Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality 9783110328349, 9783110328011

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Michel Weber and Pierfrancesco Basile (Eds.) Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality

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

Volume 14

Michel Weber Pierfrancesco Basile (Eds.)

Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality

ontos verlag Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick

Bibliographic information published by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nastionalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de

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2007 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 10: 3-938793-38-4 ISBN 13: 978-3-938793-38-1 2007 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

Apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness. (A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality)

Contents Preface .........................................................................................................................7

I. Process and Universals Process Philosophy and the Problem of Universals Reiner Wiehl ...........................................................................................................13 Abstraction and Individuation in Whitehead and Wiehl Anderson Weekes....................................................................................................39

II. Nature and Subjectivity Prehension John B. Cobb, Jr. ..................................................................................................123 Whitehead, Hume and the Phenomenology of Causation Pierfrancesco Basile ..............................................................................................137 Subjectivity, System and Intersubjectivity Joseph A. Bracken ................................................................................................159 Maxwell’s Field and Whitehead’s Events Leemon B. McHenry.............................................................................................177

III. Ethics and Civilization Morality and Scientific Naturalism David Ray Griffin .................................................................................................193 Can Specific Rules be Deduced from Moral Principles? John W. Lango......................................................................................................221 Ethical Quantities Nicholas Rescher ...................................................................................................241 The Wand of the Enchanter George Allan .........................................................................................................249 Creativity, Efficacy and Vision Michel Weber........................................................................................................263

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IV. Psychology and Phenomenology Truthfulness and Memory Michael Hampe .....................................................................................................285 Empathy and Reliability Bernd Weidmann ..................................................................................................303 On Gadamer, Phenomenology and Historical Relativism Alon Segev .............................................................................................................311 Max Scheler on Love and Hate Helmut Maaßen.....................................................................................................335 About the Authors ...................................................................................................345 Analytical Table of Contents...................................................................................349 Process Thought Series............................................................................................354

Preface The present volume gathers prominent international scholars from Continental Europe and the US to celebrate the complex legacy of Reiner Wiehl, whose work has been instrumental in bringing together the European tradition of “prima philosophia,” as represented by Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and to a certain extent Nietzsche, with the adventurous speculative renewal of the twentieth century by such authors as Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Alfred North Whitehead. Like Philippe Devaux (1902–1979) in Belgium, Enzo Paci (1911–1976) in Italy and Jean Wahl (1888–1974) in France, Wiehl is one of the very few European thinkers to have understood the importance of that historical synergy and especially to have insisted on the dazzling virtues of Whitehead’s ontology. Particularly significant in this respect are his seminal Introduction to the German translation of Adventures of Ideas (1971) and two recent books, Metaphysik und Erfahrung (1996) and Subjektivität und System (2000). Wiehl has made important contributions to various aspects of the process paradigm: accordingly, essays with a range of focus as wide as Wiehl’s own expertise are gathered in this volume. “Phenomenology,” “Pragmatism,” “Existentialism,” “Post-modernism,” “Analytic Philosophy”—all these denominations are likely to be wellknown to the reader. What is, however, process philosophy? What are its characteristic doctrines and concerns? Since it seemed appropriate to have Reiner Wiehl himself answer these questions, Part I (“Process and Universals”) begins with one of his most recent papers (“Process Philosophy and the Problem of Universals”), which has been written and translated for this occasion and in which the problem of the distinctive nature of process philosophy is explicitly addressed. Wiehl first draws a distinction between a broad and a narrow sense in which the expression “process philosophy” can be understood, and then provides an illustration of how the process paradigm in the strict sense impacts upon traditional philosophical issues by considering the main ways in which it modifies the classical doctrine of universals. Wiehl’s intellectually challenging paper is followed by a long and equally challenging response by Anderson Weekes (“Abstraction and Individuation

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in Whitehead and Wiehl”), where different theories of individuation are carefully distinguished and the question is raised as to the exact nature of Whitehead’s position. Besides providing a detailed commentary of Wiehl’s interpretation of Whitehead on the problem of universals, Weekes discusses some apparent contradictions in Whitehead’s theory. Moreover, he argues that the problem of individuation is set upon a wholly new basis, for whereas traditional theories of individuation assume individuality as a static phenomenon, Whitehead’s metaphysics understands it as a dynamic process with multiple phases and aspects. Notoriously, Whitehead arrived at his complex ontology by way of generalisation from two main sources: our experiences (starting with his own), the actualities we know better because we know them from “within,” and the basic notions of post-Maxwellian physical theory. In Part II (“Nature and Subjectivity”) John Cobb (“Prehension”) introduces one of the most basic concepts in Whitehead’s philosophy, prehension, arguing that an analysis of experience based upon that concept is more adequate than materialism, Humean empiricism and Kantian dualism. The following paper by Pierfrancesco Basile (“Whitehead, Hume and the Phenomenology of Causation”) continues the line of thought initiated by Cobb by giving a closer look at Whitehead’s critique of Hume. Moving beyond the mere epistemological plane, Joseph Bracken (“Subjectivity, System and Intersubjectivity”) focuses upon the Whiteheadian concept of “society,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic solidarity and internality of all constituents of reality. Although Bracken is appreciative of Whitehead’s approach, he argues that Whitehead fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of how distinct constituents (Whitehead’s actual occasions) can give rise to a complex capable of acting as a single individual, not merely as a collection of parts; Whitehead’s theory stands therefore in need of correction and supplementation. With the last paper of Part II we turn to the other source of Whitehead’s speculative generalizations, modern physics: Leemon B. McHenry (“Maxwell’s Field and Whitehead’s Events: The Adventure of a Revolutionary Idea”) investigates the influence of James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory and of the concept of a physical field on Whitehead’s ontology of events. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the sort of worldview we hold is likely to influence our decisions with regard to issues of practical concern, as well as our general attitude towards life and its challenges. In Part III (“Ethics and Civilization”) David Ray Griffin (“Morality and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts”) argues that the widespread denial of moral realism is based upon a mistaken conception of naturalism, one that should be replaced by a naturalistic worldview based upon the

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philosophy of Whitehead. In an analytical fashion, problems concerning the logic of moral arguments are addressed by John W. Lango (“Can Specific Rules be Deduced from Moral Principles?”) who, inspired by Whitehead’s conception of coherence (which involves more than mere logical coherence), advocates an ethical coherentism that involves deductive reasoning. This might seem surprising at first sight, for coherentism and deductivism are usually held to be contradictory positions, yet Lango contends that it is foundationalism, rather than deductive reasoning per se, that is incompatible with coherentism. Nicholas Rescher (“Ethical Quantities”) provides vivid illustrations of the difficulties we encounter in providing quantitative ethical specifications. How many escaping guilty does it take to justify one condemned innocent? We are at loss in providing any criteria for determining the correct number, yet we cannot avoid this sort of questions in ordinary life. In the two remaining papers of this section, George Allan (“The Wand of the Enchanter”) explores Whitehead’s account of the origin and essence of civilization, whereas Michel Weber (“Creativity, Efficacy and Vision: Ethics and Psychology in an Open Universe”) tackles the question of how psychology and ethics should be reinterpreted in an open universe of the sort envisaged by radically empiricist thinkers such as James and Whitehead. Although Whitehead’s philosophy fades from view in Part IV (“Psychology and Phenomenology”), the sort of issues with which he was concerned do not. The problem of subjectivity is addressed in a more concrete and direct fashion by Michael Hampe (“Truthfulness and Memory: Philosophical Notes on Trauma”), whose reflections upon the nature and significance of traumatic experiences issue in a critique of reductionist explanations, once represented by Huxley’s epiphenomenalism and today by the more refined yet still incomplete accounts of neuropsychology. If people should begin to view themselves solely in terms of scientific descriptions, Hampe writes, then “the realm of what is humanly possible would be dramatically reduced.” The critique of reductionism is thus motivated by a larger concern about the existential and moral quality of our lives. The “mystery” of the human psyche (no irony involved) is also the topic of Bernd Weidmann’s essay (“Empathy and Reliability: Albert Fraenkel as seen by his Patients Hesse and Jaspers”), which canvasses a portrait of Albert Fraenkel’s personality and professional ethos through the recollections of two of his patients. The relation of subjectivity and the historicity of our cultural heritages is discussed from an hermeneutical perspective by Alon Segev (“On Gadamer, Phenomenology and Historical Relativism”), whose paper emphasizes the phenomenological components in Gadamer’s writings with the aim of criticizing the mistaken interpretations of Rorty and Habermas.

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The book ends with a paper by Helmut Maaßen (“Max Scheler on Love and Hate: A Phenomenological Approach”), where Scheler’s conception of love is analyzed in the context of his general theory of emotions. It is quite appropriate that a book such as this one, in which the idea of reality and of subjectivity as being in constant process occupies the centre of the stage, should end with an open question, for Maaßen asks us to consider whether our love is to be directed upwards towards a vision of God, as it is held by Augustine, or down to every-day life, as suggested by James Joyce. It is also fitting that, as the interested reader will see, his paper should end on a light note: after all, the ability to smile is oftentimes the best antidote to that crystallization of ideas Whitehead labeled “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”—the cause of avoidable evils in the larger world that incessantly grows outside the fascinating yet limited boundaries of philosophical speculation. A common thread runs through all contributions: the problematic nature of subjectivity and especially of its process slant, which easily eludes the static and abstract schemes of rationality. We regard it as a positive— indeed Whiteheadian—characteristic of this book that different ways of tackling philosophical problems are featured, for the question of the adequacy of the method used in philosophical speculation has to remain an open one. This book would not have seen the light without the conjoint efforts of many colleagues and friends. We are indebted to Reiner Wiehl and Bernd Weidmann for their kind and competent assistance during the preparation of this volume. A very special thank must go to Anderson Weekes, who has tackled the rather difficult task of translating Professor Wiehl’s paper while also commenting upon it in a way that is both scholarly accurate and philosophically acute. Finally, we wish to thank all contributors, including those who for reasons of time and space could not participate in the present volume: Andrea Poma and Joachim Klose. Pierfrancesco Basile & Michel Weber September 2006

I. Process and Universals

Process Philosophy and the Problem of Universals Reiner Wiehl 1. What is Process Philosophy? What is process philosophy?∗ What specific characteristic defines it as such? On a first approximation, this question refers to the whole of European philosophy, especially to its origins—the classical Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and its pre-Socratic roots—as well as to medieval and modern philosophy.1 Indisputably, Aristotle may be considered the first acme of European process philosophy. One need only think of the significance of his concept of motion (kinēsis) and its involvement with the founding notion of his philosophy, the concept of actualization (energeia or entelecheia). When Aristotle criticizes the philosophy of Plato, his great teacher and predecessor, it is precisely from this viewpoint of a “process philosophy” that his critique is primarily accomplished. For he charges Plato with an inadequate understanding of motion and of the complexly ordered totality to which motions give rise.2 It is just this critique that enables us to glimpse in Plato not so much the Pythagorean as, on the contrary, the criticized Heraclitean. And Aristotle is by no means the only one to see Plato—the very Plato who created the theory of Ideas—as the founder of process philosophy. Throughout the Middle Ages the most important Platonic text was the Timaeus, which can be grouped together with the Theaetetus and the Sophist to show that the motility [Bewegtheit] of being was an issue already anticipated by Plato. In the modern period, in the philosophy of the twentieth century, we must mention Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead not only as path-

∗ The author’s notes appear as footnotes with Arabic numbering, endnotes with Roman numbering refer to the translator’s additional notes.

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breaking proponents of process philosophy, but also as thinkers who recurred to the just-noted feature of Platonic philosophy in working out their own views.3 To read the whole of European philosophy as process philosophy means distinguishing different modes and kinds of processuality. It means seeing the concepts of motion [Bewegung] and processuality [Prozessualität] as the decisive keynotes in every variation of philosophical emphasis. Thus, for example, there is the happening of motion in the occurrences [Vorgänge] of nature, and there is the unique motion of the cosmos as a whole; but also there are specific processes of human cognition throughout its varied types, all of which efficaciously express the motion of the soul and the mind. Furthermore, with its concept of God medieval philosophy added to the manifold types and forms of motion that make up the nucleus of any process philosophy the idea of creation [Schöpfung], which is fundamental in process thinking. What is creation? It is primarily the creation of a world, but also the creation of all creaturely being to the extent that it is not sufficiently explained through knowledge based on scientific research. Scientific knowledge renders many things intelligible, even the genesis of living things. At the same time, however, it always harbors questions about its own limits and thus also gives rise to the philosophical question of epistemological critique. So it is not by accident that the imprint of process theory upon modern philosophy is found in philosophical logic and in the general theory of knowledge. Taking its departure from Kant, a theory of the “motion of the concept” was developed and found its consummate elaboration in Hegel’s speculative logic, as well as in the theory of the cognitive process developed by the neo-Kantian school.4 In regard to the overall development of the European tradition of process philosophy, we can make the following observation. Since the founding of this tradition by Plato, the categories of motion, becoming [Werden] and creation, as well as their counter-notion, the Idea, have remained fundamental throughout. The meaning of this decisive counter-notion is complex. What is fundamental is that the Idea, along with all of its closelyallied concomitant determinations, embodies an authority that makes possible the articulation of an antithesis to ceaseless coming-to-be and passing-away. It is the assumption of Ideas that makes it possible to secure a fixed point of reference in the continual flux of things and in the ceaseless change of appearances. Thus, in its purest form, this notion of the Idea represents the transcending of moved and mutable being. The Idea is the being of the eternal.

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Universals cannot be simply identified with Ideas.5 While such an identification is a question of terminological usage, it is also a question of the specific form that process philosophy takes. Interpreting the whole of European philosophy as process philosophy, including the Platonic theory of Ideas, requires a distinction between a broader and a narrower concept of this philosophy. In the broadest sense, every form that European philosophy has taken is process philosophy insofar as it is founded on an opposition between the changeable and the unchangeable (and that means: insofar as philosophical thinking is framed by these concepts in a way that qualifies as metaphysics). This general and broad understanding contrasts with an understanding of process philosophy in the proper and narrow sense. The latter can be distinguished by an array of theorems that do not by any means all require one another and which, accordingly, make it possible to discriminate the different subtypes of such a “process philosophy proper.” Process philosophy in the proper sense consists in a specific delimitation of the basic concepts of process philosophy taken in the widest sense: in a specification or modification in the meanings of (1) creation, (2) motion and (3) Idea. (1) The narrower specification of the traditional, wide-ranging concept of creation is given expression in the definition of the term “creativity.” Regardless of its direct linguistic descent from the tradition of JudeoChristian creation theology, the concept of “creativity” has acquired a specific intonation in recent process philosophy that forbids any immediate equation of the principle of “creation” with the principle of “creativity.” Creativity is not the cause of the world’s coming into being, nor the cause of the genesis of a being,i but rather the principle or ground of novelty.6 It thus presupposes the happening of eventsii as such, for it is a principle of the formation and shaping of events [ein Gestaltungsprinzip des Geschehens]. By contrast, the act of creation as traditionally understood is in no way necessarily bound up with the idea of novelty. On the contrary, creation is understood in the broad tradition of mythico-theological “process philosophy” as a unique, one-time occurrence. In contradistinction to the idea of novelty, this implies something incomparable. Through this incomparable occurrence something comes to be that has more so the character of the supra-temporal and eternal than the novel. (2) The second modification in meaning concerns the definition of motion or, more precisely, the motility of beings [des Seienden] and the mutability [Veränderlichkeit] of things. Process philosophy in the narrower sense presents a radical critique of the ontology of things and substances. Here the character of what-is in its primordial form is not that of things or substances. The principle of “creativity” thus does not refer primarily to

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things or to substances, but to events or processes. Strictly speaking, it is not things which are novel, but something pertaining to events. In regard to motion and processes, process philosophy’s critique of things and substances means: motion is not primarily something attributed to something, not something secondary and derivative, not a state of existing things, but rather that which the givenness of things presupposes as an anterior ground. This critique of thing-ontology is a consequence of the Eleatic aporias about motion. The primordiality of motion, of events, is incompatible with the primordiality of enduring things, of which some properties change while others stay the same. If the motility of what-is (of beings) is construed radically, then the seeming fixity and durability of things dissolve into phenomena, into mere appearances. “Phenomenalism” is thus the consequence of an explicit or implicit ontology that presupposes motion and things, motility and thinghood, as equiprimordial givens. Phenomenalism and skepticism accompany process philosophy in the broader sense from the beginning.iii (3) The precise delineation of the third specification—that is, the narrower specification of the concept of “Idea”—poses particular difficulties. In Platonism originally Ideas represent, in contrast to motion and the moveable [dem Beweglichen], what truly and properly is; they represent that which bestows permanence and duration upon what is moveable and moved—both as such and for its human accessibility. These Ideas thereby distinguish themselves from things and objects of all sorts because the latter belong to the realm of the mutable or perishable [des Veränderlichen bzw. Vergänglichen]. In this way one of the essential determinations of Ideas emerges: their transcendence with respect to things and objective states of affairs insofar as the latter belong to the realm of the moveable. There is a long tradition of process philosophy that does not take its departure from the Platonic heritage described here, but owes its allegiance instead to the Aristotelian heritage, which must be seen as the inversion of Platonic philosophy, albeit under the aegis of “ideal types” and potent simplification. This tradition, which basically dominates the entire European tradition, consists for one thing in the inversion according to which being that is moveable and moved acquires primacy over the unmoved and eternal—a primacy, at least, that is valid for us humans in our quotidian grasp of objects and the world. To be sure, in a sense this primacy is circumscribed. For, in contradistinction to an assumed pure motion that can be thought only in the form of a constant and invariable motility [unveränderliche Bewegtheit] of the eternal, all earthly motion is bound up with things and objective states of affairs and is, by dint of this

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connection, already possessed of a certain constancy and fixity. Nevertheless, the status of Ideas is thereby fundamentally altered. For one thing, the Ideas, insofar as they are still posited as conditions of a kind of permanence at all, forfeit their status as that which truly and properly is. What truly is are rather things in their motility under the presupposition of a being conceived in the manner of Ideas,iv but without Ideas being conceded the status of truth. Ideas are not what truly is. They are items of givenness [Gegebenheiten] that the human being acquires from a particular perception and makes serviceable for an application beyond the present moment. The two philosophical positions described here are distinguished in the traditional nomenclature as realism (about Ideas) and nominalism. Process philosophy in the narrower and proper sense can be seen as a revision of these two positions, which have dominated classical philosophy. This revision results immediately from the two previously-noted characteristics of process philosophy in the narrower and proper sense: from the assumption that true and proper being [Sein] is the being of motion or process and that no proper and primordial being belongs to things and their objective states of affairs. These assumptions entail a peculiar and at first sight seemingly paradoxical consequence for process philosophy in the narrower sense. They imply that a primordial and essential ontological valence attaches to Ideas as well as to processes. Under the stated conditions there cannot be any question whether Ideas exist, but only how. For, if only the moved, the moveable, exists to begin with, then the possibility of determining the moveable as this or that moveable, as this or that determinately thus and so moved moveable, must be sought in Ideas. The question of the what and how of the givenness of Ideas leads now to the concept of universals and thereby to the assumption of a hierarchy of linguistically bound determinations of concepts ordered in levels of generality and particularity. As universals, ideas are bound up with such hierarchies, whose conceptual structure involves, not last, valuations.v Ideas, construed in this way as universals, are bound up with hierarchies of value-determinations. In respect to their opposite orientations, such hierarchies can be either open or closed in both the upward and the downward directions.vi The downward termini of such hierarchies are what we call “individuals,” the upward “universals.”7 Accordingly, open hierarchies evince a transcendence of individuality and universality.vii In connection with the hierarchy of value-determinations given concomitantly with Ideas, traditional process philosophy contains an ambiguity that cannot be resolved within the bounds of its own ontology.

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At issue is the ambiguity of the specific reference of these hierarchies, which refer either to the moveable as such or to the moveable via the assumption of things and their properties. In other words: the noted ambiguity roots in the obscurity and absent clarification of the relation between motions and things. Thus, it remains uncertain whether motion is something pertaining to things or things are something pertaining to events (that is, whether motion is an event to which things give rise or things are structures to which events give rise).viii A further indeterminacy is involved in this ambiguity of traditional process philosophy. This has to do with the meaning of transcendence. One of the two meanings of transcendence construes it in reference to the totality of a given hierarchy of concepts and value-determinations. The other meaning arises from the primal relationship (to be discussed below) that the hierarchy of concepts and values enters into with things or events. It involves the transcendence of a part of the hierarchy—in the extreme case, the transcendence of the highest or of the lowest in the hierarchy— vis-à-vis the being [Seienden] for which the hierarchy functions as a predicative order [Bestimmungsordnung].ix

2. Types of Universals and their Ontological Referents The second meaning of transcendence corresponds at least partially to the problematic known as the controversy over universals, which owes its origin to the implicit divergence between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy and historically became the main bone of contention in medieval philosophy.x Now if process philosophy in the narrower sense accords things and their objective states of affairs a merely derivative ontological status that can be made intelligible only by reference to the primordial ontological givenness of processes and Ideas, then several important consequences follow. They concern the basic assumption about Ideas and their referral to processes. For one thing, it follows that Ideas and their allied hierarchies of concepts and values have events (and what is processually given in concomitance with events) as their primordial referents.xi If for any hierarchy of ideas there has to be a respective basis which constitutes the basis for the validity of the hierarchy of determinations, then this basis is not to be found in things, which function as the basis for the concepts of individuality, specification, and generality. Under the stated conditions, the basis must rather be sought in the events themselves and in their givenness. But from this follows a second

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consequence: there must be—given in the events themselves—a structure and a differentiation with sufficient affinity to the hierarchical order of Ideas that the referral of the hierarchy of concepts and values to events is made possible. This differentiated structure is not primarily that of the distinction between the general and the particular, which is a conceptual distinction, but that of width and depth. This implicit order is that of spacetime. It is as little a purely spatial order as it is a purely temporal one. Rather, space and time constitute the fundamental order of events to which the hierarchical orders of Ideas refer.xii How different this is from the Kantian theory of the world is plainly evident.8 It has in common with Kant’s theory only the distinction between the patterns of order relevant to motion and to concepts. But an important consequence for determining the nature of universals is bound up with the second peculiarity of process philosophy explicated in the previous paragraph. A single complex of interconnected events represents for itself a universe in the sense that different Ideas and concomitantly different hierarchies of concepts and values can be and in reality actually are related to this historical universe. There is not merely one historical universe, but many universes, which do not exist without relation or interconnection.xiii The real and possible interconnections must therefore admit of measurement according to their respective width and depth. To this width and depth corresponds a structure of form, which we designate as spacetime. A historical universe is relative to all those events that are contained in it and which, relative to it, have their respective width and depth. Historical worlds, too—that is, not just Ideas or conceptual determinations—manifest particular hierarchies of their own. There are also, in respect to width and depth, differences in primordiality and equiprimordiality. Process philosophy in the narrower sense thus leads with strict consistency to two different forms of universals and to correspondingly different hierarchies, namely, to a hierarchy of generality and particularity and to a hierarchy of width and depth. Generality and particularity are conceptual distinctions that apply to things, while width and depth are processual-historical distinctions that apply to events. Bound up with this is a deep-running revision of the traditional theory of relations.9 Since in view of the primordiality of events and of Ideas only a secondary ontological significance is accorded to things and substances, not only does the classical distinction in the theory of universals between realism, nominalism, and conceptualism become obsolete, but also the simple and straightforward distinction between internal and external relations vanishes. What takes its place initially is the more complex

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distinction between historical and conceptual relations. But this presupposes that the two primordial givens, the happening of events and ideal determinacies, cannot be reduced to one or the other type of relation (i.e., to the historical or the conceptual). It is one of the mistakes of Kant’s transcendental idealism that he reduced the interconnection of events to the corresponding type of relation, that is, to the intuition-forms of space and time. And on this basis it was merely a matter of logical consistency when his successors in the Marburg school derived the two types of relation from one another and dissolved the relations of space-time into conceptual relations. These reductions may be of use for laying the foundations of a mathematical logic, but for the understanding of reality they were false leads. The two primal forms of relationality (historical and conceptual), which correspond to the two primal types of universality (width and depth, on the one hand, and generality and particularity, on the other), have a common formal property: they are both internal or inner relations. This is a defect inasmuch as the conditions of possible external relations are not fulfilled ipso facto with the givenness of internal relations. Internal relations are such that the relata cannot be separated from their relations and are thus given only in an inseparable connection with the relations. Since there are not only monadic and dyadic relations, but also polyadic relations, any given relation of one sort or another can be considered in terms of the completeness with which it fulfills the conditions of an internal relation, e.g., patterns are structures of internal relationality whose relata need not be completely internal. Internal relationality thus represents the formal primary form [die formale Grundform] which relations take among events, on the one hand, and among Ideas, on the other. To the extent that there is a primal form in common here, it can be grounded theoretically on the fundamental concept of removal/distantiation [Entfernung], i.e., on the formal primary difference between proximity and distance.xiv This difference constitutes the fundamental form common to the two primary relations of events and of Ideas: that is, it constitutes the fundamental differentia of width and depth, on the one hand, and of generality and particularity, on the other. Proximity and distance represent a formal primary distinction [eine formale Grundunterscheidung] that neutralizes motion into rest and stylizes rest as potential motion. The distinction between proximity and distance conceived in this general form contains no preferential metric. A measure for proximity and distance first arises from the specific determinations of the connection between events and Ideas. Now removal, as a general primary form, represents, to be sure, an abstraction from the basic thesis of process philosophy in the narrower and proper sense. According to this

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thesis events or processes enjoy an absolute ontological primacy—not only vis-à-vis things and thingly objects, but also vis-à-vis the order-structures of Ideas. In that distances (removal) neutralize motions and stylize states of rest, they methodically conceal that primacy of the motility of what-is (of beings). This absolute ontological primacy of process and event makes a third class or type of internal relation necessary.xv Accordingly, processes or events are not only related internally to other events in their world, but also to Ideas and their structure of internal relations. Consequently, processes refer internally to internal relations of other events and to internal relations of Ideas, which in turn also contain relations to other items of givenness. Processes thus represent for process philosophy in the narrower sense a more or less complex structure of internal relations. This structure has for its own part the ontological status of an event.xvi In the happening of this event multiple and various internal relations are ordered, and they are ordered in such a way that different operations contribute to their order. To such an order belong coordination and subordination, but also exclusion and abstraction. The unity of a discrete, unified event requires the assumption of a corresponding principle of unity. According to the basic thesis of process philosophy—that the most primordial givens are the events themselves—the principle of the unity of a discrete event can be nothing other than the happening of the event itself. It makes no sense to seek the unity of a particular event outside of the event itself.

3. Processes and Subjects in Modern Philosophy The principle of unity of a particular discrete event is the principle of subjectivity. According to process philosophy in the narrower sense, a subject is not to be understood as Idea—not as a conceptually specified nexus of values—but as event.xvii Subjectivity as the principle of unity of a discrete event is the relevant event considered from the standpoint of its immanent unity and in respect of its immanent ground of unity. In regard to its formal structure, subjectivity is a particular kind of self-reference. Process philosophy understands this reference of the subject to itself as a “self-becoming” [“Werden zu sich”],10 as an event in which an incipient self [ein anfängliches Selbst] becomes a determinate self, in itself finalized: the respective self of that particular event [Geschehen]. Subjectivity as process is an autopoietic event. But in this connection a more precise distinction has to be made: between autopoiesis and autogenesis.11 A

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subject does not produce itself. It is not the creator of itself. The genesis of a subject represents for it a long antecedent history, which disappears into the width and depth of its antecedent world. The event that constitutes a single subject originates out of countless other histories, whose interconnection makes up its antecedent history. In various definite ways, these histories imbue the happening of the subjectivity that is being constituted. The incipient subject cannot be precisely delineated in its incipience. The incipience of it consists in a process of dissociation from its more or less complex antecedent history. Considered externally, the incipient subject at its inception appears as the happening of the contraction of an antecedent world. In the process of dissociation from this anterior world, the contraction constitutes the beginning of an interior world of its own that is unique in itself. The incipient happening of a subject is the incipient happening of the elaboration of an interior world. The happening of the self-becoming of a finalized subject is the elaboration of the particular exclusive uniqueness of that finalized subject. The autopoietic act of the subject accordingly consists in an incipient (initial) delimitation of its self-being from its anterior environment and the development of this independent self-being into an exclusively determined self. But the autopoietic event does not imply the standing still of the world. In the selfformation of the discrete self, its pre-given world—its antecedent world— develops itself into a world of the self’s own, into its world, in which the self exists. Modern process philosophy is for one thing characterized by the assumption of a primordial primacy of processes over things. According to this assumption, processes are the most primordial entities, the elementary building blocks of the world, from the specific collocation of which in each instance the givenness of objective things can first be accounted for. But the specifically modern character of process philosophy finds its particular expression in the positing of an ontological equiprimordiality of processes and subjects. Thanks to this assumed equiprimordiality, the elementary processes are not just events with an immanent teleological structure according to which an initial determination [eine anfängliche Bestimmung] develops itself towards a particular goal, prompted partly by external factors, partly from out of an inner specificity of form. Rather, the goaloriented happening assumed here is explicated in modern process philosophy by means of the modern principle of subjectivity. Accordingly, the initial determination of a process is a determination just as much indebted to subjective activity as the concluding determinacy with which the respective process finds the fulfillment of its initial (incipient) determination. The incipient subject is accordingly in its incipient activity an unsatisfied striving that ultimately finds a definite fulfillment developed

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from within itself. This fulfillment is the fulfillment of that which the thuscharacterized subject of an incipient event was able and wanting ultimately to become and conclusively to be. According to the ontological assumption of process philosophy summarized above, subjectivity is the elementary life-form of happening in its processuality, and processuality is the history-form of subjectivity. Human subjectivity and human historicity are to be conceived in terms of these elementary forms of what-is. In order to understand concepts appropriate to human behavior such as consciousness, will, and action, process philosophy requires a special system of categories which enables the construction of ever more complex connective structures—connective structures that can be developed out of the elementary life-forms and history-forms.12 Human consciousness thus presupposes in its manifold forms of expression and configuration complex combinations of processes. It further presupposes in these combinations abstractions through which the manifold data in the processual happening are some of them separated out, others combined with one another, and still others transformed. The elementary combination of the life-form of subjectivity with the historical form of processuality constitutes that basic principle of process philosophy that was previously called the principle of creativity and distinguished from the traditional principle of creation. It is precisely through this interpretation of processuality as subjectivity that creativity is distinguished from causality. Not all events are as such completely determined. Not all interconnections among events are from the first absolutely determined through an inner or outer regularity of law. In process philosophy in the narrower sense, determination in the sense of complete and definitive determinacy is solely a limiting case of the possible connection of events. Thanks to the basic principle of creativity, a possible occasion [Anlass] for the genesis of novelty is given with every new event, in view of the subjectivity dwelling within it. The possibility of strict determinism is thereby abrogated. The connective structure both within historical worlds and among various such worlds is determined by definite probabilities of combination. These probabilities have their ontological ground in the synergy of creativity and subjectivity occurring in the discrete processes interconnected in such structures. The synergy of creativity and subjectivity in the bringing about of novelty is more primordial than the efficacy of human freedom. Just as human consciousness presupposes a complex connective structure of events and subjective actions, so, too, human freedom presupposes the conditions of the possibility of the genesis of novelty in the respective world of the subject of action concerned. Human freedom is, incidentally, by no means restricted in its function to the

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production of novelty. The capabilities and functions of human freedom are incomparably more complex and multifarious. Human freedom can be deployed not last for the preservation of the past and what is deemed valuable. But even this use of freedom presupposes a given world in which the genesis of novelty is possible and actual. Causality (in the sense of lawconforming determination) and human freedom do not constitute opposites that unconditionally exclude one another. Both the one and the other belong to the broader and more encompassing realm of the possible efficacy of creativity and subjectivity. Consequently, causal operations can be distinguished according to how much room they leave for the genesis of novelty and furthermore according to the manner in which they permit such leeway. A philosophical theory of creativity thus requires the construction of a system of categories that makes intelligible the possibility of such differentiated types in the formation of causal efficacy. In such a theory, the possibility must be recognized that subjective behavior may in one way or another be able to withdraw from the immediate influence of causal factors. Such a theory must take account of the plethora of possibilities for the conformal and non-conformal behavior of subjects involved in processual complexes. With the increasing intricacy of what happens [des Geschehens] and the growing complexity of subjective behavior not only do the possibilities for non-conformal behavior grow, but thereby also the possibilities of increasing tension between conformality and nonconformality, which threatens the stability of existing structures of interconnection among events. The traditional theory of Ideas, which we owe to the process philosophy of Plato, receives a new construal in modern process philosophy and not last in the context of the modern connection of creativity and subjectivity just described. The difference between, on the one hand, the fundamental relationships of the general and the particular and, on the other, the universality of highest genera (which transcend those fundamental relationships) is something that was already known to Plato in framing his theory of Ideas. And also known to Plato were the displacements in the reference of such fundamental relationships when their primordial reference to concrete events of motion is subject to change.13 What modern process philosophy introduces as a novelty in the theory of universals hinges, first of all, on the ontological devaluation of objective things in favor of elementary processes. A new categorial-ontological status is thus demanded of Ideas as equiprimordial entities: one that is no longer oriented towards putatively primordial relationships of things and properties. Universals thus lay claim to an ontological status more primordial than that of properties, which are to be discovered and observed on things. Prior to any such ontological determination and its logical use as predicate in a

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proposition or propositional function, a more primordial connection of Ideas with the elementary processes must be assumed. This can be seen in the form in which universals are connected to those relations that were previously called internal. The traditional theory connects universals—in the form of general concepts—primarily to external relations. For modern process philosophy, internal relations are partly the concrete relations of a process to the processual world given to it, partly the relations between it (the process) and Ideas, partly the relations between Ideas themselves. From the viewpoint of the ontological equivalence of subjects and processes, these internal relations can also be thought of as subjective modes of behavior. In Whitehead’s process philosophy, which plays a prominent role among the diverse forms of such philosophy, these internal relations are terminologically specified as prehensions. The relevant categorial and ontological connection of universals with such prehensions (or internal relations of processes) must not be misconstrued in the sense of modern nominalism. For nominalism, the universals in question are abstractions, more exactly: they are abstractions that abstract the properties of things and express them in linguistic designations. It is precisely from modern nominalism that modern process philosophy, in regard to its theory of universals, distinguishes itself.xviii But the difference concerns not only the secondary ontological status of things and properties. Rather, it also touches directly on the fundamental relationship of concretion and abstraction in both theoretical and practical respects. The modification of the meaning of concrete and abstract in modern process philosophy consists, for one thing, in the direct involvement of concretions and abstractions in the processual event. Thus, the given concretions and abstractions derive from the actuality of a certain particular event, from the efficacy of the subjectivity that inhabits it. The second modification to which this primal relationship is subject can be delineated as an extension in the scope of the differences between the concrete and the abstract. That means that there are very many more categorial types of the concrete and the abstract than the traditional substance and thing ontology wanted to believe. Thus, for example, there are, along with particular, individual processes, also complex structures interconnecting processes, the concreteness of which is in no way inferior to that of the individual processes. Every such structure represents for its indwelling subjects a concrete world, which possesses a definite—even if not easily determinable—width and depth. Such a world evinces a definite structure, the pattern of which cannot be adequately described simply by means of a particular combination of properties.xix Regarding the events that make up its actuality, a historical world derives from their growing together into the definite concretion of this world, i.e., from the synergy of the subjects

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involved in this happening. Abstractions are the result of partial events or of special subjective activities. But in this connection we must distinguish between activities that are objectively present as abstractions from a concrete event and abstractions that derive from such an abstract activity.xx Things and their qualitative determinations derive their abstract ontological status from an abstract and abstracting activity, and they thus presuppose abstractions as the condition of their own abstractness. This is true even for the case in which subjects are viewed as sorts of objective things. In such a view, not only a concrete, but also an abstract subjectivity is presupposed. When such a viewing occurs, the specific interiority, the private life that constitutes a concrete subject, is either reduced or, on the basis of another, different subjectivity, extinguished. Now the noted modification of the fundamental relationship of concretion and abstraction in modern process philosophy plays itself out especially in the theory of Ideas (or the theory of universals). It follows as a consequence of this modification that in the philosophical tradition and even in traditional process philosophy Ideas (or universals)—as much in respect of their concretion as in respect of their abstract status—have always been underdetermined.xxi

4. Universals as Possibilities The modification of the fundamental relationship between concretion and abstraction in modern process philosophy hinges on the previously-noted transcending of any particular relationship of generality and particularity. An idea in its universality is both more concrete as well as more abstract than any such relationship of concepts. An Idea is the former (more concrete) as a constitutive moment within a processual event in that it participates immediately in the concretion of the event, i.e., in the concrete subjective activity within it. In reference to the Idea, the subjective activity inhabiting a concrete event can be called thinking.14 The Idea is thus the most primordial moment of thought-activity. Inasmuch as subjective activity in an event can for its part be more or less abstract, the same holds true of the activity of thinking. For process philosophy, in contrast to modern nominalism, the Idea is the moment of concretely possible thoughtactivity within an event. Just as important as this concretion of the Idea is its ontological constitution as an abstract abstractum. In its ontological status an Idea is more abstract than the property of a thing, more abstract even than the property of a thing lacking express reference to a particular thing (that is, a quale as such). It is a mode, the “sort and manner” of a quality, without

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being fastened to one. Whitehead used the term “non-entity”xxii to characterize this extremely abstract status of universals. This seemingly paradoxical designation becomes intelligible if one considers that not every something has to be without question an entity. The possible interconnection of an indefinite plurality of somethings is distinct from the interconnection of entities of a definite type. The preeminent meaning of universals in process philosophy lies in their functional determination as possibility. An Idea is a possibility of being: the possibility of an event; the possibility which a subject within an event [innerhalb eines Geschehens] thinks in that it makes a given possibility its own or rejects it; the possibility of a modification of a possibility; etc. An Idea is concrete as the possibility of a concrete event to realize itself according to this possibility or on the basis of a modification of this possibility. And, in view of the concrete subjectivity that inhabits such a concrete event, that means: the thinking of a possibility in the realization of which the respective subject finds its fulfillment. The most extreme abstractness of the Idea lies in its universality, which transcends any particular relationship of general and particular and, moreover, any particular realization of itself in a particular event or historical context. A discrete Idea, purely as such, represents an abstract abstractum. It is a universal insofar as it represents for every possible historical world a possibility of realization, without being realized in any particular concrete historical world. Universals acquire their preeminent function as concrete and abstract possibilities through the principles of processuality and subjectivity as well as through the principle of creativity. The first two principles are in their correlation principles of reality. By contrast, creativity is a basic principle of order—more exactly, a principle of the ordering of possibilities. The unities of historical structures of interconnection derive not last from the principle of creativity. They are based upon orders that differ in respect of the extent of their strictness and degree of their stability. Where possibilities are given, both realized and unrealized, corresponding impossibilities are also given. Consequently, there emerges with every process, with every processual event, a relational mesh of possibilities and impossibilities, which is more or less concrete, more or less abstract. In direct relation to a particular processual event there is much that is from the outset prevented from realization and thus represents an impossibility for this event. Other data [Gegebenheiten] present themselves first as possibilities that prove to be impossibilities only in the course of the event’s development, or in some cases only at its conclusion or possibly only retrospectively from the vantage point of another event. And then,

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finally, there are those peculiar events whose development runs backwards. Here it is revealed unexpectedly in the course of a process how an impossibility becomes a possibility, whether it becomes an open, unconcluded and unrealized possibility or even a realized one. Such an unusual development permits us to speak of the realization of the impossible.15 The relational mesh of possibilities and impossibilities, which appears in every concrete event, is arranged for its part in contrasts of concrete and abstract possibilities, which make up the order-structure of this event in regard to the historical world that surrounds it. Valuations are bound up with a concrete event’s contrasts of possibilities and impossibilities. It is the subject of such an event that is occupied from the outset with these valuations. It values in that it takes up or abjures the possibilities presented to it, and through behavior of one sort or another takes in stride the corresponding impossibilities. The determination of novelty represents a particular evaluation of the realization of a definite possibility on the basis of the principle of creativity. The value of novelty can be ascertained from the comparison of distinct phenomena in which a change, a break in continuity, or a revolution in the structure of events is effected. Evaluations of such realizations differ regarding the extent of their thoroughness. The theory of universals has been sketched here in the context of modern process philosophy. It is nothing more than a sketch. And the process philosophy that has been described in this connection is more just a schema or blueprint for such a philosophy than a concrete form of it. In such a concrete form numerous additional interpretations as well as, consequent to these, certain reinterpretations would be unavoidable. Only such additional expositions would permit a precise grasp of the problems that an elaborated process philosophy involves. Among the problems so posed would be: to what extent does process philosophy provide a unified foundation for the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of culture? To what extent does process philosophy succeed at overcoming the inherited Cartesian dualism of corporeal and mental things? Is process philosophy able to ameliorate the contemporary estrangement between science and the human being’s everyday experience? In addition, there are philosophical questions that concern the ontological status of the basic concepts and basic principles of this philosophy: is process philosophy a definite type of “fundamental ontology,” or are its basic concepts meaningful only when used—that is, applied—in this or that domain of objects? Are these concepts employed exclusively with heuristic intent? The theory of universals brings with it scarcely less important questions: what to make of the asserted functional determination of

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universals as possibilities? Is it appropriate to embed these possibilities in a conceptual structure organized around the difference between the concrete and the abstract as its critical parameter? And not last we encounter the problem connected with the indefinite multiplicity of possible and actual orders. On this assumption, how is the unity of our world thinkable and wherein is the human being’s universal directive for the use of practical reason to be grounded? Among the fundamental questions that come up here belongs also the question raised by Nicholas Rescher in his Process Metaphysics: whether process philosophy has to assume the emergence of novel universals.16 A provisional answer to this question is given in the present sketch through the delineation of novelty as the subjective evaluation of the realization of a definite possibility. But this answer is, unavoidably, as provisional as the preceding presentation of process philosophy and the related theory of Ideas. A critical examination of Rescher’s theory of universals requires, in effect, an in depth examination of his whole conception of process philosophy. Without being able to broach the particulars, the present analysis reaches the conclusion that Rescher’s thesis that novel universals must come into being is indeterminate in view of the diverse types of universals. In regard to the traditional understanding of universals, the thesis that novel universals must come into being would lead to an antinomy. Translated by Anderson Weekes

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Notes This paper has been originally written for this volume. In the meantime, a German version has been published with the title “Prozessphilosophie und das Universalienproblem” in G. von Sivers and U. Diehl (eds.), Wege zur Politischen Philosophie. Festschrift für Martin Sattler (Würzburg 2005), pp. 181-196. 1. On the history of process philosophy, see M. Hampe, “History of Process Philosophy: Problems of Method and Doctrine,” in M. Weber (ed.), After Whitehead (Frankfurt/Lancaster 2004), pp. 77-93. 2. A salient symptom of the incorporation of the Aristotelian theory of motion into process philosophy is the translation of the Greek term kinēsis by the term “process” [Prozess] in H. Wagner’s rendering of Aristotle’s Physics. See Physikvorlesung, Werke in deutscher Übersetzung, Vol. XI (Darmstadt 1983), p. 294. 3. From this vantage point should be read the famous comment of A. N. Whitehead that the whole of European philosophy consists in a series of footnotes to Plato. See Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by D. R. Griffin and D. Sherburne (New York 1978), p. 39. 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik. Zweiter Band: Die subjektive Logik, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. XII, edited by F. Hogemann and W. Jaeschke (Hamburg 1981), pp. 187ff. 5. For this distinction the classical author is Immanuel Kant. See the chapter “Von den Ideen überhaupt” [“On Ideas in general”], Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. III (Berlin 1904), pp. 245ff. (=B 368ff.). 6. In this sense Whitehead called creativity the “universal of universals” (Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 21). On the philosophy of Whitehead see B. Saint-Sernin, Whitehead. Un univers en essai (Paris 2000). A good overview of the meaning of the principle of creativity in the natural and cultural sciences is to be found in R. Holm-Hadulla (ed.), Kreativität. Heidelberger Jahrbücher 44 (Heidelberg 2000). 7. See chapter X (“Abstraction”) of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (New York 1967). 8. See the writer’s “Aktualität und Extensivität in Whiteheads KosmoPsychologie,” Subjektivität und System (Frankfurt 2000), pp. 320-373.

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9. See E. Cassirer’s Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. VI (Hamburg 2000), pp. 334ff. and 353ff. 10. I use this expression in allusion to the title of the book by U. Guzzoni, Werden zu sich. Eine Untersuchung zu Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik (Freiburg/München 1963). 11. It would be still more precise to distinguish here between autopoiesis and self-organization or self-reference. See N. Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaften (Frankfurt 1997), pp. 64ff. 12. See the writer’s “Zum Problem der Komplexität in den Systemtheorien Whiteheads und Luhmanns,” Subjektivität und System, op. cit., pp. 374-392. 13. Sophist, 251b-257c. 14. A sketch of the ontological relationship of thought and time can be found in C. Wolfgang, Grundlegung einer Theorie des Geistes (Frankfurt 1975), pp. 11ff. 15. See R. Wiehl “Die Verwirklichung Selbstorganisation 7, 1996, pp. 71-87.

des

Unmöglichen,”

16. See chapter 4 (“Process and Universals”) of his Process Metaphysics. An Introduction to Process Philosophy (Albany 1996), especially p. 82.

Appendix: Translator’s Notes Translating Professor Wiehl’s short but dense paper was not without its challenges, and I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Wiehl and to Dr. Bernd Weidmann for their generous and always congenial assistance. The paper provides a highly abstract examination of the nature of abstraction. The reader should know that I have in many places made the translation less abstract than the original, but that in every case these clarifications have been carefully vetted with the author and bear his approval. The same cannot be said for these footnotes, for which I bear sole responsibility. I can only hope they will provide more help than hindrance in understanding the text. A more systematic attempt on the part of the translator to illuminate this undeniably difficult text can be found in section one of my contribution to this volume, “Abstraction and Individuation in Whitehead and Wiehl: A Comparative Historical Approach.” The reader should bear in mind, however, that those comments do not reflect an authorized interpretation any more than do the scattershot of suggestions in

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these footnotes. They represent a speculative attempt to understand Professor Wiehl’s argument in light of his earlier essays on Whitehead and the texts they seek to interpret. I. Because meaning and sentence construction require the German participle Seiendes to have a verbal rendering in English as well as a nominal one, the translation employs “what-is” or “what [modifier] is” for the former, and “beings/a being” (but never “being”) for the latter. II. In this translation Geschehen is given both a verbal rendering as “what happens” and a nominal rendering as “event/happening/happening of events/eventuation” depending on the meaning of the German and the requirements of English syntax. III. The argument in this paragraph is quite elliptical. The idea seems to be that thing and motion are not quite compatible as coordinate, fundamental categories. The Eleatics showed that the reality of things implied the impossibility of motion and the reality of motion or change implied the impossibility of things. The attempt to countenance both at the same ontological level thus leads inexorably to phenomenalism about one or the other and hence to skepticism. IV. The author explained that he has deliberately left it open whether Aristotle’s substantial forms or the Prime Mover should be understood here. V. On the question of why valuations are involved in the conceptual structure of the hierarchy of universals, the reader may wish to consult Wiehl’s essay “Prozesse und Kontraste. Überlegungen zur Ästhetik,” Zeitwelten. Philosophisches Denken an den Rändern von Natur und Geschichte (Frankfurt 1998). A value parameter is involved, for example, whenever there are differing degrees of determinacy and indeterminacy, order and disorder, significance [Prägnanz] and redundancy, agreement and disagreement, or univocity and ambiguity (ibid., pp. 90ff.) VI. As the author indicates in footnote 7, he is thinking here of Whitehead. The idea of an “open hierarchy” is singularly important in Whitehead’s thought. It makes its first appearance in his early works on mathematics and natural philosophy in the theory of “extensive abstraction” (by means of which he defines mathematical objects such as points) and then features prominently (under the title “infinite abstractive hierarchy”) in the definition of what it means to be concrete or individual (an “actual occasion”) in Science and the Modern World; it reappears in Process and Reality in the Theory of Extension of Part IV. VII. The text is laconic. An example of hierarchies open in the upward direction might be the infinite abstractive hierarchies Whitehead introduces

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in the chapter on abstraction in Science and the Modern World. Whitehead makes an illuminating comment about this concept: “The existence of such an infinite abstractive hierarchy is what is meant by the statement that it is impossible to complete the description of an actual occasion by means of concepts” (Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 169). Because the qualitative specificity, complexity, and nuance of an actual individual can never be exhausted by a finite description, its associated hierarchy is infinite in the upward direction: the description of it would go on forever, adding specifics, qualifying them, qualifying the qualifications, ad infinitum. And this is what it means to be individual, rather than universal. Individual means to be infinitely complex or nuanced. We could say then that the infinite abstractive hierarchy transcends universality because it constitutes (or defines) individuality. An example of hierarchies open in the downward direction would seem to be the abstractive classes generated by the method of extensive abstraction presented in Principles of Natural Knowledge, Concept of Nature and Part IV of Process and Reality. The abstractive class is a series of nested regions, diminishing in extent, but having no last member. The abstractive class illustrates what Whitehead calls the Principle of Convergence to Simplicity with Diminution of Extent. By focusing on smaller and smaller regions, we find that (an approximation to) an adequate description of its content needs to be less and less complex: although the series does not converge to a limit, the properties of the content do. These limit properties will be the universals Whitehead calls simple eternal objects. We could say then that the abstractive class transcends individuality because it constitutes abstractness through convergence toward an ideal or counterfactual simplicity. In other words, it transcends individuality because it defines the greatest possible universality. The interpretation is far from certain. The translator explores further the line of interpretation tentatively suggested here in his own contribution to this volume. VIII. The contrast can be drawn sharply by means of the Platonic notion of participation. According to the one alternative, evanescent events, by participating in Ideas, yield stable things. According to the other, stable things, by participating in different Ideas over time, yield change and motion, that is, things with changing properties. IX. On the distinction between the two kinds of transcendence, the reader may wish to compare corresponding passages in the author’s essay “Prozesse und Kontraste,” op. cit., and in chapter X (“Abstraction”) of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. The first type of transcendence seems to correspond to the kind of universality or abstractness Whitehead describes on p. 158; the second type of

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transcendence seems to correspond to the kind of universality or abstractness he describes on pp. 169ff. These seem to correspond in turn to the second and third types of abstractness the author distinguishes on p. 73 of “Prozesse und Kontraste.” The gist appears to be that universals are transcendent (or abstract) in the first sense of transcendence because they can be multiply instantiated. Each universal (or complex description consisting of universals) will thus transcend any particular instance the way the possible transcends the actual (since it is always capable of multiple instantiation). Accordingly, a more detailed description of something is not any less abstract, in this sense of abstract, than a less detailed description. In this sense the whole hierarchy of concepts is abstract, from its first to its last member. But a complex description employing universals is transcendent in the second sense of transcendence when it falls short of a complete description of the qualitative specificity of an individual, and the more it falls short the more abstract it is. In this sense it can be said that a more detailed description is less abstract. But no description will ever achieve full concretion. According to Whitehead “it is impossible to complete the description of an actual occasion by means of concepts” (Science and the Modern World, op. cit., pp. 169ff.). Accordingly, no matter how detailed, no description employing concepts alone will ever be sufficiently nuanced to be able to pick out an actual individual uniquely, and it will thus be transcendent in the second sense. X. The traditional controversy over the nature and status of universals was concerned exclusively with the predicables of genus and species (that is, terms or concepts classified as the genus or species of something). It is the second sense of transcendence that is relevant to this debate because it is in this second sense that the genus transcends the species and the species transcends the individual. XI. Professor Wiehl appears to assume here that classification in terms of genus and species applies only to things in the sense of stable entities sustaining a manifold of enduring properties. Since classification is based on similarity and difference, whatever is classified must sustain such comparative relations. This certainly implies a manifold of properties. For example, an item classified must have minimally one different property of similarity and one different property of dissimilarity to other items in the classification for each level of its remove from the highest genus. Does this mean the ultimate items must be enduring things? It is not immediatly clear why this has to be case. XII. The reader is advised to consult the index of the corrected edition of Process and Reality for passages relevant to the concepts of “depth” (“narrowness”) and “width.” Especially important in this regard are pp.

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105, 110-115, 163-166, 279-280, 317-319. Professor Wiehl has rightly seen that for Whitehead intensity of feeling depends on depth of relevance and width of contrast. Width and depth are thus the parameters of the quality space of enjoyment and satisfaction. Wiehl is also right to see the twodimensionality (ibid., p. 166) of this quality space as the critical bridge to the four-dimensionality exhibited by the extensive continuum in our cosmic epoch (ibid., pp. 163-166, 91-93, 317-319). Whitehead emphasizes that the “relationships of metrical geometry” are not intrinsic to the extensive continuum (ibid., p. 66). “In its full generality beyond that of the present epoch, it does not involve shapes, dimensions, or measurability” (ibid.). It includes only “the various allied relationships of whole to part, and of overlapping so as to possess common parts, and of contact, and of other relationships derived from these primary relationships” (ibid.). XIII. For Whitehead there are as many universes as there are occasions since each occasion is the concrescence of the entire universe from a unique perspective. XIV. The idea of a non-metrical “distance” between concepts is something Prof. Wiehl’s developed in his unpublished doctoral dissertation Der Begriff in den Anschauungsformen der Mittelbarkeit und Unmittelbarkeit, nebst einem Anhang über die Kategorien in Whiteheads “Process and Reality” (1961). XV. The author may have the following argument in mind. It is possible to describe motion in ways that do not involve motion, e.g., mathematically. The formula expressing change of position in a coordinate system is a static representation of motion. A similar situation is to be found in Minkowski space, where motion is represented as a world-line in a four-dimensional space. Conversely, it is always possible to represent a body at rest as being in motion in a different coordinate system. This relativity levels the difference between stasis and kinēsis, being and becoming. These insights based on metrical considerations can be generalized. We can perhaps imagine some kind of purely topological transformations according to which rest is the transformation of motion and vice versa. Motion and rest become different kinds of projection in a topology indifferent to either. This kind of topology seems to be what the author has in mind. Furthermore, he analogizes this event-topology in which the differences between motion and rest are dissolved into descriptive transformations to a purely conceptual topology of Ideas, a kind of description space. Internal relations define both kinds of topological manifolds (the event-topology and the Idea-topology), and the relation of (non-metrical!) proximity and distance is the common form of both topologies. However, the manifolds have only topological properties

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(including the aforementioned proximity and distance). They have no metrical properties. (Professor Wiehl does not explain in this paper how it is possible to think of proximity and distance non-metrically.) The author suggests that the topological manifold of events cannot enjoy real motion or real becoming without taking on a specific metric and that this can happen only if a third kind of internal relatedness enters the scene, an internal relation between an event in the event manifold and the manifold of Ideas. This is what Whitehead called “conceptual prehension” or mentality. It allows an event to have an inner or intrinsic reality that is not relative to a description. The interpretation is, to say the least, uncertain and speculative. XVI. In stark opposition to the ontology of things, what Professor Wiehl calls process philosophy in the narrow sense seems to have its raison d’etre in the infinite distance or difference between the ultimate particular events and the Ideas in terms of which they can be described. What Professor Wiehl calls the “primal relationship” between events and ideas is the mutual involvement of totally disparate things (the word “thing” is used here out of grammatical necessity and does not signify thing in the strong sense). For process philosophy, therefore, “participation” itself must be understood as a radical kind of event that cannot be further explained. By contrast, the thing ontology has it easy. Things provide an ultimate and stable point d’appui for a finite number of essential attributes, ensuring that the distance between lowest subject and highest predicate in a chain of descriptions or definitions is finite and manageable. Indeed, one of the things that Aristotle tries to prove (Posterior Analytics A 19-23) is that if there is an ultimate subject, then there must be a highest predicate that can be reached through a finite number of definitional steps, and, vice versa, if there is a highest predicate, then there must be an ultimate subject. The sequence Aristotle envisions is: [ultimate subject] isdefinition a [proximate difference] + [proximate genus]; [proximate genus] isdefinition [next up difference] + [next up genus]; [next up genus] isdefinition … {finite number of intervening definitions} … [category]. If the ultimate subject (an ultimate subject is defined as something that is not itself said “of” a subject) is present “in” a subject , the category will be among the attributive ones (quality, quantity, relation, etc.); if the ultimate subject is not “in” a subject, the category will be substance. XVII. The important contrast here is between a Leibnizian and an Aristotelian theory of individuation. The author is affirming, contrary to Leibniz, the position Whitehead seems to be stressing in Process and Reality (but see the translator’s contribution to this volume for important caveats), namely that no complication of universals will ever be adequate

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to individuating an actual event. What will be missing is precisely the haecceitas of the individual. According to Professor Wiehl’s interpretation of Whitehead, only subjectivity can provide this haecceitas. This does seem to be Whitehead’s view in Process and Reality—or at least one important element in it. It may or may not be his view in Science and the Modern World, where individuality is discussed in terms of an infinite abstractive hierarchy. If the infinite abstractive hierarchy is supposed to be a sufficient condition of individuality, then we can say that Science and the Modern World shares with Leibniz’s view the idea that concepts or universals do define the individuality of a thing, but it undercuts this view at the same time by denying that any finite set of universals can adequately define its individuality. On this interpretation the difference between Process and Reality and Science and the Modern World would then be: in Science and the Modern World Whitehead believes that no finite complication of universals will define an individual, while in Process and Reality he believes that even an infinite complication of universals is not sufficient, although it may be necessary. On the other hand, if Science and the Modern World proposes the infinite abstractive hierarchy only as a necessary condition of individuality, then there does not seem to be any necessary conflict between Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. However, for reasons that cannot be elaborated here, I develop a third, more complicated line of interpretation in my contribution to this volume: in both Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality the infinite abstractive hierarchy is in one sense only a necessary condition and in another a sufficient condition of individuality. As an abstract essence it is only a possible synthesis of universals and thus only a necessary condition of individuation; as a real essence it is the actually achieved togetherness of these same universals and thus a sufficient condition. We cannot make any sense of the difference between possible and actually achieved, however, without referencing the haecceitas of the (partially) self-referential subjective becoming that achieves the synthesis. XVIII. Process philosophy in the narrow sense must take universals seriously because according to its ontology there are no pre-given things from which universals could possibly be abstracted in a nominalistic (conceptualistic) fashion. XIX. The description in terms of properties is inadequate precisely because it abstracts from the interiority of events, their private intensity of feeling, which constitutes their subjectivity. The inadequacy of description by properties is bound up with Whitehead’s and Wiehl’s rejection of the Leibnizian theory of individuation. Real individuality eludes the specificity

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that can be achieved with genus+differentia descriptions. individuation occurs in the “quality space” of width and depth.

