Creativity and Its Discontents: The Response to Whitehead's Process and Reality 9783110327854, 9783110327465

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Alan Van Wyk and Michel Weber (eds.) Creativity and Its Discontents The Response to Whitehead’s Process and Reality

PROCESS THOUGHT Edited by Nicholas Rescher • Johanna Seibt • Michel Weber Advisory Board Mark Bickhard • Jaime Nubiola • Roberto Poli Volume 9

Alan Van Wyk and Michel Weber (eds.)

Creativity and Its Discontents The Response to Whitehead’s Process and Reality

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2009 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-86838-018-7 2009 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher dd ag

Contents Introduction ................................................................................... 5
 1. CUP and Macmillan Editions, 1929 ....................................... 13
 2. Macmillan Reprint, 1960 ...................................................... 105
 3. Free Press Corrected Edition, 1978....................................... 107
 4. Translations ........................................................................... 137
 5. Bibliographies ....................................................................... 155
 Index.......................................................................................... 237
 Table of Contents ...................................................................... 247
 


Introduction Michel Weber “I do not expect a good reception from professional philosophers” wrote Whitehead to his son North on November 4 1929 when the publication of Process and Reality was imminent: You ought to have got a copy of my book by this time—Process and Reality. It represents what I can make of the world in general. But I do not expect a good reception from professional philosophers. It deserts the ordinary way of putting things at the present moment. Also it is more speculative than philosophy in the recent past. In my opinion philosophers have been running into funkholes and so the subject has lost all interest.1 With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that Whitehead was, in this case also, rather prophetic. Later, to Charles Hartshorne, he would add that the book was “rightfully clumsy.”2 Additionally, according to Broad, he was nothing less than “an abominably obscure and careless writer.”3 Let us go through the obvious, and sometimes less obvious, reasons for this state of affairs. To start with, the Gifford Lectures were themselves a bit of a debacle: the initial audience of 600 quickly dropped to half a dozen, equally mystified by the matter and the style of the lectures.

1

See Victor Augustus Lowe’s Alfred North Whitehead. The Man and His Work (Volume I: 1861–1910; Volume II: 1910–1947 (edited by J. B. Schneewind), Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985 & 1990), II, p. 252; the entire letter is quoted pp. 339–341.

2

Charles Hartshorne, private correspondance with M. Weber on July 15 1994.

3

Charlie Dunbar Broad, “Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947),” Mind, Vol. LVII, N° 226, 1948, pp. 139–145, p. 144.

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First, the matter. Whitehead was not systematically perusing the history of ideas or even attempting a new philosophy of nature accompanied with some carefully chosen epistemological considerations. Whitehead’s purpose was metaphysical at its core. Worse even, he did not really rely upon existing ontologies or upon his own past enquiries: it was altogether a new ontological foundation that was proposed. Even those who could have somehow followed an exposition relying upon the substance/attribute ontology or its Stoic subversion were left behind. In sum: not only the scholarship of the audience was wanting, but the intuition of the stakes unavailable. Why so? Although substance metaphysics is unable to provide coherent and applicable categories for all non-everyday purposes, it is supported by very deep scholarly roots and backed with common-sense. On the contrary, the categories at stake in Whitehead’s lectures, basically processual and panpsychic, apparently lack both the historical roots and the commonsensical ring. This situation was of course due to the Zeitgeist: as recent publications by D. Skrbina and D.S. Clark amply show, the historical roots of process panpsychism are actually quite impressive.4 So much for the matter of the lectures—the style was equally found inadequate. As usual, Whitehead improvised while oscillating between known and unknown territories. On the one hand, his technicalities were not fully settled yet—and they never will be. Obliged to forge brand new categories to expose and unfold his own vision, he was confronted with a totally unprepared audience. On the other hand, his knowledge of the history of philosophy was too meagre to be able to critically assess and objectively discuss the arguments of canonical figures such as Locke and Hume. In conclusion, the lectures were not appealing to anyone—philosophers, scientists, or the cultivated public. And the Whiteheads did not even like Scotland! All this holds for the book as well, which expands the material prepared for the lectures. Actually all points mentioned were aggravated. Commonsense and substantialism hold that there cannot be a science of the contingent transitoriness of experience—solely of its necessary endurance. But what is the major claim of process philosophy? At its core, actuality is 4

David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, Cambridge, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2005 and, D.S. Clark, Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude, Albany (N.Y.), State University of New York Press, 2003.

Introduction

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process-like, eventful, transitory, contingent; only potentiality is substancelike, settled, necessary. Hence, the science of the necessary, if it can be achieved at all, is only the by-product of a more fundamental type of systematic thought: process speculative philosophy, that tackles the necessary and the contingent as well as the qualitative and quantitative aspects of our existence. (Although it is true, to a certain extent, that, in our cosmic epoch, the necessary and the quantitative go hand in hand, an additional argument is needed to show this at the metaphysical level.) All the well-known objections exploited by Plato and Aristotle still hold unless one finds a tertium quid between the rigid cosmos that substantialism requires and fosters and the total chaos that process thought seems to support, at least since Heraclitus. But this feat is actually not as difficult as the supporters of substantialism would like us to believe. Whitehead’s fundamental methodological standpoint is straightforward enough: one has to start from one’s own experience, not only because we have actually no other choice (something that cognitivists still tend to ignore), but because it is—by definition—the best possible cognitive source in terms of immediacy, richness and intensity. As a matter of fact, the primary goal of speculative philosophy is to elucidate immediate experience. This single goal would however be rather solipsistic if it is not pursued for the sake of elucidating all experiences whatsoever. The wager is clear: under certain hypothesis, one can extrapolate from one’s own conscious experience to all mundane experiences, conscious or not, highgrade or low grade. Now, what do we gather in everyday experience? Both being and becoming are obviously featured under various guises: passivity (being acted upon) and activity (agency), stability (permanence) and fluidity (evanescence), descriptive fixity and productive energy or drive, discrete individuality and interactive relatedness, separateness and wholeness, uniformity of nature and innovation/novelty… Process philosophy acknowledges all these shades in experience but systematically prioritizes the process aspects over the substantial ones.5 It does not deny the existence of stability amid flux: it relativizes it. All experiences are taken at face value, but only their process-character is recognized as foundational (in the loose sense of the word).

5

Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics. An Introduction to Process Philosophy, Albany (N.Y.), State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 35.

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We do not live either in a fully determinate cosmos or in a completely unpredictable chaos—but in a chaosmos where events share a family resemblance of sorts due to the double uniformity at work: genetic and morphological. Hence, the possibility of a science of the accident, of the sumbebekos as the ancient Greeks said: concrescence as well as transition can be systematically understood. Creativity does not take place in a chaotic scene (which would actually mean independently of any scene whatsoever), but—in the case of Whitehead—in a Victorian theatre that has logically expressible common-sensical rules. In short: creative eventfulness is bridled by a double structure of uniformity. On the one hand, the genetic intensive analysis that rhythms all becomings in a fourfold manner; on the other, the coordinate extensive analysis that guarantees the solidarity between all beings and all becomings. Again: if the matter of the lectures and the published text was quite harsh, their style was equally disorientating and Whitehead himself concedes that his systematic exposition is “practically unintelligible” (Process and Reality, xi). Within the published text of Process and Reality, Parts One (minus the categoreal scheme itself) and Five nevertheless stand out for their apparent easy access. Part Two seems a bit shallow for a “qualified” philosophical scholar, who might already be used to “piecemeal discussions” as Lowe said, having obviously in mind Ford’s interpretation. Part Three appears truly idiosyncratic. Part Four does not seem to deserve even a mention for most Whiteheadians. Since these different parts suggest to a significant extent different readings (different statics) and different assessments of the entire Whiteheadian speculative adventure, it is no surprise that this “piecemeal discussion” path has actually been exploited by numerous scholars. As a matter of fact, the exact dynamics of the work remains largely implicit: the correlation of the genetic analysis of Part Three with the morphological analysis of Part Four has to be constructed from innumerable arguments. By doing this, one is likely to come to a pancreativist interpretation of the type I have argued for these last fifteen years. Equally problematic was the language used. In all his works, Whitehead not only deplores the weakness of intuition and the deficiencies of language, he is also keen to identify the main fallacies involved (dogmatic fallacy, perfect dictionary and misplaced concreteness), to incriminate the syntax of the Indo-European languages, and especially to denounce its substantialistic interpretation of the subject/predicate pattern. Whitehead’s critique of the subject/predicate pattern as it strictly reflects the substance/attribute creed was not new, it was almost trendy at the time (remember, e.g., Frege, Russell, Lukasiewicz and the always lurking

Introduction

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Stoics), but Process and Reality’s lexicon was unfashionably new and the book’s style (lauded by W.B. Yeats, who despised Russell’s!) made it difficult to digest. Whitehead stretches everyday and philosophical languages “beyond their common meaning in the marketplace”6 to their semantic limits and, when necessary, he does not hesitate to coin brand new categories. There is actually no major concern to be had here: all philosophers are known to be keen to forge new conceptual mile-stones (it is even because of this trait that they can be recognized as philosophers) and Whitehead does not pulverize language into verbs in order to make us understand how and why the world has to be pulverized into events. Despite many critics, reading Process and Reality does not amount to coping with the musicality of Finnegans Wake! Furthermore, Whitehead had no real interest in proof-reading and, as a result, the book was published in the most deplorable condition, with numerous errors as well as discrepancies between the Macmillan and the Cambridge original editions. Last but not least, the broader context of the book deserves a mention. Although most Whiteheadians will agree that Process and Reality constitutes the acme of his work, there is no consensus on how to understand the relationship (if any) that binds the pre-systematic and the post-systematic expositions of his late metaphysics. It is not even clear that the founding process intuition remained the same. Here is how we define our variables for heuristic purposes: first, Process and Reality is to be considered as the most extensive exposition of Whitehead’s mature metaphysics; second, his previous publications in the field (mainly Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making) were still conceptually shy and informed by Plato’s categories; third, the later publications (mainly Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought), attempt to expose the mature metaphysics of PR with the popular style of pre-systematic Platonic modes of exposition.7 This move is quite 6

Whitehead, Modes Mass., 1937–1938, 1933], New York, 1938. Reprint: New

7

Equally inspiring would be the partition of the developmental phases the late Whitehead went through with his own concepts of romance, precision and generalisation. Cf. Elizabeth M. Kraus’ Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (New York, Fordham University

of Thought [Six lectures delivered in Wellesley College, and two lectures delivered in the University of Chicago, Macmillan, and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, York, The Free Press, 1968, p. 12.

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misleading unless the reader remains fully aware of the targeted vision as it was specified in Process and Reality and of the nature of the main anchor that was slowing his speculations: Whitehead’s atavistic Platonism, itself induced by his Logicism and his Anglicanism. Both because of his algebraic training and his Christian education, he was heavily submitted to the evidence of the time: creationism, i.e., the world was created by the divine fiat of a rational and benevolent first “being”. Process and Reality nevertheless makes clear that creation is a making not a happening; it is poietic, not praxic. Commentators sometimes speak of co-creation; growth togetherness of independent co-origination would constitute a better approximation. All these issues—and many more—are addressed in the material summoned here with the help of the following pattern. First, the editors sought to gather all the major critical reviews of Process and Reality’s original editions (Cambridge and Macmillan, 1929) in their chronological order (even though it has not always been possible to determine precisely the date of publication). Two reviews stand out: Northrop’s for its critical sympathy and important assessment of the meaning and significance of Process and Reality; Stebbing’s for its shameless undermining of any interpretation of Whitehead’s feat of conceptual architecture. Unfortunately, the later has had a tremendus impact on the reception of the book in the U.-K. and elsewhere. Second, we reprint the only review available of the Macmillan 1960 edition. Third, one finds the equally important reviews of the Free Press corrected edition (1978). Fourth, all the main translations are put on the hot seat by specialized reviewers. Last but not least, we propose critical bibliographies briefly introducing to the secondary literature on Process and Reality, sorted according to their linguistic sphere. Each author was free to present the data in the way that seems most adequate to the local state of affairs. The editors are grateful for the colleagues who have granted permission to reproduce material published elsewhere. Barry Whitney deserves a special Press, 1979) and H. Woodhouse’s “Russell and Whitehead on the Process of Growth in Education” (in Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, n.s., vol. 12, 1992, pp. 135-159) on this.

Introduction

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mention, since a number of seminal papers first published in Process Studies are reprinted here. In one of the entries, the reader is reminded of Evelyn Whitehead’s remark to Lucien Price: “His thinking is a prism.” This book attempts to elucidate the prismatic reception of Process and Reality in order to pave the way for a fair assessment of its contemporary relevance.

1. CUP and Macmillan Editions, 1929 Mumford, December 1929 Lewis Mumford. “Metaphysics and Art. Review of Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, by Alfred North Whitehead; Essays in Philosophy, edited by Thomas Vernor Smith and William Kelley Wright; The Philosophic Way of Life, by T.V. Smith.” The New Republic, December 18, 1929: 117–118. Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 to January 26, 1990) studied at Stuyvesant High School, the City College of New York and the New School for Social Research, yet never earned a degree. He was an American historian of technology and science, also noted for his study of cities. In 1919 he became associate editor of The Dial and wrote architectural criticism and commentary on urban issues. He was involved in numerous research positions and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. In 1943 he was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire. He served as the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over 30 years. The New Republic was founded in 1914, as a journal of public opinion. Originally, the magazine’s politics were liberal and progressive, and as such it was concerned with understanding the changes brought about by America’s late-19th century industrialization. In 1975, the magazine was bought by Harvard University lecturer Martin Peretz, who transformed The New Republic into its current incarnation. It was, and remains, a widely read and circulated journal of public opinion.

Mr. Alfred North Whitehead is the foremost metaphysician of our time; and his newest book, “Process and Reality,” cannot in the very nature of things be criticized after a few poor weeks of apprehension and analysis. In “Process and Reality” Mr. Whitehead has carried further the description of experience which he outlined in “Science and the Modern

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World” and in “Symbolism”; and, going back to the central tradition of speculative philosophy, he has built up a complete cosmology, in which the relation of man and nature and “reality” and knowledge and experience are re-expressed and re-defined, in such a way as to leave no element unaccounted for. The tool of speculative philosophy, as Mr. Whitehead points out, is language; but, unfortunately, words are blunt instruments, and our naïve description of the world is inadequate partly because we have worked with false categories and with a defective vocabulary. It is an essential part of Mr. Whitehead’s task, accordingly, to displace our existing categories and our naïve logic, the sediment of earlier systems of thought, with a philosophy contrived to reveal both the surface of experience, known to common sense, and the inner grain of things which science and intuition explore. Concrescence, prehension, nexus, symbolic reference: these are but a few of the new terms Mr. Whitehead has coined. To master his thought, one must master this complete and accurate vocabulary; and, by the same token, to get hold of the vocabulary one must follow the movement of thought which has, by its inner necessity, created it. Mr. Whitehead does his best to aid us in this effort, by showing wherever possible the kinship between his own ideas and those expressed in other terms by Descartes, Locke, Hume, Bergson, Dewey, James. Indeed, one of the great values of Mr. Whitehead’s cosmology is that instead of starting de novo it attempts to integrate the fundamental members of every previous structure of philosophy, not eclectically and piecemeal, but as a new graft on a tree utilizes the trunk and tissue and circulatory system of the organism to which it is joined. “Process and Reality” is perhaps the most difficult treatise in philosophy since Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”; and while it will take a considerable time to master Mr. Whitehead’s thought sufficiently to be able to appreciate its originality, and its final value, it is safe to say that these Gifford Lectures will stand out even in the distinguished company to which they belong. A subtle, comprehensive, above all, a generous mind, great enough to be above the egoisms of the subjective system makers, Mr. Whitehead has brought to logic and metaphysics a sense of the richness of experience which it has been the habit of philosophers to deny in favor of some narrower order whose contemplation has brought them an immediate esthetic satisfaction. In “Science and the Modern World” one felt this richness by allusion and quotation; in “Process and Reality” it has been translated into propositions, categories, definitions. At present, the book is plainly beyond the general reader; but I venture to predict that it will finally reach him, or his immediate descendants, and that the world itself will become concretely the richer through Mr. Whitehead’s speculative explorations.

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It is a little unfair to pass from “Process and Reality” to “Essays in Philosophy.” Some sly ironists must have given it the sub-title “By Seventeen Doctors of Philosophy,” for that describes the work with deadly accuracy. Such unity as these disjecta membra have is due to the fact that the authors have belonged to the philosophy department of Chicago and have come under the influence of Professors Tufts, Mead, Moore and Ames; but although there are able men in this group, their united contributions are not particularly impressive: one might bind together any six members of the Journal of Philosophy and achieve a work quite as coherent and pertinent. I turned with interest to the essays on esthetics; for a weakness in this department was traditional in the social and pragmatic thinking we associate with the Chicago school; but I cannot say that the work of these younger thinkers gives an assurance of development; rather the contrary. Miss Kate Gordon, in “On Art as Expression,” comes to the conclusion that “the work of art is a creation of something rather than an expression of something. It is rather than it means.” Professor John Boscom of Wisconsin has gone further than this in the eighteen-sixties; and the notion that an existence which implies human relationship or contact, as art does, can be isolated from meaning is a rather quaint one to conjure up in the present decade. Turning to Mr. Van Meter Ames’ “Essay on Aesthetic Experience,” one comes upon a rather remarkable passage in which he annihilates the peculiar values of fine art by turning every instrument into an equal work of art. This is the mutilation of a truth: namely, that every experience has an esthetic aspect. Telephones, street-cars, automobiles may have genuine esthetic form, but the form does not derive from the fact that a “street-car represents the values involved in the problem of conveying the public around the city,” and the mere act of suspense and personal distress that may arise when waiting for a car does not, as Mr. Ames would have it, make a sensitive observer hail the car as a thing of beauty when it finally appears—unless the car is a thing of beauty quite apart from the suspense or distress. To describe art merely as the dexterous adaptation of means to ends, and to say that wherever this adaptation has been accomplished there is art, is to ignore the critical problem of art: why certain ends are more valuable than others, and why the embodiment of these ends in a work of art is one of the highest types of activity possible to a human being. The distinction between the fine arts and the useful arts may, as Mr. Ames says, be invidious; but this is not to say that it is not a real distinction, or a true one. A person who preferred to live with a cadaver pickled in alcohol rather than a statue by Michelangelo, or have a Ford car in his living-room instead of a sculpture by Brancusi might have an exquisite sense of the values to be found in anatomy or mechanics, and he might avoid all appearance of

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invidious concern for “higher” pleasures; but essentially speaking, he would be an idiot. In their distrust of ends that are not instrumentally connected, the Chicago school has an inveterate tendency to abandon the search for relevant ends altogether, and to deify instruments. One finds the same error in Mr. T.V. Smith’s otherwise penetrating and sympathetic exposition of Royce, James, Santayana and Dewey. His little book as a whole is to be recommended, for, like a wise guide, Mr. Smith raises questions and interests which will drive the reader to a more intimate acquaintance with the works that he presents; yet when he touches on esthetics, one finds him milling around in the same predicament as Mr. Ames, and uttering similar fallacies. It is high time that a few of these errors were punctured; for they are fast becoming stable items in the American credo, and are echoed every Sunday in the magazine section of the metropolitan dailies. When Mr. Smith says that “the notion that an automobile or a shoe or a city apartment cannot be as beautiful as a painting or a sonata […] is a pathetic fraud” one wonders if he can be wholly unaware of the pathos of his apologetics. What does such a generalization come to? It is a denial of the hierarchy of values, because of a superstitious fear that such a hierarchy is an acknowledgment of odious social privileges, whereas, obviously a scale of values exists in relation to life itself, quite apart from what prevails in the social order. Pure art is more deeply exhilarating, more life-enhancing than industrial art, however fine and fit the latter may be. To deny this difference is not to release the industrial serf to freedom, but merely to put a verbal gloss on the degradations and deprivations of his life. Mr. T.V. Smith does not distinguish between that which is useless for industrial production and that which is useless for life; and in protest against spurious leisure class values, he rejects or belittles real values as well. The fine arts do not, to be sure, bake bread; but they have a prime function in relation to the human personality which every civilization but our industrial one has recognized and cherished. Our scientific and mechanical society, which has endowed us with a vast amount of potential leisure—now endured for the greater part under the painful rubric of “unemployment”—has incidentally deprived us a of philosophy and habit of life which would enable us to make good use of it; the savages of the Marquesas or the peons of Mexico are far better fitted to take advantage of our new economic state than our Chicago philosophers. This is a painful and humiliating fact. Nevertheless, it arises as an unfortunate by-product of what is essentially the finest contribution of the Chicago school; its interest in the side of human experience neglected by upper-class dilettantism, and its concern to humanize modern industry and distribute all values

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throughout the community. Why, however, should these philosophers fancy that there is a necessary connection between contempt for the fine arts and a desire to improve the social order? Why, in their proper effort to achieve egalitarianism in the means of life, should they fail to perceive a vital difference in the modes of life? For what is social improvement if it lead not to a fresh creation, on our own level, of the joys and intensifications of life once common to the peasant cultures which industrialism undermined and devitalized, to its own undoing?

Clark, January 1930 Axton Clark. “Ringing the Knell of Nineteenth Century Materialism.” The New York Times Book Review, January 5, 1930, p. 11. Founded in 1851, The New York Times has become the paper of record for the United States. The New York Times is published daily, with the Book Review section appearing in the Sunday edition.

“Process and Reality,” by Professor A. N. Whitehead, is a very remarkable book. It witnesses anew to the vital achievement of the human intelligence in our period. Science enjoys spectacular victories; philosophy, though more reconditely brilliant, stands not a whit behind. S. Alexander’s monumental “Space, Time and Deity” opened a decade; Whitehead’s “Process and Reality” comes to close it. Perhaps the situation can best be made clear by saying bluntly that these two works surpass Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” and Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” for intrinsic importance, though naturally not as yet for historical standing or influence. Professor Whitehead, having been well known at the outset as a mathematician, turned, with a certain flavor of intellectual drama, to philosophy. A number of important works in that latter field lie behind the present contribution. Of this series, “Science and the Modern World” is best known and has had the most influence with the general public. “Process and Reality,” the greatest of all his books, grows like a kind of prodigious flower, the stem represented by his previous achievements. The intention of the volume is to give a systematic account of the cosmos, in such a way that philosophy, science and religion will be reconciled in one sweeping viewpoint. Its peculiar merit may be indicated by the fact that Professor Whitehead is not only a philosopher of extraordinary accomplishment, but of all living philosophers the most authoritative on the profound achievements of natural science and mathematics. He has worked out a cosmological scheme to include all we have learned in the last quarter of a century about physics and astronomy; and his philosophy is basic and explanatory in a way that the physicists’ or astronomers’ own philosophical views too often are not. Einstein’s philosophy, for example, in spite of his tremendous brilliance in his own field, has amateurish characteristics and seems a trifle too dogmatically held.

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Whitehead’s originality, accordingly, consists in having written defensible philosophy which does justice to the viewpoint of contemporary science. He is vigorously ringing the knell of nineteenth century materialism. Apart from the members of a tradition represented at various time by Lucretius, La Mettrie or Herbert Spencer, philosophers have rarely taken that type of materialism seriously, but physicists have. It is by inclusion of the theories of modern physics, by showing that the nineteenth century doctrine is no longer adequate to explain the observations of contemporary science, that Whitehead helps to discard it. He calls his new view “organic realism” or “the philosophy of organism.” It may be remarked in passing that this involves, on his part, a revolutionary attitude toward certain forms traditionally accepted as fundamental in the applicability of logic to the nature of the universe. In the language of physical science, says Professor Whitehead, this change of outlook concerning the ultimate constitution of the cosmos may be expressed as “the displacement of the notion of static stuff by the notion of fluent energy. Such energy has its structure of action and flow and is inconceivable apart from such structure.” In the undefined words at one’s disposal it is hardly possible here to do more than adumbrate the system as a whole. This ultimate, fluent but structural constituent is organic in the universe through four phases, beginning and ending in God. The first phase is an ultimate creativity in which God is primordial, non-temporal and nonconscious. This phase contains what one might call a divine appetite for actuality, which results in the diversified world of stars, earth, personalities, atoms, electrons—briefly, in all the phenomena of human consciousness as well as of the theory of relativity and the quantum theory. But this is not enough. The hunger of deity passes into a third stage, “of perfected actuality, in which the many are one everlastingly, without the qualification of any loss either of individual identity or of completeness of unity.” In the fourth phase the creative action completes itself. For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. These phases co-exist, as it were, and interpenetrate. God, as a beginning, is unconscious, as an end is conscious. The world of individuals embraced by Him hangs between Him in His primordial and in His complete phases. This speculative synthesis is reached by the consideration of innumerable facts; but empiricism as an initial philosophical procedure is expressly repudiated. The view aligns itself consciously in a great philosophical

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tradition; the affinities with Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Bradley, Santayana—to mention a few—are obvious. But taken in its completeness it represents a highly organized original system, built with extraordinary cognizance of science. Besides this volume such a book as Ouspensky’s “Tertium Organum,” which has had its day with the intelligentsia, is the presumptuous stammering of a sophomore. To weigh all the doctrines in detail would mean a technical appraisal as complex as “Process and Reality” itself. Two critical points will suffice here. The first is rather in the nature of exhibiting a danger. Except in the hands of one whose knowledge of scientific, sociological, psychological fact is as accurate as it is encyclopedic, and whose intellectual humility as well as his self-critical capacity are well-nigh boundless, the method of cosmological speculation leads into either stupidities or complicated vagaries, as witness, in the latter case, William Butler Yeats’s curious concoction of gyres, cones, husks, etc. That Professor Whitehead has the requisite qualifications to so high a degree is a testimony to his erudition and his genius, but not intrinsically to the speculative method. The other point is a very essential one. Part V of “Process and Reality,” treating of “The Ideal Opposites” and “God and the World,” requires a far more detailed working out and a more cogent grounding in the rest of his system than Whitehead has given it. One must add at once that he admits the limitation of his treatment in this section, as well as that some of the most interesting material, from the standpoint of general readers, is there. Practically speaking, the effect of such a book lies in the future. It has taken centuries for the complexity of the Copernican doctrine to become the truism that the earth moves around the sun; it will take centuries more for the schoolboy to learn to babble something to the effect that earth and sun are each in motion relative to each other. In an equally slow but definite way a great philosophic system throws its forces into the active life of persons who never dream of the originators. Aristotle, transmogrified through St. Thomas Aquinas, helped in the crystallization of the dogma of Catholicism; the ghost of his view concerning the immutability of types put in an appearance much later at a certain trial in Dayton, under the aegis of W. J. Bryan. In the same way the tradition in which “Process and Reality” is a pioneer will undoubtedly work its way into everyday life and affect in some measure the eventual status of political and social institutions. Perhaps in closing one may dwell on the esthetic aspects of such a cosmological essay as Professor Whitehead has undertaken. Once one has mastered terminology, turn of thought and depth of meaning, a beauty all its own stands out in the stupendousness of the internal correlations and the daring of the attack toward the ultimate. When Professor Shapely discovers

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the centre of our sidereal universe that penetration becomes something starry and spatial, something dramatically tangible to the visual imagination. But the speculative boldness of the philosophical intellect, when it is thoroughly grasped, is still more stupendous and dramatic. It intends not merely to reach into the subtleties of mathematics and into clouds and stars, but to range ardently up toward deity, deeply into the values and purposes of individual existence, widely through the structure of the totality of things, till every factor of nature, of human endeavor, of divine aspiration, is seen in action and perspective, like some white-crested Himalaya stretching below the peak of a conquered Mount Everest of reason and insight. With the life of this internal beauty “Process and Reality” breathes.

Ginzburg, January 1930 Benjamin Ginzburg. “Mr. Whitehead’s Living Universe.” The Nation 130, no. 3365 (January 1, 1930): 18. The Nation, founded in 1865, is a weekly magazine publishing articles on politics and culture. It describes itself as “the flagship of the Left,” and is one of the foremost publications of the political and cultural Left in the United States.

Science is today as much of a problem as it is a fact. The tremendous burst of activity in the last twenty-five years which has brought new life to the old and fundamental science of physics has succeeded in ruining the traditional cosmology of materialism, the guiding faith of scientists since the days of Galileo and Newton. With the theories of relativity and the new developments in sub-atomic physics, scientific method has achieved some of the most glorious victories that have ever fallen to the human spirit, but the scientist is completely at a loss when he stands aside from his specialized equations and tries to conceive the structure of the universe as a whole. Mr. Whitehead suggested a few years ago, in his “Science and the Modern World,” that the way out of the difficulties posed by relativity and quantum mechanics lay in the acceptance of a “philosophy of organism”; and he also indicated that such a philosophy, unlike the traditional scientific point of view, would be able to heal the divided conscience of mankind and reconcile scientific thought with our religious and esthetic intuitions. In the present work he has attempted to apply this philosophy in detail and to see whether it stands up under the exacting test of a complete interpretation of human experience. The effort is magnificent both in scope and in execution. Many scientists have recently been driven to philosophizing, but their amateur efforts in epistemology and metaphysics have been in striking contrast with their eminence as scientific investigators. To cite but one example, Mr. Eddington has thrown up his hands and told us that science no longer knows what its equations and pointer readings mean in reality; hence it no longer forbids us to believe in the “unseen world” accessible to the mystic’s immediate experience, with its revelations of God, freedom, and immortality. In contrast to this attitude of scientific skepticism, Mr. Whitehead has undertaken the more difficult and constructive task of

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determining the place of science and scientific laws in the structure of reality. His work, whether it be regarded as completely successful or not, will certainly stand out as a masterful piece of philosophizing. Even if it does nothing else than revive the rationalist’s faith in a wholehearted philosophy of the universe, it will have achieved its aim and earned the gratitude of the friends of thought. Mr. Whitehead asks boldly, how are we to conceive the universe in the light of the new scientific ideas? And the solution seems to him to be indicated by the analogy of biological experience, which supplies just the aspects of relativity and individuality that appear to be demanded by the new physics. He bids us imagine, not a static universe of enduring matter motivated by external forces, but a living universe of interrelated corpuscular organizations. These corpuscles are a law unto themselves, having their own purposes and their own freedom, but they are held together by an internal solidarity, by common participation in Platonic forms, which Mr. Whitehead calls “eternal objects.” In fact we can best visualize Mr. Whitehead’s universe by keeping in mind the Platonic cosmology of the “Timaeus,” where the Demiurge, with his mind on the Ideas, is represented creating the universe out of relative chaos. Instead of creation taking place from the outside, Mr. Whitehead represents creation as a fixation of the potentiality of the creatures through the spontaneous “ingression” of the eternal objects. It follows that the uniformities on which the scientist bases his laws come into being as part of the evolving activity of the creatures. Mr. Whitehead hazards the conjecture that, like the economic laws of human societies, the basis of the scientist’s laws is an evolutionary social product—common ideals that come to be shared by groups of elementary organisms. He also believes that as social forms scientific laws are subject to genesis and decay, although the more fundamental social forms, as for example space and time, are carried over into repeated epochs and thus constitute the underlying basis for the more specialized societies and organic systems. It is by a tour de force—which, however, is not altogether convincing— that the author tries to absorb the space-time continuum into the created universe and to represent both spatiality and temporality as expressions of the internal determinateness of the creatures. The general picture that he would like us to see is a universe of untrammeled creativity and spontaneity—a universe in which indeterminate potentiality gradually takes shape through the ingression of forms emanating from the timeless source of all order, God. That Mr. Whitehead should identify the forms with God is not surprising. There is a twenty-five hundred year precedent in philosophy for this

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identification, but what is surprising is that he should refuse to pay God the traditional “metaphysical compliment” of eminent reality over and above the finite creatures. Such a compliment appears to be necessary if God is to serve as the internal cement of the universe. But Mr. Whitehead evidently feels that thither lies the road to mysticism, and he therefore tries to compress his metaphysical principle of God (and incidentally his own religious intuition which seems to shine through between the lines) within the narrow framework of biological naturalism. As a result he succeeds in enlivening the universe of the physicist, but he is not quite successful in quickening the life of the spirit.

Northrop, January 1930 F. S. C. Northrop. “A New Philosophy. Review of The Sciences of Philosophy, by J.S. Haldane, and Process and Reality, by Alfred North Whitehead.” The Saturday Review of Literature 6, no. 24 (January 4, 1930): 621. Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop (November 27, 1893 to July 21, 1991) received his B.A. from Beloit College in 1915, M.A. from Yale University in 1919, a second M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, in 1922 and 1924, respectively. He was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1923 as an instructor in Philosophy, and later was named professor in 1932. In 1947 he was appointed Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law at Yale. He chaired the Yale Philosophy Department from 1938 to 1940 and was the first Master of Silliman College, from 1940 to 1947. The Saturday Review of Literature began publication as a popular weekly magazine, and became an influential source of book reviews and literary commentary. Retitled the Saturday Review in 1952, it continued publication until 1982.

One of the most interesting things in contemporary thought is the way in which apparently different problems in different fields of scientific endeavour reveal themselves to be the same. This is important because it suggests that a change in the first principles common to all the sciences is essential for further advance. This is clearly indicated by two recent important books: “The Sciences and Philosophy” and “Process and Reality.” The former by Professor J. S. Haldane is the fruit of the experience and reflection of a physiologist; the latter by Professor A. N. Whitehead, has grown out of the materials of mathematics, physics, logics and philosophy. Both books protest against the philosophical outlook of traditional modern science, and insist that an entirely new philosophy is necessary. Moreover, the specific considerations in their respective fields which provoke these conclusions are identical. Firstly, there is the fact of order or relatedness in nature. For Professor Haldane this order appears as biological organization; for Professor Whitehead, as space-time structure, and the “prehensions” which relate anything to practically everything else. Secondly, there is activity or process. In biology this evidences itself in the

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regulation and maintenance of the normal organization; in physics, as the inseparably temporal character of space; and in immediate awareness as extensive “duration” which contains passage and “concrescence” as an essential character of its immediacy. Thirdly, there is the increasing coincidence of the relational character of all natural entities. This appears for Professor Haldane in the inadequacy of physico-chemical categories in biology; for Professor Whitehead in the rejection of physical substances for “events” or “actual occasions,” and in the substitution of the many-termed type of propositions of the traditional logic of Aristotle. This change in logic is very important in Professor Whitehead’s philosophy. It entails that natural entities without internal relational properties are meaningless. This means that entities such as physical atoms, or spiritual souls, or absolute space with its relation of “simple location” between it and any entity which it contains, must be rejected. By extending this idea to include psychological factors he brings mind within nature and thereby founds objective psychology and a new theory of mind. It is at this point that his latest book goes beyond anything which he has done before. In “The Concept of Nature” he asked us to recognize that when we hear the crack of the revolver, we know not merely the audible sense datum which is given “by adjective,” but also the whole space-time structure of nature which is given by “relatedness.” In “Science and the Modern World” he asked us to believe also that the revolver report in question, even when it is the part of a larger event which is the murdering of an innocent child by the highwayman, gives not only an entire hierarchy of eternal objects, but also God. And now in “Process and Reality,” we are asked to include in this event those psychological elements of “feeling” and “subjective immediacy” which contribute to its melodramatic character. In fact, failure to make this last inclusion is the fallacy, he tells us, which “haunts realistic philosophy.” Evidently, the modification in scientific and philosophical outlook which Professor Whitehead proposes is a most revolutionary one. If accepted, hardly a traditional category or conception can remain. Not only must the physical atoms of current science go, but also the souls of current religious thought, and the atomic sensa of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Russell, and the positivists. The factors of fact which involve the least falsification of actuality are such things as a spree on Saturday night at the Joneses, the clatter of visible sensa which we call “this typewriter in operation now,” and the whole realm of “eternal objects” which these factors “prehend,” as process emerges into this actual occasion, and this occasion, upon attaining “satisfaction,” ceases and thereby joins the immortal group of eternal

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objects which become possible ingredients for a succeeding actual occasion. For sheer originality of conception and expression there is nothing, at least in recent philosophy, to compare with this. In fact, it is so original that one wonders whether even Professor Whitehead has rejected everything which must go if it is accepted. For he refers occasionally to molecules, brains, nerves, and electrons and protons, and to societies of atomic entities which are quite obviously physical objects of traditional and contemporary scientific thought. Now, it is to be emphasized that a philosophy of organic creativity which would insist “that the process of generation is to be described in terms of actual entities,” where “actual” means having the character of observable immediacy, cannot refer to such unobservable things as electrons and protons and molecules for an elucidation of its doctrine. Furthermore, these physical atomic entities, as used by science, are by definition things which move, whereas Professor Whitehead tells us that “actual occasions” do not move. It becomes evident therefore that certain entities which Professor Whitehead still retains, must be rejected if his philosophy is accepted. This difficulty is also present in the philosophy of Professor Haldane. He tells us that a scientific biology must begin with the living organism of immediate observation. He also says that modern physiology has revealed the living thing to be constituted as much by the materials of its environment as by those within its own epidermis. This last statement is undoubtedly true. But Professor Haldane would be entirely unaware of this fact, were it not for the atomic mechanistic philosophy which he repudiates. A philosophy which will not go beyond observed immediacy can reach no other conclusion than that the organism ends where its environment is observed to begin. Professor Whitehead’s doctrine of “atomic occasions” has precisely the same consequence. It is only when one accepts the mechanistic atomic philosophy and begins to view the living thing from the physico-chemical point of view that we learn that the stability of our bodies depends as much on the invisible molecules of the invisible air in our environment as on the invisible molecules of their visible structure. Furthermore, none of the evidence which Professors Haldane and Whitehead have emphasized is incompatible with the physical atomic philosophy which they attack. It only seems to be, because they commit the fallacy of maintaining that proof of the incompleteness of the traditional physical atomic theory is proof of the falsity of any such theory. In other words they overlook the possibility, which their own failure to reject physical atomic categories forces us to take seriously, that the present

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occasion calls for an amendment to, rather than a rejection of, the traditional philosophy of science. Nevertheless, their work is important. For they have made us aware of the difficulties which we face, and have prepared our minds for the change which may be necessary. This is especially true of Professor Whitehead. He has made us aware of the difficulties over motion and measurement to which the theory of relativity has given rise. In fact, he is the only contemporary scientist, with the possible exception of Professor Hermann Weyl, who clearly perceives the muddle and contradictions which permeate accepted scientific theories at the present moment. It is because his philosophy rests upon the reality of these difficulties and is the first systematic serious attempt at their solution that it is of first rate importance. When one adds to this the creative insight which inspires everything that he does, and the skill with which he has brought the advances of modern logic, mathematics, and physics to bear upon an analysis of the esthetic, religious, epistemological, and intellectual life of man, the lasting importance of his latest achievement becomes evident. Whether this is the philosophy to which scientific evidence and philosophical analysis is driving us, is, I believe, a debatable question, but that there is no philosophical system which faces existing scientific evidence and problems, and demonstrates its potential capacity in all realms of human activity, as does this one, is something which no well informed student of the issues of contemporary thought can doubt.

Wieman, January 1930 Henry N. Wieman. “A Philosophy of Religion.” Journal of Religion 10 (1930): 137–139. Henry Nelson Wieman (August 19, 1884 to 1975) completed his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard University in 1917. Wieman served as professor of philosophy at Occidental College from 1917 to 1927, professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School from 1927 to 1947, and professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Illinois from 1956 to 1966. He was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1912, and while teaching at the University of Oregon in 1949, became a member of the Unitarian church in Eugene. He was fellowshipped as a Unitarian minister in 1950 and was active in the Unitarian fellowship at Carbondale, Illinois, during his residence there from l956 to 1966. His first published work was entitled Religious Experience and Scientific Method, and his most popular work was published in 1946: The Source of Human Good. He was also one of the developers of Zygon, Journal of Religion and Science. Founded in 1882 as The American Journal of Theology, the Journal of Religion is an academic journal published by the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. It publishes articles and essays in Christian theology, ethics, and philosophy of religion, particularly those from a historical, social, or psychological standpoint. It is the primary journal through which empirical theology has been and continues to be developed.

Not many people will read Whitehead’s recent book in this generation; not many will read it in any generation.1 But its influence will radiate through concentric circles of popularization until the common man will think and work in the light of it, not knowing whence the light came. After a few decades of discussion and analysis one will be able to understand it more readily than can now be done.

1

Process and Reality. By Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Macmillan, 1929. xii+545 pages. $4.50.

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Process and Reality is an attempt to set forth a system of ideas which will illuminate the whole of experience, every instance of experience and all possible experience. This is audacious beyond words. It is metaphysics and cosmology. Therefore in the eyes of some it is ridiculous. It has all the audacity that metaphysics and religion have always had. It is that venture of speculative thinking to which men are inevitably driven, from which they cannot escape, and yet from which they shrink. Therefore it is good form to hold it up to ridicule. Ridicule is the last refuge of that kind of self-esteem which must be protected from the sight of reality. Has Whitehead given us a true solution to the total problem of man in the universe? No, he has not. Wherein his error lies the reviewer does not know. He only knows the problem is so vast and the human mind so limited that the final word has not yet been spoken. But when it is spoken, if ever it is, there will be in it some echo, however faint, of this book. For the book is not a new creation achieved by the unaided efforts of one man. The author has leaned heavily upon the great thinkers of the past. He has critically absorbed what they had to say and has reorganized it in the light of the best thought of our times. He communicates with all the centuries and brings to renewed expression and to slightly further development the high thinking of Western civilization since Socrates. What we have here, then, is not merely the thinking of one man, but the thinking of many ages focused anew and become articulate again. This periodic recapitulation and new expression of the best thinking is the way the mind of man moves through history toward a better answer to the ultimate and all-important questions. These questions are: What is the universe? What is God? What is man? There is reason to believe the best possible answer up to date is here presented. Some day there will be a better answer, but not now. Much of the language has been invented by Whitehead himself; that is to say, he uses old words but puts his own peculiar meaning into them. Every original thinker must do this more or less, but Whitehead does it to excess. Because of this peculiar meaning of words he at times seems to justify a kind of orthodoxy which further study makes plain he never intended to support. There is danger he will be quoted in defense of all sorts of orthodox religious notions that are quite alien to his thought. One of the most striking features of the book is its comprehensiveness. Consideration is given to almost every aspect of experience. This is possible because of the high degree of abstraction in which he is able to think. He criticizes philosophy and philosophers for their failure to take into consideration this many-sidedness of the world. “Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.”

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There is one short chapter of great beauty and profundity which all should read and ponder. It is chapter i of Part V, pages 512–18. He notes that the most precious occurrences are most transitory. The reason is that the dearest experiences are mutually exclusive, hence that which is of greatest value must pass to make way for other great values. This fact is symbolized by the ancient statement: “He giveth his beloved—sleep.” Therefore the chief problem of progress is to organize the world in such a way as to make less mutually exclusive and more mutually inclusive the best that men can experience and the best that can ever occur. There is an inclusive system of organization which holds together not only all that is actual but also all possibilities. This system is of such a sort that it promotes this increasing inclusiveness of precious objects. This system he calls God. Permanence and change are equally important and indispensable. “Abide with me” expresses the values of permanence; “fast falls the eventide” states the fact of change. The perfect moments, the lovely scene, the dear friend must pass. But “the perfect moment is fadeless in the lapse of time. Time has then lost its character of ‘perpetual perishing’; it becomes the ‘moving image of eternity.’” Religion cannot escape the cosmological problem, try as it will. Writes our author: “The theme of Cosmology, which is the basis of all religion, is the story of the dynamic effort of the world passing into everlasting unity, and of the static majesty of God’s vision, accomplishing its purpose of completion by absorption of the World’s multiplicity of effort.” Religion can turn its back on cosmology when advancing knowledge presents a world that is foreign to the presuppositions of religious tradition, or when the cosmos appears too complex and baffling for any sort of conceptual grasp. But if we are sincerely and thoroughly religious we cannot escape the problem that way. It will stand at our shoulder blade like a specter casting its shadow on all we behold. Process and Reality has faced the specter and found not a specter but a problem. The first requirement for an understanding of Whitehead is to grasp the distinction he makes between objects and events. Events constitute the ultimate fact beyond which there can be nothing else. Everything which is or ever can be must pertain to events. Objects are aspects of events. An object is that aspect which an event presents when it interacts with another event. When events interact they present reciprocal aspects to one another. These aspects are objects. For example, the table and myself are aspects of events which arise because of the interaction between that event to which the table pertains, and that event to which I pertain. “I” here means the social object called a personality.

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As events transpire with the creative advance of nature they might interact in ever so many different ways, for there is an infinity of possible ways in which events might interact. That means there is an infinity of objects, actual and possible. But, as matter of fact, this infinite wealth of possibility does not occur except according to a definite order. That means many possibilities are excluded for the sake of this order. If it were not for this ordering principle which shapes the interaction of events the universe would be a chaos or, at any rate, be very different from what it is. But through all the changes in the interaction of events this basic order is maintained. Why? There is no reason save the arbitrary fact that interacting events do conform to the principle of an ultimate system. Within the bounds of this system they can undergo a great many different changes in the manner of their interaction, but the essential character of this system forever abides. Possibility constitutes the nature of the universe quite as much as actuality. The possible interaction of events constitutes objects even when such interaction never occurs. Such objects are not actual; they might be called transcendental until they are actualized, if they ever are. The ultimate system gives order to these transcendental objects as well as to the actual occurrence of events. This ultimate ordering system is God. God is not an object. That is, he is not one aspect of an event which is presented to another event when the two interact. He is that ultimate ordering principle of system which becomes more and more manifest in the world of actual events as time goes on. Through him is all increase value.

Mabbott, March 1930 J. D. Mabbott. “Whitehead and Relativity.” The New Statesman Spring Books Supplement (March 15, 1930): xi—xii. John David Mabbott (November 18, 1898 to January 26, 1988) attended Edinburgh University and St. John’s College, reading for a B.Litt. and completing his thesis in 1923. Mabbott was appointed in 1922 to a lectureship in classics at Reading, followed by a year’s philosophy teaching at Bangor, after which he was brought back to Oxford to teach at St John’s. In 1939 he published the influential article “Punishment” in Mind. Other important works include An Introduction to Ethics, The State and the Citizen, and his final work John Locke. At the beginning of World War II he was recruited into the research department of the Foreign Office, then under Arnold Toynbee. The New Statesman, founded in 1913, is a weekly British publication of culture and politics. Over the years, it has moved politically and culturally to the left, and has become a leading voice of left-of-center political and cultural commentary in Britain.

The two movements of our time which are likely to revolutionize most completely our common ways of thinking are relativity and psychoanalysis. The latter has already won its place in ordinary thought and language; the children chatter of complexes over their cocktails. But relativity is still supposed to be a mystery moving entirely in unintelligible symbols and metaphorical paradox, and the children remain resolutely Newtonian in their outlook on space and time. The first conception, that the world is fourdimensional, is not too difficult, and we have Flatland and H. G. Wells’ Time Machine to help us. We know that an appointment means a place and a time; the children might be tempted to say, “You cannot have a date with people unless you have a spot with them too.” Again, if we take an actual world-distance, the interval between two spatio-temporal events in history, we split it into space and time. What is the “interval” between Marathon and Waterloo? We say 1,000 miles south-east of Waterloo is another historic plane, and 2,000 years earlier in its history was a battle. This necessary analysis of the single distance is just like “forming fours.” You want to reach a point behind your right-hand neighbor, and you take a place to the rear with the left foot and one to the right with the right. The actual

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distance between the two positions is not two paces, and “rear” and “right” concern only our ways of moving from one to the other. If your body were not quite square with the front rank, but screwed round a little to the right, then you would move only one foot to your rear and three feet to your right in order to reach the same position as before. Now space and time correspond to “rear” and “right” in this illustration. The real distance from Marathon to Waterloo is not spatial and temporal, though we express it, as above, by a kind of sideways step in space followed by a backward step in time. The second point in the relativity theory is that the proportions of space and time into which we split this single interval depend on the observer. If we were to mount on a swiftly moving body those measuring instruments, on which in the end these dates and distance depend, the amounts of space and time we found would differ. Velocity of the instrument has the effect illustrated in forming fours by turning slightly to the right before beginning. Now many philosophers are still inclined to adopt towards relativity the Nelsonic attitude—”I cannot see the signal”—and except for Whitehead all the others, notably Eddington, Haldane and Wildon Carr, have taken relativity as merely more evidence for idealism and against realism. For many years, since his book The Concept of Nature appeared in 1920, Whitehead has been working out and gradually revealing an alternative solution. Science and the Modern World remains his best book for the general reader; his latest work Process and Reality is rather for the specialist. It bristles with new terminology, and gives little relief by means of illustration or comparative argument; yet it is the most final expression so far of the greatest piece of constructive thinking which English philosophy has recently seen. Whitehead’s first achievement is to present a system which evades the hoary antithesis between realism and idealism, and finds a place for the new discoveries in a way which is relational without being subjectivist. The latter doctrine would simply say that scientists have long known that colour and taste are mind-dependent, and now they know that distance and duration are mind-dependent too. They have in fact caught up to Kant. If the effect of relativity were only to draw the closer round me the veil of my own subjectivity, it would involve no very radical change of outlook. Whitehead, however, takes a new way, which we can illustrate by considering the example of colour. Locke says “Let us consider the red and white colours in porphyry… Can anyone think any real alterations are made in the porphyry by the presence or absence of light?” Whitehead gives this rhetorical question the unexpected answer. The ways the concentration of classical philosophy since Aristotle on the subject-

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predicate relation has produced all these views in which any quality which is relational is taken to be unreal and therefore a psychic addition. What colour is my curtain? It looks blue in daylight and green in electric light. Surely it cannot have both these qualities, therefore it has neither, and colour becomes the “effect in our minds” of the real curtain. Secondary qualities are mind-dependent. Yet the evidence does not suggest this, but rather that the colours both belong to the curtain and that at least one of them is light-dependent. Occasionally there is real evidence that a colour depends on the observer, as when those drugged with santonin see things yellow, but even here the dependence is on the observer’s body, not on his mind. Whitehead’s main point, however, is that such relational qualities are quite real, and belong genuinely to the physical world. Nothing prevents my being both a father and an uncle, and in relation to the appropriate terms I really am both. The evidence which Locke used to prove colour was the effect in his mind of other real qualities would make my fatherhood (or avuncularity) an effect in his mind also. The distinction between qualities which all the evidence requires is a distinction within reality between relative and absolute, and not a distinction between objective and subjective. Locke had really shown then that colour was a relational quality dependent on light; he supposed also that location and duration were absolute, that the shape and size and date of an object were without any qualification its own. The work of Einstein shows that these properties are relational also. Events simultaneous for one observer would be successive for another, and there are similar spatial variations. Here once more Whitehead avoids Eddington’s subjectivist conclusions by showing that “observer” is ambiguous. The measurements are relative to the velocity of the observer’s instruments. A camera would record simultaneity or succession according to its velocity, while the “owner” who owns it need not move from his study. His mind in no way determines the variation. The resultant view of nature is curiously novel. The world of nature no longer consists of an aggregate of substances each possessing in its own right its own qualities. It becomes very complex because all colours, shapes and durations we observe are all really there but relationally determined. Whitehead, indeed, denies that any physical object can possess qualities of its own at all. Here, however, relativity seems to require that space and time should be relative, but that the intervals from which they are abstracted should be absolute. Minkowski first put the point quite clearly— “Henceforth space and time are but shadows, and only a union of the two preserves an independent existence.” Even in the case of colour, our tests for colour-blindness, and the intelligible use of phrases like “a bad light,” suggest approximation to real non-relational colours. Among the substances so diversely interrelated are human beings, and their

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physiological conditions certainly determine some of the more wild qualities which other objects possess. Perhaps even a few cases appear where psychical conditions have this effect. When I see a haystack in the distance and expect it to be cylindrical, it may actually look cylindrical. If later on I find its near side to be flat, then I can assert that its cylindricality was relative to my expectant mind. But following Whitehead, I shall insist that it was the actual haystack which possessed this temporary relational quality, just as I may really be a temporary uncle, even if my only niece survives but a few days. Having achieved this theory of the world of nature as an interrelated “organic” whole in which substances have the qualities they do only because of their relation to other substances, Whitehead goes on to ask about qualities. He calls them, rather confusingly, “objects.” An example of such an object is a particular shade of green. One such object may have ingression into a large number of substances or events, its ingression, but not its nature, being determined by the relation of these events to others. This shade of green is what it is regardless of passage and variety of the actual world, and the relations between shades of colour are equally unaffected by the processes in which colour is manifested. The “objects” of Whitehead are therefore “eternal objects” like Platonic Ideas. Similarly a particular or determinate shape may be the shape of many events. The shape which is visible in the paper before him has ingression into the world of nature here and now because of the relation of my paper to other substances, including its relation to the velocity of an observer moving with the earth’s surface. Here, not merely Plato but even the detailed cosmology of the Timaeus comes to mind. One question remains. The reason for my paper’s shape or colour is found in its relation to other events. There is still needed the reason for the whole. Any one event manifests the eternal objects it does by virtue of its “prehension” of other events. The whole is what it is by the fiat of God. As in the Timaeus, there is no relation between God and the “eternal objects,” but only between God and the spatio-temporal world. It is just here that there is, if not a difficulty, perhaps a growing point in Whitehead’s system. The other growing point is his conception of value. The whole universe is organic, yet within it there are events with degrees of self-subsistence, and this self-subsistence is value. A heap of sand owes its shape and size to relations with other events—relations in which its character as sand plays little part. An organism also owes its colour, shape and size to relations to other events, but in this relation its own nature counts. The sand-heap cannot have a side steeper than a certain angle, not because it is this sandheap nor even because it is sand, but only because of the dryness of its

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particles. I cannot jump more than five feet in the air, and the reason is not merely my being a man but my being the very man I am. When the wind strikes the sand-heap its character is once more irrelevant; sifted sugar or powdered diamonds would scatter as readily. But when the wind hits me it may make me first annoyed and then exhilarated, because my own character contributes to the result. Real individuality, then, appears not when I retain my selfhood in sacrosanct isolation, for such aloofness is impossible, but when my nature leaves its mark on the qualities which emerge both in me and in other substances in the course of my passage through the world. The hermit possesses his peculiar quality not because he is cut off from the world, but because he is related only to one part of it— his cell. There is not yet a clear connection between these interesting views and our ordinary moral and aesthetic experience. As an account of senseexperience and physical objects the system has reached its full stature; as a theology and a theory of value it seems still to be feeling its way. Few men can have combined so complete a mathematical and scientific equipment with such a width of interest in life and thought, and of those only one or two have made a serious attempt to express both sides in a single philosophy. Plato and Leibniz are among the number. In both of them the main difficulties centre round the conceptions of God and value, and this may suggest that Whitehead’s obscurity on these points is inevitable for a philosophy which begins with nature instead of mind. If there is anything in this, it must enhance the interest with which his further development in these two spheres will be watched.

