The Metaphysics of Experience

A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality

Elizabeth Kraus

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780823217953
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823283156
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

The Metaphysics of Experience styles itself as "a Sherpa guide to Process and Reality, whose function is to assist the serious reader in grasping the meaning of the text and to prevent falls into misinterpretation." Although originally published in 1925, Process and Reality has perhaps even more relevance to the contemporary scene in physics, biology, psychology, and the social sciences than it had in the mid-twenties. Hence its internal difficulty, its quasi-inaccessibility, is all the more tragic, since, unlike most metaphysical endeavors, it is capable of interpreting and unifying theories in the above sciences in terms of an organic world view, instead of selecting one theory as the paradigm and reducing all others to it. Because Alfred North Whitehead is so crucial to modern philosophy, The Metaphysics of Experience plays an important role in making Process and Reality accessible to a wider readership.The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead's Process and Reality is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

1

PROCESS PHILOSOPHY AND ITS PROBLEMS

I • THE NATURE OF PROCESS PHILOSOPHY

PROCESS PHILOSOPHY is an answer to the being vs. becoming, permanence vs. change problematic which has been central to metaphysical speculation since the time of the Greeks. Most attempted solutions resolve the antitheses either by denying the reality of one or the other of the paired alternatives or by making it in some sense less real than, dependent upon, or derivative from the other. Despite the implications of its name, the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead does not opt for the Heraclitean alternative; nor does it attempt to make permanence in any way the subservient member of the pair. Rather, it asserts that being and becoming, permanence and change must claim coequal footing in any metaphysical interpretation of the real, because both are equally insistent aspects of experience.

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts [PR 338].

This is not to say that the permanence affirmed by Whitehead can be identified with substance in any of its classic forms (Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, etc.). These conceptualizations of the unchanging element in experience fall, in one way or another, into the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness: the error of reifying what in fact is a high-order abstraction. Nor can Whitehead be interpreted as rejecting the classical notions of substance in an unqualified manner. On the contrary, he acknowledges his debt to Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, et al., for various cogent aspects of their theories. His rejection of substance focuses on an error which was introduced into European philosophy by the medievals and found its most eloquent spokesman in Descartes: namely, that a substance is “an existent thing which requires nothing other than itself to exist” (Principles of Philosophy, I.51). It is this notion of substance as independent, as “just its individual self with no necessary relevance to any other particular” (PR 50), which Whitehead sees as fatal to a metaphysics which would purport to remain faithful to the modern experience of the world as an eco-system. Although the error originated with the Schoolmen, it has its roots in the Aristotelian dictum that substance is always a subject and can never become a predicate in the sense of inhering in another subject (Categories, 2A).

A twofold difficulty is hidden in the classic view of substance. First, it exalts the categories of quality and quantity over the category of relation, failing to realize that the former themselves are relational in that they express the ways in which substances are for other substances, and are not attributes of isolated substances. In other words, the subject-attribute mode of predication has been mistaken for a metaphysical paradigm. Secondly, and more fundamentally, the classic view makes an unwarranted dichotomy between a substance and its predicates, attributing permanence to the former and changeability to the latter, and in the same act renders substance qua substance transexperiential and unknowable (incapable of being present in another substance—in this case, in a knowing subject), graspable only in and through its accidental modifications. To put this in other language: the problematic conception is substance not as “that which is”—substance in the truly metaphysical sense—but substance in its categoreal distinction from accidents, substance as a logical and/or linguistic category. Whitehead himself retains the former sense in his notion of actual entities as the “final real things of which the world is made up” (PR 18); yet he denies the sort of radical aseity which accrues to substance when, in addition, it is considered as suppositum for accidents and hence as supporting qualities which it possesses in its own right, independent of its relation to the world. He sees this rejection of the essential relatedness of things as leading inexorably either to a Leibnizian rationalism of windowless monads or to a billiard ball universe of blindly interacting, quality-less particles. Both alternatives spell death to the metaphysics of experience, which for Whitehead must be a metaphysic of the patterned intertwining of all things: a philosophy of organism.

What is permanent in the Whiteheadian scheme is not, therefore, some underlying stage upon which accidental change is played, but rather the value achieved, the world-unification effected by and in an entity whose self-creative process is the growing together of the public world in the privacy of a perspective. It is important to note that this permanence is not to be construed as the endurance of the “is” of “that-which-is.” To exist in the Whiteheadian sense is to self-actuate, to create a moment of “for-one’s-self–ness,” to be now. The product of the self-creative act, being, is immortal and permanent; the activity, becoming, is not. The activity perishes as it achieves the goal of determinateness aimed at in the process. An actual entity “‘never really is’” (PR 85). It is a drop of process, a pulse, a throb of existence, an event, a happening of value which sacrifices its immediacy in the instant it is gained, in the same manner as any “now” loses its nowness to a subsequent “now.” Just as permanence cannot be attributed to the nowness of “now,” so also the actual entity cannot endure in its subjective immediacy. By the same token, just as the content of any “now” becomes an historical “then” to be taken into account by all future “nows,” so the structure of the subjectivity achieved by an actual entity in its process is transformed into objectively functioning, stubborn, past fact. The final causality operative in self-creative process becomes efficient causality transcending the process. “For-one’s-self–ness” becomes “for-the-others-and-for-the-totality.” “Everything that in any sense exists has two sides, namely, its individual self and its signification in the universe” (MT 151). These two poles cannot be torn apart. Each finds its fulfillment in the other via their dialectical relation. Thus, becoming is for the purpose of being (signification in the universe), and being is for the purpose of novel becoming (the emergent individual self).