Real

XX. This difficult passage can perhaps be interpreted as follows. What counts as abstract is one of two things. It can be (1) any unseparated part of something concrete considered in isolation from the rest of that concretum (a part by coordinate division of the extensive continuum) or (2) the content (or subjective result) of a mental act of abstraction holding something in view that is not a part emerging by coordinate division of anything concrete and is therefore not “objectively present” in the extensive continuum. Rather, it will be a part that emerges by some form of genetic division. Of course, the mental act of abstraction may itself be something concrete and thus have coordinate parts that are “objectively present.” Once the act takes its inevitable place in public (objective) time, for example, its successive phases will constitute coordinate parts of the time it takes up. But abstractions that are not extensive partitions of the concrete are strictly mental. They derive from an abstractive activity. Professor Wiehl’s example is the idea of a thing without subjectivity (a vacuous actuality), which is in no way “objectively present.” It is not a coordinate part of the extension of anything concrete, but rather the isolation and reification of a genetic condition of concretion, namely, localization in the extensive continuum. Coordinate and genetic division are used here exclusively in Whitehead’s technical sense of the terms. XXI. Universals have been underdetermined in the sense of concealing an ambiguity, ambivalence, or equivocation vis-à-vis the two possible meanings: general concepts of classification abstracted from and related externally to the properties of supposedly pre-given things or primordial Ideas to which ultimate and unique events of happening are themselves internally related. XXII. The reference appears to be: “[T]he endeavour to understand eternal objects in complete abstraction from the actual world results in reducing them to mere undifferentiated nonentities […] The general relationships of eternal objects to each other, relationships of diversity and of pattern, are their relationships in God’s conceptual realization. Apart from this realization, there is mere isolation indistinguishable from nonentity” (Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 257).

Abstraction and Individuation in Whitehead and Wiehl: A Comparative Historical Approach Anderson Weekes In the early twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead (to the chagrin of many) conceived a philosophical cosmology in the grand tradition of western metaphysics.∗ He believed there was a need for such a cosmology, properly updated to incorporate important scientific developments such as quantum theory and relativity theory. He was unembarrassed to take as models for this project the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Bergson. The topics were traditional; the theorems were not. Actuality and potentiality, being and becoming, subjects and objects, universals and particulars, internal and external relations—these familiar tropes of classical philosophy found expression in a natural philosophy clearly indebted to projective geometry, special relativity, universal algebra and mathematical logic. This paper looks at one of the most ancient and abstruse of perennial philosophical topics, the career of which intersects with every great metaphysical system: the principle of individuation. Whitehead’s contribution to this subject is examined in light of the tradition he emulates. We want to know what Whitehead’s theory of individuation is, but this will be unilluminating if we don’t know what issues motivate philosophers to take one position or another on a question so abstract. What are the basic positions that have been taken in the traditional debate? Why were they taken? What should be the parameters of an inclusive taxonomy

∗ In this paper, reference is made to the following editions of Whitehead’s works by means of the following standard abbreviations: AI: Adventures of Ideas (New York 1967); CN: Concept of Nature (Cambridge 1978); PNK: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (New York 1982); PR: Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by D. R. Griffin and D. Sherburne (New York 1978); S: Symbolism. Its Meaning and Effect (New York 1985); SMW: Science and the Modern World (New York 1967).

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of theories of individuation? Where would Whitehead fit in such a scheme? These are the guiding questions that receive at least partial answers here. The first part sets the stage by laying out the necessary analytic vocabulary. I do this by tracking the many different meanings of abstractness (or universality) that Whitehead distinguishes. Since abstractness and individuality are correlative counter-notions, each kind of abstractness delineates individuality somewhat differently. These fine delineations will prove very useful in keeping track of the traditionally debated theoretical alternatives. Since these distinctions have been a focus of Reiner Wiehl’s interpretations of Whitehead, I take as my point of departure his paper “Process Philosophy and the Problem of Universals” (PU). I begin with a central, but difficult passage in Professor Wiehl’s essay concerning the different senses in which universals can be said to “transcend” particulars, relying for guidance on an earlier essay of his, “Prozesse und Kontraste” (PK), and on the chapter on abstraction in SMW. While my interpretation of Professor Wiehl’s difficult paper must remain tentative, the clarification he facilitates of Whitehead’s analytic apparatus in SMW is more secure. In part two I examine the contrasting theories that have dominated the philosophical tradition regarding the relationship of intuition and thought, which sheds light on the question of individuation. Part three turns to individuation proper, offering a taxonomy of traditional positions. Finally, in part four, I examine Whitehead’s own treatment of individuation in CN, SMW and PR in order to establish the precise points of agreement and disagreement with the traditional positions delineated in parts two and three. A brief word need to be said about my method of presentation, which follows the order of discovery, dwelling on the structure of the problems in order then to explore alternative solutions (mainly by retracing the dialectic of evolving arguments and counter-arguments in the history of philosophy). This method finds its justification in the nature of the problems considered. Abstract philosophical problems are entirely discursive phenomena and their existence depends on an argument or set of arguments for their existence, giving their specific discursive genesis a primacy that no solution, however satisfying it may seem, can ever annul. I note in advance that the argument in each part of this paper reveals the same two positions as fundamental alternatives. Since the language required for explicitness and clarity about such an abstract problem is of necessity somewhat cumbersome, it will be helpful to fix the relevant terminology at the outset. The basic question is whether individuality is to be understood as a unique extreme of specificity or as a singularity somehow beyond or more than specificity. By specificity is meant the kind

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of identity that can be specified without recourse to any indexical (tokenreflexive) acts of reference, that is, by a description that presupposes acquaintance with universals alone. (Whether we can be acquainted with universals without having been previously acquainted with particulars is immaterial. The question is whether, once we are acquainted with universals, we can successfully pick out an individual using universals alone. If so, then in such a case individuality coincides with unique specificity.) The identification of individuality with unique specificity is sometimes called “essentialism” because it envisions the individual as being nothing more than a unique complex or intersection of universals (“essences”).1 Each individual will therefore differ in some perfectly definable way from every other individual. All individuals, in other words, will differ in specie (in type) from one another. In this case, to be individual rather than universal (or concrete rather than abstract) means being the last or most specific species (one of the infimae species) of a given genus, which would be comparable to being the last and most complex member (the vertex) of what Whitehead calls an abstractive hierarchy. Contrariwise, if a description employing universals alone fails to pick out an individual, then by implication individuality is something more than extreme specificity. The question naturally arises what this something more is. How can what is already typologically unique be further individuated into numerically distinct instances? Since the answer to this question obviously cannot consist in specifying what transcends specificity, we should not be surprised that the question elicits abstruse and exceedingly subtle responses. The difference between the two positions becomes especially complicated when essentialism abandons the traditional Aristotelian idea that the complexity of a thing’s essence is necessarily finite. In that case there is no “last” term in the specification of the essence. The distinction between singularity and infinite specificity is more elusive than the distinction between singularity and unique finite specificity, as the discussion of Whitehead’s theory of individuation in part four will show.2

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1. The Abstractness and Transcendence of Universals The core insight of Professor Wiehl’s paper has to do with the meaning of the traditional concept of universals. This concept suffers from a fundamental ambiguity. Even process philosophy, he believes, is not immune to this failing. It inherits the failure of the philosophical tradition to distinguish unequivocally between two very different ways that something can be said to transcend particulars and hence to be abstract or universal. This is stated, but not altogether explained, in his paper when he refers at the close of part one to the “ambiguity of traditional process philosophy,” which, he says, “has to do with the meaning of transcendence.” Since “universals,” “abstractions,” and “eternal objects” are roughly co-extensive notions (in Whitehead and Wiehl), all defined by the same relation of “transcendence,”3 these terms will presumably all suffer from the same ambiguity. Bearing this in mind, we can begin to unpack Professor Wiehl’s meaning simply by collating texts in Whitehead and in Professor Wiehl’s earlier writings bearing on the ambiguity of any of these rubrics. In PU Professor Wiehl states, somewhat enigmatically: One of the two meanings of transcendence construes it in reference to the totality of a given hierarchy of concepts and value-determinations. The other meaning arises from the primal relationship […] that the hierarchy of concepts and values enters into with things or events. It involves the transcendence of a part of the hierarchy—in the extreme case, the transcendence of the highest or of the lowest in the hierarchy—vis-à-vis the being for which the hierarchy functions as a predicative order.

Happily, we can turn to an earlier essay for some elucidation here. In PK Professor Wiehl distinguished three ways that Whitehead’s eternal objects can be said to be abstract.4 First, eternal objects are abstract insofar as each one can be considered apart from its relationships with all other eternal objects. Secondly, they are abstract insofar as they are possibilities for realization considered apart from the actual givenness of a real thing. Thirdly, they are abstract insofar as they are unspecific determinations considered apart from individuating factors (such as, for example, generic predicates). I suggest that the two meanings of transcendence distinguished in the quotation above correspond to the second and third meanings of abstractness noted in PK:

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Table I “Process and Universals” (PU)

“Prozesse und Kontraste” (PK) Abstraction Type 1 EO apart from Its Relationships to All Other Eos Abstraction Type 2

Transcendence of Universals Type 1

EO as Possibility apart from Its Realizations in Actual Instances Abstraction Type 3

Transcendence of Universals Type 2

EO as Unspecific Determination apart from Individuating Factors

(EO = Eternal Object)

Let’s pursue the triad from PK for the moment. Since these distinctions are meant to gloss Whitehead’s discussion of abstraction in chapter ten of SMW, it makes sense for us to seek their basis in this critical text. Professor Wiehl’s first kind of abstraction, I suggest, corresponds to what Whitehead calls the “individual essence” of the eternal object, which Whitehead contrasts with its “relational essence.”5 According to its individual essence, the eternal object “is what it is […] considered in respect to its uniqueness,”6 while the relational essence involves “its reference to other eternal objects.”7 The individual essence abstracts from the eternal object’s relations to other eternal objects, and this abstraction is justified because “eternal objects are devoid of real togetherness: they remain within their ‘isolation’.”8 The second type of abstractness seems to correspond to what Whitehead has to say about eternal objects as “entities which transcend [the] immediate occasion [of cognition] in that they have analogous or different connections with other occasions of experience.”9 As possibilities for realization, eternal objects are capable of multiple instantiation. Any instance of an eternal object thus transcends its particular instance as something identically instantiated elsewhere or inherently capable of such multiple instantiation. It is by way of this inherent possibility for instantiation that unrealized eternal objects (whether completely unrealized or just unrealized in a given case) are, according to Whitehead, able to become relevant to occasions that do actually exist.10 These first two types of abstractness form a necessary couplet defined by contrast. Whitehead proposes a relational ontology according to which

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relations are constitutive of what things are. Therefore, nothing can be concrete apart from its relations. Since there are two kinds of relations, external and internal, and eternal objects possess both of them, there will evidently be at least two ways for an eternal object to be abstract, depending on which type of relation is abstracted from. Eternal objects have internal relation with other eternal objects (e.g., red is not blue and wouldn’t be red any more if it were, so its difference from anything not-red is an internal relation; red and blue are both colors and couldn’t be red and blue without having this much in common with one another, so their generic similarity is an internal relation). And, eternal objects have external relations with the actual entities that instantiate them (it makes no difference to red whether anything is red right now, so its being instantiated is an external relation as far as red is concerned). The eternal object apart from its internal relations yields abstraction in sense one; the eternal object apart from its external relations is abstraction in sense two. The possibility of these two kinds of abstraction guarantee that eternal objects have a definite identity that is not context dependent (does not vary in relation to other eternal objects or depend on their concrete realization). The third type of abstractness seems to correspond to what Whitehead means when he says that the distinguishing characteristic of the mental is the “abruptness” of “a finite complex concept.”11 This is one of Whitehead’s most original contributions to philosophy and requires some careful elucidation. Along the way we will distinguish yet two more senses of “abstract,” giving us a total of no less than five. First of all, to understand what Whitehead has in mind when he describes “abruptness” as a kind of abstraction, we must examine an important distinction he makes between two diametrically opposed measures of abstraction. He employs this distinction to construct a new oppositional couplet, in which abstraction as abruptness is one of the contrasted terms. Just as senses one and two are terms of a necessary couplet whose respective meanings are illuminated by their contrast, so too with abruptness and its opposite. In order to understand abruptness, then, we will have to look at the kind of abstraction with which it is paired by contrast. These latter two meanings of abstraction will become senses three and four in our tally. The diametrically opposed measures of abstraction Whitehead distinguishes are “abstraction from actuality” and “abstraction from possibility.”12 Whitehead stresses that “some confusion of thought has been caused” because they run in “opposite direction[s].”13 Let’s take as an example the description “a round red rubber ball.” This description is more concrete than “a round rubber ball,” which again is more concrete than “a

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round ball.” The more complex description is less abstract because it more closely approximates the plenary detail of the actual concrete individual. But by the same token it is able to apply to fewer things. It does not just apply to fewer things in fact. Rather, it is capable of applying to fewer things. In this latter respect, therefore, it can also be said to be more abstract in a well defined sense: through greater specificity it abstracts more from the scope of possibility and concentrates on a narrower scope of potential realization. Since a description achieves greater specificity through greater complexity, complexity is a measure of abstraction from possibility, while simplicity is a measure of abstraction from actuality. This same insight is expressed in ordinary logic books by saying that the extension and intension (or “content”) of a class-concept bear an inverse relation to one another. Whitehead puts it this way: [W]ith a high grade of complexity we gain in approach to the full concreteness of [an actual occasion], and with a low grade we lose in this approach. Accordingly the simple eternal objects represent the extreme of abstraction from an actual occasion; whereas simple eternal objects represent the minimum of abstraction from the realm of possibility. It will, I think, be found that, when a high degree of abstraction is spoken of, abstraction from the realm of possibility is what is usually meant—in other words, an elaborate logical construction.14

Returning to Wiehl’s definitions, it should be obvious that abstractness in his senses (1) and (3) are both kinds of abstraction from actuality. It should also be obvious that abstractness in Wiehl’s sense (1), that is, the simple eternal objects in their isolation, will coincide with the greatest abstraction from actuality, even if this is not the hallmark by which sense one is defined. (It is defined by the isolation of eternal objects from one another.) It is abstraction in sense three that is defined by the hallmark of abstraction from actuality. But note that it is defined by abstraction from actuality as such, which means any degree of abstraction from actuality. This establishes a clear conceptual distinction between senses one and three, even if the extension of A1 is wholly included in that of A3: A1 = Abstraction of Eternal Object from Its Relations to All Other Eternal Objects (implying greatest abstraction from actuality); A3 = Any Degree of Abstraction from Actuality (implying abstraction of eternal object from its relations to at least some of the other eternal objects).15 We have also established a clear distinction between senses one and two (abstraction from internal versus abstraction from external relations). But we wanted most to understand the difference between senses two and three. Remember that our goal is to understand the difference between the two kinds of transcendence broached in PU and that my hypothesis is they

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correspond to abstraction in senses two and three in PK, which is a more manageable text because its bearing on Whitehead’s own distinctions is more transparent. However, establishing the conceptual distinction between senses two and three is not as straightforward as the other distinctions. Isn’t abstraction in sense two defined as abstraction from actuality just as much as sense three? In order to understand the difference between senses two and three we must understand what it means for sense three to be defined by the concept of abruptness, and this, as noted, requires us to examine the concept Whitehead contrasts with abruptness, which is the concept of the extremity of abstraction from possibility. Abruptness is abstraction in sense three, and the extreme of abstraction from possibility is the fourth sense of abstractness that we must consider. Once we understand how senses three and four form an oppositional couplet, we will be positioned to come back to sense two (the abstraction of eternal objects from their external relations) and see how it differs from abruptness. As an oppositional couplet, sense three versus sense four may seem lopsided since the one term is abstraction from actuality (of any degree), while the other is specifically the extreme of complete abstraction from possibility. Sense one versus sense four might seem to be a more balanced couplet (because they are contraries: extreme abstraction from actuality versus extreme abstraction from possibility), but we will see that it is three and four that form the appropriate contrast. This begins to make sense as soon as we realize that they are in fact contradictories. For extremity of abstraction from possibility means no abstraction from actuality and thus turns out to be another name for concreteness, so the contrast in question is some (any) abstraction from actuality versus no abstraction from actuality, which simply means nonconcrete versus concrete (or, as we shall shortly see, finite versus infinite abstractive hierarchy of eternal objects). Whitehead’s description of what I am subjoining to Wiehl’s list as sense (4) is logically precise. First Whitehead defines the notion of an “abstractive hierarchy of concepts (or eternal objects) based upon a set g of simple eternal objects.”16 G can be a finite or an infinite set of simple eternal objects. The abstractive hierarchy is a set of combinations of those simple eternal objects, and these combinations can be finite or infinite. Where, for example, the combinations are an open set defined by recursive operations, the abstractive hierarchy will be infinite, regardless of whether the base is finite or infinite, and where the combinations are finite, Whitehead defines the hierarchy as finite, again regardless of whether the base is finite or infinite. He then tells us what the extremity of abstraction

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from possibility is; that is, he tells us what individuality means for the philosophy of organism: In any actual occasion a, there will be a group g of simple eternal objects which are ingredient in that group in the most concrete mode. This complete ingredience in an occasion, so as to yield the most complete fusion of individual essence with other eternal objects in the formation of the individual emergent occasion, is evidently of its own kind and cannot be defined in terms of anything else. But it has a peculiar characteristic which necessarily attaches to it. This characteristic is that there is an infinite abstractive hierarchy based upon g which is such that all its members are equally involved in this complete inclusion of a [understand a subjective genitive: “involved in this complete inclusion of (them by) a].17

The significance of this does not become clear until Whitehead adds: “The existence of such an infinite abstractive hierarchy is what is meant by the statement that it is impossible to complete the description of an actual occasion by means of concepts.”18 An actual individual is something no finite description can capture: no finitely employed inventory of concepts, no finite set of combinations, no finite iteration of their combinations. It is infinitely complex or infinitely nuanced (depending on how you look at it). This is abstraction in sense four: extreme of abstraction from possibility, i.e., actual concrete individuality.19 Simply by negating this concept of extremity of abstraction from possibility we arrive at a perfectly welldefined sense of abstractness from actuality: any finite description, no matter how complex, will fall short of actual individuality and so be abstract.20 This is our sense three, abruptness, which we can now explain. Since the description or analysis of any concrete individual is always finite, at some point it is discontinuous. It breaks off abruptly with a determination or characteristic that is not further qualified in the description, even though that quality in the individual is in fact still more nuanced, indeed, infinitely more nuanced, than the description allows. One of Whitehead’s boldest and most ingenious claims is that finite abstractive hierarchies are not artifacts of our descriptions, but rather exist independently of consciousness. Although they do play an important role as the content of all conscious mentation, they are also factors in the constitution of things that do not think and need not be thought about. Things that fall short of actual individuality exist and play a critical role in the make-up of what is fully actual and individual, whether or not it is a conscious or even a living type of individual. And this yields us our fifth sense of abstractness, for if the abstract “really exists” and contributes to the concreteness of things, then any ontology limiting itself to what is concrete in the more conventional sense is ipso facto abstract.21 Such an ontology would fail on its own terms to be an ontology of the concrete if the concrete is itself actually informed by a constitutive relevance of the

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abstract. For example, a description of a human being that ignored values and goals would obviously be far more abstract than one that took them into account. This constitutive relevance of the abstract is what Whitehead calls mentality. But he means by mentality something relevant to the constitution of all beings, not just conscious ones. Mentality, in other words, is broader than consciousness, and whether it is conscious or not, it presupposes rather than generates its abstract objects, which are finitely complex sets of eternal objects. It is best to take this provocative proposition in two steps: first, the Platonistic claim that thought presupposes rather than generates its abstract objects; second, the peculiarly Whiteheadian claim that these objects contribute to the specificity of more than just conscious thinking. (1) Whitehead’s belief in the ontological autonomy of abstractions in senses one, two, and three has obvious affinities with the so-called Platonism of such nineteenth century thinkers as Bolzano, Lotze, Frege, and Meinong, who were all agreed that non-actual or incompletely individuated things can and do have some kind of being.22 In fact, Meinong’s non-existent objects offer a particularly good example of the abruptness of a finitely complex set of eternal objects. The golden mountain has exactly two properties: it is golden and it is a mountain. It makes no sense to ask what the weather is like on the golden mountain unless we stipulate that, too. But a real mountain will have properties we have not stipulated, but can discover—infinitely many of them. Thus, on a real mountain there will be weather, an average annual rainfall, a standard deviation to the average annual rainfall, a change in the standard deviation over periods of time, and so on and so on with qualifications and refinements indefinitely. Thus, although every description of the mountain is finite, it is a description of a real mountain only because the description could be continued indefinitely. By contrast, whenever we think about something unreal (or not yet real, like a goal), we are able to capture what we mean by a description that stops satisfactorily with a finite amount of detail. It is easy to see that everything we normally think of as physical proffers material for an interminable description, while everything we normally think of as mental, such as concepts, wishes, theories, fantasies, or descriptions themselves, is (and must be) finite and abrupt in this way. The idea that finitude of content characterizes the mental thus accords with our experience. But the usual assumption is that this finitude of content is an artifact of consciousness. What the logical Platonists of the nineteenth century claimed was that these mental objects did not depend on thought, but on the contrary that thought depended on the self-sufficiency of these objects, which, even if they do not and indeed cannot exist in the most eminent way, nevertheless have some kind of originary presence.

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(2) But for all of the thinkers mentioned, their ideal forms (or “nonpsychological concepts” or “pure objects”) tend to be conceived as purely logical entities, and as such they are physically and metaphysically inert, relevant only to cognition. Whitehead, on the other hand, wants to solve the problem that Aristotle had already exposed in Plato’s original version of the theory of forms: how can they ever be causes of anything if they are so ethereal and derealized as to be inert cognita? Whitehead’s metaphysics of process is meant to explain how finite abstractive hierarchies—independent of their being excogitated by conscious subjects—affect the outcome of events in nature. Whitehead believes it is the abruptness of finitely complex eternal objects that allows for a discontinuity of otherwise deterministic processes and explains how the irruption of something genuinely new into the world is possible. The constitutive relevance of the abstract to the concrete creates a leeway for unpredictable development. Whitehead may be the only philosopher who has offered a purely logical definition of the mental. “This breaking off from an actual illimitability is what in any occasion marks off that which is termed mental from that which belongs to the physical event to which the mental functioning is referred.”23 Mentality is defined by the abruptness of a finite abstractive hierarchy, which not only accords with our own experience of mentality, but also gives us a general criterion for mentality that allows us to generalize it to “inanimate” things without falling prey to animism and anthropomorphism. Mentality is the discontinuity of natural processes that makes room for spontaneity and novelty in the outcome. Table II summarizes our results so far. We can now understand the important conceptual differences between the second and third types of abstractness and finally return to the two types of transcendence (which I have suggested correspond respectively to the second and third kinds of abstractness). Universals are transcendent in the second sense of abstractness (first sense of transcendence) because they can be multiply instantiated. Each universal thus transcends any particular instance the way the possible transcends the actual. But universals are transcendent in the third sense of abstractness (second sense of transcendence) inasmuch as they fall short of a complete description of the qualitative specificity of an individual, which in an important sense they always do. For no matter how detailed, no description employing an inventory of concepts finitely will ever be sufficiently nuanced to be able to pick out an actual individual uniquely. The description will be applicable to multiple individuals (and thus transcend them) not so much because of an inherent possibility of multiple instantiation, but because it leaves out

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distinguishing nuances. It will therefore be transcendent in a sense clearly distinct from the former. Table II PU (Wiehl)

Transcendence of Universals—Type 1

Transcendence of Universals—Type 2

PK (Wiehl)

SMW (Whitehead)

Abstraction Type 1 (EO apart from its Relationships to All Other Eos)

Individual Essence of an Eternal Object

Abstraction Type 2 (EO as Possibility apart from Its Realizations in Actual Instances) Abstraction Type 3 (EO as Unspecific Determination apart from Individuating Factors)

(SMW 159)

Eternal Object as a Pure Possibility for Instantiation (SMW 158)

Any Finitely Complex Eternal Object (SMW 171)

Actual Infinity of an Infinitely Complex Eternal Object (Greatest Abstraction from Possibility: Concrete Individuality) (SMW 169ff.) Real Individuals Considered Physically (Apart from their Mentality/Spontaneity) (SMW 170)

It is important to see that these two kinds of transcendence can, but need not, coincide. This will depend on one’s theory of individuation, which brings us to the nerve of all these distinctions. The divisive question will be: can something be abstract in sense two (capable of multiple instantiation) without being abstract in sense three (an incomplete description)? Depending on how she understands individuation, a philosopher will have a different understanding of abstractness and universality, and she will tend to privilege one or another of the

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discriminated senses of abstractness accordingly. But the converse is just as true: commitment to the priority of one or the other senses of abstractness will largely determine one’s theory of individuation.

1.1. Universality and the First Type of Transcendence Defining universality primarily in terms of the possibility of multiple instantiation suggests that universals become instantiated by becoming the attributes of a thing, which instantiates and thus individuates them. It is crucially important to see that the thing individuates the type without further specifying it, for any specification would ipso facto belong to the type and be capable of multiple instantiation! This implies that what universals lack is not (necessarily) adequate specificity, but (necessarily) the indefinable quality Scotus called haecceitas. Haecceitas is the quality of unique singularity that makes a thing capable of being the ultimate referent of ostensive indication: this one as opposed to that one, where both are identical in type. This possibility means that individuality is somehow something more than extreme specificity of type. Individuality must involve something sui generis and indefinable: a discriminated singularity beyond anything that could be specified employing nothing but abstract concepts and universal descriptors. Consequently, if we restrict ourselves to understanding universality according to the first type of transcendence, there would be no in-principle reason why a complete description of an individual thing by a finite set of universal predicates should be impossible. Since individuality in this case would not depend on infinite nuance, the lack of infinite nuance implied by the possibility of a complete but finite description would not be at odds with the requirement that what exists be fully individuated. The description would not lack adequate nuance, but only the primitive, indefinable quality of the thing’s haecceitas that no description can capture. Furthermore, even though it was a complete description of an individual, it would still be capable of multiple instantiations: two individuals could be identical in all respects and still be different individuals simply because they were different things, differing only in virtue of their respective haecceitas. And last but not least, on this theory of individuation there would be no inprinciple reason why even an infinite abstractive hierarchy must uniquely identify an individual. Decoupling specificity from individuality not only means that individuality does not depend on infinite nuance (as its necessary and sufficient condition), but also that infinite nuance fails to

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entail individuality even in the manner of a sufficient (but not necessary) condition. All this means is that an infinite abstractive hierarchy would in and of itself still lack haecceitas. Consequently, there would be no reason why the same infinite abstractive hierarchy could not be multiply instantiated. Multiple individuals could have the same infinitely nuanced specificity and would differ only numerically. Individuality would thus involve a discriminated singularity beyond what could be specified even in an infinite description. On this understanding of universality, something can be abstract in sense two (capable of multiple instantiation) without being abstract in sense three (incomplete), but not vice versa. Sense two thus becomes the fundamental sense that will define what the transcendence of universals essentially means: lack of haecceitas. We saw that defining universality primarily in terms of the possibility of multiple instantiation suggests that individuation happens when universals become instantiated as attributes of a thing. Consequently, this view of universality leads quite naturally to the idea that haecceitas is something that belongs exclusively and inalienably to the thing-substrate. Other interpretations of haecceitas are of course possible. Some will be considered later in this paper: haecceitas as relative or absolute space-time location, relative position in (or in relation to something in) the immediately experienced intuitive manifold, indication by token-reflexive reference. However, since these interpretations have a hard time expressing what it is that does the instantiating in the token-type relationship, they are intuitively less obvious than the thing-theory of individuation, for which a “thing” is simply the requisite vehicle for instantiation. The interpretation of individuation most readily suggested by the first kind of transcendence is therefore the Aristotelian one, which associates individuation with an ineffable thisness of things. Nevertheless, multiple instantiation of the same type remains possible even if we decide to get rid of “things” and reinterpret haecceitas as, say, relative or absolute space-time location or token-reflexive indication within a field of immediate acquaintance. Discussion of these more complicated options is reserved for subsequent parts of this paper. But a general reservation about the singularity-beyondspecificity view of individuation belongs here. A pre-requisite of this view of individuation seems to be that we allow individuals instantiating the same type to differ in “accidental” respects and count among the accidents their relational properties inter se, such as their relative space-time location. Otherwise we would indeed be unable to discriminate them and thus unable to identify them (as being distinct but “the same”). This consideration suggests that the various theories of haecceitas (unique

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thinghood, space-time locus, object of token-reflexive reference) are more intimately connected than might have seemed at first glance.

1.2. Universality and the Second Kind of Transcendence Defining universality in terms of the shortfall of any finite description visà-vis the richness of the individual suggests that a complete description, if it could be achieved, would not lack individuality and would thus be ipso facto incapable of multiple instantiation. But a complete description cannot, on this telling, be achieved because individuality is the result of a synthesis of universals that is infinitely complex or nuanced (an infinite abstractive hierarchy). On this view of individuation, multiple identical individuals would be impossible. All individuals would have to be different in specie even though the difference could not be specified in any finite description. Haecceitas as an indefinable formal addition to things would be superfluous to their individuality. The individual would be unique precisely and only because it is infinitely complex. It would differ in specie from every other individual simply because there would be no other effective principle of numerical individuation than specificity. On this understanding of universality, nothing can be abstract in sense two without being abstract in sense three. Indeed, it can be abstract in sense two only because it is abstract in sense three. Sense three thus becomes the fundamental one that defines what the transcendence of universals essentially means: lack of complete specificity. If this reading of the two kinds of transcendence is correct, then we are finally in a position to understand one of the principal themes in Professor Wiehl’s paper: how each meaning of transcendence is differently biased in regard to the primacy of things and processes. Privileging the first meaning of transcendence leads to a thing ontology and an Aristotelian theory of individuation. On this account, formally identical individuals are possible: two things can be the same in all specifics, and yet numerically distinct simply because they are numerically distinct things. Privileging the second meaning of transcendence leads away from a thing ontology to an understanding of the individual as an unrepeatable singularity (an event) and hence to a radical process ontology and a Leibnizian theory of individuation. On this account, instantiation would not require a substrate, such as things or “matter” or intuition or space-time. Instantiation would coincide with the logical fact of extreme specificity. But by the same token, instantiation would be incapable of adding to type-specification any further

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degree of individuation. Multiple identical individuals would therefore be impossible. All individuals would be different in type. Here is perhaps the place to interrogate the mischief-making Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Let’s bracket for a moment the question of finite versus infinite descriptions and focus simply on the idea of multiple individuals with identical descriptions. Surely the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles holds in a very basic sense that if there were absolutely no differences between two individuals then they would indeed be the same individual. But if that were the last word on the matter, then the question we are asking—can numerically distinct individuals be the same?—would be senseless. The short answer would be: of course not, otherwise they would not be numerically distinct. Now this short answer may seem to be the very claim of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, but in fact it is not. The short answer, because it takes itself to be a tautology and hence self-evident, denies the meaningfulness of the question, which, it assumes, is asking about the possibility of something impossible, the possibility, namely, of a contradiction. But the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles—while it also gives a negative answer to the question can there be identical individuals?—is nevertheless giving a very different answer than the short one, for it gives a negative answer to our question in a context where the question itself is assumed to be meaningful. The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, in other words, does not take itself to be trivially true, but to be a strong metaphysical claim, the falsity of which is not logically impossible. An easy way to illustrate this difference is to point out that the short answer has no consequences, while Leibniz famously employed his principle to prove the unreality of space. The Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is therefore a principle of strong metaphysical consequence, and both its truth and its falsity have important implications that would, in the case that obtains, constitute a priori knowledge about the world. Thus, to understand the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, we must understand the conditions under which it is meaningful to ask if two things can be the same. We already have what we need to do this. I noted above that a pre-requisite of the singularitybeyond-specificity view of individuation (such as the haecceitas theory) seems to be that we allow “identical” individuals to differ in “accidental” respects. Otherwise there could be no sense in asking if things that are different (different enough to count) are “the same,” and nothing could be considered the same as anything other than itself. This observation reveals what we are looking for. There are specifically two assumptions that make the sameness of discernibles a meaningful question and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, as well as its denial, a matter of strong

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metaphysical consequence. First, the idea (or possibility) of multiple instantiation depends on a distinction between accidental and essential properties or at least between absolute and relative ones. If all predicates were on the same footing, it would be impossible to see how we could ever say two “distinct” items were the “same.” What we mean when we say this is ostensibly that they differ only in “accidental” respects. And yet these accidental differences seem to be essential to the possibility of a plurality of “identical” instances! Perhaps, however, they are essential only for our recognition of such individuals. This consideration points up the second important assumption in play here. The idea (or possibility) of multiple instantiation presupposes a certainty that accidental or relative predicates, however necessary they may be for our a posteriori discrimination of otherwise identical individuals, are unable to individuate them. If we assume otherwise, the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (or its denial) ceases to be a principle of strong consequence that tells us something a priori about all the individuals in the world (namely: that they are/are not all different in specie; that they do/do not possess a singularity beyond specificity) and reverts to being an undeniable tautology of no philosophical value. It is significant that endorsement of these two assumptions characterizes the positions of both Aristotle and Leibniz, despite the fact that it leads them to opposite conclusions about individuation. In both cases, however, it leads to strong a priori conclusions about the nature of individuals. Assuming the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, Leibniz argues: because space (i.e., relative predicates) cannot individuate things, their relative difference in space (their presence at different locations) presupposes that they are already differently individuated in their absolute properties. In other words, the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is able to prove the unreality, superfluousness, or derivativeness of any discriminating predicates over which it is not defined in the first place. Leibniz’s conclusion is that all individuating differences (any differences resulting in the possibility of discrimination) have to be essential or derived from essential differences. Since spatial location is a relative difference, it must be derived from absolute differences.24 Aristotle begins in a similar place, but because he employs a different principle, he arrives at a different place than Leibniz. The principle Aristotle assumes is the following: what is essential is precisely what things of the same natural kind25 have in common. He thus argues: since (a) accidents cannot individuate things and (b) what is essential is precisely what things of the same natural kind have in common, something else, which is sui generis, neither accidental nor essential, must be at work in

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individuation. For Aristotle, this is the actuality of the essence, which is not a universal (a commonality) any more than it is an accidental singularity. This theory is remarkable, for at the same time that it explains individuality without recourse to accidental predicates, it allows individuals to be distinct and yet essentially identical. In other words, demoting discriminating predicates to the status of accidents incapable of individuating a thing and incapable of derivation from what individuates it abrogates the identity of indiscernibles in principle. Aristotle and Leibniz therefore agree (a) on a distinction between relative and absolute predicates and (b) that relative predicates cannot individuate anything. For Aristotle this means that the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is just not true. For Leibniz it means that relative differences must be the external reflection of absolute ones so that the validity of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles is preserved. An important variation on the arguments we are considering, which forfeits any ability to draw a priori conclusions from the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, holds that individuals can be essentially the same (like Aristotle and unlike Leibniz), but that accidents are after all enough to individuate them inter se (contrary to both Aristotle and Leibniz). This is a not uncommon position in the history of philosophy. It appears to be the teaching of many Scholastics and of Aquinas in particular. Now let us go a step further and examine what happens if we abstain from making such a predicate-type distinction as essential versus accidental or absolute versus relative. For one thing, as noted above, the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles becomes an insignificant tautology. All things will be the same thing or differ in some predicate, end of story. But even if we envision a world in which all predicates are of a homogenous type, we can still draw an ideal contrast and ask if the predicates in this world are all essential (or all like the ones we were calling essential) or all accidental (or all like the ones we were calling accidental). The thesis “all differences among individuals are accidental differences (i.e., all properties are accidents; there are no “real” essences) should perhaps make us think of Ockham and the Nominalists. The thesis “all differences among individuals are essential differences” (i.e., there are no “accidents;” all properties are essential to what a thing is) should perhaps make us think of the Stoics and of Spinoza. We can summarize our results by reviewing the different kinds of abstractness and seeing how all but the last involve a kind of transcendence. In sense (1) each eternal object is abstract insofar as it transcends the others in its individual essence. In sense (2) each eternal object is abstract by virtue of its inherent possibility for multiple

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instantiation. It thus transcends each and every actual instance. In sense (3) any finite complex of eternal objects is abstract simply because it is finite: everything fully concretely real is infinitely specific. The finitely complex eternal object thus transcends individuals the same way the genus transcends the species. In sense (4) the concrete is abstract insofar as it is the extreme of abstraction from possibility. Since this coincides with an infinite specificity, the adequate description of which would, if we only could execute it, never break off at any last specification, it transcends any description the way the infinite transcends the finite. In sense (5) the physical is abstract if taken apart from the mental. The reflections that led to this last conclusion can be recapitulated as follows. In and of itself, the finite abstractive hierarchy lacks any concreteness. But it is nevertheless relevant to the process by which things become concrete. As mentality, this relevance becomes causally efficacious, exercising a force of innovation discontinuous with what already exists. It thus contributes something to the fullness of a thing’s concretion, and nothing can be considered fully concrete in abstraction from the forms of abstractness that have informed its coming to be. It is this kind of consideration that allows Whitehead to see in materialism an entirely abstract doctrine.

2. Two Ways of Distinguishing Concepts and Intuition A distinction between different faculties (or modalities) of cognition in terms of a fundamental polarity or positive/privative contrast is almost universal in the history of philosophy. But how the contrast operates has been understood in two very different ways. The following table of contrasts associated with traditional theories of cognition will illustrate the common ground, which evidently goes beyond a mere pattern of polar contrasts to include a similarity in the content of what functions contrastively. The table draws freely from the history of philosophy and is not meant to be either exhaustive or systematic. A few examples from each period suffice to indicate a large pattern of agreement. Consider the following spectrum of oppositions that runs the gamut from Parmenides to Frege: Table III doxa

aletheia

aisthesis

noesis

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Anderson Weekes katalepsis

prolepsis/ennoia

species impressa

species expressa

sensation

intellection

perception

understanding

intuition

concept

sensibility

understanding

receptivity

spontaneity

intuition

signification

object

concept

Similarly, opposite qualifications attach to the respective modalities (or to their activities or contents or objects). Here are a few of the familiar ones (there is no ordered, one-to-one correspondence between the items in the preceding and following lists; the correspondence is only between the groups): Table IV visible

invisible

unbounded

bounded

relative

absolute

fleeting

remaining

non-intelligible

intelligible

deceptive

faithful

particular

universal

concrete

abstract

passive

active

given

made

confused

distinct

sensuous (full)

non-sensuous (empty)

immediate

mediate

manifold

one

non-discursive

discursive

continuous (dense)

discrete

analog

digital

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To these catalogs we must add Whitehead’s contrast: infinite versus finite abstractive hierarchy. Now, however difficult it may be to agree on what the common denominator is in each column, I doubt there will be any disagreement that the terms have in each case been assigned to the appropriate side. The members of each group have a strong family resemblance to one another, despite the obvious fact that they do not line up in terms of relative value: the true or more true or truth-conferring term of the contrast switches back and forth for different pairs. I illustrate this by assigning each pair in Table III to one or another philosopher or school closely associated with that particular way of drawing the contrast and giving an asterisk to the term privileged by that philosopher or school: Table V Parmenides

doxa

aletheia*

Plato/Aristoteles

aisthesis

noesis*

Stoics

katalepsis*

prolepsis/ennoia

Neo-Platonists

sensation

intellection*

Scholastics

species impressa

species expressa*

Locke

perception*

understanding

Leibniz

perception

understanding*

intuition*

concept

sensibility*

understanding

receptivity*

spontaneity

Husserl

intuition*

signification

Frege

object*

concept

Ancients/ Medievals

Moderns

Kant/Neo-Kantians

There are many peculiarities and much to think about in this schema, but I want to highlight only one thing. While a division of cognitive modalities made by contrasting the immediate givenness of something concrete and qualitatively dense with the remove of something intangible and counteroperating from within remains constant throughout the history we are looking at, what is considered to be the ultimate source of validation migrates back and forth. The reason for this is rooted in a deeper

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disagreement about the way the terms of each couplet are opposed. The critical question over which the philosophers divide is whether the two modes of cognition know different objects or the same objects in different ways. To say with Whitehead, for example, that concepts will never capture the whole content of intuition implies that capturing the content of intuition is what concepts try to do and that, in fact, they succeed at capturing at least some of it. This establishes a definite idea of the relation between concepts and intuition. It implies that concepts and intuition deal with the same objects, but in different ways. Intuition contains the fullness of the object. Concepts do not. Conception is an economical but intrinsically deficient way to know something about the same object we do or can intuit. This view of the relationship between concept and intuition is the one usually thought of as modern and explains why for most of the modern figures listed the source of validation falls in the left-hand column. The contrary view, that concept and intuition have different objects, is the view usually thought of as ancient and, as we shall see, explains why for most of the ancient and medieval figures listed the source of validation falls in the right-hand column. Of course there are important exceptions to this rule on both sides of the supposed ancient/modern split. The view typically associated with Greek antiquity is that the aistheton and the noeton are different kinds of objects. The intelligible and the sensible constitute separate worlds. This is indeed the view of Parmenides, Plato, the neo-Platonists, and—with important qualifications—Aristotle. Different cognitive modalities, like aisthesis, doxa, dianoia, and noesis, each have their own proper objects. This is the point of Plato’s divided line, which is a graded classification of objects. The most noble kind of objects top the line and the shabbiest kind anchor it. A separate cognitive modality is required (and so postulated without further ado) for each class of objects. Since these modalities differ in value depending on the value of their respective objects, the divided line does indirectly become a graded classification of cognitive modalities, but these are not valued as better and worse apprehensions of the same things, but as the cognitive correlatives of better and worse types of objects. Of course there are ontological relations of dependency and derivation among the different classes of objects. According to the divided line: images depend on things; things depend on the mathemata; and the mathemata depend on the forms. In general, the sensible world depends on the intelligible world as an image upon its original. This fact can be interpreted to mean that knowing one class of objects involves knowing another class eminently or deficiently. This was a favorite tack of neo-

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Platonism—perceiving appearances is a deficient way of knowing the being upon which they depend; having intellection of being is an eminent way of knowing the appearances that depend on it. But this is only because of the objective relationships that exist among the various classes of objects. It is the interrelation of the objects, not the variable efficacy of cognition that is responsible for the availability of an object in more and less adequate ways. Strictly speaking, each mode of cognition has its separate objects, which are not properly available to the other modes. What Plato and Aristotle called “true opinion” offers a clear-cut example of this situation. True opinion is not a deficient way of knowing something that could have been proved; it is the proper way to know something contingent that cannot be proved.26 To the classical Greek way of thinking typified by Parmenides, Plato, and (with qualifications) Aristotle, to say nothing of its neo-Platonic revival in late antiquity and the early Renaissance, it is the being of the object that is eminent or deficient, not the way it is known. Perception is inferior to intellection not because it is a deficient mode of cognition, but because it targets a class of objects deficient in being. Aristotle does not uphold this view in all respects. For Aristotle, knowledge of separate substances and first principles is noetic in a way that contrasts with aisthesis in terms of their respective objects. But in the allimportant case of composite substances it turns out that sense perception and intellection are both directed at the same thing, just knowing it in different ways. For if we were to say that the composite is only sensible and cannot be known, that only the form is known, making primary and secondary ousia separate objects, we would do violence to Aristotle’s fundamental intent. However different, primary and secondary ousia are also one and the same (in a way that we can recognize as peculiarly Aristotelian even if it is exasperatingly difficult to elucidate). For one thing, the form is not a separate and distinct model upon which the composite is based, but its own being and essence. On the other hand, it is not an accident that the form is the form of a composite. Such a form is, accordingly, actual only insofar as it is actualizing the composite (which it perforce is always doing). To grasp such a form is thus to know something perceived, not something separate. Granted that in the case of composites intellection and perception are both directed at the same thing, the question of which mode is eminent and which is deficient turns out to be frustratingly tricky. It may seem obvious that thought is eminent because it grasps the essence, but the essence is actual only insofar as it is actualizing the sensible individual. Parallel to Aristotle’s systematic equivocations about the relative priority (as well as the identity and difference) of primary and secondary ousia we therefore

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find an ambivalence about which mode of cognition is eminent and which is deficient. On the one hand, since what sense-perception grasps are accidents, not essences, it is obviously deficient. Accordingly, there are many passages where Aristotle presents thought as the eminent mode of cognition vis-à-vis composite substances.27 But insofar as thought grasps only universals, it, too, is deficient. The real is actually individual and concrete, and to know it means to grasp it in its actuality.28 Accordingly, there are decisive passages where Aristotle clearly gives privilege to aisthesis!29 Of course this should not be misconstrued as an incipient nominalism. Aristotle never identified individuality with the sum of contingent differences we could perceive between one thing and others. As I will discuss in the next part, Aristotle always thought of individuality as the unique tokening of the essence, which implies but does not depend on the presence of sensible accidents. But this does make the token, not the essence, the object of eminent cognition. In fact, what Aristotle appears to envision is a situation where eminent cognition is flanked by opposing deficiencies: sense-perception insofar as it only grasps accidents (aisthesis) and thought insofar as it only grasps universals (dianoia), between which we find noesis, a mode of cognition that grasps what is essential (like dianoia), but at the same time targets the concrete (like aisthesis). What marks Aristotle’s approach as fundamentally classical in its outlook is that noesis (eminent cognition) is always more thought-like than perceptionlike, whether its objects are separate or composite substances, while aisthesis, even when it fronts for noesis as the eminent mode of cognition vis-à-vis the sensible composite, is deficient in comparison with cognition of separate substances: substances that are sensible are ipso facto less knowable than those that are not. Hence, Plato’s graded ontology of beings is indirectly preserved: the availability of some substances to a deficient mode of cognition (whether we construe it as aisthesis or dianoia or both) is the result of their own deficiency of being. Intimately connected with this—its flip side—is Aristotle’s refusal to abandon the idea of secondary ousia altogether. As long as secondary ousia is an essence rather than an abstraction, it will be necessary to seek eminent cognition of the individual in something ultimately thought-like. As usual, it is the Stoics who seem to have been primarily responsible for a break with classical attitudes. According to the Stoics, who were strict materialists, there is no intelligible world, no such thing as separate substances. Only sensible individuals are real, and they inhabit a world in which the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles holds absolutely. Consequently, true knowledge must be the grasp of an individual thing’s unmistakable uniqueness. The Stoics are thereby compelled to make two critical changes to the epistemology they inherited. First, because there are

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no separate intelligible objects, they universalize what for Aristotle was a principle of limited validity: the notion that perception and thought can be directed at the same object. Secondly, because there is no place for essences in this scheme, they invert the order of importance classically ascribed to thought and perception. Perception is the eminent mode (always), while intellection is the deficient one (always). Intellection is the deficient mode because for the Stoics it is nothing more than deficient perception: sensible ideation that stops short of being able to pick out something in the world uniquely. What Aristotle called an essence is simply a description that applies equally to multiple individuals because it fails to completely describe any of them. This inversion of the classical order is reflected in the table above, where the Stoic katalepsis (the “cognitive impression” that captures a thing in its unmistakable singularity) falls on the same side as Parmenides’ doxa, and the ficta of their prolepseis and ennoiai (i.e., general concepts and abstract notions) fall on the same side as Parmenides’ truth. The Hellenistic perspective is a complete reversal of the classical one: Table VI Sensible

Intelligible

Parmenides, Plato

Doxa

Truth

Stoics, Epicureans

Truth

Fictions

The skeptical reader can verify that the Stoics’ katalepsis has been lodged in the proper column of Table III by tracking its crucial properties, which fall in the left-hand column of Table IV. The kataleptic impression is sensuous, immediate, given (passively received), concrete, and particular, even if it is not unbounded, deceptive, or confused. The Stoic view that thought is a deficient grasp of the same object that is fully available to perception takes hold in Hellenistic thinking, propounded mostly by philosophers, but it becomes strikingly evident in the epistemological ideas of the great practicing scientists of the Roman period, Ptolemy30 and Galen.31 This is the view taken up again in the later Renaissance, indebted as it was to the recovery of Hellenistic ideas. Finally, Kant is the one who puts into a kind of canonical form the idea that concepts are a finite and penurious way to designate indirectly what intuition gives us immediately in inexhaustible plenitude. This idea continues to play a crucial role into the twentieth century: in neoKantianism and in Husserl’s phenomenology, for example.32 In fact, when Whitehead says that it is impossible to complete the description of an

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actual individual by means of concepts, he reveals his extraordinary proximity to his German contemporaries, Ernst Cassirer and Heinrich Rickert, whose neo-Kantian philosophy revolved around the importance of this insight.33 But just as views in antiquity were not homogenous, views in the modern period are not either. Nevertheless, it was not until the extraordinary developments of mathematics in the nineteenth century that the StoicKantian viewpoint encountered real peril. When mathematics moves beyond Euclidean geometry and the theory of real numbers it becomes impossible to see mathematical concepts as attenuated ways of knowing the sensible world and a return to Platonism becomes hard to avoid. Many accepted this; many did not. The theory of logic known as Intuitionism appears to be a way of embracing the counter-intuitive advances of mathematics without giving up the Stoic-Kantian view of thought as beholden to intuition. This discussion can now be harvested for its bearing on individuation. If conceptual thought is merely a deficient approach to the intuitive object, then we should expect to find individuals only in intuition. But if conceptual thought has its own objects, there is no reason why we should not be able to find individuals in the intelligible world as well. Another possibility is the one that Leibniz explores: that intuition is merely a deficient approach to an intelligible individual, whereby we should expect to find individuals only in the intelligible world. That true individuality is intelligible, not sensible, is of course the position of the classical Greek philosophers, but they got there in a very different way. They thought that sense perception knew an object deficient in true individuality, not that sense perception was deficient in grasping the true individuality of its object. But either way, the fact remains that if any individuals can be found in the intelligible world, then there is no reason to think that what individuates even a sensible individual is itself necessarily something peculiar (or peculiarly available) to intuition. The two views of the relation between concepts and intuition therefore imply two different views about individuation, to which I now turn.

3. Peculiarities and Problems of the Traditional Theories of Individuation Traditionally, there have been two basic theories of individuation. One is the theory we find in Aristotle’s account of composite (sensible)

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substances, in Duns Scotus, or in Kant: universals can never yield individuality; individuality is a primitive and irreducible principle, unique to and constitutive of each thing (like the thisness of Aristotle’s tode ti, or Scotus’ haecceitas, or immediate givenness within the space-time manifold of intuition). For convenience, I will call this the intuitionist theory of individuation (not to be confused with the intuitionist theory of logic). The other theory is the one we find in the Stoics, in Leibniz, in Aristotle’s theory of separate substances, or in Scholastic angelology: all things differ in specie; nothing differs in number only; individuals are simply the infimae species (the last or most specific species), while universals are the next up species and all the higher genera.34 For convenience I will call this the logicist theory of individuation. (The placement of the Stoics in this classification is peculiar: here I group them with logicists even though in the previous section I identified them as intuitionists. How they can be metaphysical logicists and epistemological intuitionists is something that will concern us later.) I set the stage for comparing these two paradigms of individuation by reviewing Plato’s theory of individuation in the Timaeus. Then I look at the intuitionistic and the logicist theories in that order.

3.1. Plato’s Theory of Individuation in the “Timaeus” The first formal attempt at a theory of individuation is to be found in Plato’s Timeaus. Plato postulated the forms to explain why things are always of a certain sort such that the question what is it? always makes sense, even if we can’t always answer it. But forms can’t provide an answer to the other question so basic that it always makes sense to ask it: does such a thing exist? In the Timeaus, Plato proposed the amorphous spatial matrix he called the Receptacle as the basis for existence: a thing of such and such a kind exists when the form of such a thing is realized in the medium of the Receptacle. The Receptacle is simply postulated as something that makes such tokening (instantiation) possible, just as the bronze is what makes it possible for the sculptor to realize his design. Plato concedes the ad hoc character of this postulate when he says that we arrive at the notion of the Receptacle through a form of “bastard reasoning.” He knows, in other words, that strictly speaking it would be a fallacy to argue: something such as the Receptacle would explain the difference between tokens and their types; since there is such a difference, the Receptacle must exist. Nevertheless, he seems to regard the Receptacle as the only possible way to explain the difference between tokens and their types, which makes his bastard reasoning not a fallacy, but the first clear example of

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methodologically self-conscious transcendental argument in western philosophy. The Receptacle is the condition of the possibility of existence (that a thing is) as distinct from quiddity (what a thing is). However, at the same time the Receptacle explains something else. It explains numerical individuation: how there can be more than one thing of a given type. An easier way to explain multiplicity would have been to say that no two things are really identical. Such a position had already been adopted by Anaxagoras and articulated very clearly by Diogenes of Apollonia.35 But Plato is at pains to pursue another path. He denies the Receptacle any character of its own so that it can realize the forms perfectly without distortion. There is, consequently, nothing to stop it from realizing the exact same form arbitrarily many times. The Receptacle has no effect other than to allow for a token-type distinction and a multiplicity of tokens. The principle Leibniz called the Identity of Indiscernibles has no validity in the cosmology of the Timaeus. According to Timaeus’ “likely story,” what we find at the most elemental level of physics is a limited variety of regular geometrical shapes, each of which is identically instantiated countlessly many times. Since the Receptacle exercises no resistance to the forms realized in it, the elementary particles of air, earth, fire, and water are not morphological approximations to, but perfect realizations of the regular solids. They are, moreover, nothing but these geometrical shapes. They have no other properties, and all their phenomenal properties are supposedly reducible to geometrical ones. The fact, for example, that things in our ordinary experience are subject to change and are always imperfect realizations of “what they are” is deduced from the geometrical properties of the elements, which ultimately are perfect and unchanging (the triangles, namely, of which the solids are composed). It is a matter of simple necessity that things composed of such elements will be unstable and subject to motion, unrest, and corruption in mathematically determined ways depending on the mode of composition. The pure receptivity of the Receptacle is, in other words, conceptually designed for the purpose of reducing everything without residue to form and the formal relations of forms. This reduction to form creates an air of paradox that is difficult to avoid in any theory of individuation allowing for multiple identical individuals. The individuals of the Timaeus are complexes of nothing but universals, so what makes them existing individuals rather than unrealized forms? Clearly the Receptacle contributes everything to this difference, and yet it is critical that it contribute absolutely nothing! Anything positive it contributed to the differentiation of identical individuals would ipso facto make them nonidentical and should really be counted as a formal difference. This

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generates the problem that Aristotle saw with Plato’s theory of individuation. Even though he believes in the multiple instantiation of something formally identical and postulated the Receptacle to explain this, Plato has failed to say why anything is concrete. Neither the forms nor the Receptacle are concrete, so where does the concretion of actual things come from? Of course the Timaeus does not contain Plato’s only reflections on individuation. More commonly associated with Plato’s name is the idea that the individual was an imperfect copy of an ideal original, an image participating in (but never coinciding with) the form. This idea never sat well with Aristotle. Aristotle understood the theory of participation to mean that concrete individuals were less actual than the universals (forms) they exemplified. He did not see how the forms could lack concreteness and yet be actual or how concreteness could be explained as the attenuation of an actuality that was not itself concrete. He thought Plato was engaged in the impossible task of deriving the concrete from something not concrete, but supposedly more primitive. Ironically, this is also how Aristotle was understood by seventeenth century philosophers, who thought Aristotle’s essence or substantial form was an abstraction, a hypostatized ens rationis, that was somehow supposed to cause its possessor to be a concrete instance of itself. Whitehead believes that Aristotle’s seventeenth century critics rediscovered Aristotle’s own doctrine of the intrinsic concreteness of actuality in their insistence on grounding philosophy in the concrete experience of subjectivity.36

3.2. Intuitionistic Theories of Individuation Aristotle thought there had to be more to a thing’s individuality than its numerical distinctness or even its difference from all other things. Relative position, for example, is enough to discriminate otherwise identical things. But how could the concreteness of something depend on relative and accidental properties? Moreover, essential properties and intrinsic differences, in and of themselves, don’t help us out of this problem either. A particular shade of red is essentially different from all other colors, but that does not make it an individual thing. And, finally, two patches of the same color aren’t different because you can count them; you can count them because they are different. Aristotle’s conclusion was that concreteness is something primitive and inexplicable. Duns Scotus, however much he may diverge from Aristotle’s theory of individuation (and this continues to be a subject of debate), agrees with Aristotle on the one cardinal point, which is stressed by Whitehead as well: individuality

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must be primitive. It cannot come from any prior principle. It cannot be constituted. Nothing that is not already individual could give rise to individuality. For Scotus this means that haecceitas is a “formal” part of every individual thing.37 For Aristotle it means that a this cannot come into being absolutely; it cannot be generated from antecedents that are not already in possession of thisness. The application of this principle to biology results in Aristotle’s doctrine of the eternity of the species realized in the cyclical becoming of its individuals: a this comes only from a this of like type—a horse produces a horse; a man produces a man. To some, the insistence on concreteness may seem question begging. Perhaps nothing really is concrete in this sense Aristotle was so fond of. So let’s return to the Receptacle and ask how it makes even numerical distinction possible, regardless of the question of concreteness. The only feature that seems to belong intrinsically to the Receptacle is its expanse as a spatial matrix. Accordingly, we could try to explain numerical individuation as a function of differential location in this matrix. This is indeed a very common recourse taken in the history of philosophy, but the result is to burden space with the whole mystery we were trying to explain in the first place: if contentless space is itself without qualities, undifferentiated, and everywhere the same, what makes two places different? One reaction to this challenge is to concede the argument and, like Leibniz, base the differentiation of space on the differentiation of its content. On this account it would be impossible for there to be any two completely identical things. Similarly, exactly one and the same quality could never be extended in space. Extension in space would only be possible as a function of continuous qualitative difference. Another reaction to this challenge is defiance. Kant makes the strongest showing here. He believes that purely numerical individuation is a brute fact that can be easily documented and that this brute fact has unique metaphysical importance. For it proves that space, precisely because we cannot specify the nature of its peculiar contribution to experience conceptually, is something metaphysically primitive, something that cannot be derived from its content or from any specifications employing universals. This is the context in which Kant’s paradox of incongruent counterparts must be evaluated: it documents the alleged brute fact by generating a mathematically irrefutable counterexample to Leibniz’ Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Simply by reversing the plus and minus signs, the equation for a clockwise conical spiral becomes the equation for a counterclockwise conical spiral that is necessarily identical in all respects to the clockwise spiral—except for the stubborn fact that the two spirals are

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distinct numerically. They are distinct for the obvious reason that they cannot be brought to coincide—no more than you can put your left hand into a right-hand glove, even though the two gloves are morphologically identical. It is a very curious fact that Kant deployed the paradox of incongruent counterparts twice in his career: in the pre-critical period to prove the reality of space and then in the critical period to prove its ideality! Perhaps this means it proves neither. What it does prove is that the Leibnizian theory of space is wrong: space is not the order of coexisting differentials. It must be a principium individuationis sui generis. The metaphysical reality and the transcendental ideality of space are both attempts to make sense of its stubborn autonomy vis-à-vis thought and its machinery of concepts and universals. The aim of Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts is the same as the aim of his arguments about time and space in the “Transcendental Aesthetic:” to prove that “to be” means to be unique in ways that defy conceptual specification. A recent contribution to this very old debate has been made by Michael Dummett.38 The lesson Dummett draws from McTaggart’s refutation of time strikingly recalls Kant’s thesis. Dummett shows that to be in time means to be individuated in ways that defy purely conceptual specification. Reflections of this sort inevitably bring us back into the proximity of something like the ineffable concreteness invoked by Aristotle or Scotus.