Carr, July 1930 H. Wildon Carr. “Professor Whitehead’s World-Building.” The Personalist 11, no.3 (July 1930): 157–163. Herbert Wildon Carr (Jan 1, 1857 to July 8, 1931) served as Professor of Philosophy at the University of London and the University of Southern California. In addition to authoring works on Leibniz, Bergson, and Croce, he interpreted works of both Bergson and Croce. He was also influential in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion.

Lovers of Rabelais will remember Pantagruel’s first meeting with Panurge. Impressed by his appearance he questioned him to know who he was, whence he came and whither he was bound. His answers came in one language after another, none of which could Pantagruel understand. At last he inquired of him how it was that knowing so many languages he yet was ignorant of French. “French,” replied Pantagruel, “is my native tongue” and forthwith the two became life-long friends. Professor Whitehead philosophizes in a language I find difficult to understand and impossible to speak. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, the subject of his recent Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh, is a philosophical work of the first importance, and my desire to understand is compelling. There is moreover a deep natural sympathy between us. The philosophical problem is the same for both of us and we approach it in the same way. He sees as clearly as I do that the only appeal is to experience and that the only experience for each is his own. We both take the problem as it has been formulated by the great thinkers of old and the great system makers of the modern scientific era, and we are both intent on discovering the true interpretation of the revolutionary discoveries in physics in the present century. Yet at a certain point we appear to part company. Professor Whitehead studies his problem and seeks his solution along the line marked out by the great pre-Kantian philosophers. He repudiates the post-Kantian idealisms. I, on the other hand, take the Kantian position and its Hegelian development as my starting-point. It is therefore to me deeply disappointing that Professor Whitehead, who has an extraordinary gift of expression and could if he would write with the lucidity of Hume, will philosophize more geometrico like Spinoza. My difficulty is not the new terms he finds it necessary to introduce, it is rather the havoc he makes of long recognized meanings and

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the topsyturveydom he brings about in the use of familiar words. Let me give an illustration of each of these grounds of perplexity. The ultimate constituents of the world are a class of entities he names “eternal objects.” These we are told early in the book are the Platonic ideas but renamed because of an ambiguity in the meaning in the employment of the word “idea.” Soon however we find sense-data or sensa also called “eternal objects.” Possibly Professor Whitehead thinks that in this way he can avoid the great difficulty in the Platonic theory, namely, how to relate the ideas to sense experience. But if this is Professor Whitehead’s solution it is not Plato’s. If it had been Plato’s he surely would have put it into Socrates’s account of the theory in the Parmenides and not have left him silent before the dilemma with which Zeno confronted him. This, then, is my first cause of perplexity. To identify the Platonic ideas with the entities which modern realist philosophers name sense-data confuses for me the whole problem of the ancient philosophy from Plato to Plotinus. My second cause of perplexity is Professor Whitehead’s use of the term “feeling.” This disconcerts me completely. By feeling I am accustomed to mean pleasure—pain, in so far as this contrast is not resolvable into distinct sensations but qualifies sense experience of every kind. Professor Whitehead uses the word apparently for what Hume called “impressions” and he then goes on to classify feelings by qualities such as “physical,” “perceptual,” “conceptual,” “propositional,” and many more, all of which to me sound like flat contradictions. I do not deny his right to use words in any way he chooses, but I wish for myself he would rely less on etymology and more on context to fix his meanings. Hegel declared German to be a particularly good language for philosophy because so many of its words admitted a variety of meanings. I agree with Hegel. The wonderful thing to me about discourse is that it conveys meaning by contextual continuity and not by assembling arbitrary signs. “Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks” says Professor Whitehead (p. 403). I on the contrary cannot believe that even a god by a miracle could turn squeaks into language. I have said enough on this important if minor question of expression, let me come to the philosophy itself. There have been in the modern period two great system makers, two great philosophers who may be described as world-builders. The first is Descartes; his world-building followed the great Copernican discovery. The second is Hegel; his world-building followed the great philosophical revolution of Kant. Today again there is need of world-building, called for this time by the scientific revolution brought about by the Eintstein theory. This is the world-building that Professor Whitehead attempts.

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“Give me matter and movement and I will make a world” said Descartes. Hegel asked for no outside material. We had, he said in effect, only to look within, follow the activity of the logos or reason as we experience it each in our own spiritual life, to see the evolution of the real—Logic, Nature, and Mind. For Professor Whitehead it is not so simple. His formal requirements are: eight categories of existence; twenty-seven categories of explanation; and nine categorical obligations. Also he refers to six multiplicities or collective kinds of entities (p. 44) as having been “just mentioned.” I cannot find the mention of them. It may be an omission, or it may be a case of looking for the spectacles on my nose, but I have searched and not found them. Besides these formal requirements his material requirements are simpler but quantitatively very formidable—eternal objects without limit, actual occasions without restriction. Thus equipped he invites us to behold the concrescence of the ultimate constituents of nature first into cells and organic wholes and then into ever higher forms. Whence, we ask, is the motive force? The answer is not that of the post-Kantian idealists, that life is consciousness in right, that mind or spirit is the ultimate reality, and that matter is phenomenon. The answer is that of the pre-Kantians. The source is God. The eternal objects are, Professor Whitehead tells us, the primordial nature of God. The meaning is plain. The ultimate bricks of the universe are a discrete manifold with no unifying principle in themselves. The ultimate bricks of conscious experience or mind have this same discrete atomic character. Their development is not the expression of an inner nature, for they have none; it is a “concrescence” due to the external, unifying, organizing power of God. This introductory assemblage of principles and requirements and the formulation of them, like a multiplication table to be accepted and memorized, may be bewildering and discouraging to the ingenuous inquirer, but I must confess it is not irrational. Why should we think worldbuilding a simple matter? It is true we may make a world out of extension and movement, or even out of being and nothing, but shall we find more in the world we have made than we had put into it at the beginning? Professor Whitehead says that “philosophy is explanatory of abstraction and not of discreteness” and that “the true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself yet participated in by its own nature?” This, I think, was essentially the attitude of the seventeenth century philosophers, and Professor Whitehead like them can only find the principle of unity which moves through “concrescence” to concreteness in God. He distinguishes the primordial from the consequent nature of God but he has no other principle by which the ultimately discrete constituents of his universe can become concrete in an organism than by assuming a nature of God. God is, if I read him rightly, the category of the Ultimate as

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Creativity, presupposed in all the more special categories to which I have referred. This God whom Professor Whitehead introduces so insistently into his philosophy is the God whom Heine declared the Critique of Pure Reason to slew; not the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” but the “god of the philosophers.” Process and Reality is written in five parts, and it is in Part III, the Theory of Prehension, and Part IV, the Theory of Extension, that the worldbuilding proceeds in earnest. The former represents the subjective, the latter the objective features of the world, or perhaps we may say the one purports to show how the mind can pass out of itself into the world, the other how the world determines the direction of the mind’s activity. It is in Part IV that Professor Whitehead is at his best. When he is dealing with purely mathematical concepts he has an extraordinary genius for lucid explanation. Take for example his definition of a straight line which holds for any geometry, whether it be Elliptical, Euclidean or Hyperbolic, and then the simple manner in which the principles of the three geometries are shown to follow the postulate of parallelism in each case. In this part also Professor Whitehead offers a new solution of Zeno’s paradox concerning motion. This is of quite special interest because it would seem to imply a complete reversal of his former solution in Principia Mathematica based on the Cantorian definition of an infinite series. The new solution implies a kind of quantum theory of Space. The passage (p. 468–9) is too long to quote and too important to epitomize. It introduces “quanta of extensiveness which are the basic regions of successive contiguous occasions.” The flying arrow is a “vector” always in some extensive quantum and yet traversing a series of contiguous occasions. This is very different from the continuity of space and time defined as a compact series of points none of which are contiguous, but I fear lest I am intruding in a realm where I must tread as an angel. Let me now try in my own way to describe Professor Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism.” The starting point would seem to be the simple pure fact of experience with its particular report which Hume calls an “impression.” For Hume this is ultimate and subjective in the meaning that it is what it is experienced as and nothing more. Hume says indeed that it arises from unknown causes but this is clearly, if we take his whole argument into account, only his way of saying that there is no possibility of going beneath it; it does not mean that there are unknown causes of it. Now to build a world out of such material is impossible and the whole force of Hume’s argument is to prove that it cannot be done. How then are we to make the passage from this matter of pure experience to the kind of entities which will serve to give substantiality to the world? There is indeed a

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preliminary question. Why make the attempt? Why not accept skepticism as ultimate? The reason is, Professor Whitehead replies, that there exists something in our spiritual constitution which Santayana has named “animal faith” and which even Hume recognizes in the belief which we cannot throw off in practical life. And now comes the crucial step. Professor Whitehead identifies Hume’s “impression” with what modern realist philosophers call a sense-datum. There is virtue in a name. C’est le premier pas qui coûte. A sense-datum can be defined in physical terms. Its very name implies that is has both a status in the objective world and an influence in the subjective world of experience. So a passage is effected from the private psychological world to the common world of all experients. The sense-datum is now an “eternal object,” that is, a timeless entity. Thus the first difficulty is overcome. Let us pass to the second. The external world differs from the internal world as extension from intension. The extensive world is divisible and discrete. It is impossible to discover any principle of unity in its separate entities or eternal objects. Yet the world must have some principle of unity and this cannot be the mere external unity of a collection or heap, it must be an organic unity, otherwise we can conceive no rational principle on which it could be apprehended by a conscious mind. Where then are we to find this unity? According to Professor Whitehead it cannot be in the mind. He will have no truck with idealism. Hence he is under the necessity to produce a Deus ex machina. The “Philosophy of Organism,” as Professor Whitehead names his philosophy, is essentially a theory of what is now called emergent evolution. The unity and creativity of the process require the postulate of God, but the creative process is only rendered possible by the fact (a fact like animal faith accepted but unexplained) that eternal objects exhibit polarity and one of the poles is mental, thus enabling them to enter into society. Now I should like to challenge Professor Whitehead by adapting an illustration which he will recognize as coming from a work which we both rank as one of the highest attainments of the genius of philosophy, Hume’s Dialogues of Natural Religion. Suppose a spider to attain the greatest degree of intelligence and self-conscious reflection consonant with its special organization, would the external world as conceived by us provide a direct passage from its intelligence to ours? Is not point-to-point correspondence, not to speak of actual identity, between my world and the spider’s simply unintelligible? On the other hand, if I adopt the idealist principle will it not follow at once that if I pass from my system of reference to that of the spider it will yet remain the same? This is in effect saying no more than the truth embodied in the Christian doctrine of the

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Incarnation. There is only one way in which even God can know man and that is by becoming man. I suggest that the idealist principle rationalizes knowledge and the realist principle does not.

Nagel, July 1930 Ernest Nagel. “Review of Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology and The Function of Reason.” The Symposium 1, no.3 (July 1930): 392–398. Ernest Nagel (November 16, 1901 to Sept. 22, 1985) emigrated to the United States at the age of 10, and received a BS from New York’s City College in 1923 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1930. He taught for one year (1966–1967) at Rockefeller University, but otherwise spent his academic career at Columbia University, where, in 1967, he became a University Professor. He was among the most important philosophers of science in his time. In 1958 he published, with James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof. His masterpiece, The Structure of Science, published in 1961, practically inaugurated the field of analytic philosophy of science. Nagel also served as an editor of the Journal of Philosophy (1939–1956) and of the Journal of Symbolic Logic (1940–1946).

The pursuit of metaphysics as the study of the generic characters of existence has been slowly regaining professional adherents. Once its central theme, reaction to the unchecked flights of nineteenth century romantic speculation has well nigh banished metaphysics as a legitimate subject matter for philosophy. But the problems which professional philosophers refused to consider became acutely pressing in the special sciences. It was to be expected that ere long comprehensive treatises on the nature of existence would appear, fashioned by philosophers who were sensitive to the advances of recent science as well as to the ancient tradition that philosophy is the systematic study of being. To the series of distinguished essays on metaphysics which contemporary philosophers have contributed, these volumes are a notable addition. Process and Reality, to which the second book under review can serve as an introduction or summary, should be doubly welcome. In the first place, it is written by a man highly sensitive to the most varied phases of human experience, and exceptionally competent to write on some of them. Mathematics, physics, biology, art, religion, are not alien to him, and in at least the first two disciplines Whitehead is an acknowledged master. As a consequence, his volumes are crammed full with insights and flashing phrases which illuminate both text and subject matter as lightning does a stormy night. In the second place, Whitehead’s approach to philosophic

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problems has avoided traditional clichés. He has faced the issues of philosophy with the conviction that not only must the characters which science especially notes be taken as genuine traits of existence, but those specific characters which eventuate when the rest of nature interacts with the human organism must be so taken as well. The traits which appear in the segment of existence falling within human experience are taken by him as instances of, and continuous with, analogous traits in the furthest reaches of nature. His metaphysics consists, therefore, in the framing of categories adequate to describe every phase of existence, but which are nevertheless such that any characters whatsoever, subsumed under those categories, are shown to be not different in kind, though different in degree of complexity, from the characters manifested in human life. In this fashion does Whitehead hope to demonstrate the unity of man and nature. No summary less extended than the book itself can do justice to the sweep and ingenuity of this cosmology, which requires one Category of the Ultimate, eight Categories of Existence, twenty seven Categories of Explanation, and nine Categorial Obligations for its framework. In essence, however, its doctrine is a variation on the Platonic-Leibnizian theory of how a multiplicity of pure forms or eternal objects are caught up by (ingress into) the flux of actuality. For like many other metaphysicians, Whitehead finds himself in agreement with pre-Kantian fashions of thought even though he started out in opposition to them. Temporal things arise by participation in eternal things. But in coming to be a determinate instance of a pure form, a temporal thing reflects (prehends) the universe of many, disjoined actual occasions so that its selective absorption of the disjoined universe culminates in a novel and unified event, which in turn contributes its share to (becomes objectified in) the intrinsic natures of other actual occasions. Every actual entity must, accordingly, be construed as dipolar. It is something physical, the culmination of antecedent processes which emerge in it as a novel synthesis and enjoy therein a specific physical immediacy, called “feeling”; and it is also something restive or appetitive for eternal objects as yet unrealized in the flux, thereby passing on from the finality of its own eventuation to new moments of completed creation. “Some lowly, diffused form of the operations of Reason constitutes the vast diffused counter-agency by which the material universe comes into being.” Consequently, every actual entity is capable of two supplementary analyses: genetic analysis shows how the entity has become what it is as the outcome of its prehending the rest of the universe; morphological analysis indicates the relations of efficient causality which it bears to its contemporaries and successors. The pervasive twofold character of an actual entity as physical or final, and as mental or appetitive, is the prototype selected by Whitehead in terms of which such relations as that of

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the mind to its body can be rendered intelligible. The initial dualism of actual entity and eternal object is mediated, however, as in Plato and Leibniz, by a God. He has both a “primordial nature,” whereby the barren pure forms are eternally and ideally realized in him, and whereby he constitutes a principle of selectivity so that the actual process never fails to exhibit the principles of Whitehead’s metaphysics by precipitating new eternal objects; and he has a “consequent nature” wherein the mutual immediacy of whatever once is actual is forever conserved. So this metaphysics ends in a Bradleyan view of the universe: it is actualized in individual entities; but these are nevertheless organically connected in the unity of God’s feeling of their conjoint existence, as well as through the relevance to them of every unactualized form ideally felt by God. In spite of the speculative power of this cosmology, it will leave some readers dissatisfied and censorious. This reviewer, at any rate, must protest, in the first place, against the severe abuse of language to which Whitehead is partial. Every attempt at precision in metaphysics is praiseworthy. But when, instead of using newly coined words or old words carefully redefined, he introduces words that have an accepted meaning and inevitable human association to denote his own unusual categories, he invites confusion and obscurantism. Words like feeling, satisfaction, decision, appetition, society, which have a vague enough accepted connotation, can be employed only with danger as the equivalents, more or less, of more neutral words like immediacy, completion, selectivity, incompleteness, structure. For the ease with which the former set of words become symbols for specifically human qualities, which are then read into every occurrence in nature, makes them unfit for exact thought, especially when their meanings are loosely stated. It is a strange irony that the coauthor of Principia Mathematica should have at once so great a distrust of language that he disowns it as adequate to express propositions, and yet so much faith in a word like “feeling” that he uses it to connote indiscriminately the different types of immediacy which events possess. If language does not “express” a proposition, what, one would like to know, does? What is “expression” if language does not do it, and what is a “proposition” if language does not adequately express it? The program to construct a coherent, logical, and necessary system of ideas, in terms of which every element of experience is to be stated, is not far from sheer verbalism if, for example, every variety of immediacy is subsumed under the label of “feelings,” and if thereby the tenuous analogy between the feelings of human beings and the specificity of any event is expanded into an identity of type.

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Speculation, as Whitehead urges, is the life blood of science and philosophy. But he also admits that it must not run wild. Unless the speculative flight ends in theories which are directly or indirectly verifiable in human experience, what differentiates a daring philosophy from myth and superstition? Now what are the possible ways of verifying Whitehead’s ubiquitous feelings, satisfactions, unconscious prehensions, or his God’s patience, wisdom, consciousness, and conservation of all values? Either these terms do not mean what they ordinarily mean, and then this metaphysics must certainly be supplemented by more analytic studies; or the existence of what they denote is not verifiable. Furthermore, when Whitehead declares that by “coherence” of ideas he understands that no entity can be conceivable in “complete abstraction” from the system of the universe, one may retort that no relational way of thought can declare itself otherwise. But one must also add, that while there can be no “complete abstraction” in this sense, there undoubtedly is a “relative abstraction” so that one must not make the impossible demand that the nature of the whole universe be presupposed in whatever we may say. Whitehead’s pursuit of truth as “nothing else” than how the composite natures of actualities receive representation in God’s nature (p. 18), is fortunately not his only occupation, otherwise the Universal Algebra and the Principia would never have been written. And when one reads, further, that the “necessity” of a philosophic scheme must bear in itself its own warrant of universality (p. 5); or when a frequency theory of probability is made to depend on an intuitive and infallible knowledge of “equal probabilities” (p. 307); the reader can only gasp and wonder at the audacity of the mathematician who denies the principles of the method of his own science when he turns philosopher. More serious difficulties in this scheme of ideas remain. This cosmology is an explicit attempt to combine a pluralism of events, an appreciation of their uniqueness and contingency, with an organic view of existence in which the “togetherness” of things is facilitated by God’s non-temporal conceptual feeling of the realm of pure forms. In so far as each thing is what it is in virtue of the concrescent union in it of other things, existence is organically connected and all relations are internal. Nevertheless, Whitehead recognizes two types of prehensions, a positive kind, in which a “positive,” definite bond exists between every pair of items in the universe, accompanied by a feeling of that bond; and a negative kind, in which some items are excluded from contributing to the subjects constitution. All actual entities, but only a selection of eternal objects, are felt by a given subject; nevertheless, even the eternal objects not felt play a role, since negative prehensions too have their immediate aspects, the “negative prehension of an entity is a positive fact with its subjective form” (p. 66). The proverbial

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flea on the dog’s tail does add, apparently, to the actual nature of the dogstar; for if it does not do so “positively,” the exclusion of the flea from contributing to the internal constitution of Sirius is nevertheless accompanied by an appropriate subjective feeling all the same. The “organic” nature of existence is proved because all things must be related, since if two things are not related in a specific way, the non-relation is, after all, a relation of a kind! All this may be true, but the conclusion that existence is organic is won at the price of so far diluting the meaning of “organism” that the application of the term to specific biological structures no longer differentiates the latter from “inorganic” structures. Of what avail to call the interrelation of the stars organic, if the kind of organization the stars exhibit is poles apart from the organization of living things? Why anything should happen at all, why actual things should be “restless after novelty,” is a problem which no naturalistic philosophy need face, since if it is faced it must be left unanswered, even if it is in the bosom of God. Whitehead’s philosophic writings have been largely devoted to calling attention to this element of ineradicable freshness and unaccountability in every event, and he has not hesitated finally to identify this creative urge with the divine element in actuality. The price of novelty, however, is the passing away of characters which antecedent events possessed, and the creative advance of nature is accompanied by the perishing of those immediacies which have already emerged. On Whitehead’s theory of God’s twofold nature it is difficult to see how creation does retain its spontaneity, and how what is once actual does pass away. For the primordial nature of God is his feeling the entire multiplicity of eternal objects, so that be reason of God’s sharing in the nature of actual entity, there results a gradation of the relevance of eternal objects to the career of that entity. “Effective relevance requires agency of comparison, and agency belongs exclusively to actual occasions. This divine ordering is itself matter of fact, thereby conditioning creativity. Thus possibility which transcends realized temporal matter of fact has a real relevance to the creative advance” (p. 46). That individuality and self-determination which appeared to be the contribution of every event to existence, seems here to be derivative from the primordial nature of God which transcends the given actual occasion. On the other hand, the consequent nature of God provides for the objective immortality of every actual thing. “In it there is no loss, no obstruction. The world is felt in a unison of immediacy” (p. 524). God thus becomes the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands! But either the “unison of immediacy” is a Pickwickian description of the posterity or causal consequences of actual entities, or death and decay become illusions.

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In Whitehead’s system, therefore, the possibilities into which actual entities can develop are given once for all, and unlike Charles Peirce’s cosmogenic growth of possibilities, novelty in actuality must always come from “somewhere.” Whitehead’s conclusion is in line, therefore, with the traditional philosophic and theologic systems. But one reader at least would like to know what is the literal meaning of conceptual prehensions of eternal objects, if consciousness is not necessary for such prehensions. One would like to know on the basis of what evidence, or upon what interpretation, appetition for an eternal object plays the role of final cause, efficacious in the realization of determinate occasions. One would like to know Whitehead’s detailed solution of the well known antinomies arising from the notion of the class of abstracta (p. 73). One would like to know what it means to say that “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (p. 254), or that it is the appetition for unrealized forms which is the final cause of the temporal process. One must ask whether the characterization of process as an “influx” of eternal objects, or of change as the description of the adventures of eternal objects in actuality, are really contributions to an understanding of change and process. One suspects, therefore, that eternal objects, instead of regarded as the relational patterns invariant over segments of existence, are uncritically hypostatized so that a God must be invoked to precipitate them back into the flux. And one suspects that Whitehead has accomplished the resolution of the Cartesian problem of how the mind and body interact, only by raising the hopeless question of how possibilities can be effective in regulating their own realization.

Marvin, November 1930 F. S. Marvin. “Prof. Whitehead’s Philosophy. Review of Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology. (Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh during the Session 1927–1928.) By Prof. Alfred North Whitehead. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1929).” Nature 126, no. 3185 (November 15, 1930): 754–755. Francis Sydney Marvin (1863–1943) was a scholar and historian, working primarily in the history of Western Civilization. Among his many published works are Western Races and the World, Unity of Western Civilization, Science and Civilization, and Progress and History. One of the most important scientific journals in publication, Nature was founded in 1869, and is now published by the Nature Publishing Group. Nature has attempted to avoid narrow specialization, continuing to publish articles across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although intended for the scientific community, many of the most important articles contain brief summaries, so that the journal enjoys a wide lay audience as well.

It does not fall within our scope to attempt a detailed or technical examination of the volume of Gifford Lectures in which Prof. A. N. Whitehead has expounded at greater length than elsewhere his system of metaphysics. This has been done in many other notices, and we would be understood here only to give a general impression from rather a lay point of view, comparing it with other newly published syntheses of similar scope—for example, that of Profs. Alexander and Haldane, Pringle Pattison and Hobson, and Sir Arthur Eddington. Gifford lectures always open up a prospect of such fresh attempts to bring together the conclusions of science and put them into some sort of living relation with religion. It is an increasingly difficult task, and one should be grateful to the valiant men who essay it and the foundation which encourages them. It is doubtful, however, whether much has yet been achieved in the direction which most of the lecturers have had in view, mainly for two reasons: either they restate their old religious and metaphysical preconceptions side by side with a summary of certain aspects of recent science—that was the method, among others, of two eminent Gifford lectures, Eddington and Haldane—or they undertake quite a new construction of their own, with a new phraseology and new ideas

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very difficult to accommodate to accustomed usage; Prof. Whitehead is the greatest example of this type, Prof. Alexander inclining towards him, but with much more tenderness to our traditional language and ways of thought, and also—the most important point—a much more thorough and accurate psychological analysis. In Prof. Whitehead’s work, whether in this volume or in the better-known “Science and the Modern World,” we are constantly enlightened by some inspired phrase or conducted to a new vista of unity between the thinkers of the past and the opening realms of thought in the future. In this sense Prof. Whitehead is himself one of the builders of unity, a potent force in the new renascence of “the universe which is thus a creative advance into novelty”. But when we turn to the system itself which he has elaborated with so much patience and ingenuity, we are overwhelmed by a cloud of perplexities and doubt. The first and most obvious cause of this embarrassment is the extraordinary obscurity and redundance of the language. Here is a comparatively simple sentence, selected rather for that reason out of a multitude of others which on every page have confounded the wits of the most practiced readers: “The depositions of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, merely mean that ideas which these men introduced into the philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptation, and inversions either unknown to them or even explicitly repudiated by them”. What does this sentence tell us except that “No philosopher’s words can be taken as final”? This, however, is a simple case. The greatest difficulty arises when the author adds to this redundancy of ordinary expressions the whole apparatus of a new terminology which he has himself invented and he himself remains the only writer to employ. No doubt an author is justified in introducing words carefully framed to express ideas which he cannot find adequately expressed in accepted phraseology. But clearly he must, if he wishes to be read and understood, do this with the utmost care and moderation. Now, Prof. Whitehead, thinking that he has a great new idea to expound which dominates all his thought, has not only transformed one familiar word to express this new thought, but has added to it a whole string of others which constantly recur in the midst of long and complicated sentences. The leading word transformed is, of course, ‘organism’, and with this come entity, superject, prehension, concrescence, and many more. Some are new coinage, others are old words used in a novel and not always strictly consistent sense.

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This coinage of new words goes further than merely verbal explicitness— which, in fact, it does not secure. The deeper difficulty is that having set up the one great idea with its new denomination of ‘organism’ and ‘organic’, the author is apt to proceed and to move in a completely new world of thought, more and more detached from the world of familiar fact from which he sets out. This starting-point for the new philosophy is given in an early passage as follows: the “doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that, however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed in determination of components of concrescence—its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purposes, its phases of subjective aim—beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe. This final reaction completes the self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause.” This final ‘self-creative unity’ is what the author means by ‘God’, who is elsewhere defined, more briefly in the same direction, as “the principle of concretion”. One understands in a vague sense what this aims at. It has close affinities with other large general ideas current at the moment, especially Gen. Smits’s ‘holism’. It has a value, no doubt, in raising the mind above the complexities of particular events: above all, in connecting the idea of creation with that of increasing order and unity and the world. But when applied ab extra, as it were, overriding the known distinctions, for example, of the living and the non-living, the conscious and the unconscious, it confuses and does not enlighten us. For one reader at least, full admiration for the author and sympathy with his general aim, more light comes from the less ambitious but more faithful psychological analysis of the school of Bradley and Alexander.

Stebbing, October 1930 Susan L. Stebbing. “Review of Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality.” Mind 39 (1930): 466–475. L. (Lizzie) Susan Stebbing (1885 to 1943) was educated privately and at Girton College, Cambridge University, and the University of London, where she obtained an M.A. in Philosophy in 1912. She belonged to the 1930’s generation of British analytic philosophy, and was a founder in 1933 of the journal Analysis. She held a number of academic positions, including Director in Moral Sciences Studies, Girton and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge University; Professor of Philosophy, Bedford College; Principal, Kingsley Lodge School for Girls, Hampstead, London; Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; Visiting Professor, Columbia University, New York; President of the Aristotelian Society; President of the Mind Association. Her major publications include A Modern Introduction to Logic, Ideals and Illusions, Philosophy and the Physicists, and Thinking to Some Purpose. Mind is a British, academic philosophy journal, currently published by Oxford University Press, founded in the late 1800’s. The journal deals primarily with philosophy in the analytic tradition.

In these Gifford Lectures Prof. Whitehead has given us the “more complete metaphysical study” to which reference was made in the preface to the second edition of The Principles of Natural Knowledge and of which an outline was suggested in Science and the Modern World. The book makes extraordinarily difficult reading. This is not entirely Prof. Whitehead’s fault. A comprehensive metaphysics cannot fail to be difficult, and Prof. Whitehead is determined to avoid the dangers of specialism by including in his Cosmology “all particular topics.” But the difficulty is undoubtedly increased by the obscurity of Prof. Whitehead’s style, by his queer choice of words, and by his failure to provide definite examples elucidating his main conceptions. A further difficulty arises from the fact that Prof. Whitehead has come to hold views inconsistent with his earlier views, which, however, he has never explicitly abandoned. The most important change in his views relates to the fundamental distinction between objects and events. There is a less unintelligible change in his view with regard to the relation of mind to nature. Some indication of the

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reasons for these changes of view might have aided us to see why Prof. Whitehead holds the views that he now holds, and what exactly he takes to be their implications. But there is no such indication. Prof. Whitehead states clearly in the Preface that the motive leading him to write this book lies in his belief that “the movement of historical and philosophical criticism of detached questions, which on the whole has dominated the last two centuries, has done its work, and requires to be supplemented by a more sustained effort of constructive thought” (p. ix). Accordingly it is his intention “to state a condensed scheme of cosmological ideas, to develop their meaning by confrontation with the various topics of experience, and finally to elaborate an adequate cosmology in terms of which all particular topics find their interconnexions” (p. vi). Such an effort of constructive thought rests upon the assumption that speculative philosophy is both possible and important. Prof. Whitehead’s book can be rightly judged only if it be approached from this point of view. Those who believe that the proper work of philosophy consists in the detailed, critical investigation of particular problems will but waste their time if they attempt to read this book. The first essential is to attempt to understand Whitehead’s conception of the nature and importance of speculative philosophy, to the consideration of which he devotes the first chapter. “Speculative Philosophy,” he says, “is the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted” (p. 1). He maintains that all constructive thought in the sciences is dominated by unacknowledged speculative schemes. There is considerable truth in this contention. The most dogmatic metaphysicians are usually to be found among the “pure scientists” who frequently profess to repudiate metaphysics. Thus there is something to be said for Whitehead’s contention that the philosopher should attempt to make such schemes explicit in order that they may be criticised and improved. In the present work, however, Prof. Whitehead is concerned to construct his own scheme. He fully recognises that the formulation of such a scheme must be tentative. It would be unreasonable to criticise Prof. Whitehead’s cosmology on the ground that it is neither complete nor final. But we surely have a right to expect that his interpretation of his constructive scheme should be detailed and clear, for only so could it be shown to be adequate to, and applicable to, experience. The exposition, however, is not clear, and it is not detailed but only comprehensive. This combination of lack of detail with comprehensiveness of outlook makes the book impossible to summarise and extraordinarily difficult to criticise. To attempt to do either properly would require a volume of Mind, and would in any case be beyond my powers. I can, therefore, only attempt to point out what appear to me to be

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some of the more important contentions, and to consider the outcome of this “essay in cosmology” in the light of Prof. Whitehead’s earlier contributions to philosophy. Even with regard to this attempt I feel considerable hesitation since I am quite sure that I have often misunderstood what Prof. Whitehead wants to say. The language in which nearly the whole of the book is written is extraordinarily obscure. Prof. Whitehead himself would have but scant sympathy with the complaint that his choice of words is queer and that his expressions are obscure. He insists upon the unfitness of language for the purposes of metaphysics. “Words and phrases,” he says, “must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilised as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap” (p. 4). Those who, like myself, are unable to make such an imaginative leap are bound to be baffled by his use of such ordinary words as “God,” “feeling,” “valuation,” and sometimes to find whole sections unintelligible. At the outset Prof. Whitehead lays down as 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, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth” (p. 1). This statement is susceptible of two different interpretations of which one would reduce the presupposition to a simple truism whereas the other would involve a highly disputable dogma. According to the former interpretation the presupposition would amount to nothing more than the assertion that anything out of relation to everything else would be not only unknown but also unknowable, and as such would never be the concern of philosophy. So much everyone must grant, but nothing whatever follows from this admission. According to the second interpretation the presupposition would amount to the assertion that everything is in essential relations with everything else. This is equivalent to the assertion that reality is a highly coherent system. The statement, “it is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe” would most naturally suggest only the first interpretation; it thus appears obvious. But Whitehead certainly intends it to be interpreted in the second way, and he does not seem to recognise that so interpreted this presupposition requires some justification. On the contrary, his system is based upon it. This system is called “the philosophy of organism”. He declares: “The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation” (p. 9). To me, at

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least, the “solidarity of the world” does not express an obvious fact. It is, however, this fact which the philosophy of organism is invoked to explain. Prof. Whitehead seeks “to base philosophical thought upon the most concrete elements in our experience”. For this purpose he selects three notions—”actual entity,” “prehension,” “nexus”. These are the first three of eight Categories of Existence, of which the fifth is “Eternal Objects”. Actual entities and eternal objects are said to “stand out with a certain extreme finality. The other types of existence have “a certain intermediate character” (p. 29). In terms of the first three Categories of Existence he formulates twenty-seven “Categories of Explanation” and nine “Categoreal Obligations”. It is not possible here to refer to each of these. Their bare statement occupies eight pages which even Prof. Whitehead admits to be unintelligible apart from the rest of the book. It must be sufficient to refer only to those to which the most importance appears to be attached. There is a statement in the Preface which suggests the most important notions. “The positive doctrine of these lectures,” says Prof. Whitehead, “is concerned with the becoming, the being and the relatedness of ‘actual entities.’ […] All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness 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. This is the doctrine that the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those things which jointly constitute stubborn fact” (p. viii). To understand the philosophy of organism, summed up in this passage, it is first necessary to understand what exactly is meant by “actual entity,” “prehension,” “nexus,” and “God”. Some attempt must be made to explain these notions. ‘Actual entities’, which are also called ‘actual occasions’, are said to be “the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (p. 24). The complexity of an actual entity is due to the fact that every actual entity prehends all other actual entities, so that an actual entity α is a real component of another actual entity β. An actual

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entity is a concrescence, i.e. a growing together, of diverse elements. It is apparently for this reason that an actual occasion is called an “organism”.1 By “prehension,” therefore, Whitehead seems to mean the definite way in which an actual occasion α includes other occasions in its concrescence. Accordingly the togethernesses of actual entities are real individual facts, “which are real, individual, and particular, in the same sense in which actual entities and the prehensions are real, individual, and particular” (p. 26). Such a particular fact of togetherness is called a ‘nexus’ (plural form is nexûs). The distinction between a nexus and a prehension is not made very clear, but in the list of the eight Categories of Existence prehensions are said to be Concrete Facts of Relatedness, and nexûs are said to be Public Matters of Fact. Every prehension consists of three factors: (i) the subject prehending; (ii) the ‘datum’ prehended; (iii) the ‘subjective form’. By the ‘subjective form’ is meant “how that subject prehends that datum” (p. 31). When the data prehended are actual occasions the prehension is called “physical prehension”; when the data are eternal objects the prehension is called “conceptual prehension”. Neither form necessarily involves consciousness. Prehensions may also be distinguished into positive and negative prehensions. Positive prehensions are called “feelings,” and by “feeling” is apparently meant “blind physical perceptivity”. Negative prehensions are said to involve “elimination from feeling”. The point of the introduction of negative prehensions seems to be that it enables Whitehead to maintain that every item in the universe is prehended, negatively or positively, by every actual occasion. But his account of negative prehensions is so unclear that I cannot attempt to discuss it. The doctrine of objective immortality depends upon the conception of “positive prehension” or “feeling”. Whitehead insists that actual entities must not be regarded as unchanging subjects of change. An actual entity is both the subject experiencing and also what he calls the “superject” of its experiences. Thus, “it is subject-superject, and neither half of this description can for a moment be lost sight of” (p. 39). As subject an actual entity is “perpetually perishing”; as superject it is “objectively immortal”. Thus Whitehead says: “An actual entity is to be conceived both as subject presiding over its own immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its function of objective immortality” (p. 61). This appears to mean that an actual occasion α in perishing is 1

Characteristically Prof. Whitehead nowhere defines “organism,” nor does the word itself appear in the index. As is usual in Prof. Whitehead’s books, the index is quite inadequate and is not free from misprints.

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objectified in an actual occasion β, in that α becomes a constitutive element in the concrescence of β. Thus each occasion is immortal throughout its future, and β has to conform to α. The word ‘objective’ in the phrase “objective immortality” is used in the sense which it bears in the Cartesian phrase ‘realitas objectiva’. The conception of objective immortality results from Whitehead’s fourth Category of Explanation, which he calls the “principle of relativity,” and which he formulates as follows: “that the potentiality for being an element in a real concrescence of many entities into one actuality, is the one general metaphysical character attaching to all entities, actual and non-actual; and that every item in its universe is involved in each concrescence. In other words, it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’” (p. 30). The ninth Category of Explanation—called the ‘principle of process’— states, “That how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is”; consequently, “its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’” (p. 31). This qualification of one actual entity by other actual entities is said to be “the ‘experience’ of the actual world enjoyed by that actual entity, as subject” (p. 233). Further, Prof. Whitehead asserts that the philosophy of organism accepts what he calls “the reformed subjectivist principle,” namely, “that apart from the experience of subjects there is nothing, nothing, bare nothingness” (p. 234). This is said to be an alternative statement of the ‘principle of relativity’. From this principle there would seem to follow another principle of which Whitehead makes considerable use, and which he calls the ‘ontological principle’.2 This is stated in the eighteenth Category of Explanation as follows: “That every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance, has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in the process of concrescence” (p. 33). This is said to mean that “actual entities are the only reasons; so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities”. Whitehead accordingly also calls this ontological principle the ‘principle of efficient, and final, causation’. The application of the principle of relativity and the ontological principle—and the resultant doctrine of objective immortality—appears to make havoc of the fundamental distinction between universals and particulars, which Whitehead formerly recognised in his distinction 2

It should be observed that the twenty-seven Categories of Explanation are not mutually independent. It is difficult to see why Prof. Whitehead selects just those which he does select.

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between object and events. He now states explicitly his reason for preferring the latter pair of terms to the former. The passage is so important that it must be quoted in full: The ontological principle, and the wider doctrine of universal relativity, on which the present metaphysical discussion is founded, blur the sharp distinction between what is universal and what is particular. The notion of a universal is of that which can enter into the description of many particulars; whereas the notion of a particular is that it is described by universals, and does not itself enter into the description of any other particular. According to the doctrine of relativity, which is the basis of the metaphysical system of the present lectures, both these notions involve misconception. An actual entity cannot be described, even inadequately, by universals; because other actual entities do enter into the description of any one actual entity. Thus every socalled ‘universal’ is particular in the sense of being just what it is, diverse from everything else; and every so-called ‘particular’ is universal in the sense of entering into the constitutions of other actual entities (p. 66). This seems to me a great muddle. It is surely extraordinarily confusing to say that a universal is a particular because it is “diverse from everything else”. The recognition of the diversity of universals (or eternal objects) was stated by Whitehead in Science and the Modern World in terms of a principle called “The Translucency of Realisation”. This was said to mean that “any eternal object is just itself in whatever mode of realisation it is involved. There can be no distortion of the individual essence without thereby producing a different eternal object” (loc. cit., p. 240). This principle is not mentioned in the present book; instead we have the statement that a ‘universal’ is ‘particular’ because it is “diverse from everything else”. This statement seems to me to involve a sheer misuse of language. The doctrine now expounded is inconsistent with Whitehead’s former conception of the nature of objects and events. In the Concept of Nature Whitehead says: Objects are elements in nature which do not pass. The awareness of an object as some factor not sharing in the passage of nature is what I call ‘recognition’. It is impossible to recognise an event, because an event is essentially distinct from every other event. Recognition is an awareness of sameness. […] An object is ingredient in the character of some event. In fact the character of an event is nothing but the objects which are ingredient in it and the ways in which those objects make their ingression into the

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event. Thus the theory of objects is the theory of the comparison of events. Events are only comparable because they body forth permanences. We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say, ‘there it is again’. Objects are the elements in nature which can ‘be again’ (loc. cit., pp. 143–144). This passage (and others in The Concept of Nature and in The Principles of Natural Knowledge) certainly recognises that there is a fundamental distinction between objects and events. Identity could be recognised amid the diversities of actual entities, or events, because of the ingression into these events of objects which could ‘be again’. Throughout these two books objects were conceived as accounting for identity, repetition, permanence, universality and abstractness. But according to Whitehead’s present doctrine the identity of diverse actual occasions appears to be due to the objectification of one actual occasion in another actual occasion. It seems to be an inadequate description of this doctrine to say that its result is to “blur the sharp distinction” between universals and particulars. It surely involves the denial that there is any fundamental distinction between an eternal object and an actual entity, and is difficult to reconcile with the statement, already quoted, that “actual entities and eternal objects stand out with a certain extreme finality”. It is true that it is not in its character of an immediate, existential entity that an actual occasion is regarded as entering into the ‘constitution’ of another actual occasion. On the contrary, Whitehead is as concerned to maintain that actual occasions are perishing particulars as that they are immortal. He insists that “an actual entity has ‘perished’ when it is complete” (p. 113), and that “its birth is its end” (p. 111). These statements agree with his former view that an event is “essentially passing”. But he wishes now to insist that the actual entity “perishes and is immortal” (p. 113). The perished actual entity is immortal because—as he immediately goes on to say—“The actual entities beyond it can say, ‘it is mine’. But the possession imposes conformation”. But ‘conformation’ is also called ‘re-enaction’ and ‘reproduction,’ and Whitehead makes it clear that what is reproduced is an actual occasion, which, in its capacity of superject, enters into the constitution of other actual entities. Also, permanence is due to reproduction. Thus Whitehead says: “In the world there is nothing static. But there is reproduction; and hence the permanence which is the result of order and the cause of it” (p. 337). Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is conceived as providing a reconciliation of permanence with “the inescapable flux” (p. 296). This reconciliation, according to the new doctrine, seems to be brought about by means of the actual entities themselves. But since as perishing particulars

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the actual entities cannot ‘be again’, or, as Whitehead now prefers to put it, ‘abide’, and yet as immortal they do abide, it would seem to follow that actual entities must now be conceived as capable of taking the place of eternal objects. They are to be made to account for identity, repetition, permanence, and universality. They are also now conceived as sharing with eternal objects the characteristic of being abstract. They acquire this characteristic in becoming objectified. This Whitehead says: “The objectified particular occasions together have the unity of a datum for the creative concrescence. But in acquiring this measure of connexion, their inherent presuppositions of each other eliminate certain elements in their constitutions, and elicit into relevance other elements. Thus objectification is an operation of mutually adjusted abstraction, or elimination, whereby the many occasions of the actual world become one complex datum” (p. 299). It would seem, then, that there is no function performed by eternal objects that is not also performed by actual entities. If this be so, it is difficult to see why eternal object should be retained. But it was just this sharp distinction between objects and events, upon which Whitehead formerly insisted, that seemed, to me at least, one great merit of his earlier Naturphilosophie. Various inconsistencies that were apparent in Science and the Modern World may perhaps be taken as signs that Whitehead, in writing that book, was passing from his earlier theory to his present exceptionally obscure philosophy. Those who have reproached Whitehead for protesting against the “bifurcation of Nature” whilst himself admitting a “bifurcation” of events and objects have, no doubt, reason to be pleased with his latest development of the philosophy of organism. For my part, I have never been able to see that the repudiation of the former doctrine should entail the denial of any ultimate distinctions, and I can only regard Prof. Whitehead’s present position as deplorable. The denial of the doctrine that Nature is closed to mind is, however, inconsistent with the rejection of the bifurcation of Nature. This at least Whitehead seems to have maintained in his earlier writing, in spite of some obscurities and vacillation in his view with regard to the nature of mind and its relation to passage.3 It is clear that Whitehead does now deny that Nature is closed to mind. So much was apparent in Symbolism: Its Meanings and Effect. The present work puts the denial in doubt. Prof. Whitehead should, then, now hold that his former protests against “the bifurcation theories” were mistaken. But on this subject he makes no 3

I dealt with this difficulty in an article on “Mind and Nature in Professor Whitehead’s Philosophy,” in Mind, July, 1924.

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explicit pronouncement. Again, the distinctions, once so carefully drawn, between ‘scientific objects’, ‘perceptual objects’, and ‘sense-objects’ would now appear to be worthless in view of his present insistence upon “enduring objects”. Mr. Baithwaite, in reviewing Science and the Modern World4 pointed out the difficulties in Whitehead’s treatment of “enduring objects”. These difficulties have but become more acute with the collapse of the ultimate distinction between objects and events. It is not to be supposed that Prof. Whitehead would himself admit that this collapse has occurred. On the contrary, there are numerous passages in which he reaffirms the distinction. But there are other passages in which it seems clearly to be denied. The whole doctrine of objective immortality, as I have tried to show, renders the distinction valueless. That Whitehead himself is unaware of his vacillation on this point seems to be due to his conception of God. In this conception all the difficulties of his philosophy come to a head. God is an actual entity, but he is a non-temporal actuality. Apart from God the eternal objects would be a multiplicity of disjoined bare potentialities. But according to the ontological principle such a multiplicity of potentialities is impossible. Consequently Whitehead makes this multiplicity of potentialities actual by placing it in the non-temporal actuality, ‘God,’ which is then called “God’s primordial nature”. The reconciliation of permanence and flux is called “God’s consequent nature”. Thus Whitehead says, “The primordial created fact is the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects” (p. 42). Again, “The consequent nature of God is the fluent world become ‘everlasting’ by its objective immortality in God” (p. 491). Thus in God there is combined “creative advance with the retention of mutual immediacy” (p. 489). Through his primordial nature God is ‘the principle of concretion’; through his consequent nature he “saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life”. The relation of God to the world is summed up in seven contradictions, which are said by Whitehead to be “antitheses”. There is truth in Whitehead’s comment: “The concept of ‘God’ is the way in which we understand this incredible fact—that what cannot be, yet is” (p. 495). He seems to have forgotten his own warning that “God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse” (p. 486). Prof. Whitehead’s indefensible usage of language becomes nothing short of scandalous when he speaks of ‘God’. He says that ‘God’ is a term used for “Creativity,” “Aristotelian ‘matter’,” “modern ‘neutral stuff’,” since 4

See Mind, October, 1926.

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“the contemplation of our natures as enjoying real feelings derived from the timeless source of all order, acquires that ‘subjective form’ of refreshment and companionship at which religions aim” (p. 43). This statement is odd enough, but when he goes on to speak of God’s “infinite patience,” of God as “tenderly saving the turmoil of the intermediate world,” of God as being “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness,” we are forced to conclude that the use of the familiar name has beguiled Prof. Whitehead into forgetfulness of the part he has assigned to the non-temporal actuality which he chooses to call “God”. It is difficult to acquit Prof. Whitehead of a deliberate desire to encourage the unclear thinking that is so common with regard to this subject. It is much to be regretted that a writer of his eminence should even appear to lay himself open to such a charge. The length of this book, the difficulty of Prof. Whitehead’s thought, and the confusion in his expression of it have led me to write a review that is already too long, and yet much that is of the greatest importance has been passed over in silence. This, however, is inevitable. The doctrines I have dealt with are fundamental to his philosophy, so that no part of it can be explained unless these are first understood. This is the case even with regard to the theory of extension, expounded in Part IV, which is the easiest part of the book. By using Prof. de Laguna’s notion of “extensive connection” instead of the relation of “whole to part,” Whitehead has been able to give a more satisfactory account of the method of extensive abstraction. In the short space left to me I must confine myself to calling attention to this improvement, and to pointing out other topics of interest in other parts of the book. Prof. Whitehead has made clearer than he did before the theory of symbolic reference as the interplay between presentational immediacy and causal efficacy. With regard to Locke and Hume he has much to say that is illuminating and important, and upon which I should like to have been able to comment. If one attempts to consider the book as a whole one is faced with the problem of its significance. That it is obscure no one can doubt. That it is worth pondering I am convinced. Whether it is the product of thinking that is essentially unclear but capable of brief flashes of penetrating insight; or whether it is too profound in its thought to be judged by this generation, I do not know. Reluctantly I am inclined to accept the first alternative.

Taylor, 1930 A. E. Taylor. “Some Thoughts on Process and Reality.” Theology 31 (1930): 66–79. Alfred Edward Taylor (December 22, 1869 to October 31, 1945) was educated at Kingswood School, Bath, and at New College, Oxford, of which he was elected a scholar and, in 1931, an honorary fellow. He obtained first classes in honour moderations (1889) and literae humaniores (1891). Taylor taught at Merton College, Oxford, the University of Manchester, McGill University, Montreal, the University of St. Andrews, and the University of Edinburgh, from which he retired in 1941, while continuing to do the work of the chair until 1944. His most important published works include Elements of Metaphysics, The Problem of Conduct, his Gifford lectures, published as The Faith of a Moralist, and two studies of Plato: Plato: the Man and his Work, and A Commentary on Plato’s ‘Timaeus’. Theology is a British journal, founded in 1920, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It is intended for a lay and general audience, publishing articles and reviews exploring developments in Christian theology.

