. Spinoza (1988), p. 74. Whitehead (1929a), p. 309. Whitehead (1929a), p. 21. Spinoza (1994). God’s dependency upon the world is the topic of Chapter 7. Strawson (1959), p. 9. Strawson (1959), p. 9. Strawson (1959), p. 9. Strawson (1959), p. 10. Strawson (1959), p. 10. Within the analytic camp, this thesis has been challenged by Davidson (1980). Strawson (1959), p. 57. Rescher (2000), pp. 33–47. In traditional terminology, Rescher charges Strawson with a confusion between rationes essendi and rationes cognoscendi. It was Maxwell’s concept of a field that revolutionized Whitehead’s thinking about reality; this point is discussed in McHenry (2007). See for example, McHenry (2003), p. 161: ‘When Whitehead repudiated substance philosophy and posited an ontology of events in its place, many such as Strawson would claim that he ceased to make sense ... If Whitehead is right, however, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, not ordinary language philosophers, are at the forefront of making sense.’ See also the longer response to Strawson in McHenry (1992), pp. 103–11. Whitehead (1933), respectively pp. 78, 228 and 227. Whitehead was made sensitive to the problem of whether conceptual revision is possible by the fate of James’s and Bergson’s philosophies. Having recognized that our ordinary concepts are pragmatically useful but distortive of the nature of the real, they opted for a form of irrationalism that rejected thought as vehicle of truth in favor of intuition. If our concepts are inadequate to the nature of reality as well as not revisable, this is indeed the necessary outcome. Whitehead firmly rejects this conclusion: ‘I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.’ (Whitehead (1929a), p. xii); see also p. 209: ‘the history of philosophy supports Bergson’s charge that the human intellect “spatializes the universe”; that is to say, that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyze the world in terms of static categories. Indeed Bergson went further and conceived this tendency as an

150 Notes

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

inherent necessity of the intellect. I do not believe this accusation [my emphasis], but I do hold that spatialization is the shortest route to a clear-cut philosophy expressed in reasonably familiar language.’ Whitehead (1929a), p. 11. Whitehead (1929a), p. 159. Stebbing (1930), p. 466. Stebbing (1930), p. 475. Stebbing (1930), p. 475. Whitehead (1929a), p. 17. Whitehead (1929a), p. 17. Whitehead (1929a), p. 3. Whitehead (1929a), p. 3. Whitehead (1929a), p. 3. Whitehead (1929a), p. 7. Whitehead (1929c), p. 67; see also Whitehead’s comments on the main features of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle at pp. 84–5. In Maxwell’s field theory and Einstein’s theory of relativity, things become strings of events or space time worms; see McHenry (2007). Russell (1900), p. 9. Russell (1900), p. 19. Russell (1900), p. 42. Russell (1900), p. 45. Russell (1900), p. 44. Russell (1900), pp. 12–13. In Russell (1903), pp. 222–3, the possibility is also discussed that ‘L is greater than M’ might be analyzed as ‘L is of height X’ and ‘M is of height Y.’ Russell rejects this analysis on the ground that the analysandum is a relational fact whereas in the analysans we have two disconnected facts. In order for the analysis to be complete, we should specify that ‘X is greater than Y,’ but if we do so then we have once again failed to reduce relations to properties, for the original relation greater than now reappears in the analysans. Mates (1986) rejects Russell’s contention that a proposition such as (1) ‘Theaetetus is taller than Socrates’ is not adequately analyzed by the conjunction of (2) ‘Theaetetus is 6 feet tall’ and (3) ‘Socrates is 3 feet tall.’ Mates’s reasoning is as follows: ‘I find this [Russell’s] argument unconvincing. Leibniz would indeed say, I think, that (1) above is reducible to the propositions (2) and (3); his examples of reduction show that in reducing a given proposition to sets of propositions of “A is B” form, it is not necessary that the result of the reduction be logically equivalent to the original. It is only required that it implies it; and (2) and (3) certainly imply (1)’ (pp. 217–18). Mates’s objection raises an important question as to the criteria of a successful analysis. Russell certainly thinks that propositions are individual realities with a unity of their own, so that a correct analysis must be capable of showing how the component parts of the proposition can coalesce to form a unity. This means that, for Russell, the requirements are not solely logical, but metaphysical as well; how one settles the issue largely depends on one’s theory as to the ontological status of propositions. Russell (1900), p. 13. Russell (1903), p. 221.