3.3. Logicist Theories of Individuation The other doctrine, which identifies individuality with specificity, is very satisfying to the logically minded because it eliminates—at least in principle—anything from the world that cannot be completely specified by concepts, that is, anything that cannot be picked out uniquely by definition or description alone. It envisions a world just like that of Stoics physics or Leibniz’ monadology or Aristotle’s supra-lunar world of stellar intellects where the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles holds absolutely. Nothing can then be numerically distinct without being specifically distinct. In principle, science should be able to proceed unencumbered by the problem posed by individuals that are distinguished only indexically. The fact that logicians have often had such an ideal of individualityreduced-to-specificity in mind, however vaguely, explains perhaps a fallacy identified for the first time by Frege. It is not uncommon in the history of logic to find conflated two very different logical relations: the subsumption

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of an object under a concept (the inclusion of a thing within the extension of a class) and the subordination of one class-concept (e.g., a species) to a higher class-concept (e.g., a genus). Predicating a concept of an individual thing is very different from predicating a concept of a concept—unless, of course, the individual is simply a most specific species. In that case it coincides with the species, which becomes a class that has only a single member, making the difference between the class and its unique member easy to overlook and hard to pin down. What makes the token different from the type it uniquely satisfies? This appears to be the same question posed above: what makes the instance different from the form if the Receptacle contributes nothing to what the instance is? An important point needs to be highlighted. In the possible world we are envisioning, where individuality reduces to greatest actual specificity, there would be no logical, only a pragmatic need for proper names or for demonstrative expressions such as this, that, here, there, now, then, I, you, etc. What these words have in common is the ability to designate things immediately, without identifying them by descriptive specification. It is a way of designating things that is conceptually (“intensionally”) unmediated. The unique importance of this kind of reference has been emphasised numerous times in the history of philosophy. In his Logic, Mill recognizes it as the function of proper names. In the first Critique, Kant recognizes it as the function of intuition. In our own century this peculiar function has captured the attention of both Continental and AngloAmerican philosophers. Russell assigned this function to “logically proper names.” Husserl called it reference by “essentially occasional expressions,” meaning all terms whose meaning depends on the context of utterance. Analytic philosophers have called it “indexical” or “token-reflexive” reference and developed a causal theory of meaning to account for it. From Kant’s intuition to Russell’s logically proper naming, all these functions are forms of token-reflexive cognition that presuppose the involvement and participation of the subject in the world it knows. In the logicist world we are imagining, where everything could be identified by its unique description, immediate reference of this sort would be metaphysically superfluous, however convenient it might be. If this function is metaphysically superfluous, then “knowledge by acquaintance” (by which I mean acquaintance with particulars) is necessarily a deficient mode of knowing something that could be more properly known by description alone. The crucial questions thus become: is knowledge by acquaintance and token-reflexive participation in the world something that science should properly aim at replacing with a wholly objective knowledge by

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description? Is the only scientific function of acquaintance to provide us with explananda, but never with explanantia?39 There are three possibilities here. (1) Positive answer. However difficult, it is in principle possible to replace knowledge by acquaintance with knowledge by description that relies on no acquaintance at all. The proper activity of science is to explain the content of acquaintance without relying on acquaintance. (This is the concept of science that Carnap expressly sought to justify in Der logische Aufbau der Welt, §§ 13-17.) Acquaintance is therefore a kind of true belief that science replaces with knowledge. (2) Qualified negative answer. It is impossible to replace knowledge by acquaintance entirely with knowledge by purely objective description, but this impossibility stems only from our own cognitive limitations. (3) Unqualified negative answer. It is impossible to replace knowledge by acquaintance entirely with knowledge by purely objective description, and this reflects something fundamental about the nature of the things we seek to know. (1) The idea that intuition is a deficient way of being apprised of something that concepts alone can actually know should remind us of Leibniz’s idea of perception as nothing more than confused intellection. But what does it mean to say that science, under ideal circumstances, could dispense with acquaintance? The idea of a wholly “objective” cognitive methodology has played a powerful role in the history of philosophy and science. But the requirements of such a method are not often followed to their logical extreme, which is: it is possible to explain (or at least to specify) any fact of acquaintance without presupposing any facts of acquaintance. In other words, whatever we know by acquaintance we could also (and more properly) know in a way that doesn’t depend on any acquaintance with anything—including ourselves. Stated in this way, such an idea may seem absurd. But it has lurked in more than one gifted mind. It is behind Leibniz’s idea that everything that can be known a posteriori can also be known a priori, i.e., every fact can ultimately be deduced from truths of reason. And this is just what we would expect a committed logicist to say. Nevertheless, Leibniz admits—almost grudgingly—that much of what we know we will only know a posteriori. To God is reserved the ability to know everything a priori. In the end his position appears to be alternative two. Leibniz’s commitment to this extreme idea of science is patent, and his articulation of it is paradigmatic in its clarity and simplicity. But he is not

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alone. A little scrutiny finds the same idea behind a range of scientific programs that seem on the surface to have little in common. Echoes of Leibniz’s idea resound among the German Idealists, who have long been ridiculed for allegedly thinking that from reason they could deduce everything a priori—facts of experience, laws of nature, and even their own place in the history of philosophy. While such criticism is often poorly informed on particulars and cannot be taken at face value, it is not without justification. It is true that Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel all demanded that science proper make no presuppositions, least of all the presupposition of positive empirical data. Science proper could therefore be nothing other than a speculative philosophy that proceeded through a chain of necessary deductions from an absolute first principle to the derivation of particular truths. Just how far this deduction could go was the question that generated controversy from the start. Already in 1801 Wilhelm Krug mocked the project of deduction, which Schelling, in his System of Transcendental Idealism, had proclaimed with characteristically inelegant bravado: Speaking as a physicist, Descartes said: give me matter and motion and I will build the universe out of it for you. The transcendental philosopher says: give me a Nature of opposite activities, of which one proceeds infinitely and the other endeavors to intuit itself in this infinity, and out of that I will make Intelligence along with the entire system of its representations emerge for you.40

To understand the scope of this claim it is only necessary to know that “system of representations” means the empirical world. And, to be sure, the Idealists claimed to deduce natural phenomena (such as matter, magnetism, organic life), as well as general laws of nature and the general course of world history. However, on the grounds that contingency is one of the things that is absolutely necessary, they were able to avoid the full burden of deducing particular facts. Krug took them to task for this. He accused them of false promises and defied them to deduce even one empirical phenomenon, famously proposing his quill pen.41 In response, Schelling and Hegel insisted that it is only the system of phenomena that is rational and thus deducible.42 However, because the line between system and positive fact was fluid, the limit case of exhaustive a priori deduction always hovered over their program of Naturphilosophie, whether as an impossible ideal or as a reductio ad absurdum. Laplace’s determinism proved to be a less laughable project of deducing particulars. Its great summary statement deserves to be quoted: All events, even those which on account of their insignificance do not seem to follow the great laws of nature, are a result of it just as necessarily as the revolutions of the sun. […] We ought then to regard the present state of the

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universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.43

Although Laplace is rightly held in much greater scientific esteem than the likes of Schelling, they share a concept of science defined by the impossible limit case of exhaustive deduction, as comparison of Laplace’s summary statement with the following passage from the System of Transcendental Idealism shows: Thus, for example, sensation is an act of the ego, which, were it possible to demonstrate all of its middle terms, would lead us to a deduction of all qualities in nature, which is impossible.44

Laplace proposed what we now call a “covering-law” or “nomologicaldeductive” model of scientific explanation: particular events are explained by deducing them from antecedent events by means of general laws. Such a model is implicit in Newton’s Principia, albeit not in the universalized form that implies strict determinism. Explaining natural events by general laws is in effect a way of deducing what is known by acquaintance from what is known by description or, to put it differently, a way of reducing acquaintance to description. Of course, while acquaintance is eliminated in the covering laws, it crops up again in the specification of the boundary conditions. In this context, we can see why Laplace’s revision of Newton’s cosmology had unusual significance for philosophy. Because Newton’s deistic universe needs occasional rewinding by God, even Laplace’s imaginary intellect would be unable to deduce its history and future from its present state. Periodic acquaintance with new and undeducible boundary conditions would always be required. But Laplace (and, ironically, Kant in his great pre-critical work on the “natural history” of the heavens) showed how the boundary conditions themselves (all but the very first) could be generated by the covering laws, thus bringing us one tantalizing step away from a purely objective methodology. Needless to say, revisions in cosmology do not usually have epistemological ramifications. In this case, however, a concept of science that had previously been the fantasy of speculative idealism was given universal legitimacy. What the example of Laplace demonstrates is that the ideal of science disengaged from any constitutive reliance on acquaintance is a more familiar figure than my initial characterization may have led the reader to believe. It is well known and often trusted under names such as determinism, materialism, or just plain science.

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This idea continues to play an important role in contemporary discussions of science. It seems entirely reasonable to suppose that the perspectivity and subjectivity that characterize the empirical act of knowing are contingencies of the act irrelevant to the nature of what is known— presumably even in the case where it is ourselves we are seeking to know. This leads to an ideal of knowledge that would wholly eliminate from its content any residues of its contingent genesis. This is the implication of the common idea that knowledge is objective (i.e., is knowledge in the strictest sense) to the extent that it has eliminated or overcome subjectivity. The problem with such an ideal is that no cognizance could be taken of the act of cognition itself as a real psychological or psychophysical event happening at some place and time, unless, of course, this fact were itself arrived at in a purely objective way, rather than subjectively by selfacquaintance. But self-cognizance by acquaintance is implicit in all indexical language (as that in reference to which something is here or there, now or then, etc.), making the elimination of this vestige of subjectivity depend on the elimination of all indexical terms from scientific description. This brings us right back to the logicist theme of explaining or describing facts of acquaintance in a way that presupposes no facts of acquaintance, for being objective (in this sense) simply means relying at no point on an indexical anchor to execute a description of the world or the self it contains. At one point in his Logical Investigations, Husserl, of all people, imagines the possibility of such a scenario, invoking an “ideal” equivalence between the actual momentary denotation of essentially occasional expressions and corresponding absolute space-time coordinates!45 And even (or especially) in his phenomenology, which germinates from ideas in his Logical Investigations, Husserl shows a keen interest in freeing consciousness from its psychological reality: transcendental consciousness is prior to and independent of its tokening as this consciousness. Phenomenology thus appears to be a science that does not in fact presuppose the act of cognition as a real psychological or psychophysical event happening at some place and time. Because a purely objective description cannot take advantage of its own perspective, Thomas Nagel has dubbed it “the view from nowhere.”46 It would have to enter the world not only “from nowhere” but also from “nowhen,” excluding not only indexical time words, but also any use of tense (tense is essentially token-reflexive, establishing temporal position relative to the time of enunciation). These constraints seem impossible to meet and call into question either the possibility of objective knowledge or the way we have been construing objectivity. However unreasonable this interpretation of objectivity may seem once it is cast as an ideal of description that relies on no acquaintance, not a few philosophers have

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invested in it in the name of reason. Husserl is perhaps the most explicit, insisting in the Logical Investigations that the possibility of replacing “subjective” with wholly “objective” expressions, while “factically” impossible, is ideally and in principle demanded by the “unlimitedness of objective reason” (Schrankenlosigkeit der objektiven Vernunft).47 Here again, just as with Leibniz, Schelling, and Laplace, science is defined by an idealized limit case whose impossibility is not denied. This makes all four concepts of science edge away from alternative one, which they proclaim, towards alternative two, which they concede. Because the major transitions in his philosophical thinking present an object lesson in the problem of “objective description,” Husserl’s example deserves close examination. Making the rationality of the world depend on absolute space and time is obviously something Husserl gave up with his discovery of phenomenology, but it is in precisely this context that we can appreciate the genius of his concept of phenomenology, for it turns out to be another way to satisfy the same demands of “unlimited objective reason.” It is actually a better way, since objectivity is now an ideal that is supposed to be realizable rather than counter-factual in its normativity. The trick is that the “phenomenological reduction” necessarily includes what Husserl calls the “eidetic reduction”: the reduction of all individuals to their corresponding types. Phenomenological description thus turns out to be nothing less than the realization of the logicist concept of science: an exhaustive description of the world that employs universals alone, never relying on the token-reflexive indication of individuals. Just how extraordinarily peculiar the resulting description is (the world as the content of absolute consciousness) is probably a good measure of how overextended the original demand for a “token-free” objectivity was. These last reflections also point up a connection as unexpected as the one suggested above between Schelling and Laplace. For Husserl’s phenomenological reduction appears to have something in common with the ether that contemporary physicists were seeking: transcendental phenomenology and absolute location are both ways of eliminating tokenreflexivity from our description of the world. A further comparison is also possible, for it is questionable whether absolute consciousness is any less quixotic than the ether. Indeed, Husserl himself eventually came to recognize not one but two fatal threats to his logicist interpretation of phenomenology as a rigorous science: first, the temporality of consciousness, which binds it to the critical index of the now, and, secondly, the dependence of consciousness on the life-world, which binds it—and every essence it discloses—to the factical givenness of its particular historical milieu. It is bound, in other words, to the world that can be identified only demonstratively as this one.

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The twentieth-century fascination with the ideal of purely objective knowledge was of course not limited to Husserl. It was characteristic not only of the Vienna circle and the early Wittgenstein, but also of much analytic philosophy of science. Positivism and its analytic legacy were actually more dogged proponents of the “unlimitedness of objective reason” than phenomenology, since Husserl at long last gave up on it. Doggedness notwithstanding, positivism and analytic philosophy both offer case studies of the failure of “objective reason” as trenchant as the example of phenomenology. Positivism runs almost parallel to phenomenology, since in both cases attempts to realize the dream of purely objective knowledge led conspicuously in the very opposite direction. Husserl was led to the life-word as the ultimate foundation of all knowledge. Because the life-world, being the presupposition of all objectifying knowledge, is itself unobjectifiable, reason cannot take possession of it and must simply acquiesce to its ultimacy, despite its lack of rationally desirable features such as transparency or exact delineation (i.e., clarity and distinctness). It was Husserl’s realization that meaning and essence depend on the lifeworld, and not the other way around, that led him to his famous confession that “the dream of philosophy as a rigorous science is dreamed out […]”48 In its search for objectivity the Vienna Circle also found itself mired in subjectivity. For it was led to a doctrine according to which the most basic scientific truths would all be of the sort “Here now red,” in other words: token-reflexive reports of subjectively experienced sense data.49 Far from eliminating acquaintance from science, this program ends up basing everything on it. It was Karl Popper who recognized that this theory of science contributed nothing to the objectivist program it cherished and was in fact an extreme form of psychologism. Just as the nineteenth century attempt to derive the laws of logic from the way human beings think compromised the universal validity of logic, so, Popper argued, the attempt to derive empirical statements of science from private perceptual experiences compromises their objectivity.50 Since the gap between actual cognitive experience and objective reason proved to be unbridgeable, we should not be surprised at Popper’s astoundingly radical proposal for salvaging the latter: to treat “protocol sentences” not as records of psychological events, but as intersubjective conventions.51 Unfortunately, this leaves unanswered whether there might be better and worse conventions of this sort and by what criteria—other than the psychological ones we wanted to avoid—we might evaluate them. As a final case study of the failure of objective reason I mention the debates about meaning in analytic philosophy. What Putnam’s argument in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning”52 comes down to is this: that there is a latent

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indexical component in all referring terms. The causal theory of meaning implies that it is not only impossible to pick out an individual by specification alone, but that it is even impossible to refer to a type by specification alone. All type names are token-reflexive in that they presuppose the types of things found in this world, with the latent properties they have here rather than in some other possible word where things look the same, but would have different latent properties. For when, in the fullness of time, we uncovered the latent differences, we would rightly insist that it was our types we had been referring to all along, even though, ex hypothesi, it was impossible for us to specify our types so as to discriminate them from their Doppelgänger. But that means that all along we were referencing them indexically. The upshot of this argument is that all terms are essentially occasional expressions in Husserl’s sense: they refer to things of various descriptions only insofar as such things are the ones found in this world. Remarkably, this is the same conclusion Husserl had finally come to. Because they are rooted in it, even essences presuppose the life-word, which cannot in turn be reduced to an essence. Instead, it is an ultimate fact. In his Logical Investigations Husserl had proposed a taxonomy of intentional acts according to which only objectifying acts (acts that specify an object) can be thetic or non-thetic (affirming or denying the existence of something). This amounts to saying that we do not affirm the existence of anything we cannot objectively describe. In conceding in the Krisis that the life-world is necessarily given in the manner of a non-objectifying thesis, Husserl has in fact conceded that the life-world is given causally and can be signified only indexically. The rootedness of essences in the life-world thus means that they cannot be purged of their intrinsic reference to something that can be identified only token-reflexively, which is the very conclusion Putnam has made famous. (2) A qualified negative answer is given by those who do identify individuality with specificity, but concede that the limitations of our faculties and the complexity of the world render it such that we will always have to rely on acquaintance in our scientific explanations. Because our concepts never reach the requisite specificity, we fall back on intuition, which gives us the power to discriminate things without actually understanding their differences. Here we find, with varying degrees of chagrin, most of the figures discussed already under alternative one: Leibniz, Schelling, Laplace, and the Husserl of the Logical Investigations. For all of them, the logicist ideal is indispensable as the norm for a real knowledge that mostly falls short of it. It is the knowledge that an infinite intellect actually has (Leibniz), or the knowledge that an infinite intellect

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would have if there were such a thing as an infinite intellect (Laplace), or the knowledge that we would have if contingency weren’t necessary (Schelling), or the knowledge that we would have if the demands of reason were “factically” fulfilled. Our knowledge is knowledge in the truest sense only to the extent that it measures up to this ideal, which it can sometimes do qualitatively (some of what we know can be specified by description alone and is certain a priori), but not quantitatively (most things we cannot know a priori by description alone). The rest of what we know is not knowledge stricto sensu, but a true belief in the modern sense, for the facts we are thus acquainted with have a rational etiology, even if we cannot know it. We should note that Schelling’s counterfactual conditional “if contingency weren’t necessary” is tantamount to “if individuality were specificity,” which is therefore a concession that individuality is in fact not specificity. This pushes Schelling’s metaphysics down under alternative three, while keeping his concept of science attached to alternative one: knowledge stricto sensu is specification. This implies that individuals are indeed more than specificity, but by the same token cannot strictly speaking be known, even though we can be acquainted with them—a position he seems to share with Plato in the Timaeus. For Schelling, acquaintance with individuals would therefore seem to be a form of true belief more in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle—something that lacks a rational etiology because it is true only “by accident.” As for Husserl’s counterfactual conditional, “if the demands of reason were factically fulfilled,” it is impossible to imagine what a world in which they were fulfilled would have to look like. Husserl seems to be thinking of absolute space-time coordinates as last differentiae, and thus as the ultimate part of each thing’s specificity. How could these differentiae be known? Perhaps they would be known to God if, as Newton speculated, absolute space were His sensorium, but we would have to add absolute time as a sensorium as well. A qualified negative answer seems to come from the Stoics too, for they also believe that description cannot replace acquaintance even though individuality is simply unique specificity. But their rationale is unlike that of Leibniz or the others just discussed. For Leibniz, acquaintance is confused description, and it would be better to do without it if only we could. God does know conceptually what we can only know by intuition. Similarly for Laplace or Husserl in the Logical Investigations, we fall back on acquaintance because the adequate description, while not a metaphysical impossibility, is not available to us. For the Stoics, however, intuition is not inferior to thought. On the contrary, their katalepsis is sensuous, not

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conceptual, and yet they decidedly believe in the identity of indiscernibles and hence the logical character of all individuality. This puts them in the curious position of identifying individuality with unique specificity while believing that intuition is the eminent mode of cognition. This combination of theses is possible only if intuition is a way of specifying (rather than demonstratively indicating) an object. How can intuition be a mode of specification? The crux is their belief that sensuous intuition is not less, but more clear than thought. This seems to have been suggested to them by the fact that the finest qualitative discriminations are ineffable. From this they made a remarkable inference. If what defines thought is the fact that it operates exclusively with general concepts or universals, this is because thought is simply specification that has stopped short of picking out an individual uniquely. Description by concepts is incomplete specification because complete specification is always ineffable intuition. Thus, while they agree that it is impossible to replace acquaintance with description (even though individuality is just unique specificity), this implies something about the limitations of thought rather than about the limitations of our ability to have thoughts. Only acquaintance succeeds in going all the way to the point of capturing an individual in its unmistakable uniqueness. Their katalepsis is therefore a kind of acquaintance. It is the highly nuanced acquaintance of the skilled artisan or connoisseur, able to discriminate so finely that even the most similar individuals are not confused. This is confirmed by an amusing passage in Cicero’s Academica. In discussing Stoic doctrine, Cicero illustrates the sort of wisdom that is supposed to define the Stoic sage with the satirical example of a poultry keeper allegedly so practiced at his trade that he could discriminate one egg from another: simply by looking he could determine which hen had laid it!53 But even if katalepsis is a kind of acquaintance, it differs from all the other kinds of acquaintance discussed in a fundamental respect. They all assumed an essential indexical component. The Stoics’ katalepsis, however, is not token reflexive. Even though its grasp of extreme nuance presupposes the ineffability of tacit knowledge and the embodied skills of discriminative competence that we normally associate with the tokenreflexivity of the first-person, performative attitude, it actually targets something that is not context dependent and could in principle be picked out of a cosmic line-up. The individual is discriminated by its qualitative peculiarities alone. For the Stoics, katalepsis is simply discrimination that has reached the most extreme possible degree of nuance and therefore reveals the unique specificity of its object. Thus, their position has in common with intuitionists the reliance on acquaintance at the same time

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that they remain committed logicists who deny that individuality is anything more than specificity. This position is not impossible to fathom if we bear in mind that all the qualia of perception can be construed as universals. This allows the object of intuition (an individual) to be construed in a logicist fashion as a unique combination of universals. Since this is Whitehead’s way of understanding qualia, his infinite abstractive hierarchy may be a modern equivalent to the Stoics’ “kataleptic presentation” (the sensuous content of the act of katalepsis). Whether Whitehead is thus committed to the same theory of individuality as the Stoics will be discussed in part four or this paper. (3) The wholly negative answer to this question is given by the intuitionistic theories of individuation we considered first. If individuation is more than specificity and identical individuals are possible, tokenreflexive acquaintance will be our only way to keep track of them. We saw that this was the answer of Aristotle, Scotus, and Kant. The following table summarizes the results of this section: Table VII Individividuality Is More Than Specificity

Individiduality Is Extreme Specificity

Aristotle

Individividuality Is Only Knowable By Intuition

Duns Scotus

Individividuality Is Only Knowable By Concepts

Plato’s Timaeus (?), Schelling ca. 1800

Stoics

Kant Leibniz Laplace

Husserl is omitted from the table because his placement is complicated by conflicting commitments. His concept of reason requires him to take his position as a metaphysical and epistemological logicist alongside Leibniz, while his theory of evidence makes him, at the very least, an epistemological intuitionist like the moderns (other than Leibniz) discussed in the previous section. We have seen how the impossibility of reconciling these two commitments compelled him at last to abandon one of them.

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4. Whitehead’s Theory of Individuation We have seen that numerous senses of abstractness are to be found in SMW. They differ from one another in philosophically important ways that Professor Wiehl has delineated. We have also seen how privileging one of the senses of abstractness over the others can bring us into alignment with very different factions in the traditional debate about individuation. We have reviewed that debate and discussed complications and peculiarities famously associated with the major factions. It remains now for us to determine Whitehead’s own allegiance in this debate. Because Whitehead shares motives and concerns with both of the major factions we have discussed, determining his own position is not as straightforward as it might seem at first. Let’s begin with a schematic recapitulation of our argument so far. We sketched the history of the debate about individuation from two analytic perspectives: epistemologically in part two and metaphysically in part three. Epistemologically it appears as a dispute over the relative value of intuition and intellection for securing knowledge of individuals. Metaphysically it appears as a dispute over whether the principium individuationis is some kind of conceptually unspecifiable singularity or just a unique extreme of specificity. The following matrix combines the analytic perspectives of the previous two parts: Table VIII Theories of Cognition vs. Theories of Individuation Intuitionistic (Individuality Is Singularity Beyond Specificity)

Logicist (Individuality Is Specificity)

Intellection Eminent & Intuition Deficient

Intellection Deficient & Intuition Eminent

Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Schelling ca. 1800

Aristotle (re: composite substances), Duns Scotus, Nominalists, Locke, Kant, Neo-Kantians, [Husserl]

Parmenides, Aristotle (re: separate substances), Spinoza, Leibniz, [Husserl], Positivism, Determinism

Stoics

Back in part one we proposed an interpretation of the two types of transcendence/abstractness alluded to by Professor Wiehl in PU. Let’s

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recall the relevant two types and use our analytic matrix to sharpen the contrast between them. In sense one of transcendence (hereafter: T1) all that universals necessarily lack is haecceitas, not adequate specificity, and this lack is enough to secure their potential for multiple instantiation. In sense two of transcendence (hereafter: T2), to be universal means to fall short of complete specificity and thereby be able to apply to a number of things that are partly or generically, but not completely or specifically identical in type. Haecceitas as something distinct from extreme specificity is crucial to the theory of individuation implied by the former construal of universals and superfluous to the one implied by the latter. Giving precedence to T1 leads to what I have called intuitionistic theories of individuation, such as we find in Aristotle, Scotus, or Kant, and typically to the promotion of some kind of token-reflexive acquaintance as an eminent mode of cognition giving us privileged access to individuals. This token-reflexivity may, but need not be, recruited metaphysically to explain the very nature of individuality. This metaphysical strategy was used by Kant, but not, for example, by Aristotle. What Kant and Aristotle have in common is the epistemological idea that token-reflexive acquaintance is indispensable if we are to be cognizant of individuals that possess individuality beyond specificity. Despite its partial anticipation by Aristotle (in the case of composite substances) and Scholastics such as Scotus (in one sense) and the Nominalists (in another sense), this epistemological idea tends to be more prominently associated with modern rather than ancient positions. For as soon as we add that there are no other individuals than the ones that have to be accessed by means of token-reflexive acquaintance, we arrive at a thesis that is recognizably modern even if its roots are in Scholastic Nominalism: that there are no “intelligible” individuals; the only individuals are the sensible ones, and everything non-sensible is an “abstraction.” Sensuous intuitability thus becomes a test of reality, and sense perception becomes an eminent mode of cognition. Of course it is possible, like Plato, Aquinas, or Schelling, to combine an intuitionistic theory of individuality with an insistence on intellection as the eminent mode of cognition. What this implies is that individuality, insofar as it evinces singularity beyond specificity, is something accidental and metaphysically tawdry. It is, to be sure, knowable by token-reflexive acquaintance, but this is “knowledge” in a very weak sense and hardly worth having. Giving precedence to T2 leads to what I have called logicist theories of individuation and, exceptions such as the Stoics notwithstanding, usually leads to the denigration of acquaintance as a deficient mode of approach to individuals.54 This position is usually thought of as ancient because it sees

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true individuality as something revealed to thought rather than intuition. The Greek word for something revealed to thought is noumenon. The fate of this word in modern philosophy is a good measure of how far from ancient ideas modern thinkers wanted to be. Nevertheless, logicians such as Leibniz and many of the nineteenth century Platonizing philosophers of logic were happy to rehabilitate intellection as an eminent mode of cognition. Furthermore, logicist ideas seem to have played an unadmitted or at least an underestimated role in modern conceptions of scientific knowledge that posit an ideal of wholly objective (standpoint-independent) or nomologically exhaustive (deterministic) content. Implicitly at least, these conceptions identify individuality with specificity and make intellection the eminent mode of cognition, but they remain essentially modern in that they deny the existence of separate individuals that are intelligible without also being (in principle) sensible. In other words, they posit individuals that are wholly intelligible without being only intelligible. This means that we can know by objective description every individual we are acquainted with, but also, at least in principle, that we can be acquainted with every individual we know by description. By contrast, the Platonizing logicians of the nineteenth century are rehabilitating a characteristically ancient idea when they posit, among others, individuals that are intelligible only, intrinsically incapable of becoming the object of intuitive acquaintance. Although logicist theories of individuation typically promote intellection as an eminent mode of cognition giving us privileged access to individuals, it is possible, as the example of the Stoics proves, to combine a logicist theory of individuation with an insistence on intuition as an eminent mode of cognition. What this means is that the qualitative nuance of intuition achieves a specificity that not only surpasses thought, but also suffices to pick out an individual by its absolute properties alone, without any reliance on relational properties connecting it with the act of intuition as something happening at a given place and time. How to go about situating Whitehead in our analytic schema? Let’s begin with the simplest question: does he subscribe to the ancient or the modern view of cognitive modes? The ancient view allows thought and intuition to have separate objects and inevitably grants eminence to thought, while the modern view makes thought a deficient way of knowing the same thing that intuition knows eminently. There can be no doubt that Whitehead is in one sense wholly modern: thought and intuition are two ways of knowing the same individuals. But the situation is not as straightforward as it first seems because thought and intuition, while knowing the same individuals, do have separate objects (eternal objects versus actual occasions).

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Everything therefore hinges on how these separate objects are related to one another so as to converge in the same individual. We will find that this complication puts all the options, ancient and modern, back on the table, and makes all our other questions extremely difficult to answer: which mode of cognition is eminent and which is deficient and why? Is individuality unique specificity or singularity beyond specificity? If we follow Whitehead’s arguments one by one, we will find him migrating from one position to another or even insisting on combining elements from contrasting positions. Therefore, assuming Whitehead’s position is not always vacillating (or simply incoherent), we will be able to discover its unity only if we can also expose critical limitations in our analytic schema as it now stands. So let’s pause here to say something about the genesis of this matrix and its adequacy. With the topic of the matrix being individuation, its two parameters are epistemological position vis-à-vis individuation and metaphysical position vis-à-vis individuation. These are the variables of our analysis. As an inductive survey of well-known historical positions, the preceding two sections strongly suggest that only two values are possible for each variable and, in fact, the same two in each case: metaphysically one is either a logicist or an intuitionist, and epistemologically one is either a logicist or an intuitionist. Despite a tendency for the metaphysical and epistemological perspectives to run parallel, it’s obvious from our historical survey that the two parameters represent independent variables: one’s metaphysical position on individuation tends to influence, but does not constrain, one’s epistemological position on individuation, and vice versa. This yields our matrix of four possibilities. If adequacy in the representation of possible positions is wanted, a simpler matrix than this is not possible. But, based on our historical survey, a more complex matrix does not seem possible either, which suggests that it is a complete taxonomy of possible theories of individuation. As an inductive conclusion based on limited samples, this conclusion is tentative. If we look at the matrix as an inductive hypothesis, then what I am doing in this section is testing the adequacy of the hypothesis against a new slate of data, which confronts us in the form of Whitehead’s remarks on individuation in a variety of contexts over a period of roughly twenty years. The argument will proceed dialectically. Mindful of their chronology, I will examine several important texts concerning individuation in Whitehead, considering different possible interpretations of each, especially in light of the others and their possible interpretations. In the first section I address the epistemological question (which mode of access to individuals is eminent?) and in the second section the metaphysical one (is

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individuality unique specificity or singularity beyond specificity?). In each section I begin with SMW, considering the implications of the theory of individuation I extracted from the chapter on abstraction in the first part of this paper. This gives us preliminary answers to our two questions. I proceed in each section by comparing these results with Whitehead’s pronouncements about individuation in other works, revisiting earlier conclusions as necessary. The third section suggests how our analytic schema needs to be revised if we are to find coherence in the many views Whitehead seems to express. It will be useful to keep the chronology of the relevant works in mind as we proceed: PNK, CN, SMW, S, PR, AI.

4.1. What is the Eminent Mode of Access to Individuals for Whitehead? 4.1.1. Let us begin our discussion of this question by noting Whitehead’s obvious deep sympathies with the intuition faction, which is evident in his understanding of mentality as discussed in part one above. According to the passages cited from SMW, thought will never grasp an individual because thought operates with a finite number of universal qualifications, while the individual involves an infinite complexity. Whitehead’s understanding of mentality in SMW therefore implies that intellection cannot possibly be an eminent mode of cognition. This much seems certain. But how does he stand in regard to intuition? This is more difficult. For example, if, like Kant, we understand intuition as a mental function of a peculiar sort (characterized namely by immediacy), then we encounter the obvious problem: for Whitehead, nothing “mental” reaches all the way to individuality. How then do we ever become cognizant of individuals according to Whitehead? If we do have truck with individuals, it would have to be by way of an experience that was not mental! And this is indeed Whitehead’s teaching, which can be documented in all of the works that concern us here. From PNK onwards, we find Whitehead advocating for a kind of nonmental perception as the necessary basis of any possible knowledge of the real world (the world populated by individuals rather than universals). From SMW onwards, however, he begins to introduce a distinction that necessitates a refinement in our question. For Whitehead comes to the conclusion that such non-mental perception would have to be pre-cognitive and pre-conscious. This is the “uncognitive apprehension” of SMW and the “unconscious experience” of PR. Thus, in PR Whitehead adopts “the principle […] that consciousness presupposes experience, and not

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experience consciousness.”55 The question we have thus far posed, What is the eminent mode of cognitive access to individuals?, must therefore be reformulated as What is the eminent mode of experiential access to individuals? We will be able to return to the question of cognition or conscious experience of individuals only at the end of this investigation. I turn now to textual documentation of the eminence of what I am calling “non-mental perception” in Whitehead. In S and PR Whitehead is explicit that it is only through non-mental perception that we can have any access to individual things other than ourselves. This is clear in the first place from PR’s basic contrast between physical and conceptual (mental) prehension. The former takes account of individuals precisely because it is not mental; the latter fails to reach individuals precisely because it is abstract and grasps only universals. But the importance of non-mental perception is cast in stronger and sharper relief by Whitehead’s more subtle distinction between two fundamentally different modes of perception: perception in the mode of presentational immediacy and perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Presentational immediacy is a form of perception dominated by mentality, while causal efficacy is a form of purely physical perception. Perception in the mode of causal efficacy is purely physical not in the sense that mentality plays no role in the way it comes to be (because mentality does play a role in the “subjective form” of all perceptions), but because its objects are physical individuals. The critical ingredients of mental perception are the universals Whitehead calls “simple eternal objects,” by which he means qualia, which function as its principal objects insofar as they become localized in a geometrically structured object-space. The critical ingredient of physical perception is the causal action to which the experient is subjected by individual entities in its environment (this environment is not identical to the geometrically structured object-space of presentational immediacy, although by a process Whitehead calls symbolic reference the two can be correlated). By another name, this causal action upon the subject is its “prehension” of those agents as objects for it.56 Based on these distinctions we can say that Whitehead’s candidate for eminent mode of experience— one that grasps concrete individuals rather than abstractions—is perception in the mode of causal efficacy (and his candidate for an eminent mode of cognition is presumably what he calls consciousness of perception in the mode of causal efficacy, as I discuss later). And this is well corroborated, for Whitehead is, in fact, quite explicit that the philosophy of organism transforms the traditional modern concept of intuition (which is the concept of intuition as an eminent mode) into that of prehension.57

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Although Whitehead is nowhere as emphatic in advocating for the eminence of non-mental perception as he is in S and PR, it is nevertheless clear that he held a similar position much earlier. PNK and CN both operate with a distinction—not identical with, but very similar to the distinction between perception in the mode of causal efficacy and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy—between senseawareness of events and sense-awareness of objects: the former is related to individuals, the latter to the universals characterizing them. By making such a distinction Whitehead is ostensibly restricting the role of universals to a function that does not achieve individual reference. Taken as it stands, this implies that reference to individuals is a function in which universals (mentality) play no role. Although this conclusion will be soon qualified, it is nonetheless clear that sense-awareness of events is distinguished by a specifically non-mental moment. Finally, we must consider whether the concept of an eminent, non-mental form of perception, which is implied by Whitehead’s discussion of mentality in SMW’s chapter on abstraction, can actually be found in any of the other chapters. For the chapter on abstraction (along with the chapter on God) is a late interpolation into that text and does not necessarily speak for the rest of the work. In fact, the concept we are looking for plays a prominent role in the all-important chapters III and IV, where Whitehead begins to construct the conceptual apparatus that will become his speculative philosophy. It must be conceded that a distinction between two kinds of perception is not made systematically in SMW, but it seems to be intimated in a passing contrast between “prehension” and the “ingression of sense-objects.”58 In any case, however, a broader contrast, similar to PR’s general contrast between physical and conceptual prehension, is patent. It is after all in SMW that Whitehead first introduces the term “prehension,”59 which he does in order to create a contrast between a “cognitive” and an “uncognitive” way of perceiving or taking account of another thing: i.e., “apprehension” versus “prehension.” Obviously modeled on Leibniz “perception without apperception,” prehension is described as a natural process of unifying remote data. It is what abrogates the traditionally assumed constraint of “simple location,” effectively referring to individuals at locations distant from its own place of occurrence. In short, SMW’s “uncognitive apprehension” appears to be what I have already identified as non-mental perception in PNK, CN, and PR. Our provisional conclusion, then, is the following. For Whitehead, intuition (properly reinterpreted as non-mental perception) is the eminent mode of experience. This would situate Whitehead on the right-hand side of our matrix, with the epistemological intuitionists, which brings us to our

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next question: is he to be placed in the upper quadrant, with Aristotle and Kant, or in the lower quadrant, with the Stoics? I will examine metaphysical criteria for making this determination shortly. Before doing that, I want to examine epistemological criteria, which come down to this: is experiential access to individuals the result of token-reflexive acquaintance or exhaustive specification? 4.1.2. We can translate the present question into Whiteheadian language in the following way. The virtue of non-mental perception is that it can reach concrete individuals because it escapes the finite limitations of mentality. But how does it escape these limitations? Does Whitehead’s sense-awareness actually grasp the infinite complexity of the individual, or does it circumvent the necessity of doing this with the trick of tokenreflexive acquaintance? As a token-reflexive subterfuge for getting to where no thought can actually take us, effective sense-awareness would be a way to short-circuit the infinite path otherwise prescribed by concepts. But as an achievement of synthesis that is no longer mental precisely because it implies a description that is (would have to be) infinite, effective sense-awareness would be the realization of an actual infinity. The latter possibility would have some surprising implications, which we should pause briefly to mention seeing that we will need to return to them later. It cannot be stressed too much that Whitehead thinks of the qualia of sense perception as universals. It is in light of this doctrine that we must consider the possibility that sense-awareness discloses individuals by assimilating their infinite specificity rather than by token-reflexive acquaintance. For this looks a lot like a roundabout rehabilitation of the epistemological logicism we thought Whitehead flatly rejected. But what Whitehead flatly rejects is actually something more specific. He denies universals the capacity to specify an individual insofar as they are functioning mentally. By itself, this does not preclude the possibility that they can also function non-mentally (intuitively) and as such succeed at picking individuals out by their unique specificity. (This second possibility also opens the way to a third possible interpretation: that Whitehead thinks intuition accesses individuals both by token-reflexive indication and by infinite qualitative specification, but discussion of this must be deferred to the very end of this paper.) Granting a crucial role to token-reflexive acquaintance would push Whitehead into the upper quadrant with Aristotle or Kant (or possibly into the lower left quadrant with Leibniz, as I discuss below). Granting senseawareness the power to fully grasp the unique specificity of an individual would push him into the lower quadrant with the Stoics. For even if the Stoics did not stress the infinite character of an individual’s specificity,

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they affirmed the two cardinal theses defining the lower right quadrant of our matrix. First, they endorsed the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, which means they identified individuality with unique specificity. Secondly, while denying thought the capacity to reach all the way to the uniqueness of an individual, they specifically granted this capacity to intuition—at least in the ineffable extreme of discriminatory competence (i.e., katalepsis). Crucially, the success of intuition was not seen as the achievement of token-reflexive acquaintance with the individual, but as the consummation of the same process of specification thought was aiming at—in other words, as a kind of complete specification. It seems obvious at first glance that Whitehead goes with the Stoics. For there can be no doubt that SMW represents thought as failing to conquer something that is simultaneously available to us: “it is impossible to complete the description of an actual occasion by means of concepts” means that finite description fails because the material actually given for description is somehow infinite (in its complexity or nuance, as expressed by the infinite abstractive hierarchy associated with it). This suggests that sense-awareness actually grasps the infinite complexity of individuals and constitutes the standard against which thought is seen to fail. But this conclusion is problematic. Such an infinite complex of eternal objects could only be the object of what PNK calls sense-awareness of objects, not sense-awareness of events, and it is expressly with the latter alone that Whitehead associates the grasp of individuals. This issue is complicated, however, by the fact that sense-awareness of events and sense awareness of objects are not really different acts of sense-awareness. Rather, they are distinct, yet inseparable aspects of one and the same sense-awareness: There is no apprehension of external events apart from recognitions of sense-objects as related to them, and there is no recognition of sense-objects except as in relation to external events.60 The organic philosophy does not hold that the “particular existents” are prehended apart from universals; on the contrary, it holds that they are prehended by the mediation of universals. In other words, each actuality is prehended by means of some element of its own definiteness.61

Nevertheless, it appears that the contact with individuality is precisely what PNK’s sense-awareness of objects and PR’s objectification via eternal objects cannot contribute to the total complex act, and there does not seem to be any reason to qualify this conclusion for the case of an infinitely complex eternal object/object of sense-awareness: [U]niversals are the only elements in the data describable by concepts, because concepts are merely the analytic functioning of universals. But the “exterior things,” although they are not expressible by concepts in respect to their individual particularity, are no less data for feeling; so that the

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It seems, therefore, that we must grant the following two theses: (1) The only thing capable of achieving reference to actual individuals is what PNK calls “event-awareness” and PR calls “perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” (2) Reference to individuals cannot be achieved by means of an infinitely complex sense-object/eternal object, because such an object would pertain only to PNK’s sense-awareness of objects or PR’s objectification via universals. I add, as a third premise, the main thesis of my epistemological analysis of the problem of individuation: (3) Reference to individuals is achieved either by token-reflexive acquaintance or by exhaustive specification. If we grant these three premises, then, by exclusion, we are compelled to conclude that, for Whitehead, reference to individuals must be achieved by an essential token-reflexivity. This conclusion is evidently corroborated by the opening arguments of CN, to which I now turn. CN begins with reflections on what it means to know nature. In this context Whitehead lays enormous stress on the fundamental and indispensable role played by a purely indexical component in perception. Any account of how nature can be known must begin, he says, with an appeal to the inexplicable demonstrative power ingredient in senseawareness: “something perceived is perceived as an entity which is the terminus of […] sense-awareness, something which for thought is beyond the fact of that sense-awareness.” Thought, in other words, has to be about something that is not thought; perception has to be of something that exists independent of perception. Sounding like the later Franz Brentano, Whitehead says: “All thought has to be about things.” To be thought, thought must transcend itself and make contact with what is beyond thought. But the possibility of self-transcendence is given to thought only by sense-awareness, which is possible in turn only because senseawareness transcends itself. Whitehead thinks the key to this selftranscendence is indexical or demonstrative reference (what might nowadays be called the crucial causal element that distinguishes “wide” content from “narrow” content), which is always embedded in senseawareness. Thought has a descriptive content that helps to conceptually disambiguate an act of demonstrative reference, but cannot explain it or substitute for it. That which thought is about is therefore not well indicated

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by a description of any sort (misdescription would otherwise be impossible), but rather by a demonstrative phrase like the pronoun “it” when employed in unambiguous contexts. However much the uniqueness of reference depends on conceptual disambiguation, there remains an indispensable achievement of causal reference that no amount of conceptual specification could have achieved on its own. Similarly, senseawareness has a describable content, but is not reducible to this describable content: misperception would otherwise be impossible. The indexical moment is always fundamental. Consider the following two passages from CN: The “it’ […] presupposes that thought has seized on the entity as a bare objective for consideration. […] The entity is so disclosed as a relatum in the complex which is nature. It dawns on an observer because of its relations; but it is an objective for thought in its own bare individuality. Thought cannot proceed otherwise; namely, it cannot proceed without the ideal bare “it” which is speculatively [roughly: successfully—meaning the reference has been understood] demonstrated.63 No characteristic of nature which is immediately posited for knowledge by sense-awareness can be explained. It is impenetrable by thought, in the sense that its peculiar essential character which enters into experience by sense-awareness is for thought merely the guardian of its individuality as a bare entity. Thus for thought “red” is merely a definite entity, though for awareness “red” has the content of its individuality. The transition from the “red” of awareness to the “red” of thought is accompanied by a definite loss of content […] This loss in the transition to thought is compensated by the fact that thought is communicable whereas sense-awareness is incommunicable.64

In the passages intervening between the above two quotations, Whitehead systematically contrasts the role of demonstration,65 which is “impenetrable to thought” with the role of description, which obviously employs universals. From these comments it is easy to extract Whitehead’s position regarding the relative importance of intuition and conception (thought), but also regarding the mechanism by which intuition achieves what thought cannot. By itself, no amount of description ever gets to real things, while demonstration does. Even if demonstration always presupposes a certain amount of description (which is to be expected if they are, as we established above, inseparable), what demonstration finally achieves is something for which no description (not even an infinite one) could substitute: the demonstrative indication of something beyond the content of experience, which nothing can vouchsafe except causal interaction with the thing being experienced. Demonstration is not something infinitely more nuanced than thought (a difference in quantity), but something wholly other and “impenetrable” to it (a difference in quality).

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If this conclusion is correct, what are we to make of the discussion in SMW’s chapter on abstraction, which seems clearly to imply that intuition differs from thought precisely in that it discloses the infinite specificity of individuals, while thought does not? I will come back to this problem of reconciliation below. 4.1.3. Suppose we are (for the time being) satisfied with the conclusion that Whitehead belongs with those who insist on token-reflexive acquaintance as the only mode of access to individuals: we now face a third and more difficult question. Why exactly is this demonstrative intuition necessary? There are, after all, two possible reasons, each having very different implications. Is demonstrative intuition necessary because, although individuality is simply unique specificity, it is in each case an infinite specificity, making it impossible for us, with our finite means, to grasp an individual through its specificity? If so, the problem comes down to this: experience is always finite, while individuality is infinite. Hence, a finite trick for targeting individuals must be found, and this would be token-reflexive acquaintance. Or, on the contrary, is demonstrative intuition necessary because individuality involves a singularity beyond specificity, beyond even infinite specificity? If so, the possibility of “infinite experience” would not necessarily be excluded, but at the same time it would never be sufficient for access to individuals. In the former case, intuition would be the eminent mode of access only by default. It would really be a remedial form of intentionality that succeeds at targeting an individual by the effective but undignified means of acquaintance, superior to thought only because thought, despite its intrinsically more dignified means of specification by universals descriptors, fails to achieve any reference at all when faced with the infinite specificity of individuals. On this account, individuality would still be unique specificity, as the Stoics or Leibniz believed, even if it could not be known by specification. Accordingly, intuition would play the role specifically ascribed to it by Leibniz, rather than the Stoics. It would have the same value that, according to Leibniz, a posteriori knowledge has for the finite mind. Empirical familiarity (a posteriori knowledge) offers to the finite mind something it would otherwise not experience at all. But an infinite mind knows a priori, without recourse to any empirical familiarity, the same truths that a finite mind is only familiar with empirically. Similarly, what token reflexive acquaintance would offer is fundamentally more than what finite thought could ever yield us, but fundamentally inferior to what infinite thought would yield if it were possible. The critical point is that, given the assumed nature of individuality, specification rather than acquaintance would be the ideal way to access it. It would only be the

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finitude of experience, not the nature of individuality itself that would keep us from accessing it by specification. In the latter case, however, where individuality is singularity beyond specificity, intuition would be truly eminent because individuality would be something as qualitatively different from specificity as demonstration is from description, just as Aristotle or Kant believed. Here it is the very nature of individuality that prevents us from accessing it by specification. But here we have already crossed over to the metaphysical part of our examination of Whitehead’s theory of individuation. So let’s return now to the chapter on abstraction in SMW and, looking more closely at the theory of the infinite abstractive hierarchy, see what it implies about the principium individuationis.

4.2. What Constitutes Individuality for Whitehead? In SMW Whitehead associates individuality with a description of infinite complexity. Limiting ourselves first to this text alone and leaving aside anything we have just learned from other texts: in allegiance to which faction should we construe Whitehead’s theory of individuation in SMW? The answer to this question will depend on how we answer another question, which we must consider first: is Whitehead proposing the infinite abstractive hierarchy (hereafter: IAH) as a sufficient or just a necessary condition of individuality? Because the answer to this question is far from obvious, it will be instructive to consider both possibilities. Suppose first that the IAH is intended as a sufficient condition of individuation. In that case, it is evident that Whitehead would be proposing an essentially Leibnizian theory of individuation. The significance of the infinite abstractive hierarchy would be that all individuals do differ in specie. Individuality would therefore be the same as specificity. Depending on whether we thought of intuition as grasping this specificity or just tracking it by way of the makeshift trick of token-reflexive acquaintance, we could place Whitehead in either of the two lower quadrants—with the Stoics or with Leibniz. But we must note at once that there is a small but decisive qualification we would have to make to this interpretation, and it would go a long way towards mitigating the logicism of an otherwise very Leibnizian viewpoint. Individuality would be infinite specificity (a point that Leibniz concedes but does not stress as essential to the very nature of individuality). So Whitehead, on this interpretation, would ingeniously get to have it both

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ways. All individuals would differ in specie only, which means their differences would indeed be purely conceptual and reducible to purely universal qualifications. But each individual would nevertheless be infinitely nuanced or infinitely specific, which means that individuality could never be reduced to any finite set of universal qualifications. In principle, individuality would be something ineffable, something that always transcends conceptual thinking because mentality is always finite. From this perspective Whitehead’s theory of individuation would seem to approximate more to the intuitionistic faction, which always emphasized the impossibility of capturing the individual in concepts alone and consequently the indispensability of something extra-logical, something extra-conceptual (aisthesis, intuitio, Anschauung, or token-reflexive reference) in becoming aware of or knowing an individual. According to this interpretation of the IAH, we would have to say Whitehead disagrees with the intuitionistic faction, insofar as he does not believe that concepts (universals, eternal objects) are intrinsically incapable of specifying an individual. On the contrary, eternal objects would be all the forms of definiteness that things can have. As eternal objects functioning in an infinite abstractive hierarchy, “concepts” would—on this interpretation—constitute individuality. But Whitehead would agree with the intuitionistic faction as soon as concepts are construed psychologically as aspects of mentation. As such they are always, like everything mental, irremediably finite: each one of them will be finite in complexity, just as every composite description will be finite in its complexity (since the total number of concepts employed for any characterization will also be limited). As a function of mentation, then, universals will always be incapable of sufficient acuity to seize an individual by its unique description. But what is crucial here is that every individual would, at least in principle, have a unique description: it would differ from all other individuals in ways that did not depend on predicates relative to a token-reflexive anchor. So individuality would be infinite specificity, which transcends thought, but does not transcend specification by universals. On this interpretation, Whitehead’s position would appear to come very close to that of the Stoics, who endorsed the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, but denied thought the capacity to reach all the way to the uniqueness of an individual. Before considering the alternative interpretation, let’s note that there is an obvious problem with interpreting the IAH as a sufficient condition of individuation: it appears to be flatly contradicted by PR. Consequently, it seems we would have to assume Whitehead changed his position between SMW and PR in order to preserve this interpretation of the IAH. The testimony of PR is twofold, involving one of Whitehead’s many forensic

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principles as well as direct statements. Regarding forensics, we have to consider the relevance of the pejorative “subjectivist principle,” which Whitehead considers a fundamental fallacy: the idea that the datum in the act of experience can be adequately analyzed purely in terms of universals. Interpreting the IAH as a sufficient condition of individuality implies the following questionable thesis: the datum in the act of experience can be adequately analyzed in terms of an infinitely complex set of universals. The question is whether the qualification “infinite” salvages the subjectivist principle. Apparently it does not. Whitehead does think there is something of value in the subjectivist principle that deserves to be salvaged: it has to do with the way the most primary data for philosophy will always be facts having the form my perception that S is P rather than of the logically more straightforward form S is P. But in PR Whitehead salvages the subjectivist principle through a reform that does not involve the infinite abstractive hierarchy (although to be sure the role of the IAH in individuation, perhaps as a necessary conditions, is not denied either), but rather involves the insistence that the objective relata of experience are themselves particulars, not universals. Proposed as a sufficient condition of individuation, however, the IAH would suggest the contrary: that the relata of concrete experience are not so much particulars as infinitely complex eternal objects. This reminds us of the fundamental difference in roles between “sense-awareness of objects” and “sense-awareness of events” in PNK and CN. The IAH, since it has to do only with universals, seems relevant only to sense-awareness of objects. No improvements to the objective correlate of sense-awareness of objects (even making it infinite in complexity) can achieve what sense-awareness of events achieves, and it is only by recognizing the sui generis achievement of the latter that the valuable element in the subjectivist principle can be salvaged. As for direct statements, nothing could be more explicit than the following: [T]he “organic doctrine” demands a real essence in the sense of a complete analysis of the relations, and inter-relations of the actual entities which are formative of the actual entity in question, and an “abstract essence” in which the specified actual entities are replaced by the notions of unspecified entities in such a combination; this is the notion of an unspecified actual entity. Thus, the real essence [of an actual entity] involves real objectifications of specified actual entities; the abstract essence [of the same actual entity] is a complex eternal object. There is nothing self-contradictory in the thought of many actual entities with the same abstract essence; but there can only be one actual entity with the same real essence. For the real essence indicates “where” the entity is, that is to say, its status in the real world; the abstract essence omits the particularity of the status.66

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Whitehead seems to be saying the same thing with the following briefer declaration: One actual entity has a status among other actual entities, not expressible wholly in terms of contrasts between eternal objects.67

Individuality must be something beyond specificity, even infinite specificity, if there is more to an entity than what can be specified by contrasts of universals or, again, if there is no contradiction in the thought of multiple individuals satisfying the exact same type, where the type is specified by the complete ordered set of eternal objects characterizing it. According to these passages in PR, individuation seems to involve something beyond what eternal objects can specify, beyond what could be said about an entity presumably even in an infinite description. It requires, namely, the causal embeddedness of that entity in the real world. The individual is such and such a type of entity in this particular set of relations to other actual entities. This is consistent with the position we found Whitehead advocating in CN: causal embeddedness is the anchor for the token-reflexive acquaintance required for individuals to be recognizable. If this is Whitehead’s position in PR, it explains the great stress he lays on token-reflexivity: It must be remembered that the phrase “actual world” is like “yesterday” and “tomorrow,” in that it alters its meaning according to standpoint.68 Just as Descartes said, “this body is mine;” so he should have said, “this actual world is mine. My process of “being myself” is my origination from my possession of the world.69

Taken together, these last four passages from PR suggest that individuation involves something unspecifiable that only token-reflexive acquaintance can discriminate. We should briefly consider the possibility that Whitehead thinks this token-reflexive element is only necessary for our discrimination of individuals because we are unable to pursue the process of conceptual specification to infinity. This would leave the door open to the possibility that in PR Whitehead does think the IAH is a sufficient condition of individuation, but not a sufficient condition of our ability to discriminate individuals. It would, in other words, be a sufficient metaphysical condition but not a sufficient epistemological condition of individuation. This will indeed suffice for a reconciliation of SMW’s emphasis on the infinite specificity of individuals with CN’s emphasis on an exclusively token-reflexive access to them, but it will not suffice for a reconciliation between SMW and PR. For in the longer passage from PR quoted above Whitehead says quite clearly that there can be multiple individuals of the same type, which implies that what SMW called the IAH is not a sufficient condition of individuation. Therefore, if Whitehead did

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believe that the IAH was a sufficient condition of individuation in SMW, he seems to adopt a new theory in PR. And if he does jettison the IAH as a sufficient condition of individuation, then his silence in PR on its residual status leaves its role in PR’s theory of individuation uncertain. Does Whitehead abandon it entirely—because perhaps it is superfluous to his new theory of individuation? Or does he think of it merely as demoted in status so that it continues to play a role that is not insignificant, even if it is diminished, and that can be inferred, even if it is not discussed—the role perhaps of a merely necessary condition of individuation? The other prima facie possibility is that in SMW Whitehead was proposing the IAH as a necessary condition of individuation only. If this is the case, there is not necessarily a conflict between SMW and PR. Although not mentioned explicitly in PR, we can consistently think of the IAH as continuing to play the same role it played in SMW. Let’s distinguish these two interpretations of the IAH as the strong interpretation (IAH is a sufficient condition of individuations) and the weak interpretation (IAH is only a necessary condition of individuation). The point we have arrived at so far is the following: the strong interpretation requires us to hold that PR rejects the position of SMW, while the weak interpretation allows us to view Whitehead’s development as cumulatively consistent. But the strong interpretation also raises questions about continuity between SMW and CN or PNK. For the earlier books are very much like PR in stressing demonstrative indication rather than specification in connection with individuals. Construing the IAH as a sufficient condition of individuation seems to require us to hold that SMW deviates— in emphasis if not in doctrine—from PNK and CN, while PR expressly contradicts SMW and reaches back to the doctrine that SMW either contradicted or at least refused to emphasize. This seems prima facie implausible and militates against the strong interpretation. On the other hand, there are, as I argue below, decisive considerations that militate against the weak interpretation: there can in fact be no doubt that PR holds every individual to be typologically unique, which means that multiple individuals of the same type are actually impossible. This, of course, cries out for reconciliation with the passages just cited from PR, where Whitehead envisions the logical possibility of multiple identical instances and seems to give emphasis to the token-reflexive singularity rather than the infinite specificity of individuals. (This parallels the problem left unresolved in the previous section: how to reconcile the implication of SMW that intuition discloses the infinite specificity of individuals with the clear statements of CN and PR that disclosure of individuals is tokenreflexive?)

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The interpretation I propose is therefore neither of those just given, but one that is more complex. The problem is that we have still not taken account of two distinctions that are crucial to Whitehead’s theory of individuation. One is the distinction between real and abstract essence; the other is the distinction between subjects and objects/superjects. Taking proper account of these distinctions, I believe it is not only possible to reconcile the ostensibly conflicting passages of PR with one another, but also possible to reconcile a strong interpretation of the IAH with the possibility of cumulative consistency. Thus, although it is obvious that Whitehead, as he progresses from PNK and CN to SMW and finally to PR, continues to develop a more and more complex and nuanced theory of individuation, there is, I suggest, at least one consistent reading of the final doctrine that offers a strong interpretation of the IAH and nevertheless does not require us to hold that SMW rejects the position of PNK and CN or that PR rejects the position of SMW. There are two key elements to the proposed interpretation. One is that we apply the distinction between real and abstract essence to the IAH itself. We will then discover that the IAH as abstract essence is (in a special and restricted sense) capable of multiple instantiations and thus only a necessary condition of individuation, but as real essence is necessarily unique and thus a sufficient condition. (By the same token, we will see that only the abstract essence is externally related to its instances, while the real essence must be internally related.) The implication of this state of affairs is curious. Because the abstract IAH is infinitely specific without being individual, it seems to follow that individuality is more than specificity. But this means that the IAH as real essence, because it is individual, must be something more than its own specificity. How does the IAH as real essence succeed at becoming more than a function of universals so as to possess a singularity beyond its own specificity? Understanding how this could be requires us to look at the role of subjectivity in producing the infinite specificity of the superject, which is the second key element of the proposed interpretation. However, what we will find is paradoxical: that the conditions for the emergence of new individuals in the world are such that every individual is of necessity specifically unique, which means that the infinite specificity of the IAH is, after all, sufficient for individuation! This seems to suggest that any further singularity is superfluous (if not non-existent). But if this is the case, then in what does the difference between the real and the abstract essence consist? Why is the same infinite specificity in the one case inadequate and in the other adequate for individuation? I propose that the only difference is the following: in the abstract essence the synthesis of eternal objects is not

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real but possible, while in the real essence alone is the synthesis real, the product of becoming that is contingent, historically dated, and subjectively motivated. This interpretation does have one somewhat unorthodox implication for Whitehead scholarship, which is that complex eternal objects are not eternal in the same way that simple ones are. It is only the possibility of their synthesis, not their synthesis that is eternal. Let’s reconsider our approach before we proceed to grounding the proposed interpretation.