It would be hard to over-rate the importance of the main ideas of Dr. Whitehead’s volume of Gifford Lectures, Process and Reality, or their interest for divines and metaphysicians. It is not merely that they deserve profound and attentive respect as the personal convictions of an eminent mathematician and man of science who is also an original philosopher; they have an added importance as illustrating the marked change of outlook on ultimate matters which has come over physics in the last thirty years and is equally shown by the recent publications of two such prominent thinkers as Professor Eddington and Sir J. H. Jeans. There are important points in which these two eminent men are in disaccord, and it seems clear that neither of them would simply accept Dr. Whitehead’s account of the natural world as it stands. And, no doubt Dr. Whitehead is himself too true a philosopher to expect, or desire, such a complete coincidence of independent judgments. But on the most vital points of all there is, I think, an agreement fairly indicative of the new and more philosophical temper which is finding its way into physical science, and it is to Dr. Whitehead, as

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the most consciously philosophic of the three distinguished writers, that we naturally turn for light on the sources and character of this temper. Accordingly, I venture, at my own risk, a few remarks on what I take to be the motive and principles of his philosophy of natural science. I say “at my own risk,” for I am painfully conscious that my interpretation of Dr. Whitehead’s central thought has no kind of authority, and may possibly be mistaken. No one but a worker who knows the physical sciences from within could have a right to a confident opinion on the elaborate details of this new “theory of the natural world,” and this reason alone would compel me to confine myself to points of general philosophical principle. Even on points of principle Dr. Whitehead is not always easy to interpret. He necessarily expresses himself largely in a novel and difficult language of his own creation, and, to be quite frank, he leans, in his latest works, perhaps a little too much to oracular brevity and obscurity. His deep sayings, like George Fox’s, at times “fall brokenly from him.” Yet, when I read the new volume in the light of its precursors, especially Science and the Modern World, I seem to discern one or two principles of the first importance as the corner-stones of the whole edifice; it is of these that I shall try to say something in an amateurish way, in the hope that I have not misunderstood seriously. A reader of such typical nineteenth-century works on natural science as those of Mach or Karl Pearson, if suddenly introduced to Dr. Whitehead’s volume, would probably feel that he had been transported back into the mental atmosphere of a far-away age, that he was breathing the air of Plato’s Timeaeus, or even of Aristotle’s Physics. Except in its latest sections, Process and Reality, he might say, is very little concerned with what I regard as the proper work of physics, the reduction of the “routine” of recurrent natural processes to mathematical formulation. In the main it is one long discussion of such extra-scientific notions as God, substance, potentiality and act, final causality, contingency, quality. Some of these lie wholly outside the sphere of the physicist and are irrelevant to his special problems; others are mere delusions begotten of ignorance, the very rubbish of the “scholastic” metaphysics against which science was so long ago warned to be on its guard by both Bacon and Newton. From his own point of view the critic would be entirely right, and it is the very fact that he would be so right which is the proof of the change of outlook characteristic of our present age. No one knows better than Dr. Whitehead himself that there is the closest affinity between his own general attitude towards nature and Plato’s, and that if the affinity with Aristotle and St. Thomas is less marked, that is only because neither of them was, like Plato, a mathematician. The root of the matter is that the typical

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physicists of the last age were consciously or unconsciously “positivists” in their philosophy. Dr. Whitehead is a convinced believer in metaphysics; they, though few of them knew it, were at heart obstinate irrationalists; he is as persistently rationalist as a school-divine. They were specialists with the specialist’s habit of “never seeing the wood for the trees”; Dr. Whitehead is of Plato’s mind in holding that you will never get clear about the trees unless you grasp the general pattern of the wood. This explains Dr. Whitehead’s preoccupation with those general preliminaries to the natural sciences which physicists of the school of Kirchhoff and Mach relegate to the limbo of a lumber-room for the storage of antiquated mental furniture. Their view was that their business as men of science was simply the discovery of the most manageable set of mathematical formulae which will serve as a “short-hand” for registering the recurrences observed in natural processes, and the prediction of future recurrences of the same kind. Calculation and prediction, not understanding, it was said, is the one ideal of natural knowledge. Our task is not to understand the course of events—that is impossible—but to describe it. That the course of events lends itself to full description in the language of mathematics, and the description should enable us to predict, were simply taken for granted as facts about which no question was to be raised. It was assumed, in fact, as obvious that if we only start with the notions of a uniform unbounded, continuous space and time for things to move about in, and an indefinitely large number of eternally unchanging particles of some sort moving about in them, always in accord with two or three ultimate “laws in motion,” the problem of completely describing, and even of predicting, the most varied natural events can be reduced to that of analyzing the motions of a complex into those of its elementary components. The life of a mammal, even perhaps the intellectual and moral history of man, will have received its complete scientific description when it has been resolved into a complicated dance of millions of particles through space and time. To admit any factor in either which cannot find a place in this scheme is to falsify the description of the facts by the introduction of unmeaning “metaphysical verbiage.” The movements of particles are facts, and whatever is not a motion of a particle is not fact. This is the view of the world of which Dr. Whitehead has said elsewhere that it had just one little defect—that it is flatly incredible. The reasons why such a view is incredible—so far as they are independent of the discovery of particular facts of which the particular kinematical scheme adopted can give no description—seem to be three. The first and most obvious, that driven home unanswerably thirty years ago by the criticisms of James Ward, is the incurable abstractness of any

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description permissible under the general scheme. When the procedure of Kant writing the Critique of Pure Reason, or even of a cat playing with a mouse, is reduced to a mere dance of particles, manifestly the most salient features of the fact, the deliberate purpose of Kant, the spontaneous initiative of the cat, are simply left out of the description. The scheme has not even a place for the most arresting characteristic of the inanimate world, its riot and wealth of sensible quality. Nothing of all this can appear in a kinematical description. If fact is adequately described by kinematical equations, all that gives the world of life its main interest for us must be dismissed as “fancy,” unauthorized mental addition to the fact. (And of the mind which is supposed to make the addition a doctrine which begins by identifying “real fact” with the movements of a particle can, of course, give no account whatever.) The second source of incredibility, a legacy from the anti-metaphysical philosophy of Hume, is the doctrine called by Dr. Whitehead the “fallacy of simple location.” This is the principle laid down by Hume in the statements that “all our perceptions are distinct existences,” “our impressions are loose and separate.” That is, a genuine fact is always an utterly particular bit of happening confined to just this one “locality” in space and time, and merely juxtaposed with a multitude of other disconnected bits of happening. As the popular expositions of the “theory of relativity” have now taught us all, it seems quite impossible to give any unambiguous meaning to such an absolute and unambiguous location and dating of an event. But the central difficulty of the theory borrowed by nineteenth-century physics from Hume is independent of any particular doctrine of “space-time.” It is that the very possibility of scientific description presupposes recurrences, partial repetitions, in the course of events, whereas if all events are strictly particular, there can be no recurrence or repetition. Description is necessarily description by means of “universals,” and if a description can ever be true, “universals” must somehow be real; but according to the doctrine of “simple location,” a “universal” cannot be anything but a fiction, as Hume very well knew. The third incredibility, a direct consequence of the second, is that if all events are strictly particular, prediction becomes impossible. The triumphs of scientific prediction are an indisputable fact, and according to the very view of science we are considering, intelligent anticipation of the future is the great motive to the construction of the whole mathematical scheme. But if “all our perceptions are distinct existences,” my present perception can clearly give me no warrant for any inference beyond itself. Without “induction” the “derivation” of characteristics of the past or the future from observed characteristics of the present, natural science cannot proceed a step, and without a philosophical conception of the nature of an event which rejects the doctrine of “simple location,” induction is no more than

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haphazard guessing. Hume himself, being a sceptic, freely admits this. “The mind,” he says, “never perceives any connection between its ideas”; “belief”—and he means our belief in the dogmas of science as well as in those of theology—belongs rather to the “sensitive” than to the rational side of our nature. It is, that is to say, a matter of blind emotional faith. As Dr. Whitehead has wittily observed, this position satisfied the Royal Science, but disquieted the Church, for the reason that divines are by tradition rationalists, and Fellows of the Royal Society are not. But they certainly ought to have seen that a view of the nature of the scientific problem which implies that science is the same as the foi du charbonnier must be gravely wrong somewhere. The explanation of the singular fact that so many men of science in the last century should have formally professed a philosophical view according to which science is impossible is, of course, quite simple. Like other persons who have inherited a credo, they were accustomed to repeat the phrases of their “Belief” without thinking of their meaning. And the reason why they did this was that they were specialists, not accustomed to the long-range “synoptic” view of the philosopher. They were, in fact, too much interested in the trees to worry about the pattern in the wood. Their real interest was in the formulation of the mathematical laws by which this or the other type of recurrent natural process could be calculated and predicted. To the solution of these special problems they brought all the resources of alert and original minds. The general principles inherited from Hume were only dwelt upon in a more perfunctory way when it was felt desirable to put some outsider, divine or metaphysician, and his claims to a knowledge of his own in his proper place of inferiority as a pretender. And for that purpose a good sounding anathema esto does not serve any the worse for being repeated without thinking; if it only sounds terrific enough, it matters comparatively little that its meaning will not bear inspection. Of course, if one is really in earnest with rationalism, and so holds that the “course of nature” really has a coherent pattern, the time is bound to come, as it clearly has come in contemporary physics, when this indifference to philosophical principles cannot be kept up. It is then that it becomes imperative to look at the wood as well as at the trees; if science itself is not to be dismissed as a nightmare of misguided imaginations, a revision of first principles becomes absolutely necessary. This is what has happened twice in history in connection with the pure mathematics: once when the penetrating criticisms of Zeno led to the reconstruction of the whole framework of geometrical thought of which the Elements of Euclid are the product, and again in the last century when Weierstrass and others set about purging the calculus of the crazy bad logic of its founders. It is happening

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now to the physical sciences. No one, of course, doubts the genuineness and the importance of their results, but the problem is to know precisely what these results amount to; how our scientific knowledge of nature is related to our extra-scientific knowledge of the world of human activities of all kinds. To offer an answer to this problem is to construct a philosophy of natural science. It should be clear from what has gone before that any tolerable philosophy of natural science must satisfy three conditions. First, it must recognize the full inevitableness of abstraction in all scientific description and the impossibility of reconstituting the full character of a concrete fact by any mere complication of abstractness. Next it must contrive to say what a scientific “fact” is in a way which avoids the “fallacy of simple location.” It must show us how we can think of its unit events, whatever they are, in a way which does not isolate each of them in its prison-cell of space-time volume. Third, it must conceive of the world-process made up of the facts in a way which does not make prediction of the unobserved on the basis of the observed a miracle or “lucky shot”; it must make “induction” intelligible. These are the conditions Dr. Whitehead is trying to satisfy by his “philosophy of organism.” In a way the key to the whole position may be said to be in our hands when once we recognize the artificial and schematic character of the “classical” kinematical scheme. In any actual process we can observe, however small its scale, we always find two characteristics inseparably combined, sameness and novelty. What was here persists, and yet we see the new, what was not here before, in the act of budding out of it, and it is just this “concretion” of the old with the novel that is the innermost character of all “happening.” And again, what happens is something strictly individual; there are partial recurrences, but the whole event never repeats itself. In fact, it is only arbitrarily that we can give the name “whole event” to anything short of the “whole of nature at a moment,” and that the whole of nature is never the same at two different moments is explicitly asserted by the “principle of Carnot” which is steadily revealing itself as the most significant of all physical principles. Now a philosophy based on mistaking the abstractions of kinematics for actual facts has to sunder the two inseparable characteristics of a real event, the persistence of the old and the emergence of the new. The persistence of the old is accepted as the fact; the appearance of the new is explained away as an illusion of the percipient mind. All that is ever “really” novel is held to be the assumption of different positions in a uniform space by particles which remain eternally self-identical. And it was the dream of the nineteenth-century physicists that we might yet be able to show not only that each of his atoms is always

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self-identical, but that every one is indistinguishably like every other. It is true that there was the difficulty that the atoms of different chemical elements appeared to have different characteristic weights. But it was hoped that this difference might be got over by resolving the atom of each chemical element into a complex of a number of “prime” physical atoms, each the exact replica of every other. In that way individuality and novelty would finally be banished from the “real” world. It is not for me, who am no physicist, to say anything here of the astonishing results reached by the work of Rutherford and others on the constitution of the atom, and the way in which they seem to dispose finally of the anticipation that real happening will ever be resolved into the mere taking up of fresh positions by indistinguishable bits of stuff. What I would lay stress on is a point of general philosophical principle. No doubt, any analysis of the complex process of happening or becoming which we call nature must be given in terms of assumed units, or atoms, but these units, just because what is being analyzed is itself the cosmic “happening,” will be units of happening, not units of stuff; atomic events, or, to use a word of Dr. Whitehead’s, “occasions,” not atomic particles. And being events, our units will have the distinctive character of events, the complication of the persisting old with the emerging new, within themselves as their own fundamental character. Process cannot be analyzed into anything which is not itself process, a consideration fatal to all the philosophies which treat time as an illusion. With this abandonment of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” goes also the abandonment of the other fallacy of “simple location.” The unit or “atom” of our cosmology is a unit or atom of process, a “unit event.” And events do not go on their own way alongside of, but independent of, each other; they all form together the one web of the complex event which is nature. No part of the web is simply indifferent to any other part. Every event is influenced, positively or negatively, by all the other events of different wheres and different whens. They form its setting, and it is determined in all sorts of ways by its setting. This is what Leibniz meant when he said that every one of his monads was a “mirror,” from its own perspective, of the whole universe; what Lotze meant when he said that “things take note of on another”; what Francis Bacon meant when he said, in a sentence more than once quoted by Dr. Whitehead with approval, that all things, “though they have not sense, have perception.” It is what Dr. Whitehead means by saying that each unit “occasion” is a “prehension,” from its own special standpoint, of the whole of nature, that the whole world-process is condensed in, and concerned in, every one of its own details. And it is important to note that the determination is not merely one

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way. The future, as well as the past, is present in its own way in the present moment. This is an immediate consequence of the principle that the units into which we can analyze process are themselves units of process. The present event is what it is and no other, not merely because it is coming out of the particular old out of which it is coming, but because the particular new which is coming to be out of it is coming to be out of it. As Leibniz said of his monad, the event is not only laden with the past, but equally pregnant with the future. It is in virtue of this principle that “induction”— the divination of characters of the not now present from those of the present—works both ways; it will reconstitute the eclipse of the remote past as well as anticipate that of the distance future. Induction, in fact, is only possible because no event is simply here and now, and nowhere else; there is a real sense in which every event of any place or time pervades all places and all times. Or, to speak with Dr. Whitehead, every “occasion” is a prehension of all occasions. We see at once that a cosmology conceived on these lines brings us back to recognition of both efficient and final causality, whereas the philosophy of the nineteenth-century men of science dismissed the latter as anthropocentric superstition and replaced the former by mere uniform routine of sequence of one “disconnected” event on another. Efficient causality comes back with the frank admission of the arbitrariness of the cuts by which we isolate the contents of a region of space and time for our own convenience. Since every unit event is the budding of the novel out of the familiar and the particular way in which the budding is exhibited is influenced by the whole of the familiar “setting,” either negatively or positively, the “part” really is active in shaping the future; activity could never have been felt to be a paradox but for the prevalence of the “fallacy of simple location.” And final causality, in the Aristotelian sense, comes back with the implication of the future in the present. The present is the present it is because it is budding into the novel pattern into which it is budding. The human embryo, for example, develops in the special way in which it does develop, and in no other, precisely because it is going to be a human baby, and in time a human adult, and nothing else. It would be no tolerable account of the human baby to account for it as Aaron did for his molten image by saying that his materials were flung together and “there came out this calf.” And there is a still more important consequence yet to come. It follows from the same principles we have been considering that, in spite of all the scientific determinists, real contingency has to be recognized as a genuine and omnipresent feature in the cosmic process. Each of our events really contributes to the making of itself. This is just because there is a real, not

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merely an apparent, element of novelty within the event itself. Since an event is the novel “budding out” of the familiar, no event is just the old and familiar over again, and nothing more. It is made what it is not simply by taking it up into the particular novelty into which it does take it up. No event is simply determined, or made what it is, wholly from without, because every event has something unique in it. It only becomes fully determined by its own occurrence, that is, by its actual contribution of novelty to the pattern of the world. This is what Dr. Whitehead means when he speaks of every event as making a “decision,” or says that an “occasion” is “undetermined from without and determined from within.” The most important application of the conception is, of course, to the case of our responsible moral “decisions.” The paradox of “determinism”—a paradox felt and resented by the ordinary “sensible man,” though he commonly cannot put his finger on its root—is just that it insists on maintaining that our line of action is already “determined” while we are still “undecided how to act.” An historically minded philosophy like Dr. Whitehead’s, which rightly insists that the units into which we can subdivide process must be themselves process, must dismiss the paradox as a mere sophism. It is true, according to such a philosophy, of everything in the universe, and not of intelligent moral agents only, that the thing decides for itself, in the last resort, how it will “prehend” the universe, much as Professor Eddington has said, veiling truth under the language of jest, that the earth “goes where it likes.” The difference between the intelligent moral agent and the unintelligent thing is that the moral agent knows that he is making “decisions,” the irresponsible thing makes them without knowing what it is doing. Or, as Leibniz said, moral freedom is “spontaneity with intelligence.” We can see now why Dr. Whitehead should have given the name “philosophy of organism” to his mode of interpreting the natural world. Living organisms, as known to the biologist, are the most striking illustrations—except living human minds, that is—of all the principles of which we have been speaking. The life of an organism is itself throughout a perpetual devenir, a production of novelty, a making of new responses to the varying situations to which the organism is exposed. The element of spontaneity and initiative to the response has always been noted by the physiological psychologist as the characteristic distinction between the reaction of the lifeless upon its surroundings and the response of the living to stimulus. Final causality, again, as we have already observed, is as difficult to expel from the facts of organic life as it is hard to recognize in the inorganic world. (In fact, its prominence in the Aristotelian philosophy is pretty clearly due to the circumstance that Aristotle was himself a biologist and came to philosophy from biology.) And there is no better

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illustration of what Dr. Whitehead means by the “decision” exercised by an “occasion,” and its “prehension” of the universe into novelty, than the typical relation of every organism to its “environment.” It feeds on the environment; that is, it takes up constituents of it and actually transforms them into constituents of its own substance; it converts them into living tissue. Of course one could illustrate all these points even better from the reactions between a human mind and its “social milieu,” but the facts of organic life have the advantage of being more easily accessible to precise scrutiny and description, and less readily distorted by the personal bias of an observer. Biology has thus, thanks to the patient labours of Darwin and his contemporaries, put ready to our hands the very notions we need to work with, if we are to produce an interpretation of the natural world which a philosopher—that is, a man who is seriously determined to think consistently—will not be driven to pronounce incredible. The task of the philosopher of nature is to detect in the inorganic world the main features of the pattern already manifest in the organic. A final and most momentous step towards formulating these principles still remains to be taken. All process is a “concretion” of the already produced into novelty, and the novelty is really novel. This means, of course, that Aristotle’s great formula that becoming or process is the actualization of potentialities is exactly true, and therefore that the real and the actual are not to be identified. Beyond the actual there is always a range of real possibilities which are in course of conversion into actuality. The schoolboy of to-day will be the adult citizen of ten years hence. But it would not be the full truth of the matter to say only that there is a schoolboy now and there will be a grown man ten years hence. We have not stated the whole truth unless we add that the schoolboy is now “becoming” the man he will be. Unless we insist on that, the very fact of “becoming” slips through our fingers in the attempt to describe it, just as motion does if we imagine that it means only being first at one place and then at another. Now a real possibility, while it remains a possibility, differs at once from an impossibility, which never is nor can be actualized, and from the already actualized. That Julius Caesar should turn away from the Rubicon when he reached it was no impossibility, yet the possibility was never, and never will be, actualized. What is actualized in the course of history is a selection from a wider system of real possibilities. And this means the dependence of history on a twofold “decision,” the “decision” which makes the difference between the possible and the impossible, and the “decision” in virtue of which one possibility is actualized to the exclusion of its contrary. Clearly, it is only

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the second of these “decisions” in which the “actual occasion,” the event which is coming to be, is playing a part. Events are not themselves the creators of the scheme of relevant possibilities under which they emerge into actuality. It is for Caesar to “decide” whether he will cross the Rubicon or will not, but the relevancy of just this particular alternative to the “decision” Caesar has to make is a condition of the decision. Real possibilities, in fact, are an organized and articulated system of “eternal objects.” Every “event” is the embodiment in the historical process of a selection from these “objects,” which are, in fact, the Platonic ιδεαι. It is just because they are an articulated system that the whole body of real possibilities is involved, in varying degrees of “relevancy,” in each of the “decisions” which constitute actual historical events. If an event were merely a particular “occurrence,” Hume would be right; there would then be no “connection” between events but only spatial and temporal juxtaposition, and the induction which is the foundation of science would be, as Hume thought it was, the mere expression of a logically unjustifiable expectation. Science would be no more than the record of the baseless anticipations of mankind, and its success would be a standing “miracle.” Hume is in fact wrong, and events are not merely juxtaposed but connected in virtue of the systematic interconnection of the “universals,” “Platonic ideas,” or “real possibilities” which are “situated” in them. (To take a pair of elementary examples: the members of my body are not merely contiguous with one another, they are connected by the aesthetic pattern of the human “type” which pervades them; the successive sentences and clauses of the paragraph I am now writing are not merely a sequence of printed symbols, but are, or ought to be, connected by constituting the expression of a logically articulated thought.) But if real possibilities thus form a system with a definite structure—and if they do not, the possible is no longer distinguishable from the impossible, both reducing alike to the unactualized—we have further to recognize the great principle that definite possibility itself is founded on an antecedent actuality. As Aristotle said, “the potential is only actualized by the agency of the already actual.” Or, to express the same thought in the language of Lotze, the one eminent philosopher whose name, oddly enough, I seem never to have seen mentioned in Dr. Whitehead’ writings, it is only because there is an ultimate actual reality which has the character it has, that the course of history at any moment presents us with just such and such real possibilities. Behind the whole of what may be and what may not be, there must be, as the source of the distinction, that which does not happen, but eternally and once for all is. The source of the open possibilities without which there would be no becoming must be the eternal “decision” of God. Dr. Whitehead is, in fact, “doing right,” I do not know

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whether consciously or not, to two great philosophic positions. He is reasserting the doctrine of Augustine and Christianized Platonism in general, that the “archetypal ideas” of creation are eternally contained in the “Word” which was in the beginning with God, and is God. He is also vindicating against the more skeptical Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason the earlier and more Leibnizian Kant who had made the necessity for the distinction between real possibility and impossibility the foundation of the “only possible proof of the existence of God.” If Dr. Whitehead’s line of argument is sound, as I confess it seems to me that it is, the conception of God as the ultimate source of the historical world of becoming thus comes back into cosmology, not as a permitted hypothetical interpretation of the facts which reason can do nothing either to substantiate or to discredit, but as the absolutely necessary foundation for the very distinction between fact and unfact. And we see also why appeal to any one particular class of natural facts is a dangerous basis for a theistic argument, and why it is true that it is irrelevant and improper to fall back on God as the explanation of any special natural fact. The reason is that the eternal “decision” of God lies behind every fact. If, per impossibile, there could be any single fact which does not involve this “decision,” there is no reason why it should be involved by any other fact. The cosmologist does not, for example, need to bring in God to set the solar system moving by giving it an initial push or spin; where he does find the conception of God indispensable is when he asks himself why there should be anything at all, and not just nothing. I am far from sure how far Dr. Whitehead’s account of God, as it stands, will satisfy the theological reader. For one thing, the nature of the argument in Process and Reality involves concentration on the special question of the significance of the thought of God as a cosmological principle of explanation. But God, to the Christian, and to the Theist generally, is something much more than a principle of explanation; God is also the wholly adorable, the aim and goal of all endeavour, the Omega of creation as well as its Alpha, and no one knows this better than Dr. Whitehead himself, as one can see from his essay on The Making of Religion, as well as from the incidental passages in Process and Reality itself where God is dwelt on as the spring of spiritual “refreshment.” An account of what we mean by God which is unexceptional, so long as we are concerned merely with the question what God must be to be the source of all possibilities and all facts, may prove quite inadequate when we go on to consider what God must be to be the inspiration and sustainer of the “life hid with Christ in God.” And I do now feel sure that incidentally Dr. Whitehead has not committed himself to some positions in his utterances about God which

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need serious reconsideration in view of the fact that God is as much the King of Saints as the “Source of all being, throned afar.” I feel this particularly in connection with two features of his treatment, the series of theses enunciated at the end of the volume (p. 492) in which the world is declared to be necessary to God, to transcend God, and to be in some sense creative of God, and the distinction made from the start between creativity and God, who is declared Himself to be a “creature,” though an eternal creature and the “primordial” concretion of creativity. I cannot help thinking that I trace here uncriticized prepossessions, due to the influence of Spinoza in the one case and Bergson in the other, which would not stand close examination. In fact, I feel for my own part that both influences, especially that of Bergson, are leading Dr. Whitehead into unconscious tampering with his own sound principle that all possibility is founded on actuality. In particular, the attempt to get back somehow behind the concreteness of God to an élan vital of which the concreteness is to be a product really amounts to a surrender of the principle itself. I honestly think Dr. Whitehead is here himself falling a victim at the outset to the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” And I think the influence of Spinoza intellectually always a dangerous one for a metaphysician. A natural admiration for Spinoza’s character seems to be regularly to blind most students to the hopeless incoherence of his thinking. “Incoherence,” Dr. Whitehead himself says, who goes on to point his criticism against Descartes, “is the arbitrary disconnection of first principles.” Now I should be tempted to say that the most glaring example of this disconnection in modern philosophy, and one which brings incoherence into every discussion of its affects, is Spinoza’s intercalation of his “attributes” between “substance” and its “modes,” though this very doctrine of the “parallel” attributes is the special Spinozistic thesis which has left the deepest mark on Dr. Whitehead’s own exposition of the facts of the natural world. I seriously believe that Dr. Whitehead’s work would be even better than it is if it were influenced a little more by St. Thomas and little less by Spinoza.

Belgion, 1930 Montgomery Belgion. “Review of Process and Reality: An Essay In Cosmology.” The Criterion 9 (1929–1930): 557–563. Harold Montgomery Belgion (September 28, 1892 to October 29, 1973) served as editor-in-charge of the European edition of the New York Herald in 1915. After serving in World War I, he began a varied and extensive career as a journalist and editor, including work for the New York Herald, the London Daily Mail, the Westminster Gazette, and the Daily Sketch of London, through which he established a reputation as a literary critic. While a prisoner of war in World War II, Belgion was awarded a Diploma in English Literature by Oxford University. In 1929 he published Our Present Philosophy of Life, publishing his most successful book in 1945, Reading for Profit. Additionally, after 1944 he lectured extensively for the British Council at French Universities, for the British Army, and for the University Societies in Cambridge and London. The Criterion, a British literary review, was founded by T. S Elliot in 1922, and only ever achieved a small readership. Although ostensibly a British literary review, containing works by and about such literary figures as Joyce, Proust, and Cavafy, The Criterion also produced conservative cultural analysis of European culture in the intra-war years. The Criterion folded in 1939.

In this expansion of the ‘Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh during the session 1927–1928’, Professor Whitehead completely and finally enunciates that philosophy of organism which has been in the making, as it were, throughout most of his earlier books, and indeed received partial exposition in those two popular works, Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making. He formulates a philosophic scheme which he has sought to make all-embracing, a ‘system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted’. Without doubt he has thus made the most ambitious and the most important contribution to English philosophy since the publication of Appearance and Reality. The architectonic power he displays, the broad purview, the subtle argumentation, and the aptitude of his specially-coined terminology, are all on this occasion, as his previous writings have led one to expect,

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overwhelmingly brilliant. Whether the scheme can be accepted as adequate, whether, in particular, he has succeeded, as he believes he has, in bringing ‘the aesthetic, moral and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science’, is another matter. The scheme is grounded in tradition. As Professor Whitehead points out, no doctrine is put forward that ‘cannot cite in its defence some explicit statement’ either of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, or Hume, or ‘of the two founders of all Western thought, Plato and Aristotle’. And numerous statements of these great predecessors are interpreted with an acuity and a freshness which would make the book momentous merely as a commentary. But the tradition is older than that to which most English philosophers of recent times have appealed. The philosophy of organism is, in the main, ‘a recurrence to pre-Kantian modes of thought’. On the other hand, it owes much for its articulation to ‘the logical and mathematical investigations of the last two centuries’. Dr. Whitehead has important remarks to voice concerning negation, contrast, ‘incompatibility’—this last term being borrowed from Dr. H. M. Sheffer. Likewise, he insists that measurement is not a comparison of infinitesimals, or of an approximation to infinitesimals, because there are not infinitesimals. Measurement depends on straightness, not straightness on measurement. Accordingly, extensive quantity is a construct, a notion definable in terms of each systematic geometry found applicable, since a systematic geometry is determined by the definition of straight lines similarly found applicable, and the definition is possible independently of measurement. The philosophy of organism adopts from science the principle that scalar quantities are constructs derivative from vector quantities. That is to say, it deems the notion of ‘passing on’ to be more fundamental than that of private individual fact. Also, declaring that measurement is dependent on a direct intuition of permanence in respect to congruence for the instruments employed, and basing himself on the conception of extensive connection— a conception adopted from Professor de Laguna and superseding the conception of extensive whole and extensive part—Dr. Whitehead finds the modern theory of private psychological fields untenable. In all such matters his reasoning is a reasoning only possible to an eminent mathematician. No summary of the philosophic scheme can be attempted in a review. One must be content with indicating a few features, and mentioning when and how such features appear unacceptable. The philosophy of organism seeks to cope with the rush of immediate transition. The process of the title is the becoming of experience. What becomes are actual entities. They ‘are the final real things of which the

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world is made up’. These instants, or throbs, of experience are atomic. Yet ‘each atom is a system of all things’. Dr. Whitehead deems himself anticipated by Locke, in that the latter held (Essay, IV, VI, §II) that the qualities of things are their relations to all other things. Each entity completes its becoming by perishing, and thus is time found to fulfil Locke’s description of it as being ‘perpetually perishing’. But the entity perishes subjectively, and in so perishing is at once objectively immortal, entering into the constitution of novel actual entities. This is the power, in Locke’s sense of the term (II, XXI, §I), of one entity on another. There is thus a continuous advance into novelty, and the principle of that novelty is creativity. Each actual entity is accordingly a creature. It is novel, it is unique, yet its origination imposes conformation. The philosophy of organism is a subjectivism. ‘Apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness’ (p. 234). But it is also a realism. It is a realism on the basis of the ‘withness of the body’. ‘We see with our eyes, we taste with our palates’. As a result: When we perceive a contemporary extended shape which we term a “chair,” the sense-data involved are not necessarily elements in the “real internal constitution” of this chair-image: they are elements—in some way of feeling—in the “real internal constitution” of those antecedent organs of the human body with which we perceive the “chair” (p. 89). This withness of the body and the object perceived in perception through the senses, termed by Dr. Whitehead, ‘presentational immediacy’, leads to the contemporary world’s being consciously prehended as a continuum of extensive relations. But the events of experience happen in causal independence of each other, i.e. actuality is atomic. The spatio-temporal extensive continuum is not a fact of these events. Yet it is a fact derived from the actual world of these events. Accordingly, it is ‘real’; ‘it expresses the solidarity of all possible standpoints throughout the whole process of the world’ (p. 92). Hence the mathematical relations involved in presentational immediacy belong equally to the world perceived and to the nature of the percipient. ‘They are, at the same time, public fact and private experience’ (p. 464). Dr. Whitehead has just been quoted as saying: ‘elements—in some way of feeling’. Sensationalism is superseded for the philosophy of organism by the doctrine that esse is sentiri. ‘The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion’ (p. 227). ‘In general, consciousness is negligible’ (p. 436).

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At this point one may interject that it is difficult to understand how, except through consciousness, Dr. Whitehead can know anything about ‘the primitive form of physical experience’, and hence consciousness cannot be negligible. According to him, Descartes, in finding that ‘this stone is grey’ had to be replaced by ‘my perception of this stone is grey’, made the greatest philosophical discovery since the age of Plato and Aristotle (p. 222). But if it is true that the stone is only known as grey in my perception of it as such, it is equally true that, as Dr. Whitehead admits, ‘we can only discuss experiences which have entered into conscious analysis’ (p. 253). This being so, when he condemns metaphysicians who dwell primarily on consciousness, thought, sense-perception, one may well follow him. Since the external world cannot, for us, be more than our conscious experience of it, [sic] as well drop all reference to both perception and consciousness. Be pre-Cartesian. But that does not yield a warrant for relegating conscious perception to ‘the higher phases of experience’, and professing to discuss blind emotion. Leibniz had a theory of unconscious perception, i.e. of unconscious feeling (Monadologie, §14 and §23), but he did not venture to say anything about it beyond that it must exist. How does Dr. Whitehead contrive to say more? ‘Consciousness,’ he says, ‘recalls earlier phases from the dim recesses of the unconscious’ (p. 342). How is he acquainted with the earlier phases in question? Likewise, how is he able to get to grips with process and analyze fluency? He finds that, ‘on the whole, the history of philosophy supports Bergson’s charge that the human intellect “spatializes the universe”’ (p. 297). But, surely, it is not only the history of philosophy that illustrates that charge: it is all experience. As he himself remarks: ‘We can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the presupposed completion’ (p. 299). That is to say, the process is beyond our ken. How, then, can he analyze our experience as a process? The answer is, in both cases, that he uses his imagination. He applies to philosophy a method which has, he finds, been the source of progress in science. Before I comment on this application, let me say a word, while I may, about the other relations of the philosophy of organism to science. He says: It has been a defect in the modern philosophies that they throw no light whatever on any scientific principles. Science should investigate particular species, and metaphysics should investigate the generic notions under which those specific principles should fall (p. 163).

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He says this, yet the philosophy of organism does not seem so much to ‘investigate the generic notions’ as adopt, to the elaboration of its own theories, the ‘specific principles’, in particular the specific principles of physics. It is true that thereby light is thrown on scientific principles, since their analogical use makes their original sense plainer. Again, the philosophy of organism, on information from physics, treats the ‘materialistic concept’ of ‘continuous stuff with permanent attributes, enduring through differentiation, and retaining its self identity’ through time, as being mistaken, as much for the atom as for, say, the stone. Dr. Whitehead says: The mysterious quanta of energy have made their appearance, derived, as it would seem, from the recesses of protons, or of electrons. Still worse for the concept, these quanta seem to dissolve into vibrations of light. Also the material of the stars seems to be wasting itself in the production of the vibrations (p. 109). But he also says: Finally all scientific interpretation is based upon the assumption of directly observed unchangeability of some instrument for seconds, for hours, for months, for years (p. 179). Thus, is not the ultimate basis of science the very ‘materialistic concept’, which, Dr. Whitehead tells us, physics proves mistaken? Is not the unchangeability what we experience, and the behaviour of protons, electrons, and quanta, only inferred? Similarly, for the material of the stars to be seemingly wasting itself, must not there be a material of the stars? The philosophy of organism, borrowing from science, transforms the assertion ‘All things flow’, into the assertion ‘All things are vectors’. But are not vectors themselves actually static abstractions evolved to make motion and direction calculable? As to the use of the imagination in the elaboration of a philosophic scheme, even if the requisites of application, coherence, and logical perfection are met—for from unintelligible hypotheses there can be no reasoning—there remains this difference between the use of the imagination for such a purpose and its employment in the construction of scientific hypotheses: that scientific hypotheses wait on experiment. From the hypotheses consequences are deduced, only for the hypotheses to be rejected if those consequences differ from what observation reveals. Coherence and logical perfection, indeed, are not enough. For, as regards fact, the imagination remains incurably untrustworthy: it can construct what is not fact as easily as it can construct what is. In short, imagination is not insight.

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Dr. Whitehead declares that ‘all productive thought has proceeded’ by ‘the poetic insight of the artists’, and that leads to his manner of dealing with aesthetics. On this head, he, so versed in mathematics and science, appears as no more than an amiable amateur. For instance it is very questionable if there is any such thing as ‘the poetic insight of artists’, but that the matter is disputable has evidently never occurred to him. Again, he says that, but for its relatedness, experience would be nothing ‘but a barren aesthetic display’. But for a display to be aesthetic, implies relatedness as much as anything. So it is not surprising that his integration of ‘aesthetic interests’ in his philosophic scheme is one of that scheme’s least satisfactory features. However, with his emphasis on feeling, the distinction between imagination and insight may seem to him insignificant. He says: ‘“True or false” is so largely irrelevant for the pursuit of knowledge’ (p. 15). This is logic, and there would be a great deal to be said regarding his logical views. It must suffice to mention that the philosophy of organism abandons the subject-predicate forms of thought as ‘a direct embodiment of the most ultimate characterization of fact’. This is essential to its supersession of morphological description by the description of dynamic process. The abandonment is achieved by the substitution for universals of eternal objects, and, following Locke, Leibniz, and Hume, the eternal objects are equivalent to ideas determined to particular existents. Particular existents are not ‘prehended’ apart from universals; on the contrary, it is by ingression of the eternal object in the actual entity that, by its ‘subjectsuperject’, the latter is prehended at all. But the recurrence of objects is viewed as being novel actual existents containing in part a previous actual existent. And this view is conditioned by Dr. Whitehead’s conception of induction. He quotes from Science and the Modern World: You will observe that I do not hold induction to be in its essence the derivation of general laws. It is the derivation of some characteristics of a particular future from the known characteristics of a particular past. The wider assumption of general laws holding for all cognizable occasions appears a very unsafe addendum to attach to this limited knowledge. He admits that, ‘in every inductive judgment, there is contained a presupposition of the maintenance of the general order of the immediate environment, so far as concerns actual entities within the scope of the induction’. But he considers that this is merely a matter of statistical probabilities. Surely, however, this is no adequate view of induction. For how can there be ‘statistical probabilities’, unless there are general laws? In other words, induction must presuppose a law of causation.

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Dr. Whitehead has much that is important to say in this volume concerning judgment. Although it may be surprising, one’s inclination is to consider the outcome as supporting Cook Wilson’s view of the inexistence of judgment. In conclusion, it is to be said that the philosophy of organism appears to deal with religion and morality as unsatisfactorily as it deals with aesthetics. In this philosophy God is (a) ‘the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects’, ‘the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire’, and (b) ‘the principle of concretion’. One does not see why these elements should be termed God. As regards religion generally, Professor Whitehead treats religion as emotion. This is a quite modern theory of religion, originating with Schleiermacher, and fails to allow for, among other factors, the sine qua non of belief. But morality receives even more summary treatment. Dr. Whitehead says that ‘morality of outlook is inseparably conjoined with generality of outlook’, and he goes on: ‘The antithesis between the general good and the individual interest can be abolished only when the individual is such that its interest is the general good’. Again he speaks of ‘the principles of morality’ as being expressions ‘of the requisites for depth of experience’. The view such statements reveal is a view generally popular today. It is not, however, a view ultimately tenable. The philosophy of organism is open to the same charge that Maine de Biran leveled against Leibniz’s Monadology: it omits to reckon with the self. Dr. Whitehead says: Descartes […] conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts that order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker (p. 210). But unless there are individual selves, enduring and responsible, there can be no morality.

Moore, May 1931 Merritt Hadden Moore (University of Chicago). “Mr. Whitehead’s Philosophy.” The Philosophical Review 40, no.3 (May 1931): 265–275. The Philosophical Review is an academic philosophy journal, founded in 1892, by the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. The Philosophical Review publishes articles in all areas of philosophy, and is intended for generalists in philosophy.

[265] With the appearance of Process and Reality it may be assumed that Whitehead has presented us with his magnum opus, the speculative completion of his system. If this is the case it becomes pertinent to discuss the system in its entirety. This we shall attempt to do as well as we may in the scope of a few pages. While it is not true to say that his thought is organically divided into an earlier and a later period, for our purposes it is both legitimate and easier to take two phases of it and treat them separately. These aspects can never be clearly demarcated, in one sense, for from the very first one runs across leads that are clearly developed only in the completed Philosophy of Organism. The first phase of the philosophy is found in The Concept of Nature, An Enquiry Into the Principles of Natural Knowledge, and Introduction to Mathematics. This is the group of writings in which Whitehead is most avowedly an exponent of Realism. “Nature is that which we observe in perception through the senses. […] Thus in a sense nature is independent of thought. […] What I mean is [266] that we can think about nature without thinking about thought.”1 “What is ultimate in nature is a set of determinate things, each with its own relations to other things of the set.”2 These ‘things’ are the ‘brute facts’ to which we must all come back if we would know anything about nature. But what do we know when we know this type of fact? Three characteristics are distinguishable in our immediate experience of them. The first is denotative determination, or spatial differentiation. This is 1

Concept of Nature, p. 3.

2

Principles of Natural Knowledge, p. 73.

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obviously a factor concerning spatiality, with the various things occupying different parts of an extended field. Some things are ‘here’, others are ‘there’. (‘Thing’ here is a term of complete abstraction, referring to nothing more than the fact of occurrence. Every event or actual entity is a thing.) The second aspect is that of change, or temporal differentiation. No thing, or, as we shall hereafter say, event, is ever exactly repeated. It is this that gives reality to time. Because of the complete impossibility of recalling past events, when an event is past it is irrevocably gone. It can never recur in the uniqueness of its peculiar individuality. The third character of any ‘brute fact’ is that of eternality, or temporal identity. Things change, but aspects of things also endure. Qualities are peculiarly recurrent. As change is expressed in the “doctrine of events,” so permanence is accounted for in the “doctrine of eternal objects.” These objects are “factors in nature which are without passage.”3 The fact that objects recur, whereas events do not, leads to a certain confusion of the distinguishing features. “Events are named after the prominent objects situated in them, and thus both in language and in thought the event sinks behind the object, and becomes the mere play of its relations.”4 The fact that the same eternal objects have ingression into two events is no criterion that the events are the same. The common element, which receives the distinctive name, is indicative of the permanence of the objects only; it bodes nothing for the events involved. The latter simply are, and are gone. So much for the realistic and naturalistic elements of our study. This is unquestionably a strong part of Whitehead’s position. We shall see, however, that it serves as the basis of a very pretentious development which certainly dwarfs, if it does not actually destroy, [267] its foundations. One of the fundamental presuppositions of science and of a philosophy of nature is that of the orderliness of nature in all of its aspects. “There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction of the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”5 This order is more essential for Whitehead’s purposes than it is for any particular science. Each science is interested in the possibility of discovering ordered relations in a special field. It is not much concerned whether or not this field is a part of a more inclusive order that relates it to every other branch of science. But the opposite is true of a 3

Concept of Nature, p. 125; Principles of Natural Knowledge, p. 62.

4

Concept of Nature, p. 135.

5

Science and the Modern World, p. 5. Also Religion in the Making, p. 119.

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philosophy that makes any attempt to bring the various sciences into a system. It is peculiarly important for a philosophy of organism such as we are now considering. If you think of the universe as an organism, its interconnexions are not to be thought of as the result of any fortuitous concourse. Relatedness is the very essence of organism. Thus if we are to think of reality in terms of the completely encompassing organism that this system suggests, there is no place whatsoever for contingency of any type. When we seem to find contingency it is because we are abstracting. We are only seeing a part of the whole. Really to know it we must get this part back into its relatedness.6 Some of us may feel that it is at just this point that Whitehead goes astray. His “concept of nature as the locus of organism in the process of development”7 apparently means much more to him than what he actually discovers in nature. It is at this point that he leaves behind his descriptive philosophy of nature and begins his speculative study. This element is in all of his philosophy, but now it becomes the character of it specifically and intentionally. It is felt that some such concept is required to keep us from running into bifurcations similar to those that started Modern Philosophy on its confused and baffled quest. The explicit development of this view begins in Science and the Modern World; is carried along in Religion in the Making, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, and the Function of Reason; and it is finally completed in Process and Reality, at the end of which, “in so far as the enterprise has been successful, there should be no problem of space-time, or epistemology, or of causality, left over for discussion,” for “the scheme should have developed all these generic notions [268] adequate for the expression of any possible interconnection of things.”8 That Whitehead has now left the table of the realists with its solid fare, to pick up such illusory crumbs as he may at the hands of the idealists, will be all too evident. In brief, one may say that the important doctrines in this second part of the philosophy are the following: that of “prehension”; that of “ingression”; that of “concretion”; and that of “feeling” as the fundamental character of being. Of course they all presuppose the doctrine of “organism,” as has been stated. These together are the processes by means of which organisms come into being and are known. It must be borne in mind also that this part 6

Principles of Natural Knowledge, pp. 12, 13.

7

Science and the Modern World, p. 108.

8

P. vii.

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of the philosophy presupposes what has gone before. “Events” are continued under the names “actual entity” and “actual occasion”.9 The term “event,” in Process and Reality, has a more specialized meaning, namely, “the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, inter-related in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum”.10 “Eternal objects” are also continued, although there are now two species of them—the objective and the subjective. The distinction is based on “the antithesis between publicity and privacy” as reflected in “their primary modes of ingression into actual entities”.11 Prehension is unification. It “may or may not be cognitive. […] Realisation is a gathering of things into the unity of a prehension; and […] what is thereby realized is the prehension, and not the things. This unity of a prehension defines itself as a here and now. […] The things which are grasped into a realized unity, here and now, are not” the things simply themselves, but the things “from the standpoint, in space and time, of a prehensive unification”.12 It will be seen that prehension is practically synonymous with perception. The reason the more common term is not used here is that it leads to a ready acceptance of a position which Whitehead regards as false, and so wants to guard against. This is true of all of his original and forbidding vocabulary. Perception has come to mean some sort of a passive awareness of things presented to experience. This is quite contrary to prehension. Prehension is a process of unification. There is no such thing as awareness of things as themselves ‘out there’. We are aware only of aspects of things unified in prehension. Another, and equally important, distinction is that [269] whereas perception is almost always used as though it involved a cognitive element, the term prehension is used for “uncognitive apprehension”13 as well as cognitive; it “was introduced to signify the essential unity of an event, […] the event as one entity, and not as a mere assemblage of parts or of ingredients”.14

9

Ibid., pp. 27, 28.

10

Ibid., p. 113. My italics.

11

Ibid., p. 445.

12

Science and the Modern World, pp. 101–103.

13

Science and the Modern World, p. 101.

14

Ibid., p. 106.

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The non-cognitive aspect of prehension is more important for our purposes than the cognitive. In the last analysis this becomes unificatory awareness through sympathetic feelings. In the Categories of Explanation “positive prehensions” are identified with “feeling”. These positive prehensions are the feelings of a subject. And a subject is the unity of an event, a unity of prehension; of any event, of any prehension.15 The limitations of this process, which keep everything from knowing all things, are two. First there is the doctrine of satisfaction. This is the “final phase in the process of concrescence constituting an actual entity. […] The many feelings which belong to an incomplete phase in the process of an actual entity, though unintegrated by reason of the incompleteness of the phase, are compatible by the unity of their subject [The Category of Subjective Unity]. There can be no duplication of any element in the objective datum of the ‘satisfaction’ of an actual entity, so far as concerns the function of that element in the ‘satisfaction’. Here as always the term satisfaction means the one complex, fully determinate feeling which is the completed phase in the process [The Category of Objective Identity].”16 You can see what this means. Every actual entity is a society of feeling which is determined by the subjective aim of the actual entity. The end which this subjective aims seeks to realize is satisfaction. This is true of a human subject; it is true of the great gray Castle Rock in Edinburgh. Value is the key to the whole of existence; value is the form of purposes to be realized by every entity.17 The principle of Concretion, or God, as it is called in Science and the Modern World, is the second principle of limitation. “Every actual occasion is a limitation imposed upon possibility, […] by virtue of this limitation the particular value of the shaped togetherness of things emerges. […] Each individual activity is nothing but the mode [270] in which general activity is individualized by the imposed conditions. […] According to this argument the fact that there is a process of actual occasion, and the fact that the occasions are the emergence of values which require such limitation, both require that the course of events should have developed amid an antecedent limitation composed of conditions, particularization, and standards of value. […] Some particular how is necessary, and some 15

Process and Reality, pp. 88–89.

16

Ibid., pp. 38–39.

17

A very brief but lucid statement of this position is found in Religion in the Making, pp. 101, 102.

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particularization in the what of matter of fact is necessary.”18 “God is the ultimate limitation.”19 This simply means that there is a more inclusive actual satisfaction in the world which controls the satisfactions of the less inclusive actual entities. In this more inclusive actuality, therefore, lies the creativity of the whole process. The whole order of the world is determined by creativity under the influence of value. The creativity thus influenced is God. As a result of God’s nature, the order of the universe is aesthetic. This function of limitation in God, in Science and the Modern World, is partly taken over by the doctrine of “negative prehension” in Process and Reality. A negative prehension limits because it “excludes from feeling”. But in excluding the feeling of one actual occasion from that of another, a negative prehension yet relates them, for exclusion is a negative relation. By so tenuous a thread as this hangs the complete internality of relations. Having been relieved of this function, God now becomes the quintessence of possibility. The limits of all that may be are in him. This is the timelessness of the eternal objects preserved in grander state. But this timelessness is not yet quite Spinozistic. There remains a difference between being actual potentiality and being potentially actualized. And by another thread so tenuous as this hangs the reality of time and process. The question of how limitation is introduced brings us to the Doctrine of Ingression. Ingression is the term used to designate the process by which different types of reality interact. It will be remembered that there is a dual aspect in all experience. Things change; things are permanent. What are the conditions that determine what particular changeless objects shall go to make up this particular event? In so far as this is a problem related to the self-creation of an actual entity, ingression means participation. Events have ingression into other events; they participate in the self-realization of other events. This part of the doctrine is relatively simple, if we accept the appetitive nature of the process of concretion as it [271] has been developed, because the mutual ingression of actual entities by each other can take place on the non-cognitive level of prehension. But this is not true of the ingression of eternal objects. This can take place only on the cognitive level; or rather, a prehension of an eternal object is a cognitive prehension. But cognitive prehensions are limited to actual entities having a very special kind of feeling, namely, cognitive feeling. Nevertheless, eternal objects do have ingression into non-cognitive entities. And, on the 18

Science and the Modern World, pp. 251–256.

19

Ibid., p. 257.

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other hand, cognitive entities, such as you and I, are more apt to recognize the fact that in some way eternal objects have had ingression into actual occasions, than we are to be aware of the process which makes the ingression possible, even in cognitive prehensions. Thus the problem of how ingression takes place is apt to turn out to be like those questions that naughty children ought not to ask, or which mother is too busy to answer. When we undertake a search for some more definite statement we finally come across the following: “The term ‘ingression’ refers to the particular mode in which the potential of an eternal object is realized in a particular actual entity, contributing to the definiteness of that actual entity. […] The functioning of an eternal object in the self-creation of an actual entity is the ‘ingression’ of the eternal object in the actual entity.”20 It all comes back to God as the principle of concretion. God “is that actual entity from which each temporal concrescence receives that initial aim from which its selfcausation starts.”21 This statement of the doctrine of ingression has disclosed nothing of the nature of eternal objects as residents of an eternal realm of forms. This is one aspect of them. But we must draw the line somewhere; since this question simply raises further metaphysical problems, and does not help us to solve the ones already raised, we shall have to let it go after having taken cognizance of the fact that a difficulty does exist here. It is largely a reopening of the problem of the Platonic Ideas and the Essences of the Critical Realists. Various problems of the nature of God have been hinted at that should be more fully dealt with, but cannot be dwelt upon here. Suffice it to say that beyond his character of limiting all individual self-realisation, and his character as possibility, God is not the whole of reality. He is an actual entity having limitations. He is more inclusive than any other entity. In some way he has peculiar rela- [272] tions to all other actual entities on the one side and to the eternal objects on the other. The question of the peculiar status of space-time in the earlier works, and the influence of Alexander on Whitehead’s thought, is another point that has been ignored. This for two reasons. He repudiates his earlier position in his later works. Whereas space-time came very near having some such primordial status as it has for Alexander in the earlier period, it is definitely

20

Process and Reality, pp. 34 and 38.

21

Ibid., p. 374.