Notes

151

59. Whitehead (1920), p. 150. 60. Whitehead (1929a), p. 190; at p. 137, Whitehead also writes: ‘The doctrine of the individual independence of real facts is derived from the notion that the subject-predicate form of statement conveys a truth which is metaphysically ultimate. According to this view, an individual substance with its predicates constitutes the ultimate type of actuality. If there be one individual, the philosophy is monistic; if there be many individuals, the philosophy is pluralistic. With this metaphysical presupposition, the relations between individual substances constitute metaphysical nuisances: there is no place for them.’ But does the view of a plurality of unrelated monads make sense? Doesn’t plurality always involve relations? Whitehead concludes, again at one with Russell, that ‘in defiance of the most obvious deliverances of our intuitive “prejudices” – every respectable philosophy of the subject-predicate type is monistic’. 61. Russell (1900), p. 48. 62. Leibniz (1875–1890), p. 263. On the correspondence between De Volder and Leibniz, see Russell (1981). Loemker (1973), p. 72, interprets Whitehead’s ontology as an ideal prosecution of that debate. 63. Russell (1900), p. 126. 64. This reverses, or at least complicates, the standard view that Russell followed Whitehead in adopting a process metaphysics; a statement of this view has been recently provided by Skrbina (2005): ‘Modern process philosophy was originated in spirit by Bergson, developed into a philosophical system by Whitehead, supported by Russell, and carried on to the present day by Hartshorne, Griffin, De Quincey and others’ (p. 174). The point is not merely historical: to lose sight of Russell’s original contribution is to lose sight of some of the purely philosophical reasons against the notion of substance. 65. Whitehead (1929a), pp. 18–19. 66. Whitehead (1933), p. 129, see also (1929a), p. 56. The very first sentence of Leibniz’s Principles of Nature and of Grace reads as follows: ‘Substance is a being capable of action’; see Leibniz (1898), p. 406.

3 The Relevance of Leibniz: Ward’s Theory of Monads 1. Dummett (1994), p. 3. Dummett’s contention that the history of ideas is philosophically more interesting than what he disparagingly calls ‘the history of thinkers’ is certainly correct, but it is not clear that the former can be practiced in detachment from the latter. 2. Lowe (1985), p. 119. 3. Taylor (1900), p. 244. 4. For information about Ward’s intellectual development, see Ward (1927) and Sorley (1925). 5. Ward (1899), p. 81 6. Ward (1899), pp. 109–10. 7. Whitehead (1925), p. 51. 8. Whitehead (1925), p. 58. 9. Whitehead (1925), p. 59.

152 Notes 10. See the brief but unanswerable critique of ‘the economic man’ in Whitehead (1929c), p. 75. 11. See Chapter 1, ‘Faith, Idealism, and Logic’, of Allard (2005), esp. pp. 6–14. 12. Seth (1887), p. 230. 13. Leibniz (1898), §3. 14. James (1890), p. 146. 15. James (1890), p. 146. 16. Clifford (1878), p. 65. 17. Clifford (1878), p. 65. 18. Towards the end of the paper, however, Clifford advances a more radical theory according to which reality is constituted by purely experiential beings: ‘Matter’, he says, ‘is a mental picture in which mind-stuff is the thing presented’; see Clifford (1878), p. 67. 19. James (1890), p. 160. 20. Nagel (1986), p. 59. 21. James (1890), p. 158. 22. James (1890), respectively p. 180 and p. 161. 23. James (1890), p. 181. 24. Ward (1927), p. 247. 25. James (1890), p. 180. 26. Basile (2004), pp. 161–77. 27. Leibniz (1898), §16. 28. Leibniz (1898), §19. 29. Ward (1911), p. 228. Ward uses the term ‘singularism’ because of the ambiguity of ‘monism’, which may refer to an absolutist conception of reality as well as to a pluralistic type-monism such as Leibniz’s theory of monads. 30. Leibniz (1898), §7. By ‘accident’ Leibniz means what are today called ‘tropes’, that is, particular property-instances rather than properties qua universals. 31. Lotze (1887), §64. 32. Lotze (1887), §64. 33. Lotze (1887), §66. 34. Russell (1900), p. 138. 35. Lotze (1887), §64. 36. Lotze (1887), §69. 37. Stout (1952), p. 218. 38. Bradley (1897), p. 102n. For a criticism along the same lines, see Stählin (1889), p. 120. 39. Lotze (1887), §79; see also §35, where the world is said to be a ‘ceaselessly advancing melody of event’. 40. The only author who seems to have recognized this is Paul Grimley Kuntz, who explicitly refers to Lotze as a process philosopher in his introduction to a late edition of Santayana’s dissertation. See Kuntz (1971), especially pp. 69–83. 41. Ward (1911), p. 260. 42. Ward (1911), pp. 391–2. 43. Ward (1911), pp. 392–3. 44. Ward (1911), p. 392. 45. Ward (1911), p. 219. 46. Ward (1911), p. 260. 47. Ward (1911), p. 257.

Notes 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

153

Ward (1911), p. 51. See the essay ‘Mechanisms and Morals’ in Ward (1927), p. 245. Griffin (1998), pp. 188–9. Ward (1911), p. 256. Ward (1911), p. 463. Ward (1911), p. 464. Ward (1911), p. 60. Ward (1911), p. 60. Whitehead (1929a), p. 32. Ward (1911), p. 433. Whitehead (1929a), p. 91. Broad (1975), p. 169. Russell (1927), p. 38. Ward (1911), p. 215. Ward (1911), p. 421. Ward (1911), p. 54. Ward (1911), p. 228. Ward (1911), p. 245. Ward (1911), pp. 238–9. Ward (1911), pp. 240. Ward (1911), p. 242. Ward (1911), p. 437. Ward (1911), p. 479. Ward (1911), p. 479.