4.3. Does Whitehead’s Theory of Individuation Fall in the Blind Spot of Our Analytic Matrix? Before anything else, let’s take note of a possibility that our analytic schema, while not prohibiting, nevertheless does not specifically envision. To say, as I have, that for purposes of individuation haecceitas would be superfluous to unique specificity (and vice versa) is not to say that they are incompatible. There is nothing contradictory in the notion of an individual whose individuality is overdetermined, possessing both unique specificity and haecceitas. Whitehead in fact strongly supports both theories of individuation—sometimes in the same book (e.g., PR). It is, of course, possible that he is vacillating back and forth, but we should not reject out of hand the possibility that he has reasons for wanting to combine both theories. In fact, I shall make the following argument. Just as phenomenology identifies what it calls a “genetic” fallacy—mistaking the conditions of a thing’s coming-to-be for a description of what it is— process philosophy identifies a complementary mistake, which we could call a “descriptive” fallacy: forgetting that what things are is something they have come to be. The descriptive fallacy results in the attempt to understand what things are by means of a timeless description as though they were wholly static phenomena (essences). The superfluousness of haecceitas to unique specificity will turn out to be a finding of “pure description.” Avoiding the descriptive fallacy means recognizing important ways that unique specificity depends on haecceitas, and this, I propose, motivates Whitehead’s embrace of both theories of individuation. I begin by showing how our analytic matrix is limited by an implicit descriptive bias. So far we have considered the problem of individuation in terms of the traditional token-type distinction, distinguishing a specificity theory of individuation from a singularity theory of individuation based on the answer to the question: can there be more than one token of the same type?

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If the answer to this question is yes, then there must be something more to an individual’s singularity than its specificity. In looking for this “more,” we broached a number of traditional possibilities, such as accidental or relative predicates, space-time location or realization at different loci of the Receptacle, a formal property of thisness (haecceitas) added to the essence, or, as in Aristotle’s composite substances, the contingent actuality of the type, which is ipso facto the singularity of an instance. But so far we have throughout our investigation taken a static view of the token-type relation, as if they were both given and we could compare them to decide what, if anything, the token possesses that the type does not. This is indeed a very common approach to the question. For example, the nineteenth century Platonizing logicians we have already alluded to postulated three realms of “being”: the first was the material realm of physical nature; the second was the psychological realm of mental events; the third was the eternal realm of universals and the complex universals we are calling “types.” The first realm is in both space and time; the second is temporal only; and the third realm is neither spatial nor temporal. The third realm in other words is entirely static. Consequently, by taking a material or psychological individual at an instant we can compare it with its static type and ask how they differ. (A static view of the token-type relation can also be taken by those who dismiss the third realm and see universals as mental entities: they are comparing tokens given in intuition and taken at an instant with their concepts of them as fixed in language or discursive analysis.) We have drawn a clear distinction between Whitehead and those who take a purely psychological view of concepts, but in the same breath we have insinuated a static view of the token-type relation into Whitehead: contrasting him with the psychological logicians by comparing him to the Platonizing logicians who postulated the third realm. Whitehead seems to invite this comparison by talking about “complex eternal objects” much the same way he talks about simple eternal objects and by stressing that eternal objects are related externally to their instances. But setting the problem up in this way ignores some of Whitehead’s own caveats and in the end makes it impossible to discover the difference between a thing’s abstract essence and its real essence. Since it treats the abstract essence as nothing but a hypostatized real essence, the abstract essence contains ipso facto everything that the real essence contains, and we are thus sent looking in strange places for what surplus the real essence might actually have over the abstract one. Intimately bound up with this Platonizing view of types as inhabiting a static, eternally pre-given realm of forms is an equally Platonizing view of the realm of instantiation. If types are externally related to their instances, then how many instances there are is a matter of indifference to the type, and so to the instances as well. Thus, our tendency

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in this paper has been to think of tokens as inhabiting a kind of Platonic Receptacle, where they stand in a loose array, mutually independent from one another: they participate in forms but are not necessarily or essentially related to one another. Whitehead’s position diverges from the one just described in ways we need to examine. The metaphysical scheme Whitehead advances in PR can be summarized as follows. Each real individual in the universe has two aspects to its existence. The primary or originative aspect is the process by which it comes to be. This is a process by means of which an individual arises at a discrete locus within the extensive continuum by absorbing, reconciling, and concretizing the ambient causal influences converging at that locus from all the antecedent individuals in the world. This process Whitehead calls concrescence. It is driven by the goal of achieving complete determinacy in relation to every possibility (yes, every possibility—hence the constitutive relevance of eternal objects to this process!). As long as this process is still underway, the entity in question is a subject. But once this process has achieved its goal, its animating nisus, because satisfied, expires, and what is left is something static, which Whitehead calls a superject. (Between process and stasis there is a moment of consummated self-enjoyment, the discussion of which I defer to the end of this paper.) Development and impulsion belong to a subject seeking concretion; stasis and permanence belong to it as a superject that has become concrete. Now what we have done so far in this paper is to assume that our tokens are superjects and to ask how they stand in comparison with their types. But by ignoring the dynamic aspect of instantiation we exaggerated the aloofness of the type. The relationship of the subject to the type is obviously more fundamental and illuminating than the relationship of the superject to the type, and we must consider this first, even if our ultimate goal is to understand the individuality of superjects. With Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme in mind, we must consider two fundamental issues: (1) what is the status of the subject’s individuality prior to the perfected realization of the infinitely nuanced superject it resolves into, and (2) what is the status of the IAH prior to its realization in the superject, i.e., what is the relationship between the IAH and the subject realizing it? (1) If the subject is (at least for most of its career) an inchoate individual that is seeking, but has not achieved, complete individuation, in what sense can we even say that the subject is an individual? And if it is not an individual, then what is it? Some kind of universal? Surely not some kind of universal since a subject is the agent of its own becoming and only individuals can be agents. The solution to this problem brings us to a theory of individuation that appears so far to have been overlooked in this paper.

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Despite the many theories we have looked at, we have considered only one type of individuation: individuation as the differential value distinguishing separate things. But this is individuation as a kind of “being for another,” as Hegel would call it, and it is Hegel to whom we owe the theoretical grasp of a different kind of individuation: being-for-self. Self-reference constitutes a unique form of individuation that does not depend on any differential value. We can imagine twins who are identical in all respects, including their personalities and experiences, but they would nevertheless be distinct individuals—not because of any difference between them, but quite on the contrary because of something they have in common. Each of them instantiates the same relationship of immediate self-reference. Being self-related makes something ipso facto different from everything else that is self-related! That is the peculiar nature of selfhood. Each self is unique because it is related to itself rather than another, even if every self has exactly this property. That makes selfhood look a lot like haecceitas. Distinct selves are different in a sui generis way that defies any attempt to describe it or specify it conceptually with universals. In fact, self-reference is the ultimate form of token-reflexivity and a precondition of all other forms of token reflexivity: here and now have meaning only for something that experiences itself as here and now, and nothing can experience itself as anything if it does not experience itself. From these observations we are entitled to conclude that self-reference as a form of individuation has not been overlooked in the earlier pages of this discussion, but rather made its appearance disguised as haecceitas whenever this was understood as intrinsically involving some kind of token reflexive acquaintance. It was not necessarily implied when haecceitas was conceived as being metaphysically independent of an epistemological anchor of this sort, which is how Aristotle or Scotus seem to understand it. But whenever token-reflexive acquaintance was seen as essential to what individuation is (and not just to knowing it), we were either dealing with or presupposing self-reference as the anchor (or null-point) of possible indication, where indication is functioning as a principium individuationis. Because Whitehead’s subjects are to a significant extent self-referential, aiming at their own concretion, they are individuals in this Hegelian sense. This makes our picture of individuation in Whitehead more complex than we first assumed. Let’s distinguish between differential individuation and self-referential individuation terminologically as d-individuation and sindividuation. Then we can say that subjects in Whitehead are—until the very moment of their final consummation—necessarily not d-individuated, but that they are s-individuated because they are the process of aiming at their own d-individuation.

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Now let’s remind ourselves of our original question (can there be multiple individuals of the same type?) using our newly refined language. It seems that multiple subjects of the same type should be possible. For to begin with, subjects are not necessarily d-individuated. Insofar as they are subjects still becoming they have an underdetermined d-individuality, which would thus allow for multiple instantiation the way abstraction in sense three (from part one) does. Properly speaking, subjects still becoming are s-individuated. (The importance of this will become clear later when we discuss conscious experience.) But it belongs to the nature of sindividuation to allow for multiple instantiation. There can be as many things as you like that all say “I,” and despite being identical they will all be successfully referring to something different. But what about dindividuals (superjects)? Can there be d-individuals according to Whitehead that are instances of the exact same type (namely, of the same IAH)? If there can be, then the IAH is not a sufficient condition of individuation; if there cannot be identical individuals, then the IAH is sufficient. (2) To answer this last question we need to clarify the relationship between a subject and the IAH it ultimately realizes, for the question comes down to this: can more than one subject realize the same type? Determining this will help clarify what status the IAH can have “independent” of its realization, that is, in its status as “abstract essence.” Let us note, first of all, that two s-individuals cannot aim at the same IAH for the simple reason that they cannot aim at the IAH at all: it cannot have the status of a mental object. Mentality is always finite. Thus, while only mentality can drive or motivate a synthesis, only a physical synthesis can be infinite. To know if there can be two identical individuals thus requires us to look at the conditions of physical synthesis, and we will see in fact that each physical synthesis must be typologically unique. Whitehead thinks that each thing in the universe is related internally to all other things that have, relative to it, already come to be. Being a token means being somewhere, and being somewhere means having a perspective on the universe that is unique to that locus. Each thing constitutes its own individuality as a double function of the singularity of the universe and its unique perspective on that one universe. It is easy to see that under these circumstances no two things can be completely identical in type. In order to be identical in type to something else, an actual occasion would have to be identical with something from which it is removed by some finite distance in space-time and with which it does not share a perspective. What it is would therefore have to be (at least in part) independent of its perspective on the universe, which is to say that its relation to (at least some of) the rest of nature would have to be external. Whitehead’s idea that the universe constitutes an

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organic whole of which all the parts are internally related precludes the possibility of any two individuals being identical.70 These considerations are conclusive and force us to admit the IAH as a sufficient condition of individuality in PR. Each individual is necessarily associated with a unique IAH. The question we must now address is how to reconcile this with Whitehead’s statements, also found in PR, about multiple identical instances and token-reflexive individuality, which seem to imply that individuality is more than specificity. The first thing to note is that the token reflexivity broached in PR (and, by retrospective implication, in CN) characterizes the individuality of subjects and the extrinsically denominated individuality of things indicated within the token-reflexive experience of subjects, not the intrinsic individuality of superjects, which should exist independently of their being experienced. Infinite specificity is associated only with the latter kind of individuality, the d-individuality of superjects. There is therefore no contradiction in Whitehead’s ascribing an individuating role to both specificity and token-reflexivity. The latter individuates subjects, the former superjects. Secondly, Whitehead is clear that it is the abstract essence, not the real essence, that can be multiply instantiated. This means we are quite safe in letting infinite specificity be a sufficient condition of real individuation, but this exacerbates the remaining question: what does the abstract essence lack so as to fall short of picking out an individual uniquely. Doesn’t it of necessity have the same infinite specificity as the real essence? I suspect that our mistake in approaching the problem of individuation in Whitehead was to ask in the first place if the same IAH could have multiple instances, as if the IAH had some being independent of its instances. And it is true that Whitehead speaks of “complex eternal objects” as though they existed eternally apart from their contingent instances. But this cannot be quite right. The crucial point I want to stress is that eternal objects are, as Whitehead himself insists, inherently abstract in sense one (from part one) above: the simple eternal objects all remain in the “isolation” of their disparate individual essences. Now what can this mean but that “complex eternal object” is a sort of oxymoron? Can eternal objects really be eternally pre-given in their manifold possible complexities? Isn’t it the possibility of their combinations that is pre-given? Thus, Whitehead says, “we are discussing possibility; so that every relationship which is possible is thereby in the realm of possibility.”71 Whitehead’s simple eternal objects must indeed have some kind of third-realm, Platonic-type being by virtue of being the ultimate conditions of all possibility in a world where possibility “actually” exists. But apart from this default being in the case of simples, eternal objects don’t seem very much like denizens of the third

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realm. On the contrary, their composition into a complex seems to be parasitic upon the actual occasions that realize such combinations, rather than the occasions depending on the complex eternal objects.72 What I called in part one the relevance of the abstract to the concrete is the relevance of a possible, not an actual complex of eternal objects. A complex eternal object as such—not a possible one but one that enjoys the real togetherness of its component—can exist only as realized in an instance, which happens in one of only two ways: physically or mentally. The IAH cannot exist as something mentally realized because mentality is never infinite. The conclusion is that the IAH can only exist as something physically realized in the superject. One important consequence that follows from this is that the real essence is internally related to its necessarily unique instance. And this is just what Whitehead seems to be saying in the passages quoted above. But there is no reason why the abstract essence—the possibility of a synthesis—need be internally related to an instance. Indeed, it cannot be internally related since it remains possible whether there is an instance or not. This allows us to see why there is nothing contradictory in the idea of multiple individuals with the same abstract essence, even though no two individuals can actually be identical in type. For, as we noted before, if a type is externally related to its instances, it will be a matter of indifference to the type how many instances there are. There is consequently no logical reason why the abstract essence could not have multiple identical individuals, even if one and the same universe, because it is organically integrated and has the coherence of a Gestalt, could not contain both of them. There is no reason, for example, why the same IAH could not adequately correspond to one individual in each of a multitude of possible universes.

5. Conclusion I return now to the question how we are to classify Whitehead’s theory of individuation. The first conclusion to draw from the foregoing analysis is that Whitehead belongs, as we originally suspected, with those who think of intuition as an eminent mode of experience. His logicist tendencies are metaphysical, not epistemological. But in what does the eminence of intuition consist? We queried earlier if intuition (the “sense-awareness” of CN, the “perception in the mode of causal efficacy” of S, the “physical prehensions” of PR) was to be understood as the realization of an actual infinity. It is clear that thought is deficient because it tries to grasp the individual through its specificity and cannot reach all the way to the

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individual’s infinite specificity. It is not clear, however, if intuition transcends thought because it is the realization of the actual infinity thought was aiming for, or only because it is token-reflexive. To be sure, concrescence is the realization of an actual infinity. But at the point where concrescence is consummated in an infinitely specific individual, the occasion in question is no longer a subject and no longer has any experience of other occasions at all. Must we, by contrast, say that as long as an occasion is still a subject it experiences an intuition that necessarily falls short of the infinite specificity of the world it is intuiting? This would mean that intuition never grasps the individuality of its objects by their unique specificity, but only by their causal relation to the act of intuition. I think this is going to far, however, for Whitehead clearly envisions a moment of consummated subjectivity, where the complete (infinite) determinacy that subjectivity was seeking has been realized, but is still being subjectively enjoyed. And, in fact, his description of this state is his gloss on the meaning of “individuality” in his philosophy: Individuality—The individual immediacy of an occasion is the final unity of subjective form, which is the occasion as an absolute reality. This immediacy is its moment of sheer individuality, bounded on either side by essential relativity. The occasion arises from relevant objects, and perishes into the status of an object for other occasions. But it enjoys its decisive moment of absolute self-attainment as emotional unity.73

From this passage I think we are entitled to conclude that for every occasion there is a moment of overlap, where it is still an s-individual, but already a d-individual. This implies the overdetermined individuality I previously suggested as an overlooked possibility in our analytic matrix. Furthermore, it can be adequately expressed in the language of PNK, supporting my contention of continuity in Whitehead’s theory of individuation: at the same time that the individual is, as sense-awareness of events, causally related to the real conditions of its own becoming (and so refers to itself and its world token-reflexively), this same individual’s sense-awareness of objects will, as an intuition of the same antecedent world, be the realization of an actual infinity, describable only by an IAH. In the moment of absolute self-enjoyment, sense-awareness of objects therefore intuits the unique specificity (d-individuality) of the world and constitutes the unique specificity (d-individuality) of the subject, while sense-awareness of events intuits the token-reflexive singularity of the world (its causal relation to the subject) and constitutes the token-reflexive singularity (s-individuality) of the subject. This overdetermined individuality puts Whitehead’s theory in both the upper and lower right hand quadrants of our matrix.

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It bears stressing that individuality in the moment of absolute selfenjoyment is overdetermined both epistemologically and metaphysically: epistemologically, because the subject intuits the individuality of objects both token-reflexively by their causal efficacy and typologically by their unique specificity; metaphysically, because the subject constitutes its own individuality as both a self-referential singularity and a unique specificity. It remains for us to determine what the situation is before and after this phase of overlap between the entity’s s-individuality and d-individuality. But first we must come back to the difficult question we deferred when we decided to talk about eminent experience of individuals as opposed to eminent cognition of individuals. The infinitely nuanced intuition I have just described is necessarily “unconscious.” So if we are really asking about eminent cognition (i.e., conscious experience), we need to draw a different conclusion. Consciousness is, after all, something “mental,” so consciousness of perception in the mode of causal efficacy would, presumably, not be any more able to access individuals by their specificity than a description overtly using universals. We can be sure of this conclusion not only on the grounds just adduced (that consciousness is something mental), but also on the grounds that consciousness is incompatible with the consummated d-individuation of the state Whitehead calls absolute self-enjoyment. Whitehead says expressly that “[n]o actual entity can be conscious of its own satisfaction; for such knowledge would be a component in the process, and would thereby alter the satisfaction.”74 Since conscious experience can belong only to a pre-terminal phase of selfrealization, it can never be or be the experience of d-individuality. Therefore, to the very extent that it is conscious, “consciousness of perception in the mode of causal efficacy” will be unable to grasp individuals by their unique specificity. Cognition will always have to fall back on its token-reflexive involvement in the world it is experiencing. These conclusions about the individuality of the subject and object of conscious intuition can be generalized and apply to the individuality of the subject and object of any experience prior to the moment of absolute selfenjoyment. This answers the question of the nature of individuality prior to absolute self-enjoyment: it is (and intuits) token-reflexive individuality only. The status of individuality after the moment of absolute self-enjoyment comes down to this: is Whitehead a metaphysical intuitionist or a metaphysical logicist about the individuality of the superject? This is the main question that has been driving my whole analysis of Whitehead’s theory of individuation. Although the outline of my answer has already been given above, I propose to make one last indirect approach to this

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question by asking what is the eminent way of experiencing the superject’s individuality. Specifically, is the token-reflexivity of conscious intuition, which has just been elucidated, an eminent or a deficient mode of experiencing individuals? For if it is deficient, then by implication the only individuality intrinsically possessed by the superject must be the typological individuality of unique specificity. But if it is eminent, then by implication the superject must, in addition to its unique specificity, possess an intrinsic haecceitas (an intrinsic non-typological individuality), for this alone could be the object of a token-reflexive acquaintance functioning as an eminent mode of access to individuality. Let’s note that the token-reflexivity of conscious intuition is precisely what Whitehead was describing in the extended passages quoted above from CN. It looks in some respects like intuition as Leibniz understood it: effective in putting us in relation to individuals by the trick of tokenreflexive acquaintance, but fundamentally lacking in clarity as to their specificity. Whitehead’s concept of conscious intuition would therefore seem to belong in the lower left quadrant, with Leibniz and others who think of intuition as an indexical substitute for the clarity of an infinite definition, although in Whitehead’s case it would be a substitute for something quasi-Stoic: an infinitely specific intuition. But this assumes, along with Leibniz, that the intuited individual possesses only unique specificity so that knowing it by token-reflexive acquaintance is a deficient way of accessing its individuality. This seems to be a sensible conclusion. For the superject is, by definition, no longer s-individuated. Therefore, it cannot derive a more-than-specific singularity (a non-typological singularity) from self-reference. Where else can it derive such singularity? Perhaps it is only in relation to other sindividuals that it has any such singularity, that is, insofar as it is an object of their experience standing in causal relation to them. But this is singularity by extrinsic denomination and would obviously be a poor substitute for experiencing its intrinsic individuality, guaranteeing that conscious intuition is an essentially deficient mode of experiencing the object’s individuality. If this is not Whitehead’s view, the problem is to see how the non-typological singularity of an actual occasion can keep from “evaporating” as it turns into the superject. On the interpretation advanced in this paper, Whitehead is both a metaphysical intuitionist and a metaphysical logicist not only regarding the individuality of the subject, but also regarding the individuality of the superject. In the case of the superject, however, this overdetermination is extremely hard to pin down. It comes down to the peculiar way that the superject both is and is not more than its specificity: the superject contains

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nothing more than its infinite description would contain, and yet it possesses an individuality that even its infinite description would lack. The reason is that the individual is the real togetherness of elements that are otherwise eternally arrayed as possible to combine. It seems impossible to say in what this reality consists except to defer the question by saying real togetherness is togetherness that is causally embedded in the one real world. Nevertheless, Whitehead’s unusual metaphysical scheme does give us a little more explanatory traction than this. We said that every superject has a unique abstract essence, but that its individuality is nevertheless not just the uniqueness of its essence. It is the “reality” of that essence. We can make some sense of this difference if we take into account the subjective sindividuality from which real superjective d-individuality emerges. Real as opposed to abstract (or merely possible) d-individuality is individuality that results from a token-reflexive synthesis of the antecedently real universe, whose individuals, in turn, must satisfy the same regressive definition. There is, therefore, a critical difference between Whitehead’s position and the one I am calling logicist, although at the same time he makes concessions to logicism that none of the figures I have identified as intuitionists would tolerate. The principal concession is that every superject truly is a typological (as opposed to a merely token-reflexive) singularity. The superject cannot help but be typologically unique because Whitehead’s universe has the coherence of a Gestalt. The critical difference is that the superject cannot help but be more than just an abstract typological singularity because the genesis of the type has the non-typological singularity of a (partially) self-referential synthesis. The d-individuality of the superject inherits the non-typological singularity of its genesis precisely insofar as it is an achieved, rather than a merely possible synthesis. The non-typological individuality of the superject is therefore a residue of the sindividuality of the subject from which it emerges. This non-typological singularity is most obviously reflected in the fact that the individual’s unique description is eternal (indifferent to place and time) while the real togetherness of the elements in its unique description is something uniquely associated with a single place and time. The interpretation of Whitehead’s theory of individuation proposed here has the virtue of accounting consistently for a great deal of seemingly contradictory textual evidence. It might be objected that the interpretation goes too far, proposing that Whitehead does not in later works reject any of his own earlier positions on individuation. It is not, however, so implausible that he should incorporate earlier positions into more complex ones. There is also some, albeit limited, textual evidence that can be adduced in support of a claim for coherence between the positions of SMW

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and PR. First, the distinction between the real and the abstract has systematic value in both works, and we might reasonably expect the same language to be associated with the same doctrine. On the interpretation advanced here we can assert that PR’s distinction between the real and the abstract essence corresponds exactly to SMW’s distinction between real and abstract possibility. The abstract essence expresses an abstract combinatorial possibility; the real essence expresses a synthesis constrained by real possibility. Secondly, it is possible to find some adumbration in SMW of PR’s emphasis on the crucial role of subjective activity in constituting the reality of an essence: In any actual occasion a, there will be a group g of simple eternal objects which are ingredient in that group in the most concrete mode. This complete ingredience in an occasion, so as to yield the most complete fusion of individual essence with other eternal objects in the formation of the individual emergent occasion, is evidently of its own kind and cannot be defined in terms of anything else.75

This adumbration in SMW of PR’s concept of concrescence is consistent with an interpretation that finds the same concept of reality operative in both books. If “reality” is a togetherness of eternal objects that is itself not eternal, but is rather the result of a self-referential activity of synthesis, then we should expect Whitehead to associate reality with a process marked by an indefinable haecceitas, just as he does in the passage quoted. And far from excluding token-reflexivity from its analysis of intuitive experience, which an isolated reading of the chapter on abstraction might suggest, SMW makes its role explicit in the crucial chapter IV: This unity of a prehension defines itself as a here and a now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential reference to other places and other times.76

This passage of SMW establishes continuity not only with the emphasis on the token-reflexive aspect of experience in PR, but also with the discussion of “demonstration” in CN. Thus, far from there being a vacillation between two positions, it seems that in each work we have examined Whitehead supports a dual theory of individuation that combines the IAH with the token-reflexive fact of acquaintance. An unorthodox consequence of the interpretation advanced here is that all complex eternal objects are in a certain sense “created.” Only the possibility of their combinations would be eternal and uncreated. However, there is a small but growing minority of voices in process scholarship arguing that Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme demands the creation of “new” eternal objects.77 How their arguments compare to mine is a subject for further research.

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Appendix: The Finitude of Mentality and God’s Infinite Mind Based on passages in SMW I have claimed that mentality is defined by finite complexity (or “abruptness”), and I have assumed that this is also Whitehead’s position in PR. But isn’t the equation of mentality with finitude clearly contradicted by these passages from Part IV of PR, where Whitehead is discussing God’s mentality? One side of God’s nature is constituted by his conceptual experience. This experience is the primordial fact in the world, limited by no actuality which it presupposes. It is therefore infinite, devoid of all negative prehensions.78 Conceptual experience can be infinite, but it belongs to the nature of physical experience that it is finite.79 A physical pole is in its own nature exclusive, bounded by contradiction: a conceptual pole is in its own nature all-embracing, unbounded by contradiction. The former derives its share of infinity from the infinity of appetition; the latter derives its share of limitation from the exclusiveness of enjoyment.80 God is the infinite ground of all mentality.81

I don’t think these passages stand in contradiction to the interpretation of mentality I have based on SMW. God’s primordial nature is positively related to an infinite number of eternal objects, but each one has an “analytical character,” i.e., is finite and abrupt, whereas the actual occasion realizes an infinitely complex eternal object (as does, I suppose, God’s consequent nature) by subjecting the realm of possibility to a gradation of relevance. “Gradation” is the opposite of abruptness. The infinitude of conceptual experience is not one of depth, but of breadth, so to speak. Conceptual experience can simultaneously entertain an indefinite number of incompatible possibilities. But each one of them will be finite. Physical experience, by contrast, cannot realize incompatible possibilities and is thus necessarily limited (finite) in its range or compass. But the possibility it does realize will be infinite in its specificity, which means that it will be graduated rather than abrupt.

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Notes 1. W. H. Leue, “Process and Essence,” Phenomenological Research 20.1, 1960, pp. 62-79.

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2. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Aristotle, the philosopher most insistent that the complexity of a thing’s essence is finite, is also the one most emphatic in rejecting essentialism, while the philosopher most emphatic in adopting essentialism, Leibniz, is the first to explicitly affirm that the complexity of a thing’s essence is infinite. 3. As Whitehead explains: “These transcendent entities have been termed ‘universals.’ I prefer to use the term ‘eternal objects,’ in order to disengage myself from presuppositions which cling to the former term owing to it prolonged philosophical history. Eternal objects are thus, in their nature, abstract. By ‘abstract’ I mean that what an eternal object is in itself—that is to say, its essence—is comprehensible without reference to some one particular occasion of experience. To be abstract is to transcend particular concrete occasions of actual happening.” (Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 159.) 4. R. Wiehl. “Prozesse und Kontraste. Überlegungen zur Ästhetik,” Zeitwelten. Philosophisches Denken an den Rändern von Natur und Geschichte (Frankfurt 1998), p. 73. 5. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., pp. 159ff. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., p. 169. 9. Ibid., p. 158. 10. The metaphysics of counterfactual relevance is something to which Whitehead assigns the highest importance. An adequate metaphysics of counterfactual relevance is, he feels, urgently needed in the modern world, and his own turn to metaphysics in Science and the Modern World is animated by this need. 11. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 171. 12. Ibid., p. 167. 13. Ibid., p. 170. 14. Ibid.

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15. The following paragraphs will discuss what is tacitly implied here, namely, that nothing can be concrete that is not related to every eternal object. All this means is that a concretum is definite or decided in relation to every possibility: every predicate is either truly affirmed or truly denied in relation to it. 16. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 169. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., pp. 169ff. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 171. 21. “So far I have merely been considering an actual occasion in the side of its full concreteness. It is this side of the occasion in virtue of which it is an event in nature. But a natural event, in this sense of the term, is only an abstraction from a complete actual occasion. A complete occasion includes that which in cognitive experience takes the form of memory, anticipation, imagination, and thought.” (Ibid.) 22. This assertion is subject to important qualifications that are discussed at the very end of this paper. 23. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 171. 24. G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, translated and edited by P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge 1981), pp. 229ff. [=Philosophische Schriften (Berlin 1962), Vol. VI, p. 229ff.] 25. Things of the same natural kind are things in the world of becoming with stable similarities: the stable similarity between two pieces of gold, for example, or, more importantly, the similarities between the cycles of periodic phenomena and between phenomena with the same periodic cycles—think of biological reproduction or meteorological phenomena evincing repeating closed cycles such as evaporation-precipitation. Not only do two sloths of the same age have relatively stable similarities, but any two sloths also evince a similar diachronic pattern or sequence of pairs of similar properties, from the characteristics of being an infant sloth to the characteristics of producing an infant sloth. 26. Aristotles, Analytica Posteriora, A 33 (89a2-6). 27. Ibid., A 2 (72a2-6), A 30-31 (87b19-88a18); Metaphysica A 2 (982a21-25). 28. Ibid., M 10 (1087a15-19); De Anima, B 5 (417a23-30).

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29. Ethica Nichomachea, Z 12 (1143b5-14), which should be taken together with the two references in the preceding footnote and probably with De Sensu et Sensibilia 6 (445b16-17) as well. 30. In his treatise “On the Kriterion and Hegemonikon” Ptolemy says in express contradiction to neo-Platonic views he cannot have been unaware of: “Hence it also follows that sense perception and thought deal with the same objects, though not in the same way.” See P. Huby and G. Neal (eds.), The Criterion of Truth. Essays written in honour of George Kerferd together with a text and translation (with annotations) of Ptolemy’s “On the Kriterion and Hegemonikon,” (Liverpool 1989), p. 197. 31. On the prominence of this doctrine in Galen and its Stoic roots, see M. Frede’s “Stoics and Skeptics on Clear and Distinct Impressions,” Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis 1987), pp. 151-176, and the passages he references, especially in Galen: “Cognitive [i.e., “kataleptic”] impressions are not only clear, as opposed to obscure (amudros cf. Alexander of Aphrodisias, De anima, 71.5ff.), they are also are distinct (ektypos; cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers VII 46), as opposed to confused (sugkechumenos; cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematikos VII [=Adversus Logikos I] 171). To see what their distinctness is supposed to consist in, it will be useful to refer to a doctrine which is never explicitly attributed to the Stoics but which we do find in Hellenistic dogmatic medicine and of which we have some reason to believe that it is in part of Stoic origin. According to this doctrine, the discriminatory power of the senses far outruns the ability of the mind to conceptualize the object. Thus, if under normal conditions we see an object clearly, its features are represented in the impression in such detail that our concepts do not capture them in all their detail. Hence, though a normal impression, as a rational impression, has a propositional content, the way it represents the subject of the proposition cannot be exhausted by any number of propositions (cf. Galen’s De locis affectis, Opera omnia Caludii Galeni, Vol. VIII, 86.12ff., 87.4, 117.6, 339.13, 355; De praesagitione ex pulsu, Opera omnia, op. cit, Vol. IX, 366.10; De sanitate tuenda, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, Vol. V, Pt. 4, Fasc. 2 [Frede has Fasc. 1], p. 185, 16) [or in Kühn’s Opera, Vol. IV, 423.4]” (Frede 1987, 161). The ancient sources cited are: (1) Alexander of Aphrodisias: De anima, Greek text in Alexandri Aphrodisiensis, Praeter commentaria scripta minora. De Anima Liber cum Mantissa, Consilio et Auctoritate Academiae Litterarum Regiae Borussicae, Edidit Ivo Bruns 1887 (Berolinii Typis et Impensis Georgii Reimer), 1-100; available in English as The De Anima of Alexander of Aphrodisias: A Translation and Commentary by Athanasios P. Fotinis (Washington 1980). (2) Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers,

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Greek text and English translation available in two volumes in the Loeb Classical Library, edited and translated by R. D. Hicks 1972 (Cambridge 1972). (3) Sextus Empiricus: Adversus Logikos [=Adversus Mathematikos VII-VIII] (Against the Logicians [=Against the Professors VII-VIII]), Greek text and English translation available in the Loeb Classical Library, Sextus Empiricus in Four Volumes, edited and translated by R. G. Bury (Cambridge 1967), Vol. II. (4) Galen: De locis affectis, Greek text in K. G. Kühn, Opera omnia Claudii Galeni, 22 Volumes (Hildesheim 2002), Vol. VIII, pp. 1-452, available in English as Galen on the Affected Parts translated by R. Siegel (Basle 1976); De praesagitione ex pulsu (On Prognosis by the Pulse), Opera omnia, op. cit., Vol. IX, pp. 205-430; De sanitate tuenda (On Hygiene) in Corpus medicorum Graecorum, Vol. V, Pt. 4, Fasc. 2 (Leipzig and Berlin 1923), pp. 1-198, or in Kühn, Opera omnia, op. cit., Vol. VI, pp. 1-452 available in English as A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene, by Robert Montraville Green, with an introduction by H. E. Sigerist (Springfield 1951). 32. Husserl’s intuitionism is balanced by an equally pronounced commitment to a kind of Leibnizian logicism, as the next section will reveal. Each stage in his development can be seen as a different way to reconcile these two tendencies through different metaphysical or epistemological qualifications. 33. H. Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (Tübingen 1915), pp. 31ff.; E. Cassirer, Substance and Function & Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, authorized translation by W. C. Swabey and M. C. Swabey (New York 1953), Part II, passim, especially pp. 232ff. and 254 [=Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin 1910), pp. 309ff. and 337]. 34. Qualia are sometimes mistakenly added to the list of what things must count as universals in a Leibnizian universe. But in fact, the Leibnizian theory of individuation prohibits any two qualities from being identical, making all qualia distinct particulars that can have only generic properties in common. It is only on some variety of the intuitionist theory of individuation that qualia can be universals. 35. Anaxagoras, fr. 12; Diogenes of Apollonia, fr. 5 in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Zürich/Hildesheim 1952), Vol II, pp. 37ff. and 61ff. 36. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., pp. 40ff., 75, 80, 159ff. 37. From this perspective, the paramount “Realist” Scotus has more in common with the Nominalists than, say, Thomas Aquinas: albeit for very

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different reasons, Scotus and the Nominalists both hold that the singular individual is the true and proper locus of concretion, whereas Thomas denies that sensible individuals possess a concreteness proper to their singularity. Their distinction from others of they same type is something accidental, making it inferior to and less knowable than their species, which is the true locus of concretion. Thus, for Thomas, the “real” individuality of a thing does coincide with its specificity. Far from being something primitive, a thisness distinct from specificity is something specious. For the Nominalists, of course, the sensible singular is the locus of true individuality not because it has an inexplicable formal component that confers individuality, but because the relative and accidental differences distinguishing singulars from one another (including differences having to do with their serving as the designata of acts of token-reflexive indication) are all the individuality there is. To be sure, this implies a nominal agreement with Thomas: there is no distinction between thisness and specificity. But for Nominalists it is the idea of a specificity other than accidental singularity that is specious. This makes the sensible singular a true individual and intuition an eminent mode of cognition by default. 38. M. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge 1978), pp. 351357. 39. I leave aside the question of the origin of our knowledge of universals. It does not matter for our purposes whether they are encountered through a special kind of acquaintance (a direct acquaintance with universals) or are derived by some kind of abstraction from our acquaintance with particulars. In the latter case, acquaintance with particulars would play an indispensable role in providing us with our stock of universal concepts, but the validity of universals as explanatory tools would not depend on this fact about their manner of genesis or discovery. The independence of explanation-by-universals from acquaintance with particulars would therefore be in no way compromised by this genetic dependence of description on acquaintance for the acquisition of universal concepts. If it turns out that explanation is unable to achieve independence from acquaintance, it will have nothing to do with the conditions of acquiring universal concepts. It will have to do with the impossibility of explaining any particular fact without referencing some other particular fact among the explanantia. 40. F. W. J. Schelling, Schriften von 1799-1801 (Darmstadt 1982), p. 427. 41. W. T. Krug, Briefe über den Neusten Idealismus: Eine Fortzsetzung der Briefe über die Wissenschaftslehre (Leipzig 1801), p. 74; see also pp. 25ff., 29ff., 31ff.

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42. G. W. F. Hegel, Jenaer Kritische Schriften, edited by H. Buchner and O. Pöggeler (Hamburg 1968), pp. 174-187. 43. P. S. Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, translated from the Sixth French Edition by F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory, with an introduction by E. T. Bell (New York 1951), pp. 3ff. [=Essai philosophique sur les Probabilités (Paris 1819), pp. 2ff.]. Let it be noted that, as a matter of general principle, the deducibility of the future and the past from the present state of the world was not a new thesis. As an alleged necessary consequence of the principle of sufficient reason, it was already affirmed by Christian Wolff a century earlier (e.g., in his Psychologia Rationalis [1734], § 435). See C. Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, herausgegeben und bearbeitet von J. École, J. E. Hofmann, M. Thomann, & H. W. Arndt (Hildesheim 1972), Abteilung II: Band 6, pp. 353ff. 44. F. W. J. Schelling, Schriften, op. cit., pp. 398ff. Comparison of these two passages also reveals an important difference between these two otherwise very similar concepts of science. Determinism is concerned with the deduction of events. For the deterministic paradigm, the defining characteristic of science thus becomes the ability to make successful predictions. For the Idealists, it was not events, but the classes of natural phenomena, that is, the kinds of things that make up the natural world that were to be deduced. In the one case nature is conceived as a diachrony of interdependent events, in the other as a synchrony of interdependent types. 45. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. II, Part. I: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, edited by U. Panzer (Haag 1984), I § 28, p. 95. 46. T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York 1989). 47. E. Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, op. cit., I § 28, p. 95. 48. E. Husserl, Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologische Philosophie, edited by W. Biemel (Haag 1969), p. 508. 49. M. Schlick, “Über das Fundament der Erkenntnis,” Erkenntnis IV, 1934, pp. 96ff. 50. K. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York 1968), pp. 93-103 [=Logik der Forschung (Tübingen 1966), pp. 60-69]. 51. Ibid., pp. 104-111 [= pp. 69-76]. 52. H. Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality (Cambridge 1979), pp. 215271.

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53. Cicero, Academica, Latin text and English translation available in the Loeb Classical Library, Cicero in Twenty-Eight Volumes, Vol. XIX, De Natura Deorum & Academica, edited and translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge 1979), II 57. 54. The Stoics would fully agree, however, in denigrating token-reflexive acquaintance. 55. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 53. 56. Whitehead is not a dualist, and the fact that he distinguishes between something “mental” and something “physical” should not be misunderstood. By radically reconceptualizing what “mental” and “physical” mean, Whitehead thinks he can preserve a polarity that does not imply incoherence. 57. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., pp. 49, 54ff., 113ff. 139, 151ff., 242. 58. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 69. 59. Ibid., pp. 42, 69. 60. A. N. Whitehead, Principles, op. cit., p. 83 61. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 152. 62. Ibid., p. 55. 63. A. N. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, op. cit., p. 8. 64. Ibid., p. 13. 65. In this context Whitehead uses “demonstration” in its etymological sense, from de-monstrare: to point out, indicate, designate, show. It is a question of ostension, not of proof, as when we employ a “demonstrative” pronoun or adjective (this, that) to indicate something in our environment. 66. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 60. 67. Ibid., p. 229. 68. Ibid., p. 65. 69. Ibid., p. 81. 70. Already in 1919 G. E. Moore determined that the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles would necessarily hold in a world where all relations were internal; see his “External and Internal Relations,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 20, pp. 40-62. 71. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 164.

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72. I leave for future discussion how this interpretation needs to be qualified in light of Whitehead’s theological speculations in Process and Reality. 73. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 177. 74. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 85. 75. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, op. cit., p. 169 (emphasis added). 76. Ibid., p. 69. 77. M. Weber, Whitehead’s (Frankfurt/Lancaster 2006).

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78. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 345. 79. Ibid., p. 345. 80. Ibid., p. 348. 81. Ibid.

The

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II. Nature and Subjectivity

Prehension John B. Cobb, Jr. I. When Lewis Ford and I began the journal Process Studies in 1970 there was little interest in the thought of Alfred North Whitehead outside North America. We wanted, nevertheless, to give the new journal the appearance of being international. We were delighted that we knew of one German scholar who was interested, and throughout its history the journal has proudly borne the name of Reiner Wiehl as a member of the advisory board. I rejoice that the situation in Europe is now changing and that serious study of Whitehead in Europe is increasing. I rejoice also in this opportunity to honor Professor Wiehl for his steadfast support and leadership. II. The topic I have chosen, one to which Whitehead made a particularly important contribution, is the relation of human experience to the remainder of the world. My plan is to identify schools of thought in terms of their accounts of this relationship. Whitehead discusses this relationship in terms of physical feeling or prehension. Much of this paper will be an explanation of this concept. Most American philosophers in the past half-century have belonged to the school of analytic philosophy. Since this label refers to a style of approach to philosophical issues rather than to underlying convictions about the way things are, analytic philosophers do not all adopt the same position with regard to the issue I have in view. Accordingly, my classification of major options does not correspond to the way American philosophers are likely to identify themselves. Recognizing, then, that my typology is tendentious, I offer it nonetheless as one useful way of describing the present scene. The first three positions, the ones that I criticize, are materialism, Humean empiricism, and Kantian dualism. I identify the fourth school, the one in which I locate Whitehead, as nonmaterialist naturalism. Since I want to devote most of my time to explaining Whitehead’s contribution, my treatment of the first three options will be extremely schematic.

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I should acknowledge that I am an anti-foundationalist in the sense that I do not believe that there is any place to begin philosophizing that does not already express important assumptions. That means that philosophers cannot prove and demonstrate. I will not make any effort to prove that Whitehead is correct and others are wrong. I will, however, explain why I find his treatment of the relation of human experience to the natural world more satisfactory than the major alternatives. I also acknowledge that I begin with a bias toward common sense. By this I do not mean the culturally-conditioned common sense that is notoriously unreliable. I mean, instead, those convictions that everyone lives by in practice whatever they may say in theory. My colleague, David Griffin, has labeled these “hard-core common sense.” For example, I believe that anyone who speaks at all presupposes that there are hearers who have a reality similar to that of the speaker. I believe, further, that those who speak presuppose that they have some kind of self-determination, that is, that they are not simply complex arrangements of mere matter or exhaustively products of the past. Arguing the contrary seems a self-contradictory activity. Indeed, I believe that arguing philosophically against the assumptions entailed in the activity of arguing is self-defeating. With respect to my major concern in this paper, I believe that no one can actually avoid believing that she or he is intimately involved with a physical body whose reality is not dependent on conscious thought. Further, I doubt that anyone can avoid acting as if this body is continuous in character with other bodies that make up our environment or can doubt that there are causal interactions among these bodies. In short, whatever we say about the external world theoretically, we continue to act as though it has a reality prior to and independent of our mental activity. These convictions provide for me norms by which I judge philosophies. That is, I favor philosophies that explain, rather than explain away, these common sense assumptions. Of course, adequacy to universal common sense is not the only norm. There is much else to which a philosophy should be adequate. Also I am committed to consistency, coherence, and relevance. But I assume that my convictions about the importance of explaining hardcore common sense beliefs rather than explaining them away may be the most distinctive part of my assumptions. Obviously, these preferences and prejudices play a large role in my objections to materialism, Humean empiricism, and Kantian idealism. III. Materialism continues to be widespread in the United States. A great many scientists have been socialized into accepting it, even if they rarely

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attempt to provide a sophisticated account. A smaller number of philosophers do attempt to defend it, and many others, even if they rarely discuss the question directly, show their materialistic bias when they discuss such questions as the mind-body relation. Probably the most widely accepted views in the United States are psychophysical identism and supervenience. Since both deny any causal role for human experience, locating all causality in the material brain, they seem to be continuations of epiphenomenalism under different labels. Although this may not be an extreme form of materialism, since it does not flatly deny the occurrence of conscious experience, by rejecting any role of such experience, it comes close enough for me to use the label. Obviously, this kind of thinking fails to account for the ongoing experience of being affected by our bodies and of, in turn, influencing them. It must count the latter, at least, as wholly illusory. It requires that we suppose that the apparent influence of our experience in one moment on our experience in the next is also illusory. Since I believe no one can act as if this were so, I regard adopting such a belief as a philosophical weakness. This is to say nothing about the extreme difficulty of providing a coherent notion of matter in the first place, a problem well explained by both Hume and Kant. I have qualified the empiricism of which I want to speak as Humean. I do so because I regard my own position as a form of empiricism. The empiricism I reject holds that all knowledge of what is outside the body is mediated by the senses and that what is provided by the senses are sensa or sense data. I call it Humean because Hume gave it its classical expression, and subsequent discussion of sensory empiricism has largely accepted his work as a starting point. Hume showed that when we take the data of sense experience as the basis for all our knowledge of the world, many of those assumptions that we all make in practice are unintelligible. We cannot explain why we suppose, unfailingly, that there is a world consisting of something other than these sensory data. We cannot explain why we are so sure that there are other subjects. We cannot explain our sense that one event happens because other events have happened. We cannot explain the role of our bodies in the experience of the world. Despite these problems, Humean assumptions are still widely asserted, and many analytic philosophers employ them, at least part of the time. Many discussions of causality in American philosophy still follow Hume’s lead. Sometimes Humean empiricism is combined in remarkable ways with materialist habits of mind, as they were even in Hume himself. My own judgment that this whole approach is wanting is obvious in the way I have set up this discussion. Followers of Hume “solve” many problems by simply deducing conclusions from the assumption that all knowledge of the

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world must be developed from the data of sense experience. The fact that these solutions contradict many beliefs that in practice no one escapes is not allowed to count against them. For me, on the other hand, it counts heavily against them. Most analytic philosophers are vaguely, if not explicitly, dualistic. They are quite sure of the reality of their own feeling and thinking and take for granted that there are others with similar feeling and thinking. They also suppose that the world they see and touch is for the most part of a quite different order. Perhaps Cartesian dualism is closer to the view reflected in most analytic philosophy rather than Humean empiricism. At a rarely examined level, Cartesian dualism is still alive and well. Nevertheless, I have qualified the dualism I want to discuss as Kantian, because this is the form of dualism that is most likely to be systematically and critically defended by philosophers. Just as, after Hume, earlier forms of sensory empiricism came to be chiefly of historical interest, so also, after Kant, earlier forms of dualism were largely superseded in critical philosophical discussion. Kant, of course, shared my dissatisfaction with the results of sensory empiricism. His response has been of enormous importance in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is my impression that, on the European continent, it is the basis for almost all subsequent philosophical developments. In the United States, as I have already indicated, the situation is more diverse, in that Humean empiricism and materialism still flourish in various guises. But Kant has been very influential there also, partly directly, and partly through the many other European thinkers he has influenced. It would be foolish for me to attempt to instruct Europeans about Kant. Almost all European philosophers are better Kant scholars than am I. I have the impression that in his Critique of Judgment there are formulations that differ markedly from the features of the Critique of Pure Reason that I am highlighting. I believe the former book may contain resources for my topic that still remain to be fully mined. However, my interest here is not to discuss the intricacies of Kant’s thought but to highlight his impact on subsequent thinkers with respect to the relation of human experience to the external world. Kant accepted Hume’s account of sensory experience and the extreme limits of what can be learned from it, when it is taken by itself. Indeed, Kant went even farther than Hume. He showed, for example, that from the data of sense experience we gain no sense of time. But Kant knew that in fact we have a sense of time and also that we are aware of causal relations in a way not accounted for by the regular succession to which Hume appealed. Accordingly, Kant argued, the organization of the data of sense

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experience is the work of the mind. Kant posited a noumenal world that in some way supplied the sensory data. But this acknowledgment of an external world was not successful. He could say nothing about what it is, and his own account of causality precluded assigning it any causal role in relation to the phenomena. Accordingly, his followers generally gave up Kant’s noumenal world and adopted a more fully idealist position. I call this idealism dualistic, nevertheless, because it affirms two quite distinct spheres. There is the sphere of the creative activity of mind. There is the sphere of the nature that appears to us because of that creative activity. These spheres are to be understood and studied in radically different ways. From my perspective, the greatness of Kant’s contribution lies in showing the immensely creative activity of the human mind in constituting the world in which we live. In the United States today, there are relatively few who follow Kant himself closely, but there are many who emphasize how human languages construct and constitute the diverse worlds in which human communities live. Much is said of the social construction of reality. Feminists have been particularly influential in showing how reality is constructed in many societies for patriarchal purposes. Some philosophers of science argue that the work of science is to construct the world rather than to describe it. Since so much of social construction is an expression of power, there is now much interest in its deconstruction. The emphasis on the construction of the world can also be quite individualistic. Much has been written on how our diverse life experiences lead us to construct our worlds differently. A psychotherapist can hardly help patients without provisionally entering into the ways they have constructed their worlds. The purpose of therapy can be understood to be to help patients reconstruct their worlds in ways that bring them less conflict and pain. The Protestant denomination that calls itself “Christian Science” developed out of the New England transcendentalism that was deeply influenced by Kant. Practitioners believe that the mind constructs the body, so that if one’s mind is fully healed there will be no sickness or disruption in the body. They refuse medical care because this is based on physicalist assumptions. Although this denomination is now declining, similar ideas are widespread in related movements and in some New Age groups. Much as I appreciate and admire the brilliant analyses that have followed from the view that our worlds are constructed by our minds or our language, I am convinced that, taken by itself, it leaves central features of our experience unintelligible. No language could construct our bodies in such a way that they cease to need food. The explosion of an atomic bomb is not simply a word-event. This does not mean that we cannot study the diverse ways in which societies have constructed the eating of food. Nor

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does it mean that the way we interpret the explosion of an atomic bomb is unimportant or that the prior construction of the world was not a major factor in the occurrence of this event. But a philosophy that does not recognize a distinct physical component in food and atomic explosions, a component that is impervious to how humans think about them, is inadequate. What I am calling Kantian dualism fails to account for the autonomous reality, activity and causality of the natural world. IV. I am calling the school of thought in which I locate myself nonmaterialistic naturalism. It reflects the understanding of some physicists that what they have called matter in the past is better viewed as energy. Among its members are William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce. My own teacher was Charles Hartshorne. But because of limited time, I will confine myself to Alfred North Whitehead, who is generally recognized as the most rigorous and comprehensive thinker in this group. When critically discussing the limits of empiricism above, I was careful to speak of sensory empiricism. This is because another label for this group of thinkers is “radical empiricism.” They agreed with Kant that sensory empiricism cannot account for our experience, but they undertook to overcome this limitation through a more exhaustive, or radical, examination of what is given in experience. Despite differences in emphasis and style, they have much in common with some schools of phenomenology. Whitehead deconstructed ordinary sense experience into two elements. One he called “presentational immediacy.” When we attend to what is most clearly conscious, this is what appears, and it is understandable that Hume, and some of his predecessors, limited themselves to this. In vision, for example, presentational immediacy presents to us as immediately given patches of color. Hume took these as exhausting what is given in visual experience, and he drew consistent implications. Ironically, these consistent implications do not account for the fact that we experience these patches of color as derived from beyond ourselves. The naïve notion that the brown of the rug as such characterizes the rug in itself apart from visual experience can, of course, readily be shown to be absurd. But that the rug is such that, given suitable lighting, it causes multiple persons to have the visual experience of brown when attending to the region in which it is located is not a naïve view. It fits the facts as we know them. Also, it can be investigated by physics and physiology. From a scientific point of view, there is an indirect causal effect of events in the rug on the neurons in the brain. From the subjective point of view, there is a sense of derivation of

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elements of experience from beyond themselves. The correspondence here gives some justification for the claim that when we examine our experience radically we discover that the perception in the mode of presentational immediacy to which Hume gave exclusive attention arises out of “perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” This doctrine, that we perceive the causal efficacy of the world, is the radical and distinctive contribution of Whitehead. Because it is unfamiliar, it is this that I want to discuss in the remainder of my paper. To show that it is an idea to be taken seriously will require approaching it from several angles. I have begun with the aspect of experience (vision) in which the experience of causal efficacy may be the most difficult to identify phenomenologically. Let us turn to another kind of reflection in which the argument that causal efficacy is empirically experienced may be more readily accepted. I ask you to focus on the flow of your own experience. Consider the relation of one moment of experience to its immediate predecessor. It is my judgment that what we find on such an examination is that the earlier experience flows into the later one. The later one is what it is largely because of this influence of the earlier one. On the other hand, the earlier one does not determine every feature of the later experience. One way to focus attention on this relationship is to consider the experience in which one is hearing the final chord in a musical phrase. If there were nothing but what is given in presentational immediacy alone, the sound would be just what it is in itself. But in fact one hears it as the completion of a phrase. The sounds one was hearing in the preceding seconds are still resonating in our present experience. Otherwise there would be no music. The point is equally clear when one listens to speech. In presentational immediacy one has only a single sound. The sound may be the completion of a word. But as such, in presentational immediacy, it is simply the sound that it is. That, in fact, it is for the hearer the completion of a word depends on the continuing presence in that moment of what was heard before. Or consider another thought experiment. Bertrand Russell once argued, based on his own commitment to sensory empiricism, that there is no reason not to suppose that the world came into being just as it is in the present moment. In other words, sensory empiricism provides us no evidence that there has been a past. Yet we all know that there has been a past. In a very significant way, we experience that past. We know that this moment of experience is not the first because we feel the present experience as growing out of past experiences. The argument here is that actual empirical experience does not have the character it would have if all that is given in experience as outside itself were sense data. Empirically, or

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phenomenologically if you prefer, there is a sense of derivation from the past that is particularly clear in relation to one’s own immediately past experiences. This does not have the vividness of the sense data, and it is rarely attended to, but it remains experiential. Whitehead believed it deserves an attention it has rarely received in the history of thought. Whitehead calls the relation of one occasion of experience to its predecessor a “prehension.” A prehension is the way in which one momentary experience incorporates or takes account of earlier such moments. The prehension to which I have directed attention is the one in which we can, at least vaguely, be conscious of both the act of prehending and the occasion that is prehended. We prehend the earlier occasion of our experience as itself a subject prehending other occasions. Through its mediation we prehend these other occasions, and through them, others. This prehension of past occasions of experience is central to understanding both epistemology and causality. It is the way past occasions participate in constituting present ones. It also explains our deep conviction that experience has as its object or data things that have some reality apart from our experiencing them. That is, my prehension of the immediate past experience is an example of the way past occasions of experience exercise causal efficacy in my present experience. At the same time such prehensions are the reason that I know that I am experiencing a past reality. V. Now, if we are to go on to Whitehead’s rich speculations about the role of prehensions in the world, I must ask readers to take the example I have given above and reflect about it. I hope they will find meaningful the notion that experience flows from one occasion into the other. The earlier occasion participates in constituting the later one. The later one incorporates the earlier experience in part, integrating that into itself. This is the prehensive relation. Although one can be somewhat conscious of this relationship, it is not the sort of thing to which we normally attend. In the evolutionary process conscious awareness and attention have been directed to events external to our bodies. Our ancestors needed to be alert to danger, on the one hand, and to prospects of food, on the other. Attending to the internal flow of experience would not have contributed to their survival. If this prehensive relationship is constantly taking place quite apart from any conscious awareness, it is not hard to suppose that other prehensive relationships occur that can never become conscious at all. Whitehead speculates that each occasion of human experience prehends not only past human experiences but also the events in the brain and through them events

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in other parts of the body and beyond. To put it in another way, there is a causally efficacious flow from external events to bodily events and from them to the occasions of human experience. Although we cannot identify in experience the prehensions of events in the brain, we do discover in our experience a vague but indubitable awareness of our bodies as causally effective in our experience. This awareness is heightened when there are acute pains or pleasures. My misery is caused by an aching tooth, or my pleasure, by the massaging of my back. Whitehead assumed that the prehensive relations primarily involved follow the lines traced by physiologists. He also noted that in the evolutionary process bodily functioning developed to highlight for conscious awareness events in some parts of the body and not others. We feel the events in nerve endings but not in their transmission through other nerves. This movement between human experience and bodily events is rendered plausible only by emphasizing the primacy of events. An occasion of human experience is an event. The firing of a neuron is also an event, as is the aching of a tooth. Metaphysically, Whitehead affirmed that events are the primary realities, not objects or substances. Some events are partially conscious. Most have no consciousness at all. But all are related to others by prehension. That is, each event takes into account earlier ones and flows into later ones. The presence or absence of consciousness is not important for this process. Although consciousness is rare in the universe, subjectivity is not. Since so many philosophers identify subjects with conscious subjects, this point must be stressed in any explanation of Whitehead’s philosophy. He speculated that every event is both subject to the influence of other events and active in its own constitution and causal efficacy for others. In these respects it is like conscious human experiences. Since most of what transpires even in the most highly conscious human experiences is not conscious, it should not be too difficult to understand that events with no consciousness at all still prehend antecedent events and are prehended by others. These prehensions constitute the natural causes that Hume could not discover in experience and that Kant posited as the contribution of the human mind. Human experiences are complex events, fully immersed in this web of natural causes. It is important to see that in this cosmology causes are influences. A cause determines some feature of the event in which it exercises causality. It never necessitates that the event in question have, as a whole, just the character that it does. In human experience we cannot but believe that, although much of what we are each moment is simply the result of the past,

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in each moment there is also some freedom or, more accurately, some selfdetermination. Just how to assimilate all the causal influences from the past and to integrate them in the present is decided in that present. The range of choices may be quite limited, but, in some moments, it is of immense importance for the future. Whitehead sees no reason to deny that self-determination is also present in the experiences of other living things. Since consciousness contributes to the width of the range within which decision is made, as the role of consciousness declines, we would expect decision to play a smaller role. But even in human experience the moment-to-moment decisions are not conscious choices. So, even when consciousness is wholly lacking, we need not posit that events are totally determined by the past. How much spontaneity we can attribute to events of diverse sorts, and how precisely they can be predicted from their boundary conditions, are questions for investigation, not dogmatic prejudgment. One caution is important here. The word “events” has a wide range of uses. We speak of a conversation as an event. But that event can be broken down into sub-events and those into other sub-events. A moment of human experience is the sort of sub-event that can no longer be broken down. It either occurs or it does not. It is these unitary, indivisible events that are the final subjects that take account of others and act on others. Cellular events seem to have this kind of unity, as do electronic ones. The event of a rock falling does not. We must look for the indivisible events in this case by analyzing the larger event at least into molecular ones. The prehensive relations are among the molecules or smaller units in the rock. The rock as a whole is a society of unitary events, and as a society it does not prehend or have any self-determination. Whatever spontaneities there are in the unitary events that compose the rock are statistically cancelled out by their vast number and randomness. Thus far I have suggested a vision of a universe of interconnected events. Of course, the actual picture is far more complex since these events vary greatly in their relations and in their complexity. But the main point here is to show how the notion of prehension provides a way of understanding the causality that pervades nature, inclusive of human experience, without suggesting a deterministic world. I turn now to the epistemological side. VI. Whitehead believed that ordinary sense experience is in fact an integration of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy and perception in the mode of causal efficacy. He called this integration “perception in the mode of symbolic reference.” Perception in the mode of

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causal efficacy is the kind of prehension of which I have been speaking, viewed from the side of the receiving subject. My personal past and my body influence my experience. They bring into the “here-now” what was “there-then.” The aching in my tooth a tiny fraction of a second ago is my aching now. But it is felt as derived from the tooth. Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy locates it in clear consciousness there-now in the place where the tooth’s aching occurred a fraction of a second ago. When abstracted from the perception in the mode of causal efficacy from which it arises, perception in the mode of presentational immediacy gives no clue as to its source or as to time. When integrated with perception in the mode of causal efficacy in symbolic reference, we have the experience of the tooth as aching now. In presentational immediacy there is no truth or error. The sensa are as they are. But in actual sense experience, there is error, because the sensa are referred to the real, present world. With regard to the aching tooth, the great likelihood is that the tooth is continuing to ache in the present much as it was aching a fraction of a second ago when nerve impulses carried the message to the brain. There is unlikely to be significant error. But we all know about phantom pains, when one continues, in symbolic reference, to locate the pain in the amputated limb. Similarly, with visual experience of nearby objects the error in locating the color in the present object is normally trivial. If, however, we are gazing at the night sky, presentational immediacy locates the star in terms of the place from which the light came, which may be far indeed from where the star now is. There is another kind of error involved in much symbolic reference. When we attribute aching to the tooth, there may be little error. What is happening in the cellular events in the tooth may not be drastically unlike the pain we attribute to that source. But when we attribute greenness to the grass, the difference is quite considerable. Accordingly, this attribution is often dismissed as naïve realism. Greenness as a color is brought into being out of light waves by the eyes and brain. The cells in the grass have no comparable experience. This suggests that the world as given us in presentational immediacy may be totally discontinuous with the real world despite the fact that in Whitehead’s vision all of nature is intricately interconnected. Whitehead speculates that the disconnection is not quite that sharp, and Charles Hartshorne developed this speculation in a remarkable book, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, in which he provided supportive scientific data. The theory is that colors and sounds, textures and tastes, all have strong emotional bases. We often use adjectives that seem more appropriate in one sensory realm in application to another. For example, a

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color may be cool or warm. These terms apply directly to the subjective, emotional component of the perception of that color, which is derived from the perception in the mode of causal efficacy that gives rise to the perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. Some colors, some sounds, and some tactile sensations may all have much the same emotional basis. Whereas it is certainly naïve and erroneous to suppose that the cells in the grass experience greenness as a sense datum, it is not necessarily absurd to think that cellular experiences have an emotional component. Presumably this is quite unconscious, but so are most human emotions. One may then speculate that the emotional character of the experience in the cells in the grass is somewhat replicated in the emotional component of their prehension in the mode of causal efficacy from which the sense datum, green, arises visually. I have stressed that this is speculation. Of course, this whole discussion of causality and epistemology is speculation. But I highlight the speculative character of the present discussion because it is unnecessary to the basic structure of the cosmology. Its importance to Whitehead and Hartshorne is existential or religious rather than conceptual. For both of them, it is important not only to know that we are part and parcel of the natural world but also to feel this. There are many people who do have this sensibility, and it involves a sense of connectedness and kinship, some would say, oneness. The belief that the feelings that the objects of sense experience arouse in us have no continuity with what is felt by them contributes to a sense of isolation or alienation. To show philosophically, with some scientific support, that those who intuit closer connections may not be wrong seems of some importance to Whitehead and Hartshorne—and to me. We believe that it makes sense to think that the world in some way replicates itself in our experience. VII. Thus far I have spoken only of one type of prehension. Whitehead wrote about two basic types and the many complex ways in which they are integrated. The one of which I have been speaking Whitehead called “physical.” A physical prehension is a prehension of another occasion of experience. The prehension of one’s past experiences is physical. Of course, the prehension of neuronal events is also physical. This is the causal efficacy of the world for the occasion. But Whitehead was convinced that we cannot understand human experience as simply physical. We also prehend pure potentials, or pure possibilities, in abstraction from any embodiment. The colors of which I have been speaking are such possibilities. Initially, the point here is that from the actual entities we

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prehend physically, we can abstract some forms, potentialities, or possibilities. All of our sciences depend on the ability to entertain these in abstraction from their specific embodiment. We can imagine ways in which these may be combined with each other and embodied in the world. All conscious experience depends on the ability to compare what simply is with what may be. In short, “conceptual prehensions,” as Whitehead called these, are of immense importance in human experience. Much of Whitehead’s writing consists in a detailed account of how conceptual and physical feelings are integrated in human experience. He speaks of physical purposes and transmuted feelings as well as of various kinds of propositional feelings and intellectual feelings. The discussion of symbolic reference that I offered above can fit into this rich analysis of experience. The doctrine of conceptual feelings opens the way to its own share of interesting speculations. Whitehead believed that we can entertain possibilities that we do not abstract from the data of physical prehensions. He believed that the realm of possibilities has a certain order that makes possible order in a world pervaded by freedom. He believed that the activity of creatively integrating the past in the present, moment-bymoment, depends on the lure of particular relevant possibilities. He believed that all these possibilities must be “somewhere” and that somewhere must be in some actual entity. His speculations about conceptual feelings led him to an original and distinctive doctrine of God. For me, as a process theologian, these speculations are of great interest and provide a welcome alternative to the dominant theological cosmologies. However, my topic here is prehension. If one accepts this doctrine, one can account for the highly complex conscious experiences of human beings in a fully non-reductionistic way, while at the same locating human beings fully in the context of the natural world. Nature no longer appears as passive, mechanical matter. It is dynamic. Even those things that we call inanimate are made up of entities that are continuous with simple forms of life. The emergence of life and consciousness in the evolutionary process is no longer sheer mystery. Our study of the natural world can be continuous with our study of the human world. Our experience is continuous with that of other animals and even with much simpler entities. Our deeper understanding of the world will reject objectification as its mode. We live as subjects in the midst of subjects. For me this is a great gain over materialism, sensationalist empiricism, and all forms of dualism. Whiteheadians are almost of necessity ecologically oriented. Our concern about the natural environment is, of course, partly motivated by our concern for the well being of humanity. But we are also concerned about

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other beings for their own sake. Everything has some value in itself. Everything has value for other things. All things are related. All things are akin. Nothing exists in itself and of itself, least of all human beings. Humans cannot be saved apart from the natural world. We have enormous influence in the shaping and reshaping of that world. But it is equally true that that world shapes us. Indeed, we are simply one form—one very special and valuable form—taken by that world.