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set aside for the more Bergsonian term of Creativity in the later one. Here again to follow this question would lead only to a by-path. The doctrine of feeling has been hinted at enough in the explanation of prehension, ingression, and concretion, to make unnecessary, for our purposes, any further statement about it. In evaluating the system we have been presenting, it must be continually kept in mind that it started as a Philosophy of Nature. It may be expected that its problems arose from that field. We have seen that such was the case. And the problems are real. Anyone who has thought in terms of possibilities, organisms, relations, and the like, will recognize the poignancy of the issues developed. How can one account for that nebulous realm of possibility which continually throws away “the best laid plans of mice and men” by showing in future actualizations aspects of experience never imagined previously? How is the organic character, so obvious in the case of some parts of nature, to be explained unless as attempted by Whitehead? What of this matter of the internality and the externality of relations? How are the many repeated sequences, the wide-flung consequences from comparatively trivial events, to be accounted for unless all nature is one related whole? But, on the other hand, why do things that can be reasonably expected to follow from other things sometimes turn out to be so amazingly divergent? So with other difficulties that the philosophy of science continually presents to us. Whitehead has striven honestly to answer them. Why does his answer meet with such incredulous response from his peers? Possibly not the least reason is temperament. It seems unquestionably that this system is the product of a mind peculiarly sensitive to those demands that have produced the great speculative systems of the past. This is an attempt at explanation. The common current of the age, in no small measure, due to the skepticism of science itself, spends itself rather in description. This is true even in philosophy. We have become imbued with an experimentally justified caution that is not overly interested in settling ontological and cosmological pro- [273] blems of such universal scope. We take our universe, piecemeal, as if it were really the pluralistic thing our descriptions imply. This does not necessarily mean superficiality. Some very subtle and stimulating work has resulted. But it does mean that our Zeitgeist is empirical rather than rational. Empiricism can never be aught but pluralistic. There is another and more critical basis for placing the new messiah in the role of the one “despised and rejected”. The type of experience he has based his system on is real, and not to be denied. “There is no man […] who has not, at one time or another had the rare moment of emotional

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exaltation and instantaneous vision, the persistence of which might make him understand it. These flashes of inexpressible emotion, universally experienced, are in themselves sufficient to make the whole world vaguely mystical; […] to make scientific scepticism itself, occasionally, somewhat more than sceptical of its doubt.”22 The question is, does it carry the peculiar relevancy to all experience and all reality that is claimed for it? Probably not. Is it true that out of our most primitive emotional experiences, these vague forebodings of unseen presence in dark places, this quest for light “in the night in which all cows are black” is the right tack to follow if we would be truly en rapport with ultimacy? It seems hardly likely, although better minds than ours have spoken in its favor. This aspect of Whitehead’s philosophy became obvious in Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, relative to his treatment of causal efficacy.23 The peculiar intuitional character of it, as it becomes knowledge through the sympathetic feelings of Process and Reality, makes one think of that aesthetic or mystic type of experience in which one is ‘identified with his object’ in a sense far different from that of ‘knowing the object’. Such mystical identification may take place. If the great mystics are to be believed (and we have no reason to question their statements), it is a fact that such experiences are real. Moreover, it seems unlikely that they can be wholly accounted for by determining the dietetic habits of those who have them, as some of our physiological psychologists would like us to believe. None the less, they seem to lack both the frequency of occurrence and the agreement as to their peculiar meaning and relevance that are necessary to give to any experience such import as these bear to the whole system under consideration. It could well be answered that this seems to be the case only in conscious reflexion, and conscious experience can ac- [274] count for only a meager part of our time. This is true, more or less. Large areas of our experience of, and contact with, the world of nature are not conscious. Within those areas we can make some surprisingly subtle adjustments of other objects. Two points must be noted in this connexion. First, most activity successfully carried out without consciousness acting as guide has at some earlier time been specifically under conscious control. These experiences are therefore not intuitional but habitual, if we may contrast attitudes in this way. Secondly, the problem that Whitehead sets us is one which inescapably requires consciousness. With all his distrust of language, he is undertaking a critical evaluation of experience, knowledge, and 22

Frederick Berry, The Scientific Habit of Thought, p. 75.

23

Especially pp. 39–49.

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reality, which is peculiarly rational. It reminds one of the great extent to which Bergson uses reason both to point out and to prove the validity of an intuition that by definition can never be rationally known. This is not a dialectical problem. It is one of methodology. Any such ultimate categories as those introduced in Process and Reality must be amenable to rational verification. Otherwise we lose the very agreement which is supposed to be one major value of the system, the goal that such philosophical systems set for themselves. Intuitions are famous for their incommensurability. It is true that the answer attempted would solve one of the problems from which the system arose, namely the problem of knowledge. The formal difficulty of epistemology is well pointed out in the hue and cry against bifurcation. By identifying all actuality with a system of feelings one immediately breaks down the duality of nature. But after all how fare these attempts at substantial or substrational identification? Idealists recognize nature as ‘appearance’; materialists allow the mind to continue in the dubious term ‘epiphenomenon’; so feelings must be variegated in some more fundamental way than is indicated in either phase of the process, i.e. that of actualization, the process going on; or that of concretion, the process actualized. The theoretical difficulty may disappear, but the practical difficulty, even for knowledge, remains. When one considers the difficulties that accompany this solution, like a train of camp-followers never wanted but always there, as soon as its cosmological and ontological implications become apparent, one realizes how great is the price paid for the formal epistemological satisfaction. It seems that, even with all due respect to the genius portrayed in this most recent system, we shall have either to be satisfied yet a while longer with the pluralism of empirical philosophy, or to turn to other than feelings for our objectivity and unification. In thus [275] emphasizing feeling Whitehead has certainly committed his own well-named “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” in a grand manner; the part has come perilously near engulfing the whole. Value is a very real experience; but needless to say, as a phase of that experience, it does not become the criterion of the fundamental character of all reality.

Murphy, 1931 Arthur E. Murphy “Permanence in a Changing World.” The Christian Century 47 (1931): 303–304. Arthur Edward Murphy (1901 to 1962) studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1926. Over his career, he held academic positions at the University of Chicago, Cornell University, Brown University, the University of Illinois, the University of Washington, and the University of Texas. He published numerous articles on classic American philosophy, also publishing a number of important texts: Theory of Practical Reason, The Uses of Reason, and Reason, Reality, and Speculative Philosophy. The Christian Century was founded in 1884 as The Christian Oracle as a Disciples of Christ denominational magazine. The Christian Oracle was renamed in 1900 as The Christian Century, and was sold by the Disciples of Christ in 1908. The Christian Century has been, and continues to be, the main popular voice of liberal and mainline Protestantism in the United States, publishing articles on faith, politics, and culture.

Professor Whitehead’s Gifford lectures, not unnaturally, deal in the end with the effective presence of God in the world. This in itself is not surprising. The theoretical sustenance which the liberal clergy can depend upon for securing their ideas from eminent scientists under such conditions is normally very considerable. But in this case the issue involved is rather more fundamental. Some years ago this very original thinker profoundly impressed contemporary thought as a critic of scientific abstractions and a spokesman of relativity and the “creative advance of nature.” In the attempt to broaden and generalize this attitude into the “speculative philosophy” of his more recent period, he has become increasingly concerned with that contrasted aspect of unity and “everlastingness” in things which is the traditional object of much religion and metaphysics. As the title indicates, this book is his systematic attempt to synthesize the “process” of his earlier works with the “reality” which no essay in cosmology could possibly afford neglect. Nor is the appeal to deity in this connection merely adventitious. Permanence and order find their most characteristic expression in experience, thinks Professor Whitehead, in our “moral and religious intuitions,” and these latter are among the ultimate data for any

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metaphysical description. Hence we are not surprised to learn that in the everlastingness of God the “evil” of temporal limitation is transcended, that no good thing can wholly perish, and that divinity quite literally shapes our ends to whatever measure of endurance they may attain. Such a philosophy is not only of considerable interest to the disciples of this author and those of the deity thus described, but it serves as a commentary on the solemn and fashionable attempt of recent philosophy to “take time seriously.” In a review of this sort, I can only attempt to record the major impressions which this tremendous work has produced on the reviewer and is likely, I think, to leave with the fairly critical reader. In how far they do justice to the intricacies of the total system, only time and tireless industry of metaphysical criticism can determine. In the first place, the book seems more difficult than it has any right to be. No doubt these are high matters and arduous, but even so the presentation of hypothetical and relative conclusions at the very outset in the form of categories and “obligations” of the most extreme generality, the whole couched in a vocabulary designed to obliterate even the minimum of connection with familiar ideas, is rather needlessly trying to the reader. Perhaps, as enthusiasts have assured us, future generations will appreciate this work at its true value. If so, it will speak very well indeed for the intellectual hardihood of our descendants. Meanwhile, without the benefit of their enviable insight, the reader is likely to find “Process and Reality” very hard going. Secondly, and if he has survived the first fifty pages, this same inquiring reader is likely to be fascinated by the metaphorical sweep of the author’s main hypothesis in its application to a wide variety of contemporary issues. That all concrete entities are centers of feeling, mirroring yet transcending the past world from which they have arisen, focusing in the determination of their present immediacy the whole growing world and shaping it into new processes of definition and achievement, guided and “lured” onward by the conceptional presence of future possibilities as final causes, sustained through all their limitation by a divine order of perfect adjustment—this is a hypothesis of tremendous imaginative scope and appeal. And when the dazzled observer sees it applied with awe-inspiring virtuosity to such diverse subjects as immediate “vague” experience, the logic of propositions and the presuppositions of physical measurement, he is tempted to surrender ecstatically to the charms of this new metaphoric and rejoice at so modern and comforting a solution of the riddle of the universe. Finally, if he has managed to keep his feet and his head through this high carnival of abstractions, he may be inclined to ask himself what, in the end, it is really all about. That all direct knowledge concerns the feelings of

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feelings indefinitely multiplied and reflected, is high doctrine, but it leaves our common sense information about tables and chairs in a very curious situation. That process and becoming rule the world is a great saying and we are happy to learn that all this is wholly compatible with the conceptually predetermined order of relevant possibilities that exists in the mind of God. But how precisely the reproduction in “physical experience” of the divine plan of things constitutes any genuine novelty it is a little hard to see. And there is a deeper doubt than these. After all, the world really is full of a number of things, its temporal “creativity” remains incorrigibly contingent with respect to metaphysical formulae, and the assurance that all its risks and perils are transmuted in divinity into enduring goodness savors rather of edification than of exact description. Contemporary philosophers have taken time very seriously indeed, but it is doubtful whether the contingent complexity of occurrent reality is sufficiently decorous to return the compliment. For all its speculative acumen, “Process and Reality” leaves the temporal diversity of things very nearly where it found it. Perhaps there is a fourth stage of insight on this subject. If so, its achievement lies beyond the limitations of this review, and of this reviewer.

2. Macmillan Reprint, 1960 Fjellman, November 1961 Carl Fjellman. “Review of Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan Co., 1960.” Lutheran Quarterly 13, November (1961): 371–372. Carl Gustaf Fjellman (May 7, 1919–) attended Augustana College, receiving a B.A. in 1941 and B.D. from the Augustana Seminary in 1945. He was ordained in the Lutheran Church in 1945 and served the Trinity Lutheran Church in Alameda, CA between 1945–1947. He later attended the University of California in Berkeley and Drew University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1955. Fjellman joined the faculty at Upsala College in 1947, was a dean between 1951–1961, acting president between 1965– 1966, and finally president of Upsala College in 1966. He held that position until 1975, when he assumed the role as a chancellor for one year. The Lutheran Quarterly was founded in 1949, and was published until 1977. It was the successor to the Evangelical Review, founded in 1849, and the Lutheran Church Review, founded in 1882, and the Augustana Quarterly, which ran in 1922. It is currently published as the Lutheran Quarterly, New Series. The Lutheran Quarterly is intended for a theologically interested general audience.

The appearance of a fifth printing of Whitehead’s Process and Reality (almost simultaneous with a paperback edition) is sufficient evidence that this difficult Essays in Cosmology (sub-title) still attracts readers. The reason for this is clear: The difficulty of the book is matched by its importance. Ten years after the first edition of Process and Reality (1929), E. A. Burtt wrote that it “is one of the most difficult philosophical books every written […].” James Collins has recently attested to its importance: “One of the few metaphysical masterpieces produced by our century.”

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For those interested in the religious implications of Whitehead’s thought, this book, his major philosophical word, cannot be avoided. His shorter writing, Religion in the Making, is certainly more “readable,” but it is doubtful that anyone who does not have imaginative powers and a command of philosophy equal to Whitehead’s could properly understand his position in this smaller book without first struggling through Process and Reality. Whitehead’s process philosophy, or philosophy of organism, has had a marked influence on some contemporary theologians, not only in being recognized as a position to be contended with but also in being accepted as the most adequate philosophical system for the expression of Christian theology. The writings of Daniel Day Williams, Henry Nelson Wieman, Bernard E. Meland, Bernard Loomer, and Harold A. Bosley indicate the seriousness of the attempts made to formulate a process theology based on Whitehead. To a lesser extent, Nels F. S. Ferre and, in England, Lionel S. Thornton also illustrate the influence of Whitehead on theology. The work of Charles Hartshorne in philosophy of religion provides a helpful Whiteheadian bridge from process philosophy to process theology. Whitehead was a man of wide-ranging knowledge and interests and is probably known better by the general public for his writing in fields other than philosophy and religion. It is also no doubt true that he is more widely quoted than read. But for those who wish to undertake a serious study of Whitehead, Process and Reality will continue to be the most important of his writings.

3. Free Press Corrected Edition, 1978 Ogden, Fall 1979 Schubert M. Ogden. “Review of Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. By Alfred North Whitehead. Corrected edition by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. Free Press, 1978.” Perkins Journal (Fall 1979): 57. Schubert Ogden (March 2, 1928–) was educated at Ohio Wesleyan University, Johns Hopkins University, The University of Chicago (The Divinity School), where he received his Ph.D. in 1958, and PhilippsUniversität, Marburg, Germany. He was ordained a Methodist minister in 1952 as a deacon, and in 1958 as an elder. He has published Christ with Myth, On Theology, The Reality of God, and The Point of Christology. He taught principally at Southern Methodist University in the Perkins School of Theology.

For half a century, students of Whitehead’s philosophy have had to make do with an inadequate text of his major work, Process and Reality. Partly because of his own indifference to the routine chores of scholarly existence but also because of errors made in transcribing his manuscript and discrepancies between the first American and English editions, a corrected edition of this work has long been overdue. Happily, two able Whitehead scholars, carrying forward earlier efforts by others as well as themselves to list the corrigenda in the existing editions, have now produced the kind of text that the intrinsic quality of Whitehead’s thought and writings has always deserved. Consequently, the appearance of this book is an event, and one may confidently predict that henceforth all serious study of Whitehead’s contribution to metaphysics and philosophical theology will be based on it, rather than on any earlier editions of his magnum opus. This one may do all the more confidently because the page numbers of the first American edition, to which most of the secondary literature makes reference, have been inserted in the text in brackets, and because all

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divergences from either of the first editions, American or English, have been carefully signalled in the Editors’ Notes, thereby giving the reader access to the readings of both earlier editions through this one. If I have any complaint in this connection, it is only that the page number of the American edition were not also given—or given instead—at the inside top of the page, which would have made it a good deal easier to find them. Also worthy of special note is the new, greatly expanded Index with which the work is now supplied. Over thirty pages long, it provides a superb analytical tool of just the sort that careful students of Whitehead have long felt the need for, as witnessed by the innumerable indices that many of them have long since made for their own use and shared with fellow students. For the rest, the editors appear to have done their work in the most responsible way, neatly avoiding the opposite perils of either doing too little or doing too much. Now and again, they hardly give sufficient reasons for their decisions—as in the case of some of the paragraphs they relocate, or when they dismiss a proposed change simply stating their belief that it would be incorrect (p. 211, l. 24). But such lapses, if, indeed, that is what they are, are notable for their rarity; and one’s dominant impression after reviewing all the changes, as I did, is that here is an editorial achievement of the highest quality by which both the editors and publisher have placed all students of Whitehead in their debt.

Christian, 1979 William A. Christian, Sr. “Review of Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. By Alfred North Whitehead. Corrected edition by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburn. New York: Free Press, 1978.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47, no.3 (1979): 478. William A. Christian, Sr. (1905–1997) studied at the University of Edinburgh, Oxford, Chicago Theological Seminary, and received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1942. A well respected scholar of philosophy of religion, he served as the John A. Hoober Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. He authored a number of important studies in philosophy of religion, including Doctrines of Religious Communities: A Philosophical Study, Meaning and Truth in Religion, and An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion is generally considered to be the premier academic journal in the field of religious studies. It is an international quarterly journal, publishing scholarly articles that cover world religious traditions as well as the methods for religious studies.

A corrected edition of Process and Reality has been needed for a long time. We have had the 1929 Macmillan edition, the Cambridge University Press edition of the same year, and the Free Press paperback of 1969, all with different pagings, and all with numerous errors due to Whitehead’s distaste for proofreading and the deficiencies of publishers’ proofreaders. Now we can read the book without distraction by such matters. Though the editors did not find it feasible to retain the Macmillan paging, which most published studies of Whitehead have used, they have inserted in brackets the Macmillan page numbers. The editors have been conservative, and rightly so. They explain all their changes, and their resistance to some suggested changes, in 23 pages of notes. Some of them give us Whitehead’s marginalia in his copies of the 1929 editions, and these are often interesting. I believe that none of the changes are likely to have much weight, one way or another, in arguments about Whitehead’s main doctrines. Another welcome improvement is the expanded index compiled by Griffin. Instead of the nine pages in the Macmillan edition the new index

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runs to thirty-three pages. It includes many new entries and many additional references. This will be a great boon to students engaged in puzzling out the nuances of Whitehead’s uses of terms. For these reasons future readers will be much indebted to the Center for Process Studies which supported the project, to the Free Press, and most of all to the editors for their labor.

Connor, 1979 David E. Connor. “Review of Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978.” Iliff Review 36 (1979): 59– 61.

Whitehead’s major work, delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1927–28, is now available in a new hardback edition with corrections made by David Griffin of Claremont and Donald Sherburne of Vanderbilt. Also included in the volume is a new index prepared by Griffin. Since Process and Reality has already seen three editions (the “American” Macmillan, the “British” Cambridge, and more recently the Free Press paperback), some may wonder why it is necessary to publish yet another version of this book. The answer to this question, according to the editors, is that all three of the previous editions contained numerous errors, including “incorrect references, misquoted poetry, other faulty quotations, faulty and inconsistent punctuation, and […] wrong and missing words […]” (Editors’ Preface, vi.) In addition, the editors indicate that there are “over three hundred discrepancies between the American (Macmillan) and the English (Cambridge) editions, which appeared in different formats with divergent paginations” (Eds’. Pref., v), and that the 1969 paperback edition, to make matters worse, “added some new errors of its own” (Eds’. Pref., x). Consequently the editors have set out to produce a standardized edition of PR in which all errors are corrected and in which the index has been greatly expanded. Physically this volume is a significant improvement over the paperback edition which students have been using for the past ten years. The margins are wider, the pages are heavier and larger, and the print is more readable. Each page is approximately equal in length to 1 1/2 pages of the original Macmillan edition, so that Whitehead’s entire text, including the Preface and the Table of Contents, has been reduced to 371 pages (where the original contained 533). The Table of Contents, with its abstracts, has been placed entirely in the front of the book; in earlier American editions the abstracts were located immediately preceding their respective Parts and were therefore more difficult to find and to use.

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Most scholarly reference to PR has relied upon the pagination of the first Macmillan edition, and when I was a student in Claremont three years ago it was thought that the Griffin-Sherburne edition would have its pages numbered according to this same scheme. It turns out, however, that this was impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, the editors have inserted bracketed page numbers into the new text which refer to the initial Macmillan pagination, facilitation any needed cross-reference. The book contains three major sections which are not to be found in any other edition of PR: the Editors’ Preface (6 pp.), the index by David Griffin (32 pp.), and the Editors’ Notes (23 pp.). The Editors’ Preface is devoted mainly to a discussion of the reasons why a new edition of PR was needed, and it also gives a brief explanation of the ways in which changes in the text were made. Griffin’s new Index appears to be at least five or six times as long as any previous index to PR, and it will render an obvious service to many readers. The final pages of the book comprise about 500 notes by the editors. Each note refers to some specific point in the text of PR, located by a single or double obelisk or a single or double asterisk. Each obelisk indicates that an actual change has been made in at least one (or both) of the earlier editions of PR, and each asterisk refers to an editorial note that is given even though no change has been made at that point in the text. The notes themselves are identified by page- and line-numbers. For example, on page 254 of the text, in the second line, the word “transmitted” is followed by an obelisk; we check the Editors’ Notes and find an obelisk followed by: “254.2 changed ‘transmuted’ to ‘transmitted’ (M 388.11, C 359.15).” That is, the editors have changed the word “transmuted,” which appeared in the Macmillan edition on p. 388 and in the Cambridge edition on p. 359, to read, “transmitted.” Most of the changes are relatively trivial in nature, such as those involving punctuation or spelling; but others, such as the one given in the above example, involve significant differences in meaning. Whether any of these changes will prove to be controversial, only time will tell. It is obvious that this new edition of Process and Reality represents a great deal of hard work and painstaking attention to detail on the part of the editors. They and the Free Press are to be commended for seeing this project through to its completion. This is a book that all students of Whitehead will want to own; for it is easier to use than prior editions, in terms of both its physical form and its scholarly advances. If the price seems high for the beginning student perhaps it is well to consider that Process and Reality has never been an easy book, and that at the outset it requires of the reader a seriousness which may well justify the higher expense for the sake of the advantages gained.

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The new index and notes are such thorough pieces of work that they remind one of the conversation overheard between two students who where discussing Augustine’s influence on Calvin. One pointed out that the Index of Sources in Calvin’s Institutes lists over 600 references to Augustine. The other, thinking of the scholar who had toiled away compliling the index, responded, “But what an awful way to spend a sabbatical!” As far as Whitehead is concerned, the tedious work of putting the finishing touches on Process and Reality must have seemed a similarly awful task. Whitehead was notoriously loathe to participate in the proofreading process. Perhaps this was partly due to his own personal idiosyncrasies; but also, I think, it was because of the fact that, as a part of his philosophy itself, he did not place a great deal of importance in the kind of exactitude which proofreading procures. To be sure, he wished to express his philosophy with precision; but on the other hand, he wrote: Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate […] metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap. And, we are told that in his lectures Whitehead often responded to that which seemed to be perfectly correct—to the ‘stabilized technicalities’—by saying, “The exactness is a fake!” (Essays in Science and Philosophy, p. 74.) I surely am not saying that Griffin’s and Sherburne’s wish to eliminate errors from Process and Reality is a dubious goal. Their new edition of PR is to be highly praised. But I would suggest that we take care, lest we allow the abundance of indexed terms, bracketed page numbers, asterisks, and obelisks to create the vague, unacknowledged impression that we have discovered the kind of exactness that Whitehead himself would have repudiated. It would be a doubtful irony indeed if a corrected edition of PR came to be viewed as a manifestation of the type of concreteness that Whitehead himself held to be misplaced and fallacious.

Burke, 1981 T. E. Burke. “Review of Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (corrected edition). Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne; Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience; Wolfe Mays, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science and Metaphysics; Ann L. Plamondon, Whitehead’s Organic Philosophy of Science.” Philosophical Books 22, no.2 (1981): 123–126. The journal Philosophical Books is dedicated to reviewing and discussing new publications in all areas of analytic philosophy.

Philosophy, according to one of Whitehead’s aphorisms, is “the critic of abstractions”; and as such it contributes to “the healthy progress of society” since “a civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress (Science and the Modern World, 1932 edn., p. 73). Abstractions are, of course, often unobjectionable and indeed necessary; the danger, and the source of many time-honoured philosophical problems, lies in losing sight of that from which we abstract, and hence mistaking the abstraction for concrete reality. Process and Reality is, in essence, a sustained attempt to correct such mistakes, to expose the unacknowledged abstractions of earlier cosmologies (and of science and everyday discourse in which these are embodied), and to develop a system of categories designed to do justice to both sides of the familiar contrasts—flux and permanence, temporal and eternal, subjective and objective—and present them as mutually indispensible elements within a single reality. The difficulties of such a task are too obvious to require emphasis. Whitehead has, perforce, to adapt for his purpose pieces of conceptual equipment originally designed for much more limited tasks, and to generalize and juxtapose them in whatever ways seem likely to get across to his readers his vision of reality. Very roughly, the key concepts, as the title “Philosophy of Organism” implies, are taken from the biological sciences, and stretched, as it were, in either direction to cover the fields of physics and psychology as well. But Whitehead draws freely on all the resources accumulated over half a century through extensive explorations in various branches of science and in philosophy, history and the arts, as well as his own distinctive work in logic and mathematics.

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The resultant distillation is extraordinarily rich and extraordinarily obscure. And so, ironically, Whitehead’s efforts to link his organic philosophy to a whole cultural history, and to show how it is in effect required by the natural sciences as they outgrow earlier cosmologies, have often helped to relegate it to the realm of eccentric and isolated systems, which may challenge the occasional intrepid thesis-writer, but are remote from the mainstream of philosophical development. In recent years, however, Process and Reality has, for a variety of reasons, come to appear less isolated and anachronistic than it did to the first generation of philosophers who read or at any rate opened it; particularly in the field of philosophical theology, but (as Ann Plamondon’s book illustrates) not exclusively there, thinkers have begun to find in it enough of relevance and importance to repay patience with the obscurities and eccentricities. Whitehead’s commentators and critics find their tasks at different levels. David Griffin and Donald Sherburne have worked, as it were, at ground level, trying to determine what it was, quite literally, that he intended to say. Whitehead characteristically had little interest in the routine jobs of checking references, standardizing punctuation, correcting proofs or compiling an index. As a result, many slips of the author’s own making, plus many more added by typists and compositors struggling with difficult handwriting and largely incomprehensible text, got through to the original editions, which appeared with “many hundreds of errors and with over three hundred discrepancies between the American (Macmillan) and the English (Cambridge) editions” (Editor’s Preface, p. v). It has indeed been claimed that we have a more reliable text of Plato’s Republic than of Process and Reality. The present editors have performed a labour of love in weeding out the misprints and misquotations, and tidying up the often odd and confusing punctuation. Some idea of their thoroughness is given by the fact that, in preliminary work, “suggested corrigenda lists of six scholars were collated, and then circulated among eight [different?] scholars for opinions and observations” (p. ix)—and by the twenty-three pages of editorial notes with their patient record of commas inserted and deleted, etc. There is also a new and much amplified index, prepared by David Griffin; the original one was notoriously defective, lacking even the key term ‘organic’ and its derivatives. While this corrected edition will not lead to any radical new reappraisals of the book’s content, it removes many of the minor difficulties and irritations from the reader’s path, and for this reason is an appreciable advance on its predecessors. Elizabeth Kraus’s book, subtitled “A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality,” is intended for study in conjunction with the original work. Commendably, she introduces it through a preliminary discussion of

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Science and the Modern World, undoubtedly the right starting-point for the examination of Whitehead’s later philosophy, since it is here that he explains most clearly what he sees as its genesis and function, and gives a comparatively uncluttered and untechnical sketch of its essentials. The rest of her book is a section-by-section commentary on Process and Reality itself. If it is not appreciably more translucent than the original, the fault is presumably largely Whitehead’s; for the most part he offers no distinctive arguments, for or against specific theses, which a commentator might expound or criticize, but rather, as I have said, an attempt to put across a certain vision or world-view, which we can criticize only by considering whether or to what extent it rings true to the various facets of human experience. As Miss Kraus puts it, “Whitehead does not present a graded series of concepts through which one can move in linear fashion; rather the comprehension of each entails the prior comprehension of the others. [… U]nderstanding will come […] all at once or not at all” (p. xii); and later, in discussing Whitehead’s final theological reflections, “The text is more appropriate for meditation than for critical analysis” (p. 159). Her book reflects an earnest struggle to understand, to see the world through Whiteheadian eyes; and arguably this is the only spirit in which it is worth while to approach Process and Reality at all. Wolfe Mays attempts to cover a much wider field, the whole development of Whitehead’s philosophical thought, from its earliest manifestations in Universal Algebra (1898) to the final system. For good measure, he offers also a short account of Whitehead’s life, and some mention at least of the major critical points that have been raised about his work—all within 134 pages. Certainly he performs a useful service in pointing out, to the unmathematical, that works such as Universal Algebra and The Principle of Relativity embody important elements of Whitehead’s philosophical development, and that we cannot without loss dismiss everything that Whitehead wrote before his late fifties as too technical—and, to the overparochial, that there are illuminating comparisons to be made with such thinkers as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. His book is the product of many years of Whiteheadian studies; its main drawback is that it is condensed to such an extent as to defeat its declared purpose of providing an introduction to Whitehead’s thought. There is simply no way in which the purpose, scope and limitations of the method of extensive abstraction can be summarized accurately and intelligibly in two pages (pp. 53–4) or Whitehead’s theological view in two-and-a-half (130–2). For the student who already has a fair grasp of the more familiar aspects of Whitehead’s work, no doubt this book will help to fill some of the gaps in his knowledge of its entire structure and direct him towards the main critical issues; but it tries to do too much in too little space to be of much use to the beginner.

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Ann Plamondon considers the organic philosophy, not in isolation, but as potentially valuable contribution to current debates in the philosophy of science. Since Whitehead himself, as we have seen, regarded such a philosophy as something demanded by the development of science, this would appear an obvious enough way to approach it; but the philosophy of science has for the most part been preoccupied with the methods rather than the subject-matter of science, and, as Miss Plamondon says, the continuity between metaphysics and philosophy of science has been largely neglected (p. 5). But, as she goes on to show, Whitehead’s characteristic view of the interrelatedness of the elements of the world clearly has a bearing on the problems of induction and the nature of scientific laws. For example, if these elements are to be seen as successive generations of “actual entities,” each in essence a process of self-creation from the material furnished by its past, and in its turn providing material for the selfcreation of the next generation, then there is some ground for belief in continuity of characteristics. Laws are then immanent in the nature of the actual entities themselves, rather than imposed on them ab extra. On the other hand, since organic development permits change and novelty as well as continuity, the laws themselves become capable of evolution, and hence should be seen, not as holding throughout the whole of nature without limit, but only throughout “environments” which, however vast, are still finite. (See esp. pp. 88ff.) Whatever difficulties we may find in these specific ideas, they serve to call attention to the points that a philosopher of science has a choice not between having a general cosmology and doing without, but only between an explicit and implicit one; and that this cosmology is highly relevant to his considerations of the nature and scope of science. Despite its occasional naiveties of style and presentation, Miss Plamondon’s book does, at the least, indicate a promising growth-point for Whiteheadian studies, and, of the works reviewed here, is probably the most likely to persuade the uncommitted reader that Whitehead is worth the efforts required to understand him.

Nobo, 1983 Jorge Luis Nobo. “Review of Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. Corrected Edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press, 1978).” Process Studies 13, no.2 (1983):159–173. Nobo (1940–) received his BS from Candler College (Cuba) in 1959, a BA from the University of Miami in 1966 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Austin, Texas in 1973. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas. In 1986 he published Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Process Studies is an academic journal committed to the advancement of the study of the work of Alfred North Whitehead, and the tradition of process thought inspired by his work. Founded in 1971, and published by the Center for Process Studies, Process Studies has become the primary voice for the study of process thought in the United States.

[159] It is difficult to imagine a work of comparable importance having as abominable a printing history as that had, until recently, by Whitehead’s epoch-making Process and Reality. When the book’s two original editions appeared in 1929—published respectively by Macmillan in the U.S. and by Cambridge in England—each contained hundreds of errors. These errors were not limited to the typographical variety. In both editions, quotations and internal references were often inaccurate, and more than a few paragraphs or sentences were obviously misplaced. Moreover, the two editions exhibited not only different formats and paginations, but also over three hundred discrepancies. To make matters worse, neither the errors nor the discrepancies were eliminated in the first two subsequent American editions. The Harper Torchbooks paperback edition, published in 1960, used the original Macmillan plates without bothering to correct a single typographical error. The first Free Press paperback edition, published in 1969, did set type anew, but followed the Macmillan text religiously. Thus, it repeated all the Macmillan mistakes, added a few of its own for good measure, and succeeded only in introducing a third divergent pagination. The latest (1978) edition by the Free Press, however, signals the beginning of a new, happier chapter in the printing history of PR. This newest version—labeled “the corrected edition” to distinguish it from all

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previous versions—has received the editorial attention the book always had needed but for so long had lacked. Its editors, David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, have spared neither time nor effort in their resolute attempt to correct all previous mistakes and avoid any new ones. They have scrutinized the two original editions and compared them line by line. They have agonized over the criteria to be used in instituting changes or corrections. They have consulted and corresponded with other Whiteheadian scholars on all manner of possible mistakes in the text and on ways of correcting them. They have consulted Whitehead’s personal copy of PR and have made use of the corrections, additions, and comments he inserted in the text or wrote on the margins. They have hunted down the appropriate editions of works quoted by Whitehead and have corrected his frequent errors of transcription or memory. They have, in brief, by these and by other means, sought to locate and correct every mistake in the original [160] texts. Not surprisingly, they have thus produced an edition far superior to all previous ones in textual accuracy and overall quality. However, an editorial task of the magnitude undertaken by Griffin and Sherburne is not without its dangers and pitfalls. Some novel features of the corrected edition’s format may be distracting to the general reader; and some of the textual modifications may be deemed inappropriate by other Whiteheadian scholars. Accordingly, this review has a two-fold aim: first, to recognize some of the corrected edition’s many positive features and achievements, so that those not already familiar with its merits may learn of them; and second, to identify some of the edition’s few shortcomings, so that they may be corrected in future printings or editions.1 To that two-fold end, I shall first consider some of the novel features in the edition’s format and then, after discussing the difficulties Griffin and Sherburne faced in their task, turn to a detailed consideration of some of the more questionable decisions they made either to change, or to let stand, the original text.

Some Novel Features Beautifully executed and meticulously proofread, the new edition incorporates over seven hundred corrections. All divergences from the 1

That the editors are willing to continue their efforts to improve the text is not an assumption. In an announcement appearing in PS 8:69, Griffin and Sherburne publicly requested that they be informed of any errors in the corrected edition, “so that corrections can be made before the second printing.”

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original editions are signaled in the text by means of single and double obelisks; moreover, the editors’ notes (pp. 391–413), which are geared to the pages and lines in which the corrections appear, specify the nature of each correction and also, when the changes are controversial, provide justification for them. Since nearly all changes are signaled, and since the editors’ notes indicate how the text read in the original editions, it is almost always possible to recover the original texts from the corrected text. The only exceptions are certain types of changes, considered trivial and uncontroversial by the editors, in respect to which only the first instance of each kind of change has been flagged and noted. The editors’ notes contain also other entries corresponding to passages in the text that are flagged by single or double asterisks. Most of these notes either provide reasons for not changing the text in places where some Whiteheadians think it should be changed, or impart interesting information concerning the comments Whitehead wrote in his personal copies of PR. Notes of the first kind give witness to the difficult editorial decisions Griffin and Sherburne often had to make. Those of the second kind make Whitehead’s marginalia a matter of public record and thus constitute a welcome aid to the scholarly task of interpreting Whitehead’s thought. Making public the marginalia on Whitehead’s copies of PR is but one of several features that will endear the corrected edition to Whiteheadian scholars. Another such feature—already present in the British edition, but not found in any previous American edition—is the incorporation into the Table of Contents of the Abstracts for the book’s five parts. In every previous edition, the Table of [161] Contents lists the work’s parts and chapters, but does not include Whitehead’s section-by-section abstract of each chapter in each part. Instead, in those editions, the abstracts are dispersed throughout the book, the abstract for each part immediately preceding it in the text, with the result that information important to the scholarly study of this difficult work is not found in its Table of Contents, where it would be most useful, but in five differently located and hard-tofind Abstracts. The corrected edition puts an end to that nonsense by integrating the Abstracts into the Table of Contents, thus vastly improving the Table’s scholarly usefulness. But the editors did miss an opportunity to improve the Table’s usefulness when they neglected to give the page numbers for the different sections in each chapter. Fortunately, their oversight should be easy to remedy in future printings of the corrected edition. In the meantime, it takes but a few minutes to “improve” one’s copy by penciling in the missing page numbers.

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Two additional features not previously found in an American edition, but already present in the Cambridge version, are the setting off of lengthy quotations and the textual incorporation of the so-called corrigenda (really an addendum) appearing on Macmillan’s page 546. But by far the most endearing feature of the corrected edition is one not found in any previous edition: the tremendously expanded and impressively analytical index prepared by Griffin. Whereas the original indexes of proper names and terms featured a total of roughly five hundred (500) entries, most of which listed only four or five, often ill-chosen, references, the new integrated index comprises nearly eight hundred (800) entries, many of which list scores of references. Moreover, whereas the original indexes were not analytical, Griffin’s is, giving a separate list of references for each of the different modifications of a term. Indeed, Griffin’s index is so thorough that there is a danger it may be considered exhaustive in regard to entries and complete in respect to references. It is neither, even though it comes very close to being both. Consider, by way of examples, that ‘supersession’, a very important technical term (regarded by Whitehead as a category in his 1927 “Time”), is not indexed despite its appearing at least seven times in the text and that the entry for Norman Kemp Smith omits reference to page 215n (328n).2 My point is that Whiteheadians should not be lulled into complacency by Griffin’s exceedingly fine accomplishment; they should remain alert to omitted terms and references so that, when enough omitted items have been collected, they may be added in future printings or editions. The omissions I have found, I hasten to add, are very few; and I suspect future additions to the index will constitute but a small fraction of its total size. So the fact remains that the new index is an invaluable scholarly tool that, together with the integrated Table of Contents and the inclusion of Whitehead’s marginalia, makes the corrected edition particularly useful for any in-depth study of Whitehead’s major metaphysical treatise. If the reaction to it of my undergraduate students is typical, the corrected edition does include two features which the average reader [162] is likely to find annoying. One is the bracketed insertion of the Macmillan pagination into the text; the other is the hundred’s of asterisks and obelisks which pepper the book’s pages. To the general reader, the interruption of a sentence or word by a bracketed number and the profusion of flagging signals are practices which seem far more distracting than useful. To the 2

Instances of ‘supersession,’ or of some form of the verb ‘to supersede’ occur at PR 43/68, 46/72, 58/91, 84/129, 100/153, 150/227, 154/233.

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Whiteheadian scholar, on the other hand, these practices are quite useful and not seriously distracting. The bracketed page numbers signal the exact beginning or ending of each Macmillan page; the obelisks serve as helpful reminders that the text has been modified by the editors and, hence, may carry a different meaning in the original editions; finally, the asterisks signal the availability of information pertinent to the passages they flag. Thus, the same features that bother the average reader are likely to be welcomed, even praised, by the Whiteheadian scholar. However, since the corrected edition is likely to become the only edition in print, it should serve all readers. Some attention, therefore, should be paid, in future printings, to the needs of the general reader. In that regard, I offer the following suggestions. The relocation of the Abstracts and the setting off of lengthy quotations make it impossible to retain the Macmillan pagination. Nonetheless, the vast body of secondary literature containing references to the Macmillan edition makes it imperative that the latter’s pagination be preserved somehow. The corrected edition achieves this end very economically with the bracketed insertion of the Macmillan page numbers. But it would be aesthetically more pleasing, and far less distracting, to indicate the original pagination marginally. Not only could the line where a Macmillan page begins be indicated by placing the Macmillan page number next to it, but also the exact character with which the Macmillan page begins could be indicated by a decimal number equal to the number of characters and spaces appearing in that line before the Macmillan page begins. Thus, the number 150.28 next to the twelfth line of page 98 would indicate that page 150 of the Macmillan editions begins after the first 28 characters or spaces in that line. If, as is customary, the marginal numbers are set in reduced type, they would not detract from the page’s appearance and would convey the same information now conveyed by the bracketed page numbers. It is not desirable to do away entirely with the system of signals used by Griffin and Sherburne. Such a system is necessary to ensure that the original texts be recoverable from the corrected edition and that information pertinent to the meaning of a given passage be available to the reader. But the number of signals can be reduced. There is no need at all to indicate the correction of obvious typographical errors—e.g., the replacement of ‘Monodology’ with ‘Monadology’ or of ‘well’ with ‘dwell’. In addition, uncontroversial changes, such as the correcting of Whitehead’s misquotations or the dropping of commas needlessly separating a subject from its verb, could be listed by type of change at the end of the book. Another list could include changes suggested by other scholars, but which Griffin and Sherburne re- [163] frained from making. In this manner, the

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number of asterisks and obelisks appearing in the text could be significantly reduced, but potentially controversial changes, as well as Whitehead’s marginalia, would still be flagged. Regardless of how the average reader reacts to the two features last considered, Whiteheadian scholars will find little to complain about, and much to praise, in the corrected edition’s format and physical production. Any reservations scholars may have about the new edition more than likely will have to do with the appropriateness of some of the textual changes instituted by the editors. Before dealing with some of those changes, it is important to consider the difficulties inherent in the task undertaken by the editors.

The Editorial Task The editorial task undertaken by Griffin and Sherburne was made difficult in the extreme by a number of circumstances which most editors never have to face. For one thing, no part of the PR manuscript, and only Part V of the typescript from which Macmillan set copy, remains in existence. Hence, except for those passages in which Whitehead was quoting other authors, the editors had no ‘original’ text against which they could check the published texts. For another, with Whitehead no longer alive to veto any misguided ‘corrections’, Griffin and Sherburne could not feel at liberty to introduce all the changes they might have suggested to a still living author. In addition, a conservative approach—correcting the most obvious errors but otherwise letting the text stand—was made impossible by the more than three hundred discrepancies between the two original editions. Finally, the complexity of Whitehead’s philosophy, the idiosyncrasies of his writing style, and the peculiarities of his technical terminology together made the task of correcting the text inseparable from the task of interpreting it. The danger loomed large, therefore, that the editors’ misunderstanding of some aspect of Whitehead’s thought would translate into textual changes distorting or obscuring Whitehead’s intended meaning. To solve some of the problems created by these unusual circumstances, Griffin and Sherburne have put to good use the work done by the unknown editor of the Cambridge edition, who did a more rigorous job of catching typographical and punctuation errors than did the Macmillan editor. They argue, in their preface to the corrected edition, that the corrections introduced by the Cambridge editor, since Whitehead did not object to them, may be taken as precedents for the permissible kinds of changes to be carried out consistently throughout the text. In regards to matters of punctuation, this approach works rather well. For example, gone are the

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commas that Whitehead often placed between subject and verb, and added are the commas needed to set off independent clauses. However, where the Cambridge editor did not establish clear precedent, some questionable practices do remain—like the use of a semicolon when a comma [164] is called for. But at least by following the precedents set by the Cambridge editor Griffin and Sherburne have reduced the risk of introducing changes inconsistent with Whitehead’s stylistic preferences, while still managing to improve the text. Even as they were following the example set by the Cambridge editor in matters of punctuation, Griffin and Sherburne had to be careful not to follow the Cambridge editor’s example in matters where correcting the text is inseparable from interpreting it. For the Cambridge edition contained a number of errors that resulted from its editor’s unfamiliarity with, or misunderstanding of, Whitehead’s thought. To guard against the possibility of distorting the text as a result of their own interpretative mistakes, lacunae, or biases, Griffin and Sherburne have relied on the following precautions or factors. First, many of the changes in wording represent the consensus, or near consensus, of eight or nine Whiteheadian scholars. In this regard, many of the revisions in the corrected edition reflect the outcome of work initiated by Sherburne in the early sixties, when he first enlisted the aid of other Whiteheadian scholars to produce a list of corrigenda for PR. The list was published in 1963, and subsequent discussions and revisions of it have greatly reduced the risk of changing the text of PR in ways not agreeable to most Whiteheadians.3 Second, the editors’ perspectives on Whitehead’s philosophy are sufficiently different from each other to provide a check on the biases and deficiencies of each editor’s interpretation of the text. Third and last, Griffin and Sherburne adopted the principle that a change or correction would not be made unless they both agreed to it. No one familiar with the complexities of Whitehead’s thought will find these safeguards entirely reassuring. There are probably as many divergent interpretations of Whitehead’s thought as there are students of it. For that reason, the agreement of nine or ten Whiteheadian scholars cannot guarantee that a particular modification of the text will not conflict with some scholar’s plausible, if perhaps less popular, interpretation of the modified passage. Moreover, the areas of interest and expertise represented by either of the editors do not add up to an exhaustive understanding of 3

The list was published in George L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead, Essays on His Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp. 200–207).

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every detail and implication of Whitehead’s philosophy. Yet unfamiliarity with any detail or aspect of Whitehead’s philosophy can easily lead the editors to alter the text in ways that distort or obscure Whitehead’s intended meaning. Nonetheless, though these three safeguards do not rule out the possibility of inadvertently distorting Whitehead’s intended meaning, they, together with the thoroughness Griffin and Sherburne have brought to their task, have kept questionable textual modifications to a minimum. No doubt other readers will discover mistakes which have escaped me. But when all changes questioned by one or another Whiteheadian scholar are collected, they will add up, I suspect, to less than five percent of the total number made—a very tolerable figure, in my opinion. In any case, no conceivable set of safeguards could have completely eliminated the possibility of editorial mistakes. Thus, if the text of PR was to be improved at all, the risk of occasionally [165] distorting it had to be taken. Griffin and Sherburne took that risk successfully; the rate of challengeable textual changes introduced by them is extremely low. Given the unusual and difficult circumstances amid which they had to carry out their editorial tasks, their success is truly commendable.

Some Questionable Changes Though few in number, some of the more questionable changes introduced by Griffin and Sherburne have riding on them important issues of meaning and interpretation. If my reasoning concerning those changes is cogent, they should be omitted or modified in subsequent printings of the corrected edition. With that end in mind, it should prove worthwhile and instructive to consider in some detail the changes I find most troublesome. On page 6, line 12 (M 9.7; C 7.19),4 Griffin and Sherburne have inserted a comma after ‘mathematics’ so that the sentence thus modified now reads: “It is a remarkable characteristic of the history of thought that branches of mathematics, developed under the pure imaginative impulse, thus controlled, finally receive their important application.” As a result of this insertion, the elliptical adjective clause ‘developed under the pure imaginative impulse’ is now set off by commas, and its function as a 4

‘M 9.7’ means ‘Macmillan page 9, line 7’; ‘C 7.19’ means ‘Cambridge page 7, line 19.’ These are the symbols used by Griffin and Sherburne in their notes to refer to the American and British editions.

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modifier of ‘branches of mathematics’ is thereby changed from restrictive to nonrestrictive. This change in the clause’s function drastically alters the meaning of the sentence. In the sentence’s original version, Whitehead is deliberately restricting his subject to branches of mathematics that were developed under the pure imaginative impulse and, therefore, is not implying that all branches of mathematics were thus developed. In the revised version, Whitehead appears to be talking about all branches of mathematics and parenthetically adding that they are, one and all, developed under the pure imaginative impulse.5 But the revised version cannot be correct; for Whitehead did not hold that all branches of mathematics were developed under the pure imaginative impulse. Whitehead’s relevant views on this matter are set forth in his An Introduction to Mathematics (henceforth referred to as IM).6 There Whitehead maintains that, in the initial development of some branches of mathematics, the imagination is a slave to the practical impulse. These branches owe their birth, in each case, to some pressing, practical problem spurring the mathematical imagination to devise a solution. As examples, Whitehead gives: first, the initial development of geometry to meet the needs of land-surveying (IM 22f.); second, the initial development of fractions to deal with the necessities of parcelling out lands (IM 49); third, the invention of the minus and plus signs, and of negative and positive numbers, to meet the needs of weigh-men concerned with indicating the extent goods fall short of, or exceed, a standard weight (IM 59f.); and fourth, the invention of trigonometry to meet the needs of astronomical research (IM 128f.). In each of these examples, a branch of mathematics is born from the marriage of imagination and utility. [166] But not all mathematical branches, Whitehead maintains, are born in this fashion, for there are some branches—the examples he gives are conic sections (IM 100; PR 6/9) and the theories of probability, tensors, 5

The remark ‘thus controlled’ is explanatory, not restrictive. The control which Whitehead is alluding to is the pursuit of logical perfection. Obviously, all branches of mathematics—including those developed under the pure imaginative impulse—are developed under the constraints of logic.

6

The references in the text are to Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958, Galaxy Book). In the Henry Holt Company edition (New York, 1911) the relevant passages are on pages 36f., 71f., 85f., 174f., and 136f. (Given in the order in which I refer to them in the text).

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and matrices (PR 6/9)—whose development is due to the mathematical imagination asserting itself without benefit of any practical or utilitarian impulse (IM 100; see also AI 199f.). These branches, invented “without a thought of any utility other than to satisfy the craving for knowledge” (IM 100), are the only ones of which it may be said that they are developed under the pure imaginative impulse. They are the ones Whitehead had in mind in PR when he wrote the sentence under consideration. Conic sections, for example, were studied as an abstract, useless theory for eighteen hundred years before they were found necessary for attaining knowledge of the laws of planetary motion (IM 100). The context in which the sentence appears is illuminating (PR 5f./7f.). Whitehead is discussing two conditions for success in the imaginative construction of metaphysical systems: first, that the method of descriptive generalization be used; second, that categoreal coherence and logical perfection be unflinchingly pursued. Both conditions bear on the system’s applicability, i.e., on how much of our experience can be interpreted in terms of the system’s notions and principles. The first condition is sufficient to guarantee some degree of applicability or success; for the system’s categories will be applicable in the field of knowledge from which the generalization is made. But the success of the system is trivial if the ideas it derives from a given locus of knowledge do not find application outside that locus. To achieve genuine success, the second condition is necessary, though not sufficient. Whitehead turns to the example of mathematics in order to emphasize the importance of logical perfection. The example is relevant because of that discipline’s similarities with metaphysics: both disciplines employ the method of imaginative construction; both develop their concepts by the “generalization of special notions observed in particular instances” (PR 6/9); and both seek conceptual coherence and logical perfection. Accordingly, since branches of mathematics developed by the purely imaginative, but logically controlled, impulse have eventually found important applications, we have reason to hope that metaphysical theories produced by the imaginative, but logically constrained, use of descriptive generalization also will find important applications. In this regard, it would be pointless for Whitehead to talk about mathematical branches developed to solve specific practical problems; for it is neither surprising nor revealing that those branches have found important applications. What is pertinent for Whitehead to emphasize is that even branches developed without any regard to utility, but under the constraints of logic, have subsequently been given important applications.

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Clearly, then, in the sentence in question Whitehead wishes to restrict his subject to mathematical branches that were developed under the pure imaginative impulse. By converting a restrictive [167] clause into a nonrestrictive one, Griffin and Sherburne have distorted the meaning Whitehead intended his sentence to have. Since the authors construe the change as trivial—they flag it with a single obelisk and do not offer any justification for it in the Notes—we may conclude that their unfamiliarity with this particular aspect of Whitehead’s views on the development of mathematics has led them astray. In Section VII of the first chapter of Part III, Griffin and Sherburne have altered the order of the section’s five paragraphs so that what was originally the third paragraph now appears last. Neither of the two notes referring to this alteration (227.36 and 228.16) offers an explanation as to why the paragraph’s relocation was thought necessary or justifiable. Obviously, the editors judged the paragraph did not read well in its original location. With that judgment I entirely agree. But there is a better location for the paragraph than that chosen by the editors. Indeed, the editors’ choice of location suggests they have not fully understood the import of the paragraph in its relation to the doctrines discussed in Section VII. To my way of understanding it, the paragraph—with the order of its two sentences reversed—should trade places with the original second paragraph. To argue for this claim, we must first examine the entire section in its proper context. The first three categoreal obligations—Subjective Unity, Objective Identity, and Objective Diversity—are introduced in Sections IV and V of the chapter. In Section VI, we are told that the importance of these categories can be understood only if we consider the actual world correlative with an actual entity “in the light of a ‘medium’ leading up to the concrescence of the actual entity in question” (PR 226/345). Now, in the original editions, Section VII has the following structure. The first paragraph notes that, in the preceding section, “only the first category has been explicitly alluded to” (PR 227/347). The purpose of the present section, it then adds, is to point out “how the other categories have been tacitly presupposed” (PR 227/347). The second paragraph then makes explicit how the second category has been presupposed, while the fourth paragraph does the same for the fourth category. The fifth paragraph, in turn, explains that the third category “is in truth only a particular application of the second category” (PR 228/348). As for the troublesome third paragraph, it reads, in its entirety, as follows: Thus the process of integration, which lies at the very heart of the concrescence, is the urge imposed on the concrescent unity of that universe by the three categories of subjective unity, of

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objective identity, and of objective diversity. The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element in the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities. (PR 347f.) The location of this paragraph is odd precisely because it needlessly [168] interrupts what otherwise would have been a continuous discussion of the two categories not explicitly alluded to in Section VI. Presumably, Griffin and Sherburne sought to eliminate this interruption by moving the paragraph to the end of the section. Unfortunately, by placing it there, they inadvertently compounded a different interruption without adequately solving the one with which they were wrestling. For notice, in this regard, the continuity of thought between the last two sentences of the original fourth paragraph and the first sentence of Section VIII. The former read: “The category of objective diversity expresses the inexorable condition—that a complex unity must provide for each of its components a real diversity of status, with a reality that bears the same sense as its own reality and is peculiar to itself. In other words, a real unity cannot provide sham diversities of status for its diverse components” (PR 227/348). The latter: “This diversity of status, combined with the real unity of the component, means that the real synthesis of two component elements in the objective datum of a feeling must be infected with the individual particularities of each of the relata” (PR 228/348f). The obvious continuity of development exhibited by these two paragraphs suggests that the original fifth paragraph was carelessly added by Whitehead some time after the composition of Sections VII and VIII. By making the addition, Whitehead seriously disrupted the continuity between the two sections; in turn, by moving the original third paragraph to the end of Section VII, Griffin and Sherburne have only worsened this disruption. To avoid increasing the disruption of continuity between sections, while at the same time eliminating the internal disruption of Section VII, it is necessary to make the two interrelated changes I mentioned earlier: first, the order of the two sentences constituting the original third paragraph must be reversed; and second, the order of what originally were the second and third paragraphs must be reversed also. When these changes are made, moreover, we find that the ideas discussed in the section are being developed in a perfectly coherent and continuous manner. Let us next consider how Section VII would read if these changes were instituted. The first paragraph would continue to have its present transitional function. But the second paragraph now would begin with a sentence

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alluding to the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities—alluding, that is, to the self-identities and mutual diversities whose preservation is ontologically guaranteed by the Categories of Objective Identity and Objective Diversity, respectively. This sentence expresses also, though all too cryptically, the reason why the first three Categoreal Obligations are necessary: that the oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each item in the universe, repeat themselves in each novel creature. Because of this repetition of the universe in each of its creatures, every past actual entity, except those in the immediate past, will be causally objectified an indefinite number of times in the actual entity relative to which that past is defined. Yet all objectifications of one actual entity in [169] another must be integrated so that ultimately the novel actuality has but one integral prehension of the past entity and, conversely, the past entity has but one integral function, however complex, in the novel actuality. The prehensive integration of the many objectifications of one self-same entity is governed by the first three Categoreal Obligations—and that is precisely what is stated by what now would be the second sentence of the section’s second paragraph. This second sentence, it should be noted, contains a phrase—‘that universe’—for which there is no adequate referent in either the original, or the corrected, text. In my proposed modification of the text, however, the phrase obviously refers to the universe as characterized in the previous sentence. Moreover, what now would be the section’s third paragraph itself begins with a reference to the integration that has just been said to lie at the very heart of each concrescence. This third paragraph, together with the fourth and the fifth, now would uninterruptedly carry out the promised discussion of the second and third categories. With the changes I have suggested, we obtain, or so it seems to me, a far better reading of Section VII than is obtained through the change made by Griffin and Sherburne in the corrected edition. In addition, my suggestion allows for a straightforward, if entirely speculative, explanation of how the section became disorganized in the first place. Simply assume that, in Whitehead’s manuscript, the section had the structure I have given it, except that the two sentences constituting the second paragraph were in the order they were first published. Assume also that the relevant manuscriptpage included some sort of notation instructing the typist to reverse the order of the said two sentences. Finally, assume the typist misunderstood Whitehead’s instructions and reversed the order of the manuscript’s second and third paragraphs instead of reversing the order of the sentences. Section VII then would have the structure with which it appeared in the original editions.