4 The Phenomenology of Causation: Whitehead and Hume 1. For a realistic interpretation of Hume’s theory of causation, see Wright (1983) and Strawson (1989). For an overview of the debate, see the essays in Read and Richman (2000). 2. Whitehead (1927), pp. 37–8. 3. Whitehead (1929a), p. xi. 4. Whitehead (1927), p. 52. 5. Whitehead (1927), p. 5. 6. Whitehead (1927), p. 57. 7. Hume (1978), p. 1. 8. Hume (1978), pp. 7–8. 9. Whitehead (1929a), p. 162. 10. Whitehead (1929a), p. 140. 11. Hume (1978), p. 3. 12. Hume (1978), p. 34 (Hume’s emphasis). 13. Hume (1978), p. 6. 14. Hume (1975), p. 75. 15. Hume (1978), p. 156. 16. Hume (1978), p. 165. 17. Having observed that ‘necessity is something that exists in the mind, not in objects’, Hume goes on to argue that it is ‘a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and

154

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

Notes to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses’. See Hume (1978), pp. 165 and 167 respectively. For a detailed account of Hume’s explanation of causation see Stroud (1977), pp. 42–95, and Wright (1983), pp. 123–74. Whitehead (1929a), p. 134. I owe this remark to Galen Strawson. Whitehead (1929a), p. 140. Whitehead (1929a), p. 175. Hume (1978), p. 87. Hume (1978), p. 104. Hume (1978), p. 105, also reads as follows: ‘tho’ we are here suppos’d to have had only one experiment of a particular effect, yet we have millions to convince us of this principle; that like objects, plac’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects ... The connexion of ideas is not habitual after one experiment; but this connexion is comprehended under another principle, that is habitual, which brings us back to our hypothesis.’ Whitehead (1927), p. 43. Hocking (1963), p. 15. Hume (1978), p. 636. Whitehead (1929a), p. 50; the expression ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ is used as a description of an infant’s first experience of the world in James (1890), p. 462. Russell (1956a), p. 41. Whitehead (1929a), pp. 170–1. Hume (1975), p. 67n. Hume (1975), pp. 77–8n. Hume (1975), pp. 77–8n. Hume (1975), p. 78n. Hume (1975), p. 78n. Hocking (1963), p. 13. Whitehead (1929a), p. 315. Attention is drawn to this point by Griffin (1998), pp. 83–4; see Skrbina (2005), pp. 108–11. Kant (2002), p. 13. Kant (2002), p. 13. Kant (2002), p. 13. Kant (2002), p. 14. Kant (1961), B427–428. Clifford (1878), p. 67. Ward (1911), p. 392.

5 The Metaphysics of Causation: Whitehead, Hume, and James 1. Hume (1978), p. 67. 2. Hume (1978), p. 68. 3. Hume (1978), p. 68.

Notes 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

155

Hume (1978), p. 252. Hume (1978), p. 253. Whitehead (1929a), p. 159. Moore (1903), p. 450. Descartes (1986), p. 12. Berkeley (1998), p. 120. Whitehead (1929a), pp. 151–2. Hume (1978), p. 20: ‘Abstract ideas are therefore in themselves individual, however they may become general in their representation.’ Whitehead (1927), p. 33. Whitehead (1929a), p. 153. James (1890), pp. 350–60. The two Mills, James and John, are the main targets of James’s critique. James (1890), pp. 360–6. James (1890), p. 606. Whitehead (1925), p. 104: ‘the total temporal duration of such an event [the actual occasion] ... constitutes its specious present’; see also Whitehead (1938), p. 89. Whitehead (1920), pp. 72–3. Whitehead (1927), p. 39. For a brief but useful discussion of Husserl’s account of the present moment of experience, see Sokolowski (2000), pp. 134–40. James (1890), p. 240, refers to Brentano as a philosopher who has given due emphasis to the phenomenon of the past’s entrance into the present. Whitehead (1925), p. 104. This important question is also rarely discussed by commentators. Sprigge (2006), p. 440, takes an agnostic position; Lango (1972), p. 5, explicitly defends the thesis that actual occasions are unobservable speculative entities: ‘We cannot observe an actual entity with our senses; we cannot infer an actual entity with empirical theories; we cannot consciously apprehend an actual entity through introspection. We must therefore obtain an understanding of actual entities through speculation.’ Whitehead (1933), p. 221. Whitehead (1933), p. 184. Note how this passage suggests that we are immediately aware of single occasions; however, this does not seem to be the case. Whitehead (1929a), p. 19. There is no doubt that this is Whitehead’s position. See for example Whitehead (1933), p. 189: ‘our sense of unity with the body has the same original as our sense of unity with our immediate past of personal experience.’ Whitehead (1927), p. 46. Whitehead (1927), p. 46. Whitehead (1927), p. 46. Whitehead (1929a), pp. xiii–xiv. Bennett (2003), p. 240. Whitehead (1929a), p. 164. Whitehead (1929a), p. 181. Nobo (1986) provides an interpretation of the mechanism of causal objectification that conflicts from the one that is here advanced. According to