Whitehead, Hume and the Phenomenology of Causation Pierfrancesco Basile We shou’d in vain hope to attain an idea of force by consulting our own minds. (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature) It is almost indecent to draw the attention of philosophers to the minor transactions of daily life, away from the classic sources of philosophic knowledge; but, after all, it is the empiricist who began this appeal to Caesar. (Whitehead, Process and Reality)

1. Introduction In his Metaphysik und Erfahrung Reiner Wiehl has explored and vividly communicated the complexity of the relationship between philosophers’ attempt to reach a synoptic view of the nature of reality and the way reality manifests itself within the restricted locus of our subjectivity.1 The present paper has a similar aim, for it tries to convey a sense of the metaphysical significance of our most simple experiences through a discussion of Whitehead’s criticism of Hume. Like many of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors, Whitehead defines his own position in terms of what he accepts and what he rejects in Hume’s empiricism.2 On the credit side there is Hume’s critique of the notion of substance and his account of the self as a flux of perceived contents: such an account emphasises the fluid nature of the self and is therefore very congenial to Whitehead’s philosophical approach, which stresses the primacy of the category of process over that of substance. On the debit side there is Hume’s neglect of an important distinction between two levels of our experience: whereas in perception in the mode of presentational immediacy the mind is acquainted with contents that can be consciously distinguished (for example, visual sense data), in perception in the mode of causal efficacy we are vaguely yet intimately aware of the action of external things impinging upon us. According to Whitehead, the

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two modalities do not have the same status, since perception in the mode of causal efficacy is more fundamental in many ways. Three aspects of this basic mode of experience need to be particularly emphasised. First, our primary contact with the world occurs in the mode of causal efficacy with a blind reception of the action of external things. Only in a derivative stage are the deliverances of this primary mode converted into wholly discriminated contents that can be conceptualised philosophically in the guise of, say, Russellian sense data. In conveying the sense of ourselves as interacting with independent realities, this mode of perception explains why mankind’s outlook with regard to the external world is, some philosophers notwithstanding, so naturally realistic and antisceptical. Secondly, perception in the mode of causal efficacy is not limited to human beings and the higher animals. Whitehead emphasises that “sense-perception is mainly a characteristic of more advanced organisms; whereas all organisms have experience of causal efficacy whereby their functioning is conditioned by their environment.”3 In other words, perception in the mode of causal efficacy is a creature’s own awareness of being internally related with, and in a very real sense both limited and constituted by, the surrounding world. Thirdly, perception in the mode of causal efficacy lies at the bottom of that sense of intensity and adventure that gives importance and significance to human life. When the deliverances of this mode of perception are fainter, the contents of presentational immediacy become dominant and the emotional tone of our entire state of mind is altered: “[I]n some tired moment there comes a sudden relaxation, and the mere presentational side of the world overwhelms with the sense of its emptiness.”4 Independently of any reference to an external world mere presentation of sense data is uninteresting. We need the pressure of our natural environment in order for our life to be meaningful, much in the way in which in the social realm we need to tease—and to be teased by—other people.5 The present paper does not try to exhaust the complexity of Whitehead’s theory of perception, nor of its relationship with the theory held by Hume or even its appraisal by Wiehl.6 In what follows, attention will be focused upon one single point, namely Whitehead’s allegation that Hume disregards perception in the mode of causal efficacy. According to Whitehead, Hume is not alone in committing this mistake and the accusation could be extended to the whole tradition of modern philosophy. Nevertheless, this mistake is particularly serious for a philosophy that purports to give an account of the origin of our notion of causation: it is indeed at the primitive level of perception in the mode of causal efficacy that those experiences are made which lead us to develop that notion.7

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Since Hume’s account of causation is based upon a theory of the mind as acquainted with what he calls “impressions of sensation,” Hume is de facto restricting without justification the scope of his analysis to perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. In this way, he mistakes what is secondary and derivative for what is prior and fundamental. As Wiehl has put it,8 Hume is charged with the fallacy known as hysteron-proteron, that is, a reversal of a natural or logical order: the failure of Hume’s attempt to provide an adequate account of the notion of causation is therefore only to be expected, as Whitehead not solely contends but also sets out to prove.

2. Whitehead on Hume’s Empiricism It may be good to review some basic ideas of Hume’s theory of experience, before respectively considering his account of causation and Whitehead’s criticism of it in the next two sections. According to Hume’s classification in A Treatise of Human Nature, all of the mind’s perceptions are either impressions or ideas. The former concept refers to “all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul,” the latter to “the faint images of these [the impressions] in thinking and reasoning.”9 Since impressions always precede and give rise to ideas, it is possible to arrange different sorts of perceptions according to their genetic occurrence: impressions of sensation (sensations such as “heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure and pain”) give rise to ideas of sensation (ideas “of pleasure and pain”); these are usually followed by impressions of reflection (emotions such as “desire and aversion, hope and fear”) which may be copied by ideas of reflection (the ideas of such emotions).10 As a way of illustrating these distinctions, consider the case of a person who has lost his way and is forced to spend an awful night in a wood. He has painful experiences associated with the night’s darkness, the humidity of the air, and the frightening cries of wild animals. These sensations are all impressions of sensation. The night having been awful, it is likely to be memorable. Hence his memory will retain ideas of the sensations had: these are all ideas of sensation. Some time later, that person may tell his unfortunate adventure to a friend. It is to be expected that the recalled ideas will be accompanied by an emotional reaction, for example by feelings of aversion: such emotions are impressions of reflection. These emotions are themselves something it is possible to think about: the ideas involved in such reasoning are ideas of reflection.

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Whitehead’s response to this account is twofold. On the one hand, he criticises the view of the nature of emotions involved in Hume’s explanation. Emotions do not arise at a later stage of our experience after ideas of sensations have been formed. On the contrary, perception in the mode of causal efficacy is already emotionally charged: emotions antedate both Hume’s “impressions” and “ideas” of sensation and are certainly not dependent upon them. “Experience—Whitehead observes—has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon Hume’s impressions of sensation.”11 In the technical language of the mature metaphysics of Process and Reality, emotions are the “subjective forms” of our “prehensions,” receptive modalities that colour in a unique way our primitive acts of relating to the world.12 On the other hand, Whitehead recognises that Hume has made a very significant step away from the traditional conception of the mind as a static substantial soul. In particular, Whitehead observes that Hume provides a genetic as opposed to a morphological account, for as a matter of fact he is describing the mind as a process of derivation of higher forms of experience (represented by ideas) from lower ones (represented by impressions). Hume also conclusively showed that the conception of the mind as a static underlying substance is empirically ungrounded, for what is given is not an enduring principle of unity but the flux of our perceptions. As he has it in a very crucial passage from the Treatise, introspection does not disclose an enduring self, but “a bundle or collection of different properties, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”13 The general principle that the mind is not a static reality but a process of self-construction out of data received from the past, already envisaged by Hume, is the basis of Whitehead’s own account of mentality, and specifically of human mentality, in his genetic analysis of an actual occasion, i.e., his explanation of the process leading to the unification of a subject’s many experiences into a single unified moment of experience. A characterisation of this process of unification, technically the concrescence whereby many prehensions come together into the unity of the satisfaction, has been provided by Wiehl in terms of the important distinction between unification as “concrescence” and unification as “synthesis.”14 Whereas “synthesis” suggests that the principle of organisation of the data is external to the data themselves, “concrescence” suggests that the data to be unified are themselves active elements in the process of unification. Thus “concrescence” conveys the notion that the unification of the many is a process of self-organisation. Clearly, this way of conceiving unification

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goes much further than Hume’s general notion of mentality as a process, and also clearly differentiates Whitehead’s theory of subjectivity from the one held by Kant.15 Hume’s perceptions are either simple or complex. A faculty called “imagination” has the power to combine ideas in novel ways and to create ideas of things never perceived. Hume writes: “I can imagine to myself such a city as the New Jerusalem, whose pavement is gold and the walls are rubies, tho’ I never saw any such.”16 In its constructions, however, the imagination has to make use of simple ideas, which ultimately refer back to simple impressions. Such is the idea of the colour gold, which Hume could not possess had he never seen it. The distinction between simple and complex perceptions having been drawn, Hume is in possession of all the concepts needed to state in a precise form the empiricist intuition that all knowledge depends upon experience. Hence he lays down the principle that “all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.”17 Can this principle be regarded as valid? Notoriously, Hume himself discovered an exception. Imagine an observer confronted with the scale of all shades of a given colour, ordered according to their relative intensities, and complete except for one position. The observer would still be capable of framing an idea of the missing shade, filling the empty space in his imagination. Like most commentators, Whitehead rightly disagrees with Hume’s evaluation that “the instance is so particular and singular, that ‘tis scarce worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.”18 Not only has Hume provided a counterexample to his own principle, it is not even true that “the instance is so particular and singular,” as Hume would like to have it. As Whitehead observes, the experiment could be repeated for all shades of all colours, as well as for other classes of sensations.19 The significance of this counter-example is greater than it may appear at first sight. The fact that we can form an idea of the missing shade by reference to the other shades indicates that the different shades are not entirely independent but form a systematic whole, that is, that they are internally related with each other. Hence Hume’s response suggests that the mind (meaning by “mind” the total whole of a person’s psychical contents at any one moment) cannot be atomistically conceived as a sum of independent parts, but must be thought of as a unified whole of which the different identifiable sensations are aspects or internal articulations. In such a whole, no identifiable content is what it is apart from the whole to which it belongs, but is coloured by its relations to all other contents.20

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Whitehead’s problem is precisely that of developing an ontological account of the mind that makes justice of these two phenomenological insights: on the one hand, the mind must be conceived as a process, as Hume clearly recognised; on the other, the mind is at any one moment a holistic whole, a fact Hume apparently missed. Whitehead sees clearly that after Hume there is no going back to the idea of the mind as an enduring substance underlying the flux of our experiences. Accordingly, his metaphysics of the self is an attempt to face Hume’s challenge squarely: the mind is now conceived as consisting of serially ordered “occasions” or moments of experience, each of which comes into being out of previous ones and lasts for a brief moment, before being superseded by a novel experiential occasion.21

3. Hume’s Account of Causation Having laid down the empiricist principle, Hume examines its consequences for our idea of causation, the idea that a certain cause has the power to bring about a certain effect. What impression is the original from which the notion of causation derives? For the purposes of the present paper, it is important to recognise that Hume answers this question in two different ways. Let’s begin by considering what may be called his “official account,” the explanation that is developed at great length in the Treatise, the Abstract and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, reserving a discussion of the alternative account for a later section. In the Enquiry, a concise statement of the official account is provided in the following passage: [A]fter a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe that it will exist. This connexion, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion.22

This passage summarises Hume’s conclusion in the Treatise. Hume begins his examination by providing an analysis of the notion of causation into the three components of succession, contiguity and necessary connection. It is with this latter idea that a difficulty seems to arise, for when we see one object acting upon another (recall the example of the two billiard balls), we never experience a necessary connection between the cause and the effect. In this way, we seem to find ourselves in the puzzling situation that we

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have the idea of necessary connection without any corresponding impression. These considerations cannot be taken to prove that the empiricist principle must be given up, however. All they show is that the impression which gives rise to the notion of necessary connection is not an impression of sensation. Since we know on the ground of the empiricist principle that there must be a simple impression corresponding to any existing simple idea, we know that such an impression must be an impression of reflection.23 Hume’s long reasoning in the Treatise has the purpose of clarifying the nature of this impression. In the first place Hume observes that, when it has been perceived in a repeated number of cases that an object (or event) of kind C has been followed by an object (or event) of kind E, the mind acquires the habit of framing an idea of an object (or event) of kind E each time it perceives an object (or event) of kind C.24 Secondly, he points out that we do not solely anticipate the effect by entertaining an idea of it, we also believe that the effect will occur. How is belief, as opposed to the mere entertaining of an idea, brought about? Hume thinks that the difference between an idea that is merely entertained and one to which we give our assent has to be explained in terms of a difference in force and vivacity: ideas that are merely entertained are less vivid than those we believe in; in turn, these are less vivid than the impressions we derive from our senses. On this basis, Hume is in a position to argue that the reason why we do not solely conceive the effect, but also believe that it will occur, is that the vivacity of the perceived cause is transmitted to the conceived idea of the effect, a process which occurs in accordance with the fundamental principles of the mind and, in particular, of the imagination.25 Thirdly, Hume addresses the fundamental question as to the perceptual correlate of the idea of causation. The determination of the mind to pass from a present perception to the conceived idea constitutes that “sentiment or impression” from which our idea of necessary connection is derived: [A]fter a frequent repetition, I find, that upon the appearance of one of the objects [the cause], the mind is determin’d by custom to consider its usual attendant [the effect] […] ’Tis this impression, then, or determination, which affords me the idea of necessity.26

This passage raises a problem of interpretation of some importance in view of an evaluation of Whitehead’s criticism of Hume. Neither a “determination” nor “a customary transition of the imagination” can indeed be intelligibly subsumed under the category of impression as Hume describes it. One way to render Hume’s position more intelligible here is to

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read him as saying that the transition of the mind, from the perception of the cause to the conception of the effect, is accompanied by a feeling of compulsion. The mind experiences the necessity by which it is lead to anticipate the effect: “After we have observ’d the resemblance in a sufficient number of instances,” Hume says, “we immediately feel a determination of the mind to pass from one object to its usual attendant.”27 Such a feeling of necessitation takes the place of the missing sensory impression of a necessary connection. There is, however, a further problem to be solved. If the necessary connection turns out to be an experience in the mind of the observer, more precisely an impression of reflection which accompanies the transition from a perceived cause to a conceived effect, why do we speak and reason as if that necessity existed in the external world? Hume’s explanation involves a reference to what he takes to be a natural projective tendency of the mind: a subjective feeling in the mind is projected onto the world and mistaken for an objective relation between external things.28

4. Whitehead’s Critique of Hume Let’s now turn to a consideration of Whitehead’s critique of Hume’s theory of causation. Whitehead’s criticisms are scattered in several places of his works and can be grouped under two main heads. On the one hand, he advances philosophical objections aimed at questioning the intelligibility of Hume’s explanation. On the other, he directs our attention to some empirical evidence that is taken to contradict what he takes to be implied by that account. To the former group of objections belongs the remark that “Hume seems to have overlooked the difficulty that ‘repetition’ stands with regard to ‘impression’ in exactly the same position as does ‘cause and effect’.”29 Whitehead’s point here is that Hume’s account of causation presupposes that a certain cause has been repeatedly experienced in association with a given effect. At least prima facie, however, it is as difficult to see from what impression the idea of “repetition” derives as it is to identify the impression from which the idea of “causation” arises. In other words, because of his extensive use of the notion of “repetition” in his explanation, Hume owes to his reader an account of the origin of “repetition” just as much as he does of “causation.” Otherwise he could justly be accused of having explained obscura per obscuriora, i.e., of having merely replaced the original puzzle as to “causation” with a novel one as to “repetition.”

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The same considerations also apply to another notion that plays an important role in Hume’s Treatise, namely “habit.”30 The second set of critical remarks calls into question the empirical adequacy of Hume’s account. According to Hume, after the mind has experienced that a certain cause C is constantly followed by a certain effect E, it feels a determination to anticipate the effect E when perceiving C; this internal feeling of determination enters into our notion of causation and is eventually mistaken for a real connection between outward things. If this were true, Whitehead contends, repetition would be a necessary condition for our knowledge of particular causal relationships. Since according to Hume we have no direct perception of the causal link, we need to repeat the experience of a cause being followed by a certain effect in order to be sure that there really is a connection between them. As against Hume’s explanation, Whitehead points out that repetition is not in general a necessary condition for our knowledge of causal relations. Consider the case of reflex actions, such as the blink of the eyes when an electric light is turned on. Our knowledge that the sudden flash made us blink is immediate and requires no previous experiences of the same sort.31 According to one of Hume’s examples, “we remember to have seen that species of object we call flame, and to have felt that species of sensation we call heat. We likewise call to mind their constant conjunction in all past instances. Without any further ceremony, we call the one cause and the other effect […] In all those instances, from which we learn the conjunction of particular causes and effects, both the causes and effects have been perceiv’d by the senses, and are remember’d.”32 On Hume’s theory, our knowledge that fire burns requires repeated experience, yet one could ask whether a child really has to burn his hand more than once in order to learn that fire burns and provokes a sensation of pain. Explicitly put, Whitehead’s point is that, in those cases where we are directly involved in causal happenings, we do have a direct experience of the causal nexus, for we do not merely experience the pain and the heat of the flame, but also that these sensations are provoked in us by a certain object or external event.33 Another unlikely consequence of Hume’s account of causation is that sensory perceptions, and in particular visual sensations, are necessary for our awareness of causal efficacy, an awareness which in that account would seem to be one and the same with the feeling of internal compulsion upon which our idea of causation is based. Hume contends that once the mind has experienced a constant conjunction, a feeling of internal compulsion is experienced as soon as the cause is perceived. This account is difficult to reconcile with the fact that our awareness of causal efficacy

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seems to be stronger in the fading of the familiar sensory perceptions. “Most living creatures of daytime habits,—Whitehead observes—are more nervous in the dark, in the absence of the familiar visual sense data. But according to Hume, it is the very familiarity of the sense data which is required for causal inference.”34 The reason why such creatures are afraid in the dark, Whitehead contends, is that they feel themselves at the mercy of unknown external forces: even though they lack the usual visual sensations, they retain an immediate awareness of the objective reality of independent causal powers. Upon the whole Whitehead’s remarks are as simple as they are convincing: there really is in our experience a sense of participation in a larger world that is not captured by Hume’s atomistic analysis in terms of simple impressions. Note also the appropriateness of the image of a living organism afraid in the dark; the evocation of a state of darkness functions as a metaphor of the vagueness of the information about the external world conveyed by perception in the mode of causal efficacy. This must be contrasted with the “brightness” of presentational immediacy, where the mind is aware of neatly discriminated contents. In giving philosophical significance to what after all are well-known facts of our experience, Whitehead is making the point that Hume’s philosophy is not empiricist enough, but is vitiated by philosophical overintellectualism. This is the philosophers’ desire to explain all phenomena in terms of what is “clear and distinct,” a desire originating with Descartes and left as a legacy to the whole of modern philosophy.35 Whitehead’s following words refer to metaphysics, but they can be taken to have a more general significance: “The dilemma of metaphysics is that either you are clear, and leave much out, or else you are adequate—and muddled […] You come to a point where clearness is impossible.”36 In this case, the ultimate principles of explanation are Hume’s impressions of sensations, each of which is a definite item with boundaries that differentiate it from all the others. In Hume’s philosophy, “all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences”:37 there is no reason to assume, however, that what satisfies the intellect’s predilection for sharp contrasts will also deliver an adequate representation of the phenomenon under examination. This remark applies to all attempts at providing a systematic account of reality, including Whitehead’s own. We want our concepts to have sharp edges, yet clarity and precision will lead to falsification and distortion if the totality to be grasped is really a “buzzing world,” as Whitehead says borrowing William James’ famous expression,38 if it is intrinsically chaotic and fuzzy. Hence the somewhat perplexing, to the rationalistic mind very

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disturbing question: might it not be the case that, at least sometimes, the less clear account is the one closer to the truth?39

5. Hume on the “Vulgar” Notion of Causation In his discussion of Hume’s account of causation, Whitehead acknowledges that Hume implicitly recognised the reality of a mode of perception different from presentational immediacy.40 In particular, he quotes those passages where Hume uses expressions such as “we see with our eyes” or “we feel with our hands.” Innocuous as they seem to be, such expressions record that there is more to our experience than sensory perceptions (a seen colour, the coldness we feel when merging the hand into the water): we also immediately feel that such impressions originate in a definite part of our body (the eye, the hand). Such an experience of derivation involves a feeling of passivity, of being acted upon, as well as the awareness of an intimate link between our mind and our bodily organs. Certainly, these visceral feelings cannot be reduced to impressions in the Humean sense. However, Whitehead is mistaken in thinking that Hume’s recognition of the facts of perception in the mode of causal efficacy is merely involuntary. Hume acknowledges the existence of what Whitehead would consider a deeper level of experience in two brief notes in the Enquiry,41 where he advances an alternative explanation of the origin of our idea of causation closely resembling Whitehead’s own account. Hume first denies here that our experience of effort when we try to exert a force upon an external object may provide us with an idea of power or causal efficacy, but only a few lines later he also writes that “[i]t must […] be confessed that the animal nisus, which we experience, though it can afford no accurate precise idea of power, enters very much into that vulgar, inaccurate idea, which is formed of it.”42 This passage is interesting because Hume admits here the reality of a phenomenon different from the one he had discussed in the Treatise. The origin of our common notion of causation, he now writes, must be explained not by way of reference to an inner compulsion associated with an acquired habit, but by way of reference to “an animal nisus, which we experience.” This is the inner sensation of trying to overcome a resistance that is felt by all living creatures when acting upon the realities of their surrounding world. Hume also considers a problem involved with his official account, according to which we never make the experience of a force or principle

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connecting a cause with its effect, but only of their constant association and of our acquired internal compulsion to pass from the perception of the one to the idea of the other. But if we have no experience of such a principle, why does mankind dispose of so many words that refer to it? Hume carefully tries to avoid the potential implications of this reflection, and writes that “[a]s to the frequent use of the words, Force, Power, Energy, &c., which every where occur in common conversation, as well as in philosophy; that is no proof, that we are acquainted, in any instance, with the connecting principle between cause and effect.” He also adds, however, that “[t]hese words, as commonly used, have a very loose meaning annexed to them; and their ideas are very uncertain and confused.”43 Once again, Hume cannot avoid recognising that there is a notion of causation different from the one he has discussed in his official account, even though this notion is “very uncertain and confused” and the words used to express it “have a very loose meaning annexed to them.” Even more interesting for the purposes of the present paper is Hume’s explanation of the origin of this other notion of causation. According to Hume, the notion originates with the immediate feeling every living being has of himself as an active agent as well as a passive subject. The vulgar notion is based upon the awareness common to all living organisms of being causally related to an external world; as he puts it in a very significant passage: “[n]o animal can put external bodies in motion without the sentiment of a nisus or endeavour, and every animal has a sentiment or feeling from the stroke or blow of an external object, that is in motion.”44 Hume also observes that, once we have formed the vulgar notion of causation, we apply it to all things whatsoever, animate as well as inanimate: “These sensations, which are merely animal […] we are apt to transfer to inanimate objects, and to suppose that they have some such feelings, whenever they transfer or receive motion.”45 The vulgar notion of causation is inextricably tied to our capacity to feel our inner effort when we try to act upon external bodies and to feel our passivity when they act upon us. Such a conception can therefore be meaningfully applied solely to living sentient organisms. This notwithstanding, commonsense does not notice the absurdity which is involved in using it in causal reasoning about insentient objects, mislead as it is by the projective tendencies of the mind. Hume’s account of the vulgar notion of causation shows that he is wholly aware of those phenomena Whitehead refers to as “perception in the mode of causal efficacy.” The differences between the two philosophers are here not so great after all. Hume recognises that we have an immediate perception of ourselves as active agents when he talks of “the animal nisus,

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which we experience.” Most importantly, his example of the “sentiment or feeling from the stroke or blow of an external object” finds a nice parallel in Whitehead’s remark that “being tackled at Rugby, there is the Real. Nobody who hasn’t been knocked down has the slightest notion of what the Real is.”46 Here what we experience is the force of independent powers acting upon us, rather than clearly distinct sense presentations. In view of these similarities, it is actually surprising that Hume gave so much prominence to the view of the mind as having a clear grasp of its contents in his explanation of the formation of our concepts, for it does certainly look as if Hume would agree with Whitehead’s fundamental insight that “we find ourselves in the double role of agents and patients in a common world.”47 Of course, Hume would still deny that experiences of causal influence provide us with any impression of necessity, so that the problem of the origin of this idea remains unsolved. Nevertheless, given that in his official theory of causation he is ready to admit that an internal feeling of determination is sufficient to account for the empirical correlate of that idea, it is rather difficult to see now why he should not be ready to accept that our own sense of passivity, the feeling of ourselves as being at the mercy of external forces, could play the same explanatory role.

6. Towards a Metaphysics of Experience Before bringing this discussion to an end, a further aspect of Whitehead’s account of the origin of our notion of causation deserves to be brought to the light. One way to do this is by considering Hume’s contention, mentioned above, that we are deluding ourselves when we employ, in reasoning about “inanimate objects,” a notion of causation whose meaning is derived from the experiences of sentient subjects. If indeed the notion of causation originates with the experiences felt by a sentient being when he is transmitting or receiving motion, then it would seem that only two alternatives remain open: either we abstain from using such a notion at all with regard to inanimate objects, or we embrace a panpsychistic conception of reality. This line of argument is implicit in the philosophy of Whitehead, who in Adventures of Ideas writes: “in so far as we apply notions of causation to the understanding of events in nature, we must conceive these events under the general notions which apply to occasions of experience. For we can only understand causation in terms of our observations of these occasions.”48 Since the occasions of experience we are most intimately acquainted with are those composing the individual moments of our own

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psychic life, the only sense we can give to causation is that which we acquire in our primitive experiences of causal efficacy; yet, this sense is linked with a conception of the cause as a centre of experience and of the effect as felt by one such centre.49 The purpose of mentioning this argument is not to defend its validity, but to illustrate a last point concerning Whitehead’s discussion of Hume’s account of causation. Contrary to what may appear at first sight, the argument shows that the issue is not only epistemological but metaphysical. What is at stake is nothing less than a general theory of reality, as well as the possibility of reaching it by way of generalisation from the self’s primordial experience of the world. More generally, it is the nature of the relationship between metaphysics and experience which is in question, here respectively functioning as terminus ad quem and terminus a quo of Whitehead’s philosophical speculation. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the nature of the relationship between experience and metaphysics is captured by the statement that “the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects.”50 Whitehead goes even so far as to ascribe to Hume a philosophical project similar to his own, as when he says that he accepts “Hume’s doctrine that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience.”51 Whitehead is here over-emphasising the extent of the similarity between his philosophy and that of Hume, for certainly Hume would not have endorsed Whitehead’s metaphysical conclusion that experience is a pervasive feature of reality or, as he also forcefully states in one formulation of his reformed subjectivist principle, that “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.”52 The notes in the Enquiry clearly show that the problem is not solely Hume’s intellectualism or his failure to take notice of those phenomena that for Whitehead are experiences of causal efficacy, but also a fear of anthropomorphism, for what sense would it make to ascribe “sensations, which are merely animal […] to inanimate objects”? This charge, which has been raised by many against Whitehead, cannot be discussed here in any detail.53 What needs to be emphasised is that at this juncture a radical choice must be made: if we want to be thoroughgoing empiricist—as both Hume and Whitehead try to be—either we abandon the speculative enterprise altogether and refrain from making any claim about the intrinsic nature of realities beyond ourselves, or we try to understand them by reference to our experiential life.

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What should be clear is that the rejection of speculative metaphysics is not the only position consistent with an empiricist attitude in philosophy;54 probably, such a rejection is not even the more reasonable one. Since we all in practice presuppose some general view of reality and are influenced by it, is it not better to articulate our metaphysical assumptions in an explicit way, so that they become available for critical examination, rather than follow Hume’s proto-positivistic suggestion in the Enquiry and commit all books of metaphysics to the flames? True, it is only to be expected that there will be some amount of “sophistry and illusion”55 in our speculative constructions. Hopefully, however, the exercise of questioning the validity of inherited categories, of developing new ones and of looking at the world through the lenses of new conceptual schemes will lead to greater intellectual freedom, openness of mind and an enhanced awareness of the complexity of life. As Professor Wiehl has pointed out, Whitehead’s original and provocative “pan-subjectivist” metaphysics forces us to reconsider that question, which modern thought presumed to have answered once for all—Was ist und was vermag Metaphysik?56

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Notes Work on this paper was made possible by a grant provided by the Swiss National Foundation (SNF); I am indebted to John Wright, Geoffrey Madell, Julian Kiverstein and Michel Weber for helpful discussions and critical comments on an earlier draft, and to the Department of Philosophy of the University of Edinburgh for having provided ideal working conditions. 1. For example in Metaphysik und Erfahrung: Philosophische Essays (Frankfurt 1996). In more than one place, Wiehl has shown how Whitehead was able to add new dimensions to the historical and theoretical complexity of this relationship by the introduction of radically new ideas, for example in his comparative examinations of Whitehead’s philosophy with those of Spinoza and Kant. See in particular the essays “Whiteheads Kant-Kritik und Kants Kritik am Panpsychismus” (pp. 333-374) and “Metaphysik und Erfahrung. Überlegungen im Anschluss an Spinoza und Whitehead” (pp. 375-397), both published in the above mentioned volume. See also his “Einleitung in die Philosophie A. N. Whitehead,” Alfred North Whitehead: Abenteuer der Ideen, translated by E. Bubser (Frankfurt 1971), pp. 7-71. 2. Other philosophers are relevant as well, among the moderns especially Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and Kant. A general account of Whitehead’s understanding of the philosophical relevance of the history of philosophy, as well as of his relationship with the above mentioned philosophers, has been recently provided by C. Kann, Fussnoten zu Platon. Philosophiegeschichte bei A. N. Whitehead (Hamburg 2001). Hume was the polemical target of thinkers with whose ideas Whitehead was acquainted, such as Bradley, James and Santayana. 3. A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism: its Meaning and Effect (Cambridge 1928), p. 5. 4. Ibid., p. 57. 5. One reason for this is that the interaction with the external world engenders in the living organism an emotional reaction. Our primary awareness of the external world as an active power is therefore vague, confused, and full of primordial emotions; only in a later stage of our experience is this inchoate whole of feelings transformed into a world of distinct things. As Whitehead has it: “Our experience starts with a sense of power, and proceeds to the discrimination of individualities and their qualities.” A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York 1968), p. 119.

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6. A complete account of Whitehead’s theory of perception would require a discussion of symbolic reference, a mixed perceptive modality generated by the interplay of perception in the mode of causal efficacy with presentational immediacy. A fuller yet concise account of Whitehead’s theory of perception is provided by E. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience (New York 1998), pp. 75-86. 7. In Whitehead’s own words: “The notion of causation arose because mankind lives amid experiences in the mode of causal efficacy.” (Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 175). 8. R. Wiehl, “Einleitung,” op. cit., pp. 42-43. 9. D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, second edition by L. A. SelbyBigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford 1960), p. 1. 10. D. Hume, Treatise, op. cit., pp. 7-8. 11. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York 1978), p. 162. 12. “[T]here are many species of subjective forms, such as emotions, valuations, purposes, adversions, aversions, consciousness” (Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 24). Whitehead’s idea is that each act of prehension involves both an object and a particular way of prehending it: emotions refer to “how” something is felt and are better referred to by means of adverbs rather than nouns or adjectives. 13. D. Hume, Treatise, op. cit., p. 252. 14. R. Wiehl, “Einleitung,” op. cit., pp. 26-28. 15. Insofar as the concrescence requires a subjective aim which is provided by God in order to be initiated, however, the question arises whether Whitehead’s application of the notion of self-organization is consistently carried out. Whitehead discusses Kant’s view of the self in Process and Reality, op. cit., pp. 155-156. 16. D. Hume, Treatise, op. cit., p. 3. 17. Ibid., p. 4 (Hume’s emphasis). 18. Ibid., p. 6. 19. “This exception cannot be restricted to colour, and must be extended to sound, and smell, and to all graduations of sensation.” (A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 132.) 20. Simple and well-known examples are the way colours and shapes function as parts of larger pictures or the different sorts of contrasts that may arise between the sounds of the instruments and a singer’s voice in a

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musical piece. (For an insigthful analysis of this sort of contrasts, see John W. Lango’s “Whitehead’s Category of Contrasts,” Process Studies 32.1., 2003, pp. 37-61). The idea that the parts of a whole are what they are according to the position they occupy within the whole, so that the whole is not the mere aggregate of its parts but essentially contributes to their natures, is for Whitehead “a commonplace of art” and can be used as an illustration of “the doctrine of real unities being more than a mere collective disjunction of component elements” (A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 229). See also D. Pears’ Hume’s System: An Examination of the First Book of His “Treatise” (Oxford 1990), pp. 20-26, for a discussion of the counter-example that emphasises Hume’s failure to recognise the holistic nature of the mind. 21. The fundamental problem for Whitehead’s view is that of explaining how a novel moment of experience comes into being: according to Whitehead, a retrospective analysis of a moment of experience discloses it as a concrescence of prehensions, i.e., as a (at least partly) self-realised integration of contents derived from previous such moments. The idea that the stream of consciousness that constitutes our enduring self can be analysed into a series of interconnected momentary selves is borrowed from James’ Principles of Psychology (New York 1890), see especially Chapters IX (“The Stream of Thought”) and X (“The Consciousness of Self”). An account of James’ position that includes a comparison with Whitehead’s is in M. P. Ford, William James’ Philosophy: A New Perspective (Amherst 1982). See also “The Metaphysics of The Principles of Psychology,” Chapter 2 of T. Sprigge’s James and Bradley. American Truth and British Reality (Chicago/La Salle 1993), pp. 67-107. 22. D. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford 1975), p. 75. 23. D. Hume, Treatise, op. cit., pp. 77-78. 24. Ibid., p. 93. 25. Ibid., p. 98. 26. Ibid., p. 156 (Hume’s emphasis). 27. Ibid., p. 165. 28. Having observed that “necessity is something that exists in the mind, not in objects” (ibid.), Hume goes on to argue that it is “a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that

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these objects discover themselves to the senses” (ibid., p. 167). For a detailed account of Hume’s explanation of causation, see B. Stroud, Hume (London/Boston 1977), pp. 42-95, and J. P. Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester 1983), pp. 123-174. 29. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 134. 30. Ibid., p. 140. 31. Ibid., pp. 174-175. 32. D. Hume, Treatise, op. cit., p. 87 (Hume’s emphasis). 33. In his discussion of the example of the flash, Whitehead writes: “The man will explain his experience by saying, ‘The flash made me blink’; and if this statement be doubted, he will reply, ‘I know it, because I felt it’.” In other words, we do not merely experience the flash and our blinking, but also that the flash made us blink, i.e., we feel the causal connection between the two events (Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 175). 34. A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism, op. cit., p. 50. 35. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York 1968), p. 175. 36. Quoted from W. E. Hocking, “Whitehead as Man and Thinker,” in G. L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead. Essays on his Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs 1963), p. 15 37. D. Hume, Treatise, op. cit., p. 636. 38. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 50. The expression “blooming, buzzing confusion” is used by James (The Principles of Psychology, op. cit., p. 462) as a description of an infant’s first experience of the world. 39. One such mind was clearly Russell’s, who in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (London 1956), p. 41 recalls the following anecdote: “He [Whitehead] said to me once: ‘You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.’ I thought his remark horrid, but could not see how to prove that my bias was any better than his.” Russell’s bias here is the same as Hume’s. 40. See for example A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., pp. 170-171. 41. There is much in the Enquiry that should deserve careful consideration besides these two notes, but a complete examination of Hume’s discussion of causation is not possible within the limits of the present paper. 42. D. Hume, Enquiry, op. cit., p. 67n.

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43. Ibid., pp. 77-78n. 44. Ibid., p. 78n. 45. Ibid. 46. Quoted from W. E. Hocking, “Whitehead as Man and Thinker,” op. cit., p. 13. 47. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 315. 48. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 184. 49. An argument along the lines just sketched was explicitly advanced by William James in Some Problems of Philosophy, in The Works of William James, edited by F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers and I. K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge/London 1978). James first argues that “the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency.” Then he concludes that “if we took those experiences as the type of what actual causation is, we should have to ascribe to cases of causation outside of our own life, to physical cases also, an inwardly experiential nature. In other words we should have to espouse a so-called ‘pan-psychic’ philosophy” (p. 109). 50. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 166. 51. Ibid., p. 166. 52. Ibid. For a recent discussion of the principle, see D. R. Griffin and O. B. Smith “The Mystery of the Subjectivist Principle,” Process Studies 32.1, 2003, pp. 3-36. 53. Discussions of this objection are provided by E. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience, op. cit., pp. 7-8, and T. E. Hosinski, Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance (New York 1993), pp. 92-94. It is also important to observe that the thesis that experience is a pervasive feature of reality does not entail the absurdity that absolutely everything (including ordinary macroscopic objects) is an experiencing subject: this qualification applies to all ultimate constituents of reality, but only to some of the wholes which they form. See D. R. Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom and the Mind-Body Problem (Berkeley 1998), especially pp. 188-189. 54. Contrary to what is suggested, for example, by A. J. Ayer in the preface to the first edition of his Language, Truth and Logic (London 1936), p. 9. 55. D. Hume, Enquiry, op. cit., p. 165. 56. R. Wiehl, “Metaphysische Entwürfe im 20. Jahrhundert,” Metaphysik und Erfahrung, op. cit., p. 124. “Pansubjektivismus” is Wiehl’s

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denomination for the special version of panpsychism advocated by Whitehead: see, for example, his “Whiteheads Kant-Kritik und Kants Kritik am Panpsychismus,” op. cit., p. 347.

Subjectivity, System and Intersubjectivity Joseph A. Bracken Many contemporary philosophers and theologians have a deep distrust of classical metaphysics with its strong focus on logical analysis and organized thought-systems purporting to give a comprehensive view of the God-world relationship or some other all-embracing topic. This attitude may partly be traced to the impact on the academy of Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas in which he laid bare the contrast between “totalizing” rational modes of thought and the potential infinity of human subjectivity, above all, as seen in the “face” of the other.1 Likewise, the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others in “deconstructing” classical texts in philosophy and theology so as to reveal their hidden mechanisms for power and control have made the rest of us alert to the subtle dangers of allegedly objective modes of thought. But from a scientific perspective formal logic and systematic thinking are indispensable tools for setting forth hypotheses worthy of serious attention. Rational consistency in one form or another thus remains the “name of the game” for most academics. Reiner Wiehl has clearly captured this tension between the demands of rational objectivity and the creative spontaneity present within human subjectivity in a series of books and articles over the years. Recently, for example, he published Subjektivität und System in which he pointed to the different ways in which the notion of subjectivity can be employed first in the construction of objective rational systems and then in the interpretation of subjective worlds of experience.2 For the purpose of this article, however, I will focus on his essay “Whitehead’s Cosmology of Feeling between Ontology and Anthropology” in Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity, edited by Wiehl himself and Friedrich Rapp. 3 Therein he compares Whitehead and Hegel on the theoretical presuppositions of a philosophy of life. Both Whitehead and Hegel, for example, rejected the classical notion of substance as the foundational concept of metaphysics. For, substances or things only exist in the human mind as an unconscious abstraction from the dynamic flow of events taking

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place in reality. Hence, to focus on presumed substances or things is to commit what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” to mistake the abstract for the concrete.4 Likewise, both thinkers turned to the notion of subjectivity as the true source for a genuine philosophy of life. But at this point they differed significantly in their metaphysical schemes. Hegel conceived his system as both the logical and historical selfmanifestation of Absolute Spirit wherein objectivity and subjectivity are in the end perfectly reconciled. But Hegel in that respect was implicitly committed to a “totalizing” approach to reality. The process of the selfmanifestation of the Absolute Spirit was already logically complete in his philosophy and in due time would presumably also be fully manifest in history. When the triumph of rationality in cosmic history is complete, then the process-character of life will inevitably come to an end. Whitehead, on the contrary, with his turn to the Subject conceived reality in terms of a plurality of momentary self-constituting subjects of experience which by their dynamic interrelation from moment to moment co-constitute the apparent substances or enduring things of this world.5 As Wiehl perceptively comments, Whitehead thereby privileged creativity or life over rationality or truth.6 Given the never-ending multiplicity of centers of subjectivity, each engaged in its creative self-constitution out of the data presented to it by antecedent subjects of experience, there can be no end to the ongoing process of life. Truth is therefore never an accomplished fact as in the speculative philosophy of Hegel: “The reality of life and of the individual processes of life is more original than the truth of knowledge and process of its proof of truth. Truth is only one of many functions of life, as incidentally also error and deception, although a very important one: It encourages the development of higher life.”7 As Whitehead himself commented in Adventures of Ideas, “[i]t is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true […] But, of course, a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.”8 What is ultimately important is the ongoing process of life even if it sometimes meanders into dead-ends along the way. Yet is it possible that Whitehead overplayed the priority of creativity over rationality? Did he, in other words, adequately account for the existence of rationality and order within the creative process? Did he not postulate, for example, the reality of the consequent nature of God in Process and Reality so as to bring into harmony what might otherwise be a chaotic jumble of disconnected events: “God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast.”9 Yet, if so, is this not a deus ex

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machina for what should be an intrinsic feature of reality even apart from God? Whiteheadians might counter-argue that in virtue of Whitehead’s ontological principle the ultimate reasons for things are to be found in actual entities.10 So what is the problem with stipulating that the ultimate unity of things in this world is to be found within God, the primordial actual entity? But this is clearly an instance of what postmodernists like Jacques Derrida have called “logocentrism,” the appeal to a “transcendental signified” so as to satisfy the human passion for order and intelligibility.11 The unity of things should rather be found in the things themselves and in their internal relations to one another, not in an appeal to a “transcendental signified” like the divine consequent nature in Whitehead’s philosophy. My own position is that what is needed for the proper combination of creativity and rationality is not simply a metaphysics of subjectivity but a metaphysics of intersubjectivity whereby objective order and rationality are first brought into being and then sustained in being by the interrelationality of momentary subjects of experience in ongoing succession. But is this not what Whitehead himself had in mind with the category of “society,” namely, a nexus of actual occasions with “social order” or a “common element of form” in time and most often in space as well?12 In principle, this is true. Yet, as I will indicate below, closer examination of what Whitehead said about societies makes clear that he remained all his life more focused on the parts, the constituent actual occasions, than on the whole, the society as an ontological reality in some sense distinct from its parts and with an “essential character” peculiar to itself.13 To begin, let us look more carefully at Whitehead’s definition of society in Process and Reality: A nexus enjoys “social order” where (i) there is a common element of form illustrated in the definiteness of each of its included actual entities, and (ii) this common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of the conditions imposed upon it by its prehensions of some other members of the nexus, and (iii) these prehensions impose that condition of reproduction by reason of their inclusion of positive feelings of that common form. Such a nexus is called a “society,” and the common form is the “defining characteristic” of the society. The notion of “defining characteristic” is allied to the Aristotelian notion of “substantial form.”14

What is distinctive about this definition of a society is that the common element of form arises in each member of the nexus by reason of its prehensions of that form in “some other members of the nexus.” Hence, each constituent actual occasion has to filter out what is irrelevant as opposed to what is relevant for itself in the pattern of interrelationality at work in its immediate antecedents within the society. Likewise, it does so by focusing its attention on some of its antecedent actual occasions but by

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implication not on all of them. Hence, the question naturally arises how one can be sure that the same common element of form or governing pattern of interrelationality will in fact be faithfully transmitted from one set of actual occasions to another so as to perpetuate the “defining characteristic” of the society. Whitehead’s answer presumably would be that it is not necessary for the common element of form to be reproduced in exactly the same way within each newly concrescing actual occasion of the society in question. As he notes elsewhere in Process and Reality, it is enough that the constituent actual occasions are analogously the same in terms of their common reproduction of the defining characteristic of the society.15 But, once again, the question arises how one can be sure that the society will not cease to exist or at least dramatically change character from one moment to the next. The constituent actual occasions are, after all, each a world unto itself. As Whitehead himself comments, “no two actual entities originate from an identical universe; though the difference between the two universes only consists in some actual entities, included in one and not in the other, and in the subordinate entities which each actual entity introduces into the world.”16 Among these “subordinate entities” would be presumably eternal objects which “are the same for all actual entities”17 but may not be prehended by each concrescing actual occasion in the same way. So there is an objective uncertainty about the persistence in time of Whiteheadian societies with a well-defined common element of form. Given the evolutionary character of physical reality according to Whitehead, one would expect that common element of form to change gradually over time. But what logical guarantee is there that it will not dramatically change from one moment to the next and effectively be a different society or no society at all? This may seem to be a fine puzzle not worth worrying about, but it points in my judgment to a basic problem in Whitehead’s scheme for many scholars. By his own admission, Whitehead is a philosophical atomist: “The ultimate metaphysical truth is atomism. The creatures are atomic.”18 Michel Weber points out, to be sure, that the latter’s emphasis on actual entities as “the final real things of which the world is made up”19 was necessary to allow for genuine novelty in an evolutionary context.20 Without the privacy afforded by the notion of a momentary selfconstituting subject of experience which is heavily influenced but not controlled by its environment, there is no ontological basis for spontaneity in a cosmic process otherwise dominated by fixed patterns of activity. Yet did Whitehead thereby vindicate the reality of novelty in his evolutionary cosmology at too high a price?

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For if, as noted above, “no two actual entities originate from an identical universe,” then there is no objectively existing universe at all. Even the universe as existing from moment to moment within the consequent nature of God is not the universe, but God’s universe, the panoply of events in this world as experienced by God and somehow integrated into a harmonious totality from moment to moment. The ontological unity thus achieved only exists within God as the primordial actual entity, not between finite actual entities in this world. Thus there is no objectively existing universe within Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme because all ontological unity is the unity of actual entities in their self-constitution. There are unquestionably close analogies between actual entities, on which basis Whitehead can stipulate the existence of societies with a common element of form among their members, but there is no universe as such. For, in the end, as Whitehead himself maintains, actual entities “are the final real things of which the world is made up. ” Admittedly, at the very end of Process and Reality Whitehead sets forth the “four creative phases in which the universe accomplishes its actuality.”21 But careful analysis of those phases makes clear that the third phase, “the phase 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,”22 is a description of the divine consequent nature, not of the world except as it is indirectly reflected in the latter. Whitehead, to be sure, then adds that in the fourth phase “the perfected actuality passes back into the world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience.”23 Through the provision of an initial aim to each newly concrescing actual occasion in this world,24 God’s experience of the Kingdom of God, that is, God’s experience of the deeper harmony of events taking place in this world, becomes a factor in that entity’s selfconstitution. But it is still only one factor among many others at work in the process of concrescence for that actual occasion. In the end, accordingly, we are left with a multiplicity of entities, each engaged in its own selfconstitution. There is no objectively existing universe. Was this a mental lapse on Whitehead’s part or a deliberate choice? In all likelihood, it was a deliberate choice since, as already noted, he consciously espoused metaphysical atomism. But, in my judgment, the deeper reason for that choice may well have been that he had no other alternative, given his repudiation of the classical notion of substance. It is revealing that in Adventures of Ideas he aligns his own understanding of societies with the classical notion of substance even as he notes that

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confusion between the two terms has been an obstacle in Western philosophy since the time of the Greeks: The real actual things that endure are all societies. They are not actual occasions […] A society has an essential character, whereby it is the society that it is, and it also has accidental qualities which vary as circumstances alter. Thus a society, as a complete existence and as retaining the same metaphysical status, enjoys a history expressing its changing reactions to changing circumstances. But an actual occasion has no such history. It never changes. It only becomes and perishes.25

Whitehead evidently thinks that it is a mistake to confuse actual occasions with mini-substances despite the fact that he himself refers to actual occasions as “the final real things of which the world is made up.” Societies, on the contrary, are much closer in ontological function to substances in that they endure over time. But what are societies if they have enduring thing-like characteristics and yet seem to be only aggregates of analogously constituted actual occasions, as noted above? Here Whitehead may have been at a loss to say and so simply devoted his attention to the self-constitution of the constituents of societies, actual occasions, and their dynamic interrelation.26 What has been clear to me for many years now is that there is a further alternative, namely, to think of societies as environments or structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions. As we shall see shortly, Whitehead himself made reference to societies as environments in “layers of social order” for any given set of actual occasions. But, even apart from Whitehead’s explicit statement on the issue, one can argue for the suitability of the notion of “field,” “environment,” or with suitable qualification “system,” as a foundational concept for a specifically social ontology. For what is needed is an objectively existing reality constituted by the ongoing interplay of its constituent parts or members. Yet it is not simply an aggregate of those parts or members because it exercises a type of “top-down” causality on the activity of the parts or members even as it itself originally came into existence and is even now sustained in existence by the “bottom-up” causality of those same parts or members. As we shall see below, a Whiteheadian society thus exercises agency but only in virtue of the agency of all its constituent actual occasions acting in unison. To flesh out this proposal, I will now cite the pertinent passages out of Process and Reality on the nature of societies which seem to lend themselves to this interpretation. Every society must be considered with its background of a wider environment of actual entities, which also contribute their objectifications to which the members of the society must conform […] But this means that the environment, together with the society in question, must form a larger

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society in respect to some more general characters than those defining the society from which we started. Thus we arrive at the principle that every society requires a social background, of which it is itself a part. In reference to any given society the world of actual entities is to be conceived as forming a background in layers of social order, the defining characteristics become wider and more general as we widen the background.27

There is admittedly no reference to “fields” in this citation. But “environment” and “field” are sufficiently close in meaning to make them virtually convertible. What one specifies in either case is something objectively existing which is shaped in its ongoing function and manifest structure by psychic events, that is, the self-constitution of momentary subjects of experience, taking place within it. The field is not itself a subject of experience but is the byproduct or objective result of the dynamic interrelation of subjects of experience. Whitehead himself seems indirectly to confirm this field-oriented approach to reality with his comments about the role of the Receptacle in Plato’s philosophy: “Plato’s Receptacle may be conceived as the necessary community within which the course of history is set, in abstraction from all the particular facts.”28 In the same context he refers to the Receptacle as “the matrix for all begetting, and whose essence is process with retention of connectedness.”29 Presumably this notion of the Receptacle corresponds to what he calls the extensive continuum in Process and Reality. In any case, as I have indicated elsewhere, with one key modification it seems to correspond well with what Jorge Nobo calls the “ontogenetic matrix” for the becoming and the being of actual entities past, present, and future; in Whiteheadian terms, it is the conjunction of creativity and the extensive continuum so as to constitute the ontological ground or vital source for everything that exists.30 In still another passage of Process and Reality, Whitehead makes clear the bottom-up and top-down causality at work in Whiteheadian societies, above all, if one interprets them as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions: The causal laws which dominate a social environment are the product of the defining characteristic of that society. But the society is only efficient through its individual members. Thus in a society, the members can only exist by reason of the laws which dominate the society, and the laws only come into being by reason of the analogous characters of the members of the society.31

The agency of the constituent actual occasions is clearly different from the agency of the society as such. Yet each is indispensable for the other. The constituent actual occasions by their efficient causality, that is, by their combined agencies of self-constitution, co-constitute a common element of

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form both for their own existence here and now and for their successor actual occasions in the same society. That is, they imprint upon the field to which they all belong a definite pattern of interrelation which is, on the one hand, basically the same as the pattern of self-constitution for each of them individually but, on the other hand, not exactly the same since it corresponds to the pattern of organization between those actual occasions, not within any one of them in particular. The successor actual occasions in the same society will in turn prehend that common element of form, each in its own way as the basis of its individual self-constitution. What we have then is a reciprocal causality first of a given set of actual occasions upon the society to which they belong and then of the society as a field of activity thus structured in a given way upon the next set of actual occasions in the society. The antecedent actual occasions thereby exercise efficient causality upon the prevailing structure of the society and the society in turn exercises a type of formal causality upon the next set of actual occasions to arise. Presumably this is what Whitehead meant by saying in the above citation that a society “is only efficient through its individual members,” but then immediately added that “the members can only exist by reason of the laws which dominate the society.” Constituent actual occasions with their momentary bottom-up or efficient causality come and go. But the society as an ongoing field of activity structured by their dynamic interrelation remains and exercises its own top-down or formal causality on subsequent sets of concrescing actual occasions. The problem noted earlier, namely, how one can guarantee the persistence of an identical common element of form for a Whiteheadian society given Whitehead’s predilection for thinking of societies simply in terms of their constituent actual occasions, has thereby been solved. The form is embedded in the structure of the field for successive sets of actual occasions to prehend. While this form can certainly evolve over time as a result of new patterns of interrelation among the constituent actual occasions, it cannot change dramatically in the short run. As Whitehead notes in Adventures of Ideas, a society “has an essential character, whereby it is the society that it is.” The value of this alteration in Whitehead’s scheme can perhaps best be estimated by comparing it with Whitehead’s own approach to the problem of continuity of form within societies. In Process and Reality Whitehead analyzes the category of transmutation as follows: Some category is required to provide a physical feeling of a nexus as one entity with its own categoreal type of existence. This one physical feeling in the final subject [newly concrescing actual occasion] is derived by transmutation from the various analogous physical feelings entertained by the various members of the nexus, together with their various analogous

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conceptual feelings (with these various members as subjects) originated from these physical feelings, either directly according to Category IV [Conceptual Valuation], or indirectly according to Category V [Conceptual Reversion]. The analogy of the physical feelings consists in the fact that their definite character exhibits the same ingredient eternal object. The analogy of the conceptual feelings consists in the fact that this one eternal object, or one reversion from this eternal object, is the datum for the various relevant conceptual feelings entertained respectively by members of the nexus.32

What immediately stands out in this extended citation is that Whitehead is once again focusing on the parts, the constituent actual occasions, rather than the whole, the society as an objective reality with a characteristic structure or pattern of operation. But, to be fair, let us follow the logic of Whitehead’s argument from start to finish. Whitehead begins by noting that a newly concrescing actual occasion within a given society has to prehend a “multiplicity of scattered feelings” derived from antecedent actual occasions in the same society as the data for its own simple physical feelings.33 It then unifies these diverse physical feelings from antecedent actual occasions in terms of a single conceptual feeling likewise derived from the antecedent actual occasions so as to experience the physical unity of the society to which it belongs. “Such a transmutation of simple physical feelings of many actualities into one physical feeling of a nexus as one, is called a ‘transmuted feeling.’ The origination of such a feeling depends upon intensities, valuations, and eliminations conjointly favorable.”34 Thereupon, the newly concrescing actual occasion proceeds either simply to reproduce or in some way to modify the data received from this antecedent nexus of actual occasions in line with its own subjective aim and its own process of self-constitution. When one thus realizes the potential complexity of this process of transmutation within a single concrescing actual occasion and then likewise takes into account that this same process of transmutation of data from antecedent actual occasions is going on within all the other concrescing actual occasions belonging to the society in question, then, as I see it, one has good reason to wonder how the society retains the same “essential characteristic” from one moment to the next. The possibility for all the newly concrescing members of the society to undergo this process of transmutation in the same way and with the same results seems quite unlikely. De facto, the “things” of common sense experience do remain basically the same from moment to moment. But does this happen in virtue of the above-described category of transmutation which is operative within each actual occasion making up those “things”? Or does it happen, as I have suggested, by reason of the fact that a Whiteheadian society is an

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objective field of activity already structured in a certain way by reason of the efficient causality of antecedent actual occasions which then uniformly “informs” the newly concrescing actual occasions in that they all prehend the same objective structure within the field to which they belong? Both alternatives are rationally plausible. But, as I see it, the one theory is much simpler and seems to guarantee the continuity of the common element of form between successive actual occasions (or sets of actual occasions in the case of “corpuscular” societies extended in space as well as time) much more readily. Why Whitehead himself did not come to a similar conclusion is, of course, open to interpretation. But my own explanation is that he apparently could not think of societies except in terms of aggregates of actual occasions with analogously the same selfconstitution. My hypothesis of societies as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions either never occurred to him or was dismissed for some reason as not worthy of further consideration. While I agree with Reiner Wiehl, therefore, that Whitehead’s metaphysical system is a better candidate for a comprehensive philosophy of life than that of Hegel because of its strong emphasis on creativity and ongoing process, yet even here rationality and the persistence of an established order over time have to be safeguarded. Aristotle’s category of substance, in other words, cannot be simply set aside as no longer necessary in a process-oriented world. Its equivalent in terms of a principle of continuity of form or pattern of operation over time must be acknowledged and defined even within a process-relational worldview. To make this point clear, I will now cite the work of two prominent processoriented thinkers, Ivor Leclerc and Ervin Laszlo, who like myself were dissatisfied with Whitehead’s philosophical atomism and sought to remedy it in terms of a somewhat different metaphysical scheme. I will then indicate how my own revision of Whitehead’s philosophy seems to be both more faithful to Whitehead’s approach to reality and better suited to the requirements of a bona fide social ontology. Ivor Leclerc in The Philosophy of Nature first indicates how Gottfried Leibniz and Whitehead sharply criticised the materialistic atomism of early modern Western philosophy but curiously retained some of its basic features which then created problems for them in explaining “compound individuals,” actualities composed of interrelated parts or members. Leibniz claimed that individual monads making up a physical body each perceive the body as a whole “in a particular perspectival relationship.”35 A substantial bond (vinculum substantiale) thereby exists between the monads making up the body. But this is ultimately an illusory claim, says Leclerc, since in the end only the monads really exist. Similarly, Whitehead

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claimed that, since actual occasions are “the final real things of which the world is made up,” societies of actual occasions are strictly derivative from the dynamic interrelatedness of those same actual occasions. Yet, if the reasons for things are to be found only in actual entities,36 a society as such has no ontological reality or reason to exist: “the society is not ‘selfsustaining’ except in a derivative sense; it is the constituent actual entities which individually ‘sustain’ the defining character of the society.”37 Leclerc’s own solution to the problem of “compound individuals” is to return to Aristotle’s notion of a “mixture” whereby the constituent parts or members are integrated with one another so as to form a new substantial reality with its own form or agency. The constituent parts or members thereby become potentialities with respect to the new actuality to be found in the whole. Only if the “compound individual” dissolves do the component parts or members become once again fully actual entities in their own right. Leclerc summarizes his position as follows: [T]here can be a unity of a compound only by the unifying of the constituents, by their integration into a new whole. Now this unifying is an act, and this implies an agent acting, i.e., an agent effecting this unity. This unifying agent cannot be itself one of the constituents unified, for it could not then be a constituent. If there is to be an integral unity qua compound, the unifying agent must transcend the constituents. This implies that the actuality of the unifying agent must itself be emergent in the unifying.38

My own position is quite close to that of Leclerc but still different. As noted above, in my field-oriented understanding of Whiteheadian societies, the actual occasions constitutive of a given society co-constitute from moment to moment their “common element of form.” But the common element of form thus constituted “informs” the next set of constituent actual occasions in terms of their individual processes of concrescence. Thus I remain faithful to Whitehead’s dictum that agency in the sense of efficient causality “belongs exclusively to actual occasions.”39 But the common element of form or structure already present within the field exercises formal causality upon the next set of actual occasions simply by being available for prehension and thereby for integration into their individual processes of concrescence. In brief, then, while Leclerc presupposes an Aristotelian notion of substantial form as active with respect to its material components, I presuppose Whitehead’s radical rethinking of the cause-effect relationship whereby the effect, the concrescing actual occasion, is active in its own self-constitution and the formal cause, the common element of form, is simply there to be prehended. This difference between our two schemes may seem negligible until one comes to terms with the fact that, while Aristotle’s and Leclerc’s notion of

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a “compound individual” works reasonably well to explain the emergence and functioning of complex individual entities, it does little or nothing to explain how supraorganic realities like communities and physical environments over time assume an “essential character” which is different from the combined characteristics of their individual parts or members. Here, as I see it, is where my own understanding of a Whiteheadian society as a structured field of activity for its constituent actual occasions has an applicability far beyond the Aristotelian category of substance. For, if one conceives communities and environments as likewise substances or “compound individuals,” then totalitarianism in some form or other results. That is, the parts or members of the community or environment thereby lose their individual self-identity through being absorbed into the unitary actuality of the environment or community. The model of a physical organism thus does not work well for the analysis of communities and environments where the component parts or members must remain fully actual realities in their own right. Keeping this in mind, I turn now to the work of Ervin Laszlo, one of the major theoreticians of “systems theory.” In an early work, Introduction to Systems Philosophy, Laszlo first distinguished between humanly constructed or artificial systems and natural systems. A natural system he then defined as a “non-random accumulation of matter-energy, in a region of space-time, which is nonrandomly organized into coacting interrelated subsystems or components.”40 As such, the notion of natural system applies not only to individual entities, both non-living and living, but to specifically social groupings, namely, communities or environments. Furthermore, he sees the entire physical universe as thus hierarchically organized into ever more complex and/or comprehensive systems. Finally, in his latest book The Connectivity Hypothesis, he likens natural systems to structured fields of activity for their component parts or members.41 Thus understood, a natural system for Laszlo is much akin to my own understanding of a Whiteheadian society as a structured field of activity for its constituent actual occasions with two significant exceptions. For Laszlo primitive natural systems like atoms possess “invariant properties” which allow them to become functioning parts of more sophisticated natural systems.42 Following Whitehead, I hold that actual occasions as momentary self-constituting subjects of experience have no “invariant properties” but derive their internal structure and organization here and now from the environment out of which they are emerging. Likewise, with Whitehead I hold that Whiteheadian societies (unlike natural systems for Laszlo) do not exercise agency in their own right but only in and through the collective agency of their constituent actual occasions from moment to moment.