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Another troublesome modification of the text occurs on line 13 of page 88 (M 135.8; C 122.18). There the editors have substituted ‘goad’ for ‘goal’ so that the sentence this modified now reads: “This is the conception of God, according to which he is considered as the outcome of creativity, as the foundation of order, and as the goad towards novelty” (emphasis mine). At first glance, this textual change appears plausible and quite harmless. After all, the original ‘goal towards novelty’ is, to say the least, a very unusual phrase. Furthermore, ‘goal’ cannot function as a verb; but a word that could function as a verb—a verb capable of suggesting the divine activity to which Whitehead is alluding—is precisely what we would expect to precede the preposition ‘towards.’ Therefore, the original phrase appears to be nonsensical as well as unusual. ‘Goad toward novelty,’ on the other hand, is an intelligible phrase whose meaning is apparently in keeping with the immediate import of the whole sentence; for the sentence’s last phrase is obviously intended as an allusion to God as providing the initial subjective aim for each actual occasion. The phrase completes [170] the sentence’s brief characterization of God: God is not only the outcome of creativity and the foundation of order, but is also the agency whereby each actual occasion comes into existence with its creative activity already aimed towards the actualization of some relevant novelty. The initial aim may be modified, and must be made more specific, by the occasion’s autonomous decisions. But the fact remains that what is being thus modified and specified is the occasion’s God-given initial aim. By reason of God’s agency, in other words, the activity of each actual occasion is oriented towards an achievement that is, to some degree or other, qualitatively novel. Surely, that is the point of the phrase under consideration. Unfortunately, the change from ‘goal’ to ‘goad’ ceases to appear harmless as soon as we remember both that ‘to goad’ means ‘to drive, or force, into action by causing pain with a sharp, pointed stick’ and that, for Whitehead, God’s influence on each actual occasion is always persuasive, never coercive (AI 213f). Surely, any goading agency, if we take ‘goading’ in the strict and correct sense, is a coercive agency. ‘Goad,’ therefore, is definitely the wrong word to suggest God’s persuasive agency. Oddly enough, Griffin and Sherburne are well aware that the word seems incompatible with Whitehead’s conception of how God influences the world. They say as much in their long note on this textual change. Nonetheless, they attempt to justify the change in two ways: first, by speculating that “the presence of ‘goad’ in the text is easily intelligible as a mistranscription of Whitehead’s handwriting”; and second, by claiming that it is “quite normal to say that one person goads another to action when the former insistently presents the latter with an attractive ideal” (PR 398).

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I do not find either of these reasons persuasive, much less conclusive.7 In the first place, the presence of ‘goal’ in the original text could be explained in any number of plausible ways. It could be, for example, that the many similar senses shared by ‘goal’ and ‘aim’ have misled Whitehead into believing that ‘goal towards novelty’ could be used as synonymous with ‘aim towards novelty.’ Notice, in this regard, that Whitehead may have wanted to avoid using ‘aim’ twice in two consecutive sentences, for the phrase ‘subjective aim’ appears in the next sentence. Notice, too, that Whitehead does use ‘aim’ in other passages where he is characterizing God as “the ground of all order and of all originality” (PR 108. 164). Thus, in one passage he states that what is inexorable in God “is valuation as an aim towards ‘order’” (PR 244/373; emphasis mine); in another, that God, in his function of providing the initial phase of each occasion’s subjective aim, “is the organ of novelty, aiming at intensification” (PR 67/104; emphasis mine). The editor’s claim that it is normal to use ‘goading’ to describe the activity of one person getting another to act by insistently presenting the latter with an attractive ideal is ultimately without substance. I know of no dictionary—and I have consulted a good number of them—listing that sense of the word. Hence, using the word in that manner cannot be considered normal. Moreover, if some speakers use [171] it that way, they are using it incorrectly. To be sure, the figurative use of ‘goading’ is compatible with the idea that the goading person has the best interests of the goaded person in mind. But that use of the word almost always involves the sense that the goader is causing some psychological discomfort or pain—however slight—to the person being goaded. Peer pressure among youths, for example, is often exerted through forms of ridicule which, in effect, goad the individual to conform to the values of the group. Accordingly, in this example and in most others, goading—regardless of how slight the discomfort it causes, or of how noble the end it serves—is a form of coercion. We should not imagine that Whitehead was unfamiliar with the coercive connotation of ‘goading’; for he correctly uses the word in its relevant 7

Griffin is so convinced of the appropriateness of ‘goad towards novelty’ that he does not hesitate to use it in his exposition of Whitehead’s conception of God. See John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), pp. 59 and 68. Of course, his exposition makes it very clear that God’s influence is persuasive and not coercive.

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figurative sense when he asserts that “the pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit, a refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings” (SMW 31; emphasis mine). Nor should we think that he would not have been bothered by the possibility of ‘goad towards novelty’ misleading the reader into believing that Whitehead attributes a coercive power to God; for the doctrine that God’s power is persuasive rather than coercive is one that Whitehead took great pains to make clear and unambiguous. In AI, for example, he makes it abundantly clear that he agrees with Plato in respect to the doctrine “that the divine element in the world is to be conceived as a persuasive agency and not as a coercive agency” (AI 213; see also 189, 214, and SMW 276). An additional piece of evidence, in this regard, would not have been available were it not for the editors’ inclusion in the corrected edition of Whitehead’s marginalia to PR. Thus, in their note to 346.35, we find out that, in his Macmillan copy, “Whitehead crossed out ‘leading’ and wrote both ‘persuading’ and ‘swaying’ in the margin.” The passage Whitehead is correcting reads: “God is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (M 526). It is ironic that Griffin and Sherburne apparently failed to see the implications of Whitehead’s correction of the text; for if Whitehead found ‘leading’ inappropriate to suggest God’s persuasive agency, would he not have found ‘goading’ even more inappropriate? The evidence against the appropriateness of ‘goad’ is, it seems to me, incontrovertible. A replacement for ‘goal’ is desirable still; but there are at least three other words, all actually used by Whitehead in his discussion of God’s persuasive agency, which are each far more appropriate than ‘goad’; they are: ‘aim’, ‘urge’, and ‘lure’. For a number of reasons, some already sketched here, I favor ‘aim’; but a strong case could be made for each of the other terms. It is puzzling to note that Griffin and Sherburne chose not to alter the text at 346.35 because Whitehead, they claim, “did not clearly specify a substitute” (note to 346.35). How much clearer could we expect Whitehead to be? He has crossed out ‘leading’ and has written both ‘persuading’ and ‘swaying’ in the margin. Is it not crystal clear that to him either of the latter words was preferable to the former? I simply do not understand what more, by way of clarity, the editors [172] could have wanted. There are, I suspect, a good number of scholars who may wish that Griffin and Sherburne had instituted a number of textual changes not actually made in the corrected edition. I suspect also that, if we eliminate all suggested changes which are based on idiosyncratic or debatable interpretations, we will find only a small number of justifiable changes that

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Griffin and Sherburne have failed to carry out. The failure to replace ‘leading’ with either ‘persuading’ or ‘swaying’ is one of them. Another is the failure to correct a passage where Whitehead twice refers to the principle of relativity, which is the fourth category of explanation, as “the third metaphysical principle” (PR 212/324). The editors justify their decision to let the text stand as follows: It might be thought that the twofold reference in this paragraph to the ‘principle of relativity,’ which is the fourth category of explanation (and is referred to as such), as the third metaphysical principle is erroneous. However it is possible that this paragraph was incorporated from Whitehead’s Gifford Lectures…, and that this reference reflects a number used therein for some of his metaphysical principle[…]. (PR 407); (note 212.37). Surely, this note, if it is meant to convince us that the twofold reference is erroneous, is a blatant non sequitur. Regardless of what number it may have had in the Gifford Lectures, the principle of relativity is the fourth category of explanation in the categoreal scheme of PR. And reference to it as the third metaphysical principle, in the absence of another scheme of principles explicitly mentioned in PR, is, indeed, erroneous. PR, after all, is not meant to be read as a transcript of the original Gifford Lectures. The editors’ reluctance to alter this passage is all the more difficult to understand given that they have not hesitated to correct other inconsistencies of internal reference which also could have originated in the transition from the Gifford’s draft to the final, published draft. Particularly pertinent is the fact that they did correct a passage where the ontological principle is referred to as the seventeenth, instead of the eighteenth, category of explanation (PR 256/392). For notice that the shifts from fourth to third and eighteenth to seventeenth are related shifts that could be simultaneously explained if Whitehead, after writing the passages in question, had at a later time added a new category of explanation to the categoreal scheme and had placed it ahead of the principle of relativity. There are a few other places where noncontroversial textual alterations could have been made; but though they represent lost opportunities to improve the text, at least they are not instances of worsening it. There are also, as I said earlier, other textual changes actual made with which serious issue can be taken. But, for the purposes of their review, no additional instances of changes avoided or changes made need be considered. The ones already discussed suffice to justify this conclusion: the corrected edition is an outstanding edito- [173] rial achievement, a labor of love for which Whiteheadians will be forever indebted to Griffin and Sherburne; but it would be unsafe for its readers to assume that each of its textual

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modifications represents an improvement—a few do not. Whiteheadian scholars, therefore, have a responsibility to read the editorial corrections critically and to report, perhaps in this journal, their misgivings and suggestions.8

8

I am grateful for the encouragement I received from Lewis Ford and Barry Crawford while writing this review. The latter’s thorough criticism of the essay’s penultimate draft enabled me to improve both its form and content.

4. Translations Spanish Translation (1956) Reviewed by Garcia Bacca, 1956 “Proceso y Realidad”. Traducción del inglés al castellano por J. Rovira Armengol. Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1956, 474 páginas. Review by Juan D. García Bacca (Revista Nacional de Cultura 18, Caracas, Julio–Octubre de 1956, Año XVIII—Nros. 117 y 118 [Nº pp. reseña 169–170]). Translated into English by Erik Norvelle.1

Three gigantic translations have been finished in America in the last few years: James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Subirats; Heidegger’s Being and Time, by Gaos; and Whitehead’s Process and Reality, by J. Rovira Armengol. These works have been incorporated into the Biblioteca filosófica by Romero, an editor with a good eye for the valuable. Whitehead came to be a philosopher, and discovered himself as a metaphysician, after a long career as a mathematician, physicist and logician. To him and to Russell we owe the three imposing volumes of Principia Mathematica, the classic work of pure, formal and mathematical logic, written completely in a unique symbolic language which is untranslatable to any ordinary language; it is a language without words, literary syntax or traditional grammar. But that from a logician, mathematician and physicist there should be born a metaphysician—of great stature, and in our times, and in England—, I would not say that it is a miracle, but certainly that it is a case of 1

E. Norvelle is a doctoral student at the University of Navarra (Spain), specializing in the philosophy of science and nature in Thomas Aquinas. He is scheduled to complete his doctoral program in Fall of 2009; [email protected].

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spontaneous generation, or, in more current terminology, a case of “spiritual mutation”. Every mutation (call it “creativity,” following the distinctive terminology of Whitehead) brings with it the rupture of the mold or channel of nature. When Whitehead “mutated” into a metaphysician, he left the species of logicians and physicists, many of the same things occurred which I will perform here, thanks to my readers, less one: to wit, the rupture of the classically accepted philosophical language; it hardly needs saying that this subversion includes the fixed language of the modern academy. The translator of works which are linguistically, literarily and philosophically subversive, such as Ulysses, Being and Time, and Process and Reality, does not typically enjoy the same degree of benevolence from the readers of the translation as is given to the original author. A good part of the murmur of criticism which has surrounded the translation of Being and Time, by Gaos, will also envelop the version of Rovira Armengol, and for similar reasons. Unjustly so, for two reasons: first, it is one thing to perform and/or write rhetoric, oratory and philosophical literature,—secondary genres, frequently a degeneration of an authentic philosophical style—and a very different thing to write, for example, The Phenomology of Spirit (Hegel), Metaphysics of Knowledge (Hartmann), the Prior and Posterior Analytics (Aristotle), Being and Essence (St. Aquinas), Metaphysical Disputations (Suárez), Being and Time (Heidegger), Process and Reality (Whitehead)… there exists, fortunately, no mathematical oratory or astronomical rhetoric. There are still those who believe that philosophical rhetoric is admissible. Process and Reality, both in its original language as well as in Spanish,—and the same could be said of Being and Time—, is philosophy written in philosophical language,—just as severe, strict, spare and refined as mathematics. And just as effective in dealing seriously with its questions as mathematics. But who wants to take on the labor of learning it? Secondly: it is reported that Ortega y Gasset once said of Unamuno, that he wrote in a Spanish which had been “learned”; that of Ortega, naturally, would be an “innate” Spanish, which was born and is connatural with him. But what stunningly vivid things Unamuno was able to write, in his “learned” Spanish! Whitehead wrote metaphysics in a “learned” philosophical language, not in the “natural,” classic language. Heidegger wrote frequently in an “invented” German. And all of it mind-blowing— and especially in Spanish, thanks to the transgressions of the original language—for the translators. And for those readers who are conscientious, patient, and resolved to learn to read and speak in philosophical idiom.

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If we have made this observations, it has not only been in order to praise, although less than it deserves, the version of Rovira Armengol, and to have the opportunity to do the same with that of Gaos, but rather in case we might have the good fortune of putting the idea into certain heads, and into the environment generally, that philosophy has its own particular language, all its own, with the same right as that of mathematics, which has also forged its own.

Italian Translation (1965) Reviewed by Guzzo, 1965 Il Processo e la Realtà. Saggio di Cosmologia, Tr. Nynfa Bosco, Milan, V. Bompiani, Idee Nuove 41, 1965. Review by A. Guzzo (Filosofia 16, 1965, 821). Translated into English by Patrick Coppock.1

Deeply desired and much awaited, arriving finally after three years of delay, the translation given to us with profound personal presence by Nynfa Bosco, of ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD’S masterpiece: “Process and Reality,” “the most daring and monumental attempt,” as we justly can read on the dustcover, “at a complete metaphysical reconstruction of contemporary thought”. The book is being published as volume XLI of “Idee nuove,” the collection established a little less than thirty years ago by Antonio Banfi with the publisher Bompiani. To have dared to affront such a work and to have given to italian this impetuous poetry of thought written by Whitehead at his most supreme maturity of mind, is a great gift to Italian culture by Nynfa Bosco: a gift that shows the true measure of genius of the giver.

1

Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy; http://www.unimore.it; [email protected].

Italian Translation (1965) Reviewed by Sandro Travaglia, 1966 Il Processo e la Realtà. Saggio di Cosmologia, Tr. Nynfa Bosco, Milan, V. Bompiani, Idee Nuove 41, 1965. Review by Sandro Travaglia (University of Padua) (Giornale di Metafisica, 21, 1966: 872). Translated into English by Patrick Coppock.1

The widespread interest shown in Italy over the last few years for Whitehead’s activity as a philosopher justifies the occasion of this first translation into Italian of the English original of his most famous work. As the translator makes clear in her lucid introduction: “the main characteristic of this renewed interest resides in the fact that while it has authoritatively confirmed, without substantial alteration, the already solid reputation that Whitehead enjoyed as a physicist, and even more so, as a mathematician, it has nonetheless thrown new light on important aspects of his philosophy, and has also seen supporting claims on the part of biologists for the scientific validity of his organic approach” (p. 6). Published for the first time in 1929, the work “constitutes a kind of solemn consecration by Whitehead to philosophy,” and is “the work of a mathematician and physicist who, nudged out into the streams of philosophy by his own scientific work, finally manages to reclaim for philosophy the right and responsibility not to ignore the lessons of science, while, at the same time, conducting its own independent research, both in terms of method and object” (p. 9). For Whitehead, philosophical research “resembles the flight of an aeroplane that leaves the earth only to return to it, having on its return covered a space that has become ever wider, the higher its flight path has been” (p. 13).

1

Department of Social, Cognitive and Quantitative Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy; http://www.unimore.it; [email protected].

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Whitehead’s conception of organism corresponds, according to Ms. Bosco, to an “uninterrupted, but nonetheless absolutely discontinuous flow” which “is both process and reality; or rather: a continuous organic concrescence towards perfect unity in perfect variety, expressible only by means of a consolidated use of both the categories of reality and process.” (p. 21) As a useful interpretative criteria for this, in many ways linguistically difficult and conceptually intense work, the translator suggests the idea of a “violent and persistent tension between two perspectives,” the one “monadic” and the other “relational” (p. 25). The resulting translation sustains complete faith in the programmatic engagement of Ms. Bosco, who has desired to “assume the responsibility of distancing herself from the sounds of words and turns of phrase in order to better transmit their meaning” (p. 7). Even though it has not always been possible to avoid this, Whitehead’s semantic obscurity and excessive terminological technicality actually turn out to be noticeably attenuated in the Italian text. All in all, then, the Italian version of Whitehead’s work emerges as a clear, illuminating success.

German Translation (1979) Reviewed by Wolf-Gazo, 1979 Prozess und Realität. Entwurf einer Kosmologie, Übersetzt und mit einem Nachtwort versehen von Hans Günter Holl, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979, 665p. Ernest Wolf-Gazo. Process Studies 9, no. 3 (1979): 134–137. Ernest Wolf-Gazo (1947–) received his Ph.D. from Bonn University in 1974. Having taught in Germany, the US, Belgium, Turkey, and Malaysia he is currently a Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo. He is the author of, among others, A. N. Whitehead: Einführung in seine Kosmologie (1980), and Process in Context: Essays in Post Whiteheadian Perspectives (1988).

Exactly fifty years after Whitehead’s opus magnum was published in 1929, the German translation appeared in November 1979. This event tells us something about the philosophical development in German-speaking countries. Thus, before I give the English reader a rough idea of how the terminology and language of Whitehead has been handled by Dr. H. G. Holl, the translator, I want to draw a quick sketch of literature existing in German on Whitehead. Science and the Modern World has been translated as Wissenschaft und die Moderne Welt as early as 1949; yet, there was no resonance. However, this work will be republished in paperback by Suhrkamp Verlag in spring, 1981. Adventures of Ideas appeared as Abenteuer der Ideen in 1971; again, the philosophical public took hardly any notice. The translation of that particular work had not been very smooth, and several paragraphs had been left out by mistake. In 1974, The Function of Reason appeared as Die Funktion der Vernunft as a Reclam paperback. All these translations will, now that the major work of Whitehead has been translated, carry their own weight and hopefully catch the interest of the German-speaking philosophical community in order to supplement their own understanding of Whitehead’s basic thought. After the Marx and Hegel renaissance has subsided somewhat and there is a want for a new perspective in philosophy, Whitehead and process philosophy, combined with an interdisciplinary

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approach in the sciences could perhaps enter into the field of philosophical interest on a larger scale than has been the case hitherto. As far as secondary literature on Whitehead is concerned, there exists, to date, no full-length introductory work on Whitehead in German. This unfortunate situation should change quickly within the next few years. In June, 1980, the first general introduction in German on Whitehead’s basic doctrine of cosmology will appear as a paperback: Alfred North Whitehead. Einführung in seine Kosmologie, edited by E. Wolf-Gazo (Freiburg i.Br.: Alber Verlag). This volume introduces the German reader into the general aspects and concepts of Whitehead’s “Naturphilosophie.” The volume includes essays by Leclerc, Hartshorne, Jung, Boehme, and the editor. In addition, a glossary (with examples of how Whitehead used his concepts in a typical context), a time table of the major events of Whitehead’s life, and an annotated bibliography (including a complete list of all items written in German on Whitehead, e.g. reviews, articles, or dissertations), help to orient the German reader. Moreover, Suhrkamp Verlag will sponsor Materialienband zu “Prozess und Realität,” (eds. H. G. Holl and E. WolfGazo), to appear in spring, 1981. A “Habilitationsschrift” submitted to the philosophical faculty of Fribourg University, entitled Das Organische Denken—Die Organismusphilosophie A. N. Whiteheads in ihrem Verhältnis zur Tradition, by Dr. Reto L. Fetz, will also be published by Alber Verlag spring, 1981. Thus, an important first step has been done to acquaint the German reader with Prozess und Realität. The fact that an international Whitehead symposion is scheduled for fall, 1981, in Bonn should reinforce these efforts to make Whitehead more available as an alternative to native philosophical perspectives now entertained in the German-speaking philosophical community. Lastly, “process theology” should influence more and more German readers, since Cobb and Griffin’s book Process Theology, An Introductory Exposition appeared in German translation in December, 1979, from Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag in Göttingen. The most difficult aspect of the translation was, of course, how to render adequately into German Whitehead’s peculiar terminology and language. This difficulty was particularly great, since the translator wanted to make sure the German reader is not misled to categorize Whitehead’s terminology in terms of his own philosophical language-tradition. Thus, we want to catalogue the most important Whiteheadian terms: Die organistische Philosophie for the philosophy of organism; das wirkliche Einzelwesen for actual entity; zeitlose Gegenstaenden for eternal objects; daswirkliche Ereingnis for actual occasion; Konkretisierung for concrescence; Anreiz for lure; das Eintreten for ingression; das Erfassen

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for prehension; das Empfinden for feeling; die Erfuellung for satisfaction; Sinnesgegenstand for sensum; Wahrnehmungsgegenstand for percept; die Gabelung der Natur for the bifurcation of nature; Trugschluss der unangebrachten Konkretisierung for the fallacy of misplaced concreteness; Kategorie des Elementaren for the category of the Ultimate; vergegenwaertigender Unmittelbarkeit for presentational immediacy; kausale Wirksamkeit for causal efficacy; symbolischer Bezug for symbolic reference; Entwicklungsstraenge for strains; glatte Oerter for flat loci; die Theorie der Ausdehnung for the theory of extension (here ‘Ausdehnung’ reminds us immediately of Grassman); stetigen Vergehens for perpetual perishing; and finally, die Folgenatur Gottes for the consequent nature of God. In his postscript to the translation, the translator points out, rightly so, that the German reader must “unhinge” himself from the habit of thinking in terms of the subject-object form or substance-predicate categories. Yet, perhaps there is an advantage that a German reader might have, due to his classical background. Most of Whitehead’s important terms can be reconstructed from their Latin or Greek stems—a principle which the translator followed very closely. By rendering ‘actual entity’ as ‘wirkliches Einzelwesen’, it was clear that the translator derived ‘wirklich’ from the verb ‘wirken’, i.e., to have force, effect, or impact, connoting sheer activity. ‘Entity’ sounds shallow if it is translated as ‘Entität’; thus, the translator borrowed from Gottfried Martin’s translation of ‘Ousia’ in Aristotle as ‘Einzelwesen’ (see g. Martin, Allgemeine Metaphysik, de Gruyter, W. Berlin 1965, particularly Part I: Das Einzelwesen und seine Bestimmungen, pp. 40–57; English translation, London: Macmillan, 1973). The German ‘aktuell’ or ‘Aktualität’ carries the meaning of ‘contemporaeneousness’ and would be misunderstood if we would read ‘aktuale Entität’ or ‘aktuales Einzelwesen’. Also, translating ‘reality’ as ‘Wirklichkeit’, instead of ‘Realität’, comes closer to the spirit of Whitehead’s meaning. Wirklichkeit can be associated better to the idea of Prozess, rather than Realität, since the former conveys the idea of wirken, instead of Substanz, inherent in the idea of Realität. Sometimes actual entity has been translated (in essays and dissertations) as ‘wirkliches Sein’, ‘wirkliches Wesen’, or even ‘wirkliches Dasein’—needless to say, these renderings would not only be a falsification of the original meaning, but would also mislead the German reader into a Heideggerian point-of-noreturn. ‘Zeitloser Gegensand’ for ‘eternal object’ is a happy translation. ‘Eternal’ usually means ‘ewig’; however, ‘ewige Gegenstaende’ would not only be contradictory, but it also sounds comic to the German ear. A real problem

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to the translator, no doubt, has been the term ‘prehensions’. The German ‘erfassen’ captures the verbal meaning of ‘prehensions’ quite aptly; however, there is a serious difficult translating adequately the nominal form. Dr. Holl translates ‘prehensions’ as ‘erfasste Informationen’; ‘conceptual prehensions’ and ‘physical prehensions’ as ‘begrifflich erfasste Informationen’ and ‘physisch erfasste Informationen’, respectively. These terms, in translation, are quite unhappy choices and probably will lead to some problems for the German reader. The translator’s reason has been this: the Latin ‘in-formatio’ gives the term ‘prehension’ its vectorial ‘Gestalt’. However, ‘information’ can also mean ‘Vorstellung’, meaning ‘having an idea’. Thus, the plural form of ‘prehensions’ into ‘erfasste Informationen’ seems more like an interpretation on the part of the translator, rather than an exact rendering of the term in question. I would suggest that, perhaps, one could use the terms ‘Erfassungen’ or ‘erfasste Momente’ and add a footnote of explanation to appropriate chapters informing the German reader of this specific difficulty. Part three, “The Theory of Prehensions,” is translated as “Die Theorie des Erfassens,” so there exists an inconsistency in translating the plural form of ‘prehension.’ The term ‘feeling’ is translated as ‘empfinden.’ The exact German equivalent would be ‘Gefühl’; however, the German reader tends to associate ‘Gefühl’ with either a vague notion or some ‘Gefühlsleben’ in an unphilosophical sense. A difficulty has been the term ‘concrescence’, translated as ‘die Konkretisierung’. Here, the translator could have used ‘das Zusammenwachsen’, which, I think, would have closer to Whitehead’s meaning. ‘Enjoyment’ is usually given as ‘erleben’; no doubt, ‘erfreuen’, as referring to the subject encountering its environment, would have been more adequate, since the German idea of ‘erleben’ does not necessarily transmit the feeling of joy—in fact, ‘erleben’ is a rather neutral term. A serious difficulty turned out to be an adequate term for ‘philosophy of organism’, rendered as ‘organistische Philosophie’. This seems a somewhat awkward translation of that important concept. It would suffice to translate simply ‘Organismusphilosophie’ or just ‘philosophie des Organismus’. The German term ‘organistisch’ can also be an adjective for denoting an organ player, for instance, in the statement “Die organistischen Faehigkeiten von J. S. Bach waren gross.” As for the translation as a whole, my report must be positive. Having attempted myself to translate a large portion of PR into German, I can only congratulate Dr. Holl on his excellent job. There are some unhappy terms in the translation, but these can be corrected in the forthcoming paperback edition of 1981.

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The basic psychological problem the German readers will face, no doubt, is to find an “anchor” for orientation within their own philosophical tradition to come to terms with the novelty of Whitehead’s thought. The fact that many native German readers have a background in Kant or German Idealism increases (ironically) their difficulties. Whitehead, as is well known, stops short of treating, in detail, Kant and subsequent philosophical streams. German readers will have to take recourse to their old classical background. They will also reconsider some thinkers, in their own tradition, which may have been unduly neglected, e.g., the early Schelling, Max Scheler, Wilhelm Worringer, Heinrich Wolfflin, and Rudolf Arnheim (the Gestalt-psychologist). In T. W. Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie, published posthumously, we find, surprisingly, interesting aspects of the idea of process in its relation to aesthetic experience. Thus, for the German reader it will be tough going until a bridge to Whitehead is found. This challenge, however, might mobilize efforts which may yield surprising results for the German philosophical life.

French Translation (1995) Reviewed by Weber, 1998 Procès et réalité. Essai de cosmologie. Traduit de l’anglais par Daniel Charles, Maurice Elie, Michel Fuchs, Jean-Luc Gautero, Dominique Janicaud, Robert Sasso et Arnaud Villani. Paris: NRF Éditions Gallimard, Bibliothèque de philosophie, 1995. 579 pp. Michel Weber. Process Studies, Vol. 27, 1998, pp. 149–151.

The judging of a translation, however tricky, can follow a very basic rule: when a work is successful this fact remains concealed behind the stream of thought of the author; the suppleness and fluidity of the book still undulates in unison with the founding intuition. We can then re-encounter the balanced sway of the original and, through it, rediscover the author’s strokes of insight. On the other hand, it fails completely when it becomes a screen between the reader and the writer’s intuition. Now, in the case of the translation of a philosophical text, there is an additional constraint: since the ability to comprehend the intentions of the original author is not always simple, it is doubly difficult to convey these in another language. Hence, being able to refer to the original easily is essential, and the translator has to facilitate this in every way. More precisely, although some liberty can be taken with the contingent features of the text (like the unavoidable divergences of the idioms), the translation of the technicalities has to be treated with particular care—and this all the more so since PR is defined by Whitehead himself as an endeavor of categorisation. The philosopher, indeed, usually builds on the polysemiality of the language: one single key-concept carries a semantic nebulae whose coherence generates its specific meaning. (A fact which is furthermore beyond the traditional partition of equivocy, univocacy and analogy.) To say it simply: if the translator keeps changing the wording, how can the reader possibly recognise the categories involved, and organise them in the way the author intended? With this question, we reach the main paradox of the translation procedure: ideally free from all interpretation (in order not to lead the reader in a particular path), it requires a preliminary global comprehension—i.e., an interpretation—in order that we do not face the innumerable puzzles a translation generates in an undisciplined way.

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Before analysing the translation itself (hereafter cited as “PRf”), let us say a word about the three main practical premises involved. All are very promising in the tangential way they approach the hermeneutical circle. No less than seven scholars have been involved in the project. D. W. Sherburne, who was asked to give a short seminar in the Université de Nice to polish the team’s understanding of Whitehead’s intuitions, stated in a private correspondence that he has been truly impressed by the quality and diversity of the French scholars. The book begins with Sasso’s short presentation on the original text, in which we learn that a scan of PR (i.e., a computerised version) has been produced to support the reflections of the team. No doubt it should allow a perfect correlation of all the occurrences of (at least) the main concepts involved. PRf also opportunely mentions the pagination of the Corrected edition. Janicaud wrote the introduction to the translation (a previous version of which has been published in L’Effet Whitehead—see its review in PS 23/4). The program he defines shows a genuine penetration of the nature of the philosophical investigation. It enables him to identify clearly the main problems with which the team will be confronted. As he claims, one has to start off again from the principles of Whitehead’s metaphysics, to detect the inflexions of his mind. Their general policy will be to favor intelligibility and fluidity. Janicaud also justifies some translation decisions: first, since English and French share the same etymological roots for “prehension,” “concrescence,” “ingression” and “nexus,” a bare transposition of these terms is possible; second, “actual entity” and “eternal object” are respectively translated by “entité actuelle” and “objet éternel”; third, the team found it beneficial to translate “actuality” by “actualisation” (and “actualization” by “procès d’actualisation”) in order to avoid any substantialist tone; finally, the written form “superject” is kept. It is well known that the hurried reader (or the average Whiteheadian) is satisfied to read only the first and last parts of PR. If one browses PRf from this perspective, one discovers an excellent translation, as smooth as possible in the case of such an heterogeneous work. Similarly, another main phalanx of Whiteheadians—the ones only interested in his logicogeometrical inquiries—will be satisfied with the fourth part, whose technical linearity undoubtedly facilitates the translation work. To read Whitehead in one’s own language is then simply to rediscover him. Now, the quest for the arcanum of PR—especially as manifested in Parts II and III—casts decisive light on the way the whole translation works and destroys the first positive impression. Of course, any translation involves

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imperfections, some are tolerable, others not. For example, there are a few grammatical difficulties but these are passable. Some unfortunate modifications (intentional or not) of the punctuation, however, are to be deplored. The spelling and typographical mistakes are rare: of those that do occur, the more embarrassing are the disappearance, without explanation, of two sentences (PRf 156 and PRf 218). Let us now echo some of the recurrent gross difficulties with significant consequences for our understanding of Whitehead’s vision. Our selection is ordered in a two-folded way: on the one hand, there are doubtful translations systematized by the index; on the other hand, discrepancies exist between the fair translation of the index and the actual translation in the body of work. (The translation as recorded in the index is identified by “i”.) The translation of “consistency” by “cohérence” (i) completely blurs the power of PR 3–4’s definition of speculative philosophy; in other contexts, it very rarely makes sense. “Consistance logique” is more appropriate. “Doctrine” is rendered by “théorie” (i)—which encroaches upon Whitehead’s “theory”—, or “thèse”. The French “doctrine” has the same kind of semantic field, so why not use it? “Important” becomes “décisif” (i), “valeur,” “prégnant,” “portée,” or “significatif”. “Relevant” becomes “adéquat” (i), “convenance,” or “congruence”. It is properly translated by “pertinence” only twice. “Seat” is translated by “site” (i) instead of “siège” (perhaps because they share the same pronunciation). “Contrast,” opportunely translated by “contraste” (i), becomes also “opposition”. “Definiteness” is translated by “définité” (i), but also “détermination,” “caractère défini,” “façon de se délimiter,” “nature déterminée,” “réalité définie”. “Endurance” is translated by “persistance” (i), “maintient,” and even “durée”! “Everlasting” is translated by “durant à jamais” (i), as well as “durée sans fin,” “éternel,” “immortel,” “éternité,” “pérenne,” etc. “Initial aim” is translated by “but initial” (i), “tendance initiale,” and “visée initiale”. “Perpetual perishing” is translated by “perpétuel dépérir” (i), and also “périr perpétuel,” “perpétuellement en train de périr”. The critical apparatus consists of four main facets. Sasso’s and Janicaud’s forewords, already evoked, factually replace Griffin’s “Introduction”. The “Editor’s Notes” have not been translated or replaced. The translator’s footnotes cover the following topics: one corrects the Corrected edition itself—PRf 354’s note argues for the Latin “objective” instead of the French “objectivé” of PR 219—; two justify the translation;

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three clarify PR’s cultural context; thirteen give the reference of the French translation used; twenty-four specify the reference of some unexplicit quotes (of Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, etc.) used by Whitehead. The English-French and French-English lexicon crystallise the cumbersome conceptual difficulties we have sampled above. Whether the lexicon itself proposes a fair translation or not, it is not always respected in the body of work! PR’s index has been split into a (marginally enriched) index of proper names and a dubious index of terms. The serious deficiencies in the univocity of the translation made it of course an impossible task. But things are even worse when we consider that it has been reworked: if some occurrences have been added, numerous concepts have vanished. Furthermore, nothing is said on the criterion (if any) that presided in the redefinition of this major tool (using, on the top of that, the pagination of PR). The conclusion is too obvious: whatever the literary quality of the translation, from the perspective of scholarship, it is simply not reliable. Although the premises were excellent, and despite its potentialities for helping the discovery of PR by open-minded lay persons or hurried readers, it fails in its translation of Whitehead’s technicalities as well as being fainthearted in the transposition of his neologisms. As a result, the index and the lexicon are almost useless, embodying the innumerable difficulties evoked (plus many others). The existence of the scan was an ideal opportunity to create a definite critical apparatus for PR. We are forced to conclude that that opportunity was not taken advantage of. Eventually, it goes without saying that PRf’s unsystematic slide has been facilitated by the number of translators involved. Such an unusual risk, instead of creating a fruitful synergy between the specialisations of the actors, has proved to be a strategic mistake. Note This review has benefited from a private correspondence with J.-L. Gautero, D. Janicaud and D. W. Sherburne.

5. Bibliographies American and English-speaking Scholarship on PR Steve Hulbert and John Quiring1 Johnson, Actual Entities, 1937 Johnson, A. H. Actual Entities, A Study of Alfred North Whitehead’s Theory of Reality. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1937. This is Johnson’s dissertation on Whitehead’s philosophy supervised by Whitehead. It discusses the concepts of actual entities, eternal objects, causal efficacy, presentational immediacy, civilization, process philosophy, and has a concluding summary.

Miller and Gentry, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 1938 Miller, David L. and George V. Gentry. The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead. Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company, 1938. In this book, the authors criticize the Whiteheadian concepts of extensive abstraction and space-time, as well as Whitehead’s effort to synthesize the concept of efficient cause with the concept of physical perception. However, they also find that eternal objects are a necessary part of Whitehead’s philosophical system.

1

S. Hulbert is Library Director at the Center for Process Studies and Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy/Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University. J. Quiring is Program Director at the Center for Process Studies and professor at the Victor Valley College; www.vvc.edu; [email protected].

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Blyth, Whitehead’s Theory of Knowledge, 1941 Blyth, John W. Whitehead’s Theory of Knowledge. Providence: Brown University Studies, 1941. The author claims that the effort to combine the principle of relativity, the ontological principle, and the subjectivist principle creates serious inconsistencies in Whitehead’s metaphysical system.

Schilpp, The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 1941 Schilpp, Paul A. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1941. (Second Edition, 1951) This third volume in the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers placed Whitehead in company with Dewey and Santayana, to be followed by Moore, Russell, Cassirer, Einstein, Radhakrishnan, Jaspers, Carnap, Buber, C. I. Lewis, Popper, Blanshard, Sartre, Quine, Marcel, von Wright, Hartshorne, Ayer, Ricoeur, Paul Weiss, Gadamer, Chisholm, P. F. Strawson, Davidson, S. H. Nasr, Marjorie Grene, Hintikka, and Dummett. It includes standard essays, critical or supportive, by J. Dewey, W. Hocking, W. Quine, C. I. Lewis, Roy Wood Sellars, C. Hartshorne, F. S. C. Northrop, Joseph Needham, W. M. Urban, Arthur Murphy, V. Lowe, E. B. McGilvary, J. Goheen and others. Topics include modern logic, method, God, ethics, natural knowledge, speculative reason, the philosophy of organism, physical realism, and philosophies of science, space and time, psychology, language, mind, value, aesthetics, religion, and education. In addition, the collection includes the last two speculative papers written by Whitehead—“Mathematics and the Good” and “Immortality” as well as his “Autobiographical Notes.” (All three essays will be republished in Essays in Science and Philosophy, 1947). This important collection has not lost its freshness.

Foley, A Critique of the Philosophy of Whitehead, 1946 Foley, Leo A. A Critique of the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead in Light of Thomistic Philosophy. Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1946. In this work it is argued that the notions of actual entity, relation, and causality in Whitehead’s metaphysics imply a doctrine of substance, and therefore God should be understood as Pure Act rather than as an actual entity.

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Hammerschmidt, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Time, 1947 Hammerschmidt, William W. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Time. New York: King Crown’s Press, 1947. The author claims that Whitehead’s treatment of space-time represents the core of his metaphysical system as presented in Process and Reality, and his analysis of the subject informs his entire philosophy.

Lowe et al., Whitehead and the Modern World, 1950 Lowe, Victor Augustus, Charles Hartshorne, and Allison H. Johnson. Whitehead and the Modern World: Science, Metaphysics and Civilization. Three Essays on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Boston: Beacon Press, 1950. This work collects addresses delivered at a special commemorative session at the meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, held at Knox College, Galesburg, IL May 8, 1948. The addresses are reproduced in substantially the same form in which they were presented.

Wells, Process and Unreality, 1950 Wells, Harry K. Process and Unreality. London: Kings Crown Publishers, 1950. The subtitle of this book is “A Criticism of Method in Whitehead’s Philosophy.” The author attempts to show that Whitehead could not develop an adequate cosmology because it could never deal with process on its own terms. He suggests that Whitehead might have been more successful if he had paid more attention to Hegel.

Johnson, Whitehead’s Theory of Reality, 1952 Johnson, A. H. Whitehead’s Theory of Reality [1952]. New York: Dover, 1962. Whitehead supervised Johnson’s dissertation on Whitehead’s philosophy. Whitehead’s theory of actual entities is outlined in the first three chapters (eternal objects, prehensions, subjective form and aim, causation, the two poles, autonomy, contemporaries, process, time, space, interfusion,

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subjectivism, societies, extensive continuum, and mathematical applications). Subsequent chapters discuss Whitehead’s concept of God (primordial and consequent natures, creativity, superject nature, origin of the universe), philosophy of mind (perception, consciousness, memory, imagination, thinking), theory of value (truth, beauty, good, evil, morals, peace, economic value, supreme value, language, immortality), Whitehead’s relation to other philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Bradley, Alexander, T. P. Nunn, Santayana, James, Positivism), a discussion of Whitehead’s philosophic position, and a concluding critical evaluation.

Johnson, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Civilization, 1958 Johnson, A. H. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958. In this work, the following topics are discussed: prerequisites and ideals of civilization (freedom, tolerance, persuasion, wisdom; truth, beauty, adventure, peace), basic factors of history, religion (attributes of God and the development of Christianity), social philosophy (economic reforms, political thought, international relations), general principles of education and their application, a critical review of the preceding issues, and the relation of this view of civilization to Whitehead’ metaphysics. It presents a “philosophical foundation for the ideology of democracy” in a cold war context. Calvin Schrag’s review characterized the book as a perceptive study, reconciling apparent inconsistencies in Whitehead’s thought and demonstrating how Whitehead’s philosophy of civilization is in accordance with his organic ontology. It is written for the general reader, successfully translating technical vocabulary into everyday discourse [The Journal of Philosophy 56:10 (1959): 464–8].

Leclerc, Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1958 Leclerc, Ivor. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: An Introductory Exposition. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1958. A non-technical introduction to Process and Reality, this work is often considered the best general systematic introduction to Whitehead’s thought. Leclerc systematically explores the metaphysical questions Whitehead faces in Process and Reality, placing these questions in their philosophical context.

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Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1959 Christian, William A. An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. This work is one of the first critical analyses of Whitehead’s work, focusing especially on the later works. Christian organizes his reading of Whitehead around the question of individuals, arguing that there is a contradiction in Whitehead’s thought on how individuals are both immanent in other individuals and also transcendent to each other.

Mays, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 1959 Mays, Wolfe. The Philosophy of Whitehead. New York: Macmillan Company, 1959. Whitehead postulates two kinds of entities that represent God (the general system of order present in the universe), and the World (the physical events that are related within this system. The author shows that Whitehead’s method of analysis related to these two entities bears a striking resemblance to methods used in modern logic.

Palter, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science, 1960 Palter, Robert M. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. The author points out that Whitehead’s relational theory of space and time and his notion of the event allow him to avoid the problems which arise from classical conceptions of the material world.

Lowe, Understanding Whitehead, 1962 Lowe, Victor Augustus. Understanding Whitehead. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962 Lowe, who studied with Whitehead and became his biographer, tailored a set of articles to be an introduction for those with no prior acquaintance of Whitehead’s thought. Part I provides an overview of Whitehead’s philosophy, his metaphysical system, and his philosophies of science and religion. Part II, “The Development of Whitehead’s Philosophy” is based on Lowe’s piece in the Library of Living Philosophers” which, according

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to George Kline, has worn better than other introductions of the time. In this section, Lowe divided Whitehead’s work into three periods: mathematical concepts were the focus in the first period of Whitehead’s work; philosophy of natural science was the focus in the second period, metaphysics and philosophy were the focus of civilization in the third. Part III and IV characterize the type of empirical method employed in Whiteheadian metaphysics Part IV offers discusses elements needed for an evaluation of Whitehead.

Kline, Alfred North Whitehead, 1963 Kline, George L., ed. Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963; Corrected reprint: University Press of America, 1989. This collection of essays serves both to criticize and clarify Whitehead’s main philosophical ideas. Contributors include William Ernest Hocking, Charles Hartshorne, Robert M. Palter, Mason W. Gross, Lucio Chiaraviglio, William A. Christian, Everett W. Hall, Ivor Leclerc, Victor Lowe, Richard M. Rorty, Gregory Vlastos, Donald Sherburne, among others.

Laszlo, Essential Society, 1963 Laszlo, Ervin. Essential Society: An Ontological Reconstruction. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. This book introduces a social philosophy based on both ontological and anthropological premises employing Whitehead’s philosophy using an Aristotelian rather than a Platonic approach. The author argues that social evolution can be accounted for in much the same way as biological evolution and he offers the idea of “essential society” as a replacement for individualist and collectivist understandings.

Das, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 1964 Das, Rasvihary. The Philosophy of Whitehead. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964. This work argues that both process and relation are very important elements in Whitehead’s metaphysics. The value of his thought lies in his ability to combine traditionally opposed terms, such as being and

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becoming, permanence and change, mind and matter, and unity and multiplicity.

Burgers, Experience and Conceptual Activity, 1965 Burgers, J. M. Experience and Conceptual Activity: A Philosophical Essay Based Upon the Writings of A. N. Whitehead. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965. The author claims that by using Whitehead’s metaphysical system, one can develop a method whereby notions of value can be accorded a place next to the ideas of causal relationships that are present in the physical sciences. The author claims that every act that takes place in the universe is related to experience derived from the past integrated with possibilities for the future.

Cobb, A Christian Natural Theology, 1965 Cobb, John B. Jr. A Christian Natural Theology: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965. (Second edition: Louisville, Ky, Westminster John Knox Press, 2007) In this seminal work, Cobb offers an original reading of Whitehead that is intended to assist in the development of a philosophically responsible Christian natural theology. In this, Cobb develops a Whiteheadian existential anthropology, which becomes the central theme through which Whitehead’s thought is interpreted. The Preface to the second edition clarifies the main transformation his interpretation has endured since the sixties.

Emmet, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism, 1966 Emmet, Dorothy M. Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1966. This book serves as an important introduction to Whitehead’s metaphysics by a key former student. Emmet observes that some seem to be under the impression that his mathematical genius has been lost in some kind of pseudo-Platonic mysticism, but it is her intention to show otherwise, and to demonstrate that not only can his thought be apprehended by mathematicians and logicians but by individuals trained in the humanist disciplines as well.

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Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, 1966 Sherburne, Donald W. A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. New York/London, The MacMillan Company, 1966; Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1971. In this companion to Process and Reality, Sherburne has rearranged Whitehead’s text topically. Rather than following what he describes as the “weblike exposition” of the original text, Sherburne reframes PR under seven headings (The Actual Entity, The Formative Elements, The Phases of Concrescence, Nexus and the Macrocosmic, Perception, Whitehead and Other Philosophers, God and the World). This rearrangement is designed to lead readers more logically and coherently through the text. The book also features extensive commentary by Sherburne, as well as a straightforward Glossary and an exhaustive Index.

Pols, Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1967 Pols, Edward. Whitehead’s Metaphysics: A Critical Examination of Process and Reality. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. The author advances the position that Whitehead endows eternal objects with a greater degree of concreteness than he does actual entities. Furthermore, his notion of subject as superject creates a contradiction in his doctrine of freedom because it does not allow for active or substantial agents.

Schmidt, Perception and Cosmology, 1967 Schmidt, Paul F. Perception and Cosmology in Whitehead’s Philosophy. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1967. The author maintains that Whitehead’s views on perception are fundamental to his philosophy of science and metaphysical cosmology. He then explores three views of perception that he finds in Whitehead, beginning with The Organization of Thought, continuing on to the second view as found in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, The Concept of Nature, and The Principle of Relativity, and then finishing with the third view as found in Science and the Modern World, which finds full expression in Process and Reality, and arrives at a mature state in Adventures of Ideas. The first view relies upon class theory,

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the second upon the principle of extensive abstraction, and the third upon the doctrine of prehensions.

Jordan, New Shapes of Reality, 1968 Jordan, Martin. New Shapes of Reality: Aspects of A. N. Whitehead’s Philosophy. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1968. This book is divided into two parts, with the first part covering the most significant aspects of Whitehead’s philosophy, while the second part deals specifically with Whitehead’s approach to metaphysics.

Lawrence, Whitehead’s Philosophical Development, 1968 Lawrence, Nathaniel. Whitehead’s Philosophical Development: A Critical History of the Background of Process and Reality. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968. Th eauthor claimes that there are three periods in Whitehead’s philosophical development: 1919–1922—philosophy of science, 1925– 1927—the move to cosmology, 1929–1938—his mature cosmology. Within the area of cosmology, Whitehead focuses on the concept of value.

Leclerc, The Relevance of Whitehead, 1971 Leclerc, Ivor. Ed. The Relevance of Whitehead: Philosophical Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of Alfred North Whitehead. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1961 This collection of essays marks the centenary of the birth of Alfred North Whitehead. Some of the contributors focus their attention on evaluating or criticizing certain aspects of Whitehead’s though, others develop Whiteheadian themes, while still others extend Whitehead’s thought to other relevant areas.

Hartshorne, Whitehead’s Philosophy, 1972 Hartshorne, Charles. Whitehead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935– 1970. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972. This is not a commentary on Whitehead’s texts, but rather, a defense of some Whiteheadian theses, says Lewis Ford (PS 4:1, 55), a painless avenue

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to his ideas that does not require previous acquaintance. Hartshorne seeks to make truth accessible to others through Whitehead, instead of communicating the truth about him. He characterizes Whitehead as a “highly original […] Anglo-American philosopher who assimilated essential aspects of Continental philosophy […] and nearly all Asiatic philosophy” (pp. 4–5). Hartshorne discusses Whitehead’s metaphysics, the idea of reality as socially structured process, his theory of prehension, the (Leibnizian) idea of the compound individual, and the (panentheistic) idea of God. He considers Whitehead’s generalizing power and novel intuition, Whitehead in relation to contemporary philosophy and ordinary language, and some criticisms of Whitehead.

Lango, Whitehead’s Ontology, 1972 Lango, John W. Whitehead’s Ontology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972. The author’s approach to interpreting Whitehead’s metaphysics involves an analysis of the system of categories as stated in Process and Reality, rather than providing an explication of the text. By sufficiently clarifying the internal coherence of Whitehead’s metaphysical system to adequately develop the definitions of the types of entity in the system, the author is able to present a Whiteheadian ontology that is in fact grounded in the metaphysical system.

Hall, The Civilization of Experience, 1973 Hall, David L. The Civilization of Experience: A Whiteheadian Theory of Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 1973. The author claims that Whitehead was primarily a philosopher of culture. He tthen he proceeds to develop a theory of culture using Whiteheadian principles and attempts to show that it is adequate in interpreting current cultural phenomena.