156

Notes

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

the present interpretation, the original occasion and the objectified one are numerically the same, in the sense that parts of the former survive as real elements in the latter: there is a real entry of the past into the present. In Nobo’s view, however, Whitehead understands objectification as a reduplication of some aspects of the original rather than as the entry of the original into the present occasion. In itself, this is reasonable enough; it also squares with many passages in Process and Reality in which Whitehead talks of ‘repetition’, as well as with others in Adventures of Ideas where he uses the term ‘re-enaction’. The problem is that Nobo rejects the thesis that the original occasion and the objectified one are numerically identical (p. 81), but also denies that they are merely qualitatively identical: ‘the objective datum’, he says, ‘is the past actuality’ (p. 81). Nobo is right in holding that a partial qualitative identity does not suffice: if the retained element were only a reproduction or copy of the original, then Whitehead would not be justified in holding that the past is ‘immanent’ in the present in a philosophically interesting sense of this term. But on Nobo’s interpretation, one is then forced to ascribe to Whitehead the doctrine that two particulars might be the same in a sense that is (a) weaker than numerical identity, but (b) stronger than mere qualitative identity. I submit that I find it difficult to grasp what this sense of ‘sameness’ might be. Sprigge (1983), p. 230. James (1890), p. 163. Whitehead (1929a), p. 53. Whitehead (1929a), p. 161. Whitehead (1929a), p. 273. Whitehead (1929a), p. 162. Whitehead (1929a), p. 162. Whitehead (1947), p. 89.

6

The Reality of Forms: Whitehead’s Theistic Argument

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

These arguments are discussed in Chapter 7 below. Hartshorne (1941), p. 535. Russell (1900), p. 172. Passmore (1957), p. 335. Passmore (1957), p. 335. Passmore (1957), p. 336. Whitehead (1938), p. 48. Whitehead (1938), p. 47. Whitehead (1929a), p. 6. Whitehead (1929c), p. 32. Whitehead (1929a), p. 291. If eternal objects are Platonic universals, why not simply use the traditional terminology? Whitehead thinks that calling the forms universal is misleading, for in his theory there is a sense in which universality is a characteristic of particulars as well. Insofar as an actual occasion can be objectified by different occasions, it enters into the constitution of more than one individual. There is also a sense in which a particular can be multiply instantiated, as is the case with the traditional universals. See also p. 69.

Notes 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

7

157

Whitehead (1929a), p. 44. Whitehead (1929a), p. 149. Whitehead (1929a), p. 65. Whitehead (1929a), p. 65. Whitehead (1929a), p. 65. Whitehead (1929a), p. 18. Whitehead (1938), p. 69. Royce (1901), p. 374. Whitehead (1938), p. 53. Whitehead (1929a), p. 40. Whitehead (1929a), p. 40. Whitehead (1929a), p. 44. Whitehead (1929a), p. 87. Whitehead (1926), p. 154. Leibniz (1898), §43. Russell (1900), p. 180. Whitehead (1929a), p. 32. Whitehead (1929a), p. 22. Leibniz (1898), §56. Leibniz (1898), §51. See above, Chapter 2; a skeptical position with regard to Ockham’s principle understood as a serious metaphysical thesis is also taken by Marcus (1993), p. 199. Russell (1900), p. 178. Leibniz’s New Essays concerning Human Understanding, as quoted in Russell (1900), p. 290. Whitehead (1929a), p. 190. The charge that the several parts of Leibniz’s system are only extrinsically connected, juxtaposed as it were instead of forming an organically related whole, seems also to be implicit in the following remark from Whitehead (1933), p. 134: ‘But no reason can be given [by Leibniz] why the supreme monad, God, is exempted from the common fate of isolation. Monads, according to this doctrine, are windowless for each other. Why have they windows towards God, and Why has God windows towards them?’ According to Whitehead (1929a), pp. 6–7, moreover, the metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza also display incoherence as ‘the arbitrary disconnection of first principles’.

The Final View: The Dipolar Conception of God

1. Whitehead (1929a), p. 343. 2. Whitehead (1929a), p. 207. 3. Whitehead (1926), p. 16. That being said, it cannot be denied that Whitehead’s philosophy opens new avenues for theological research. For an introduction to process theology, see Cobb and Griffin (1976). 4. Whitehead (1929a), p. 343. 5. Kant (1961), A426/B454 – A428/B456. This is the argument in support of the thesis of the first antinomy, dealing with the question of whether or not the world has a beginning in time.

158 Notes 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

Principles of Nature and of Grace in Leibniz (1898), pp. 414–15. Whitehead (1929a), p. 19. Leibniz (1898), §47. Leibniz (1989), p. 46. Whitehead (1929a), p. 343. Whitehead (1929a), p. 345. Whitehead (1929a), p. 62. Whitehead (1929a), p. 346. Whitehead (1929a), p. 346. On this point, see McHenry (1992), pp. 155–62. Whitehead (1929a), p. 346. Whitehead (1929a), p. 350. Whitehead (1929a), p. 48. Whitehead (1929a), pp. 12–13. Whitehead (1929a), p. 351. Whitehead (1929a), p. 351. This is the sort of sensibility Whitehead apparently shared with an author who meant much to him, namely Cardinal Newman. In his A Grammar of Assent, Newman writes: ‘If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear ... If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which [a person’s] perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine.’ See Newman (1947), pp. 83–4. Whitehead’s point is weaker than Newman’s, however, for our sense of higher values is not taken by Whitehead to imply the reality of God; the claim is rather that the notion that we are aware of God’s consequent nature provides a reasonable interpretation of some of our moral experiences. For the relevance of Newman to Whitehead’s own life, see Lowe (1985), pp. 141–2 and 170–1. Lowe reports that Whitehead held Newman in such high esteem that even late in life he referred to him as ‘the most profound mind of the nineteenth century’ (p. 171). Whitehead (1929a), p. 246. Whitehead (1929a), p. 246. Most recently, for example, Michel Weber has argued that ‘to take novelty seriously necessitates the creation of new eternal objects’; see Weber (2006), p. 172. Whitehead (1929a), p. 244. Whitehead (1929a), p. 247. Whitehead (1929a), p. 247. Whitehead (1929a), p. 105. This is Leibniz’s image in the Monadology, §89. In a sense, it is more appropriate for Whitehead’s God than for Leibniz’s, for an architect plans the scheme of the building to be realized, but cannot control all the details of its realization. Whitehead (1929c), p. 7. Whitehead (1929c), p. 4. Whitehead (1929a), p. 255. Whitehead (1929a), p. 47.