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Thereby I locate agency primarily in the constituents of a society or system rather than in the society or system itself even though I agree with Laszlo that societies or systems are ontological realities in their own right. Once again, my point here is not simply to vindicate my own understanding of a Whiteheadian society over against other alternatives (compound individual for Leclerc, natural system for Laszlo) but to set forth a foundational concept for a new social ontology, one which does not reduce the constituent parts or members to the whole or the whole to the interplay of the constituent parts or members. Laszlo’s natural system evidently provides for the existence and activity of specifically social realities distinct from their constituent parts or members. But in attributing agency directly to the natural system instead of seeing the agency of the system as the collective agency of its interrelated parts or members, Laszlo runs the risk of totalitarianism. The natural system thereby subordinates its parts or members to its own superordinate agency much like Leclerc’s notion of the substantial form. The parts or members are then no longer actualities in their own right but instead potentialities within the actuality of the natural system. Yet, as Jürgen Habermas notes in The Theory of Communicative Action, systems then no longer exist for the sake of the individuals who created them; rather individuals exist to perpetuate the goals and values of the system.43 To sum up, while I fully agree with Reiner Wiehl that within a comprehensive philosophy of life creativity and process should have priority over rationality and order, a suitable balance between these rival principles of existence and activity must be ultimately established. Whitehead, in my judgment, overplayed the role of creativity within his metaphysical system even though, as Friedrich Rapp makes clear, he evidently wanted to achieve a systematic understanding of reality with a precision akin to that found in the natural sciences.44 His mistake lay in focusing too much on the reality and function of actual occasions as momentary self-constituting subjects of experience and too little on the reality and function of the societies out of which they emerge and to which they contribute their own feeling-laden pattern of objectification. Only if “actual occasion” and “society” are seen as equiprimordial realities rather than as the one ontologically derivative from the other, are we in a position to strike the balance between creativity and rationality, novelty and order, spoken of above. Not subjectivity by itself, therefore but only intersubjectivity is the necessary starting-point for a comprehensive philosophy of life, provided that by intersubjectivity one presupposes the notion of a Whiteheadian society as a field of activity progressively

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structured and gradually transformed by the ongoing interplay of its constituent actual occasions.

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Notes 1. E. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, translated by A. Lingis (Pittsburgh 1969), pp. 21-30. See also the Introduction by J. Wild, pp. 11-20. 2. R. Wiehl, Subjektivität und System (Frankfurt 2000). See also by the same author “Whiteheads Kant-Kritik und Kants Kritik am Panpsychismus,” in Natur, Subjektivität, Gott: Zur Prozessphilosophie Alfred N. Whiteheads, edited by H. Holzhey, A. Rust and R. Wiehl (Frankfurt 1990), pp. 198-239. 3. R. Wiehl, “Whitehead’s Cosmology of Feeling between Ontology and Anthropology,” in Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity, edited by F. Rapp and R. Wiehl (Albany 1990), pp. 127-51. 4. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York 1967), p. 51. 5. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York 1978), pp. 18, 34-35. 6. R. Wiehl, “Whitehead’s Cosmology,” op. cit., pp. 146-50. 7. Ibid., p. 147. 8. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York 1967), p. 244. 9. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 348. 10. Ibid., p. 19. 11. See J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by G. C. Spivak (Baltimore 1976), pp 10-26. 12. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 34. 13. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 204. 14. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 34. 15. Ibid., p. 89. 16. Ibid., pp. 22-23. 17. Ibid., p. 23. 18. Ibid., p. 35. 19. Ibid., p. 18.

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20. See M. Weber’s introduction to After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics, edited by M. Weber (Frankfurt/Lancaster 2004), pp. 58-59, 64. In the same essay Weber also makes clear that Whitehead’s metaphysical atomism is far removed from the material atomism of Democritus and other ancient philosophers. 21. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 350. 22. Ibid., pp. 350-51. 23. Ibid., p. 352. 24. Ibid., p. 244. 25. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 204. 26. See here J. W. Felt, “Coming to be”: Toward a ThomisticWhiteheadian Metaphysics of Becoming (Albany 2001), pp. 43-80. Felt’s key category is “primary being,” that is, a subject of activity existing by participation in the ultimate source of existing and acting that is God (pp. 62-63). In this way, he retains Whitehead’s focus on subjects of experience as “the final real things of which the world is made up” but provides for continuity within subjective experience by reverting to what he regards as the original Aristotelian understanding of substance. Felt and I, therefore, share the same misgivings about Whitehead’s metaphysical atomism but seek to resolve it in different ways, as I make clear below. 27. A. N. Whitehad, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 90. Here one might well ask what is the relation between the various societies which form a “background” for any given society and the extensive continuum which Whitehead defines as “one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche. It underlies the whole world, past, present, and future.” The extensive continuum would seem to be a combination of potentiality and actuality insofar as it “is the first determination of order— that is, of real potentiality—arising out of the general character of the world” (ibid., p. 66). The various background societies for any given society, on the contrary, are already existing actualities since they influence its concrescence here and now. Hence, they would seem to be that part of the extensive continuum which is already actualized in the current cosmic epoch. For, together, they constitute “the actual world, in so far as it is a community of entities which are settled, actual, and already become” (ibid., p. 65). 28. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 150. 29. Ibid. 30. See J. A. Bracken, The One in the Many: A Contemporary Reconstruction of the God-World Relationship (Grand Rapids 2001), p.

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123. See also J. Nobo, “Experience, Eternity, and Primordiality,” Process Studies 26, 1997, especially pp. 190-94; likewise his book Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity (Albany 1986). For a contrary view, see M. Weber, La dialectique de l’intuition chez Alfred North Whitehead (Frankfurt/Lancaster 2004), pp. 161, 253. Weber argues that Nobo thereby turns the extensive continuum into a subsistent reality and a co-constituent of Ultimate Reality with creativity, contrary to the intention of Whitehead himself in Process and Reality. Likewise, see M. Weber’s introduction to After Whitehead, op. cit., p. 67. 31. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., pp. 90-91. 32. Ibid., p. 251. 33. Ibid., p. 250. 34. Ibid., p. 251. 35. I. Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature (Washington 1986), p. 117. See also by the same author The Nature of Physical Existence (New York 1972), p. 289: “what exists in actuality is a mere aggregate, and the members of the group act in a certain harmony, which gives to it an appearance of a group character, by virtue of a co-ordination preestablished by God of the actions of the constituent monads which are in themselves separate from each other.” 36. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 19. 37. I. Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature, op. cit., p. 120; Nature of Physical Existence, op. cit., pp. 289-291. 38. I. Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature, op. cit., p. 127; Nature of Physical Existence, op. cit., p. 296: “There will in this way be a group character, qua that group, which will be derivable from the individual characters of the constituents, but not reducible to them as their sum, since the group character will be the character of the relation between the constituents, and not the collection or arithmetical sum of the individual characters.” 39. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 31. 40. E. Laszlo, Introduction to Systems Philosophy (New York 1972), p. 30. 41. E. Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness (Albany 2003), pp. 49-77. 42. E. Laszlo, Introduction to Systems Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 49-53.

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43. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., translated by T. McCarthy (Boston 1984 and 1987). See also J. A. Bracken, The One in the Many, op. cit., pp. 137-146. 44. F. Rapp, “Whitehead’s Concept of Creativity and Modern Science,” Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity, op. cit., pp. 70-93.

Maxwell’s Field and Whitehead’s Events: The Adventure of a Revolutionary Idea Leemon B. McHenry 1. Introduction Some of the greatest advances in physics were achieved when previously believed separate phenomena were discovered to be aspects of the same one. Celestial and terrestrial motions were united in Newton’s law of gravitation. Electricity, magnetism and light were unified in the electromagnetic theories of Faraday and Maxwell. Mass and energy were fused in Einstein’s special theory of relativity, space and time in his general theory of relativity. More recently in an effort toward a final unified theory, Weinberg, Glashow and Salam extended Maxwell’s theory by unifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces in what is now called the “electroweak” force. But aside from the obvious advantage that unified theories yield greater explanatory power and simplicity, they often overturn assumptions of a more general theoretical nature when there are revolutionary implications for ontology and epistemology. This was especially the case for Maxwell’s electromagnetic field, and it was left to Whitehead to make full ontological sense of the implications of this revolutionary idea. The second scientific revolution in physics, he says in Adventures of Ideas, began with the wave theory of light and ended with the wave theory of matter.1 Where Maxwell, with his inquisitive scientific focus, was always keen to ask, “what is the particular go of it?”, Whitehead formulates the question “what is the general go of it?” as a means of arriving at the ontology of modern science. Whitehead saw early in the twentieth century that unification was the name of the game in physics. His theory of unification, however, was of a much more general sort since he sought a unification of the natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc.) via a general ontology of events, and eventually a fully developed metaphysics. Maxwell’s electromagnetic field is the key idea for the development of the event ontology.2 It was the focus

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of Whitehead’s earliest work in mathematical physics, beginning with his work conducted under the supervision of W. D. Niven at Cambridge in the 1880s.3 Einstein, who viewed Faraday and Maxwell’s theory as the greatest change in the axiomatic basis of physics and in our conception of the structure of reality, identifies the course of the revolutionary idea: [U]nder the pressure of observational facts the undulatory theory of light asserted itself. Light in empty space was conceived as a vibration of the ether, and it seemed idle to conceive of this in turn as a conglomeration of material points. Here for the first time partial differential equations appeared as the natural expression of the primary realities of physics. In a particular area of theoretical physics the continuous field appeared side by side with the material point as the representative of physical reality. This dualism has not to this day disappeared, disturbing as it must be to any systematic mind.4

If indeed Einstein is right about this dualism, it remains so despite the efforts of the systematic mind of Whitehead. Although he postulated a dualism of events and properties (or “objects,” as he calls them), his conception of the uniform field of space-time eliminates the material objects or points. He says: “The physical things which we term stars, planets, lumps of matter, molecules, electrons, protons, quanta of energy, are each to be conceived as modifications of conditions within space-time, extending throughout its whole range.”5 As Quine made the point quite succinctly: “Matter is quitting the field, and field theory is the order of the day.”6

2. Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Field In his A Dynamical Theory of The Electromagnetic Field, Maxwell says: The theory which I propose may therefore be called a theory of the Electromagnetic Field, because it has to do with space in the neighbourhood of the electric and magnetic bodies, and it may be called a Dynamical Theory, because it assumes that in that space there is matter in motion, by which the observed electromagnetic phenomena are produced.7

The major points of Maxwell’s unification can be summarized as follows. (1) The development of a radically new entity expressed as the energy field. (2) Electricity and magnetism previously believed to be separate and distinct are unified into one entity, the electromagnetic field. (3) Light is unified under the more general theory of electromagnetism; light is a relatively small band of electromagnetic waves within a vast spectrum of phenomena from radio waves to gamma radiation. (4) Electromagnetism and optics are thereby unified as electrodynamics; light and

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electromagnetic waves have the same velocity and are manifestations of the same process. The physico-mathematical concept of a field emerges in the work on fluid dynamics of Euler and others. It is represented as a continuum characterized by physical quantities that may vary smoothly from place to place and moment to moment. In the theory of Faraday and Maxwell, the field is understood in terms of curved lines of force that are the sites of natural powers ready to act on material entities placed on them. Maxwell treated Faraday’s electric and magnetic lines of force as a simple geometrical consequence of this disposition, present at any point in the surroundings of an electrified conductor or a magnetic body to point in a definite direction. This resulted in the idea that the electric or magnetic force exerted on an object in the field is to be thought of as a vector at that point. The lines of force are the paths in space to which such vectors are tangent. Faraday’s pioneering experimental researches resulted in the idea that the electric field that acts on electrically charged particles and the magnetic field that acts on magnets are really one field. In his attempt to explain the electromagnetic field, Maxwell produced elaborate and unwieldy equations in quaternion form that were later transformed by Heaviside and Gibbs into the elegant simplicity and symmetry of the vector calculus. His theory is one of the great leaps of simplification in the history of physics. In Maxwell’s system of partial differential equations, electric and magnetic fields appear as dependent variables. The electromagnetic field is always represented as a field of two inter-related forces, the electric and magnetic forces. When the equations are formulated for the vacuum with no charge and current, the interdependence becomes clear. A magnetic field changing in time creates a circulating electric field, and an electric field changing in time creates a circulating magnetic field. In this way, the fields are no longer distinct; a change in one creates a change in the other. Once it was clear that electricity and magnetism form one entity, further advances in unification were mere stepping-stones. In fact it is the interdependence of the two fields that shows clearly the other major point of the unification. Waves of light were merely waves of electromagnetic occurrences. The equations imply that periodic changes in the electric or magnetic field travel through space at the speed of light with a changing electric field producing a changing magnetic field, thereby producing a changing electric field, and so on. What is true of light is true of any electromagnetic wave in the spectrum; the magnetic field is perpendicular to the direction of wave front, the electric field is also perpendicular to the

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direction of the wave front, and the two fields are perpendicular to each other.8 The development of the electromagnetic field is widely regarded as the beginning of the breakdown of the old dichotomy of atoms and the void central to the seventeenth century cosmology; for the concept of a field of force means that space is comprised of various stresses and tensions that transmit energy. The notion of empty space as the mere vehicle of spatial interconnections is therefore abandoned as a fundamental principle of physical explanation. The field is rather a medium by which electromagnetic energy has an effect over a distance. It pervades space and contains recognizable routes of energy. Maxwell attributes the breakthrough to Faraday in his Treatise: “He never considers bodies as existing with nothing between them but their distance, and acting on one another according to some function of that distance. He conceives all space as a field of force, the lines of force being in general curved, and those due to any body extending from it on all sides, their directions being modified by the presence of other bodies.”9 In place of the vacuum, Maxwell viewed the undulations as occurring in an ethereal substance, and not of the gross matter.10 Faraday’s emphasis on a “medium” as the embodiment of electromagnetic forces is expressed in Maxwell’s theory as the ether, a sea of space through which the transmissions of light, heat and radio waves is possible. So, with the introduction of the field our concept of reality had ceased to be purely atomistic, but the material points stubbornly remained. It is clear that Maxwell’s theory required two kinds of entities: the electromagnetic field, spread continuously through space, and varying smoothly in space and time, and highly localized points of matter that both create and are acted upon by the field.

3. Einstein’s Concept of Space-Time The next great leap in unification occurs with Einstein’s fusion of space and time. Building on Faraday, Maxwell and Lorentz, Einstein conceives of physical reality as a continuous electromagnetic field in space-time. As he says: “The special theory of relativity, which was simply a systematic development of the electro-dynamics of Clerk Maxwell and Lorentz, pointed beyond itself, however.”11 While it is clear that the special theory of relativity was the result of Einstein’s working out the implications of Maxwell’s equations such that they take the same form in any coordinate system, it was the general theory

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that developed a full picture of reality. With the negative results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, Einstein dismissed the ether as unnecessary, postulated the absence of any absolute frame of rest, and established the invariance of Maxwell’s equations in all inertial frames of reference. The general theory of relativity with its emphasis on gravity and the geometrical structure of space-time advances the four-dimensional view of reality. Following Minkowski’s view of the world as composed of individual events described by four numbers—three space co-ordinates x, y, z and a time co-ordinate t, Einstein conceived of objects in this space-time as four-dimensional entities or “space-time worms.” As he says, “time is robbed of its independence.”12 The time co-ordinate plays exactly the same role as the space co-ordinates. Einstein viewed this space-time as non-uniform or heterogeneous, which became a major point of disagreement with Whitehead. What he regards as a disturbing dualism of material points and fields is necessitated by his view of the gravitational field. He writes: According to the general theory of relativity the metrical character (curvature) of the four-dimensional space-time continuum is defined at every point by the matter at that point and the state of that matter. Therefore, on account of the lack of uniformity in the distribution of matter, the metrical structure of this continuum must necessarily be extremely complicated.13

It was, however, gravity and electromagnetism that provided the most perplexing link in Einstein’s attempt at a final unification.

4. Whitehead’s Ontology of Events Whitehead first introduced his theory of events in his Principles of Natural Knowledge in response to Maxwell and Einstein. He writes: “Modern speculative physics with its revolutionary theories concerning the natures of matter and of electricity has made urgent the question, What are the ultimate data of science?”14 This inquiry takes the form of a classification of natural entities that are posited for knowledge in sense awareness.15 In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead says: “the field is now open for the introduction of some new doctrine […] which may take the place of the materialism with which, since the seventeenth century, science has saddled philosophy.”16 The thesis he advances for the unification of scientific knowledge is that “the ultimate facts of nature, in terms of which all physical and biological explanation must be expressed, are events connected by their spatio-temporal relations, and that these relations are in

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the main reducible to the property of events that they can contain (or extend over) other events which are parts of them.”17 “The whole object of these lectures,” he says in Concept of Nature, “is to enforce the doctrine that space and time spring from a common root, and that the ultimate fact of experience is a space-time fact.”18 The revolution resulting from Maxwell and Einstein’s work provided the opportunity to rethink the foundations of scientific knowledge. Whitehead in particular believed that physics had lost its empirical footing with Newton. The time was ripe to begin afresh with a theory that would unify physical phenomena from the microscopic forces at the subatomic level to the macroscopic, large scale structure determined by gravity. This involved a method that began by identifying the entities of sense awareness and arriving at the precise concepts of mathematical physics and geometry via logical construction. The aim is to fill the gulf between perception and physics, between the rough world of percepts and the smooth world of physics.19 The very concept of a field plays a pivotal role in Whitehead’s attempt to erect a new foundation in events. The space-time energy field replaces the ancient trinity of time, space and matter. This gives him a basis to develop his theory in contrast to the traditional doctrine of substance and property. It is only an evolutionary accident that our visual perception is sensitive to a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation within which entities are sensed primarily as “objects” rather than as events. The field itself, and the range of entities within it and perceived though it, are predominantly of an event character, rather than of an object character. Given the entire spectrum of known electromagnetic phenomena, from gamma rays to radio waves, Whitehead argues that events are a more fundamental and comprehensive ontological category. The basic distinction of Whitehead’s ontology and epistemology is that we perceive repeatable and non-repeatable entities. The repeatable entities, he calls “objects” and these are discriminated into sense-objects, perceptual objects and scientific objects. Objects are recognita amid events.20 They are the things in nature that can be again.21 The non-repeatable entities are events, i.e., the particulars of space-time, as they can only happen once. Regarding the identity and individuation of events within nature, Whitehead contends that the recognita, properties or objects ingredient in events provide the natural boundaries.22 But there are no limits as to how these space-time regions are individuated as long as the primary relation of “extending over” is used to mark off a certain amount of qualitative similarity in the events described.

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In Whitehead’s theory, events have no independent existence. They blend into one another with the passage of nature.23 In this respect nature forms an interdependent system of internally related events. This is what Whitehead calls the “doctrine of significance”—that events are interlocked into a complex system ordered by the primary relation of “extending over.” In the Concept of Nature, he calls this fact as a relationship of factors.24 Nature is at each moment an all-comprehensive event or “fact” within which we discriminate constituent events and objects as “factors.” In sense awareness we discern “the specific character of place through a period of time.”25 Once we begin to formulate propositions about this fact as a relationship of factors we involve ourselves in abstraction that distinguishes sub-events and various orders of objects. So, it is quite clear that Whitehead’s theory of events is an ontological generalization of the theory of the energy field. Just as particles are not independent entities but rather parts of the field that act on and create the field, objects are not conceived as independent entities; they are rather the ingredients that give events structure. Just as the field is spread continuously and smoothly throughout all of space and time, the whole system of events is similarly uniform and continuous with no clear breaks or beginning or end. Within the context of the foundations of dynamical physics, Whitehead introduces the theory of events via the contrast between Newton and Maxwell. The ether repudiated by Newton is adopted by Maxwell to account for gravitational, electrostatic, and magnetic attractions. Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field, he says, presupposes events and physical properties of apparently empty space, which necessitates the “metaphysical craving” of the ether. There must be something in the empty space to which these properties belong. Moreover, he thinks that the same ether is required by the apparently diverse optical and electromagnetic phenomena.26 The ultimate facts of Maxwell’s equations are the occurrences of the volume-density and the velocity of the charge at the space-time points in the neighborhood surrounding the space-time point. But this, Whitehead writes, is just to say that the ultimate facts contemplated by Maxwell’s theory are events occurring throughout all of space and this space otherwise understood as the material ether is what he will call an “ether of events,” which is none other than the continuity of events.27 The upshot, in contrast to Newton, is that we must not think of events as changes in material at a time and place but rather conceive of space, time and material as arising out of the uniform structure of events. If we return to the idea that the entities postulated by Maxwell’s theory are fields and material points, Whitehead is then giving an ontological

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interpretation of these entities in terms of his events and objects. The spacetime structure of the electromagnetic field is understood as a uniform continuity of events. The lines of force that mark the stresses and the vector paths in the field are understood as objects ingredient in events, that is, as physical properties of the field that provide for quantitative interpretation. Charged particles are what Whitehead calls “scientific objects” and include electrons, protons, neutrons, atoms, and molecules. They are not understood as material points on a par with the field, but rather get reclassified within the general category of properties of the field. It is clear that scientific objects are not actually observed in sense awareness, but they are required as a part of scientific theory, as a refinement of sense awareness. What is observed is character in events. As Whitehead puts it: “The electron is its whole field of force. Namely the electron is the systematic way in which all events are modified as the expression of its ingression. The situation of an electron in any small duration may be defined as that event which has the quantitative character which is the charge of the electron.”28 So, particles such as electrons are not to be thought of on the model of individual substances with properties, as entities with charge; rather they are rhythmic repetitions of charge in events. Moreover, in accordance with the Minkowski-Einstein theory, any “object” must be conceived as having a historical route, i.e., a space-time worm that extends from the distant past through the briefly extended specious present of an observer to the distant future. Whitehead rejected matter as a fundamental ontological category because he argued that it did not stand up to empirical examination. It created a bifurcation of nature into illusory perceptions and an unknown cause of these perceptions.29 As mentioned above, this was also one of the main sources of his disagreement with Einstein’s theory that space-time is heterogeneous due to the peculiarities in the distribution of matter throughout the universe. Whitehead argued that the metric of space is defined in terms of objects ingredient in events such that no essential connection is required with the distribution of matter. Objects in events form patterns, and the space-time of our perceptions is conceived as continuously uniform with the more refined space-time of scientific objects. When Whitehead arrives at his ultimate metaphysical theory in Process and Reality, the concept of the field continues to play a foundational role in his theory of extension, but the electromagnetic character of reality only occupies a particular region of the extensive continuum. Once process becomes the fundamental idea of his scheme, it becomes clear that the dominant character of our cosmic epoch is that the actual occasions all

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reproduce the electromagnetic character of the epoch. But this only applies to that part of reality identified as our cosmic epoch and in time this type of order that began at the Big Bang will be replaced by another type of order, perhaps at what cosmologists call “the Big Crunch.” Whitehead writes: The arbitrary, as it were “given,” elements in the laws of nature warn us that we are in a special cosmic epoch. Here the phrase “cosmic epoch” is used to mean that widest society of actual entities whose immediate relevance to ourselves is traceable. This epoch is characterized by electronic and protonic actual entities, and by yet more ultimate actual entities which can be dimly discerned in the quanta of energy. Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field hold sway by reason of the throngs of electrons and of protons. Also each electron is a society of electronic occasions, and each proton is a society of protonic occasions. These occasions are the reasons for the electromagnetic laws; but their capacity for reproduction, whereby each electron and each proton has a long life, and whereby new electrons and new protons come into being, is itself due to these same laws. But there is disorder in the sense that the laws are not perfectly obeyed, and that the reproduction is mingled with instances of failure. There is accordingly a gradual transition to new types of order, supervening upon a gradual rise into dominance on the part of the present natural laws.30

In his ultimate conception of the universe, Whitehead viewed the laws of electromagnetism as contingent on a general character of our particular cosmic epoch. Cosmic epochs are very large “societies;” that is, very large events of some general character set within other societies of more general mathematical-geometrical structure. Since Whitehead views all societies as in process, the laws that reign in any particular cosmic epoch will break down when that particular order passes into a new cosmic epoch.

5. Assessment of Whitehead’s Unified Theory Aside from a handful of philosophically minded physicists, Whitehead’s unified theory has not had much influence on the course of theorizing in twentieth-century cosmology.31 The limited success of grand unification theories and the quest for the Holy Grail in a Theory of Everything has taken a course altogether different. While scientific realism is certainly part of this project in the sense that unified theories assume that the universe itself is unified, systematic and comprehensible, the speculations in a specific ontology have played a relatively minor role. What is, however, particularly striking is that Whitehead saw early on that unification would be a major preoccupation given the fragmentary and disunified state of physical theories in the 1920s. Einstein’s attempt to find a unified field

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theory in the later part of his life set the stage for what was to come. With major obstacles remaining in the unification of general relativity and the standard model (electromagnetic, weak and strong forces), the question is whether Whitehead’s theory of events provides fruitful direction. What appears to work in favor of Whitehead’s vision of a unified theory is the following. (1) There are indications in the standard model that the fundamental entities are fields rather than the particles. In other words, the solution to the unification of the largest structures determined by gravity and the very smallest features of the quantum works appears to be moving in the direction of the field. (2) Since Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe, cosmology has taken on a dynamic model that fits well with Whitehead’s process metaphysics and especially his theory of the evolution of cosmic epochs. Weinberg considers this hypothesis, which he credits to Andre Linde and Alan Guth, as a plausible alternative to the notion that the universe began at a definite time. Whitehead’s cosmic epochs are bubbles “in an infinitely old megauniverse, in which such bubbles are eternally appearing and breeding new bubbles.”32 (3) Reginald Cahill contends that the solution of final unification must begin with a rejection of the geometrical model of space-time in Einstein’s general relativity and the adoption of a process model in which time is taken seriously. Cahill’s process physics therefore focuses attention on Whitehead’s process metaphysics presented in Process and Reality rather than the philosophy of physics of his middle period.33 Process physics is perhaps the most promising theoretical development of a unified theory in favor of Whitehead’s basic insights. It was anticipated by Milič Čapek who devoted much of his work to defending the reality of temporal becoming against what he called the “fallacy of spatialization” in the geometrization of the temporal in the Einstein-Minkowski model of space-time.34 For Čapek, relativity theory need not be interpreted according to an Eleatic tradition of viewing the world as a timeless four-dimensional entity. But since the theory of gravity in Einstein’s general relativity is seen as a firmly established physical theory, most physicists will be resistant to the idea that its rejection is the key to the final unification. Cahill, however, defends a new theory of gravity from process physics that is in agreement with observations and experiments. In this way, the major stumbling block in a final unified theory is removed. Quantum mechanics and a theory of gravity can be united by a process model of time that preserves the distinctions between past, present and future and views extension as a random but self-organizing system from dynamic temporal processes.

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Notes An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 6th International Whitehead Conference at the University of Salzburg, Austria in July 2006. I would like to thank Nicholas Maxwell for valuable critical evaluation. 1. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge 1933), p. 200. 2. N. Maxwell argues that we must not confuse the particle/field distinction with the object/event distinction since fields are open to being interpreted in either object or event terms. The event ontology is more directly tied to the denial of a cosmic present implied by special relativity and Einstein’s subsequent adoption of Minkowski’s four-dimensional space-time interpretation of special relativity. See especially N. Maxwell, “Special Relativity, Time, Probabilism and Ultimate Reality,” in D. Dieks (ed.), The Ontology of Spacetime, Philosophy and Foundations of Physics, Vol. I. (Amsterdam 2006), pp. 232-233. While there is little doubt that Whitehead’s event theory owes much to the Einstein-Minkowski spacetime theory in his middle works, he is also taking account of the developments in the early formulation of quantum mechanics and field theory, all of which point to an event ontology rather than a traditional materialist/substance theory. For commentators on Whitehead who have discussed Maxwell’s influence on Whitehead, see V. Lowe, Understanding Whitehead (Baltimore 1966); L. W. Fagg, “Electromagnetism, Time, and Immanence in Whitehead’s Metaphysics,” Process Studies 26, 1997, pp. 308-317; and D. Athearn, “Whitehead as Natural Philosopher: Anachronism or Visionary?,” Process Studies 26, 1997, pp. 293-307. 3. Bertrand Russell reports that Maxwell’s A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism was the subject of Whitehead’s Fellowship dissertation at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1884; see My Philosophical Development (London 1995) p. 33. Lowe discusses this choice of topic in connection with Whitehead’s mathematics teacher at Cambridge, W. D. Niven, who was a student of Maxwell and edited Maxwell’s Scientific Papers. No copy of Whitehead’s dissertation survives; cfr. V. Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 94-96, 106-107. 4. J. C. Maxwell, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, edited by T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh 1982), p. 30. Einstein and Infeld write in 1938: “We cannot build physics on the basis of the matter-concept alone. But the division into matter and field is, after the recognition of the equivalence of mass and energy, something artificial and not clearly

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defined. Could we not reject the concept of matter and build a pure field physics? […] This new view is suggested by the great achievements of field physics, by our success in expressing the laws of electricity, magnetism, gravitation in the form of structure laws, and finally by the equivalence of mass and energy. Our ultimate problem would be to modify our field laws in such a way that they would not break down for regions in which the energy is enormously concentrated.” A. Einstein and L. Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (New York 1967), pp. 242-243. 5. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., pp. 201-202. 6. W. V. O. Quine, “Whither Physical Objects?,” in S. Cohen et al. (eds.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht 1976), pp. 497-504. 7. J. C. Maxwell, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, op. cit., p. 34. 8. For an illuminating exposition of Maxwell’s equations, see N. Maxwell’s The Comprehensibility of the Universe (Oxford 1998), pp. 125131 and R. Feynman, R. Leighton and M. Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Reading 1964), Ch. 18. For a more general exposition of the development of Maxwell’s thought, see P. M. Harman, The Natural Philosophy of James Clerk Maxwell (Cambridge 2001). 9. J. C. Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (Oxford 1873), p. 177. 10. J. C. Maxwell, A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, op. cit., p. 34. 11. A. Einstein, Out of My Later Years (New Jersey 1956), p. 57. 12. A. Einstein, in H. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Weyl and A Minkowski, The Principle of Relativity, A Collection of Original Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity (London 1923) p. 56. 13. A. Einstein, The Principle of Relativity, op. cit., p. 183. 14. A. N. Whitehead, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge 1919) p. v. 15. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge 1920), p. 49. 16. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (Cambridge 1925), p. 36. 17. A. N. Whitehead, Principles of Natural Knowledge, op. cit., p. 4. For Whitehead’s event theory, see my Chapter VI of V. Lowe’s Alfred North Whitehead, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 107-127, and my “Descriptive and Revisionary Theories of Events,” Process Studies 25, 1996, pp. 90-103. 18. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, op. cit., p. 132.

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19. This view is also maintained by Russell in The Analysis of Matter (New York 1960), pp. 275-289 and Our Knowledge of the External World (New York 1960), pp. 81-102. Russell at this time was greatly influenced by Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction. Lowe coined the distinction between the “rough” and the “smooth” world in his Understanding Whitehead (Baltimore 1966), pp. 180-181. 20. A. N. Whitehead, Principles of Natural Knowledge, op. cit., p. 81. 21. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, op. cit., p. 144. 22. Ibid. 23. A. N. Whitehead, Principles of Natural Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 7374. 24. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, op. cit., pp. 12-13. 25. Ibid., p. 52. 26. A. N. Whitehead, Principles of Natural Knowledge, op. cit., pp. 2021. 27. Ibid., pp. 24-25. 28. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, op. cit., p. 159. 29. Ibid., pp. 30-31. 30. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology (Cambridge 1929), pp. 126-127. 31. Henry Stapp has advanced a quantum ontology that is a version of Whitehead’s event theory. See especially his “Whiteheadian Approach to Quantum Theory and the Generalized Bell’s Theorem,” Foundations of Physics 9, 1979, pp. 1-24. Also see T. Eastman and H. Keeton’s Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience (Albany 2004). 32. S. Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (New York 1992), p. 174. 33. R. Cahill, Process Physics: From Information Theory to Quantum Space and Matter (Hauppauge 2005). 34. See especially his “Time-Space Rather than Space-Time,” in The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties (Dordrecht 1961), and “The Dynamic Structure of Time-Space,” in The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York 1961).

III. Ethics and Civilization

Morality and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts David Ray Griffin 1. Introduction A book titled Prospects for a Common Morality was motivated, say its editors Gene Outka and John Reeder, by the paradoxical fact that at the same time that a “remarkable kind of cross-cultural moral agreement about human rights” has emerged in the practical world of international affairs, the intellectual world reflects “an apparent loss of confidence in any such consensus [about] any notion of a common morality that applies and can be justified to persons as such.”1 This loss of confidence reflects a growing conviction that late modern moral philosophy has failed to justify any universal moral norms or rights. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre—having asserted with respect to the idea of “rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings” that “there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns”—says that the best reason for asserting this is “of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and […] no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed.”2 By “every attempt,” MacIntyre means every attempt within what he calls “the Enlightenment project” of providing “an independent rational justification of morality,” with “independent” meaning independent from religious ideas.3 It is this tradition that I am calling “late modern moral philosophy.” (This is a more accurate label than MacIntyre’s “Enlightenment morality” because, as pointed out below, most of the early Enlightenment thinkers did not regard morality as wholly independent from religious beliefs.)

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Agreeing that this tradition has failed, I respond in terms of five theses: (i) the widespread rejection of universal moral principles by moral philosophers reflects their rejection of moral realism; (ii) the Kantian alternative, which seeks to defend universal moral principles without moral realism, does not succeed; (iii) the rejection of moral realism is based on a sensationist-atheist-materialist version of naturalism, which can be called naturalism-sam; (iv) naturalism-sam, while supposedly adopted on the authority of science, is inadequate for science as well as morality; (v) there is an alternative version of naturalism that, besides supporting moral realism, also overcomes naturalism-sam’s inadequacies for science.

2. The Widespread Denial of Moral Realism The widespread denial of universal moral principles by modern moral philosophy is due primarily to its widespread rejection of moral realism, which is the doctrine that moral principles somehow exist in the very nature of things—that they are, in the phrase made famous by John Mackie, “part of the fabric of the world.”4 Mackie rejects moral realism, saying, bluntly: “There are no objective values.”5 Making this abstract point concrete, Mackie says that the idea “that actions which are cruel […] are to be condemned” is not a “hard fact” about the universe. Likewise, the idea that “if someone is writhing in agony before your eyes” you should “do something about it if you can” is not an “objective, intrinsic, requirement […] of the nature of things.”6 Unlike some philosophers who take this view, Mackie does not try to claim that common sense and ordinary language, properly analyzed, are on his side. He instead frankly affirms an “error theory” of ordinary moral thought, saying that “although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.”7 Gilbert Harman, giving a name to the position that Mackie has affirmed, rightly calls it nihilism—“the doctrine that there are no moral facts, no moral truths, and no moral knowledge.”8 Pointing out that, because we “ordinarily do speak of moral judgments as true or false,” nihilism “runs counter to much that we ordinarily think and say,” Harman initially gives the impression that he will retain “our ordinary views and [avoid] endorsing some form of nihilism.”9 But he can do this only by affirming the existence of “relative facts about what is right or wrong”—relative, that is, to some set of conventions adopted by a particular society. “[T]here

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are,” he says, “no absolute facts of right or wrong, apart from one or another set of conventions.”10 But this is precisely what nihilism maintains. The implications of this denial of moral realism, illustrated by Mackie and Harman,11 are brought out in Arthur Allen Leff’s “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” which concludes: Napalming babies is bad. Starving the poor is wicked […] There is in the world such a thing as evil. [All together now:] Sez who? God help us.12

The inability of the currently dominant philosophy to provide a moral theory that “sez” these things is reflected in the title of Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Saying that moral philosophy, unlike the natural sciences, cannot produce objective truth,13 Williams argues that philosophers should simply admit that they cannot provide an “ethical theory” in the sense of an account of “how we should think in ethics.” Williams denies that morality “can be justified by philosophy.”14

3. The Failure of the Kantian Approach Although I have been speaking as if the denial of moral realism entailed the denial of objective moral norms, the Kantian approach to moral philosophy explicitly disconnects these two points. Kantian philosophers such as Alan Gewirth and Jürgen Habermas, while denying that universal moral norms can be derived from the nature of the universe,15 argue that they can be generated out of human reason. It is widely held, however, that this approach has not succeeded. For example, J. D. Goldsworthy, arguing that “moral philosophers have conspicuously failed to find any plausible foundation for the supposed authority of moral precepts,” says specifically of the attempt “to show that egoism is inherently self-contradictory or irrational,” as carried out by philosophers such as John Finnis, Alan Gewirth, and Thomas Nagel: “All of these attempts have failed.”16 Of these Kantian attempts, Alan Gewirth’s is the most extensive.17 It is also, however, the most examined, and this examination largely supports Goldsworthy’s opinion. MacIntyre singles out Gewirth’s position to illustrate the failure of analytical moral philosophy to carry out the project of providing a “secular, rational justification for [the autonomous moral agent’s] moral allegiances.”18 The conclusion that Gewirth’s project, with its attempt to generate the moral point of view out of the need for self-

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consistency, has failed is also supported in careful critiques by R. M. Hare, W. D. Hudson, Kai Nielsen, and D. D. Raphael.19 Bernard Williams, who also shares the view that Gewirth’s project has failed,20 sums up the problem with the Kantian approach in general by saying, simply, that “there is no route to the impartial standpoint from rational deliberation alone.”21 Spelling out the problem more fully, Williams says: The I that stands back in rational reflection from my desires is still the I that has those desires and will, empirically and concretely, act; and it is not, simply by standing in reflection, converted into a being whose fundamental interest lies in the harmony of all interests. It cannot, just by taking this step, acquire the motivations of justice.22

The thesis of Williams’ book, that philosophy cannot provide a justification for the moral point of view, is, in fact, directed primarily against the Kantian attempt to do this. Jürgen Habermas believes that it is unfair to judge the Kantian approach primarily on the basis of Gewirth’s position, which Habermas calls “an untypical and rather easily criticizable example of a universalistic position.”23 Habermas’ own position, however, is also widely considered a failure.24 More important, Habermas himself concedes that his position can provide no answer to the question “Why be moral”—that is, why take an impartial point of view—which means that it can provide no “ultimate justification” for morality and hence no motivation to be moral.25 For motivation, Habermas says, we must rely on socialization, especially from religion.26 By his own admission, therefore, Habermas’ position provides no exception to what Williams sees as the main failure of the Kantian position, its inability to provide “the motivations of justice” out of reason alone. Some Kantians, rather than trying to generate the impartiality of the moral point of view out of practical reason, simply define practical reason so that it includes this impartiality. Paul Taylor, for example, has argued that an inclusive way of life, which takes everyone’s interests into account, is the only one that could be rationally chosen.27 His argument is circular, however, because he stipulates that a choice is rational insofar as it is “free, enlightened, and impartial.”28 Williams’ conclusion—that “there is no route to the impartial standpoint from rational deliberation alone”—seems to stand. I will continue to assume, therefore, that the denial of moral realism implies the rejection of any universal moral principles. I turn now to the primary basis for this denial.

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4. Naturalism-sam and the Denial of Moral Realism The main reason for the denial of moral realism by modern philosophers is the naturalistic philosophy that has been widely accepted by Western intellectuals. Although many critics hold that the problem is created by naturalism per se,29 the contemporary denial of moral realism is based on a particular kind of naturalism, which I call naturalism-sam. The “s” in “sam” stands for “sensationist,” the “a” for “atheistic,” and the “m” for “materialistic.” Although older histories of science and philosophy portrayed this naturalistic worldview as inaugurated by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, most of the early Enlightenment thinkers were moral realists. The reason for the gulf between the dominant moral philosophy of that era and that of today is a series of transmutations in the generally accepted “scientific worldview.” To summarize briefly the story of these transmutations:30 What is often referred to as the “mechanical worldview,” shared by Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, was really a supernaturalistic worldview with a sensationist doctrine of perception, a mechanistic doctrine of nature, and a dualistic doctrine of human beings. Although the sensationist doctrine of perception meant that there could be no direct perception of moral norms, these norms could still be known. For Locke, they were found in the Bible, which was supernaturally inspired. The first transmutation in the “scientific worldview” was to a deistic position, which rejected supernatural inspiration. But deists such as Adam Ferguson and Thomas Jefferson could explain our knowledge of moral principles, while continuing to affirm the sensationist doctrine of perception, in terms of moral knowledge deistically implanted in the human mind at creation.31 This first transmutation of the scientific worldview, therefore, created no crisis in moral philosophy. But the next one, which resulted in naturalism-sam, was another matter. This next transmutation, which retained the sensationism of the early modern view while replacing its supernaturalism with atheism and its dualism with materialism, resulted in a disenchanted naturalism with no room for moral knowledge or even moral truths. Because this form of naturalism is widely thought to be authorized by science, as shown by the fact that it is often simply called “scientific naturalism,”32 it is widely accepted as the standard of acceptable belief. It is the acceptance of naturalism-sam, I will now illustrate, that lies behind the denial of objective moral principles by our representative philosophers.

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4.1. Sensationism At the heart of Mackie’s argument against the objectivity of moral values is his “argument from queerness,” which has an epistemological and a metaphysical part. The epistemological part says that if we were aware of objective moral values, “it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else,” which are “sensory perception or introspection.”33 Mackie’s point is that, aside from what we know about our own experience from introspection, everything we know about the world originates in sensory perception. Therefore, the idea that moral principles alone are known by some special faculty should, as a purely ad hoc hypothesis, be rejected. Sensationism is even more central to Harman’s denial of objectivity. Ethics differs fundamentally from science, he argues, in having no observational evidence.34 Facts about protons can affect what you observe, since a proton passing through the cloud chamber can cause a vapor trail that reflects light to your eye […] But there does not seem to be any way in which the actual rightness or wrongness of a given situation can have any effect on your perceptual apparatus.35

Accordingly, if there were such a thing as moral knowledge, it “would have to be a kind of knowledge that can be acquired other than by observation.”36 At this point, Harman faces the embarrassing fact that ethics in this respect is in the same boat as mathematics: “We do not and cannot perceive numbers […] Relations among numbers cannot have any more of an effect on our perceptual apparatus than moral facts can.”37 This fact is embarrassing because Harman, believing that his naturalism is vouchsafed by natural science, would be loath to admit that his epistemology is inadequate for mathematical physics, generally regarded as the preeminent natural science. Harman handles this problem by resort to special pleading, concluding that we can speak of mathematical knowledge because mathematics has “indirect observational evidence.”38 Harman’s position is thereby similar to that of Willard Quine, who used his “tribunal of sense experience” to exclude moral judgments from the realm of cognitive assertions,39 even though he allowed admission to assertions about “the abstract objects of mathematics.”40 Although Quine and Harman have to cheat to do so, they both use sensationism to contrast ethical judgments unfavorably with scientific ones.

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A similar contrast between science and ethics is central to Williams’ denial of an objectivist view of ethics. In scientific inquiry, he says, we expect convergence of opinion, with the convergence explained by the fact that the thinking of the scientists is guided by the way the world really is. But in ethical thinking, Williams claims, there is no basis for expecting convergence: because we cannot perceive moral norms, there is no way for the world to guide the thinking of moral philosophers.41 We cannot, therefore, speak of “knowledge” in ethics, because knowledge requires not only that a proposition believed by a person be true but also that the truth and the belief be “nonaccidentally linked.”42 In science, this link is provided by perception of the physical world, but ethical beliefs, Williams holds, are not based on perception.43 Although he recognizes that some philosophers have claimed that “something like perception,” sometimes called moral intuition, accounts for our ethical concepts, Williams believes that “the appeal to intuition as a faculty […] seemed to say that these truths were known, but there was no way in which they were known.”44 Williams evidently finds inconceivable the idea that we could know things through nonsensory perception.

4.2. Atheism Theistic belief in the existence of a divine agent provided traditional thought with an answer to the two questions about the existence of “Platonic forms” mentioned above—namely, where do they exist? and how can they, as ideal rather than actual entities, exert influence in the world? Philosophers who accept naturalism-sam with its atheism obviously cannot accept this answer. Mackie, having said that values are not “part of the fabric of the world,” says: “The difficulty of seeing how values could be objective is a fairly strong reason for thinking that they are not.”45 The basic difficulty involves the metaphysical part of Mackie’s argument from queerness: objective values, he says, “would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.”46 They would be so different because they would have prescriptivity built into them, as do some Platonic Forms. The Form of the Good, for example, “has to-bepursuedness somehow built into it.”47 Mackie’s difficulty in understanding how objective values could exist is due to his presumption of atheism. Describing his book as “a discussion of what we can make of morality without recourse to God,” he “concede[s] that if the requisite theological doctrine could be defended, a kind of objective ethical prescriptivity could be defended.”48

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Harman explicitly makes naturalism the reason for denying ethical objectivity, even having a chapter titled “Nihilism and Naturalism.”49 Showing that naturalism as he understands it entails the rejection of any divine actuality, he defines it as “the sensible thesis that all facts are facts of nature.”50 “Our scientific conception of the world,” he adds, “has no place for gods.”51 The implication is that because “nature” neither includes, nor is included in, nor is the product of, a divine being, there is no “place” for normative values. This can be called the “Platonic problem,” because from the outset one of the main criticisms of Plato’s philosophy has been directed at the fact that his “forms” or “ideas” seemed to exist on their own—floating in the void, as it were. The middle Platonists solved this problem, raised already by Aristotle, by placing the ideas in the divine creator, a solution that was largely presupposed throughout most of the Middle Ages. But Harman, holding that scientific naturalism “has no place for gods,” concludes that the universe has no place for moral norms. Although Harman, who continues to accept mathematical principles, fails to acknowledge the Platonic problem as to where these forms exist, he does refer to the second problem, which can be called the “Benacerraf problem.” Paul Benacerraf, in an influential article titled “Mathematical Truth,”52 rightly argued that true beliefs can be considered knowledge only if that which makes the belief true is somehow causally responsible for the belief (so that the belief and the truth of its propositional content are, in Williams’ words, “nonaccidentally linked”). As philosophers of mathematics have seen, this view of knowledge, combined with the Platonic view of numbers as ideal entities, implies that there can be no mathematical knowledge. Penelope Maddy puts the problem thus: “[H]ow can entities that don’t even inhabit the physical universe take part in any causal interaction whatsoever? Surely to be abstract is to be causally inert. Thus if Platonism is true, we can have no mathematical knowledge.”53 This conclusion only follows, of course, given one other presupposition—that ideal entities do not exist in an actual entity that gives them causal agency. The importance of this atheistic presupposition is brought out by Reuben Hersh, who says: “For Leibniz and Berkeley, abstractions like numbers are thoughts in the mind of God […] [But] Heaven and the Mind of God are no longer heard of in academic discourse.”54 As Hersh sees, the Benacerraf problem was created by the rejection of theism. Although this problem was originally formulated in terms of mathematical knowledge, Harman uses it to deny only the possibility of moral knowledge. Harman’s discussion of mathematics, however, reveals his awareness of Benacerraf’s point that causation and perception are two sides of the same relation. That is, for us to perceive X is for X to exert

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causal influence on us. The problem involved in mathematical knowledge has, therefore, two sides: besides the fact that, if all our perception is sensory perception, we cannot perceive numbers, there is the complementary problem that, even if we had a nonsensory mode of perception, numbers on their own could not exert causal efficacy on us, so that we would still not be able to perceive (or “intuit”) them. Harman, with reference to Benacerraf’s article, says: We do not and cannot perceive numbers […] since we cannot be in causal contact with them […] Relations among numbers cannot have any more of an effect on our perceptual apparatus than moral facts can.55

It is at this point that Harman, having acknowledged that numbers and moral facts are in the same boat, lets numbers climb out through special pleading, so that he can conclude that “ethics is cut off from observation in a way that science is not.”56 In any case, whether evenhandedly or not, Harman uses the Benacerraf as well as the Platonic problem, both of which are created by atheism, to reject the possibility of moral knowledge. Williams likewise holds that “our values are not ‘in the world’,” saying that this is the basic idea—which he considers a discovery—behind the notion that it is a fallacy (the so-called naturalistic fallacy) to think that value can somehow be derived from fact, so that ought could be derived from is.57 This “discovery,” he says, followed on the collapse of theism’s teleological worldview, which Williams sees as the crucial event for contemporary moral thinking, saying of the assumptions provided by that worldview: “No one has yet found a good way of doing without those assumptions.”58 Accordingly, what Williams in his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy means by these limits—philosophy’s inability to justify morality59—presupposes the falsity of any form of theism. He should, therefore, have titled his book, more modestly, “Ethics and the Limits of Atheistic Philosophy.”

4.3. Materialism The materialism of naturalism-sam, besides reinforcing the two other dimensions, adds two more denials hostile to a moral worldview. One of these is the denial of freedom, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.60 The other denial involves Platonic forms. Whereas atheism denies the existence of a nonlocal agent, which could give such forms residence and agency, and sensationism denies that we could perceive any such forms, even if they exist, materialism adds the flat-out denial that any such forms exist. This denial is entailed by Harman’s definition of naturalism as the thesis that “all facts are facts of nature.”

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This nominalistic rejection of eternal forms in the name of naturalism has been challenged, however, by one modern philosopher not yet discussed, Charles E. Larmore. Defining “naturalism” as the view that the world is exhausted by the objects of the natural sciences, Larmore argues that we cannot do justice to human experience unless we say, with Plato, that the world also contains value, in the sense of a normative dimension.61 The affirmation of a normative realm, argues Larmore, is necessary to do justice to our moral experience, which assumes that moral judgments presuppose moral truths that exist independently of our preferences.62 More generally, the affirmation of a normative realm is necessary to do justice to any of our normative beliefs about values, including cognitive values about “the way we ought to think.” That is, the reasons for doubting that there are moral values, such as Mackie’s charge that they would be epistemically and metaphysically “queer,” apply equally to cognitive values. But to deny that there are any objective cognitive values would mean that the idea that we ought to avoid self-contradiction is merely a preference, with no inherent authority.63 Arguing that this Nietzschean outlook “boggles the mind,” Larmore explains: Imagine thinking that even so basic a rule of reasoning as the avoidance of contradiction has no more authority than what we choose to give it. Imagine thinking that we could just as well have willed the opposite, seeking out contradictions and believing each and every one. Has anyone the slightest idea of what it would be like really to believe this?64

Larmore’s conclusion is that, because we cannot without self-contradiction deny the existence of cognitive facts with in-built prescriptivity, there is no reason to deny the existence of inherently prescriptive moral facts.65 In a most important point, Larmore says that although anti-Platonic naturalism is widely thought to be based on the authority of science, “the belief that the achievements of modern science ought to command our assent […] puts us beyond [anti-Platonic] naturalism. For this belief makes reference to a truth about what we ought to believe.”66 This side of Larmore’s position makes it extremely different from that of Harman, Mackie, and Williams. But although Larmore rejects the materialism of naturalism-sam, he does not reject its sensationism and atheism. Because of his retention of sensationism, he cannot explain how we can perceive Platonic values.67 Because of Larmore’s retention of atheism, he has no answer to either the Platonic problem or the Benacerraf problem of how, even if Platonic forms could somehow exist on their own, they could influence our experience.68 Despite these problems, however, Larmore has cogently argued that the currently dominant form of scientific naturalism is inadequate for science

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itself, so it should not be used to veto moral realism. I will now expand on this point.

5. The Inadequacy of Naturalism-sam for Science A widely held intellectual ideal, which can be called domain uniformitarianism, is that we should try to interpret the objects in every domain of thought in terms of one and the same set of basic principles. This ideal, which lies behind Mackie’s “queerness” arguments, is a good one. Given the assumption that naturalism-sam has already proven itself adequate for virtually everything except moral experience, it would certainly make sense to try to bring our interpretation of morality into line with it. But is that assumption true? Having already suggested that all three dimensions of naturalism-sam create problems for moral theory, I will now argue that they also prevent naturalism-sam from being adequate for science.69 Many of the points will involve my argument that the chief criterion for the adequacy of a worldview is whether it can do justice to the inevitable presuppositions of human practice, which I call our “hard-core commonsense notions.”70 Why should these notions have this privileged status? Because if we cannot help presupposing them in all our actions, then we necessarily presuppose them even in the act of verbally denying them, and this makes us guilty of self-contradiction. The necessity of not denying any such notions is, therefore, entailed by the principle of noncontradiction, usually considered the first principle of reason.