Lawrence, Alfred North Whitehead, 1974 Lawrence, Nathaniel. Alfred North Whitehead: A Primer of His Philosophy. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1974. The first chapter of this book is a biography of Alfred North Whitehead, followed by chapters on the main ideas present in Whitehead’s philosophy,

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and how these ideas apply to an actual occasion coming into existence. The final six chapters are more technical in nature and deal with topics specifically related to Process and Reality.

Martin, Whitehead’s Categoreal Scheme, 1974 Martin, Richard M. Whitehead’s Categoreal Scheme and Other Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. This collection of philosophical papers cover topics ranging from a discussion of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme as outlined in Process and Reality, to the logical structure of the ontological argument, mathematics and geometry, as well as a study of intentionality.

Sarkar, Whitehead’s Four Principles, 1974 Sarkar, Anil K. Whitehead’s Four Principles from West-East Perspective. Patna, India: Bharati Bhawan, 1974. This work argues that four of Whitehead’s principles—space-time, eternal objects, God, and creativity—can be related to similar principles present in Eastern thought, especially Buddhism.

Fitzgerald, Alfred North Whitehead’s Early Philosophy, 1979 Fitzgerald, Janet A. Alfred North Whitehead’s Early Philosophy of Space and Time. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1979. It is argued that Whitehead’s theory of space-time involves the method of extensive abstraction, and by attempting to fit his philosophy to the science he makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of science.

Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process, 1980 Wallack, F. Bradford. The Epochal Nature of Process in Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980. In this book the author argues that many interpretations that the majority of Whiteheadians accept need to be revisited because they assume substantialist assumptions that Whitehead sought to replace. She believes it very important to significantly revise common interpretations of the actual entity. She also discusses Whitehead’s main ideas in the order of increasing

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dependence on other Whiteheadian terms. What results is an understanding of Whitehead’s philosophy that reveals it as more intelligible and cohesive than is generally believed.

Hartshorne and Peden, Whitehead’s View of Reality, 1981 Hartshorne, Charles and Creighton Peden. Whitehead’s View of Reality. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981. Hartshorne discuss here Whitehead’s basic categories, philosophical theism, and some of the unsolved problems with Whitehead’s thought in an historical context of other Western thinkers and Buddhism. Peden discusses Whitehead’s basic terms, foundational principles, method-transcending method, view of religion, doctrine of God, and concludes with an evaluation and comparison. Whitehead seeks to demonstrate a methodtranscending method. One reviewer considers the book flawed (PS 11:3, p. 210–213).

Ross, Perspective in Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1982 Ross, Stephen David. Perspective in Whitehead’s Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. The author provides a detailed, critical interpretation of Whitehead’s thought, emphasizing the fundamental role that perspective plays in his cosmology and discusses tensions that exist in relation to other features of Whitehead’s philosophy. The author shows that there are four principles that play an important role in Whitehead’s metaphysics. They are perspective, cosmology, experience, and mechanical analysis. He believes that most of the tensions can be resolved if perspective is accorded a more prominent role in understanding Whitehead’s theory.

Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1984 Ford, Lewis S. The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1925–1929. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. Diverging from systematic accounts of Whitehead’s metaphysic, Ford establishes a compositional analysis of the development of Whitehead’s thought in the years 1925–1929. Through a close reading of the texts of this period, Ford argues for both the importance of the development of Whitehead’s thought through the published texts of this period, as well as

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the developmental nature of the individual texts themselves, finding discontinuity in the development and presentation of Whitehead’s key metaphysical insights.

Kuntz, Alfred North Whitehead, 1984 Kuntz, Paul G. Alfred North Whitehead. Boston: Twayne, 1984. A memorial notice says that Kuntz “embraced pluralism as an expression of the bounty of divine order.” Order is key to his interpretation of Whitehead in this work. “The cyclical order of rhythm” in education is discussed in chapter one. The Pythagorean “logic of order” in mathematics is found in chapter two. “The Order of Experience: From Nature Dead to Nature Alive” takes up the next two chapters: “Bringing Order Out of Disorder,” and various kinds of order—mechanistic, organic, causal, hierarchical—order-disorder, and human responsibility. Whitehead’s philosophy of civilization is characterized as a search for new order— progress and freedom, progress and order, harmony and strife. The order of Whitehead’s metaphysics is discussed in terms of his Category of the Ultimate (Creativity, One, Many) and Categories of Existence Explanation, and Obligations—the whats, whys, and hows. Lastly, Whitehead’s vision of a “Saving Order” is explained in terms of the natures of God (Antecedent and Consequent), order out of chaos, and the possibility of progress in the history of religion.

Jentz, Whitehead’s Philosophy, 1985 Jentz, Arthur H. Jr. Whitehead’s Philosophy: Primary Texts in Dialogue. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985. This book is intended as an introduction to Whitehead for undergraduates and students of theology and philosophy. Lewis Ford found the design ingenious (PS 16:2, 155). From the Philosophy Department at Hope College, the author has constructed a dialogue with Whitehead by combining his own questions with quotations from Whitehead’s books as the answers. They address, in Part I, such themes as possibility and actuality, time, realism, dipolarity, creativity, God, freedom, and feelings. Part II takes up subjectivity, good and evil, harmony, beauty, love, and peace. Part III considers the function of reason, the aims of education, and religion in the making.

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Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, 1985 Lowe, Victor Augustus. Alfred North Whitehead. The Man and His Work. Volume I: 1861–1910; Volume II: 1910–1947 (edited by J. B. Schneewind), Baltimore, Maryland and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985 & 1990. Together, these two works comprise the most complete biographical account of Whitehead’s life and work. At the time of Lowe’s death, his research only included the years up to 1929; therefore, only a brief narrative of Whitehead’s life and work after 1929 is provided. Thus much of Whitehead’s late work, while in America and as professor at Harvard, is only briefly touched on in the second volume.

Nobo, Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension, 1986 Nobo, Jorge L. Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. In this work, Nobo argues for the necessary connection between Whitehead’s metaphysical claim concerning the universal solidarity of actual occasions and the categorical scheme that is developed in Whitehead’s work. Nobo argues that the thesis of universal solidarity is the central thesis of Whitehead’s work, and should structure how Whitehead’s work is read.

Bar-On, The Categories and the Principle of Coherence, 1987 Bar-On, A. Z. The Categories and the Principle of Coherence: Whitehead’s Theory of Categories in Historical Perspective. Secaucus: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987. Two levels of discussion are present in this book. One develops the Theory of Categories starting with Aristotle, moving through Kant and Hegel, and culminating in the work of Nicolai Hartmann and Alfred North Whitehead. In Hegel the Principle of Coherence is developed via a dialectical move. The second level of discussion begins with Whitehead’s metaphysical system with some emphasis given to his categories and propositions. A historical perspective is pursued in an attempt to more fully understand Whitehead’s categories while the Principle of Coherence is used to give at least some justification to Whitehead’s metaphysical method.

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Lucas, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead, 1989 Lucas, George R., Jr. The Rehabilitation of Whitehead. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Lucas argues for the continuity of Whitehead’s interests and methods with themes in contemporary analytic and continental philosophy. No extensive acquaintance with Whitehead is needed to navigate his attempt to address the neglect of Whitehead in recent Anglo-American philosophy and extend appreciation of him beyond his disciples outside of philosophy and the isolated scholasticism his brilliance inevitably attracted. Part one discusses the roots of process metaphysics in evolutionary cosmology and idealism, and the realist revolt against idealism. Part two develops these themes: Whitehead’s differences from evolutionary cosmology, and similarities and differences between Whitehead and Kant, Hegel, and Russell. Part three discusses analytic and post-analytic themes that Whitehead also develops, recent developments in process metaphysics (freedom, agency, substance, theism, naturalism, becoming), and Whiteheadian philosophy of science and nature (relativity and quantum mechanics).

Franklin, Speaking from the Depths, 1990 Franklin, Stephen T. Speaking from the Depths: Alfred North Whitehead’s Hermeneutical Metaphysics of Propositions, Experience, Symbolism, Language, and Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1990. This is the first work to explore the hermeneutical implications of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Franklin develops Whitehead’s conception of propositions, symbolism, and language, while using this Whiteheadian hermeneutic to offer an explanation of how human language can speak of God.

Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance, 1993 Hosinski, Thomas. Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993. This is perhaps the best attempt to date to make Whitehead’s metaphysics easier to understand. Due to the difficulty of Whitehead’s text many of his insights have been often overlooked. In this case, the author has done an

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excellent job in making Whitehead accessible without oversimplifying his vision.

Jones, Intensity, 1998 Jones, Judith A. Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 1998. Focusing on the idea of intensity, as this idea works in Whitehead’s late philosophy, Jones presents an outstanding rereading of Whitehead’s thought, challenging many earlier interpretations of his work. Jones is able to offer an able interpretation of Whitehead wherein, e.g., atomism and relational interconnection are consistently maintained. As Ford argued: “This is one of the most profound studies of Whitehead’s philosophy to appear in many years.”

Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience, 1998 Kraus, Elizabeth M. The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. New York: Fordham UP, 1998. This valuable book is an introduction to and commentary on Whitehead’s late philosophical system. The work is systematically organized so that each chapter corresponds directly with a chapter from Process and Reality in order that they can be studied concurrently. The goal throughout is to make sense of Whitehead’s technical vocabulary, obscurities, inconsistencies, and the coherence (perhaps circularity) of the fundamental elements of the metaphysical scheme. It is indeed, as its author claims, a “sherpa guide” to PR.

Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism, 2001 Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. In this work, Griffin offers a full-scale philosophy of religion drawn from the work of Whitehead and Hartshorne. Griffin explores the relation between science and religion, the validity of religious experience, the nature and existence of God, religious pluralism, creation and evolution, and the problem of evil.

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Keller and Daniell, Process and Difference, 2002 Keller, Catherine, and Daniell, Anne. Process and Difference: Between Cosmological and Poststructuralist Postmodernisms. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. In this collection of essays, the similarities and creative tensions between poststructuralism and Whiteheadian process thought are examined. Contributors (Anne Daniell, Catherine Keller, Arran Gare, Luis G. Pedraja, Joseph A. Bracken, Christina K. Hutchins, Carol Wayne White, Tim Clark, Roland Faber) argue that the differences between process thought and poststructuralism provide constructive contrasts for thought. Through their comparisons and contrasts of process and poststructuralist theories, the essays explore concepts of divinity and cosmos, the interaction between science and religion, and issues of subjectivity.

Rose, On Whitehead, 2002 Rose, Philip. On Whitehead. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002. This text provides an excellent introduction to Whitehead in a mere 94 pages. It places special emphasis on Whitehead’s aesthetics and cosmology, and also addresses the issues of freedom, beauty, and truth. The author provides a special bonus by surprising the reader with five points of contact between Whitehead and Kant. This is a fascinating introduction to Whitehead’s thought.

Shields, Process and Analysis, 2002 Shields, George W., ed. Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne, and Analytic Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. This volume brings together a group of thinkers representing both the process community and the analytic community: Nicholas Rescher, George R. Lucas Jr., Richard M. Gale, John W. Lango, James Bradley, Leemon McHenry, W. V. O. Quine, George L. Goodwin, Billy Joe Lucas, George W. Shields and Donald W. Viney. The contributors examine a wide variety of topics embodying their common interests. This collection demonstrates that the two communities in question not only have important arguments to share, but that they can work together on crucial formal ontological issues, such as mereo-topological issues springing directly from Whitehead’s works.

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Polanowski and Sherburne, Whitehead’s Philosophy, 2004 Polanowski, Janusz A. and Donald A. Sherburne. Whitehead’s Philosophy: Points of Connection. Albany: State University of New York, 2004. This collection of essays examines the range of Whitehead’s philosophy and his relevance to contemporary philosophical traditions. Contributors include George Allan, Lisa Bellantoni, John B. Cobb, Jr., Frederick Ferré, David l. Hall, William S. Hamrick, Robert Cummings Neville, Janusz A. Polanowski, Patrick Shade, and Donald W. Sherburne.

Epperson, Quantum Mechanics, 2004 Epperson, Michael. Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. This book is the first extended analysis of the relationships between relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and Whitehead’s cosmology. Epperson discusses the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead’s work and details Whitehead’s attempts to fashion an ontology coherent with quantum anomalies.

Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism, 2006 Weber, Michel. Whitehead’s Pancreativism: The Basics. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2006. This monograph has two main complementary objectives. The first one is to propose a set of efficient hermeneutical tools to get the reader started. These straightforward tools, the author argues, provide answers that are highly coherent and probably the most applicable to Whitehead’s entire corpus. The second objective is to illustrate how the several parts of Process and Reality are interconnected, something that most commentators have either failed to recognise or only incompletely acknowledged. Whitehead’s intertwining of the “tryptic” of science, religion, and philosophy is discussed after a review of his American and European legacies. The hermeneutical openness of his system is established with a synthesis of empirical and rational criteria and the universalization of subjectivity. Creative advance is generated by the contrasting dimensions of subjectivity and objectivity, freedom and necessity, mentality and physicality. “Pancreativity” is the “bifunctionality” of God and World, balancing potentiality and actuality.

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Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy, 2008 Mesle, C. Robert. Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008. Mesle “introduces the major ideas of Whitehead to the general reader,” providing a basic introduction to Process and Reality. He seeks to show “the way beyond both reductive materialism and […] Cartesian dualism,” laying “the groundwork for integrating evolutionary biology and physics, philosophy of mind, environmental ethics, theology, religious pluralism, education, and economics.” The chapters cover such themes as imaginative generalization, a unified self, experience all the way down, substance and process, reality as a causal web, relational vs. unilateral power, and what makes freedom possible. It ends with a 17-page glossary and suggested readings.

Dutch-speaking Scholarship on PR André Cloots1 Whitehead scholarship in the Dutch speaking world began with Jan Van der Veken, professor of philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium). Under his direction, André Cloots wrote the first doctoral dissertation in Dutch on process thought: Van Creativiteit naar Allesomvattendheid. Het probleem van het Ultieme in de proces-filosofie van Alfred North Whitehead en Charles Hartshorne.2 The dissertation deals with the way the metaphysical problem of the ultimate is handled by Whitehead and Hartshorne respectively, arguing that there is a considerable difference between the two process philosophers when it comes to the explication of the ultimate, linked to their respective backgrounds: pluralistic for Whitehead, idealistic-monistic for Hartshorne. This affects not only their concepts of creativity and of God, but above all the interrelation between the two. At the occasion of that dissertation, an honorary doctorate was granted to Charles Hartshorne by the University of Leuven (1978) while the “European Society for Process Thought” was founded and a “Center for Process Thought” was started at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven— which was the first such center outside of Claremont. In the years to follow, Jan van der Veken directed many more doctoral dissertations by students from all over the world. These students began Whitehead scholarship and/or established centers for Whitehead research in different countries (Australia, India, Philippines, Indonesia…). Today, doctoral dissertations remain the main part of Whitehead scholarship in the Dutch speaking world. At this moment, four doctoral students are preparing

1

Centrum voor Metafysica en Wijsgerige Antropologie, Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte, Kardinal Mercierplein 2, 3000 Leuven; [email protected].

2

From Creativity to All-Inclusiveness. The Problem of the Ultimate in the process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. 2 vols., Leuven: Institute of Philosophy, 1978.

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a Ph.D. dissertation on Whitehead in Leuven, under the direction of André Cloots.3 Through the collaboration of Jan van der Veken and André Cloots, most of the Flemish/Dutch journals in philosophy have devoted a special issue to Whitehead. The first such special issue was undertaken by Tijdschrift voor Filosofie4 (with contributions of Jan van der Veken, André Cloots, Charles Hartshorne and H.G. Hubbeling), the second by Wijsgerige perspecitef5 (with contributions of E. Wolf-Gazo, A. Cloots, G. Verschuuren and J. Van der Veken) and a third special issue was published by the journal Filosofie6 (with contributions of R. Munnik, A. Cloots, P. Oomen and J. Van der Veken). Leuven’s Process Center has also published a series of books and collections of articles on process philosophy, including Process Filosofie. Een orientatie,7 which is a general introduction to Whitehead by Jan Van der Veken, and Kon-teksten bij Religion in the Making, edited by André Cloots, as well as several other works in English.8 Several introductions to Whitehead in general,9 and to Process and Reality10 in particular, have 3

One dissertation is on Whitehead’s bifurcation of nature and the later MerleauPonty (William Hamrick, USA), one on the contemporary relevance of Whitehead's concept of religion (Kenneth Masong, Philippines), one on the logic of becoming in Whitehead and Deleuze (Isabella Palin, Belgium), and one—in co-tutela with the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris—on Whitehead and McTaggart (Rusu Bogdan, Romania).

4

Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 1980, 42/1.

5

Wijsgerig Perspectief op maatschappij en wetenschap, 1984–85, 25/4.

6

Filosofie 2001, 10/6.

7

Leuven, Institute of Philosophy, 1983. This work also includes a bibliography of publications in Dutch on process philosophy.

8

Such as Charles Hartshorne (reprint of special issue of Louvain Studies 7/2, fall 1978); Proces Filosofie (reprint of the special issue of Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 1980); P. Jonkers & J. Van der Veken, Whitehead’s Legacy, 1981; God, Man and the Universe (reprint of special issue of Jeevadhara [India], 1981); Ivor Leclerc, Whitehead Between Rationalism and Empiricicm, 1984.

9

Such as R. Munnik, “Alfred North Whitehead,” in Kritisch Denkerslexicon (Houten/Antwerpen, 1991); A. Cloots, “Alfred North Whitehead, of het Avontuur van het Universum,” in H. Berghs ed.., Denk-wijzen, Vol. I (Leuven, Acco, 1986).

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been published in surveys of contemporary philosophy, together with articles on a variety of more specific topics, such as speculative philosophy,11 nature,12 (inter)subjectivity,13 personal identity etc. In addition a number of philosophico-theological articles have been published.14 Finally, the relationship of Whitehead’s philosophy to other contemporary philosophers has occupied an important place in Dutch scholarship: Van der Veken has explored the relationship between Whitehead’s philosophy and that of the later Merleau-Ponty, while more recently, under the influence of Isabelle Stengers, the relationship between Whitehead and Deleuze has been the topic of an international conference organised by André Cloots at the Vlaamse Academie in Brussels.15 10

A. Cloots, “Alfred North Whitehead. ‘Process and Reality’. Een metafysica van de wording”. In K. Boey a.o., ed., Ex Libris van de filosofie in de 20ste eeuw. Vol. I: Van 1900 tot 1950. Leuven-Amersfoort, Acco, 1997.

11

A. Cloots, “Metafysica als speculatieve filosofie bij Whitehead”. In M. Moors & J. Van der Veken, ed., Naar leeuweriken grijpen. Leuvense opstellen over metafysica. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1994.

12

See for example P. Oomen, ‘Natuur, mens en God: Een bijdrage van het procesdenken’, in: R.P.H. Munnik, ed., Natuur en christelijke traditie: Een moeizame verhouding, Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 1992.

13

See R. Munnik, “Intersubjectiviteit en tijdsbegrip bij A.N. Whitehead” in W. Derkse, A. Leijen en B. Nagel eds., Subliem Niemandsland. Opstellen over metafysica, intersubjectiviteit en transcendentie, Damon, Best 1996.

14

Van der Veken and Oomen have especially published on the problem of God. A bibliography of Van der Veken in the field of process theology up to 1983 is published in Proces-denken. Een orientatie (op. cit.). A survey of his itinerary in this regard, is given by Van der Veken himself in “Honderd jaar denken aan al wat is,” in André Cloots and Luc Braeckmans (eds.), Kijken naar de zon. Filosofische essays over de godsvraag. Opgedragen aan Jan Van der Veken. Kapellen: Uitgeverij Pelckmans, 1998. For P. Oomen, see her “Lijden als vraag naar God: Een benadering vanuit Whitehead’s filosofie,” in: Tijdschrift voor Theologie 34/3, 246-268 and “God en een autonoom geachte natuur: Probleemverkenning en Whiteheads zienswijze’, in: W.B. Drees ed., Denken over God en wereld: Theologie, natuurwetenschap en filosofie in wisselwerking, Kampen: Kok, 1992.

15

André Cloots and Keith Robinson eds., Deleuze, Whitehead and the Transformations of Metaphysics. Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België, 2002.

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In the Netherlands, Whitehead research began with the dissertation of René Munnik in 1987 on De wereld als creatieve voortgang16 analysing Whitehead’s notion of “totality” and the development of that notion throughout Whitehead’s works (from a philosophy of nature to a metaphysics, in which not only the known but also the knower is taken into account). In Whitehead’s revolt against the “myth of isolation,” the central notion is that of “limitation,” and the dissertation argues that there are four stages from this point of view in Whitehead’s works: the stage preceding that concept of limitation (1919–1922), the stage of its development (mainly SMW and RM), the stage of its elaboration (PR) and of its modification (after 1925). Later, in 1998, Palmyre Oomen wrote a dissertation at the University of Nijmegen, Doet God ertoe? Een interpretatie van Whitehead als bijdrage aan een theologie van Gods handelen.17 In this work she deals extensively with the hermeneutical problems that arise in Whitehead’s treatment of the relationship between God and World in PR. Oomen also offers a thorough analysis and discussion of Whitehead's metaphysics in general, with respect both to its special nature and to its content. This inquiry led to an interpretation that at some crucial points deviates from the standard Whitehead interpretation. The dissertation was awarded the Legatum Stolpianum Prize in 2001. Chris Van Haeften’s dissertation on Whitehead’s theory of time should also be mentioned.18 There have been other dissertations as well, but as English is becoming the lingua franca in Flemish and Dutch academic circles, younger Whitehead scholars write almost exclusively in English. This is particularly true of Johan Siebers19 in the Netherlands and Ronny Desmet20 in Flanders.

16

The world as Creative Advance. 2 vol., Tilburg: Tilburg University Press, 1987.

17

Does God Make a Difference? An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Philosophy as a Contribution to a Theology of God’s Agency. Kampen: Kok, 1998; 2 nd rev. ed. Kampen: Klement, 2004.

18

Chr. Van Haeften, Zijn en tijd in de filosofie van A.N. Whitehead, Kampen, 1998.

19

See Siebers’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Leiden: The Method of Speculative Philosophy, 1998, published by Kassel Univ. Press in 2002.

20

Ronald Desmet, currently preparing a Ph.D. dissertation at the Free University of Brussels, has published extensively on Whitehead and the philosophy of

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For the same reason, very few works of Whitehead have been translated into Dutch. However, already in 1959, and independently of any Whitehead scholarship, Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World was translated into Dutch.21 Later, Jan Van der Veken published a translation—with extensive elucidating commentaries—of Religion in the Making.22 Finally, one introduction into process philosophy has been translated, viz. that of Thomas Hosinski.23

science and mathematics, but always in English or French. 21

Alfred North Whitehead, De natuurwetenschap in de moderne wereld. UtrechtAntwerpen: Aula-boeken, 1959.

22

Under the title De dynamiek van de religie. Kapellen: Pelckmans & Kampen: Kok, 1988.

23

Thomas Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance, 1993, transl. by Ben A. Crul, Wat gebeurt er in Gods naam? Een nieuwe kijk op wereld, God en religie vanuit het procesdenken van Alfred North Whitehead. Baarn: Agora / Kapellen, Pelckmans, 1998. Later, Crul also published a Dutch translation of David Griffin’s Reenchantment without Supernaturalism (in the series Gamma, edited by the Stichting Teilhard de Chardin, 2002).

French-speaking Scholarship on PR Michel Weber1 Louis Couturat (1868–1914), Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and Jean Nicod (1893–1924) were the first French-speaking philosophers to point to the importance of Whitehead’s works. We only mention them in passing since the present entry focuses on the major philosophical works dealing with Process and Reality. PR’s ontology was first disclosed to the French-speaking intelligentsia in 1931 by Jean Wahl (1888–1974) with his seminal article “La philosophie spéculative de Whitehead” (reprinted in Vers le concret, 1932/2004)2. This study is lured by an holistic concern: to make sense of the “Philosophy of Organism” with the help of all the works of London and Harvard and thus to show how the intended destruction of the materialistic fallacies necessitates a powerful concept of event that, in turn, allows the renewal of the construction of causality, space and time. Granted, this is sometimes done at the price of conceptual shortcuts and daring contrasts (such as the ones with Husserl), but Wahl’s metaphysical insights match Whitehead’s and thanks to an impressive historical-critical scholarship well-served by his humble Cartesian style, the argument always speaks by itself. The same year, Émile Meyerson (1859–1933), evokes SMW’s ontology (not PR however) in Du Cheminement de la pensée (1931), but his main interest remains epistemological and especially the question of the possibility of a qualitative physics germinating since PNK. He furthermore

1

Centre de philosophie pratique “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes,” Brussels; www.chromatika.org; [email protected].

2

Jean Wahl, Vers le concret. Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine. William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel. Avant-propos de Mathias Girel. Deuxième édition augmentée [Vrin, 1932], Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Bibliothèque d’Histoire de la Philosophie, 2004. See M. Weber’s Critical review (Process Studies 34/1, 2005, pp. 155–156) and his “Jean Wahl (1888– 1974)” entry in Weber and Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Frankfurt / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2008, II, pp. 640–642.

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establishes a rather misleading comparison between Whitehead and Auguste Comte.3 After a doctoral thesis on Alexander (published under the title Le Système d’Alexander in 1929), Philippe Devaux (1902–1979), who reviewed SMW in 1930,4 followed Whitehead’s seminars during the 1930–1931 winter semester and started to work on a monumental project that death left unfinished: at least three volumes introducing Whitehead’s cosmology entitled La Cosmologie de Whitehead. The first volume, which was published posthumously in 2007 by Th. Donck and M. Weber, deals mainly with the historical context of the emergence of Whitehead’s metaphysics. As such it is a first-rate testimony of one of the best historians of ideas of his time, who knew personally most of the actors involved (starting with B. Russell).5 The second volume focuses on Whitehead’s epistemology; it will also require a long editorial work to be publishable. The third volume, that was supposed to address the core of Whitehead’s ontological vision, has never been written. It is probable that the apogee of Devaux’s Whiteheadian speculations took place in the summer of 1968, when he was preparing a doctoral seminar on Process and Reality. Unfortunately, due to his deteriorating health, these speculations will never reach us. In 1939, Devaux publishes “L’esprit du néo-réalisme anglais” that emphasizes the Alexanderian legacy of Whitehead’s ontology. The same year he also translates Religion in the Making into French under the title Le devenir de la religion.6 3

See F. Fruteau de Laclos’s entry in Weber and Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, Frankfurt / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2008, II, pp. 473–480

4

“Une nouvelle phase du néo-réalisme anglo-saxon. À propos de Science and the Modern World de A. N. Whitehead,” Archives de la Société belge de Philosophie, Première année, 1928–29, fasc. n°3, 1930, pp. 9–24. Cf. Paul Gochet’s entry in Weber and Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, op. cit., II, pp. 643–644

5

Philippe Devaux, La cosmologie de Whitehead. Tome I, L’Épistémologie whiteheadienne, Louvain-la-Neuve, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2007. See R. Desmet’s seminal review: “Reconsidering Whitehead with Devaux,” Logique et Analyse, 202, 2008, pp. 167–184.

6

A new translation, evoking the vices and virtues of Devaux’s, has just been published: La Religion en gestation. Traduction et présentation de Henri

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In 1950, Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) publishes an important article “Le principe de relativité philosophique chez Whitehead,” that was first read (in French) in the Sorbonne (either late in 1948 or early in 1949) and in the Collège philosophique, in both cases upon Wahl’s invitation. On that occasion, Wahl insisted upon the similarities existing between Hartshorne’s argument and Jules Lequier’s (1814–1862).7 Two rather weak (partial and prejudiced) interpretations follow: MarcAndré Bera’s and Félix Cesselin’s.8 Wahl publishes his Metaphysical Treatise in 1953, which systematically peruses, as its full title make explicit, perennial metaphysical issues9. In this work also, Whitehead frequently appears as the white knight who saves the day. On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Whitehead, MerleauPonty and Wahl teach Whitehead in Paris and a special issue of the Revue internationale de philosophie is published in Brussels. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was teaching in the Collège de France from 1952 to 1961. In the late fifties, he designed an ontology of the “flesh” to try to overcome the foundational problems (some would say Vaillant, relue par Vincent Berne. Préface de Bertrand Saint-Sernin. Louvain-laNeuve, Éditions Chromatika, 2008. 7

Charles Hartshorne, “Le principe de relativité philosophique chez Whitehead,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 55, 1 (janvier–mars), 1950, pp. 16–29. Donald Wayne Viney’s translation is due to appear in Process Studies. For the context, see Charles Hartshorne, The Darkness and the Light. A Philosopher Reflects Upon His Fortunate Career and Those Who Made It Possible (Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 240–241). See also Hartshorne’s “La philosophie de la religion aux États-Unis,” Les Études philosophiques, n. s. VIIè année, numéros 1–2, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1952, pp. 50–56.

8

Marc-André Bera, A. N. Whitehead. Un philosophe de l’expérience, Paris, Hermann, Actualités scientifiques et industrielles, 1948. Félix Cesselin, La philosophie organique de Whitehead, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1950.

9

Jean Wahl, Traité de métaphysique. I. Le Devenir. Genèse des permanences. Les essences qualitatives. Vers l’Homme. II. Les Mondes ouverts à l’Homme. Immanence et Transcendance. Cours professés en Sorbonne, Paris, Éditions Payot, 1953.

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“aporias”) of phenomenology. It is in this context that he became very interested in Whitehead’s philosophy of nature, as his classes in the Collège de France in the years 1956–1960 amply testify.10 A very close friend of Wahl (whose influence is already clear in the 1933 research project on perception), he was—at least since the publication of Vers le concret (1932)—fully aware of the importance of Whitehead’s late systematic thought but it is doubtful that he had any primary knowledge of Whitehead before preparing these classes on “the concept of nature,” which exploit, under the guidance of Wahl’s interpretation, Whitehead’s Concept of Nature, Nature and life, most probably SMW, and perhaps a superficial knowledge of PR. For his part, Wahl teaches Whitehead in the Sorbonne (see his Cours de Sorbonne of 1957 and 1960–1961), presenting Whitehead in ways that do not seem to have significantly diverged from his previous interpretation. The special issue of the Revue internationale de philosophie features articles in English (Roy Wood Sellars, Wolfe Mays, Victor Augustus Lowe and Ivor Leclerc), German (Enzo Paci), Italian (Nicola Abbagnano) and French (Philippe Devaux and Jacques Ruytinx).11 During the time Merleau-Ponty and Wahl were exploring Whitehead in the Sorbonne, Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was a teaching assistant in that same university (more precisely in the years 1956–1961) while he was working on his doctoral dissertation Différence et répétition (1968)—which only evokes Whitehead in passing.12 He also talked about Whitehead in a general metaphysical class in Lyon University in 1965, where he taught from 1964 to 1969. 10

See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Résumés de Cours. Collège de France 1952–1960. (Édités par Claude Lefort, Paris, NRF Éditions Gallimard, Collection Blanche, 1968) and La Nature. Notes. Cours du Collège de France ([1956–1957 & 1957– 1958]. Établi et annoté par Dominique Séglard. Suivi des Résumés de Cours correspondants, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, Traces Écrites, 1995). Cf. his “Husserl et la notion de Nature. (Notes prises au cours de Merleau-Ponty),” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, N°3, Paris, 1965, pp. 257–269. Cf. also Franck Robert’s entry in Weber and Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, op. cit., II, pp. 667–675

11

Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. XV, no. 56–57, fasc. 3–4, 1961.

12

Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. Cf. James Williams’ entry, in Weber and Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, op. cit., II, pp. 645–648

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In 1966, Jean-Jacques Latour publishes “La nature dans la pensée de Whitehead” in a collective Catholic book on Idée de monde et philosophie de la nature. Wahl writes (a bit hastily it has to be said) the “A. N. Whitehead” entry of the 1968 edition of the Encyclopedia Universalis (vol. XXIII, pp. 852– 853). Alix Parmentier’s (1933–) doctoral dissertation, supervised by Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) and influenced by I. M. Bochenski (a Polish logician who was a great admirer of Whitehead) was published in 1968. It remains an important philosophical exposition whose interpretation is not weakened at all by its explicit double bias (that amounts to a Catholic theological slant). Unfortunately for Whiteheadian studies, the author quickly left academia after her thesis (that is now out of print): she published only three minor papers in 1969.13 In 1969, Devaux’s translation of the Function of Reason appears under the title La fonction de la raison et autres essais.14 In 1965, Jean Ladrière (1921–2007) urged Jean-Marie Breuvart (1934–) to read Process and Reality in the context of his attempt to systematize a Husserlian phenomenology of logic (springing from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Husserl’s own Logische Untersuchungen). Five years later, Breuvart defends his doctoral thesis on Procès et Éternité dans la philosophie d’A. N. Whitehead (1970), which was weaved around the question of the relationship between the general potentialities of PR and lived time. In 1976, he defends his habilitation thesis on Les directives de la symbolisation et les modèles de référence dans la philosophie d’A. N. Whitehead. Starting from an analysis of the reference models used by Whitehead in his own definition of process philosophy, Breuvart argues that his main concern—overcoming all bifurcations—leads to an unsolved 13

Alix Parmentier, La philosophie de Whitehead et le problème de Dieu, Paris, Beauchesne, Bibliothèque des Archives de Philosophie. Nouvelle Série, 7, 1968. See the review by Hartshorne in the Archives de philosophie in 1970 and by Sherburne in Process Studies II/2, 1972, pp. 159–165 (cf. Hartshorne’s “Whitehead in French Perspective,” The Thomist, XXXIII, 3, 1969, pp. 573– 581). Cf. the entry devoted to her in in Weber and Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, op. cit., II, pp. 682–685.

14

Alfred North Whitehead, La fonction de la raison et autres essais. Traduction et préface Philippe Devaux, Paris, Éditions Payot, Bibliothèque scientifique, 1969/2007.

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conundrum: the gap between the creative activity and the given from which it springs. In 1971, Jules Vuillemin (1920–2001) publishes La Logique et le Monde sensible, which deserves to be cited because of its analysis of the Method of Extensive Abstraction. In Louvain-la-Neuve, Jean Ladrière has conducted research in various contiguous fields: e.g., logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of nature, ethics, metaphysics and theology. All his work gravitates—more or less elliptically—around a double focus: the dialogue between science and faith, and the concepts of historicity and events. In his corpus, explicit references to Whitehead are actually far less frequent than the implicit ones. Although Ladrière was meditating on Whitehead since the fifties—he had also been an early keen reader of Milic Capek (1909–1997)—and alluding to him in his numerous classes, his first published Whiteheadian conference took place only in 1982 (“Aperçu sur la philosophie de A. N. Whitehead,” published in 1984)15. In 1984, Jean-Claude Dumoncel (1944–) publishes the first part of his “Whitehead ou le cosmos torrentiel. Introduction critique à une lecture de Process and Reality.”16 This work had actually been designed for the wellknown series of monographs “Philosophes de tous les temps” published by Seghers, but the editor of the series, André Robinet, terminated the series before the project could be completed (and later the publisher went bankrupt). It is a landmark in introductory French-speaking Whiteheadian studies. In 1985 Jean Largeault (1930–1995), who was especially working at that time with René Thom (1923–2002) publishes Systèmes de la nature. The 15

Jean Ladrière: “Aperçu sur la philosophie de A. N. Whitehead,” Etudes d’anthropologie philosophique, G. Florival (éd.), vol. II, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1984, Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de Philosophie, pp. 156–183. Besides, Jean-François Malherbe’s Le langage théologique à l’heure de la science, Lecture de Jean Ladrière (Paris, éd. du Cerf, 1985), offers a good synthesis of Ladrière’s approach. Although his main concern is theological, his chapter 7 directly addresses Whitehead’s ontology. Cf. Marc Maesschalck’s entry in in Weber and Desmond (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, op. cit., II, pp. 654–663.

16

Archives de Philosophie 47/4, (1984), pp. 569–589 ; 48/1 (1985), pp. 59–78; an upgraded version is about to be published by Les Éditions Chromatika.

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same year, he urges Xavier Verley (1945–) to read the Concept of Nature and Science and the Modern World.17 The proximity existing between Thom’s theory and Whitehead’s ideas was indeed very suggestive (the quest of a qualitative dynamics, the role of discontinuities…). By the same token, Verley also dives into Process and Reality. From Différence et répétition (1968) to Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (1991), one sees, explicitely or not, Whiteheadian themes at work in the Deleuzian “Thousand Plateaus.” In 1986–1987, Deleuze again teaches Whitehead in Vincennes. The result of his pedagogical asceticism will be published in Le Pli (1988), which features a full (but disconcerting) chapter on Whitehead’s metaphysics.18 In the meantime, Dumoncel defends his doctoral thesis in Nantes University (under the supervision of J.-L. Gardies)—Le Système de Whitehead et la philosophie analytique (1987)—arguing for a blend of analytical process philosophy that has since been implemented also by scholars such as Rescher, Seibt, Shields, Lango and Nef (cf. infra). In 1993, James Bradley (1947–) publishes “La cosmologie transcendantale de Whitehead: transformation spéculative du concept de construction logique”19 that announces his work on the speculative generalization of the function. For their part, Jean-Marie Breuvart and Alix Parmentier translate Adventure of Ideas. Not only is the translation excellent, but their introductions and notes are very important to contextualize the philosophical development of Whitehead. In 1994, Isabelle Stengers (1949–) edits L’Effet Whitehead.20 Stengers is a chemist and philosopher who is recognized for her work in 17

Largeault is yet another example of these thinkers saturated with Whiteheadian ideas but very seldom saying so. See his Jean Largeault, Systèmes de la nature, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1985 and his Principes classiques d’interprétation de la nature, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1988.

18

Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, “Critique,” 1988; an English-speaking translation is available: The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Forew. and transl. by Tom Conley, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

19

Archives de Philosophie 56, 1, 1993, pp. 3–28 (the paper, originally written in English, was translated by Marcel Regnier).

20

Is. Stengers (coordination scientifique), L’Effet Whitehead, Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Annales de l’Institut de Philosophie de l’Université de

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thermodynamics with Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003), in hypnosis with Léon Chertok (1911–1991) and in ethnopsychiatry with Tobie Nathan (1948–). But she has not only provided insightful analyses of the process of discovery in the sciences (especially from a process socio-anthropological, i.e., radical constructivist, perspective): her important social commitments stand out in an academic world crippled by the fear of any political engagement whatsoever (especially a left-wing one). Already in La Nouvelle alliance (1979; translated as Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature in 1984) one could notice the activation of SMW’s interpretation of the emergence of Western science. Her 1993 L’Invention des sciences modernes21 was secretely Whiteheadian, as she herself claims. For its part, L’Effet contains six original contributions in French accompanied by Stengers’ translation of Cobb’s essay on Whitehead published in the Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy in 1993 and of Griffin’s “Introduction” from the same volume. Dominique Janicaud was at that time finishing his collegial translation of PR (to appear in 1995); his introductory essay is here published for the first time. Luca Vanzago historically locates Whitehead’s misunderstanding of Kant and shows how time is rooted in perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Henri Vaillant introduces Lewis Ford’s compositional analysis. Jean-Marie Breuvart claims that Whitehead has betrayed Kant’s intuition by failing to consider the primacy of the practical over the theoretical. Bruno Latour exemplifies Whitehead’s ontology with the help of the discovery of lactic acid by Pasteur. Against Kant, he shows that the gaps introduced between ontology, epistemology and sociology have to be overcome. Latour shows that process thought provides a very attractive way of saving realism without using the concept of substance. His accent falls on the definition of the “substances” science works with as an experimental protocol that as a matter of fact involves the entire cosmic history. In 1989, Dominique Janicaud and Daniel Charles gather an interdisciplinary team to translate PR for Gallimard, which had bought the rights after Merleau-Ponty suggested they do so back in the sixties. The team will work until the summer of 1994. (See Weber’s review reprinted supra.) Janicaud’s introductory essay, “Traduire la métaphysique en Bruxelles, 1994. Cf. M. Weber’s critical review in Process Studies 23/4, 1994, pp. 282–284. The title is borrowed from Deleuze’s expression who took it from James. 21

Is. Stengers, L’invention des sciences modernes, Paris, Éditions La Découverte, 1993 (second edition: Éditions Flammarion, 1995).

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procès,” proceeds as a kind of reappropriation of the movement of PR itself. First, he underscores that a translation requires a tight grasp of the metaphysical principles at work in the magnum opus and derives from this his method of translation. Second, he shows how this method works out in dealing with particular concepts. In conclusion, Janicaud raises the question of the legitimacy of speculative philosophy in the light of Kantian and Heideggerian themes. On the one hand, he states that Whitehead misunderstood the late Kant who himself went far beyond the prohibitions he ingeniously framed in the first Critique. On the other hand, the relevance to Whitehead of the Heideggerian critique of the so-called ontotheology is (only roughly) sketched. In 1997 a collective work around Ladrière’s œuvre is published by Ghislaine Florival and Jean Greisch: Création et événement.22 From the perspective of Whiteheadian studies, Ladrière’s own contribution, “L’espérance de la raison” (dedicated to Paul Ricœur and possibly echoing PR 42’s “hope of rationalism”), and J.-M. Breuvart’s “La créativité comme catégorie ultime,” are to be noted. The years 1998–1999 have been of especial importance for French Whiteheadian studies: they have seen, indeed, the inscription of the first chapters of Process and Reality into the program of the “agrégation de philosophie” (section “oral—textes anglais”): Part I in totality and Part II, chapters 1 to 3. Hence the (temporary) blossoming of scientific meetings and the publication of monographs designed to help students to prepare for the agrégation’s exams. In 1998, Dumoncel publishes Les sept mots de Whitehead.23 The author, who underlines that Whitehead’s speculations are as bold as they are disconcerting, proposes an explanation of Process and Reality in six steps: 22

Ghislaine Florival et Jean Greisch (sous la direction de), Création et événement. Autour de Jean Ladrière. Centre International de Cerisy-la-Salle. Actes de la Décade du 21 au 31 août 1995, Louvain-la-Neuve / Paris, Éditions de l’Institut supérieur de Philosophie / Éditions Peeters, 1997.

23

Jean-Claude Dumoncel, Les Sept mots de Whitehead ou L’aventure de l’être (Créativité, Processus, Événement, Objet, Organisme, Enjoyment, Aventure). Une explication de Processus & Réalité, Paris, Éditions et Publications de l’École Lacanienne, Cahiers de l’Unebévue, 1998. Cf. “Recent publications in French” in James A. Bradley, André Cloots, Helmut Maaßen and Michel Weber (eds.), European Studies in Process Thought, Vol. I. In Memoriam Dorothy Emmet, Leuven, European Society for Process Thought, 2003, pp. 53–57.

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three long chapters devoted to PR’s first Part (the definition of speculative philosophy, the categoreal scheme, God and the world; and three short chapters glancing respectively at the concept of creation (qua “chaosapotheosis”), the doctrine of the Trinity, and the “system of transcendentals” (more in the Medieval than in the Kantian sense). The first three chapters display a vast knowledge of Whitehead’s corpus and a genuine sympathy for “complementary” authors such as Leibniz, Spinoza, Russell and Wittgenstein. The last three chapters are somewhat enigmatic additional speculations that endanger the balance of the book. To take the author at his word: on the whole, this work is a bold interpretation of the Gifford lectures that is ever-so-often equally disconcerting. On the one hand, it is a powerful tool of imaginative generalization; on the other, the inflation of hyperboles and contrapunctic exemplifications is not always illuminating. Although navigation on the open sea has not only advantages, the book was welcomed by the critics. The same year, Maurice Elie publishes a (very) small and disconcerting booklet on PR.24 Ali Benmakhlouf, who now occupies Janicaud’s chair in the University of Nice, gathers five papers read at the one-day Whiteheadian colloquium that took place in the University of Paris-Nanterre in 1998.25 B. Saint-Sernin provides a systematic introduction to PR’s categoreal scheme. A. Benmakhlouf contrasts, and historically contextualizes, potentiality and reality. A. Fagot-Largeault presents an argumentative study of Whitehead’s “interconnectedness.” J.-C. Dumoncel analyses the steady presence of the concept of “vector” in Whitehead’s thought (an essential theme already treated in his 1998 book, but the reader is likely to be left unsatisfied). D. R. Scully proposes (in English) “some thoughts on the implication of Whitehead’s analysis of induction.” Bertrand Saint-Sernin (1931–) is a philosopher of science who has published on A. Cournot (1801–1877), G. Simondon (1924–1989), S. Weil (1909–1943) and Maurice Blondel (1861–1949). Although he discovered Whitehead thanks to Théophile Kahn (1896–1986) already in 1965, like most of the scholars we mention in this historical critical review, he 24

M. Elie, Procès et réalité, Whitehead, Paris, Éditions Ellipses, Philo-textes, 1998.

25

Ali Benmakhlouf (Textes réunis par), Alfred North Whitehead, l’Univers solidaire, Paris, Université de Paris X-Nanterre, Publications du département de philosophie Paris X-Nanterre, 1999:

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publishes on Whitehead quite late in his academic life—precisely upon the occasion of the agrégation classes he gave in Paris IV while Anne FagotLargeault was teaching PR in Paris I.26 Whitehead. Un univers en essai (2000)27 is a very well written book that follows closely the program of the agrégation: Part I, chapters 1 and 2, and Part II, chapters 1 to 4 are respectively examined in successive chapters flanked, on the one hand, by an expressive contextualizing portrait and, on the other hand, by a conclusion on Whitehead’s topicality. The scope and density of this welltempered book qualifies it as the best available introduction to PR’s refined conceptual landscape in the French language; the price to pay being, of course, coastal navigation on the Whiteheadian shores (cf. our final assessment of Dumoncel’s Sept mots). In 2000 Denis Hurtubise publishes Relire Whitehead,28 which sticks to Ford’s rather controversial “compositional analysis”—just like Stengers’ Penser avec Whitehead, published two years later.29 And it is a bit surprizing indeed that the only two staunch followers of Ford are Frenchspeaking scholars. In 2002, Pierre Rodrigo edits a special Whiteheadian issue of Les Études philosophiques,30 with contributions by Bertrand Saint-Sernin, Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Jean-Claude Dumoncel, Pierre Rodrigo, Maurice Elie and Xavier Verley.

26

The Université de la Sorbonne was created in 1253. In 1971, as a direct consequence of the rejuvenating events of May 1968, the Sorbonne was split into 13 Parisian entities. The historical buildings are now shared by four distinct institutions: Université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris-3 (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Paris-4 Paris-Sorbonne and Paris V (Paris Descartes).

27

Bertrand Saint-Sernin, Whitehead. Un univers en essai, Paris, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, coll. Analyse et philosophie, 2000.

28

Denis Hurtubise, Relire Whitehead. Les concepts de Dieu dans Process and Reality. Publié en collaboration avec la Corporation canadienne des sciences religieuses / Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, Québec, Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000

29

Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2002. An American translation, expurgated of all its Deleuzian references, is forthcoming at Harvard U.P.

30

Pierre Rodrigo (Éd.), Les Études philosophiques, fascicule n° 4, 2002.

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The first volume of the “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes” series is published in 2004: the collective Alfred North Whitehead. De l’algèbre universelle à la théologie naturelle,31 which attempts to sketch the entirety of Whitehead’s philosophical development, from London to Harvard. PR’s categories are especially at stake in the contributions of A. Benmakhlouf, J.-C. Dumoncel, B. Saint-Sernin, X. Verley, J.-M. Breuvart, A. Cloots, M. Weber and L. Vanzago. The “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes” Network is an international scholarly society, created in 2000, that seeks first and foremost to federate Whiteheadian researches in the French-speaking linguistic world. “His thinking is a prism,” confided Mrs. Whitehead in Lucien Price’s Dialogues,32 and the only way to reconstruct the unicity of the incident light after its prismatic decomposition is to use another prism such as an interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary network. Since 2002, the Network has fostered research seminars in the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (in collaboration with Christiane Chauviré’s and Mathias Girel’s lab). Since 2005, the Chromatikon yearbook (see infra) makes public the most significant result of these debates. Complementarily, it also offer critical studies and critical reviews in Whiteheadian scholarship but also in contiguous fields. In 2004, Frédéric Nef (1947–) publishes Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, which constitutes an interesting eclectic contribution to the emerging field of analytic process metaphysics.33 Andler, Fagot-Largeault and SaintSernin’s Philosophie des sciences comes out the same year.34 The Whiteheadian contribution of this book comes from Saint-Sernin, who exploits his deep knowledge of two mathematician-philosophers who advocate a realistic ontology in a process atmosphere: Cournot, with his concept of “chance” operating in the various natural layers he identified, and Whitehead, with “creativity” dynamizing the same idea.

31

François Beets, Michel Dupuis et Michel Weber (éditeurs), Alfred North Whitehead. De l’algèbre universelle à la théologie naturelle. Actes des Journées d’étude internationales tenues à l’Université de Liège les 11-12-13 octobre 2001, Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2004.

32

Lucien Price, Dialogues [1954], Mentor Book, 1956, p. 16.

33

Frédéric Nef, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, Folio Essais n° 447, 2004.

34

Daniel Andler, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Bertrand Saint-Sernin, Philosophie des sciences, Deux volumes, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, Folio Essais, 2004.

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Still in 2004, Wahl’s Vers le concret (1932) is republished with an informative Foreword signed by Mathias Girel (see supra). In 2005, Michel Weber publishes his La Dialectique de l’intuition chez A. N. Whitehead.35 This monograph constitutes the first full exposition of the pancreativism advocated by the author since the mid-nineties. His approach has been since analysed, developed and extended in his Whitehead’s Pancreativism: The Basics (2006).36 Weber also publishes in 2005 the first issue of the bilingual Chromatikon Yearbook of Philosophy in Process evoked earlier.37 On that occasion, he was quoting Shakespeare: “Our court shall be a little academe, Still and contemplative in living art.”38 Relevant articles in French include JeanMarie Breuvart’s on PR’s concept of speculative philosophy, Jean-Claude Dumoncel’s “Cosmologie, métaphysique et philosophie,” Xavier Verley’s on value and event and Weber’s on creativity and conceptual reversion. In 2006 Xavier Verley edits a special issue of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger39 that features articles by M. Elie, D. Debaise, J.Cl. Dumoncel and Verley himself (on cosmology and phenomenology). The second Chromatikon Yearbook of Philosophy in Process40 appears in 2006. Relevant articles in French are authored by Vincent Berne (on 35

Michel Weber, La Dialectique de l’intuition chez A. N. Whitehead: sensation pure, pancréativité et contiguïsme. Préface de Jean Ladrière, Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2005

36

Michel Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics. Foreword by Nicholas Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, ontos verlag, 2006. See the overview provided supra in Hulbert and Quiring’s entry.

37

Michel Weber (sous la direction de) et Diane d’Eprémesnil (avec la collaboration de), Chromatikon I. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès— Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2005.

38

W. Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act I, Scene 1 in The Complete Works, London, Michael O’Mara Books Limited, 1988, p. 132.

39

Xavier Verley (éd.), “Whitehead,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, tome cxcvi, N°1, janvier, 2006.

40

Michel Weber et Pierfrancesco Basile (sous la direction de), Chromatikon II. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès—Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2006.

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panexperientialism and subjectivation), Jean-Marie Breuvart (on Whitehead’s philosophy of existence) and Franck Robert (on PR’s understanding of colour). Still in 2006, Michel Weber signs “La virtualité en procès,”41 carefully unfolding the various levels at which actuality and potentiality conspire in PR, and “La vie de la Nature selon le dernier Whitehead,”42 which revisits the organicism advocated by Whitehead. Then two monographs, whose exact relevance are unknown, appeared: David’s Paramètres théoriques et pratiques d’herméneutique du procès and Debaise’s Un empirisme spéculatif.43 In 2007, Xavier Verley systematically evokes in La philosophie spéculative de Whitehead,44 all the major interpretational difficulties of Whitehead’s œuvre: extension and space, continuity and atomicity, order and evolution, immanence and transcendence, God and the world… He argues that all these contrasting concepts need to be overcome with the help of the works posterior to PR itself. The same year, Bourgine, Ongombe and Weber edit Regards croisés sur Alfred North Whitehead.45 These are the Proceedings of a conference that took place around the cross-examination of Religions, Sciences and Politics. Of special interest for PR scholarship are Weber’s generalist presentation of Whitehead’s worldview and Verley’s “Mathématique et métaphysique.” 41

Michel Weber, “La virtualité en procès. Relativisation de l’acte et de la puissance chez A. N. Whitehead,” Revue internationale de Philosophie, vol. 61 n° 236, juin, 2006, pp. 223–241.