Notes

159

35. See A.H. Johnson, ‘Some Conversations with Whitehead Concerning God and Creativity’ in Ford and Kline (1983), pp. 9–10. To Johnson’s question – ‘If God never “perishes,” how can he provide data for other actual entities?’ – Whitehead replied: ‘This is a genuine problem. I have not attempted to solve it.’ Hartshorne (1941) is an attempt to systematize Whitehead’s account by conceiving of God as a society of occasions instead of as always in the process of self-actualization. On the differences between Hartshorne and Whitehead, see Griffin (1973). 36. Whitehead (1929a), p. 33. 37. Whitehead (1929a), p. 164. 38. Whitehead (1925), p. 156. 39. Whitehead (1933), p. 132. Whitehead’s formulation, ‘what it must be like to be’, is obviously reminiscent of T. Nagel’s influential paper ‘What is it like to be a bat’, in Nagel (1979), pp. 165–80. 40. Whitehead (1933), p. 186. 41. Whitehead (1929a), p. 348. 42. Ward (1911), p. 242.

8 Epilogue: Is a Leibnizian Metaphysics Still Possible Today? 1. Whitehead (1947), p. 87. 2. McTaggart (1921) and (1927); Carr (1922) and (1930b). The relevance of Leibniz for early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon philosophy is still unexplored territory. Phemister and Brown (2007), a recent collection of essays featuring major Leibniz scholars, devotes two papers to Russell, but contains only a few occasional references to Ward, Carr and McTaggart; surprisingly enough, not a single word is devoted to Whitehead. 3. Nagel (1986), pp. 51–3. 4. Nagel (1979), pp. 181–95; Chalmers (1996), especially pp. 153–5 and 276–310. 5. Strawson (2006); for further discussions of Strawson’s Leibnizian version of panpsychism, see Basile (2006b) and (2009). To the best of my knowledge, Strawson has not yet worked out a theory of intermonadic causation. 6. The idea originates in Russell’s essay of 1905 ‘On Denoting’: ‘A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science’ (quoted from Russell (1956b), p. 47). It should be noted, however, that Russell suggests here that this is a correct method for logic, not for philosophy as such. 7. Whitehead (1929a), p. xiv. 8. Besides Whitehead, authors such as Samuel Alexander and George Santayana surely deserve to be rediscovered. 9. Rescher (1998), p. 239. 10. Rorty (2007), p. 14.

Bibliography Works by Whitehead cited in the text Whitehead’s works are referred to in the notes by the date of first publication; unless otherwise indicated, this is the same as that of the edition used. Hence, ‘Whitehead (1925)’ refers to the 1967 reprint of Science and the Modern World. 1919 1920 1925 1926 1927 1929a 1929b 1929c 1933 1938 1947

An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Press, 1967). Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996). Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Macmillan). Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, eds D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978). The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: The Free Press, 1967). The Function of Reason (Boston: Beacon, 1958). Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967). Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1969). Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Rider).

Other primary sources (Whitehead’s contemporaries) Alexander, S. (1920) Space, Time and Deity: The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1916–1918, 2 vols (London: Macmillan). Aliotta, A. (1914) The Idealistic Reaction against Science (London: Macmillan). Bergson, H. (1911) Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan). Bertocci, P.A. (1938) The Empirical Argument for God in Late British Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Bradley, F.H. (1897) Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Broad, C.D. (1912) ‘Review of The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism’, International Journal of Ethics, XXIII, 77–84. ——— (1925) The Mind and its Place in Nature (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul). ——— (1975) Leibniz: an Introduction, ed. C. Lewy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Carr, H.W. (1922) A Theory of Monads: Outlines of the Philosophy of the Principle of Relativity (London: Macmillan). ——— (1930a) The Monadology of Leibniz, with an Introduction, Commentary and Supplementary Essays (Los Angeles: University Press of Southern California). 160

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Other works Allard, J.W. (2005) The Logical Foundations of Bradley’s Metaphysics. Judgement, Inference and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Basile, P. (2004) ‘German Realism and British Idealism: Herbart and Bradley’, Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie, XIV, 161–77. ——— (2005) ‘Whitehead’s Ontology and Davidson’s Anomalous Monism’, Process Studies, XXXIV, 3–9. ——— (2006a) ‘Rethinking Leibniz: Whitehead, Ward and the Idealistic Legacy’, Process Studies, XXXV, 207–29. ——— (2006b) ‘Review of Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and its Place in Nature’, Process Studies, XXXVI, 150–3. ——— (2007a) ‘The Compounding of Consciousness’ in P. Basile and L.B. McHenry (eds) Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T.L.S. Sprigge (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag), 93–108. ——— (2007b) ‘Whitehead, Hume and the Phenomenology of Causation’ in M. Weber and P. Basile (eds) Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag), 137–57. ——— and L.B. McHenry (eds) (2007c) Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in Honour of T.L.S. Sprigge (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag). ——— (2009) ‘Back to Whitehead? Galen Strawson and the Rediscovery of Panpsychism’ in D. Skrbina (ed.) Mind that Abides (Amsterdam: John Benjamins), 179–99.