5.1. Sensationism The general nature of the problems created for science by sensationism is that science claims to be an empirical enterprise, which includes the idea that its basic notions are derived from immediate experience. The sensationist version of empiricism, however, does not provide an experiential basis for at least five notions presupposed by the scientific enterprise. (1) The External World. “The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject,” declared Einstein, “is the basis of all natural science.”71 It is also one of our hard-core commonsense assumptions. But Hume’s analysis of sensory perception notoriously showed that it provides us knowledge only of sense data, not of an actual world. Although Hume

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pointed out that in practice he necessarily presupposed such a world, his philosophical theory entailed solipsism. The problem here is illustrated by Quine. Having insisted that “whatever evidence there is for science is sensory evidence,” Quine agreed with Hume that sensory perception provides no knowledge of physical objects, so that they are in the same boat as Homer’s gods. But he nevertheless “believe[d] in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods.”72 Quine thereby continued Hume’s irrational divorce of philosophical theory from the inevitable presuppositions of human practice. (2) The Past and (therefore) Time. As George Santayana pointed out, the sensationist theory of perception is even more inadequate for the presuppositions of human practice than Hume acknowledged. Because sense perception provides no knowledge of the existence of a past, sensationism implies “solipsism of the present moment.”73 With no knowledge of the distinction between past and present, we would have no knowledge of time. Quine again illustrates the problem. Acknowledging that sensory experience gives us only the “specious present,” Quine asked how we make the “momentous” step involved in “the transcending of the specious present.” But he then said that we begin with “a stage of language that is limited to the specious present and to short-term memories and expectations.”74 He thereby simply presupposed the knowledge of temporality that was to be explained. (3) Causation and Induction. As Hume also showed, sensory perception provides no basis for affirming causation, in the sense of the real influence of one thing on another, which all human practice presupposes. Sensory perception therefore provides no basis for affirming a necessary connection between an “effect” and its “cause,” hence no basis for scientific induction. Pointing out the seriousness of this problem for the rationality of science, Hans Reichenbach said that it suggests that science “is nothing but a ridiculous self-delusion.”75 The widespread belief that the problem is insoluble (in terms of naturalism-sam) was illustrated by A. J. Ayer’s whistling-in-the-dark assertion that we should “abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction.”76 (4) Mathematical Objects. This problem, already discussed, has had an interesting history. One famous mathematician, Kurt Gödel, said that our knowledge of mathematical objects comes through a nonsensory type of perception, which we call “mathematical intuition.”77 Most philosophers of mathematics, however, have rejected this idea. Hilary Putnam, insisting

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that “we think with our brains, and not with immaterial souls,” declared: “We cannot envisage any kind of neural process that could even correspond to the ‘perception of a mathematical object’.”78 This rejection of nonsensory intuition has been repeated by many others.79 The view that we have no source of knowledge about reality other than sensory perception leaves only three alternatives. One possibility is to affirm formalism, according to which mathematics is merely a game with meaningless symbols. However, actual mathematicians are Platonic realists in practice, as most philosophers of mathematics agree,80 so that this option entails a complete divergence between theory and practice. A second possibility is to overcome the problem of “unobservable Platonic entities” by the attempt to think of mathematical objects as part of the physical world, so that they can be perceived by sensory perception.81 But this is surely desperate. The third option is to follow the irrationalism of Quine, who simply “ignores the problem,” as Putnam puts it, “as to how we can know that [these] abstract entities exist unless we can interact with them in some way.”82 If we think science should be a rational enterprise, we surely need a better solution. (5) Cognitive, including Logical, Truth. Because, as Putnam points out, “the nature of mathematical truth” and “the nature of logical truth” are one and the same problem,83 sensationism creates the same problem for logical knowledge, which is even more widely presupposed by science. Although Putnam at one time had endorsed Quine’s famous denial that there are any a priori truths, different in kind from empirical truths,84 Putnam later declared—in “There Is at Least One A Priori Truth”85—that the principle of noncontradiction is an absolutely unrevisable a priori truth. But Putnam’s continued acceptance of sensationism leads him to ignore the question of how we know this truth. The problem of logical truth is, furthermore, simply part of the larger issue of cognitive truths with in-built prescriptivity, which are presupposed by every claim that we should take science seriously—as Larmore and Putnam himself point out.

5.2. Materialism Besides having no place for the ideal entities presupposed by logic and mathematics, a materialistic worldview also creates problems for time, causation, induction, gravitation, evolution, and the mind-body problem. Although all these are serious, I will limit my discussion here to three dimensions of the last-named problem.

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(1) The Emergence of Experience. One problem is how things with experience could have emerged out of things wholly devoid of experience. We have no understanding, says Colin McGinn, of how “the aggregation of millions of individually insentient neurons [constituting the brain] generate subjective awareness.”86 Declaring this problem insoluble in principle, McGinn says that at this point “scientific naturalism runs out of steam” because “[i]t would take a supernatural magician to extract consciousness from matter.”87 McGinn is only one of several contemporary materialists to call the mind-body problem insoluble in principle.88 (2) Freedom. Another dimension of the mind-body problem involves the question of how freedom is possible. John Searle, for example, believes that science “allows no place for freedom of the will.”89 Explicitly affirming the numerical identity of mind and brain, Searle says of the human head that “the brain is the only thing in there.”90 The implication is that the behavior of human beings is to be explained, like the behavior of all aggregations of physical particles, in terms of bottom-up causation, so that the causal relations behind our experiences “are entirely a matter of neurons and neuron firings at synapses.”91 Searle, however, admits that we cannot live with this deterministic conclusion in practice, because “[o]ur conception of ourselves as free agents is fundamental to our overall selfconception.” Accordingly, “we can’t act otherwise than on the assumption of freedom, no matter how much we learn about how the world works as a determined physical system.”92 Given the fact that our action includes our scientific activity, Searle admits, in effect, that his materialistic worldview is inadequate for science.93 (3) Rational Activity. Closely related to the problem of freedom is the problem of how we can engage in rational activity.94 According to the materialist worldview, all causation is efficient causation, the influence of one thing or event on another. The rational activity of a philosopher of science is, however, action in terms of some norm, such as the norm of self-consistency or adequacy to the facts. Rational activity is, in other words, an example of final causation. But the materialist worldview has no room for such activity, because the mind is equated with the brain and the brain’s activities are said to be, like everything else, determined by the causal activities of their most elementary parts, which are assumed to operate entirely in terms of efficient causation. McGinn raises this problem by asking “how a physical organism can be subject to the norms of rationality. How, for example, does modus ponens get its grip on the causal transitions between mental states?”95 McGinn admits that materialism can provide no answer, thereby illustrating Putnam’s charge that most science-

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based philosophies are self-refuting, because they “leave no room for a rational activity of philosophy.”96

5.3. Atheism If the suggestions that sensationism and materialism have created serious problems can at least be entertained by modern philosophers, the suggestion that atheism has created problems for science-based thought is generally considered beyond the pale, so widespread is the consensus that the explanatory role of theism has been irreversibly superseded. Larmore, endorsing the modern conviction that “[w]e no longer need God to explain the world,” considers this a matter that is “already settled.”97 But this conviction, which is usually simply assumed rather than argued, can be disputed. I have argued, in any case, that there are at least thirteen features about our world that cannot be adequately explained apart from theism. Five of these features—the existence and efficacy of moral, aesthetic, mathematical, logical, and normative cognitive principles—have already been discussed; the others are the world’s metaphysical order, the more particular order of our cosmos, the upward trend of the evolutionary process, the periodic appearance of novelty in this process, the world’s excessive beauty (beyond what can be explained in functional, neoDarwinian terms), the existence of ultimate truth and importance (both of which we cannot help presupposing), and the universality of religious experience.98 Insofar as these arguments are sound, there are many reasons why an atheistic worldview is inadequate for the scientific community. My more general conclusion, in any case, is that because naturalism-sam is not even close to providing a worldview adequate for scientific experience, there is no reason to try to bring our understanding of morality into line with it. In fact, although our age widely assumes that it is primarily science to which a philosophical worldview must be adequate, morality, with its inevitable presuppositions, is an equally important standard. “It is the primary aim of philosophy,” wrote Henry Sidgwick, “to unify completely, bring into clear coherence, all departments of rational thought, and this aim cannot be realised by any philosophy that leaves out of its view the important body of judgments and reasonings which form the subject matter of ethics.”99 Alfred North Whitehead, besides quoting this statement by Sidgwick with approval,100 indicated that he understood certain basic moral notions to belong to our inevitable presuppositions, saying that “the impact of aesthetic, religious and moral notions is inescapable” and that “our moral and aesthetic judgments […] involve the ultimate notions of ‘better’ and ‘worse’.”101 In light of the fact that those

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who endorse naturalism-sam cannot account for many of the inevitable presuppositions of both our scientific and our moral practice, there is no justification for the fact that this version of naturalism is, as Larmore points out, “used as a standard for acceptable belief.”102 This conclusion does not mean, however, that we can do without some standard for acceptable belief, or even that this standard need not be naturalistic in the generic sense. Naturalism in this generic sense, which is simply the rejection of the possibility of supernatural interruptions of the world’s normal pattern of causal relations, can be called naturalism-ns, with “ns” standing for “nonsupernaturalist.” There are good reasons for holding that we need a worldview that is naturalistic in this generic sense. For one thing, the best arguments against theism, such as the problem of evil, are really arguments against the supernaturalist version of theism.103 Also, naturalism in this generic sense is far more widely presupposed by the scientific community than its embodiment in naturalism-sam.104 Finally, unlike naturalism-sam, naturalism-ns does not contradict any of our inevitable presuppositions or any well-documented phenomena.105

6. An Alternative Naturalism My fifth major point is that, if we need a worldview that is broadly naturalistic but naturalism-sam is inadequate, we need a more adequate version of naturalism-ns. My recent books have been devoted to showing that the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead provides such a version of naturalism, which I call naturalism-ppp, with the “ppp” standing for “prehensive”, “panentheist” and “panexperientialist.” In this version, the sensationism of naturalism-sam is replaced by Whitehead’s prehensive doctrine of perception, according to which sensory perception is derivative from a more fundamental mode of perception, which involves a nonsensory “prehension” of other things. Atheism is replaced by a panentheistic cosmology, according to which the universe, in the sense of the totality of finite things, exists within God, understood as the soul of the universe. And the materialistic understanding of finite actualities is replaced by panexperientialism, according to which all genuine individuals have at least some iota of experience and spontaneity. I will briefly illustrate how this version of naturalism can, by virtue of accounting for the inevitable presuppositions of practice to which naturalism-sam cannot do justice, support both our moral and our scientific activities.

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6.1. Panexperientialism According to panexperientialism, experience and spontaneity, which we know to be features of what we call our minds or souls, are also possessed, to a lesser degree, by the individual components of the brain, namely, its cells and their components (organelles, macromolecules, and so on). This position, by allowing for nondualistic interactionism, can do justice to our presuppositions about freedom and rational activity. That is, like dualism, this view says that the mind and the brain are numerically distinct entities, which is a necessary condition for them to interact. Unlike dualism, panexperientialism denies that the mind and the brain’s components are ontologically different in kind—which is the Cartesian assumption that led to the conclusion that they could not interact.106 The primary reason why philosophers turned from interaction to materialistic identism is, therefore, overcome, and the mind’s capacity to exercise rational self-determination, then to direct its body’s activities, can be conceptualized. In developing his defense of freedom, which Whitehead rightly considered one of our inevitable presuppositions,107 he was explicit about its importance for morality, saying apart from the notion of partial self-determination, “there can be no moral responsibility.”108

6.2. Panentheism The panentheism of naturalism-ppp allows us to reaffirm the old idea that mathematical, logical, moral, aesthetic, and cognitive ideals can both exist and have causal efficacy in the world because they exist in God. In Whitehead’s language, they exist in the “primordial nature” of God, having influence in the world by virtue of being envisaged by God with appetition for their actualization in the world, which provides them with the prescriptivity, or “to-be-pursuedness,” with which we experience them. Solving both the Platonic and the Benacerraf problems, Whitehead says that we experience ideals by virtue of their presence in the divine, nonlocal agent: “There are experiences of ideals—of ideals entertained, of ideals aimed at, of ideals achieved, of ideals defaced. This is the experience of the deity of the universe.”109 The fact that the God of panentheism exerts influence in the world does not, however, make panentheism a version of supernaturalistic theism, because this divine influence is understood as part and parcel of the world’s normal causal relations, never an interruption thereof. Because of its denial of the possibility of divine interruptions, furthermore, this version of theism is not undermined by the problem of evil.110 This doctrine can, nevertheless, explain those further features of the

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world, mentioned earlier, that an atheistic cosmology cannot explain—such as the world’s order, the upward trend and novelty in its evolutionary process, and our presuppositions about ultimate truth and importance.111

6.3. Prehensive Perception Finally, thanks to this naturalism’s prehensive, nonsensory doctrine of perception, we can understand why we inevitably presuppose the reality of the external world, the past, time, and causation—namely, because we constantly have a direct, presensory experience of them. Also our moral intuitions, can—along with our mathematical, logical, aesthetic, and cognitive intuitions—be understood as real perceptions of principles belonging to the fabric of the world. The idea that we perceive these ideals through the same mode of perception as we perceive the external world and its causation means that moral experience does not require the ad hoc assumption of a special moral “sense” or “faculty,” so domain uniformitarianism is not violated. This prehensive doctrine of perception also provides the basis for the belief that moral norms are rooted in a Holy Reality—the belief that, by explaining why there need be no fallacy involved in the transition from an is-statement to an ought-statement, lies behind the motivation to be moral.112 Given the assumption that God is an all-inclusive actuality characterized by the quality of Holiness, our direct and constant prehension of God would produce in us an at least vague, unconscious awareness of the existence of Something Holy—an awareness that could, in exceptional moments, rise to the level of conscious awareness, producing what is usually meant by “religious experience” or an “experience of the Holy.”

7. Conclusion: A Moral-Scientific Naturalism I have argued that the apparent conflict between naturalism and morality is due to the fact that in mainline modern thought, naturalism in the generic sense—naturalism-ns—has been embodied in naturalism-sam; that although this version of naturalism has been adopted in the name of science, it is no more adequate for science than it is for morality; and that the lack of any necessary conflict between morality and naturalism-ns is shown by the fact that Whitehead’s philosophy provides a moral-scientific naturalism, which is supportive of the presuppositions of our moral as well

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as our scientific activities. To show that an adequate moral theory can be developed on this basis is, of course, a task for other occasions. The present task was simply to show that there is no necessary conflict between moral realism and scientific naturalism.

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Notes 1. G. Outka and J. P. Reeder, Jr. (eds.), Prospects for a Common Morality (Princeton 1993), p. 3. 2. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame 1981), p. 67. 3. Ibid., pp. 38, 48. See similar arguments—albeit from the viewpoint that morality can be justified on a theistic basis—in B. Mitchell, Morality: Religious and Secular: The Dilemma of the Traditional Conscience (Oxford 1980), and F. I. Gamwell, The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God (Dallas 1996). 4. J. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (New York 1977), p. 24. The extent to which the falsity of moral realism is simply presupposed by contemporary philosophers is illustrated by R. M. Hare’s nonchalant remark that “[i]t was John Mackie’s great contribution to ethics to display clearly the absurdity of realism.” R. M. Hare, “Ontology in Ethics,” in Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie, edited by T. Honderich (London 1985), p. 53. Hare, from whom Mackie evidently got the phrase about the fabric of the world, even purports not to understand what it, used with respect to moral values, might mean (p. 42). 5. J. Mackie, Ethics, op. cit., p. 15. 6. Ibid., pp. 17, 79-80. 7. Ibid., p. 35. 8. G. Harman, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York 1977), p. 11. 9. Ibid., pp. 12-13. 10. Ibid., pp. 131-132. 11. It could also be illustrated by R. Rorty’s position as formulated in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge 1989). Affirming nominalism, according to which there are no Platonic forms and hence no “order beyond time and change which […] establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities” (p. xv), Rorty holds that moral truths are made, not created (pp. 3-5, 77). Although Rorty personally is against cruelty and for liberal democracy, he cannot, he says, provide any answer to the question “Why not be cruel?” or any defense of the superiority of liberal democracy to Nazi tyranny (pp. xv, 44-45, 53-54, 197).

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12. A. Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal, 1979, p. 1249. 13. B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge 1985), pp. 148-152. 14. Ibid., pp. 17, 74, 22. 15. Habermas says, for example, that “[w]hat ought to be is [not] an entity” and that moral commands “do not relate to anything in the objective world,” so that moral truths are not true by virtue of corresponding to “moral facts” in the sense of “an antecedent realm of value objects.” See his Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, translated by C. Cronin (Cambridge 1993), p. 26; cf. p. 29. 16. J. D. Goldsworthy, “God or Mackie? The Dilemma of Secular Moral Philosophy,” American Journal of Jurisprudence 30, 1985, pp. 45, 75. 17. See A. Gewirth, Reason and Morality (Chicago 1978), and his reply to critics in E. Regis (ed.), Gewirth’s Ethical Rationalism (Chicago 1984). 18. A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, op. cit., pp. 64-65. 19. All these critiques are in Regis (ed.), Gewirth’s, op. cit. 20. B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits, op. cit., p. 210 n. 2. 21. Ibid., p. 70. 22. Ibid., p. 69. 23. J. Habermas, Justification, op. cit., p. 150. 24. See, for example, C. E. Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge 1996), p. 205. 25. J. Habermas, Justification, op. cit., pp. 71, 74, 75, 79, 146. 26. J. Habermas, Justification, op. cit., p. 79; Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, translated by W. M. Hohengarten (Cambridge 1992), p. 51; “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,” in Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, edited by D. Browning and F. S. Fiorenza (New York 1992), p. 239. 27. P. Taylor, Normative Discourse (Westport 1961), pp. 147-148. 28. Ibid., pp. 164-165. On the way a similar circularity vitiates the argument of J. Finnis’ Natural Law and Natural Rights (New York 1980), see Goldsworthy, “God or Mackie?,” op. cit., p. 74. 29. See, for example, P. E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education (Downers Grove 1995).

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30. For more detail, see D. R. Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts (Albany 2000), Chs. 2, 5. 31. See G. Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York 1978). 32. For example, the terms “scientific naturalism” and “scientific materialism” are used interchangeably by E. O. Wilson, an advocate [On Human Nature (New York 1979), pp. 200-201], and P. E. Johnson, a critic [Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove 1993), p. 116n]. For more examples of this equation, see D. R. Griffin, Religion, op. cit., pp. 35-37. 33. J. Mackie, Ethics, op. cit., pp. 38-39. 34. G. Harman, The Nature, op. cit., pp. vii, viii, 6-9. 35. Ibid., p. 9. 36. Ibid., p. 66. 37. Ibid., pp. 9-10. 38. Ibid., p. 10. 39. W. Van Quine, From A Logical Point of View (Cambridge 1953), p. 41; “Replies,” in The Philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. XVIII, edited by L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp (LaSalle 1986), pp. 663-665. 40. W. V. O. Quine, From Stimulus to Science (Cambridge 1995), p. 14. 41. B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits, op. cit., pp. 136, 149, 151-152. 42. Ibid., p. 142. Williams credits this analysis of knowledge to R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge 1981), Ch. 3. 43. Ibid., p. 149. 44. Ibid., pp. 149, 94. 45. J. Mackie, Ethics, op. cit., p. 24. 46. Ibid., p. 38. 47. Ibid., p. 40. 48. Ibid., p. 48. Williams, in an essay on Mackie’s position titled “Ethics and the Fabric of the World,” in Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie, op. cit., pp. 203-214, brings out the atheistic presupposition behind Mackie’s denial by pointing out, in response to the question “what it could mean to say that a requirement or demand was ‘part of the fabric of the world’,” that it “might possibly mean that some agency which made the demand or imposed the requirement was part of the fabric” (p. 205). Williams, of course, shares Mackie’s disbelief in such an agency.

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49. G. Harman, The Nature, op. cit., Ch. 2. 50. Ibid., p. 17. This definition is an example of what can be called naturalism-nati, with “nati” standing for “nature is all there is” (and with “nature” here understood as “the totality of finite existents”). This definition lies behind Phillip Johnson’s complete rejection of naturalism. Having said that naturalism is similar to materialism, Johnson adds: “The essential point is that nature is understood by both naturalists and materialists to be ‘all there is’” (Reason, op. cit., p. 38n). What Johnson and many others have not seen is that naturalism in this sense, which is implied by naturalism-sam, is not implied by what I below call generic naturalism. 51. G. Harman, “Is There a Single True Morality?,” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, edited by M. Krausz (Notre Dame 1989), p. 381. 52. P. Benacerraf, “Mathematical Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 70, 1973. Reprinted in Philosophy of Mathematics, edited by P. Benacerraf and H. Putnam (Cambridge 1983), pp. 403-420. 53. P. Maddy, Realism in Mathematics (Oxford 1990), p. 37. 54. R. Hersh, What is Mathematics, Really? (New York 1997), p. 12. 55. G. Harman, The Nature, op. cit., pp. 9-10. 56. Ibid., p. 10. 57. B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits, op. cit., pp. 128-129. 58. Ibid., p. 53. 59. Ibid., pp. 17, 22, 74. 60. See D. R. Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem (Berkeley 1998), pp. 37-40, 52-54, 163-167, 209-217. In these pages, I discuss J. Searle’s view that moral responsibility presupposes freedom, with which I agree, and his argument that the scientific worldview rules out freedom, with which I disagree— unless one, with Searle, simply assumes that “the scientific worldview” necessarily entails reductionism. I also contest the argument, as articulated in W. G. Lycan’s Consciousness (Cambridge 1987), that the problem can be resolved by accepting “compatibilism,” according to which the freedom presupposed in morality responsibility is compatible with causal determinism. 61. C. E. Larmore, The Morals, op. cit., pp. 8, 86, 87, 89, 116. 62. Ibid., pp. 91-96. 63. Ibid., pp. 86, 87, 99.

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64. Ibid., p. 87. 65. This case against J. Mackie’s metaphysical queerness argument had previously been made by H. Putnam, who said: “There are ‘ought-implying facts’ in the realm of belief fixation; and that is an excellent reason not to accept the view that there cannot be ‘ought-implying facts’ anywhere”; see H. Putnam, Words and Life, edited by J. Conant (Cambridge 1994), p. 170. 66. C. E. Larmore, The Morals, op. cit., p. 90. 67. On Larmore’s sensationist rejection of a direct intuition of moral norms, along with his failed attempt to explain our knowledge of them through “reason”, see ibid., pp. 8, 51, 53, 62, 96-98, 110-117. 68. On Larmore’s acceptance of a godless, disenchanted universe, see ibid., pp. 42-44, 55. 69. These arguments are developed more fully in D. R. Griffin, Religion, op. cit., Chs. 6-8, and Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca 2001), Chs. 1-3, 5. 70. I have developed this notion in Unsnarling, op. cit., Ch. 3; Religion, op. cit., pp. 98-101; and Reenchantment, op. cit., pp. 29-35. 71. A. Einstein, “Maxwell’s Influence on the Development of the Conception of Physical Reality,” in J. J. Thomson et al., James Clerk Maxwell: A Commemorative Volume (Cambridge 1931), p. 66. 72. W. Van Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York 1969), pp. 75, 44. 73. G. Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York 1955), pp. 1415. 74. W. V. Quine, From Stimulus, op. cit., p. 36; emphasis added. 75. H. Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago 1938), p. 346. 76. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York 1952), p. 49. 77. K. Gödel, “What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem? Supplement to the Second Edition,” in Collected Works, Vol. II, edited by S. Feferman et al. (New York 1990), p. 268. 78. H. Putnam, Words, op. cit., p. 503. The essay in which this statement appears was originally published in 1979, when Putnam still held a materialistic, functionalist, cybernetic view of the mind. His later rejection of that view should, it seems, lead to a reconsideration of the a priori rejection of nonsensory perception.

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79. C. Chihara, “A Gödelian Thesis Regarding Mathematical Objects: Do They Exist? And Can We Perceive Them?,” Philosophical Review 91, 1982, p. 217; Hersh, What is, op. cit., p. 12. 80. R. Hersh, What is, op. cit., p. 7; P. Maddy, Realism, op. cit., pp. 2-3. 81. R. Maddy, Realism, op. cit., pp. 44, 59, 178. 82. H. Putnam, Words, op. cit., p. 153. Putnam, whose more recent rejection of his earlier form of naturalism evidently did not include a reconsideration of its sensationism, now endorses this Quinean attitude. 83. Ibid., p. 500. 84. This denial was made by Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” which is contained in Quine, From Stimulus, op. cit. 85. H. Putnam, “There Is at Least One A Priori Truth,” Realism and Reason (New York 1983), pp. 98-114. 86. C. McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness: Essays Toward a Resolution (Oxford 1991), p. 1. 87. Ibid., p. 45. 88. I have documented these admissions from other materialists in Unsnarling, op. cit., Intro. and Ch. 6; Religion, op. cit., Ch. 6. 89. J. R. Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (London 1984), p. 92. 90. J. R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge 1992), p. 248. 91. J. R. Searle, Minds, op. cit., pp. 98, 93. The idea of statistical indeterminacy at the quantum level also provides no basis for affirming freedom, Searle adds, because all such indeterminacy is canceled out in macro-objects, such as billiard balls and human bodies. On materialist assumptions, furthermore, “the human mind can[not] force the statisticallydetermined particles to swerve from their paths” (p. 87). As these passages show, Searle, by virtue of equating the mind with the brain, takes a human being to be structurally analogous to a billiard ball. If, by contrast, the mind were considered to be a unitary agent with partially autonomous power, the lack of full determination at the quantum level might be intensified, rather than canceled out, at the level of the living human being as a whole. 92. Ibid., pp. 86, 97. Searle, pointing out that the freedom that we all presuppose involves “the belief that we could have done things differently from the way we did in fact do them,” rightly rejects the attempt to redefine freedom to make it compatible with determinism (p. 92). 93. A similar analysis of the problem of freedom and determinism is provided by T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York 1986), pp. 110-

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123, and philosopher-of-law L. Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice (Harvard 1987), pp. vii, 9-12, 263-265; “The Moral Point of View,” in R. P. George (ed.), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality: Contemporary Essays (Oxford 1996), pp. 202-204. 94. J. Kim points out that thinking of ourselves as capable of mental causation is closely related to thinking of ourselves “as reflective agents capable of deliberation and evaluation—that is […] as agents capable of acting in accordance with a norm” [Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge 1993), p. 215]. Kim himself admits that these presuppositions cannot be coherently formulated within a materialist position, see Griffin, Unsnarling, op. cit., Ch. 10, or “Materialist and Panexperientialist Physicalism: A Critique of Jaegwon Kim’s Supervenience and Mind,” Process Studies 28.1-2, pp. 4-27, which is followed by a response from Kim. 95. C. McGinn, The Problem, op. cit., p. 23n. 96. H. Putnam, Realism, op. cit., p. 191. 97. C. E. Larmore, The Morals, op. cit., p. 44. 98. My arguments are developed in Reenchantment, op. cit., Ch. 5, “Natural Theology Based on Naturalistic Theism.” 99. H. Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London 1906), Appendix I. 100. A. N. Whitehead, Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York 1947), p. 142. 101. A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York 1968), p. 19; Essays, op. cit., p. 80. 102. C. E. Larmore, The Morals, op. cit., p. 89. Harman substantiates Larmore’s point, admitting that “the naturalist’s only argument” for the view “that a belief that something is right cannot be explained by that thing’s being actually right […] depends on accepting the general applicability of naturalism” (“Is There,” op. cit., p. 383). 103. For example, in a book titled The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God (Oxford 1982), Mackie deals only with traditional theism, according to which one of God’s attributes is “able to do everything (i.e., omnipotent),” concluding that the existence of such a being is highly improbable, especially in light of the problem of evil. Mackie acknowledges, however, that his argument would cause no difficulty for forms of theism that do not accept this view of divine power (pp. 1, 151). 104. Many thinkers, however, fail to see the distinction. For example, biologist R. Lewontin, while admitting the “patent absurdity” of many

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explanations offered from a materialistic standpoint, defends the retention of this standpoint by saying that “we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door” because “[t]o appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen” (“Billions and Billions of Demons,” review of C. Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997, pp. 28-32, at p. 31). Lewontin’s statement reveals no awareness of the existence of naturalistic forms of theism, which do not allow for such ruptures. 105. Although some religious thinkers would claim that scientific naturalism-ns is contradicted by numerous well-documented miracles, I have argued that the alternative version of naturalism recommended here can accommodate the various kinds of phenomena traditionally called miracles, which are now studied by parapsychology. See D. R. Griffin, Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (Albany 1997), and, for a more thorough philosophical discussion, “Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 87.3, pp. 217-288. For my argument against the assumption that parapsychology can be justifiably ignored on the grounds that it is merely a “pseudoscience,” see my Religion, op. cit., Ch. 7. 106. See D. R. Griffin, Unsnarling, op. cit. 107. Against those who consider our feeling of freedom an illusion, Whitehead says: “This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. It governs the whole tone of human life.” Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York 1978), p. 47. 108. A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York 1959), p. 8. 109. A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, op. cit., p. 103. 110. I have discussed the problem of evil in my God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia 1976) [reprinted with a new preface (Lanham 1991)]; Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations (Albany 1991); “Creation out of Nothing, Creation Out of Chaos, and the Problem of Evil,” Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, edited by S. T. Davis (Philadelphia 2001), pp. 108-125. 111. See D. R. Griffin, Reenchantment, op. cit., Ch. 5. 112. The “religious perspective,” explains C. Geertz, is “the conviction that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structure of reality, that between the way one ought to live and the way things really are there

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is an unbreakable inner connection” [Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (New Haven 1968), p. 97]. It is this connection, Geertz points out, that accounts for religion’s moral vitality: “The powerfully coercive ‘ought’ is felt to grow out of a comprehensive factual ‘is’” [Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York 1973), pp. 126-127].

Can Specific Rules be Deduced from Moral Principles? John W. Lango 1. Introduction In making a moral judgment about a particular case, we might want to utilize a specific moral rule. But why should we accept such rules? How can they be justified? A traditional answer is that they can be deduced from general moral principles. But this traditional answer is suspect. It would seem that the logic of deductive reasoning is not adequate. How can a specific rule be extracted from a general principle by means of a merely formal logic? In this paper, I shall investigate one way of answering this last question. Admittedly, specific rules cannot ordinarily be deduced from moral principles by means of the sorts of logic that are most familiar: propositional logic and predicate logic. My view is that a different logic is needed, one that governs deductive inferences involving such moral terms as “ought” and “may.” Such a logic has been called a deontic logic. Instead of considering an entire system, I shall focus on a single rule of inference, and describe it nontechnically. That inference rule is comprehensible in and of itself. Accordingly, throughout this paper (with the exception of the appendix), the reader need not be acquainted with any system of logic, and should expect a line of argument written in familiar philosophical language. It should be realized that the rule is not a standard one, for it involves not only a conception of obligation but also a conception of necessity. Hence, to clarify it further, an axiom corresponding to it is discussed in the appendix. With the aim of illustrating the rule of inference concretely, I shall draw upon a particular field of applied ethics: bioethics. Thus the scope of this paper is somewhat unusual, in that it ranges from the concrete topic of informed consent in bioethics to the abstract topic of a combined deonticmodal logic. In Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Tom Beauchamp and James Childress utilize four moral principles: respect for autonomy,

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nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice.1 They also utilize specific biomedical rules—e.g., “Protect confidential medical information.”2 For the sake of concreteness, I shall discuss how biomedical rules can be deduced from their principles (and other required premises) by means of the inference rule. Moreover, in discussing issues of metaethics, I shall follow a dialectical procedure. In contrast to their metaethical views, I shall develop my own.3

2. The Problem of Support Beauchamp and Childress discuss “several types of rules that specify principles (and thereby provide specific guidance).”4 Such rules are not deduced from those principles. Instead, the rules specify the principles, and specification is not deduction.5 Rather than by means of deduction, the rules are justified by means of coherence.6 But this appeal to the idea of coherence evades what I shall call the problem of support: how does a principle support its specifications? For example, a rule that specifies the principle of respect for autonomy is “Obtain consent for interventions with patients.”7 More than just specifying that principle, the rule is supported by it. We ought to obtain consent for interventions with patients because we ought to respect their autonomy. Indeed, the idea of coherence includes a conception of mutual support. Moral principles, specific rules, and judgments about cases are mutually supportive. However, this conception of mutual support involves quite different types of relations of support. For instance, it is often said that a rule may be supported inductively by moral judgments about cases. And such inductive support is quite different from the type of support that principles provide for rules, or the type of support that principles provide for one another. Most importantly, the way a principle supports its specifications is unique: for they are its specifications. Hence the problem of support is not solved by appealing generally to the idea of coherence. We need to understand how the particular principle that is specified supports a particular rule that specifies it. Let me make this claim more concrete by means of an illustration. How does the above rule about medical consent specify the principle of respect for autonomy? The principle binds every moral agent, whereas the rule pertains specifically to those agents who are medical practitioners. The principle governs every action, whereas the rule concerns specifically those actions that are medical interventions. A person who is the object of an agent’s action is, in a general sense, the “patient” of that action. The

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principle holds for every patient of any action, whereas the rule pertains specifically to medical patients. Finally, consenting (in the right way) is a specific form of autonomy, and obtaining consent (in the right way) is a specific form of respect for autonomy. (The phrase “in the right way” stands for a cluster of requirements, for instance, that the consent be properly informed.) To have a convenient term, let us call this rule the medical-consent rule. Now let us examine a different rule that also specifies the principle of respect for autonomy: obtain consent for police interventions with criminals. (In other words, obtain consent from the perpetrators of crimes before arresting them.) How does this second rule specify the principle? The principle binds every moral agent, whereas the rule pertains specifically to those agents who are police officers. The principle governs every action, whereas the rule concerns specifically those actions that are interventions by police officers. The principle holds for every patient of any action, whereas the rule pertains specifically to criminals. Finally, consenting (in the right way) is a specific form of autonomy, and obtaining consent (in the right way) is a specific form of respect for autonomy. Obviously, the second rule is unacceptable. In contrast, the medicalconsent rule is (arguably) acceptable. How, then, are we to distinguish acceptable specifications from unacceptable ones? To answer this question adequately, we need to understand how a principle supports the rules that specify it. In what follows, I shall argue that sometimes, when a rule specifies a principle, the principle supports the rule deductively.

3. Deduction in Ethics It might seem that I am espousing as a model of justification in ethics a version of deductivism. But deductivism and coherentism are commonly thought to be rivals. For instance, Beauchamp and Childress contrast three models of justification: deductivism, inductivism, and coherentism.8 How, then, can a coherentist (as I am professing to be) argue that rules can be supported by principles deductively?9 Deductivism is often characterized as follows. It understands moral justification to be top-down. At the top, there are some definitely accepted premises (e.g., a supreme moral principle), and, at the bottom, there are moral judgments about cases that are deduced from those premises.10 Deductivism, so characterized, conjoins a conception of deduction to a foundationalist moral epistemology. The foundation consists in the

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premises, and the superstructure (which could also contain intermediate principles and rules) is erected by means of deduction. However, I think that such deductivism is a rival to coherentism, not because it utilizes deductive reasoning, but because it is foundationalist. Thus a coherentist, while rejecting a foundation of definitely accepted premises, can still utilize deductive reasoning. More precisely, in a coherentist moral epistemology, there can be relations of mutual support among principles, rules, and judgments about cases. On the one hand, judgments about cases can support principles and rules inductively. And, on the other hand, a principle or a rule can be among the premises from which a judgment about a case is deduced, and a principle can be among the premises from which a rule is deduced. In short, deductive reasoning is compatible with coherentism. In criticizing deductivism, Beauchamp and Childress schematize the deductive application of a principle or rule to a particular action as follows:11 (1) Every act of description A is obligatory. (2) Act b is of description A. Therefore, (3) Act b is obligatory. In light of this schema, the following might be contended about the nature of deduction in ethics. When moral judgments about particular actions are deduced from moral principles and rules (and other needed premises), the validity of this deductive reasoning can be established by means of predicate logic. But I shall challenge this contention. I shall argue, instead, that moral reasoning is singular, that deductions in ethics require a special logic. Let me explain. The concluding step in the above schema might be construed as follows. Act b has the property of being obligatory. That is, because “is obligatory” would seem to be a grammatical predicate, it might be construed as expressing the property of being obligatory. However, such a propertytheory of obligatoriness generates various puzzles. For example, is being obligatory a natural or nonnatural property? In accepting a property-theory of obligatoriness, are we committed to a cognitivist metaethics? Similarly to our visual perceptions of colors, can we have moral perceptions of obligations? In his refutation of the ontological argument, Kant maintained (roughly) that “existence” is not a predicate. Analogously, my view is that being

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obligatory is not a (real) predicate or property.12 Accordingly, let us rewrite the above schema as follows. (1) It is obligatory to do every act of description A. (2) b is an act of description A. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory to do b. Here the words “is obligatory” should not be read as a grammatical predicate, and so should not be construed as expressing a property. (Similarly, “It is not the case that” does not express a property of negation.) Hence the validity of this reasoning cannot be established by means of predicate logic. I shall not dispute further the question of whether there is a property of being obligatory. I have discussed the question briefly, in order to cast doubt on the original schema. However, even if there is such a property, there still are deductive inferences in ethics that cannot be analyzed in terms of predicate logic. Let me provide an illustration. K. Danner Clouser and Bernard Gert13 have maintained that Beauchamp’s and Childress’ four principles generate insoluble moral dilemmas. What follows might be an example. Using the beneficence principle, we decide that it is obligatory to provide a particular patient with life-sustaining medical treatment. But she does not want this treatment. And so, using the principle of respect for autonomy, we decide that it is obligatory not to provide her with the treatment. Therefore, because these two obligations conflict, we draw this conclusion. We are in the grip of an obligation that it is impossible for us to carry out. It is obligatory both to treat her and not to treat her. But why are we entitled to draw this conclusion? One answer is that we are presupposing the following pattern of deductive reasoning, which—to borrow a label from Bernard Williams14—can be called an agglomeration principle. (1) It is obligatory to do a. (2) It is obligatory to do b. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory to do both a and b. This is my promised illustration. Even if there is a property of being obligatory, the validity of deductive inferences of this sort cannot be established by means of predicate logic.

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4. The Problem of Alternativity My view is, to repeat, that moral reasoning is singular, that deductions in ethics require a special logic. How, then, are we to obtain such a logic? Among the branches of formal logic is a logic of obligation, pioneered by Georg Henrik von Wright, and termed by him “deontic logic.”15 Reflecting the claim that “existence” is not a predicate, assertions of existence in predicate logic utilize a special logical operator, the existential quantifier. Similarly, in deontic logic, obligations are expressed in terms of a special logical operator, the deontic operator ○. Note that ○a can be read as “it is obligatory to do a.” Just as (∃x) x=a does not mean that a has the property of existing, so ○a need not be interpreted as attributing a property of being obligatory to a. A disputed example of a theorem of deontic logic is the agglomeration principle: if ○a and ○b, then ○(a&b). But this is controversial. In fact, there is not a single system of deontic logic, but instead there are alternative systems of deontic logic, some of which have an agglomeration principle, and others not.16 Consequently, to my view that deductions in ethics require a special logic, there is this significant objection. There are alternative deontic logics. More generally, there is controversy about the nature of moral reasoning. Therefore, when moral principles and rules are applied to particular actions, there is no single logic of moral reasoning that can be presupposed. The key word in this objection is “presupposed.” The objection might seem plausible, and yet (I shall maintain) it involves a foundationalist assumption. It assumes that a perfected logic of moral reasoning has to be antecedently presupposed as a sort of foundation. Something like this assumption has been asserted by R. M. Hare. In sketching a moral epistemology that is “both coherentist and foundationalist,” Hare said the following. Moral principles and “singular prescriptions for actions” comprise a hierarchical structure, with the former at the top, and the latter at the bottom.17 Coherentism holds of that structure. Neither principles nor singular prescriptions are indubitable. Instead, both are defeasible. “[W]e shall have to make adjustments to one end of the structure or the other, or both.”18 Nevertheless, the structure has as a foundation “a method of moral reasoning, determined by the logic of the moral concepts.”19 By contrast, my view is that adjustments may have to be made, not just to principles, rules, and judgments about particular actions, but also to the logic utilized to deduce those rules and judgments. (Similarly, adjustments may have to be made to the procedure whereby singular judgments support

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rules and principles inductively.) Coherentism also encompasses the logic of moral reasoning. Consequently, my reply to the above objection is as follows. Indeed, there are alternative deontic logics. But there also are alternative ethical theories (e.g., utilitarian theories and Kantian theories). And there are alternative moral principles. (For example, Kant’s conception of beneficence is different from that of utilitarianism, and so there can be alternative principles of beneficence.) Ethics is plagued with this problem of alternativity. It is the hope of coherentism that, by combining principles, rules, and singular judgments into a coherent system, it can be determined which among these alternatives is best. My point is that, in fashioning such a system, a coherentist also has to determine which is best among the alternative logics of moral reasoning. Let me illustrate this point. Clouser and Gert maintain that Beauchamp’s and Childress’ principles lack “systematic unity.”20 Now Clouser and Gert might argue as follows. Beauchamp’s and Childress’ principles yield conflicting obligations—for instance, the two mentioned above: it is obligatory to treat the patient, and it is obligatory not to treat her. Using an agglomeration principle, we can draw this conclusion: it is obligatory both to treat her and not to treat her. And then, using a principle that “ought” implies “can,” we can draw this further conclusion: it is possible both to treat her and not to treat her. But it is not possible both to treat her and not to treat her. In short, the two conflicting obligations entail a contradiction. This contradiction is not dispelled by appealing generally to a conception of coherence. In response, Beauchamp and Childress might say this. We reject the agglomeration principle, we do not include it in our logic of moral reasoning. Therefore, although the two obligations conflict, there is no contradiction. However, even though one cannot decide between them by means of our logic, one still can make a choice in terms of our conception of coherence.

5. The Deduction of Rules from Principles I want now to consider a deontic logic by means of which a rule that specifies a moral principle can sometimes be derived from that principle. It is constructed by (among other things) adding to propositional logic a special logical operator: the deontic operator ○. This logic is particularly simple. It is a sort of deontic propositional logic, albeit a nonstandard one. (In this way, the complications of predicate logic are ignored.) It is

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summarized briefly in the next section, and discussed more fully in the appendix. Rather than attempt to develop it in detail, I shall concentrate exclusively on a single rule of inference, which I shall call the obligation rule. To enhance understanding of that rule, I shall first examine some inference rules that are (arguably) equivalent to it. To begin with, we note a remark by A. N. Prior: “It seems clear that (1) to do something which cannot be done without something wrong being done would itself be wrong.”21 In light of his remark, a logic of moral reasoning might include the following rule of inference. (1) It is wrong to do B. (2) You cannot do A without doing B. Therefore, (3) It is wrong to do A. I have been focusing on norms of a single type: obligations. But the concepts of wrongness and obligation are not unrelated. Perhaps they are linked by something like this equivalence: it is wrong to do A just in case it is obligatory not to do A. Consider, then, the following inference rule, which is analogous to (and perhaps even equivalent to) the preceding one. (1) It is obligatory not to do B. (2) You cannot do A without doing B. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory not to do A. The second premise is essential to this rule, and so we need to examine it more closely. Note that “You cannot do A without doing B” means that it is impossible to do A without doing B, that it is necessarily the case that if you do A then you do B. Consequently, I propose to rewrite the rule thus. (1) It is obligatory not to do B. (2) Necessarily, if you do A, then you do B. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory not to do A. Let us call this rule of inference the prohibition rule. Prior once included in a “plausible set of postulates” for deontic logic the following (which I paraphrase approximately in nonsymbolic language):22 if it is necessarily the case that, if you do A, then you do B; then, if it is obligatory to do A, then it is obligatory to do B.23 Drawing upon the idea

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expressed in this postulate, I want now to propose a comparable inference rule.24 (1) It is obligatory to do A. (2) Necessarily, if you do A, then you do B. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory to do B. This inference rule, a deontic analogue of modus ponens, says, roughly and intuitively, that any act implied by an act that is obligatory is itself obligatory. This is the rule that I am calling the obligation rule. Arguably, the obligation rule and the prohibition rule are equivalent. By substituting “not do B” for “do A” and “not do A” for “do B” in the obligation rule, we obtain this. (1) It is obligatory not to do B. (2) Necessarily, if you do not do B, then you do not do A. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory not to do A. The second premise here is equivalent to the second premise of the prohibition rule because of the following contraposition principle: necessarily, if P, then Q if and only if necessarily, if not Q, then not P. Conversely, by making the same substitutions in the prohibition rule, the obligation rule can be derived similarly, establishing their equivalence.

6. Obligation and Necessity The second premise of the obligation rule contains the word “necessarily.” My conjecture is that a coherent system of ethics should include a logic of moral reasoning that involves conceptions of necessity and possibility. In contrast, the systems of deontic logic that are most familiar do not contain necessity and possibility operators. I want now to emphasize that the logic that I am considering is nonstandard because it involves, in addition to a conception of obligation, a conception of necessity. Accordingly, I shall interpret the word “necessarily” in the second premise in terms of the necessity operator of modal logic. (Note that the above contraposition principle is a thesis of modal logic.) The deontic logic that I am considering is nonstandard because it incorporates a system of modal logic. It is a sort of combined deontic-modal logic.

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Let me summarize it briefly. It contains the obligation rule. It contains a principle that “ought” implies “can.” And it incorporates propositional logic and modal logic. (Although it does not contain an agglomeration principle, one can be added to it without contradiction.) An axiom system corresponding to it is discussed in the appendix. Brian Chellas has outlined a system of deontic logic that includes a rule of inference that is similar to the obligation rule.25 Paraphrased roughly in nonsymbolic language, the rule is this. (1) If A, then B. Therefore, (2) If A is obligatory, then B is obligatory. In applying this rule, instantiations of the premise have to be instantiations of valid theorems of logic. Here is an illustration. If you do A and you do B, then you do A. By applying the rule, we derive the following. If it is obligatory to do A and to do B, then it is obligatory to do A. But the notion of necessary truth is broader than the notion of valid theorem. Alvin Plantinga has defended a notion of “broadly logical necessity,” a notion that could encompass statements such as “Red is a colour” and “Every person is conscious at some time or other.”26 Such necessary truths are not merely formal but instead are substantive. But the subject of necessary truths is highly controversial, and there is no space to enter into this controversy here. Are broadly logical necessary truths true merely by definition? Are they known to be true by analyzing concepts? Can some of them be known to be true empirically? I shall leave such questions for the reader to decide. Following Plantinga’s lead, I shall assume that there are necessary truths that are broadly logical. This assumption is, I think, compatible with a variety of different conceptions of the nature of necessity. In particular, I think that there are broadly logical necessary truths about actions.27 There are necessary truths about actions that are not merely formal but instead are substantive. Therefore, I would construe the second premise of the obligation rule as follows. The relationship between the antecedent “you do A” and the consequent “you do B” can be one that is broadly logically necessary. Indeed, the premise can be instantiated thus: necessarily, if you do both A and B, then you do A. But it also can be instantiated by necessary truths that are not purely formal but instead are substantive. When it is instantiated by such broadly logical necessary truths, it can be understood in the following way. The nature (or concept) of doing A and the nature (or concept) of doing B are such that you cannot do A without doing B.

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A common objection to the deductive application of moral principles is that there is no decision procedure for ethics because the application of moral norms requires judgment. But the obligation rule is not a mechanical decision procedure. When a broadly logical necessary truth instantiates the second premise, it cannot be established by means of any proof technique of formal logic. By what process of judgment (or cognition) can it be established? Is such a process of judgment definitional or conceptual or (synthetic) a priori or empirical? These and related questions I shall let the reader decide. Various answers to them are compatible with the obligation rule.28

7. Some Illustrations I want now to supply a biomedical illustration. The medical-consent rule can be stated as an obligation: it is obligatory for you to obtain your patient’s consent for medical interventions. That is, the rule commands you to perform the action of obtaining her consent for medical interventions. And the principle of respect for autonomy can be stated as an obligation: it is obligatory for you to respect her autonomy. That is, the principle commands you to act so as to respect her autonomy. How are these two types of actions related? This question can be answered as follows. You cannot respect your patient’s autonomy without obtaining her consent for medical interventions. It is impossible for you both to respect her autonomy and to fail to obtain her consent for medical interventions. For the nature (or concept) of respecting autonomy and the nature (or concept) of obtaining consent for medical interventions are such that you cannot do the former without doing the latter. Therefore, a broadly logical necessary truth that instantiates the second premise of the obligation rule is the following. Necessarily, if you respect your patient’s autonomy, then you obtain her consent for medical interventions. Utilizing this necessary truth, the medical-consent rule can be derived from the principle of respect for autonomy by means of the obligation rule. (1) It is obligatory for you to respect your patient’s autonomy. (2) Necessarily, if you respect her autonomy, then you obtain her consent for medical interventions. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory for you to obtain her consent for medical interventions.

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Such a necessary truth cannot be established by means of a mechanical decision procedure. Providing it with an adequate defense would be a very difficult and controversial project, one that I shall not attempt here. Beauchamp and Childress discuss the topic of consent most thoroughly in their chapter on respect for autonomy.29 I would interpret their discussion as follows. They are not merely investigating whether a rule governing medical consent “maximizes the coherence of the overall set of beliefs that are accepted upon reflection.”30 They also are investigating how the concept of respecting autonomy and the concept of obtaining consent for medical interventions are conceptually interrelated. My suggestion is that such an investigation should aim at establishing something like the above necessary truth. Let us examine a second illustration, one that is not biomedical. Allen Wood has discussed how specific moral duties can be derived from Kant’s second formulation of the Categorical Imperative—namely, the Formula of Humanity as an End in Itself (FH). In particular, Wood has suggested that duties can be derived by means of “a process of deductive reasoning from that principle [i.e., the FH] and intermediate premises”:31 “The intermediate premises connecting FH with conduct are hermeneutical in nature: They involve interpreting the meaning of actions regarding their respect or disrespect of the dignity of rational nature.”32 What follows is one of Wood’s examples.33 (1) Always respect humanity, in one’s own person as well as that of another, as an end in itself. (2) The act of suicide always fails to respect humanity in one’s own person as an end in itself. Therefore, (3) Do not commit suicide. Let me rewrite his example in the terminology of this paper. The first premise and conclusion are rewritten as obligations. And the intermediate premise is construed as a necessary truth.34 Finally, instead of the obligation rule, the equivalent prohibition rule is used. (1) It is obligatory not to fail to respect humanity, in your own person as well as that of another, as an end in itself. (2) Necessarily, if you commit suicide, then you fail to respect humanity, in your own person as well as that of another, as an end in itself. Therefore, (3) It is obligatory not to commit suicide.

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In conclusion, the logic that I have been discussing is particularly simple. Moreover, there are controversial issues about it that I cannot try to adjudicate here.35 And so, as I have already admitted, some alternative logic of moral reasoning might be better.36 Nevertheless, the obligation rule displays one way in which a specific rule can be deduced from a moral principle.

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Appendix The obligation rule is a sort of natural deduction rule. The idea expressed in that rule is also expressed in Prior’s37 postulate: □(A→B)→(○A→○B). (□ is the necessity operator.) In this appendix, I shall discuss a system containing Prior’s postulate. That system is termed DM (“deontic-modal”). Chellas’s rule of inference is part of the following “minimal deontic logic” (which I have rewritten somewhat), a logic that permits “contrary obligations,” and thus “moral dilemmas.”38 [PL] A, where A is a tautology [MP] Given A and A→B, derive B [OD] ¬○⊥ [ROM] Given A→B, derive ○A→○B This system is termed D. Propositional logic is included by means of the axiom PL and the rule MP. OD is an axiom that says that the contradictory is not obligatory, thereby embodying a principle that “ought” implies “can.” (The symbol ⊥ is a constant for falsity.) The rule of inference ROM says that, given the theorem A→B as an hypothesis, the theorem ○A→○B can be derived as a conclusion. The system DM is a sort of minimal combined deontic-modal logic. It results by combining Prior’s postulate both with a system of modal logic that is often taken to be basic—namely, K—and with Chellas’s system D.39 [PL] A, where A is a tautology [MP] Given A and A→B, derive B [OD] ¬○⊥ [RN] Given A, derive □A [K] □(A→B)→(□A→□B) [ON] □(A→B) → (○A→○B) K is included by means of the rule RN and the axiom K.40 It can be shown that ROM is a derived rule as follows. Suppose that A→B. Using RN, we obtain □(A→B). From ON and MP, we obtain ○A→○B. It might be objected that OD does not capture the meaning of the principle that “ought” implies “can.”41 For, to say that it is (broadly logically) possible for you to do A is not to say that your doing A is merely

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(narrowly) logically possible. Note that a conception of possibility in modal logic is standardly defined in terms of necessity thus: [DfM] ◊A iff ¬□¬A. Consequently, it might be thought that the principle that “ought” implies “can” should be expressed as follows: [OC] ○A→◊A. However, OC is a theorem of the system DM. In the following proof, instead of using PL and MP, an equivalent rule of inference RPL is used: given a set of sentences, we can derive any tautological consequence of that set of sentences.42 1. ¬A → ¬A∨⊥

RPL

2. ¬A → (A→⊥)

1, RPL

3. □[¬A→ (A→⊥)]

2, RN

4. □[¬A→ (A→⊥)] → [□¬A → □(A→⊥)]

K

5. □¬A → □(A→⊥)

3, 4, RPL

6. □(A→⊥) → (○A→○⊥)

ON

7. □¬A → (○A → ○⊥)

5, 6, RPL

8. ¬○⊥ → (○A → ¬□¬A)

7, RPL

9. ¬○⊥

OD

10. ○A → ¬□¬A

8, 9, RPL

11. ◊A iff ¬□¬A

DfM

12. ○A → ◊A

10, 11, RPL

What step 7 says is roughly this: if A is impossible and yet obligatory, then the contradictory is obligatory. This link between the (broadly logical) notion of impossibility and the notion of the contradictory is mediated by ON (at step 6). We see, then, how the (arguably) more adequate formulation of the principle that “ought” implies “can” is obtainable— making essential use of ON—from what could be a less adequate formulation of that principle (i.e., OD).

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Notes 1. T. L. Beauchamp and J. F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics (New York 2001), p. 12. 2. Ibid., p. 65 3. In limiting my discussion in this way, my purpose is to set aside many of the questions that are disputed in the literature on metaethics. For a survey of the history of metaethics, see M. Timmons, Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism (Oxford 1999), pp. 3-30. 4. T. L. Beauchamp and J. F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, op. cit., p. 13. 5. Beauchamp and Childress (Principles of Biomedical Ethics, op. cit., p. 24, n. 15) express indebtedness for their conception of specification to a paper by H. Richardson. Richardson presents specification as an alternative to deductive application: “a specification will in general not follow deductively from what it specifies” (H. S. Richardson, “Specifying Norms as a Way to Resolve Concrete Ethical Problems,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 19, 1990, p. 299). 6. T. L. Beauchamp and J. F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, op. cit., p. 404. 7. Ibid., p. 65. 8. Ibid., pp. 385-401. For discussions of such models, see W. SinnottArmstrong and M. Timmons (eds.), Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology (New York 1996). 9. My conception of coherence is influenced by A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by D. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne (New York 1978), pp. 3-6. Note Reiner Wiehl’s remark that “Whitehead’s cosmology contains a number of different, yet closely related criteria of reason, among which the criterium of coherence is of special importance.” See his “Whitehead’s Cosmology of Feeling Between Ontology and Anthropology,” Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity, edited by F. Rapp and R. Wiehl (Albany 1990), p. 129. 10. T. L. Beauchamp and J. F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, op. cit., pp. 385-386. 11. Ibid., p. 386. In the following quotation, the method of numbering has been changed, the schematic letters have been italicized, and a typographical error has been corrected.

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12. C. McGinn claims that existence is a “logical property” [Logical Properties: Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity, Truth (Oxford 2000), pp. 15-51]. Similarly, it might be claimed that being obligatory is a logical property. Even if the latter claim is correct, we may still question whether inferences involving a logical property are governed by predicate logic. 13. K. D. Clouser and B. Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15, 1990, pp. 219-236. 14. B. Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge 1973), pp. 180-184. 15. G. H. von Wright, “Deontic Logic,” Logical Studies (New York 1957). 16. For a discussion of various deontic logics, see B. Chellas, Modal Logic: An Introduction (Cambridge 1980), pp. 190-203, 272-77. For an attempt to devise a new type of deontic logic, see J. W. Forrester, Being Good and being Logical: Philosophical Groundwork for a New Deontic Logic (New York 1996). 17. R. M. Hare, “Foundationalism and Coherentism in Ethics,” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong and M. Timmons (eds.), Moral Knowledge?, op. cit., pp. 197, 192. 18. Ibid., p. 194. 19. Ibid., p. 197. 20. K. D. Clouser and B. Gert, “A Critique of Principlism,” op. cit., p. 227. 21. A. N. Prior, “Logic, Deontic,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. IV (New York 1967), p. 511. 22. A. N. Prior, “Escapism: The Logical Basis of Ethics,” in A. I. Melden (ed.), Essays in Moral Philosophy (Seattle 1958), p. 135 23. This sort of principle is also discussed by W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Dilemmas (New York 1988), pp. 140, 239. 24. For an analogous rule of inference, see H. J. Gensler, Formal Ethics (New York 1996), p. 49. 25. B. Chellas, Modal Logic, op. cit., pp. 201-202. 26. A. Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford 1974), p. 2. 27. In the literature on the subject of necessary truths that has been influenced by the development of possible-worlds semantics for modal logics, putative examples are standardly drawn from the natural sciences: e.g., water is H2O. I am assuming that there also are necessary truths about

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actions. For survey of that literature, see A. C. Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (Oxford 1997), pp. 33-87. 28. For a discussion of the subjects of conceptual analysis and necessity, see F. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford 1998). In light of Kripke’s view that there are necessary truths that are known empirically, it might be argued that there are necessary truths about human actions that can be known empirically (e.g., through the science of psychology). See S. A. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht 1972), pp. 260-263. 29. T. L. Beauchamp and J. F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, op. cit., pp. 57-112. 30. Ibid., p. 404 31. A. W. Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge 1999), p. 152. 32. Ibid., p. 154 33. Ibid., p. 152. This quotation has been altered by removing a two-letter acronym between each numeral and the following sentence. Additionally, the method of numbering and the placement of the word "Therefore" have been changed. 34. Wood asserts that the intermediate premises are “empirical” (ibid., p. 154), but—in light of S. A. Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” op. cit., pp. 260-263—they also could be necessary truths. 35. The sort of reasoning expressed in the obligation rule is sometimes rejected because of so-called paradoxes of deontic logic. For attempts to solve these paradoxes, see H.-N. Castañeda, “The Paradoxes of Deontic Logic: The Simplest Solution to All of Them in One Fell Swoop,” in R. Hilpinen (ed.), New Studies in Deontic Logic (Dordrecht 1981), pp. 37-85, and W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Dilemmas, op. cit., 1988, pp. 142-55. 36. It might be preferable to have a deontic predicate logic. Also, there are various conditional deontic logics (B. Chellas, Modal Logic, op. cit., pp. 272-77). To avoid paradoxes of deontic logic, Forrester (Being Good and being Logical, op. cit., pp. 27, 251) rejects Chellas’ rule, and replaces it with an analogous but more complex rule. Forrester’s rule also applies only to valid theorems. Instead of the obligation rule, it might be better to have a more complex rule comparable to Forrester’s rule that involves the idea of broadly logical necessity. 37. A. N. Prior, “Escapism: The Logical Basis of Ethics,” op. cit, p. 135.