Objectivity, facticity, is the permanent aspect of reality—immortal achievement immortally realized; subjectivity, immediacy, process, is its changeable aspect—its advance toward novelty. But subjectivity is not the result of an underlying subject’s activity of relating objects to itself, of a one weaving a many into the pre-existent unity of its oneness. It is, rather, the “growing together” (con-crescence) of objects to create a novel subject which enriches the many from which it springs. “The many become one, and are increased by one” (PR 21). The entire world finds its place in the internal constitution of the new creature, and the new creature lays an obligation upon the future: that it take into account the value achieved by the new creature. Thus every creature both houses and pervades the world.

Two inseparable notions therefore constitute the foundational insight of Whitehead’s process philosophy: the permanence of value achieved and the ongoingness of value achievement. To construct a metaphysical scheme capable of elucidating the implications of these notions was his purpose in writing PR.

II • THE LANGUAGE PROBLEM

A difficulty of monumental proportions stands in the way of any philosopher attempting to express his insights: i.e., the language into which they must be cast. As Bergson pointed out in Creative Evolution, language was the first human artifact and, as a tool, was forged for utilitarian purposes: to give the individual a “handle” with which to manipulate more effectively the important aspects of his world. As an essentially pragmatic instrument, language functions superlatively. In a very real sense, the process of “naming the gods,” as Heidegger would put it, renders the “gods” mundane, discrete, and controllable. However, the “gods” named are those elements in experience which have survival import for the individual—those vividly apprehended because they contribute to or detract from the being and/or well-being of the organism. The act of naming “cuts” these elements out of the tissue of experience in which they come and go and stabilizes them, so that they may be anticipated in their absence, controlled in their presence, and communicated to others. However, these elements with respect to which language is so rich in its denotative and connotative power are those which are trivial to the metaphysician in his attempt to give linguistic expression to the massive core of experience, that which is all-pervasive and not transitory in its influence. “Words, in general, indicate useful particularities. How can they be employed to evoke a sense of that general character on which all importance depends” (MT 7)? Any philosopher, therefore, finds the lingua franca inadequate to the philosophical enterprise, and begins his work with the creation of special terminology in which his ideas can take flesh.

While Whitehead is no exception to the rule, he goes further than most philosophers in his construction of a novel philosophical language—further not in the direction of precision but in the direction of what might be called deliberate imprecision. For him, philosophy is “the endeavour to find a conventional phraseology for the vivid suggestiveness of the poet” (MT 68–69), “the endeavour to reduce Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ to prose” (MT 69), while retaining that vivid suggestiveness in the resultant reduction. The Whiteheadian vocabulary is not at all like the precisely defined terms of the Rationalists. It retains the evocative character and deliberate ambiguity of poetic usage.1 Whitehead begs the reader to recognize the elliptical character of his words and to allow their meanings continually to be stretched beyond the boundaries of ordinary usage, to be sought for in an imaginative leap similar to that demanded by the language of the poet. On no account is the reader to fall into the Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary by identifying a symbol and its obvious meaning in a “nothing but” fashion. Nor are words and phrases to be taken as complete explications of objective states of affairs. At all times, they are bare signposts mutely appealing for a transcending leap.

The same must be said for the philosophical concepts themselves. The clarity and distinctness of an idea is to be taken as more of a sign of its triviality than as an index of its truth. Clarity marks merely the familiarity of a concept; distinctness, its degree of remotion from the reality which it supposedly expresses. Too often, philosophy mistakes an analysis of abstract ideas for an interpretation of reality and unwittingly reduces metaphysics to logic and/or linguistics.

For a process philosopher, the problem of terminology is particularly acute, in view of the intertwined character of the aspects of experience symbolized in concepts and language. A clear and distinct idea would be a falsification of experiential realities. Just as nature and all aspects of it have a ragged edge, so their philosophical expression cannot have the sharply defined contours and precise internal structure for which a Cartesian would strive. This is not in any way to imply that process philosophy is de jure fuzzy, but rather that it must contain an element of vagueness in its language—its concepts themselves must have a ragged edge. Any philosophical system must be self-referential. If “you cannot abstract the universe from any entity … so as to consider that entity in complete isolation” (PR 28), likewise you cannot precisely define any Whiteheadian term in isolation from his system of terms: “an apparent redundancy of terms is required. The words correct each other” (AI 236).