42

Michel Weber, “La vie de la Nature selon le dernier Whitehead,” Les Études philosophiques, sept. 2006, T. 60, Vol. 3, pp. 395–408.

43

Robert David’s Paramètres théoriques et pratiques d’herméneutique du procès, Montréal, Éditions Médiaspaul, 2006; Didier Debaise, Un empirisme spéculatif. Lecture de Procès et réalité de Whitehead. Préface d’Isabelle Stengers, Paris, Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2007.

44

Xavier Verley, La philosophie spéculative de Whitehead, Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2007.

45

Benoît Bourgine, David Ongombe et Michel Weber (éditeurs), Regards croisés sur Alfred North Whitehead. Religions, sciences, politiques. Actes du colloque international tenu à l’Université catholique de Louvain, les 31 mai, 1er et 2 juin 2006, Frankfurt / Paris / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2007.

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In 2007, Bertrand Saint-Sernin’s Le rationalisme qui vient46 brings out an important double question: what sort of universal rationality is available today, in a pluralistic cultural context that is deeply influenced by the techno-sciences? What guarantees the unity of techno-science itself now that individual scientists are no more able to verify and to prove, as they used to, everything that has been experimented and demonstrated by their colleagues? In the vast historical panorama provided by the author, Whitehead comes back, again and again, to provide the relevant framework or the pertinent hint. The goal is to understand how scientific intersubjectivity and cosmic interconnexity can mingle and thereby ground tolerance and charity. The implicit and explicit references to Whitehead are all the more so impressive that he is not mentioned in the index nominum that was created by the publisher! Still in 2007, the first volume of Devaux’s La cosmologie de Whitehead, evoked supra, appears,47 as well as the third Chromatikon Yearbook of Philosophy in Process. Relevant articles in French include: Jean-Marie Breuvart on Whitehead and Husserlian intentionnality; Franck Robert’s sequel on the phenomenology of colours; Xavier Verley on Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty; and Jean-Pascal Alcantara the role of mathematics in the genesis of Whitehead’s thought. In 2008, Michel Weber publishes L’épreuve de la philosophie,48 a short monograph seeking to sketch the relevance of Whitehead’s organic or process philosophy for a personal quest for meaning in everyday life. It especially attempts to secure the foundations of a process philosophical counseling (or praxis) by complementing Whiteheadian process thought (that provides the general standpoint) with Socrates’ maieutics (for the sake of analytical rigour), Hadot’s spiritual exercises (for the vision), and James’ pragmatism (for efficacy).49 Little known in the French-speaking world, 46

Bertrand Saint-Sernin, Le rationalisme qui vient, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, Inédit tel, 2007.

47

Philippe Devaux, La cosmologie de Whitehead. Tome I, L’Épistémologie whiteheadienne, édité par Thibaut Donck et Michel Weber, Les Éditions chromatika, 2007

48

Michel Weber, L’épreuve de la philosophie. Essai sur les fondements de la praxis philosophique, Louvain-la-Neuve, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2008.

49

Pierre Hadot (1922–) is the author of numerous studies in Ancient philosophy (in particular in Neo-Platonism). Of especial importance in the context of Weber’s blend of counselling are his Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique

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philosophical counselling is a practice that is mainly rooted in Socrates’ and Epicurus’ legacies. To put philosophy to the test requires a double event taking place during the dialogue between the philosophical practitioner and the visitor (to use Gerd Achenbach’s term). On the one hand, the practitioner agrees to have her philosophical standpoint assessed by its maieutic capacity to relieve human suffering. On the other, the visitor endorses in his own way the commitment to authenticity that is specific to philosophical life. Its sequel, Éduquer (à) l’anarchie,50 explores the consequences of the philosophical praxis for the philosopher herself, not only existentially but also politically. It exploits the polysemiality of the concept of anarchy to name both the (allegedly constructive but factually genocidal) chaos that is fostered by neoliberalism and the libertarian communautarism that could constitute its much-needed antidote. Starting with an exposition of the ontological presuppositions of post-modernism inspired by Whitehead’s writings, it especially shows how the current global crisis impacts higher education in Europe and how a Whiteheadian narrative springing from the proto-idea of creative advance could re-animate our so-called democracies. Instrumental in these discussions are Huxley’s (1932) and Orwell’s (1949) dystopias as well as Whitehead’s understanding of the functions of reason. Although Rorty is not discussed, some readers have seen in this work a direct and powerful reply to the author of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). The fourth Chromatikon Yearbook of Philosophy in Process51 appears in 2008. The following French-speaking articles are of direct relevance to the focus of this entry: E. Deroo’s “Le périr chez Whitehead: esquisse anthropologique,” which provides an anthropological assessment of PR’s concept of perishing and Fr. Bisson’s “L’aventure d’une ritournelle,” (Paris, Études augustiniennes, 1981); La citadelle intérieure. Introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle (Paris, Fayard, 1992); Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris, Gallimard, 1995); La philosophie comme manière de vivre (Paris, Albin Michel, 2002); Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (2e éd. rev. et augm. [1981], Paris, Études augustiniennes, 1987). 50

Michel Weber, Éduquer (à) l’anarchie. Essai sur les conséquences de la praxis philosophique, Louvain-la-Neuve, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2008

51

Michel Weber et Pierfrancesco Basile (sous la direction de), Chromatikon IV. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès—Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2008.

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which constitutes a very insightful first reflexion on the conditions of possibility of a Whiteheadian musicology of free jazz inspired by Albert Ayler.

German-speaking Scholarship on PR Helmut Maaßen1 The first wide-ranging and influential philosophical research on Process and Reality in German was done by Reiner Wiehl (1929–). On June 3, 1959 he defended a doctoral thesis at Frankfurt University entitled “Der Begriff in den Anschauungsformen der Mittelbarkeit und Unmittelbarkelt nebst einem Anhang über die Kategorien in Whiteheads Process and Reality” (“Concept in the notion of immediacy and mediation with an appendix on Whitehead’s categories in Process and Reality”). A cyclostyled version was published in 1961. Central to the thesis is a remarkable section on Whitehead’s Categories in Process and Reality (pp. 105-173). After completing his thesis, Wiehl taught in Heidelberg (until 1997) and continued to publish numerous articles on Whitehead, becoming a doyen of Whitehead research in Germany.2

1

Independent scholar; [email protected]. This entry has benefited from the feedback of Reiner Wiehl (Universität Heidelberg), Barbara Muraca (Universität Greifswald) and Adele Gerdes (Universität Bielefeld).

2

Reiner Wiehl has published a number of works on Whitehead, including: “Zeit und Zeitlosigkeit in der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads.” In Natur und Geschichte. Karl Löwith zum 70, Stuttgart: Geburtstag, 1967, 373−405. (English translation in Process Studies 5, 1975, 3−30.) Reprinted in Reiner Wiehl, Zeitwelten. Philosophisches Denken an den Rändern von Natur und Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, 29−68; “Einleitung in die Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads.” In A. N. Whitehead, Abenteuer der Ideen, Frankfurt am Main, 1971 (22000), 7−71; “Prozesse und Kontraste. Ihre kategoriale Funktion in der philosophischen Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie auf der Grundlage der Whiteheadschen Metaphysik.” In H. Holz / E. Wolf-Gazo (Hg.), Whitehead und der Prozeßbegriff. Beiträge zur Philosophie Alfred North Whiteheads auf dem Ersten Internationalen Whitehead-Symposium 1981, Freiburg, 1984, 315−341; “Whiteheads Kosmologie der Gefühle zwischen Ontologie und Anthropologie.” In Friedrich Rapp/Reiner Wiehl (Hg.), Whiteheads Metaphysik der Kreativität. Internationales Whitehead-Symposium Bad Homburg 1983, Freiburg, 1986, 141−167. (English translation in Friedrich Rapp/Reiner Wiehl (Hg.), Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990, 127−151.) Reprinted in Reiner Wiehl, Zeitwelten. Philosophisches Denken an den Rändern von Natur und Geschichte, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, 96−128; “Einleitung.” In Helmut Holzhey/Alois Rust/Reiner

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In 1951 Helga Topel completed an unpublished doctoral thesis at Bonn University.3 In 1958, Eberhard Bubser completed a doctoral thesis at Göttingen University.4 In 1965, Klaus Heipke defended his thesis on Whitehead at Würzburg University,5 which has also not been published. In 1975 Ludwig Herdt and Hans-Günter Holl wrote their theses on Whitehead at Frankfurt University.6 In 1981, Reto Luzius Fetz published his post-doctoral thesis in Philosophy from Freiburg University (Switzerland)7 and Michael Welker published his post-doctoral thesis in Theology from Tübingen University.8

Wiehl (Hg.), Natur, Subjektivität, Gott. Zur Prozeßphilosophie Alfred N. Whiteheads, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, 9−17; “Whiteheads Kant-Kritik und Kants Kritik am Panpsychismus.” In Helmut Holzhey/Alois Rust/Reiner Wiehl (Hg.), Natur, Subjektivität, Gott. Zur Prozeßphilosophie Alfred N. Whiteheads, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, 198−239. Reprinted in Reiner Wiehl, Metaphysik und Erfahrung. Philosophische Essays. Frankfurt am Main, 1996, 333−374; “Aktualität und Extensivität in Whiteheads Kosmo-Psychologie.” In Michael Hampe/Helmut Maaßen (Hg.), Die Gifford Lectures und ihre Deutung. Materialien zu Whiteheads „Prozeß und Realität. Bd. 2, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, 313−368. Reprinted in Reiner Wiehl, Subjektivität und System, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, 320−373; “Metaphysik und Erfahrung. Überlegungen im Anschluß an Spinoza und Whitehead.” In Metaphysik und Erfahrung. Philosophische Essays. Frankfurt am Main, 1996, 375−397. See also Michel Weber and Pierfrancesco Basile (eds.), Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality, Frankfurt / Lancaster, ontos verlag, 2006. 3

Topel, H. “Whiteheads Analyse des Wirklichen Falles,” Bonn, 1951. (phil. Diss.)

4

Bubser, E., “Die spekulative Philosophie Alfred North Whiteheads”, Göttingen, 1958 (phil. Diss.). A summary of this thesis was published in 1960: “Sprache und Metaphysik in Whiteheads Philosophie,”Archiv für Philosophie 10 (1960): 79-196.

5

Heipke, Klaus, “Die Philosophie der Ereignisse bei A. N. Whitehead,” Würzburg, 1965. (phil. Diss.)

6

Herdt, Ludwig, “Immanenz und Geschichte. Zum Begriff der Kreativitat in der Metaphysik A. N. Whitcheads.” Frankfurt, 1975. (phil. Diss.). Holl, Hans Günter, “Subjekt und Rationalität. Eine Studie zu A. N. Whitehead und Th. W. Adorno,” Frankfurt, 1975. (phil. Diss.)

7

Fetz, Reto Luzius, “Whitehead: Prozeßdenken und Substanzmetaphysik,” Freiburg, 1981. [Symposion 65]

8

Welker, Michael. “Universalität Gottes und Relativität der Welt, Theologische Kosmologie im Dialog mit dem amerikanischen Prozeßdenken nach Whitehead,

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Part 1 of Fetz’s thesis deals with the relationship between science and philosophy, to set the framework for Whitehead’s thought, which he develops in Part 2. Part 3 attempts a detailed analysis of Whitehead’s main concepts in comparison with Aristotle. A number of articles have appeared in Process Studies which focus on different aspects of Fetz’s book.9 For his part, Welker tries to show which questions and interests generate Whitehead's cosmology. Furthermore, he explains the function of the idea of God within Whitehead's cosmology. Welker argues that Whitehead at first regards the development of a theory of the world as a task, which can only be fulfilled by those sciences whose theoretical language is based on mathematical formulae. Later, however, he develops a more complex concept of the world compatible with the conceptions of the world to which the humanities, common sense thought and preverbal feeling testify. Whitehead understands that the presupposed unity of the world needs to be justified. In developing the very theme of cosmology which in his conviction is basic to all religion, Whitehead uses the problematic concept of the “apotheosis of the world”: the unification of the many efforts of the world to pass into everlasting unity.10

neukirchen-Vluyn,” (1981) 1988. 9

Fetz, Reto Luzius and James W. Felt, trans., “In Critique of Whitehead,” Process Studies 20, no.1 (Spring 1991): 1-9. Fetz, Reto Luzius and James W. Felt, trans., “On the Formation of Ontological Concepts: The Relationship Between the Theories of Whitehead and Piaget,” Process Studies 17, no.4 (Winter 1988):262-272. Fetz, Reto Luzius and James W. Felt, trans., “Aristotelian and Whiteheadian Conceptions of Actuality: I,” Process Studies 19, no.1 (Spring 1990): 15-27. Fetz, Reto Luzius and James W. Felt, trans., “Aristotelian and Whiteheadian Conceptions of Actuality: II,” Process Studies 19, no.3 (Fall 1990): 145-55. For a more detailed review of this book in English see Leclerc, Ivor, Process Studies 12, no.4 (Winter 1982): 261-262.

10

For a detailed review of this book in English see Catherine Keller, “Michael Welker's Universalität Gottes--Relativität der Welt,” Process Studies 12:3 (Fall 1982). Welker has also published numerous articles on Whitehead: “Prozeßtheologie,” EKL 3 111 (1992): 1363-1366; “Die relativistische Kosmologie Whiteheads,” Philosophische Rundschau 32 (1985): 134-55; “Dogmatische Theologie und postmoderne Metaphysik: Karl Barths Theologle, Prozeßtheologle und die Religionstheorie Whiteheads,” NZSTh 28 (1986): 311-26; “Ermeßbarkeit und Vermeßbarkeit von Welt. Die Funktion ‘Postmoderner’ Metaphysik bei Whitehead.” In Henrich, D. and R. P. Horstmann, eds., Metaphysik nach Kant? Stuttgart, 1988 (330-342). (Stuttg. Hegel-Kongreß 1987/Veröff der Intern. Hegel-Vereinigung 17); “Whitehead’s Vergottung der Welt.” Neue

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In 1981 the first International Whitehead Symposium took place at Bonn University. The results from this Symposium were published in 1984 as Whitehead und der Prozeßbegriff. Beiträge zur Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads auf dem Ersten Internationalen Whitehead-Symposion, 1981.11 Whitehead would have liked this book. He was passionately interested in speculative philosophy, and these essays take speculative philosophy seriously, pressing Whitehead's categorial notions to new applications. Whitehead also disliked philosophic discipleship, and several of these essays subject his thought to candid criticism. He would have been pleased, too, with the breadth of viewpoints represented by the authors coming from Japan and Turkey as well as Europe, England, and the United States. Though the volume is entitled a “Proceedings,” its contents are wider than that, since some of the shorter essays were invited for the volume rather than actually delivered at the Symposium. The Symposium papers also appear in revised or enlarged form, reflecting the discussion that followed their presentation. The major contributors to this volume rank among the most respected process philosophers: John Cobb, Dorothy Emmet, Charles Hartshorne, Ivor Leclerc, Victor Lowe, Richard Martin and Reiner Wiehl—to name only a few. Most of the contributors, while sympathetic to Whitehead's basic philosophic ideas, think their own thoughts. The volume is not a primer of Whiteheadian orthodoxy. The reader who is not comfortable reading philosophy in German need not fear this book: of its twenty-eight essays only eight are in German, and seven of those are followed by an English summary prepared by one of the editors. It should be noted, however, that although these summaries are a great convenience, they, like most summaries, should not be relied upon as if they were the originals. The editor states that their preparation was approved of by the respective authors; he does not state that the authors have vouched for the accuracy of the resulting summaries. More than once, as a matter of fact, I was unable to locate in the original some of the points made in the summary. In one instance, (pp. 237-39, on the Fetz essay) the summary is quite misleading. Without adequately warning the reader that the summary gives the view of the editor rather than that of the essayist, the Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 24 no.2 (1982): 185205. 11

Holz, Harald, and Wolf-Gazo, Ernst eds., Whitehead und der Prozeßbegriff. (Whitehead and The Idea of Process.) Beiträge zur Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads auf dem Ersten Internationalen Whitehead-Symposion, 1981: Frankfurt, 1984.

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summary adds an extended section on Whitehead's view of substance, an addition which has no counterpart in the essay being summarized and which, in my opinion, contains serious errors of interpretation. The editors have made it easy to find one's way through the volume by suitably grouping the essays under topical headings. I call attention—with regrettable but unavoidable arbitrariness, for not everything can be mentioned—to some essays that seem to me of special interest. In (I), Whitehead's Actuality (sic: meaning, I gather, Whitehead's status, influence, acceptance), we have a foretaste of Lowe's biography of Whitehead, with its personal touches about Whitehead and more than a hint of the frustrations it has represented for Lowe. We also get a glimpse of Whitehead's status in Japan as well as in Europe, together with an extraordinary catalogue, prepared by Wolf-Gazo, of everything that has gone on in German-speaking Whiteheadian scholarship since 1945: not only books and published articles, but lectures and university courses. In (II), Philosophy of Language, Ford's essay, “The Concept of ‘Process’: From ‘Transition’ to ‘Concrescence’,” constitutes a preview of his book, The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics12 with one slight exception: the present essay contains a detailed argumentation (pp. 85-95) not to be found in the later work. In (III), Natural Philosophy and Epistemology, there is a pair of significant essays by Leclerc and by Cobb on the philosophy of nature, including Cobb's assessment of the relevance of Whitehead's thought to David Bohm's speculations about the “implicate order.” Cobb concludes that Bohm's speculations are remarkably similar to those of Whitehead, but that there is no present evidence that they are superior in interpreting nature. The essays of (IV), Evolution and Genetic Psychology, raise again the question of panpsychism and biological evolution, together with a consideration (in Von Reto Luzius Fetz's essay) of the relation of Whitehead's thought to that of Piaget concerning the origin of psychological concepts. In (VI), Aesthetics, Wiehl applies the categorial notions of process and contrast to aesthetics, while the final section (VII), On the History of Philosophy as Related to Whitehead, relates Whitehead's thought to a whole litany of other thinkers, from Lucretius to Heidegger. 12

Ford, Lewis. The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics: 1925–1929 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984).

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I dwell in conclusion on two of the essays in section (V), Philosophical Theology. Michael Welker, in “Whiteheads Vergottung der Welt” (translating Whitehead's phrase, “the Apotheosis of the World,” PR 348/529), argues convincingly that Whitehead's conception of God is equally a radical reconception of the World. Appropriately juxtaposed to Welker's essay is David Pailin's, “God as Creator in a Whiteheadian Understanding,” an essay I think worth spelling out in more detail. Pailin asks whether one can give a persuasive Whiteheadian answer to the question whether there can be meaning in the world. The important matter, says Pailin, “is not to try to discern how reality came into being ex nihilo […], it is rather to determine the structure of reality that ensures its ultimate meaningfulness” (277), even in the face of obvious evil. After noting that the contemporary theological discussion, lacking a viable theory of God as creator, has tended to focus on the relationship of God to man, Pailin returns the discussion to the nature of the God who is supposed to be thus related, and asks whether a Whiteheadian (not necessarily Whitehead's) conception of God can prove satisfactory. In testing the Whiteheadian concept he challenges the adequacy and necessity of Whitehead's theory of the atomicity of actual process and of Whitehead's supposition of a divine conceptual entertainment of a discrete multiplicity of eternal objects. Pailin brings his argument to a final focus on the issue of the plausibility of a Whiteheadian panpsychism. The viability of such a notion seems required if God is to be conceived as constantly and effectively working to promote value in the world, as distinguished from any view in which God is simply thought to have set the initial metaphysical and historical conditions, after which world history works itself out either by mechanistic necessity or by chance. A Whiteheadian vision of the world and its relation to God is necessarily teleological, and a teleological view of nature is inevitably panpsychistic. But is such a view ultimately credible? That, thinks Pailin, is the final question.13 In 1983, an International Whitehead Symposium was held in Bad Homburg and the papers of that symposium were published in 1986.14 These papers were published in English as well.15 Whiteheads Metaphysik 13

Inspired by James Felt’s book review in Process Studies 16, no.2 (Summer 1987): 149151.

14

Rapp, Friedrich and Reiner Wiehl, eds., Whiteheads Metaphysik der Kreativität. Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1986.

15

Friedrich Rapp/Reiner Wiehl (ed.), Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity.

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der Kreativität contains twelve articles centering around the concept of creativity. The book's four chapters sketch Whitehead's place in the history of philosophy, the mutual dependence between the results obtained in empirical research and their metaphysical interpretation, the cosmological and the anthropological dimensions in Whitehead's philosophy and, finally, the relationship between the philosophical and the theological interpretations of creativity.16 Although written in 1997 Michel Hampe’s article “Jenseits von Moderne und Postmoderne,” springs from researches that took place from 1984 onwards.17 The general conclusion of his article is that by 1984 Whiteheadian scholarship had left its infancy stage and had almost attained the level of Heidegger and Wittgenstein research. He argues that Whitehead is the only twentieth-century philosopher who has been able to renew the traditional metaphysical tradition without ignoring the criticism of metaphysics, i.e., without being behind the times in a supposedly postmetaphysical age. Since 1987 at least one, if not several, monographs have been published every year. In 1987 Alois Rust published his doctoral dissertation (1986) from Zürich University.18 He shows, using the relationship between speculation and mathematics in Whitehead, that the organic cosmology can be understood as a synthesis of the cosmology of Plato and Aristotle, which focuses on the essence of things (internal relations), and the Newtonian cosmology which focuses on the mathematical (external) relations of the material world.19 In 1988, Helmut Maaßen published his doctoral dissertation on “God, good and evil”.20 He argues that it is possible to develop a system of ethics, 16

Abstract from The Philosopher's Index.

17

Hampe, Michael. “Jenseits von Moderne und Postmoderne: Whiteheads Metaphysik und ihre Anwendungen in der theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie der Gegenwart,” Philosophische Rundschau 44, no. 2 (June 1997): 95-112.

18

Rust, Alois. Die organismische Kosmologie von Alfred N. Whitehead. Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1987

19

Abstract from The Philosopher's Index.

20

Helmut, Maassen. Gott, das Gute und das Böse in der Philosophie A.N. Whiteheads (God, Good and Evil in A. N. Whitehead's Philosophy). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1988.

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based on Whitehead's cosmological design, which allows for a satisfactory definition of good and evil. Whitehead's ethics can be defined as relational value-ethics: this is proved and confirmed by means of works on ethics in Whitehead. The second part of the thesis compares Whitehead's cosmotheology with Leibniz's theodicy. The value (in terms of progress) as well as the price of process theodicy is explained by means of this comparative study: on the one hand, it guarantees the freedom of the individual, while, on the other hand, limiting the omnipotence of God. In 1990 Michael Hampe published Die Wahrnehmungen der Organismen: Über die Voraussetzungen einer naturalistischen Theorie der Erfahrung in der Metaphysik Whiteheads.21 Roland Faber writes in his review: “Once in a while, when a really challenging book appears, one may have secretly wished it would have been written by oneself. This certainly is such a book. Its accomplishments consist primarily in the ability of its author to convey the most complex elements of Whitehead's philosophy of experience in a not less complex way, allowing for intense re-reading and re-thinking. Hampe's methodological intentions are quite intricate. He performs his investigation into Whitehead according to at least two aims. First, Whitehead's theory of experience shall serve as approach to the plausibility of Whitehead's metaphysics—if not to metaphysics at all. Secondly, in the course of Hampe's arguments, Whitehead's metaphysics shall be rendered intelligible as a naturalistic view of the world and of human beings. The overall question of this book concerns experience. Whitehead's philosophy of organism shall be considered exclusively within the context of the place of human experience within nature. The contemporary problems of naturalism shall be seen as having been already Whitehead's problems. But his distinguished account was able to undermine exactly the tensions which seemed to render former positions within a theory of perception unintelligible. Two elements, above all, have to be combined to attain success: (i) the relation between universals (qualities, traits) and their instantiation in unrepeatable particulars (actualities); and (ii)—which is signifying their sought relation—a theory of causality. Altogether, the conception of the book is understood as a delineation of the conditions for a naturalistic theory of experience according to Whitehead.”22 21

Hampe, M. Die Wahrnehmungen der Organismen: Über die Voraussetzungen einer naturalistischen Theorie der Erfahrung in der Metaphysik Whiteheads. Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1990. (Neue Studien zur Philosophie 1)

22

From Roland Faber‘s book review: “Die Wahrnehmungen der Organismen: Über die

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Following his doctoral thesis, Michael Hampe has published several books and articles on process thought.23 Most impressive is the volume Alfred North Whitehead, in which he gives not only a biographical sketch of Whitehead’s life, but also an outline of his philosophical development, from his early mathematical research, his studies in physics, to Process and Reality and after that to his post- PR works. In 1990 the papers of the 1987 International Whitehead Symposium, which took place in Sigriswil (Switzerland), were published.24 They cover a wide range of topics concerning nature, subjectivity and God. It is argued that Whitehead replaces the philosophical concept of matter by the concepts of process and organism. In his modern concept of the world (Weltbild), neither institutions nor the variety of human experience (poetry, religion, natural sciences, etc.) exist separately but are interrelated and stimulate each other. In 1991 two important resource books were published: Prozess, Gefühl und Raum-Zeit. Materialien zu Whiteheads 'Prozess und Realität' Band 125 and Die Gifford Lectures und ihre Deutung. Materialien zu Whiteheads 'Prozess und Realität' Band 2.26 In his review, Ford writes the following:

Voraussetzungen einer naturalistischen Theorie der Erfahrung in der Metaphysic Whiteheads, by Michael Hampe,” Process Studies 25 (1996): 124-8. 23

Gesetz und Distanz. Studien über die Prinzipien der Gesetzmäßigkeit in der theoretischen und praktischen Philosophie. Heidelberger Forschungen Bd. 30. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, Winter, 1996; Alfred North Whitehead. (Becksche Reihe “Denker” 547). München: Beck Verlag, 1998; Notwendigkeit, Experiment, Zufall. Zum Gesetzesbegriff in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Kasseler: Philosophische Schriften Bd. 4. Kassel 1999; Erkenntnis und Praxis. Zur Philosophie des Pragmatismus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 2006; Die Macht des Zufalls. Vom Umgang mit dem Risiko, Berlin: Siedler jr. Verlag, 2006; Eine kleine Geschichte des Naturgesetzbegriffs, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 2007.

24

Rapp, Friedrich and Reiner Wiehl, eds., Whiteheads Metaphysik der Kreativitat. Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 1986; Holzhey, Rust, and Wiehl, eds., Natur, Subjektivität, Gott: zur Prozessphilosophie Alfred N. Whiteheads.

25

Herausgegeben von Michael Hampe und Helmut Maaßen, Prozess, Gefühl und RaumZeit. Materialien zu Whiteheads 'Prozess und Realität' Band. Suhrkamp: Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1991.

26

Herausgegeben von Michael Hampe und Helmut Maaßen, Die Gifford Lectures

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“The first volume concentrates on the wider philosophical situation, using these headings: (1) Nature, Process and Experience (essays by Bergson, Henderson, Dewey, Santayana); (2) Relations, Qualities and Feeling (Bradley, McTaggart, Russell, Nunn, James, Hocking); and (3) Space, Time and Relativity (Alexander, Whitehead, de Laguna, Northrop). All essays have been translated into German and each section is introduced by the editors. The third, by Michael Hampe, deserves special mention as a 24-page introduction to “Whitehead's Development of a Theory of Extension.” This is a remarkable study in the development of Whitehead's theory of extension, drawing upon Hampe's dissertation: Die Wahrnehmungen der Erfahrung in der Metaphysik Whiteheads (Göttingen, 1990). It makes very clear the extent to which Whitehead was committed to finding a basis for geometry in experience. This meant the ultimate abandonment (by at least 1919) of an integration of the theory of space within the algebra of Principia Mathematica and the search for a mereological conception of space on the basis of experience. This becomes basic to the subsequent critique of Einstein. Hampe's general introduction, “Whitehead's Metaphysics and Contemporary Philosophical Self-understanding,” is particularly interesting in that it shows how Whitehead is regarded from the perspective of contemporary German academic life. Heretofore Whitehead's philosophy was seen as something of a white elephant. His significance can only be appreciated now that the anti-metaphysical rhetoric is disappearing. (No mention of deconstruction is made). The rejection of every pretence to absolute truth need not include the rejection of systematic form. Hampe also points out the ways in which Whitehead's criticism of 17th and 18th century epistemology anticipates many of the analytic efforts of our time and affirms Nietzsche's panperspectivism. The second volume contains ten letters by Whitehead, Collingwood, Nunn, Bradley, Carr, all addressed to Alexander (and from his archives in Manchester, except for the [already published] Whitehead letter to Hartshorne dated 2 January 1936). There is also an extract from Lord Gifford's will and a list of the Gifford Lectures for all four universities (Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews, Aberdeen) concurrently from 1888 to 1990. und ihre Deutung. Materialien zu Whiteheads 'Prozess und Realität' Band 2. Suhrkamp: Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, 1991.

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Most of the essays have already appeared in English, such as the first chapter of Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, and the excerpt from George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of Act (538-548). The fine essay by Dorothy Emmet on Whitehead and Alexander can now be found in Process Studies 21/3. Timothy L.S. Sprigge connects Whitehead with Santayana, while RolfPeter Horstmann argues convincingly that for most of Process and Reality Whitehead and Bradley are seriously incompatible. Yet he does not reflect on the role of the consequent nature, which I believe Whitehead saw as a temporalistic version of the Absolute. I take Whitehead to be recognizing, perhaps wryly, that after opposing Bradley for most of the book, in the end the result may not be so different after all. Helmut Maaßen provocatively discusses three philosophical approaches to the problem of creation: Plato's Timaeus, Whitehead’s God, and the Christian creatio ex nihilo. He documents some striking parallels with the Timaeus. His account of the creatio ex nihilo is nuanced by a recognition of how the doctrine developed to culminate in the second century debate with middle Platonism (just before Plotinus). Schleiermacher further reinterpreted it in terms of continuing creation. Yet if there is continuing creation with respect to every event, the role of God must be carefully defined with respect to the self-creative role of the occasion, if determinism is to be avoided. There is also a partially published essay by Hartshorne on “Peirce, Whitehead, and the Sixteen Views of God,” and essays by Gregor K. Frey, “Naturalistic Metaphysics of Whitehead and Russell,” Mana-Sibylla Lotter, “Experience and Nature: from the Philosophy of Science to the Pragmatic Metaphysics of Experience,” and Reiner Wiehl, “Actuality and Extensivity in Whitehead's Kosmo-Psychology.” Peter Simons closes the volume with “Whitehead and Mereology.” A mereology is a formal-axiomatic theory of the relation between part and whole. Simons investigates three attempts that Whitehead made in this direction: the relational theory of space (see Patrick J. Hurley, “Russell, Poincare, and Whitehead's Relational Theory of Space,” Process Studies 9/1-2, 1979: 14-23), PNK 101-109 on the method of extensive abstraction, and the analysis of extensive connection in PR 294-301. He finds the latter, with its assumption of nonreflexivity, to lead to a flat contraction (384). He argues, however, that Whitehead made the most honest and explicit attempt to develop an ontology of four-dimensional entities, even though it is

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ultimately unsuccessful. This need not mean, however, that every such attempt must be unsuccessful.”27 In 1991 four works on Whitehead were published: Thomas Beelitz published Die dynamische Beziehung zwischen Erfahrung und Metaphysik im Interesse der Theologie.28 This work explores a fundamental theme in Whitehead's thought—the dynamic interrelation between experience and metaphysics—in order to assess his theological inquiry. “If a theologian wants to understand a philosopher, he must learn to understand him as a philosopher. Only in that way can he expect to learn from him with profit” (21). Whitehead's rationalism is examined in terms of his critique of intellectualism. Experience is examined from many angles, including contrasts with the philosophical tradition, the modes of perception, and the notion of concrescence. Creativity is examined as “the necessary complexity of the form of the unity of the universe.” God is introduced only in the last twenty pages. Hans-Joachim Sander published Natur und Schöpfung —die Realität im Prozess.29 This book is a contribution to Fundamental Theology that encompasses Process Philosophy and Theology. Sander analyzes the relation between nature and creation from an analytical, a hermeneutical and a pragmatic point of view. Both the discourse about the difficult relation between religion and science, and the ecological concern in its consequences for creation theology, are considered. According to Sander, Whitehead's metaphysics offers a path for the development of a new paradigm in the conception of creativity as a cosmological dimension. Michael Schramm published Prozeßtheologie und Bioethik. Reprodutionsmedizin und Gentechnik im Lichte der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads.30 Schramm develops the metaphysical paradigm of process as explored in Whitehead’s philosophy. This paradigm allows him to support 27

From the book review by Lewis S. Ford, Process Studies 23, no.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1994): 197–198.

28

Beelitz, Thomas. Die dynamische Beziehung zwischen Erfahrung und Metaphysik im Interesse der Theologie, Frankfurt/M, Bern: Verlag Peter Lang, 1991.

29

Sander, Hans-Joachim. Natur und Schöpfung—die Realität im Prozess. Frankfurt a.M., Bern: Peter Lang, 1991.

30

Schramm, Michael. Prozeßtheologie und Bioethik. Reprodutionsmedizin und Gentechnik im Lichte der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads.(Diss., University of Würzburg, 1990)Freiburg: Schweiz, 1991. (Studien zur theologischen Ethik 34).

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a Process-Theology and ethics, which stress the ultimate value of human life. This Process ethics proves to be an appropriate tool to deal with concrete ethical problems, such as genetic engineering and forms of reproduction. Finally, 1991 saw the publication of Christoph Wassermann’s Struktur und Ereignis. Interdisziplinäre Studien in Physik, Theologie und Philosophie.31 Of this work John Cobb wrote: “This book is a collection of essays that shows how this study has affected him. It includes essays about Whitehead's logic, mathematics, physics, and evolutionary thinking. In typically European fashion, each essay is printed in the language in which it was written, some in German and some in English. Many of the essays about Whitehead are primarily designed to introduce his thought to persons not familiar with it. But especially because of Wassermann's unique comprehensiveness of approach, all of them will repay reading by any Whitehead scholar. No similar introductions exist elsewhere. One example is his essay on “The Mathematical Foundations of Whitehead's Philosophy of Religion.” Here Wassermann does not attempt to show how Whitehead's mathematics leads to his doctrine of God. Instead he shows how Whitehead's mathematics introduces a “multiperspectivity” and a “polycontextuality” that characterize also his religious vision. His essay on “Whitehead and Biological Evolution” is an extremely careful statement of what Whitehead appropriated from evolutionary modes of thought and the quite different, and much more foundational, level at which he developed these ideas.”32 Franz Riffert received his PhD from Salzburg University in 1992. His thesis on Whitehead and Jean Piaget was published two years later.33 In this work, the basic concepts of Piaget's genetic structuralism, such as structure, wholeness, transformation, accommodation/assimilation, and selfregulation, are compared with Whitehead's notions such as actual entity, subject, concrescence, final aim, superject, and eternal object. It is shown that there are many parallels within the content of these concepts and even within the problems to which they give rise. Both approaches are 31

Wassermann, Christoph. Struktur und Ereignis. Interdisziplinäre Studien in Physik, Theologie und Philosophie. Genf, 1991.

32

Cobb, John, Jr.,”Struktur Und Ereignis, by Christoph Wassermann” Process Studies 21, no.3 (Fall, 1992): 175.

33

Riffert, Franz. Whitehead und Piaget—Zur Prozessphilosophie. Wien: Lang Verlag, 1994.

Interdisziplinären

Relevanz

der

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thoroughly processual and relational. The problem of the identity of persons is discussed in detail and Riffert shows that a Whiteheadian, nonsubstantialist process-psychology need not start from scratch, but may, in principle, build on the empirically corroborated work of Piaget.34 In 1993 Elmar Busch published Viele Subjekte, eine Person: Das Gehirn im Blickwinkel der Ereignisphilosophie A. N. Whiteheads.35 According to Roland Faber: “One of the most interesting of the recent approaches to Whitehead, especially, but by no means solely, in a German-speaking context, can be seen in this book. With great effort toward clarity, Busch's encounter with Whitehead is rich in detail and rigorous in structure. Offering in the first two parts a short but sufficient presentation of Whitehead's philosophy, the main interest of the third part is to find the internal connection between the philosophical, psychological and, specifically, the physiological branches of his thought. The last section, then, develops the physiology Whitehead offered particularly in Process and Reality, thereby focussing on the brain, its function, importance, and interpretation in a process perspective.”36 Also in 1993 Ina Claus published Intensität und Kontrast, Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Gottesvorstellung ausgewählter Entwürfe der Prozeßtheologie.37 In this work Claus focuses on the important features of intensity and contrast in the process of becoming in Whitehead’s metaphysics. After describing several concepts of Process Theology she critically evaluates these concepts and indicates a perspective for future Process Theology. Three important works were published in1994: 34

Adapted from Riffert’s synthesis in Laura E. Weed (ed.) International Journal for Field Being, Special Issue on Whitehead and Process Philosophy, Vol 2, no. 1 (2002).

35

Busch, Elmar. Viele Subjekte, eine Person: Das Gehirn im Blickwinkel der Ereignisphilosophie A. N. Whiteheads. Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 1993. (Epistemata. Würzburger wissenschaftliche Schriften, Reihe Philosophie 133).

36

Faber, Roland. “Viele Subjekte, Eine Person: Das Gehirn im Blickwinkel der Ereignisphilosophie A.N. Whiteheads, by Elmar Busch,” Process Studies 24 (1995): 9296.

37

Claus, Ina. Intensität und Kontrast, Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Gottesvorstellung ausgewählter Entwürfe der Prozeßtheologie. Reihe: Studien zur systematischen Theologie und Ethik Bd. 4. (Diss., Heidelberg University, 1993) Münster: Lit Verlag, 1994.

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Michael Hauskeller published Alfred North Whitehead zur Einführung.38 This book is a comprehensive, although brief, introduction to Whitehead's philosophy, containing a compact presentation of Whitehead's work, with a particular focus on Process and Reality. Hauskeller's analysis highlights the overcoming of dualisms as the core of Whitehead's philosophical system. According to Hauskeller the pairs subject/object, necessity/freedom, body/mind are intimately connected in Whitehead and flow into each other in the process of becoming, in concrescence as well as transition.39 Felix Kramer published Der Zusammenhang der Wirklichkeit.40 Kramer argues that Whitehead ignored Fichte. Whitehead and Fichte seem to have completely different styles and thought processes. But both are similar in regarding cognition, action, feeling and self-consciousness as inseparably linked. It is futile to regard this as a priori knowledge. Rather, the deep insight of the inseparable linkage of cognition, action, feeling and selfconsciousness, already acknowledged by Fichte, only bears fruit, if it is freed from the burden of a priori thinking.41 Rolf Lachmann published Ethik und Identität: der ethische Ansatz in der Prozessphilosophie A. N. Whiteheads und seine Bedeutung fur die gegenwartige Ethik.42 This book works out an ethical theory adumbrated in Whitehead's philosophy, an ethics opposed to basic conceptions in modern metaphysics of substance and moral philosophy. Lachmann interprets this new ethics as a particular form of achieving identity, and relates this position to a discussion of contemporary approaches to ethics (G. Pfafferott, E. Tugendhat, A. Wellmer, J. Rawls, H. Jonas, A. MacIntyre, O. Schwemmer, M. Nussbaum, H. S. Richardson). This shows that an ethics of identity admits the existence of different ethical identities without leading to relativistic consequences.43

38

Hauskeller, Michael. Alfred North Whitehead zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 1994.

39

For a detailed review see Roland Faber “Alfred North Whitehead Zur Einfuhrung, by Michael Hauskeller,” Process Studies 24 (1995): 90-6.

40

Kramer, Felix. Der Zusammenhang der Wirklichkeit. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

41

Slightly adapted version of Abstract from The Philosopher's Index.

42

Lachmann, Rolf. Ethik und Identität: der ethische Ansatz in der Prozessphilosophie A. N. Whiteheads und seine Bedeutung fur die gegenwartige Ethik. Freiburg: Alber, 1994.

43

From The Philosopher's Index.

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In 1995 Joachim Stolz published Whitehead und Einstein: Wissenshaftsgeschichtliche Studien in Naturphilosophischer Absicht.44 Stolz’s argues that a revision of the foundation of the philosophy of nature became necessary because of Einstein’s revolution. Taking this situation into account, Stolz reconstructs Whiteheads development by means of the philosophical principle of covariance. The Whiteheadian critique of the key materialistic notions of classical physics turns into a fundamental critique of the principles of philosophy of nature of the modern age. Furthermore Whitehead should be considered to be a helpful voice in discussing a naturlalistc anthropology without physical reduction. In 1996 Maria-Sibylla Lotter published Die metaphysische Kritik des Subjekts. Eine Untersuchung von Whiteheads unversalisierter Sozialontologie.45 Lotter asks how there can be individuals with separate ends who are taking part in a solid community. This question is the framework within which Lotter develops a critical metaphysics, which incorporates an epistemology of modern philosophical concepts of subjectivity and their uncritical ontological presuppositions. Lotter shows how actual entities have to be thought of in a Whiteheadian way, related to each other without losing their specific individual aim. This can only be achieved if the fallacy of substance ontology is avoided. In 1997 Joachim Klose completed Die Struktur der Zeit in der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads.46 Kloses' work is an attempt to respond to the problem of the relation between the classical-physical concept of time as parameter and the subjective perception of time as duration. He invites us into a brief journey through different conceptions of time and then focuses on Whitehead's philosophical system. Klose distinguishes between two different phases in Whitehead's philosophy with respect to his time concept: a natural-philosophical phase, in which the concepts of duration and continuity take shape and a metaphysical phase, in which the idea of temporal atomicity is developed. Moreover, he refers to the whole 44

Stolz, Joachim. Whitehead und Einstein: Wissenshafts-geschichtliche Studien in Naturphilosophischer Absicht. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995.

45

Lotter, Maria-Sibylla. Die metaphysische Kritik des Subjekts. Eine Untersuchung von Whiteheads unversalisierter Sozialontologie. (Diss., Technical. University of Berlin, 1994) Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim, 1996.

46

Klose, Joachim. Die Struktur der Zeit in der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads, (Diss., University of Munich, 1997.) Reihe Symposion, Bd. 117, Verlag K. Alber, Freiburg (Br.) / München 2002.

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Whiteheadian corpus and dedicates a specific section to the concept of relativity. In 1998 Michael Hampe published his study Alfred North Whitehead, which has already been discussed above. In 1999 Rowanne Sayer published Wert und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verständnis des metaphysischen Wertbegriffes im Spätdenken Alfred North Whiteheads und dessen Bedeutung für den Menschen in seiner kulturellen Kreativität.47 A summary of this work appears in an article Sayer published in Process Studies: “Whitehead's cosmology conceives all that exists as arising out of self-interest and, therefore, as the realization of intrinsic value. While the seminal impetus for this self-realization is fundamentally of an aesthetic nature, by virtue of the interrelatedness of all creative centers, the “production of beauty” necessarily embraces an ethical dimension: the search for self-significance is inextricably entwined with the endeavours of others. Since higher forms of life, especially those demonstrating personal order, achieve the highest creativity of value, according to this scheme they carry greater weight. Nonetheless, persona achieve their values only by way of a social effort within their natural environment. Thus, a Whiteheadian “process ethic” would involve granting the natural world an ethical Status, as an ecosystem, thereby providing a basis for an environmental ethic.”48 In 2000 Roland Faber published Prozeßtheologie, Zu ihrer Würdigung und kritischen Erneuerung,49 his post-doctoral thesis written in Catholic theology at Vienna University. In four parts, Faber describes the different forms of Process Theology. In Part I he gives a critical summary of Process Theology. In Part II he develops the essential intention of Whitehead's discourse (a “propaedeutics” of Process Theology). Part 3 is a “negative process-theology,” in the sense that it deconstructs claims by process theologians and offers a sceptical solution to the dilemmas indicated in Process Theology. Part IV is a heuristics of Process Theology with a plea 47

Sayer, Rowanne. Wert und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verständnis des metaphysischen Wertbegriffes im Spätdenken Alfred North Whiteheads und dessen Bedeutung für den Menschen in seiner kulturellen Kreativität, (Diss., University of Würzburg, 1998) Ergon-Verlag Würzburg, 1999.

48

Sayer, Rowanne. “The Good, Bad and Beautiful,” Process Studies 32, no.1 (SpringSummer, 2003): 74.

49

Faber, Roland. Prozeßtheologie, Zu ihrer Würdigung und kritischen Erneuerung. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2000.

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for a critical process theology. This work covers a wide range of authors on Process Theology and enables a new approach for making process thought fruitful in a theological discourse. Later, in 2003, he published a book, Gott als Poet der Welt,50 which develops these ideas further. An English version was published in October 2008.51 In 2000 Stascha Rohmer published Whiteheads Synthese von Kreativität und Rationalität.52 Rohmer shows how Whitehead derives the self-creation of the natural as well as of the historical life-world from the interweaving of the two basic principles of his metaphysics, i.e., creativity and rationality. This allows for a new understanding of subjectivity and life, in which aesthetic paradigms play a major role. Rohmer claims that evolutionary events in nature and history attain a functional significance that aims at bridging the classic polarisation between “res cogitans” and “res extensa” as well as between efficient causality and freedom. In 2001 Christopher Kann published his Habilitationsschrift (Paderborn University): Fußnoten zu Platon, Philosophiegeschichte bei A. N. Whitehead.53 He provides a detailed analysis of Whitehead's concept of the history of philosophy in three chapters. Chapter l develops Whitehead's perspective on the history of philosophy. He explains his often quoted dictum—“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (PR 39)—in the context of Gadamer's hermeneutical method and the different schools of Plato interpretations. He then focuses on the seven main concepts of philosophy, which are Platonic ideas, mainly: the Ideas, the Physical Elements, the Psyche, Eros, Harmony, mathematical Relations and Space. Chapter 2 is a methodological reflection on the presuppositions of philosophy which ends with criteria for speculative philosophy and its impact on the history of philosophy. Chapter 3 gives a detailed approach to the Whiteheadian concept of philosophy in relation to the different traditions of Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Locke, Leibniz, Hume and Kant. 50

Faber, Roland. Gott als Poet der Welt: Anliegen und Perspektiven der Prozesstheologie, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Darmstadt, 2003, Durchges: Auflage 2004.

51

Faber, Roland. God as Poet of the World; Exploring Process Theologies. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2008.

52

Rohmer, Stascha. Whiteheads Synthese Freiburg/München: Karl Alber Verlag, 2000.

53

Kann, Christopher. Fußnoten zu Platon, Philosophiegeschichte bei A. N. Whitehead. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001.

von

Kreativität

und

Rationalität.

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Kann concludes that Whitehead wanted to bring together his focus on the synthetic effort of philosophy with his generalization of the European philosophical tradition. He does so in order to generate a synthesis of the different sciences, and to produce one concept of the world (“Weltbild”). Philosophy can only do this by relating itself to Plato's Timaeus. In 2005 Hans Günter Scheuer published Die Prozessphilosophie Alfred North Whiteheads und die Physik des 20. Jahrhunderts.54 The book is divided into five parts and thirty chapters. Part I contains an outline of the basic concepts of Whitehead’s process philosophy. In Part II, he relates these basic concepts to Aristotle and Leibniz. Part III deals with Whitehead’s theory of relativity and Part IV with quantum mechanics. In Part V, Scheurer looks at the possibility of a fundamental form of physics, drawing the conclusion that process philosophy and modern fundamental physics are basically compatible (496). In 2006 two books of importance were published. Uwe Neumann published Wirkliche Ereignisse, Zur Begründung einer nicht-reduktiven Theorie des Geistes unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kosmologie Alfred North Whiteheads.55 In this work, Neumann develops a non-reductionist theory of Spirit by relying on Whitehead’s philosophy of nature. The ultimate parts of reality are spiritual events, which, essentially, are related to each other. In contrast to Leibniz’ solipsistic monads, Neumann develops a cosmology of a communicative universe. Regina Uhtes published Metaphysik des Organischen, Zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Wissenschaft in Jonas‘ Philosophie des Lebens vor dem Hintergrund der organismischen Philosophie Whiteheads.56 In this book Uhnes asks whether there is an immanent relation between natural 54

Scheuer, Hans Günter.Die Prozessphilosophie Alfred North Whiteheads und die Physik des 20. Jahrhunderts.(Diss., University of Augsburg, 2004) Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 2005.

55

Neumann, Uwe. Wirkliche Ereignisse, Zur Begründung einer nicht-reduktiven Theorie des Geistes unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Kosmologie Alfred North Whiteheads. (Diss., University of Passau, 2005) Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2006.

56

Uhtes, Regina. Metaphysik des Organischen, Zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Wissenschaft in Jonas‘ Philosophie des Lebens vor dem Hintergrund der organismischen Philosophie Whiteheads. (Diss., University of Dortmund, 2006) Bochum/Freiburg: Projekt Verlag, 2006.

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science and natural-metaphysical philosophy? Uhtes addresses this question in relation to the thought of Hans Jonas and Whitehead. She develops a metaphysics of the organic, based in process thought, which has its basis in the self-relation of the self-transcendent living being. In 2007 Spyridon A. Koutroufinis edited a collection entitled Prozesse des Lebendigen: Zur Aktualität der Naturphilosophie A.N. Whiteheads.57 The aim of this book is to enrich scholarship in bio-philosophy. He addresses the basic problems of the living, problems which cannot otherwise be discussed adequately because within dualism (vitalismmaterialism, spirit-brain, etc.). All papers share in their research Whitehead’s basic notion that the subjectivity of process is irreducible. In 2009 Tobias Müller published Gott—Welt—Kreativität: Eine Analyse der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads.58 Müller first describes the prerequisites of metaphysics. Then outlines Process and Reality’s metaphysics. The work culminates in a discussion of Whitehead’s concept of God, its genesis, its critics and its possibilities for a future theology.

57

Koutroufinis, Spyridon A., Ed. Prozesse des Lebendigen: Zur Aktualität der Naturphilosophie A.N. Whiteheads. Freiburg/München: Verlag Alber, 2007.

58

Müller, Tobias. Gott—Welt—Kreativität: Eine Analyse der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads. (Diss., University of Frankfurt, 2007) Paderborn: Verlag Schöningh, 2009.

Portuguese Reception of PR Luís Morais1 My contribution will diverge from the others in so far as we are obliged to recognize this stubborn fact: a Portuguese translation of Process and Reality simply does not exist. More distressing, both the 1929 and the 1978 editions passed unnoticed in the Portuguese philosophical scene and not a single review is available. The fact that both editions appeared in the years during which Portugal was in political convulsions—the instauration of Salazar’s dictatorship in 1926 and the restoration of democracy in 1974—allied to the fact that, until recently, we have had an extreme dependence, almost exclusive in the humanities, on francophone culture, can largely explain the silence around Whitehead’s philosophy. In addition, the originality of the whiteheadian terminology, the novelty of his ideas, and the intrinsic difficulty of Process and Reality have been crucial in silencing the development of Whitehead’s thought in Portugal. Even in the case of the collaborative work Principia Mathematica, it is common to depreciate the contribution of Whitehead. Even so, Whitehead’s thought from the first half of the 1920’s had some resonance in one of the most important Portuguese philosophers of the beginning of the last century: Leonardo Coimbra (1883–1936). In his work, Coimbra was particularly interested in the thought of Henri Bergson and the philosophical consequences of the theory of relativity.2 With regard to the translation of other Whiteheadian works, the situation is not so frustrating: An Introduction to Mathematics was translated in 1948; Science and the Modern World was translated in 1964; and finally

1

Luís Morais, Ph. D., teaches “Aesthetics and Theory of Arts” and “Semiotics” at the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon. He is the author of O Problema Epistemológico das Relações na Cosmologia de Whitehead, Ph. D. Thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2003.

2

Leonardo Coimbra quotes Whitehead’s Concept of Nature in two of his works: A razão experimental: lógica e metafísica, Porto: Renascença Portuguesa, 1923 and A filosofia de Henri Bergson, Porto: Renascença Portuguesa, 1932.