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Index Absolute, the, 29, 36–7, 41, 48–9, 65, 112–13, 130–1 see also monism, number abstract entities, 108, 124 see also eternal objects abstraction, 21, 23, 34–5, 92–3, 129, 134, 142 accident, 27–8, 44, 90, 152n29 see also tropes; universals actual entity, 4, 7–11, 14–16, 30, 32, 108–9, 110, 115, 124, 127, 129, 132–4, 135, 139, 155n22, 159n35 actual occasion, 31, 55, 92–6, 98–100, 102–3, 109–11, 127, 129, 131–2, 135–40, 155n17, 155n24, 156n11, 156n34 agnosticism, 35 Alexander, Samuel, 159n8 Allard, James, 36 analysis (genetical vs. morphological), 69, 103 anthropomorphism, 80, 140–2 a priori, 20, 65, 117 Aristotle, 5, 7, 143, 145, 150n48 atomism, ancient, 14–15 Bennett, Jonathan, 99–100 Bergson, Henri, 4, 144, 149n36, 151n64 Berkeley, George, 17, 57, 88–9 Bohr, Niels, 149n35 Bosanquet, Bernard, 36 Bradley, Francis Herbert, 29, 36–7, 42, 48, 112 Brentano, Franz, 155n20 Broad, Charles D., 56 Brown, Stuart, 159n2 Cambridge, University of, 3, 32, 56, 87, 116 Capek, Milic, 148n2 Carr, Herbert Wildon, 144, 148n5, 159n2

categories of being, 26, 28, 50 of thought, 18–19, 65 causa sui, 139 causation efficient vs. final, 104–5 inter-monadic, 2, 4, 41, 43–4, 49–54, 61–2 transeunt vs. immanent, 51, 96–9 see also influx; objectification; perception; perishing Chalmers, David, 145 civilization, 2 Clayton, Philip, 148n2 Clifford, William Kingdon, 39–40, 82–3, 152n18 Cobb, John B. Jr., 126 commonsense, 6, 64, 79, 96 as contrasted with metaphysics, 36–7, 47, 90–1 complete concepts Leibniz’s doctrine of, 25–6, 60, 116–17, 137 composition problem, 39–41, 82 concrescence, 10, 13 God as the principle of, 134–6 see also satisfaction consciousness and its place in nature, 145 James on the stream of, 91–4 Whitehead on the stream of, 96–8 Whitehead’s definition of, 102 see also duration; intentionality; panpsychism; protention; retention continuity, principle of, 8, 38, 42, 58 contradiction, 22 logical vs. pragmatic, 47, 91 see also commonsense cosmological argument, 106 creation Lotze on Leibniz on, 44–6

169

170 Index creation – continued of novel eternal objects, 135, 158n25 Ward on, 58–61 Whitehead on traditional conceptions of, 126–8 creativity, 61, 127 criteria (for the evaluation of a metaphysical theory) adequacy, 23–4, 121 applicability, 22, 121 coherence, 22–3, 85, 121, 123, 157n36 consistency, 22–3, 121 Darwin, Charles R., 36–7, 138 see also evolution, theory of Davidson, Donald, 149n30 decision, 9–10, 69, 108–9 deism, 5, 59 Democritus, 14–15 Descartes, René, 8–13, 17, 66, 76, 87, 88, 145, 157n36 design, argument from, 58, 106, 122–3, 136 determination, 13–14, 109, 139–40 determinism, 56–7, 61 see also freedom; spontaneity De Quincey, C., 151n64 De Volder, Burcher, 30, 151n30 Dewey, John, 149n36 dual-aspect theory, 10, 39, 148n9 Dualism, Cartesian, 35, 56, 97, 141 Dummett, Michael, 32, 151n1 duration, 92–4, 155n17 Einstein, Albert, 149n35, 150n49 emergence of mind out of matter, 38–41, 145 of natural laws in the course of evolution, 56 emotions, 2, 68–9, 126, 158n22 see also subjective form enduring things, 16, 26, 30–1, 95, 111, 131 souls as, 13–14 energy, 9