The difficulties with process terminology are minor when compared with the central linguistic problematic a process philosopher must confront. Technical terminology constitutes only a small portion of the linguistic tool kit. Words and phrases must be strung together in the linguistic structures—grammar and syntax—of ordinary speech if philosophy is not to be reduced to lexicography. But language in this broader sense is one of the facts of the metaphysical situation to be interpreted in the philosophical scheme—a fact whose factors are as intertwined and mutually dependent as are the factors in the larger fact of nature. The process philosopher is forced to concede that the structure of the universe of discourse does not necessarily reflect the structure of the universe as he conceives it. The philosopher, and particularly the process philosopher, consciously works in the continual shadow of his own Uncertainty Principle. Just as, in particle physics, the technique of observation modifies what is observed, philosophic expression runs the serious risk of altering what is expressed because of the distortion which the medium introduces into the message.

To put this in more concrete terms: for a linguistic proposition to be meaningful, it must be set within a systematic universe of propositions, involving that universe for its own definiteness.2 Any proposition about the world is therefore a flatus vocis unless it simultaneously implies the general character and connectedness of the world and its own place within that larger picture. There can be no self-contained, isolated propositions. This is to say, therefore, that every proposition implies a metaphysics, that syntax, grammatical structure, and the like are disguised metaphysical assertions. Granted: the metaphysics is naïve, unexplicated, and uncriticized; but it is nevertheless a metaphysics. Until that metaphysics is explicated, no proposition can be fully determinate. But the explication can be done only propositionally—and the vicious circle closes, leaving language by its very nature indeterminate, and a precise metaphysical language impossible. The philosopher must therefore maintain a thoroughgoing distrust of any linguistic formulation. It is only a simplistic metaphysics which believes it can start with precisely formulated axioms and proceed to unfold itself deductively. Dogmatism is the classic example of the Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary.

The linguistic Uncertainty Principle compounds the problems of the process philosopher, for the metaphysic implicit in the language used, the metaphysic veiled in the “S is P” structure of the verbal proposition, is diametrically opposed to the metaphysic explicated through the language. Nouns imply static, independent entities as their referents; adjectives and verbs connote qualifiers of and activities performed by these entities. Propositions constructed out of these elements subliminally broadcast the pincushion notion of substance and accident in its crudest form. If the problem is critical for the process philosopher, it is hypercritical for the student of process philosophy. How can one learn process metaphysics in a “thing” language? The answer is, one cannot, if what one anticipates is finding the ideas freeze-dried in the linguistic expression. But if the distrust of language which Whitehead urges is taken seriously—in this case, a distrust of his own language—if his demand that expression be viewed as metaphorical and elliptical, and his continual plea for the imaginative leap from language to meaning, are complied with, the task becomes possible. But a continual effort must be made by the student, for the linguistic metaphysics of “things” slips back into thought insidiously like the evicted demon of the New Testament.3 The distrust of language called for is therefore a constant leap toward insight coupled with a negation of what is actually said—a never-ending “yes” and “no” dialectic in the mind of the reader, an ongoing attempt to see Milton’s Lycidas through and in spite of its prose rendition.

III • THE LANGUAGE OF FEELING

An additional clarification must be appended with respect to Whitehead’s technical vocabulary: namely, his use of the language of consciousness in interpretations of non-conscious processes. It is bewildering at first glance to encounter terms such as “feeling,” “emotion,” “enjoyment,” “decision,” “freedom,” “purpose,” “satisfaction,” “subjectivity,” and the like in discussions of the self-creative activity of an actual entity; and the bewilderment leads the novice to accuse Whitehead of psychologizing the real, of constructing an animism or spiritualism of the crudest, most mythological sort. If Whitehead does not intend these terms to be taken in their literal, i.e., conscious, meaning, how are they to be understood? The answer to the question is difficult to formulate, but must be attempted in the very beginning in order to forestall grave misinterpretations. One way out of the box would be to call the language of feeling metaphorical, as indeed it is; but metaphor can too readily be taken as expressing nothing real about the reality it represents. None of the classic modalities of analogy work either, because they do not express the peculiar similarity between “feeling,” “decision,” “emotion,” etc. as used by Whitehead and their hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Half Title
• 1. Process Philosophy and Its Problems
• 2. Science and the Modern World as a Romantic Version of Process and Reality
• 3. The Speculative Scheme (PR, Part I)
• 4. Discussions and Applications (PR, Part II)
• 5. The Structure of a Concrescence (PR, Part III)
• 6. The Theory of Extension (PR, Part IV)
• 7. God and the World (PR, Part V)
• Bibliography
• Indices
• Series Page