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Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect was translated in 1987. In addition, The Concept of Nature was translated, in Brazil, in 1994.3 Concerning studies on the philosophy of organism, we have only two partial analyses: one on Whitehead’s philosophy of language (Martins 1972) and one on Whitehead’s causal experience (Morais 1996). No systematic examination of either the philosophy of organism, generally, or of Process and Reality, specifically, has appeared, except for the encyclopaedia entry for Whitehead which appeared in Logos, a PortugueseBrazilian encyclopaedia of philosophy. In this entry, Antonio Martins characterizes the different phases of Whitehead’s philosophy in the terms and within the proper limits of an entry in a philosophical dictionary or encyclopaedia. However, Science and the Modern World, which has been available in translation for many years, and which is also the most accessible work on the fundamental subjects of the philosophy of organism, has been given particular mention by scientific authors; furthermore, in Portugal, as has been the case in other country’s for many years, the influence of Whitehead was first felt—and still is!—outside of the academic study of philosophy. The most interesting case is certainly the work of José Antunes Serra (1914–1990), a biologist whose fundamental investigations were focused on cytophysiology, cytogenetics, the relations between genetics and informational theory, and the role of time and space in biology. In his last years he has developed an existential theory of process, as he named it.4 3

The complete bibliographic references are the following: Uma Introdução à matemática, Coimbra: Arménio Amado Editor, 1948 (probably translated from the 1911 William and Norgate edition, by Mário Silva, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Coimbra); Ciência e o Mundo Moderno, Lisboa: Editora Ulisseia, 1964 (translated by Alberto Barros from Penguim Books, 1953); Simbolismo, o seu significado e efeito, Lisboa: Edições 70, 1987 (translated by Artur Morão from Macmillan, 1927); O conceito de natureza, São Paulo: Livraria Martins Fontes Editora, 1994 (translated by Julio B. Fischer from Cambridge U. P.).

4

From Antunes Serra’s extensive bibliography, we only report the one most directly related to his existential theory of process; we also mention the several papers where he has developed a critical reflection on the theory of evolution starting from the concept of treption, the synthesis of which is presented in Serra (1966). The existential theory of process has an intimate connection with his treptionist theory of evolution, as this makes evident the creative and emerging character of life itself.

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Considering that the task of science is not just description, explanation and prediction of the phenomena, but also their unification, Antunes Serra built up, as the culmination of his scientific life, a pluralistic view of reality in which he refuses both the reductionism and the mechanicism that pervaded science over the last centuries. In this context, the author himself gives an account of the affinities between his thought and the philosophy of organism, suggesting that although the philosophy of organism maintains a privileged position within the dialogue of his own thought, he is still able to maintain the original integrity of his own theory. 1959, “Da dialéctica e da cibernética em relação ao real e ao factual”. Vértice, 19: 402–406. 1959, “A evolução biológica e a doutrina de Darwin e Wallace”. Vértice, 19: 675– 696. 1963, “The concept of gene and chromosome treption”. Revista Portuguesa de Zoologia e Biologia Geral, Museu Bocage, UL, Lisboa, 4 (1–3): 1–14. 1964, “The genetic concept of treption (with brief reference to a unifying theory of cancer)”. J. Theoret. Biol., 6: 371–374. 1965, Modern Genetics. London and New York: Academic Press. Vol. I. 1966, “On the role of treption in biological evolution”. Canad. J. Genet. Cytol., 8: 165–183. 1972, “O conceito de trepção na perspectiva de uma teoria genética geral”. Genetica Iberica, 24: 147–210. 1979, “Lógica biológica e reavaliação actualizada de conceitos fundamentais: unidades genéticas, variação trepcional e bases genéticas da especiação”. Portugaliae Acta Biologica, A, 15: 135–201. 1983, “Treptional genetic changes: reconsidering the concept and proposing a new classification”. Revista de Biologia, Lisboa, 12: 539–550. 1984, “Filosofia da existência. I—Breve discussão de origens e bases”. Nova Renascença, Porto, IV: 191–213, 310–329. 1990, Matter, life, mind and culture in existential theory, Lisboa: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica, 107 p. (trad. port. Matéria, vida, mente e cultura na teoria da existência em processo, Vila Nova de Famalicão: Quasi Edições, 2005.) 1990, Essentials of the theory of existence in process and applications to fundamental problems of Physics: the nature of reality, quanta, particles, field; and constants of nature. In manuscript.

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Just as for Whitehead, in Antunes Serra’s theory the notion of process is fundamental. “Existence and process or existence in process, are postulated. From a philosophical point of view, process can still be considered more basic […].” (Serra 1990, p. 109) Process of nature originates, by emerging evolution, the four realms of reality—the physical, the biological, the neuromental and the cultural—each one enfolding different levels of organization. “In the existential theory here considered, the realms are originated sequentially by emerging evolution, due ultimately to the action of process […].” (Idem, p. 9) Although emerging sequentially, the different realms are not reducible to the physical one, as reductionism claims. Antunes Serra adopts a position which he names constructionism and which he characterizes as being “the way of synthesis, opposed to the reductionist analysis.” (Idem, p. 11) Moreover, following Prigogine and Stengers, he considers that the gap between the two cultures is “cultural and socially dangerous” (Idem, p. 13) and that its transposition is essentially the task of philosophy. After outlining the main contemporary philosophical movements, Antunes Serra argues that Alexander’s idea of levels of being, Loyd Morgan’s emerging evolution and Whitehead’s process have great affinities with his theory (Idem, p. 17). He also states that the notion of process, just as it was displayed by the author of Process and Reality, should be transposed to a scientific explanation of reality. Process, a central idea in our theory, is a notion perhaps as old as philosophy itself, abstracted from observations as vulgar as the course of a river or the growth and action of the organisms. It is used in several branches of metaphysics, but, under an appropriate form to be transposed for a scientific treatment of reality, it was exposed with authority by the mathematician and philosopher Whitehead. To be included in a theory with scientific basis and tested throughout their applications in sciences, process and the related concept of potentiality must have concrete expression in observable properties […]. (Idem, p. 18—italics ours)5 5

As we have been unable to access the original text which was published in English in a highly restricted edition, as discussed in the previous note (Matter, life, mind and culture in existential theory, Lisboa: Instituto Nacional de Investigao Cientfica, 1990, 107 p.), and which is not even available at the National Library, we take the risk of translating ourselves all passages from the Portuguese edition: Matéria, vida, mente e cultura na teoria da existência em processo, Vila Nova de Famalicão: Quasi Edições, 2005.

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While discussing biological organization, Antunes Serra holds that “the authors that bring into play the role of process favour the philosophy of organism [our italics] […].” (Idem, p. 82) In his “Summary,” he restates that “his theory, although original, has affinities with the fields of process metaphysics and also includes results from such domains as post-vitalist and existentialist thought” (Idem, p. 116), meaning that he attributes a decisive role both to the problems of biological organization and of freedom in the realm of culture. Perhaps one of the most philosophically significant ideas from the existential theory of process is the idea of potentialization, along with the subsidiary notions of quantization and dequantization; although these ideas have a certain correspondence with Whitehead’s notions of concrescence and transition, respectively, the Portuguese biologist generalizes them to all levels of reality. Quantization is a process of “actualization” of existence, opposed to the dequantization process, which corresponds to a “potentialization phase” (Idem, p. 31), which entails a loss of individuality and an availability for new actualizations. In an argument that looks like, although more by its function than by its content, Whitehead’s Zeno argument (PR, p. 68), Antunes Serra asserts that the non-existence of quantization would establish a continuous stream of undifferentiated reality and, consequently, an infinity of types of existence or even their absence. The origin of physical logic is process, but this alone only produces one undifferentiated stream of reality. In order to have different steps, one following the other, the continuous stream of process should suffer consecutive cuts in regular intervals. The order of such cuts requires that existence incur in types, each type presenting certain properties. At the elementary level, each property or attribute of beings is subject to quantization. If the attributes were not subject to such quantization, the intervals between the production of the property A and the property B, next to A, could change every time a being is originated, so that it would be an infinity of types of existence, or even no types; in the end, beings would tend to display continuous values of each attribute and becoming the same continuous process.” (Idem, p. 110) Although revealing, at least in his terminology, a definite substantialist drift that clearly distinguishes Antunes Serra from the author of Process and Reality, his existential theory of process possesses a novelty and an intrinsic value that renders itself an interesting intermediate position between the Whiteheadian cosmology and Alexander and Loyd Morgan’s emergentist theories. Here we limit ourselves to a display of the aspects of his theory that most intimately relate to the philosophy of organism in so

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far as this represents the more expressive reception, and reaction, to Process and Reality. However, the coordination of a vast scientific data, especially in the area of biology, and its unification through an original theory confers to his work an importance surpassing this limitative perspective. Ironically, Antunes Serra records in the bibliography of his posthumous book, published in 2005 in Portuguese but surely written between 1984 (Serra 1984) and his death in 1990, the 1960 edition of Process and Reality from Harper & Brother. Although he devoted great attention to Whitehead’s fundamental work, as we have tried to demonstrate, the 1978 edition bypassed him. Consequently, we may conclude that, in the Portuguese language, Process and Reality, chiefly in the outstanding 1929 and 1978 editions, unfortunately constitutes a case of negative prehension.

Bibliography Martins, António (1972), “A filosofia da linguagem de Whitehead,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, XXVIII, 2, pp. 151–172. Morais, Luís (1996), “A experiência causal em Alfred North Whitehead,” Análise, 19, pp. 141–150. Serra, José Antunes (1984), “Filosofia da existência. I—Breve discussão de origens e bases,” Nova Renascença, Porto, 4: pp. 310–329. Serra, José Antunes (1990), Matéria, vida, mente e cultura na teoria da existência em processo, Vila Nova de Famalicão: Quasi Edições, 2005.

Spanish Reception of PR: García Bacca on Whitehead Juan V. Mayoral de Lucas1 The author of the review reprinted above, Juan David García Bacca (1901– 1992), was a Spanish philosopher in exile for more than 40 years, a period that roughly overlapped that of Franco’s rule in Spain. In fact, part of the development of Spanish philosophy in that period—a substantial part, indeed—took place in exile.2 Therefore, if we are interested in finding out what happened to an author such as Whitehead in the Spanish-speaking world during such a long period we should rather turn our attention— partially, at least—to the group of exiled Spanish philosophers. García Bacca was one of them. Prima facie, that García Bacca went into exile could be surprising. Let me explain why. García Bacca grew up as a scholastic philosopher. He studied humanities (viz., theology, philosophy, Greek, Latin, and so forth) as a member the Claretian Order in Catalonia, so he was educated as a would-be priest. He continued this training in Louvain, among other European cities, which helped to reinforce his initial Thomist training. Our initial puzzlement could arise at this point, because García Bacca’s undergraduate training was that of an orthodox scholastic thinker, and scholasticism became the official philosophy after the demise of the Republican government in Spain in 1939.3 Why García Bacca did not return to Spain after the Civil War is a question whose answer requires further commentary.4 Although García Bacca grew up as a scholastic thinker, his initial training only served as a temporary foundation he would eventually drop. After his 1

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zaragoza, Spain.

2

On Spanish philosophy in exile, see esp. Abellán (1983, 1998).

3

Although, of course, not every scholastic philosopher was a supporter of Franco’s rule.

4

Most of the biographical facts I use throughout this introduction come from García Bacca (1982, 2000), Izuzquiza (1984, pp. 25–33), and Beorlegui (1993). I strongly encourage the reader to consult these works.

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initial training in the Claretian order, Garcia Bacca started a period of studies abroad. He spent some time in Louvain (1930) and in Munich (1928–1931),5 where he studied mathematical physics under Arnold Sommerfeld, biological science with Hans Drietsch, and improved his initial training in mathematical logic. These studies marked a break with his initial scholastic background. Upon returning to Spain, he was no longer the sort of philosopher that had once left Catalonia for an improvement and reinforcement of his Thomistic background. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Barcelona in 1934 with a dissertation on mathematical logic and philosophy of science mostly based on his “Munich background.”6 What did he find in Munich? The aim underlying that stay had originally been to get a background to forge a philosophy of natural science from a Thomistic point of view. Once in Munich, however, that plan changed significantly. García Bacca learnt there the strong connection between Newton’s physics and Kant’s foundations of physical science. He realized how the Prologue to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and its transcendental deduction of a priori categories provided the groundwork for the sort of scientific account of natural phenomena Newton’s theory called for. In this way he took a first step in his distancing from scholasticism. Other steps followed. The link Newton-Kant was not the only change in his initial background. He also came to see that Heisenberg’s quantummechanical worldview had recently challenged the deterministic structure of physical science and, accordingly, one of the very bases of modern physical science since Kant. Thus, García Bacca not only came to know that a scholastic ontology did not serve as the proper foundation of scientific knowledge, but also that its replacement (viz., Kant) did not hold water, either. Many other influences came later. I suggest the reader consult García Bacca’s thought-provoking autobiography—his Confesiones—for further information.7 Here, it will suffice to summarize them by adding that his acquaintance with Cantor’s work in number theory, or Hilbert and 5

See García Bacca (2000, pp. 38, 45) about these dates.

6

The title of his dissertation was An Essay on the Logico-genetic Structure of the Physical Sciences (García Bacca, 1935).

7

García Bacca (2000). A much shorter version is García Bacca (1982). See also Izuzquiza (1984, pp. 159–76).

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Ackermann’s work on the foundations of mathematical logic (and Hilbert’s work on geometry) led him to see that modern physical science required a complete reworking of its ontological and epistemological foundations. As a result, most of his philosophical thinking paid close attention to science. His intellectual effort was not only to adapt philosophy to suit modern physical science, but also to find out what kind of conceptual novelties could be learnt from science, and to use them to improve our current ontology and epistemology. This ever-present mixture of science and philosophy was uncommon in Spain at the time. So much so that García Bacca was in a program of his own. The main Spanish philosophers before and after the Civil War, either in Spain or in exile, showed little regard for scientific matters.8 They devoted some reflections to the overall impact of science in society, but they did not involve scientific concepts in their ontological studies. If we look for an explanation of this emphasis—or rather, lack of it— maybe the words of another philosopher in exile, Eduardo Nicol, will help. Nicol said that Spanish philosophy, at least up to 1960s, “stands out from others due to its curious absorption: because it deals much more often with itself than with philosophical problems. We want to solve what we are by talking about it. Others are what they are without talking so much, because they do what they do.”9 I do not think that Nicol is completely right in this sense. The work of many philosophers, from Miguel de Unamuno to García Bacca (and their concern with, e.g., the nature and function of religious and scientific beliefs, respectively) gives evidence of the contrary. There is some truth in Nicol’s account, though. Spanish philosophers have focused on their compatriots’ way of life—behaviour, language, values, morals, necessities, policies, history, religion, fiction, drama, poetry, and even their way of philosophizing—as a source of problems and solutions, more than on other elements of the philosophical tradition. In my view, however, it only shows that they have grounded their reflections on a quasi- or protosociological perspective. Indeed, this attitude could be qualified as “absorption,” but only of an atypical socially and culturally minded kind, which, I must add, has gained currency today. However, this attitude kept Spanish philosophy away from those aspects of Western culture that were not part of the Spanish everyday life, or of its historical and cultural past. 8

Although there were remarkable exceptions such as Xavier Zubiri, for instance.

9

Nicol (1961/2008, p. 67). Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Spanish are mine.

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Science was one of them. Few devoted time and effort to think about the significance of modern science to philosophy. García Bacca was one of those remarkable exceptions. He admitted it as follows: “[…] philosophy and science take part in nearly every work of mine on equal rights. […] I take scientists as masters of philosophy and metaphysics […]. They certainly know more ontology and real ontics than classic ontologists and philosophers.”10 It is in this respect that I say that García Bacca is in a class of his own: science is, for him, not only a social or historical problem—although part of his work is also devoted to science from this same point of view—it is an important philosophical tool, too (as, he adds, music or poetry).11 Let us return to his biography. García Bacca began to teach classes of mathematical logic and philosophy of science at the University of Barcelona, and two years after his Ph.D., in 1936, he obtained a post by public examination as Professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Definitely, it was good news for him, but he tried to improve the result by asking for his transfer to Barcelona, where he had become popular in some intellectual circles. However, the transfer never happened, because the Civil War broke out shortly after. The situation soon became dangerous,12 and García Bacca fled the country; he went to Paris and then to Latin America. He would not return to Spain until 1977. Concerning his career in exile, García Bacca accepted an offer from the University of Quito, Ecuador, and taught there for four years (1938–1942). Then he moved to Mexico (UNAM), where he spent four more years as a professor of philosophy. Finally, the Central University of Venezuela offered him a post, which he accepted. García Bacca remained in this position during the rest of his career until his retirement in 1977. He received tenure in 1959, became Dean of the Faculty of Humanities (1959– 1960), and was Head of the Institute of Philosophy for twelve years (1959– 1971). In 1977, on returning to Spain, and with the restoration of democracy in that country, the new government made restitution of his former professorship. Even so, after his retirement, he returned to Quito where he lived until his passing in 1992 at the age of 91.

10

García Bacca (1984b, p. 10).

11

Ibidem.

12

See García Bacca (2000, pp. 53-60) for further details.

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During his long career, García Bacca went through a transition from his initial activity as logician and philosopher of science to something more similar to a metaphysician. This is a first point of contact with Whitehead. In his introduction to Nueve grandes filósofos contemporáneos y sus temas (Nine Great Contemporary Philosophers and Their Themes), he likened his transition to that of Whitehead. He admitted that he had devoted a longer chapter to Whitehead in that book partially because he had found that their respective intellectual developments paralleled. Thus, he said that “to make the reader a little personal confession, that Whitehead’s mental evolution— from logician to metaphysician—resembles that modestly followed by the author of this work has carried much weight in [the decision to devote a longer chapter to him].”13 He emphasizes this transition once again in the review below. García Bacca admired Whitehead greatly. By way of example, he said that Whitehead was the “only logico-mathematical physicist that philosophizes abreast of current science and technique.”14 It is needless to say that this admiration did not only come from the parallelism I have mentioned. There is at least a pair of reasons for García Bacca to follow Whitehead—and so to praise the decision of making Process and Reality available to the Spanish reader, as he does in his review. A first reason has to do with Whitehead’s philosophical method, which is summarised in the review itself (more on this below). A second reason is not included in the review, but I can sum it up as the conceptual proximity of their respective ontological views, together with García Bacca’s consideration that Whitehead’s entire perspective is a healthy challenge for philosophers— and he could not devote a better praise to any philosophical thesis than to be “challenging.”15 I will deal with these two reasons in turn. Concerning the first reason, García Bacca considers that Whitehead subverts the traditional philosophical language in a “creative” way. I have put creative into quotation marks, because it is a meaningful usage on this occasion. “Creativity” means for García Bacca the same as for Whitehead in Process and Reality. “Creativity” entails a form of ontological novelty, 13

García Bacca (1947/1990, p. 11).

14

García Bacca (1984a, p. 88).

15

See ibid., p. 11, where he thanks Izuzquiza to have presented his work that way—viz., as “challenging.” See also Izuzquiza’s epilogue (1984, pp. 491–99): “Epílogo: Los retos de la obra de Juan David García Bacca” (“Epilogue: The Challenges of Juan David García Bacca’s Work”).

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and it works for metaphysical language and thinking as much as for the natural world itself. The requirement of philosophy is to be creative in a way that provokes the reader with new problems, with new challenges. Philosophy does not provide solutions, but problems—the reformulation of problems and the offering of new ones. “Creativity” ranks as that sort of theoretical (or conceptual) novelty. In addition, it has nothing to do with mere rhetorical novelty. Philosophy—and Spanish works are not an exception—is sometimes a mere word game. All too often, the number of philosophical titles swells, but it does not entail that truly new things are involved. García Bacca is against this purely rhetorical game. Whitehead, however (and so Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, or Hartmann) is a good example of the contrary—to wit, of genuine philosophical challenges to the human mind. His use of a new vocabulary to name some objects, processes, relations, etc. is sometimes taken as the main characteristic of his philosophical contribution. If truth be told, it is also often considered a heavy burden. But for García Bacca his subversion of the typical philosophical vocabulary is not a problem, but the upshot of a philosophical challenge rooted in a thorough understanding of the needs of philosophy to produce novelty, of being “creative.” Concerning the second reason, García Bacca had embraced Process and Reality in 1945, and had reread it repeatedly afterwards (up to 13 times, according to him).16 Obviously, his metaphysical thinking owes much to Whitehead, and particularly to Process and Reality. This book meant for García Bacca a contribution to philosophy only equalled by such works as Heidegger’s Being and Time, or Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, or by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind.17 For him, these were landmarks in the history of metaphysics, although not because of their idealistic or phenomenological trend—García Bacca did not ascribe himself to any philosophical tradition in particular (and it remains for us a quite difficult task to do so)—but because they “created novelty,” as I mentioned above. Process and Reality helped to devise a new ontological background that met the requirements of new scientific challenges. I am going to take Heisenberg’s work as an example to illustrate my point. After the uncertainty principle, García Bacca said, categorical individualization had 16

García Bacca (1982, p. 6).

17

He highlights the importance of these (and other) books in the review below. Heidegger’s work on Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is mentioned in his autobiography (1982, p. 6).

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come to a dead end. Indeed, we cannot provide a description of the position of an elementary particle and, simultaneously, a description of its momentum.18 García Bacca highlights the idea that, in accordance with this principle, as soon as we pick out any category or quantity—motion, mass, energy, etc.—we lose sight of the rest. And although this point of view only affects macroscopic objects to a limited scope, it changes the extent to which we say that the individual—generally speaking—is in truth the addition of a set of completely defined categories or quantities. We depend on conventional decisions to say to what extent an individual or object is categorically isolated from the rest of the universe.19 So we can say with García Bacca that “no individual can become a monad.”20 By this he meant that modern physics has helped to find the limits of our epistemic relation to the world, and so the arbitrariness involved in our rigid ontological categories. That we usually take things as composed of clearly defined parts does not involve that this point of view is ontologically accurate: it only involves that we are making things easier in order to handle them— and according to our epistemic limits. As I mentioned above, other challenges followed, but this one already helps us to draw the main conclusion. I shall briefly explain it. The resort to rigid ontological categories has founded the different metaphysical theories that have followed one another since Aristotle. However, a proposition does not need to be true only insofar as the property it predicates of a given subject comes, either directly or indirectly, from an allegedly unique (viz., absolute), definite categorical world-order. We live up to our commitment with truth even though our ontological categories fail or change. So we do not need to count on that kind of ontological rigidity, and Process and Reality helps to see how appropriate this absence of permanent boundaries for the categories of being is.21 In developing any ontological theory

18

See Beller (1999) for further details.

19

For a recent exposition of this idea, see Rescher (2003, pp. 51–56). Izuzquiza (1984, pp. 301–07) describes this same point of view in García Bacca.

20

García Bacca (1982, p. 9).

21

McHenry (2003, pp. 159–62) provides a survey of this point of view in Whitehead (and Quine as well). What I say to avoid the charge of epistemic relativism in the paragraph below is also, I believe, in agreement with McHenry (ibid., p. 161).

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whatever, we should have in mind the lemma that suggests no obstruction to the emergence of ontological novelty.22 It could be argued that a radical version of the absence of clear, definite ontological distinctions leads to epistemic relativism and, therefore, to the well-known slogan “anything goes.” In truth, García Bacca is not defending this point of view—even though he defends Whitehead’s ontological principle of relativity. I mean, García Bacca is not supporting the idea that any proposition whatsoever could become true if appropriately argued. Such a extreme position does not follow from García Bacca’s (or Whitehead’s) perspective. He does defend that the truth of any proposition is not a function of a unique, absolute ontological arrangement of the world, but not that any proposition, whatsoever, could be valued as true if we find the adequate perspective. This latter perspective involves that the mind orders the world at will, and García Bacca is trying to defend the complete opposite of this. The mind studies the world as it is; because of that, it is desirable not to impose any arbitrary assumption on it—and epistemic relativism (just like metaphysical realism) does so. By default, Whiteheadian “creativity,” as referring to the absence of an absolute potentiality (as, say, Aristotle’s “first substance”), is the surest ground for any ontological approach whatever. It is, as it were, “ontological minimalism” at its best. The human mind scrutinizes reality, but his epistemic decisions do not freeze—do not “stun,” García Bacca says— reality. As he, more beautifully, puts it: “Reality preserves the faculty to do without [any actual entity: electrons, atoms, fields, etc.]: to override such differences.”23 In short, actual entities are limited by an epistemic subject, which can find the proper theory to talk about them—to account for them. However, the reality allows the faculty to behave according to another categorial set. Our epistemic ability is limited in scope; meanwhile, reality is in essence “creative,” unlimited, infinite. In conclusion, by means of Process and Reality, new principles of ontological theory-construction were available. These principles meant a radical break with the scholastic background. Actually, García Bacca frequently opposes Whitehead’s ontology to Suárez’s and Aquinas’s doctrines in the chapter he devotes to the former in Nueve grandes filósofos

22

See García Bacca (1947/1990, p. 456), and compare it to Whitehead (1929, p. 43).

23

García Bacca (1984a, p. 87).

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contemporáneos y sus temas.24 He also compares Whitehead with such modern thinkers as Descartes and Kant. For instance, he follows Whitehead in considering consciousness a derivative entity, not an entity “in its own right,” even less a primary entity, as the philosophical tradition has assumed. Consequently, he argues, against Kant, that to try to build up the entire universe starting from consciousness alone is doomed to failure— just as it is not viable to build up physics starting from the heat caused by friction.25 For these reasons, Process and Reality, as Being and Time or James Joyce’s Ulysses, García Bacca says, is an essential contribution to Spanish philosophical literature, so he praises its translation in the review below.26 I suggest that the reader pays attention to this review if s/he is interested in the reception of Process and Reality in the Spanish-speaking world, but not stopping at this review—even less at this partial introduction. It is possible to find other translations of (and a few commentaries on) Whitehead in Spain,27 but hardly a deeper understanding of Whitehead’s ontology than that of García Bacca.28

References and Further Reading Abellán, J. L. (1983). De la Guerra Civil al exilio republicano (1936– 1977). Madrid: Mezquita. Abellán, J. L. (1998). El exilio filosófico en América: Los transterrados de 1939. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Beller, M. (1991). “Werner Heisenberg (1901–76).” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. CD-ROM Version 1.1. 24

See, for instance, García Bacca (1947/1990, pp. 453, 455, 461, 465–66, 514, and 519).

25

García Bacca (1947/1990, pp. 474–75).

26

Being himself an active translator, he also praises the effort on the part of Rovira Armengol.

27

Ronzón (1983, p. 608) mentions translations of Nature and Life, Modes of Thought, Adventures of Ideas, Science and the Modern World, and An Introduction to Mathematics, in addition to Process and Reality. See Whitehead (1941, 1944, 1947, 1949a, 1949b). Concerning the studies on Whitehead, she mentions Pemartín (1948), Weis (1948), and Xirau (1952).

28

I thank Gerardo López Sastre, Carlos Solís and Michel Weber for their feedback and support in writing this entry.

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Beorlegui, C. (1993). “La filosofía de J. D. García Bacca.” Isegoría, 7: 151–164. García Bacca, J. D. (1935). Ensayo sobre la estructura lógico-genética de las ciencias físicas. Ph.D. Dissertation: University of Barcelona. García Bacca, J. D. (1947/1990). Nueve grandes filósofos contemporáneos y sus temas: Bergson, Husserl, Unamuno, Heidegger, Scheler, Hartmann, W. James, Ortega y Gasset, Whitehead. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1990. (First two-volume edition, Caracas: Ministry of National Education, 1947.) García Bacca, J. D. (1964). Introducción literaria a la filosofía. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela. García Bacca, J. D. (1982). “Autobiografía intelectual.” Anthropos, 9: 4– 10. García Bacca, J. D. (1984a). Tres ejercicios literario-filosóficos de antropología. Barcelona: Anthropos. García Bacca, J. D. (1984b). “Presentación.” In Izuzquiza (1984, pp. 9– 11). García Bacca, J. D. (2000). Confesiones: Autobiografía íntima y exterior. Barcelona: Anthropos. Izuzquiza, I. (1984). El proyecto filosófico de Juan David García Bacca. Barcelona: Anthropos. McHenry, L. (2003). “Quine and Whitehead: Methodology.” In Shields (ed.) (2003, pp. 157–69).

Ontology

and

Nicol, E. (1961). El problema de la filosofía hispánica. Madrid: Tecnos. Reprinted, with a new introduction by Luís de Llera, in Mexico: FCE (Ediciones Espuela de Plata), 2008 (q. v.). Pemartín, J. (1948). “Sobre el pensamiento de Alfred North Whitehead.” Revista de Filosofía, 26: 591–604. Rescher, N. (2003). “The Promise of Process Philosophy.” In Shields (ed.) (2003, pp. 49–66). Ronzón, E. (1983). “La revista Theoria y los orígenes de la filosofía de la ciencia en España”. El Basilisco, 14: 9–40. Reprinted in Theoria, 7, Vol. A (1992): 591–622 (q. v.). Shields, G. W. (ed.) (2003). Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne, and the Analytic Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Weis, P. (1948). “Alfred North Whitehead, inspirador de una generación.” Cuadernos Americanos, March–April Issue. Whitehead, A. N. (1941). Naturaleza y vida. Trans. R. Frondizi. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Filosofía y Letras. Whitehead, A. N. (1944). Modos de pensamiento. Trans. J. Xirau. Buenos Aires: Losada. Whitehead, A. N. (1947). Aventuras de las ideas. Trans. C. Botet. Barcelona: José Janés. Whitehead, A. N. (1949a). La ciencia y el mundo moderno. Trans. M. Ruiz Lago and J. Rovira Armengol. Buenos Aires: Losada. Whitehead, A. N. (1949b). Introducción a las matemáticas. Trans. A. J. Ceci. Introduction by M. Balanzat. Buenos Aires: Emecé. Xirau, R. (1952). “A. N. Whitehead, tres categorías.” Filosofía y Letras, 23: 311-25.

Index A Abstraction 32, 37, 43, 50, 52, 59, 64-65, 67, 71-72, 74, 87, 92-93, 101102, 115, 117, 155, 163, 165, 209, 222 Actual (Actuality) 6, 20, 28-29, 33-34, 48-52, 58, 60, 62, 66-67, 74, 7779, 81, 85, 88, 94, 96, 98, 100, 127, 131, 132, 152, 167, 172, 194, 206, 209, 223 Actual Entity 29, 48-52, 59-60, 58-66, 84-85, 88, 94-97, 118, 127, 129, 131, 146-147, 155, 156, 157, 162, 165, 211, 214, 232 Actual Occasion 165, 168

28-29, 43, 48, 51, 60-62, 64, 78-79, 96-97, 132, 146,

Actual World 38, 62, 65, 85-86, 129 Adventures of Ideas 9, 128, 132, 134, 145, 162, 233n.27 Aesthetic(s) 14-16, 21, 23, 30, 39, 79, 84, 88-89, 96, 99, 149, 156, 171, 203, 215, 216, 219n.1 Alexander, Samuel 19, 53-55, 97, 158, 182, 208, 209, 222, 223 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge 57, 64, 9193, 162, 181, 209 An Introduction to Mathematics 91, 127, 219, 233n.27 Appetition 49, 52 Aristotle 7, 19, 21, 28, 36, 54, 70, 77-79, 84, 86, 138, 147, 158, 168, 201, 205, 216, 217, 231, 232

B Becoming 7-8, 46, 60, 61-62, 65, 75, 78-80, 84-85, 103, 161, 169, 176n.3, 212, 213, 223

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Being 7-8, 10, 15, 24, 43, 47, 48, 49, 60, 62, 81, 93, 160, 204, 206, 218, 222, 223, 231 Bergson, Henri 14, 41, 81, 86, 98, 100, 158, 181, 208, 219, 234 Bifurcation 65, 93, 100, 147, 176n.3, 185 Body 36-37, 49, 52, 79, 85, 213

C Categoreal 8, 60, 128, 129, 131, 135, 165, 190 Category (Categories) 43, 48, 62, 95, 122, 129-130, 135, 147, 167, 231 Category of the Ultimate 43, 48, 147, 167 Causal Efficacy 67, 99, 147, 155, 188 Causality 48, 70, 76-77, 93, 156, 181, 206, 216 Chaos 7-8, 24, 34, 167, 190, 196 Coherence 50, 59, 87, 128, 151, 164, 168, 170 Concept of Nature, The 28, 36, 63-64, 91-92, 162, 184, 187, 219n.2, 220 Concrescence 8, 14, 28, 43, 54, 55, 59, 61-62, 65, 86, 95, 97, 129, 131, 144, 146, 148, 152, 162, 203, 210, 211, 213, 223 Conformity (Conformation) 34,62, 64, 85, 133 Consciousness 7, 20, 43, 45, 50, 52, 55, 61, 85-86, 99, 158, 213, 233 Contemporary 48, 85, 157 Contrast 84, 101, 153, 171, 212 Corpuscular Organization 24 Cosmic Epoch 7 Cosmology 13-14, 23, 24, 32, 33, 38, 48-50, 57, 58, 59, 75-76, 80, 101, 118, 146, 157, 162, 163, 166, 169, 171, 172, 182, 193, 201, 205, 215, 217, 223 Creative Advance 179n.23, 196

34, 51, 54, 60, 66, 101, 130, 169, 172, 178n.16,

Creativity 8, 20, 24, 29, 44, 45, 51, 66, 81, 85, 96, 98, 103, 132, 138, 158, 165, 167, 172, 175, 192, 193, 199n.2, 204n.15, 205, 210, 215, 216, 229-230, 232

Index

239

D Darwin, Charles 78, 221 Datum 28, 45, 61, 65, 95, 130 Decision 49, 77-80, 108, 132, 232 Deleuze, Gilles 176n.3, 177, 184, 187, 188 Descartes, René 181, 233

14, 42, 43, 52, 54, 62, 81, 84, 86, 89, 154, 158, 173,

Determination 8, 24, 37-38, 48, 51-52, 55, 77-78, 88, 91, 94, 95-96, 102, 153 Dipolar 48, 167 Duration 28, 36, 37, 214

E Efficient Causation 48, 55, 76, 155, 216 Empiricism 20, 98 Enduring Object 66 Entity 28, 45, 48-51, 54, 59, 60-66, 85, 88, 92, 94-97, 129, 131, 146, 147, 152, 156, 162, 164, 165, 211, 232-233 Eternal Object 24, 28, 38, 42-43, 45, 48-52, 60-61, 63-66, 79, 88-89, 92, 94, 96-97, 146, 147, 152, 155, 157, 162, 165, 204, 211 Ethics 227

39, 71, 77, 84, 89, 101, 156, 158, 173, 186, 205-206, 211, 213,

Event 8-9, 28, 33-34, 35, 37-38, 48, 49-51, 55, 57, 63-66, 71-72, 74-77, 79, 85, 92, 94-96, 98, 159, 181, 186, 193, 196, 209, 216, 217, 225 Evolution 24, 43, 45, 118, 160, 169, 170, 173, 194, 203, 211, 216, 220222, 229 Experience 6, 7, 9n.7, 13-14, 15, 16, 20, 23-24, 27, 31, 32, 33, 39, 41-45, 47-50, 52, 58, 60, 61-62, 83-89, 91, 94, 96, 98-100, 102-103, 1157, 128, 149, 161, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 173, 183n.8, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 220 Explanation, Categories of 43, 48, 60, 62, 95, 135, 167 Extension 9, 28, 43, 44-45, 67, 84-85, 92, 94, 119, 147, 168, 194, 208 Extensive Abstraction 67, 117, 155, 163, 165, 186, 209

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Extensive Continuum 85, 158

F Feeling 28, 42, 48-51, 59, 61, 67, 85, 86, 88, 89, 93, 95-96, 98-99, 100, 102-103, 130, 147, 148, 167, 201, 208, 213 Final Causation 52, 62, 70, 76, 77, 102 Ford, Lewis 8, 163, 166, 167, 170, 188, 191, 203, 207-210 Forms 15, 24, 43, 48-50, 52, 61, 67, 95, 97, 210 Freedom 223

23-24, 77, 158, 162, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 206, 213, 216,

Function of Reason, The 47, 93, 145, 185 Future 62, 71, 72, 76, 88, 98, 102, 161

G Galilee, Galileo 23 Genetic Analysis 8, 48 Geometry 44, 84, 127, 165, 208, 227 God 20, 21, 23, 24-25, 28, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 42, 43-46, 49-52, 55, 59, 60, 66-67, 70, 79-81, 89, 95-97, 101, 102, 103, 132-134, 156, 158, 159, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 175, 176, 177, 178, 190, 194, 201, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210, 211, 216n.51, 218 God—Consequent Nature of God 43, 49, 51, 66, 147, 158, 167, 209 God—Primordial Nature of God 20, 43, 49, 51, 66, 81, 158

H Harmony 167, 216 Hartshorne, Charles 5, 106, 146, 156, 157, 160, 163, 164, 166, 170, 171, 175, 176, 183, 185n.13, 202, 208-209, 234 Heraclitus 7 Hume, David 216

6, 14, 28, 41, 42, 44-45, 54, 67, 72-73, 79, 84, 88, 158,

Index

241

I Idealism 36, 41, 45, 149, 169 Imagination 22, 86-88, 127-128, 158 Immanence 183n.9, 194 Immediacy 7, 28-29, 48-49, 51, 60, 61, 66, 67, 85, 102, 147, 199 “Immortality” 156 Immortality 23, 51, 60-62, 66, 158 Importance 60 Incompatibility 84 Induction 72, 74, 76, 79, 88, 118, 190 Infinity 34, 44, 223, 232 Ingression 24, 38, 63-64, 88, 92, 93-94, 96-98, 146, 152 Initial Aim 97, 132, 153 Intensity 7, 170, 212

J James, William 14, 16, 158, 171, 181n.2, 184n.12, 188n.20, 193

K Kant, Immanuel 14, 19, 36, 41-43, 48, 54, 72, 80, 84, 149, 158, 168, 169, 171, 188-189, 190, 200n.2, 201n.10, 216, 226, 233 Knowledge 14, 46, 50, 71, 74, 88, 99, 99-100, 102-103, 128, 156, 213, 226

L Language 8, 9, 14, 42, 49, 59, 99, 113, 137-138, 156, 158, 164, 169, 186, 220, 227, 229-230 Leibniz, Gottfried 21, 39, 48-49, 54, 75-77, 80, 84, 86, 88, 89, 158, 164, 190, 206, 216, 217

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Locke, John 6, 14, 28, 36-37, 55, 67, 84, 85, 88, 158, 216 Logic 8, 10, 14, 20, 27, 28, 30, 43, 74 Lure 89, 102, 134,146

M Mathematician, Whitehead as 19, 50, 69, 84, 137, 192, 222 Mathematics 19, 22, 27, 30, 39, 44, 47, 70, 71-73, 84-85, 88, 115, 117, 126-129, 134, 137-139, 143, 158, 160, 161, 164, 167, 179n.20, 195, 201, 205, 207, 211, 216, 226-228, 229 “Mathematics and the Good” 156 Measurement 30, 37, 84, 102 Mental Pole 45, 48 Metaphysics 6, 9, 14, 23, 32, 47-50, 53, 57-59, 70-71, 86, 101, 107, 118, 128, 138, 152, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 177n.15, 178, 182, 186, 187, 192, 203, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 216, 218, 222, 223, 228, 230 Mind 28, 36-38, 39, 41, 44-45, 49, 52, 57-58, 65, 72-73, 74, 77, 78, 100, 103, 156, 158, 161, 173, 213, 232 Modes of Thought 9, 233n.27 Multiplicity of Eternal Objects 33, 48, 51, 66, 89, 161, 204

N Nature 6, 7, 14, 22, 27-28, 34, 37-39, 43, 48, 49, 51, 57-59, 63-65, 70, 72-75, 78, 91-93, 98-100, 101, 112, 118, 138, 147, 167, 169, 176n.3, 177, 178, 184, 186, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 214, 216, 217, 222 Newton, Isaac 22, 35, 70, 205, 216, 226 Nexus (Nexūs) 14, 60-61, 94, 152, 162 Novelty 7, 51-52, 54, 74-75, 77-78, 85, 103, 118, 132-134, 149, 219, 223, 229-230, 232

Index

243

O Object 29, 33-34, 37-39, 63-66, 79, 85, 88, 92, 96, 99, 130-131, 147, 213, 230, 231 Objectification 48, 62, 64-65, 131 Ontological Principle 62-63, 66, 135, 156, 232 Ontology 6, 158, 164, 170, 172, 181, 182, 183, 186n.15, 188, 192, 209, 214, 226-228, 232, 233 Order 14, 16-17, 24, 27, 34, 51, 55, 64, 67, 88-89, 92, 96, 101-103, 132133, 159, 167, 194, 203, 215, 223, 231, 232 Organism 14, 24, 29, 38, 43-45, 48, 51, 54-55, 61, 77-78, 93, 98, 144, 206, 207, 222 Organization of Thought, The 162

P Perception 72, 75, 85-86, 91, 94, 155, 158, 162, 184, 188, 206, 210, 214 Perpetual Perishing 33, 53, 60, 61, 64, 85, 147, 153, 196 Perspective 75, 166 Philosophy of Organism 20, 23, 44-45, 55, 59-60, 62, 64-65, 74, 77, 8389, 91, 93, 106, 115, 146, 148, 156, 161, 181, 206, 220-221, 223 Physics 19-20, 23-25, 27-28, 30, 41, 47, 69-73, 87, 115, 137-138, 143, 173, 181, 207, 211, 214, 217, 226, 229, 231, 233 Plato 7, 9-10, 24, 38, 39, 42, 48-49, 54, 70-71, 79-80, 84, 86, 97, 116, 134, 158, 160, 161, 195n.49, 205, 209, 216-217 Potentiality 223, 232

7, 24, 62, 66, 70, 78, 79, 96-97, 172, 185, 190, 194, 222,

Power 43, 85, 134, 164, 173 Pragmatism 195, 207n.23 Prehension 14, 27, 38, 44, 50, 52, 54, 60-61, 75-76, 78, 93-95, 96-98, 131, 147-148, 152, 157, 163, 165, 225 Presentational Immediacy 67, 85, 147, 155

244

Creativity and Its Discontents

Principia Mathematica 44, 49, 137, 208, 219 Principle of Relativity, The 117, 162 Propositions 14, 28, 42, 49, 102, 168, 169, 231-232

R Rationalism 73, 176n.8, 189, 195, 210 Reformed Subjectivist Principle 62 Relationality (Relatedness) 7, 14, 28, 36-38, 50-51, 52, 59, 60-61, 65, 85, 88, 91-93, 96, 118, 144, 156, 158, 159, 160, 161, 170, 173, 205-206, 209, 212, 215 Relativity 20, 23-24, 30, 35-37, 62-63, 72, 101 135, 156, 169, 172, 208, 215, 217, 219, 232 Religion 19, 32, 33, 47, 53, 67, 89, 101, 106, 156, 158, 159, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172, 179, 194, 201, 207, 210, 211, 227 Religion in the Making 9, 80, 83, 92-93, 95, 106, 176, 179, 182 Repetition 24, 64-65, 72, 74, 92, 98, 131, 206 Russell, Bertrand 8, 9, 10, 28, 137, 156, 169, 182, 190, 208, 209

S Santayana, George 16, 21, 45, 156, 158, 208, 209 Satisfaction 14, 28, 49-50, 95-96, 100, 147 Science 14, 19-21, 23-24, 27-30, 47-48, 50, 53, 58, 69-74, 76, 79, 84, 86-88, 92-93, 98, 115-116, 118, 143, 146, 156, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 169, 170, 171, 172, 186, 188, 190, 195, 201, 207, 210, 217-218, 221, 222, 226-229 Science and the Modern World 9, 13-14, 19, 23, 28, 36, 54, 57, 63, 65, 66, 70, 83, 88, 92-96, 115, 117, 145, 162, 179, 187, 219, 220 Simple Location 28, 72, 74-76 Society 45, 49, 95 Space 24, 27-28, 35-37, 44, 60, 71-72, 74, 76, 93, 95, 97, 155, 156, 157, 159, 165, 181, 194, 208, 209, 216, 220

Index

245

Speculative Philosophy 7, 14, 58-59, 101, 153, 177, 178n.19, 189, 190, 193, 202, 216 Spinoza, Baruch 21, 41, 54, 81, 84, 154, 158, 190, 200n.2 Subject 8, 36-37, 50, 52, 61-62, 67, 85, 88, 96, 147-148, 162, 167, 171, 172, 211, 213, 231, 232 Subjective Aim 55, 95, 132-133 Subjective Form 50-51, 61, 67, 157 Subjective Immediacy 28, 85 Subjectivism 14, 36, 37, 44, 85, 156, 158, 214 Substance 6-8, 28, 37-39, 70, 78, 81, 133, 147, 156, 169, 173, 188, 203, 213, 214, 232 Superject 54, 61, 64, 88, 152, 158, 162, 211 Symbolic Reference 14, 67, 147 Symbolism 14, 65, 93, 99, 220 Synthesis 20, 48, 130, 172, 222

T Theology 39, 73, 106, 107, 116, 146, 161, 167, 173, 177n.14, 178n.17, 186, 206, 210-211, 212, 214-215, 218, 225 Time 24, 27-28, 33, 34, 35-37, 44, 45, 67, 71-72, 74-76, 85, 87, 92, 93, 94, 96-99, 102-103, 155, 156, 157, 158, 165, 167, 178, 181, 182, 185, 188, 208, 214, 220 Transcendence 154, 194, 218 Transcendental 34, 190, 226 Transition 8, 84, 203, 213, 223

U Universal Algebra 50, 117 Universals (Universality) 50, 62-65, 72, 79, 88, 206

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V Value 16, 22, 33, 38-39, 50, 95-96, 100, 156, 158, 161, 163, 193, 205, 206, 215, 223

Table of Contents Contents ....................................................................................... iii
 Introduction—Michel Weber ........................................................ 5
 1. CUP and Macmillan Editions, 1929 ....................................... 13
 Mumford, December 1929 ..................................................................... 13
 Clark, January 1930................................................................................ 19
 Ginzburg, January 1930.......................................................................... 23
 Northrop, January 1930 .......................................................................... 27
 Wieman, January 1930 ........................................................................... 31
 Mabbott, March 1930 ............................................................................. 35
 Carr, July 1930 ....................................................................................... 41
 Nagel, July 1930 ..................................................................................... 47
 Marvin, November 1930 ........................................................................ 53
 Stebbing, October 1930 .......................................................................... 57
 Taylor, 1930 ........................................................................................... 69
 Belgion, 1930 ......................................................................................... 83
 Moore, May 1931 ................................................................................... 91
 Murphy, 1931 ....................................................................................... 101


2. Macmillan Reprint, 1960 ...................................................... 105
 Fjellman, November 1961 .................................................................... 105


3. Free Press Corrected Edition, 1978....................................... 107


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Ogden, Fall 1979 .................................................................................. 107
 Christian, 1979...................................................................................... 109
 Connor, 1979 ........................................................................................ 111
 Burke, 1981........................................................................................... 115
 Nobo, 1983 ........................................................................................... 119
 Some Novel Features ........................................................................................120
 The Editorial Task.............................................................................................124
 Some Questionable Changes.............................................................................126


4. Translations ........................................................................... 137
 Spanish Translation (1956), Reviewed by Garcia Bacca, 1956 ........... 137
 Italian Translation (1965), Reviewed by Guzzo, 1965......................... 141
 Italian Translation (1965), Reviewed by Sandro Travaglia, 1966........ 143
 German Translation (1979), Reviewed by Wolf-Gazo, 1979............... 145
 French Translation (1995), Reviewed by Weber, 1998........................ 151


5. Bibliographies ....................................................................... 155
 American and English-speaking Scholarship on PR Steve Hulbert and John Quiring ........................................................... 155
 Johnson, Actual Entities, 1937 ..........................................................................155
 Miller and Gentry, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 1938...................................155
 Blyth, Whitehead’s Theory of Knowledge, 1941 ..............................................156
 Schilpp, The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 1941 ..............................156
 Foley, A Critique of the Philosophy of Whitehead, 1946..................................156
 Hammerschmidt, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Time, 1947 ................................157
 Lowe et al., Whitehead and the Modern World, 1950 ......................................157
 Wells, Process and Unreality, 1950 .................................................................157
 Johnson, Whitehead’s Theory of Reality, 1952.................................................157
 Johnson, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Civilization, 1958...................................158
 Leclerc, Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1958..........................................................158
 Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1959 ......................159
 Mays, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 1959.......................................................159
 Palter, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science, 1960 .............................................159
 Lowe, Understanding Whitehead, 1962............................................................159
 Kline, Alfred North Whitehead, 1963 ...............................................................160
 Laszlo, Essential Society, 1963.........................................................................160


Table of Contents

249

Das, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 1964......................................................... 160
 Burgers, Experience and Conceptual Activity, 1965........................................ 161
 Cobb, A Christian Natural Theology, 1965...................................................... 161
 Emmet, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism, 1966....................................... 161
 Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, 1966 .......................... 162
 Pols, Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1967 .............................................................. 162
 Schmidt, Perception and Cosmology, 1967 ..................................................... 162
 Jordan, New Shapes of Reality, 1968................................................................ 163
 Lawrence, Whitehead’s Philosophical Development, 1968 ............................. 163
 Leclerc, The Relevance of Whitehead, 1971..................................................... 163
 Hartshorne, Whitehead’s Philosophy, 1972 ..................................................... 163
 Lango, Whitehead’s Ontology, 1972 ................................................................ 164
 Hall, The Civilization of Experience, 1973....................................................... 164
 Lawrence, Alfred North Whitehead, 1974 ........................................................ 164
 Martin, Whitehead’s Categoreal Scheme, 1974 ............................................... 165
 Sarkar, Whitehead’s Four Principles, 1974 ..................................................... 165
 Fitzgerald, Alfred North Whitehead’s Early Philosophy, 1979........................ 165
 Wallack, The Epochal Nature of Process, 1980............................................... 165
 Hartshorne and Peden, Whitehead’s View of Reality, 1981 ............................. 166
 Ross, Perspective in Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1982...................................... 166
 Ford, The Emergence of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, 1984................................ 166
 Kuntz, Alfred North Whitehead, 1984 .............................................................. 167
 Jentz, Whitehead’s Philosophy, 1985 ............................................................... 167
 Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, 1985............................................................... 168
 Nobo, Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension, 1986 ....................................... 168
 Bar-On, The Categories and the Principle of Coherence, 1987 ...................... 168
 Lucas, The Rehabilitation of Whitehead, 1989................................................. 169
 Franklin, Speaking from the Depths, 1990 ....................................................... 169
 Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance, 1993 .................................... 169
 Jones, Intensity, 1998........................................................................................ 170
 Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience, 1998................................................... 170
 Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism, 2001 ................................. 170
 Keller and Daniell, Process and Difference, 2002 ........................................... 171
 Rose, On Whitehead, 2002 ............................................................................... 171
 Shields, Process and Analysis, 2002 ................................................................ 171
 Polanowski and Sherburne, Whitehead’s Philosophy, 2004 ............................ 172
 Epperson, Quantum Mechanics, 2004.............................................................. 172
 Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism, 2006 ....................................................... 172
 Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy, 2008................................................... 173


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Creativity and Its Discontents

Dutch-speaking Scholarship on PR André Cloots......................................................................................... 175
 French-speaking Scholarship on PR Michel Weber ....................................................................................... 181
 German-speaking Scholarship on PR Helmut Maaßen .................................................................................... 199
 Portuguese Reception of PR Luís Morais........................................................................................... 219
 Bibliography......................................................................................................224


Spanish Reception of PR: García Bacca on Whitehead Juan V. Mayoral de Lucas .................................................................... 225
 References and Further Reading .......................................................................233


Index.......................................................................................... 237
 


Process Thought I. Weber et al., After Whitehead, 2004. II. Brown, Process and the Authentic Life, 2005. III. Graupe, Der Ort ökonomischen Denkens, 2005. IV. Xie et al., Whitehead and China, 2005. V. Herstein, Whitehead and the Measurement Problem, 2006. VI. Khamara, Space, Time and Theology, 2006. VII. Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics, 2006. VIII. Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. Jamesean Applications, [forthcoming]. X. Weber et al., Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, 2008. XI. Rescher, Process Philosophical Deliberations, 2006. XII. Franzese et al., Fringes of Religious Experience, 2007. XIII. Basile et al., Consciousness, Reality and Value, 2007. XIV. Weber et al., Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality, 2006. XV. Graupe, The Basho of Economics, 2007. XVI. Dibben et al., Applied Process Thought I, 2008. XVII. Smith et al., Process and Personality, 2008. XVIII. Pachalska et al., Neuropsychology and Philosophy of Mind in Process, 2008. XIX. Franzese, The Ethics of Energy, 2008. XX. Wang et al., The Roar of Awakening, [forthcoming]. XXI. Dibben et al., Applied Process Thought II, [forthcoming].