eternalism, 112–13 see also Absolute, the; specious present; time eternal objects, 10, 112, 114 argument from the reality of, 106–11 as objects of divine intuition, 114–16 and the principle of relativity, 118–21 see also creation; ideas; universals events as the basic building blocks of reality, 11, 18, 24, 49, 96, 110–11, 127, 149n35, 150n49, 152n39 evolution emergent, 128, 134–5 of language, 20–1 and Leibniz’s theory of monads, 38–41 see also panpsychism meaning of, 55, 60–2, 138 theory of, 3, 20; its impact upon British Idealism, 36–8 experience ambiguity in Whitehead’s conception of, 140–1 as the basis for metaphysics, 8–9, 11–12, 95–8 cosmic, 36, 43, 112–13, 130–1 criteria of identity, 101–2 everyday, 2, 9, 14–15, 21–2, 43, 57, 64, 66, 74, 123, 133, 135, 139, 146–7 and intrinsic value, 128 religious and moral, 59, 106, 125–6, 133, 136, 158n22 richer than theory, 23, 33, 35, 39 ubiquitous feature of reality, 8, 38 unconscious, 39, 102 unity of, 40, 42, 52–3 varieties of, 24, 38, 67, 68, 77–9, 86, 90, 115 of a whole and of its parts, 52 see also emotions; feelings; panpsychism; perception fallibilism, 9, 12, 24 Fechner, Theodor Gustav, 4

Index 171 feelings conceptual, 115, 134 conformal, 103–4 Ford, Lewis, 159n35 form, 10, 109, 111, 114, 118–19, 135–6, 141–2 freedom, 37, 47–8, 55, 57, 106, 117, 139 future as anticipated in the present moment of experience, 92–3 as open, 37, 47, 60, 112–13, 128, 131, 134–5, 139 generalization as a metaphysical method, 7–9, 11–12, 22–3, 81, 86, 92, 95–8, 102, 140–2 God, existence of, see cosmological argument; design; eternal objects, argument from the reality of; moral argument Green, Thomas Hill, 36 Griffin, David Ray, 52, 126, 151n64, 154n38, 157n3, 159n35 harmony achieved in the course of evolution, 58 pre-established, 2, 37, 41–8, 51–2, 64–5, 120, 122–3 realized in God’s consequent nature, 130 Hartshorne, Charles, 1, 4, 14, 52, 106, 151n64, 159n35 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 36–7 Heisenberg, Werner Karl, 149n35 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 41 Hicks, G. Dawes, 148n5 Hocking, William Ernest, 154n26 holism, 40, 70, 92 Hume, David, 3, 4, 36, 63–80, 84–90, 97, 153n7, 154n24, 155n11 Husserl, Edmund, 93 idealism, 10, 37, 87 absolute, 37, 41, 43, 65, 118, 131 conceptual, 146 metaphysical vs. epistemological, 57

ideals, 135, 138, 142 ideas, Platonic, 108, 110, 156n11 identity, qualitative vs. numerical, 100–1, 156n34 immanence (vs. transcendence) of God and the world, 69, 61, 125, 143 of the past and the present, 99, 156n34 immediacy, subjective, 98–100, 105, 130 immortality, objective, 99–100 influx, theory of physical, 43–4, 47, 49, 99–100, 102, 133 ingression, 102, 109–12, 132, 134 instant, 93, 127 intellectualism, 76–7, 80, 94, 149n36 intentionality, 86–7, 89 introspection, 9, 12, 85, 87, 92, 97, 155n2 intuition, 21, 149n36 irrationalism, 90, 149n36 James, William, 6, 33, 38–41, 59, 77, 82, 84–5, 91–4, 100–1, 148n6, 149n36, 154n28 Johnson, A.H., 159n35 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 45, 58, 65, 106, 126–7 on monadism, 80–3 Kline, G.L., 159n35 Kuntz, P.G., 152n40 Lango, John, 155n22 language (as a problem for metaphysics), 17–21, 45, 48, 74, 133, 150n36 laws of nature, 54–6, 61, 139 Locke, John, 8 Loemker, Leroy E., 151n62 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 3, 29–30, 33, 35, 41–9, 59–60, 117, 152n40 Lowe, Victor, 151n2, 158n22 Marcus, Ruth Barcan, 157n32 materialism, 14, 33, 35, 37, 56, 65, 141 Mates, Benson, 150n56 mathematics, 1–2, 88

172

Index

matter, 38–9, 56–7, 81–2, 152n18 Maxwell, James Clerk, 149n34, 150n49 McHenry, Leemon B., 149nn34,35, 150n49, 158n15 McTaggart, John M. Ellis, 116, 144, 148n5, 159n2 memory, 68, 89, 93, 104, 131 mental (vs. physical) pole, 10, 55, 129, 141 metaphysics descriptive vs. revisionary, 3, 7, 17–18, 20–2, 24, 121 speculative, 1, 22–3, 80, 146–7 misplaced concreteness, fallacy of, 33–4, 91, 93 Mill, James, 155n14 Mill, John Stuart, 155n14 mind-stuff, 39–40, 152n18 monads as mirrors of the universe, 47, 20 as process-units, 13, 30, 48–9, 95–6, 142 as the true atoms of nature, 38 windowless, 13, 29, 44, 96, 120, 123, 157n36 with windows, 2, 4, 13, 51 monism neutral, 10 number, 28–9, 46, 49, 152n29 type, 8, 97, 152n29 see also Absolute, the Monotheism (vs. polytheism), 119, 121 Moore, George Edward, 87, 89 moral argument, 106, 158n22 Nagel, Thomas, 40, 145, 159n39 nature, 20, 34, 36–8, 54–7, 61, 96, 122, 140, 144–5 Neo-Hegelianism, 36–7 Neo-Kantianism, 37 neutral monism, 10 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal), 158n22 Nobo, Jorge Luis, 155–6n34 novelty, 37, 46, 55, 60, 134, 158n25 Nunn, T.P., 148n5 objectification, 99–100, 129, 132, 143, 155–6n34

occasionalism, 44, 48 Ockham’s razor, 121 ontological principle, 106, 108, 113, 122, 127 order, 2, 36, 43, 48, 54–8, 64, 122, 126–8, 136–8 organism, 36, 76 organizational duality, 52, 54–6 panentheism, 61 see also immanence panpsychism, 35–40, 52, 100, 141, 145 see also composition problem pantheism, 5, 59 see also Absolute, the participation, of sensible things in Ideas, 114 see also ingression Passmore, John, 107 past as eternally present, 37, 45–7, 69, 112–13 objective reality of the, 92–3, 97–100, 103–4, 132, 155–6n34 peace, 2 perception and apperception, 42 modes of (causal efficacy and presentational immediacy), 66–9, 75–6, 78–80, 87, 90 perishing, 104–5, 140 personhood, Whitehead’s legalistic concept of, 95 perspective, 13–14, 42, 47 Phemister, Pauline, 159n2 philosophy, value of, 35 Plato, 31, 108, 110, 114 pluralism, 15, 28–9, 48–9 see also monism, number possibilities, 5, 10, 60, 110–13, 116–17, 119, 121–2 potentiality, real and general, 109–10 prehension conceptual, 10, 55, 134, 140–2 hybrid, 134, 136 physical, 10, 99, 102–3, 134, 142 property, see accident, tropes, universals protention, 93

Index 173 psychology, 33–4, 144–5 quantum physics, 3, 9, 20, 57 Ramanujan, 107 Read, R., 153n1 re-enaction, 156n34 relations internal vs. external, 14–15 irreducible to properties, 26–9, 150n56 relativity principle of, 118–21 theory of, 2, 150n49 religion, 6, 35, 126 religious experience, 59, 126, 133 Rescher, Nicholas, 1, 19, 146, 148n2, 149n33 retention, 93, 97–8, 100, 102 Richman, K.A., 153n1 Rorty, Richard, 147 Royce, Josiah, 112–13 Russell, Bertrand, 3–5, 7, 24–30, 32, 47, 57–8, 66, 77, 107, 116–18, 122, 148n5, 150n56, 151nn60,64 Santayana, George, 90, 152n40, 159n8 satisfaction, 10, 103, 109, 137, 139–40 Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott, 148n5 science, 20, 24, 34, 36–7, 41, 57, 142 self, 9, 13, 37, 50, 84–5, 91, 94, 104 see also soul sense data, 66–7, 75, 87, 126 see also perception, modes of Seth (Pringle-Pattison), Andrew, 37 Simons, Peter, 13 singularism, 152n29 see also monism, number skepticism as to causation, 63–5 as to the reality of the external world, 86–7, 90–1 Skrbina, David, 148n9, 151n64 society, metaphysical concept of, 18, 55–6, 95, 159 Sokolowski, Robert, 155n20 solidarity, of the world, 15, 23 solipsism of the present moment, 90

Sorley, W.R., 151n4 soul, 13, 40–2, 50, 52, 69, 81–2, 92, 136 space, 14, 57 specious present, 92–4, 112–13 Spencer, Herbert, 20 Spinoza, Baruch, 15–16, 28–30, 112, 129, 157n36 spiritualism, 40, 50 spontaneity, 9–10, 13, 51, 54–6, 61, 125, 139, 168 Sprigge, Timothy Lauro Squire, 100, 102–4, 155n22 Stählin, Leonhard, 152n38 Stebbing, Susan, 21, 24 Stirling, James Hutchison, 36 Stout, G.F., 48 Strawson, Galen, 145, 153n1, 154n9, 159n35 Strawson, Peter Frederick, 17–20 Stroud, Barry, 154n17 subjective aim, 130, 135, 137, 140, 142–3 see also ideals subjective form, 10, 103–4 subjectivist principle, 13 subsistence, 108, 110 sub specie aeternitatis, 37, 112 substance and causation, 26, 43–4, 49–50, 99–100, 120 God as, 16 meaning of, 7, 16, 25, 31 mind as, 8, 12–13, 42, 49–50, 81–2, 85–6, 90, 94 and modern science, 20, 24 and ordinary language, 20 Russell’s critique of the notion of, 24–30 sympathy, 51, 102–3 Taylor, Alfred Edward, 33 theism, 5, 58–61, 138 time epochal theory of, 92–4 eternalistic conception of, 36, 44, 112 existence in, 44–7 irreversibility of, 113 reality of, 112–13 tropes, 99, 152n30

174

Index

universals, 86, 89, 108, 111, 114–15, 123, 132, 135, 141–2, 152n30, 156n11 see also ideas vacuous actualities, 8, 141 value, 2, 55, 106, 128, 135, 138, 158n22 Varisco, Bernardino, 4

Ward, James, 3–5, 32–8, 43, 46, 49–63, 83, 102, 113, 116, 117, 125, 139, 141, 143, 144, 148n5, 152n29 Weber, Michel, 158n25 Wright, John P., 153n1, 154n17 Zeno of Elea (paradoxes of), 94, 113

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