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38. B. Chellas, Modal Logic, op. cit., pp. 201-202. Basically the same system with a different semantics is in B. C. van Fraassen, “Values and the Heart’s Command,” The Journal of Philosophy 70, 1973, pp. 5-19. 39. Prior combined his set of postulates with the system of modal logic T (“Escapism: The Logical Basis of Ethics,” op. cit, pp. 135-136). 40. B. Chellas, Modal Logic, op. cit., pp. 113-115 41. For such an objection, see W. Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Dilemmas, op. cit., pp. 26-29. 42. B. Chellas, Modal Logic, op. cit., p. 46.

Ethical Quantities Nicholas Rescher An ethical quantity as here construed is one whose mis-specification can prove to be not so much incorrect or inefficient as inappropriate or even wrong in a specifically ethical sense of these terms. For example, it is clear that if and insofar as the commandment to “honor thy father and thy mother” carries ethical weight, the number two, under the identifying description “the very least number of people one should honor,” will represent an ethical quantity. To mis-specify this quantity as “one” is to be mistaken in ethics, not in arithmetic. Thus consider the classic dictum of Sir William Blackstone to the effect that “[i]t is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”1 Obviously, punishing the innocent is the wrong thing to do. But nevertheless Blackstone was a realist who doubtless realized full well that no system devised and operated by imperfect humans can be error free. And error in this sort of case comes in various kinds. No doubt we want to avoid false positives in designating innocent as the guilty. But improper negatives by way of unpunished malefactors are also undesirable. Yet how many otherwise escaping guilty does it take to justify one condemned innocent? Blackstone clearly tells us that 10 won’t do. But what of 1,000? What of 1,000,000? What of all there are? Here Blackstone was careful. It was surely not without thought that he picked 10 instead of one or another of those much larger available alternatives. After all, any workable system of criminal justice must strike a balance between two ethically geared desiderata: fairness and justice for individuals on the one hand, and on the other the larger public interest in maintaining a communally benign reign of law and order. Thus the occasional escape of the guilty from their just deserts can be tolerated in the interest of individual fairness, but such tolerance is justifiable only up to a point—a point which reflective consideration indicates as perhaps acceptable with Blackstone’s 10, discussable with 20, but pretty clearly out at 100. Yet why just exactly 10? It is, of course, sensible to say “Even one is one too many” in that it would be decidedly preferable to have none instead of even one. But it is not reasonable to say “Even one is too many” in such circumstances where there just is not actually on offer a flawless system that avoids mishaps

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altogether, so that the only way to keep error free is to have no system at all. In many or most real-life situations such an “all or nothing” approach is not only unrealistic but—in the circumstances—undesirable. Here an unrealistic perfectionism is itself something decidedly imperfect. But if not all-or-nothing then what? Just why in such cases should it be that N is appropriate? What is there about N that enables it to capture sufficiency while N ÷ 2 is too small and N x 2 is too large? But too small or too large for what? The point surely is that in such matters an ethically oriented purpose is at stake. Specify that number improperly and you have a system that on the one side tolerates the unfair and unjust treatment of individuals and on the other side invites damaging important community interests. So the point is that with ethical qualities there is going to be an ethical stake: be “too few” will always cash out to something like “too few for the general good,” “too few for public safety,” “too few for a viable system of justice,” or some such. “Too few,” that is to say, indicates a shortfall in relation to realizing some ethically worthy good. Thus consider the somewhat more dramatic situation afforded by the splendid story of Abraham’s haggle with the Lord God in the book of Genesis: [23] And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? [24] Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy ad not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? [25] That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? [26] And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes. [27] And Abraham answered and said Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes: [28] Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it. [29] And he spake upon him yet again, and said, Peradventure there shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty’s sake. [30] And he said unto him, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found there. And he said, I will not do it, if I find thirty there. [31] And he said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for twenty’s sake. [32] And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake. [33] And the Lord went his way.

So ten righteous men would have done the trick. But why only ten? Why would not six have served? So, in the ethical approach of a society how many rightless people must there be in a town before God—or, rather more commonly, man with his missiles and bombs—should spare the wicked (or

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implacably hostile) from fire and brimstone? God apparently thought that as few as ten would do the trick, perhaps because in Judaic thought it takes 10 to constitute a viable community that deserves sustaining. (Man, of course, has often been far less generous, although even here it is not irrelevant to observe that Henry Stimson struck Kyoto off the target list for the atomic bomb because of its role as a religious center.) It is clear that the specification of ethical quantities is pervasive throughout the administrative management of our everyday offers. In many American jurisdictions, people can vote at age 18. But why not already at 9—or only at 36? Presumably because the former would put public affairs at the mercy of immature judgment, while the latter would disenfranchise otherwise qualified people from participating in the political process. Both shortfall and excess clearly run us into ethical problems here. The ethical aspect of the number-specification at issue in such matters roots in two considerations: (1) The quantities at issue are coordinate with an ethically valid goal and objective—a correlative ethically worthy aim or telos. (2) How the quantity at issue is specified can be facilitative or counterproductive with respect to the realization of this ethically appropriate goal. However, ethical quantities are in general inexact. “I say unto you,” said Jesus in the parable, “that joy shall be in heaven over on sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”2 But what of nine hundred and ninety nine? Is the number here an amount that can be stretched ad infinitum? Surely not! Surely at some point numbers will tell even here. In a myriad ethically connected context in human affairs we must fix on a number. When is someone to age to: marry, enter into contracts, drink alcoholic beverages, vote, be licensed to drive an automobile, serve as president of the USA? The lawmakers will have to decide. And sensible deliberation here has to recognize that some numbers are too big and others are too small relative to the ethically significant purposes at hand. The situation is somewhat akin to that of the ancient puzzle of the heap: “How many grains of sand does it take to make a heap?” Clearly three are too few and three hundred more than enough. But the border between sufficiency and insufficiency cannot be fixed with precision. But here the analogy ends and crucial disanalogy comes to the fore. For nothing moral—and certainly nothing ethical—turns on whether or not we qualify a certain rate of sandgrains as a heap. Or again “One swallow does not make a summer.” Fine! But just how many does it take? Well, it really just does

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not matter—from an ethical point of view, at least. On the other hand, the issue of how large an assemblage of rowdy people it takes to turn an unruly crowd into a riot—thus bringing it play the legal mechanism of a Riot Act or its equivalent—is an issue that is, in the circumstances, duly fraught with ethical ramifications. Of course some ethical qualities are (arguably) determinate. Noteworthy here—perhaps—is the specification of 2 as—in our society, at least—the number of individuals who can form a marital unit. (Perhaps in the evolving condition of things this may well eventually come up for discussion and debate.) But such determinacy is the exception to the rule. A “grey” area arises with ethical quantitatives. Throughout these cases the Goldilocks Principle applies: some numbers are clearly too little and others too big, while some appear to be right, perhaps, but yet not altogether precise and fixed. In such matters there is bound to be an indeterminate, indecisive region. And what is at issue here is not a matter of mere cognition: it is not that there really is an exact number that we just cannot manage to determine with precision. Rather, there is an inherently penumbral range of indefiniteness within which a precise determination is in principle impossible. Within a limited range there is no inherent priority but only what one might characterize as scope for “administrative efficiency.” It is important to distinguish between quantitative determination and quantitative specification. With determination there is an antecedently welldefined quality at issue, and one is endeavoring to measure it. How many 1-inch diameter spheres can one fit into a 1-foot sided cubic box? Clearly 5 is too few and 5000 too many. Inbetween there is going to be a number that is just right, and with a bit of mathematics one can determine its value. But just how many years suffice to yield an “age of consent” is something quite different. It is not that there are no limits here (six is clearly too young and sixty too old). But in fixing upon 16 (or 18)—or indeed anything in the 1221 range—one is not discovering an antecedently defined quantity but rather making a specification for the purposes of the legal and administrative management of public affairs. There indeed are preexisting facts relevant to the determination (viz., those that render that 12-21 range plausibly discussable in this context). But a society’s fixing upon 16 (or 18) is a matter of specification, not determination. Here there is no preexisting numeric fact of the matter that leads us to 16 (or 18). Ethical numbers are bound to be problematic—and for good reason. Consider such generalities as:

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“A crucial justice system is ethically unacceptable that punishes the innocent too frequently.” “An educational system is unacceptable that does not permit persons of mature years a substantial latitude in shaping their studies.” These percepts are unproblematic, clearly acceptable, virtually tautologous. But then too they are vague and indefinite. For in such case how many cases constitute “too often,” how many years does it take to be “mature,” how much latitude is “substantial?” We cannot ever begin to apply the precept until those unspecified quantities are given substance via specified amounts. Consider, for example, the idea of communal prayer and worship in the context of establishing religious group solidarity. Jewish law stipulates that it takes a quorum (minyan) of ten adult men to constitute a congregation sufficient for a valid religious service.3 The underlying idea in adopting this specification of ten seems to be that it takes ten to be authentically communal. The Talmud says that if the men pray together, God is with them. Mathew contemplated a more sociable God, prepared to join in “where two or three are gathered together in my name.”4 Either way, however, the basic underlying idea is much the same, namely that to make things right with God—or if you prefer, to be ethical creatures in good standing as such—we must make them right with our fellows. But of course principles of this sort do not issue in specific numbers. In regard to the mandates of ethics and morality, zero is the favorite number and “thou shalt not” the favorite formula. (Even “Honor thy father and thy mother”—this one and only commandment that dispenses with “thou shalt not”—might be rephrased as “Never treat your father or mother disrespectfully.”) After all, there is no free pass in ethics—“Feel free to do this or so X times but no more” does not sound right in ethics: positive law does sometimes look at such questions in a different light, but in ethics there is no “three strikes and you’re out.” Philosophical deliberation regarding ethics is a matter of theory, of general principles: as standardly practiced deals in generalities and injunctions. And the Kantian universality that is sought after here insists on how things must be: they deal in all cases (“no exceptions”) rather than in “often” or “not more that 3 times.” Those ethical injunctions tell us what is to be done never or always (i.e., never omitted). So zero would seem to be the only number well known to ethics. Beyond this, ethical quantities will generally not be precise: we cannot pin them down to particular numbers. Is this good enough? Macaulay wrote in his essay on Machiavelli that “Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.” But this bit of self-refutation

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itself needs qualification and amendment. We have to add the proviso: “in the absence of further guidance for their implementation in concrete circumstances.” The general rules determinable on ethical principles alone are almost unavoidably numerally indefinite. “Share your wealth with those in need.” But to what extent? “Do not take more than your fair share!” But just what is that? To implement such precepts we must transmute generalities into specifics—and these specifics need to be aligned to the specific circumstances of the case. Something over and above honoring general principles is requisite to achieve these numeral specifics. The salient point here is that on the path downwards from general principles and governing procedure there is always a certain amount of slack. Strategic principles are one thing and tactical guidelines another; there is always some looseness in the linkage here, some lack of tightness of constraint that leaves room for variability. And in view of this, the circumstance that the general principles of ethical deliberation cannot constrain quantitative precision at the level of concrete procedural injunctions should occasion neither surprise nor discomfort. For the general principles of ethics cannot realize the quantitative detail that is requisite here. They can certainly detect flaws of egregious shortfall or excess. But quantitative precision is beyond their grasp. And so here as elsewhere we have to settle for the best we can possibly get.

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Notes 1. Commentaries on the Law of England, Vol. IV (Chicago 1979) [Facsimile of the first edition of 1715-19], p. 352. 2. Luke 15:17. 3. See the art. “Mynian” in the Encyclopedia Judaica. 4. Mathew 18:20 5. On these issues see chapter two of the author’s Moral Absolutes (New York 1989) and chapter three of Value Matters (Frankfurt/Lancaster 2004).

The Wand of the Enchanter George Allan I. This essay explores questions about the emergence, flourishing, and decay of civilized forms of life, with Alfred North Whitehead and Reiner Wiehl as our guides. To make sense of the rise and fall of civilizations, we will need to understand the limits of truth and “the magic by which a beauty beyond the power of speech to express can be called into being, as if by the wand of an enchanter.”1 II. A familiar notion in Whitehead’s metaphysics is the epistemological distinction between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy. Our primary experiences are vague feelings of an impinging world, from which clear and distinct sense data are abstracted and projected onto a contemporary spatial field as the qualitative and quantitative features of our perceptions. If, as traditional epistemologies presume, that of which we have direct knowledge are images in our mind, there is no way for us to justify an inference from those images to objects external to our mind. Whitehead argues that, on the contrary, we experience that external world directly, as a felt immediacy of indistinct externalities. We then infer that the contemporary successors of these realities have similar powers and features and that the sensa we have abstracted from our immediate experience depict them adequately. Although Whitehead’s theory is complex, the lived process is spontaneous, a genetic disposition of the human animal. Less familiar than these epistemological considerations is Whitehead’s argument that human civilization has arisen by exploiting the possibilities inherent in the differences between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy. A comparison between the world as we feel it and as we perceive it constitutes a truth-functional relation. Where the sensa of presentational immediacy are adequate to the reality they depict, the relation is true; where they are inadequate, the relation is false. What is actually existing is not necessarily what we take it to be. The interplay between truth and falsity, between actual truth and apparent truth, is what makes civilization possible.

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Reiner Wiehl argues that truth and error are at the service of life. Life, of course, is a necessary condition for the possibility of truth and error. Only animals blessed with consciousness, with the need to interpret their world effectively enough to adapt successfully to its contingencies, have the capacity to make judgments about the truth of something, and be correct or mistaken in those judgments. But truth and error, in turn, are a necessary condition for higher qualities of life, for the emergence of civilized life. With this caveat, however: that the advance from life to civilized life comes unavoidably at a cost. The more civilized our existence, the greater the chance that our mistakes will have devastating consequences, indeed that even the avoidance of mistakes will wreak havoc with our accomplishments and aspirations. As Wiehl puts it: Every development, every coming-to-be and every advance has its price. In the same way as the things that have come into being have to pay by perishing for their coming-to-be, the higher life has to pay for its higher development with the fact that its higher existence is constantly in danger. Truth and error are the conditions for a possible higher life, and at the same time are the risk factors of its higher form of existence.2

Both the rise and the collapse of civilizations are the result of the opportunity we humans have to exploit the contrast between our direct experience of the world and our perceptual interpretation of it, between “the feeling of an actual being and the feeling of a potential being.”3 III. To understand the dilemma Wiehl describes, we need to shift our attention to Adventures of Ideas and Whitehead’s famous discussion in its closing chapters of the five conditions of civilized life: Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, and Peace. To Aristotle’s four causes—material Truth, formal Beauty, efficient Adventure, and final Peace—Whitehead adds a fifth: Art. He does so because for him the formal and final conditions of a thing are not ontological necessities but temporal constructions. There are no natural kinds, no fixed conditions, no predetermined shape or outcome to things. Adventure needs Art to formulate the ends at which it aims and the routes by which it pursues them. Before discussing Art, however, we should look again at Whitehead’s epistemology. In the language of Adventures of Ideas, the content of presentational immediacy is an Appearance, a mental construct. The coherence, the integrative harmony, of an Appearance is its Beauty, and the Truth of the Appearance is its satisfactory correlation with the Reality, immediately experienced in the mode of causal efficacy, to which it refers. Whitehead then emphasizes an additional factor. Not only are the contents of the two modes of experiencing crucial to the truth of their correlation but

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also the manner of their occurrence, the subjective form. We must take account not only of what is known but also of how we know it. Since the qualities of a perception are abstractions from the emotionally richer experience of causal efficacy, it seems that perceptions would be devoid of emotional content. Yet obviously they are not. A mathematical idea or a daydream lacks the vivid immediacy, the aura of importance, that sense perceptions have. When our sense perceptions are veridical, we are aware of the fit between Appearance and Reality, finding it satisfactory, preferring its Truthful Beauty to mere Beauty. Whitehead needs to explain how this can be so, which he does by arguing that an organism takes the perceptual pattern characterizing an Appearance to be the same as that of some stretch of external Reality because “the sensum as a factor in the datum of a prehension imposes itself as a qualification of the affective tone which is the subjective form of that prehension.” This affective tone then becomes by transmutation “objectively perceived as qualifications of regions.”4 The qualitative pattern of the Appearance is derived causally from the qualitative pattern of the subjective form of the underlying felt Reality. When I look toward a nearby lilac bush swaying gently in the spring breeze, I perceive the immediately impinging world greenly. I feel a massive presence, a movement of planes and angles, and I feel it in a greenish way—soothingly, fresheningly. What I feel directly is a vague presence; how I feel it, the subjective form of my feeling, is greenishly. The quantitative features of what I have experienced are transformed by various abstraction habits into ovoid shapes with flexible surfaces, relatively unvarying on one side but corrugated on the other, shifting this way and that on their tubular stems. The how of my experiencing is transformed by similar abstraction habits into perceiving those features as having a delicate green color, a subtle acidic fragrance, as being both smooth and rough to the touch. Although our sense data are abstractions, they retain their emotional import. The sense of importance conveyed by that from which they have been abstracted is transformed into the secondary qualities we naively attribute to objects until philosophers inform us they are actually features of our mind. Whitehead is arguing that colors and sounds, odors and textures, are indeed mental qualities projected onto external objects, but that these qualities are derived from those external objects in the first place. The qualities comprising the content of experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, taken as definable features of a specific region of the extensive continuum, are actually derived from the indefinite but strongly felt experience of that region in the mode of causal efficacy and

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then projected back onto it. As a result, there is a carryover in the how of our experiencing: the felt power of the world infuses our sense of its qualitative features. My sense of the lilac bush is not only of an interesting harmony of moving shapes of various colors but also of a real thing important for me to take account of. An Appearance, however, does not necessarily describe the Reality to which it refers. My lilac bush may not be as robust as it looks because my point of view obscures the curled leaves on the side away from me. My angry impatience, derived from events having nothing to do with the bush, may obscure my appreciation of its fresh fragrance. Yet we are typically not misled if we take the Appearance as a truthful characterization of Reality; it usually works for us to do so. Whitehead has a pragmatic theory of truth: the Appearance need not be a picture of Reality. It suffices that they share enough in common for us to be able to interact with them in a satisfactory way if we treat the Appearance as though it pictured that to which it refers. Since “the functionings of the animal body” and “the happenings within the contemporary regions” are both derived from a common past in the manner indicated, the animal’s perceptions and the world it perceives are “attuned together.”5 The animal’s perceptions are trustworthy guides because, were they not attuned properly, the animal would be unable to find the food it needs to survive, would fail to detect the proximity of threats to its existence, could not attract and keep sexual partners. The process of developing pragmatically effective sense organs and organs of interpretation is thoroughly Darwinian: differential modification of these organs in a scarcity regime results by natural selection in the emergence of organisms with greater capacities for adaptive survival. Human beings have developed one such adaptively effective capacity, a new type of Appearance based on symbols instead of signs—language. Linguistic symbol systems are correlation devices in which the Appearance and the Reality share neither a quantitative nor a qualitative pattern. The words “I am looking at a green lilac bush” have no structural features in common with the fact of my perceiving a lilac bush. The squiggles of ink marching across the page are arbitrary and can take as many differing shapes and trajectories as there are human languages in which to express the notion of my seeing that particular bush of that shape and color in that place and at that time. Nor do the inky squiggles have an inherent emotional impact. Their arbitrariness cuts them off from the subjective form of the direct experience of the Reality to which they refer, cuts them off from the transferred emotion that sense-based Appearances retain.

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Languages are powerful tools of precision, far better than sense perceptions and nonlinguistic symbols in creating an Appearance that unambiguously refers to its correlative Reality. Scientific language is the apotheosis of truthful correlating. The squiggles that form a scientific description of events achieve what Whitehead calls “anaesthesia”: perfection “in its type of finiteness with such and such exclusions.”6 Scientific propositions are part of a system that achieves immense clarity and coherence by excluding what cannot meet explicit criteria for inclusion. For an assertion about the existence of a scientific object to be true, its claim about the Reality it purports to describe must be publically verifiable and unambiguously located within a classification matrix organized into a hierarchy of increasingly more general descriptions. Quantitative expressions are substituted for qualitative ones, and these quantities are reexpressed in terms of mathematical symbols or in terms of a strictly denotative technical vocabulary. My looking at the lilac bush becomes an instance of Homo sapiens showing certain characteristic fluctuations in brain wave patterns governed by laws concerning the propagation of refracted light and neural impulses from an instance of Syringa vulgaris, occurring at latitude 40o15’49’’ N, longitude 77o02’03’’ W, and 16:37.20 hours GMT, on 09 April 2006 C.E. The value of the truth science achieves, so powerfully subtle, accurate, and usable, is obvious. It provides the control over nature that makes possible production of the abundant resources that have transformed the quality of human life from that of hunter-gatherer tribalism into that of urban-centered industrialized society. The price paid for this precision, however, is the deletion of the emotional ties to causal efficacy. As Wiehl reminds us, the dramatic increase in knowledge that science affords us increases dramatically the chance for grievous error. The elegant perfection of scientific understanding is a consequence of the closed system it constructs, its purposeful exclusion of what is not empirically and publically verifiable, of what it characterizes as merely subjective or illusory. The payoff is exceeding wondrous, but closed systems, especially successful ones, sew the dragons’ teeth of their undoing. What the system excludes does not go away; it is merely ignored. As novel conditions emerge, drawing their power in part from what has been ignored, the closed system cannot cope with them adequately. It continues to ignore what it can no longer afford to ignore, retreating behind the walls within which its methods work, and so under the pressure of natural selection eventually and unavoidably collapses. The truth relation sharpened to perfection by science allows for the creation of a stable social order at a high degree of complexity, making a

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form of civilized living possible. But as the stability becomes a stasis, as it loses its adaptive flexibility, science weakens and then destroys what it had made possible. Or at least so it has been throughout the long course of human history. The perfecting of presentational immediacy through the development of well-honed scientific symbol systems is a necessary condition for the rise of civilizations, but it is also a fundamental cause of their decline and fall. The creator is also the destroyer. IV. Art, according to Whitehead, offers an alternative to scientific symbolization. Art invites discord rather than excluding it, creating open rather than closed systems. Not only are contrasting incommensurable elements retained, each with its own distinctive uniqueness, but the mode of their integration retains the emotional intensity accruing to them by virtue of that uniqueness. Works of art achieve this intensely valuable harmonization of diverse elements by inventing a significant individual, an aesthetic symbol—a bare “It”—that stands for those elements but is not abstracted from them, and consequently to which a profound aura of importance comes to be attached. “The emotional significance of an object as ‘It,’ divorced from its qualitative aspects at the moment presented, is one of the strongest forces in human nature.”7 In creating such symbols, art imitates life, for our everyday experience is rife with these distillations. I have interacted with someone—a favorite aunt, for instance—thousands of times over the years of our acquaintance, from my earliest memories on to the present day. I remember her not as an indistinct amalgam of all those particular interactions, however. Instead, I imagine my aunt as a single enduring reality, an “It” to whom I then attach the whole parcel of my memories about her, as well as my expectations about how she will behave the next time I see her, what she does in my absence, who she was before I knew her. I not only associate these remembered and imagined particulars about my aunt with the enduring “It,” but the particular subjective forms of my remembering and imagining as well: her loving embrace that afternoon she visited me in the hospital, my embarrassment at her chiding admonition after I did something stupid, my anticipation of her arrival for my twentyfirst birthday party. In this way, I have created a particular symbol, an enduring reality I call my aunt, and have invested it with a special significance, an importance that is composed of a lifetime of particular experiences, each with its own distinctive emotional flavor, distilled into one reality. Each time I see my aunt again, or think of her, I take these events as further instantiations of

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who it has been that she is, although I take them at the same time as contributions to my sense of the intrinsic value of who it is that she will become. Furthermore, I also associate other more general values with her. In thinking of her, I think of my other aunts and uncles, of family gatherings fondly remembered and of my resolve to begin planning for the next. I imagine what her parents, my grandparents, might have felt and thought about her and about their own aunts. I imagine what it was like to have lived a hundred or a thousand years ago and to be loved by ancestors of whom I have no knowledge, their origins lost in the mysterious past, yet without whom I and my aunt would not be who we are. My aunt bears these vaguely felt values as well as the vivid ones, her presence thus redolent with the importance of those communities that I intuitively know give my life meaning, that provide the continuities that are my salvation. We live amid such concrete particulars, ones fraught with transcending importance. Works of art are intentional efforts to create symbols designed to function in this significance-invoking manner. In the most archaic form of artistry, the created symbols were probably bodily movements. Early humans, for example, gathering to share among themselves the results of a successful hunting expedition, applaud one of their number as he mimics the hunt by stalking around in a crouched position, rearing back and pretending to throw a spear, making knife-cutting gestures, loading an imaginary carcass on his back and dumping it on the ground in front of his appreciative audience. The original actions are mimed, not mimicked. Irrelevant details are omitted and key moments exaggerated so that the contour of the sequence from departure to return might be evident. The day’s effort by these particular hunters to find meat for themselves and their families becomes a graphically told hunting story. The next hunting story told, although unique in so many salient ways, will share some features with the earlier story, and eventually the hunting story will become a generic account involving stylized steps and gestures standing for characteristic kinds of hunterly actions, exhibiting overall a characteristic quest-struggle-celebration pattern. Eventually, the dance that is performed in celebration of a successful hunt will no longer refer to any particular events. It will offer a form, a formulaic bare “It,” designed to evoke memories of old hunts and prior dances, designed to convey a sense of their endless extent, of hunts more ancient than those remembered by even the eldest members of the tribe, hunting stories that have been told so many times they must first have been told by the gods to the tribe’s progenitors, and of hunts and stories yet to come, ones that will occur and recur for as long as the tribe endures, and beyond that for as long as the

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immortal gods tell each other of the heroic exploits that were that peoples’ glory. Art abstracts from concrete realities but it does so in a manner intensifying rather than eliminating the felt significance of those realities. It captures a complex concatenation of emotionally overwhelming events in a single contour of color, distills years of struggle into a single phrase. It even abstracts completely from the representational function of its symbols, in order to express meanings too subtle or too inchoate to be represented. A Pollack painting or a Bach fugue, unlike Newton’s laws of motion or Whitehead’s categoreal scheme, do not abstract from concrete particulars in order to disclose the systemic pattern of relatedness in which they function, including crucially the governing rules of that system. The artist abstracts in order to concentrate, to bring together the whole of the reality the work of art symbolizes rather than to separate that reality into essences and accidents, into first principles and their derivative instances. The artistic Appearance evokes a fuller Reality than does the scientific Appearance because its symbols are not the means by which to order that reality but are instead the means by which to experience it more completely. Artistic symbols are thus open whereas scientific symbols are closed. Science makes sense of the world by enclosing it within a system; art discloses the limits of that making and invites us to embrace a world more richly diverse than any finite system can encompass. Art is susceptible to closure, however. Because it uses symbols that have no necessary connection to their referents, it too like science can seek perfection within a type—although the consequences of doing so are unfortunate. In the scientific use of symbols, where only denotative meaning is relevant, this arbitrariness is a powerful tool in fashioning a coherent system. A new linguistic symbol can be invented, for instance, or an old one given a new definition, in order to create a technical term that refers unambiguously to a specific referent. Artistic symbols, however, retain their connotative penumbra of emotional significance, and so when their denotation is shifted from one reference to another the value intensities appropriate to the old are transferred, inappropriately, to the new. For instance, the cultural heritages of various tribal groups have each been concentrated by the symbolically rich accounts they cherish of their ancestral heroes, the great events that took place under the leadership of those heroes, and the hallowed ground where victories were won, where martyrs perished, and where guiding hopes for the future were first envisioned. As these peoples are brought under the aegis of a newly emerging nation state, their varying heritages need to be further

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concentrated, brought together around new symbols such as a flag, around old symbols given new meanings such as when the culture heroes are taken as the various faces of a single national hero, and even around an explicit document such as the nation’s founding constitution. The disparate older meanings are distilled into a new national meaning. Although the flag is an arbitrary symbol only recently invented, it stands for a reality felt by the citizens who pledge its allegiance to have deep historical roots and therefore immense present worth. How easy it is, however, for the intensities of value clothing the “It” of these symbols to be taken as bounded, for the referent of the symbols to be restricted to specified individuals, those belonging to only one of the original cultural traditions, or those of a particular race or gender or skin color or religious belief. That the nation should be restricted to a portion of the people encompassed by its political authority is an arbitrary decision. Equally arbitrary is an imposed restriction that includes all the nation’s citizens but cuts off the unifying symbols from their transcending power, from their capacity to reach beyond the nation and its cultural heritages to other nations and cultures, allowing those citizens to glimpse however fleetingly their values as flowing into the values of the human species, the planet, and even the whole cosmos. The transformation of patriotism into jingoism is achieved by closing the artistic symbols, converting their self-transcending openness into instruments of exclusion. The restriction of values of profound importance to a special group justifies treating those who lack those values as inferior, as unimportant people whose worth is only their utility for the special group’s ends, or treating them as threats to the privileged group and therefore as needing to be isolated or exterminated. When the governing elite, or a single individual, becomes the symbol for all those other symbols, when the nation is thought to be incarnate in the Party or the Leader, the resulting totalitarian subjugation brings this closure to its nihilistic apotheosis. Art ceases to fulfill its proper function of showing us the limits of our systems of institutional organization and scientific knowledge when it marshals its connotative powers to indemnify one of those systems against criticism. Living within an aesthetically closed system, we lose any awareness that our familiar boundaries could be transcended and so we have no motivation to push against their limits. We are confined to the familiar and so grow progressively incapable of recognizing changes that are rendering the familiar inadequate. As old truths become uncouth, we nonetheless cling to them as though to a life raft in a gathering storm, hanging on in blind loyalty and with increased desperation to

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fundamentally important meanings for which we can imagine no alternative. Art can therefore lead us to the same impasse that Science does, to a closure from which there is no escape. Except to perish. V. Whereas closure is the essence of the scientific mode of symbol making, it is a betrayal of the artistic. For a civilization to remain vital, we its citizens obviously need a way to break through the boundaries established by our own conventional practices, but this means breaking through the boundaries of conventional imagination as well. As members of a flourishing society, we must be able to rework creatively the established symbolic meanings and the ways they orient our thinking and our actions. We need a way to move beyond the systemic constraints of precision, beyond the acceptable conceptual frameworks—beyond our common sense. The greatest art, says Whitehead, creates a Beauty beyond what has been thought possible. It fashions an Appearance that refers us to a Reality beyond “the dictionary meaning of words,”8 sending us “a message from the Unseen,” disclosing something of the mystery of things, unloosing “depths of feeling from behind the frontier where precision of consciousness fails.”9 This transcendence of the familiar is possible because the massive diversity of the concretely real world has not been eliminated by the frameworks within which we have meaningfully organized it. What does not fit within our system has been pushed into the background, excluded but not eradicated. The familiar symbols that dominate the foreground of our experience, those “Its” condensing our individual and collective memories and hopes, are so very important for us because they manage to preserve the emotional features not only of the foreground of our experiences but also of what has been relegated to the background. They embody not only the explicit meanings crucial to the framework governing them but also the intangible meanings associated with realities lurking in the background, just beyond the reach of our comprehension. If that fuller reality can be evoked by a new symbol in a particularly efficacious manner, these forgotten possibilities will rise to the surface and become available for fashioning a new ideal of perfection. A great artist crafts such symbols in paint or marble, in words or gestures—and upon our seeing or hearing them, their impact can be transformative. A great work of art suddenly makes present, as though it were waving an enchanter’s wand, the deeper contextualizing Reality upon which the existing perfection rests, from which it has been abstracted. The work of art

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releases its force of novel feeling along with a welter of conflicting previously unnoticed facticities, as a resource upon which our imaginations can draw. We are liberated from the old and increasingly stifling boundaries of the actual world and the range of ideals it permits, plunged headlong into realities previously beyond our imagining. We are henceforth free to draw on these exhilarating novelties in order to create a new Appearance-Reality contrast, one requiring that we and others fashion some new system to harmonize what it has revealed. We are impelled by the Beauty that Art crafts to undertake a new Adventure in order to conceive of a system the Truth of which is more adequate to experience than its predecessor—and, imagining it, to set about attempting to bring it to some kind of concrete actualization. We have the ability to organize our new sense of reality by creating a new way of understanding and of action, one more adaptively efficacious—one that works. In doing so, of course, we will have to exclude a cacophonous welter of other things, pushing them into the background, and so immediately creating a need for fresh aesthetic symbols capable of transgressing that system’s established constraints. The civilized sensibility I have been attempting to adumbrate in this essay is summarized in the notion of Peace with which Whitehead concludes Adventures of Ideas, a sensibility involving five dispositional understandings. First, that incompatibility is intrinsic to making harmonies, that any actual perfection must be finite. Second, that some possibilities for harmony will need to be excluded, and many of those initially included will fail of realization. Third, that these unrealized possibilities remain as possibilities. Fourth, that we and others after us can draw from all these lost opportunities in constructing new, perhaps better, possibilities for actualization, new ideals worthy of our pursuit. And fifth, that Reality is composed of nothing other than finite achievements of this sort. Peace is the realization that the only Harmony of Harmonies, the only ultimate perfection, is an ideal—an ideal not of some final achieved perfection, however, for there can be none, but an ideal of the endlessly recurrent drive toward perfection. The ultimate ideal is an Adventure from the dreams of Youth to the harvest of Tragedy, from the Beauty of the possibilities Art unveils to the Truth of our actual achievements which unavoidably fall far too short of the initial dream. Peace is the recognition that this ever-open process disclosed and energized by Art, the Tragic Beauty of this Adventure, is the ultimate Truth and is therefore its own justification. So we return to Wiehl’s comments about truth and error. Artistic creation serves life in the quest it iteratively initiates toward whatever finite

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perfections might at a given time be imagined possible. It does so by fashioning beautiful symbols that wave an enchanted wand across the world as we know it, revealing the fact that the inadequacy of even our greatest accomplishments is the condition that makes fresh enterprise possible, that error discloses truth, that the hopeless quest for a better day, a better life, a better world, a better order of the ages, is the essence of civilization, and indeed the essence of the cosmos itself.

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Notes 1. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York 1961), p. 283. 2. R. Wiehl, “Whitehead’s Cosmology of Feeling Between Ontology and Anthropology,” Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity, edited by F. Rapp and R. Wiehl (Albany 1990), p. 151. 3. Ibid., p. 136. 4. Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 245 5. Ibid., p. 251. 6. Ibid., p. 246. 7. Ibid., p. 262. 8. Ibid., p. 267. 9. Ibid., p. 271.

Creativity, Efficacy and Vision: Ethics and Psychology in an Open Universe Michel Weber In deinem Nichts hoff’ ich, das All zu finden. (Gœthe, Faust)

The present paper analyses the core idea of Whitehead’s Weltanschauung, the creative advance of nature, by focussing upon the notions of “creativity,” “efficacy” and “vision,” and shows how it impacts the ethical and psychological fields. What sort of ethics and psychology are possible in a universe of the sort envisaged by Whitehead, where stability is a not built-in feature of actuality but only a surface-effect? At the very basis of our reasoning lies a theory as to the nature of conceptual thinking and his relation to our experience: it is with a brief explanation of this theory that the following exposition will start.

1. The Void and its Heirs Since the first public statement of the Planck postulate during the famous Berlin lecture in December 1900, published one year later under the innocent title Über das Gesetz der Energieverteilung im Normalspektrum, quantum mechanics has provided scientists and philosophers alike with numerous epistemological and ontological puzzles, but also with interesting conceptual metaphors. When Einstein supplemented Planck with his groundbreaking work on the photoelectric effect,1 matters got so to speak worse. It is now almost a common notion that under adequate circumstances (in terms of energy and electric charge) a photon can annihilate itself and thereby create matter and anti-matter (say an electron and a positron). Out of the quantic void strike two specular forms of being—as if this void were an energetic plenum, a fundamental substratum, a mother-sea of events to use the language of Pauli.

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Mutatis mutandis, an analogous phenomenon can be said to take place in experience, the concept of experience being here taken in its radical empiricist meaning, as spelled in James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism and informed by the Whiteheadian organicism of Process and Reality. Under adequate circumstances in terms of degree of intensity and societal complexity, a high grade occasion of experience transmutes its immediate prehensions into conceptual contrasts constituted by two poles, such as light/dark, warm/cold, light/heavy. Eventually, it may start an ascent towards higher contrasts such as visible/invisible, fleeting/remaining, relative/absolute, concrete/abstract, passive/active, given/made, and the like.2 These primordial contrasts, which are as old as human thought itself, have first acquired a reflective visibility with Pythagoras and Parmenides. But they were already at work in the antique mythological syntheses grounding the public life of “primitive” societies and active in the incohate systematizations and private soteriological struggles of the Presocratics, as it has been made clear in the seminal works of Francis MacDonald Cornford, Wilhelm Nestle and Jean-Pierre Vernant.3 When these contrasts are uniformly organized diachronically and synchronically—when they are stable over time for one given individual as well as for a community of individuals—such a high-grade occasion of experience is what we usually refer to as “sense-perception” and constitues the clear (if not distinct) basis of a shared world. A fundamental synergy, mediated by the power of symbolism, unfolds then between sense-perception, rationality and consciousness. In order to stipulate the kind of rationality and the kind of consciousness involved in the perceptive symbolization of everyday reality, it might be useful to call them respectively “rationality-zero” and “consciousnesszero.” As the genesis of high-grade occasions of experience testifies (ontogeny, evolution and socialization), there is indeed neither one single type of rationality nor one single type of consciousness. But let us not anticipate on the existence of a variety of types and degrees of awareness and rationality. To rephrase our argument: out of the fullness of a primitive experience coalesce contrasts that sometimes acquire a pragmatic worth— in the sense that they help humans to orient themselves and each other in a transient world—but that are also endowed with the tendency to generate further abstractions and to gain, so to speak, a reality of their own. In so doing, the practical realm generates, and is complemented by, the theoretical one. Let us now also resume our initial analogy with the quantum realm. Whereas in the quantum world these corpuscular pairs usually remain

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virtual by abiding behind the Planck wall or are endowed with a very short life span and promptly go back to the void,4 in the civilized world conceptual pairs are more likely to settle, and some have indeed rooted a very big descent. From simple abstractions to very complex ones, they have been instrumental to the progressive imperialism of man over nature. As a matter of fact, the mainstream history of ideas can be interpreted as embodying one single trend: from raw experience towards higher abstractions, from pre-rational experiences towards rational, if not postrational ones (a concept that will be unfolded below). But a counter-current always existed and gained momentum with the radical empiricism of such thinkers as James and Whitehead: it claims that the abstractive flight should be stopped, reversed, re-directed towards the full concreteness of stubborn facts. Traditionally, rationalism has had a built-in tendency to favour the hegemony of one contrast over the other, and to weave from there a speculative pyramid built on its top. Radical empiricism, on the contrary, aims at using the empirical root of the conceptual pair to promote its re-unification and, through this conceptual fusion, to remain anchored in experience, to become reunited with it, perhaps even to the extreme of seeing all differences vanish. Of course, we cannot apply straightforwardly such a simplified scheme to all philosophical systems: Plato, for one, claimed that the post-rational acquaintance with reality that occurs in theoria constitutes precisely the most concrete universal element. Quite paradoxically, the highest abstractions happen to be the most concrete constituents of reality. In that primordial abstractive activity, two contrasts have made a deeper, although only contingent, historical impact: male/female and being/becoming. Two distinct questions are worth distinguishing at this point. The first one concerns the gearing or the meshing of each conceptual opposite: how have the contrasts male/female and being/becoming been understood? The second has to do with the larger conceptual framework within which these oppositions have been placed: what sort of overall picture has de facto managed the synergy between these two pairs of contrasts? Recent Western history makes clear that neither of these constrasts have been grasped in their intrinsic togetherness. Rather, one has been used as the yard-stick of the other. To a significant extent, these two contrasts can be seen as the unique cipher that has crypted all social grammars. In the last thirty years, feminist scholarship has shed a tremendous amount of light on the creation of patriarchy, and process thought has done its best to display the imperialism of the notion of being-qua-substance in our common modes of thought. There should be no doubt that all the progressive social

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forces are now dependent upon both ways of thinking, most probably supported by some form of semiotics and pragmatism. There is a tragic irony in the almost embarassing fact that all these fascinating novatory speculative ventures have been developed in a country whose government is increasingly known nationally for its apartheid and internationally for its devastating imperialism.5 Surely, this is a sign that things could change— hopefully at a quicker pace than what the corporate ownership of the planet would expect. This essay discusses the notion of creative advance with the help of the being/becoming dialectic, with the aim of showing the mutual dependence of these two poles. As a matter of fact, the dialectic of ultimate contraries has already been brought to light by Hartshorne’s appropriation of Morris Cohen’s “Law of Polarity,” according to which ultimate contraries are strict correlatives, so that nothing real can be adequately described by a onesided assertion.6 It must be emphasized, however, that Hartshorne’s wellknown matrix embodies the rationalistic trend we have referred to as “mainstream.” By applying that law (or principle) of polarity to his acute knowledge of the history of Western philosophy, Hartshorne distillates Urcontrasts that, organized into a matrix, are supposed to make manifest the irrefutability of his panentheistic view. Whereas Hartshorne proceeds deductively, the late Whitehead refuses to start from clear and distinct ideas: speculative philosophy embodies the endless search for such ideas. According to Hartshorne, reality is through and through rational and there is no need to step outside what we have referred to as “rationality-zero.” Like Russell, who is happy to stick to the so-called evidences provided by the normal state of consciousness, Hartshorne thinks that “the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day.” According to Whitehead, on the contrary, the world is “what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep.”7 There is a significant ontological opacity: rationality-zero, which springs from a pre-rational experiential stuff, should aim back at that very stuff. One recognizes here Whitehead’s radical empiricism, which operates with an onto- and phylo-genetic quasi-law that applies to the vagueness of pure experience. In opposition to this, classical rationalism proceeds with a law of calculation that applies to innate general ideas (this is obviously Hartshorne’s perspective), whereas classical empiricism proceeds with a law of association that applies to acquired particular ideas. A study of Process and Reality’s categoreal scheme offers a decisive insight on the issue introduced at the onset of this paper. Out of the experiential plenum (what Buddhists would call “the void”) and under the influence of a polarizing socio-cultural field, various conceptual pairs are

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created and progressively integrated. The point is to re-balance the power we confer to these contrasts by avoiding to isolate one pole from the other or one contrast from the others—and by not hierarchizing the polar terms but the bipolars themselves. The late Whitehead is very keen to offer some locus of intelligibility to all the major concepts that have haunted us since the Greeks—contrasts such as the one and the many, the actual and the potential, permanence and change, necessity and contingency—but he does so in a totally renewed speculative atmosphere that we will now peruse with the help of what is arguably his most fundamental idea: the creative advance of nature.8

2. The Creative Advance of Nature The concept of the creative advance of nature occurs for the first time in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919). In the Concept of Nature (1920), Whitehead claims that “it is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of the creative passage of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.”9 The passage of nature is neither directly nor fully graspable by rationality—that is, by “rationality-zero” or “natural consciousness.” Three main ideas are involved in nature’s creative advance: the gift of creativity, the power of efficacy and the bliss of vision. Each specifies a particular speculative locus, yet it is important to remember the well-known Hegelian lesson that only the whole speaks: das Wahre ist das Ganze.10 (1) Creativity is the irruption of the unheard, the beginning of a new causal chain; in common philosophical parlance, it is becoming. It requires the concepts of epochality (the “epochal theory of time” that amounts to James’ bud-like experience) and of liberty (that, at the universal scale, amounts more to spontaneity than to free-choice—the Bergsonian question being furthermore to distinguish liberty qua option-picking from liberty qua creation). Difference necessarily involves discontinuity. Here dwells actuality, i.e., the present per se that is worthy of the concept of duration. (2) Efficacy is the reproduction of patterns. In common philosophical parlance, it refers to being. It necessitates the concepts of continuity and determinism. Repetition involves continuity. It belongs to potentiality, i.e., to the pervasive past. (3) Vision refers to an eschatological horizon, a melioristic trend. In common philosophical parlance, it refers to God luring all processes. It necessitates the concepts of (hierarchies of) eternal objects and of (the primordial nature of) God. In a purely metaphorical way, it can be attached to the future.

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To offer an anthropomorphic exemplification: creativity refers to novelty (invention); efficacy to causation (repercussion); vision to horizon (projection). If we refine these concepts, we arrive at those of event (“accident” in the Aristotelian sense of sumbebekos), plastic structure, and divine eschaton. The structure is plastic because it is both a condition of possibility of eventfulness and a consequence of it. The history of philosophy offers three main complementary instantiations of these three ideas: Heraclitus, who insists on becoming, seemingly refusing any speculative worth to being; Parmenides, who attempts on the contrary to think exclusively the Absolute Being; and Teilhard, with his noodynamics and omega-point. After the analytical moment comes the synthetic one. These functors are to be regrouped in two waves, according to Whitehead’s own understanding of creativity qua actuality, efficacy qua potentiality, and vision qua eschaton. The togetherness of creativity and efficacy is embodied in the concept of growth. Moreover, the overall togetherness of growth and vision embodies the creative advance. What matters is not solely that the interplay of creativity and efficacy secure a genuine growth of the mundane tissue, but also that growth is for the better. The concept of creative advance, which stands the closer to the ineffable theo-cosmic eventfulness, is not fully intelligible for consciousness-zero because of its innovative dimension. It is mirrored in the Category of the threefold Ultimate, which lies at the core of the categoreal scheme: the creative One, the efficacious Many, the visionary Creativity. To put it in another way: creativity acts within the Category of the Ultimate as the engine of creation of the One from the Many. It is important to be aware of the polysemiality of Whitehead’s concept of creativity: the reader has to distinguish its precategorial meaning, as spelled in the creative advance, its intracategorial meaning, as spelled in the Category of the Ultimate itself, and its extracategorial meaning, which is embodied in all principles and categories of the categoreal scheme. Although the topic is complex and should deserve a much more extended explanation to be really intelligible (we have discussed it in detail in our recent monograph),11 a few sktechy elements of reflections are in order. In the first place, mother-creativity is dipneumonous: God and the World constitute the two specular loci of the creative rhythm; they are the “contrasted opposites” in unison of each other’s becoming. As Whitehead puts it: “God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity, with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast.”12 Secondly, creativity is bifunctional: on the one hand, it is

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agent, fundamental inclination towards novelty; on the other, it is reticular, partial goals, i.e., it is instantiated (in actualities-subjects, including the consequent nature) and characterised (in actualities-objects, including the primordial nature). Hence a euristic matrix of the mother-concept, with God and the World in rows and Agency and Reticularity in columns. Creativity as universal agency names the fundamental dynamism of the Whole and particularly its rule of becoming. One can distinguish its general formulation in the sentence “the many become one, and are increased by one”13 from its local principializations, which are the Principle of Limitation and the Principle of Concretion. Basic to both is the insight that “The art of persistence is to be dead”:14 only freshness, spontaneity, zest and vivacity are everlasting. Adventure, understood as “the search for new perfections,”15 is essential. On the one hand, mundane Agency is embodied in the Principle of Limitation that acts as a “limitation of antecedent selection”16 among eternal objects (general potentiality), past occasions (real potentiality) and the cosmic epoch in question. The past pushes the present in the furrow of habit, allowing a novatory capacity, the Principle of Limitation is the plummet of the creative advance. On the other hand, divine agency is embodied in the Principle of Concretion which acts as the primordial envisagement and flashing of the initial aim to secure active compossibility and teleological novelty.17 With the murmur of the initial aim, a goal which is precise enough to be potentially efficient and vague enough to preserve the exercise of freedom, God confers to the concrescence its innovatory capacity. Pure teleological pull from in front,18 the Principle of Concretion orchestrates the innovatory conspiracy. Creativity qua agent is the “internal principle of unrest.”19 Qua reticulum, it is analysable as follows. On the one hand, creativity instantiates God and the World—respectively as Consequent Nature and as actualities-subjects. On the other hand, it characterises God and the World—respectively as Primordial Nature and actualities-objects. Subjects are Instances of creativity, their togetherness institutes the subjective reticularity; objects are Characters of creativity,20 their togetherness institutes the objective reticularity. The challenge of the concept of creativity-reticulum is to specify the locus of the past and the locus of God without bifurcating them from the full actuality experienced by the subjects. “Creativity is always found under conditions, and described as conditioned.”21 From the World’s perspective, creativity-reticulum is instantiated in actualities-subjects and characterised in actualities-objects. The instance of creativity is any concrescing actual occasion, i.e., any “self-creative”22 occasion in process of becoming. The character is any concresced, perished occasion. From God’s perspective, creativity-reticulum functions as

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instantiated in the consequent nature and as characterised in the primordial nature. God’s immediacy transmutes the immediacy of the perished actualities (the value of the World)23 with an all-embracing love that excuses everything, has faith in everything, endures everything.24 This “subjective immortality” complements the mundane “objective immortality” that seals efficient causation without compromising the privacy of the actuality-subject.

3. Ethico-Psychological Openings Let us translate the three main concepts definitory of creative advance— creativity, efficacy and vision—into Process and Reality’s technicalities; this will help us flesh out its consequences in the fields of ethics and psychology. The basic technical intuition at work since Science and the Modern World is dipneumonous and percolative: God and the World are thought of as mirror societies: “[t]he fortunate changes are made ‘Hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow’.”25 Moreover, actualization occurs— at the point of contact of the two lungs of mother-creativity—in buds, totally or not at all. Following James, Whitehead’s epochal theory of time is meant to secure novelty as well as repetition. The metaphor just used demands a technical approach that can be provided with the help of the concept of the extensive continuum. A straightforward way to achieve this is to recall what Whitehead says in part IV, chapter 2, of Process and Reality, where he proposes two-dimensional illustrations of the properties of extensive connection operating on regions, and at the same time highlights the misleadingness of such diagrams, which bind too closely extensive connection and its byproduct, the extensive continuum, to spatial extensiveness. Even space-time (or time-space, as Capek has repeatedly argued it should be called26) is misleading if one wishes to understand the ultimate solidarity of the universe. Perhaps the idea of perpendicularity between the two planes would do: it would help thinking how the mundane and the divine are contiguous in all standpoints of the extensive continuum. In accordance with the basic idea of a radical empiricism, the mundane and the divine plane should not be thought of as bifurcated or simply as co-planar. Creativity is active in concrescence, the coming together of a new actuality out of a given structural past that is thereby superseded. It is a pure gift rationally approachable only ex post. Efficacy is interpreted as transition, which embodies the power of the past structures to foster new events. Vision is to be correlated with God, and especially with the

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endowment of an initial subjective aim to concrescing occasions. All actualities participate in God’s eternal blissful envisagement of the infinite hierarchies of eternal objects. Concrescence and transition, being and becoming, are geared through perishing and vision. The bursting forth of the new event occurs in a flash; when its concrescence is completed, the event settles into the world, thereby securing the creative advance. In other words, the exact same event does not occur twice—a fundamental idea not without strong ethical and psychological consequences. Perishing embodies the fundamental anchoring of experience, while vision is its lure. The former does not spare any single occasion of experience, mundane or divine; the latter is twofold: mundane past occasions tend to promote (always at short term and not necessarily for the common good) their own future; divine occasions provide, from the perspective of the common good, the optimum for all concrescences.27 It is a matter of maximizing the intensity of a given concrescence under the constraint represented by the compossibility of all contemporaneous concrescences. (How exactly God achieves this is a matter for debate: it could be argued for instance that the use of a paradoxical injunction of sorts constitutes the best hint.) To resume our argument: the core of the creative advance can be approximated with the idea of an open universe or multiverse (James) or of a chaosmos (Joyce). Creativity and efficacy, taken together, mean growth; growth lured by vision is the creative advance. So the basic question is: what sort of ethics and of psychology are possible in a chaosmos, in an open structure in which stability is not the built-in feature but only a surface-effect always compromised by the imminence of yet another eventful bursting? If the exact same event cannot recur twice, how can we assess ethical action or understand the personal character of human experience? An answer to these questions must pivot around the notion of creativity qua concrescence, yet that key would not help much without the idea of structure qua transition and above all without vision, a primordially divine attribute that also belongs to various degrees to all occasions of experience whatsoever.

3.1. Ethics Let us now exploit one of the most inspiring passage in Whitehead’s works—his 1937 lecture on “importance,” reprinted in the first part of Modes of Thought—in order to assess his ethical standpoint. This can be sketched in a way reminiscent of Religion in the Making’s discussion of

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religion and dogma, that is, what James would refer to as “first-hand” and “second-hand” religious experiences. The ethical act is intrinsically creative, for it occurs spontaneously at unison with the Whole: it is a matter of “direct immediate insight” into the maximization of importance. “Importance” is a concept Whitehead does not actually define28 but that can be approximated with some of its kins, like the notions of “value” and “enjoyment” (notions, true enough, which are as primitive). Whitehead writes: Morality consists in the control of process so as to maximize importance. It is the aim at greatness of experience in the various dimensions belonging to it. […] Morality is always the aim at that union of harmony, intensity, and vividness which involves the perfection of importance for that occasion.29

Let us acknowledge, to begin with, that the use of the term “control” in this passage is rather unfortunate and should be taken cum grano salis. Whitehead’s point is that there is an intrinsic link between the importance of a given event or emergent existent and its environment. Without an auspicious environment, importance is weakened; correlatively, a weak importance makes the entire environment suffer a loss as well. Where there is (always relatively speaking) a lack of importance, it spreads through the chaosmotic tissue. Efficacy refers to the power of the facts, i.e., to the situation with which the agent has to deal. Additionally, there is of course an ethical efficacy and rationality that predispose to the ethical praxis and that is consequent to that praxis: The codifications carry us beyond our own direct immediate insights. They involve the usual judgments valid for the usual occasions in that epoch. They are useful, and indeed essential, for civilization. But we only weaken their influence by exaggerating their status. […] In other words, they are formulations of behaviours which in ordinary circumstances, apart from very special reasons, it is better to adopt. There is no one behaviour system belonging to the essential character of the universe, as the universal moral ideal.30

First-hand ethical experiences embody the ethical praxis per se; second hand ethical experiences are only vicariously ethical—they certainly do not carry the same ontological weight as the former; neither do they have the absolute applicability they could have in a closed universe. Accordingly, there is one fundamental paradox: Morals consists in the aim at the ideal, and at its lowest it concerns the prevention of relapse to lower levels. Thus stagnation is the deadly foe of morality. Yet in human society the champions of morality are on the whole the fierce opponents of new ideals. Mankind has been afflicted with low-toned moralists, objecting to expulsion from some Garden of Eden.

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And in a way they are right. For after all we can aim at nothing except from the standpoint of a well-assimilated system of customs—that is, of mores.31

The ethical impact of the ontological conundrum is obvious: on the one hand, (almost) everything can happen in an open universe such as Whitehead’s; on the other, events occur within a pre-existing structure (that they modify). As a result, general ethical principles cannot be entirely reliable; but at the same time, broad ethical guidelines are required by everyday life and they have indeed some use. The ethical praxis can be rationalized ex post: when the action is made, we can understand why it was—or wasn’t—moral. In other words: What is universal is the spirit which should permeate any behaviour system in the circumstances of its adoption. Thus morality does not indicate what you are to do in mythological abstractions. It does concern the general ideal which should be the justification for any particular objective. The destruction of a man, or of an insect, or of a tree, or of the Parthenon, may be moral or immoral. […] Whether we destroy, or whether we preserve, our action is moral if we have thereby safeguarded the importance of experience so far as it depends on that concrete instance in the world’s history.32

This last quote refers directly to the idea of vision: universality belongs to the spirit. It is thus through the eschatological trend that rationalization can take place. Whitehead’s universalism is as striking as his relativism: all beings are relevant to the ethical sphere. Whitehead is obviously oscillating between ethics as energeia, creative human activity, and ethics as ergon, culturally maintained product.33

3.2. Psychology According to James, “[t]he problem with the man is less what act he shall now choose to do, than what being he shall now resolve to become.”34 Whitehead is even more discrete in the (human) psychological field than he is in the ethical one. There should be no doubt however about the relevance of his revolutionary worldview for this field as well. Two points stand out. In the first place, there is the problem of the assessment of the conditions of possibility of individuality (personality), a question that has been addressed—and to a significant extent is still adressed—within a simplistic substantialistic framework; and when not (Hume’s figure is symptomatic here) the entire picture seems to collapse. Secondly, psychotherapy is in need of new foundations: obviously enough, one needs an open universe— and belief in the possibility of self-creation—in order to make sense of the cure, for there is simply no way to grasp the expected psychological change in a deterministic universe. Since these specific impacts have been discussed elsewhere, we will focus here on the issue of consciousness.35

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The key that Whiteheadian process thought promotes in the field of consciousness studies is straightforward: consciousness-zero has to be profiled against a scale that embodies the various degrees of awareness, value and complexity that experience can reach. There is little doubt that the complete systematization of such a scale is a tricky business: there are, for example, serious theoretical problems involved (such as focus, typology and adequacy); moreover, the issue of measurement is, as usual in psychological matters, highly problematic.36 Nevertheless, this does not imply that the definition of the scale’s general appearance is useless. In order to screen the issue, we need to introduce the concept of treshold. The issue boils down to the operationalization of the nucleous/fringe contrast James introduced as early as his Principles of Psychology (1890). Until the eigthteenth century, Western philosophy and psychology have totally insulated the so-called normal state of consciousness from its roots, its lures, its complex variations and its pathologies. From that perspective, consciousness-zero constitutes yet another example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Instead of understanding consciousness-zero as being part of a continuum, it has been severed from it and this pure abstraction has been seen as the sole reality. Things have changed gradually, but a double inflection point is noticeable: Leibniz (Nouveaux Essais sur l’Entendement Humain, 1704) for theory and Mesmer (Schreiben über die Magnetkur, 1775) for practice. Leibniz introduced the contrast between sense-perception and apperception, which will have an important conceptual legacy in Kant, Herbart, Weber, Helmholtz, Fechner, Wundt, Lotze and Münsterberg. Its correlate—Herbart’s treshold (Bewusstseinsschwelle)—is directly responsible for the theoretical discovery of the unconscious realm. Mesmer developed a new therapeutical practice inspired by a Newtonian speculation on animal “magnetism.” The two conceptual legacies unite in the Salpêtrière school, which saw the completion of its program in Janet’s work. The understanding of the unconscious realms, however, remained limited by the complementary premisses of two streams: positivistic and nosological. On the one hand, the German scholars of the Psychologie als Wissenschaft type were basically concerned with Kant’s injunction: since psychology does not work with any objective data (measurements), it is not a science (a status that Comte still refused to her in 1870). On the other hand, the French scholars of the psychologie expérimentale sur les formes inférieures de l'activité humaine type were basically focused on the pathological (hysterical) dimension of corrupted or abnormal forms of consciousness. According to Charcot, hypnotism is abnormal, fundamentally related to hysteria, and consequently useless for therapy.

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Although the three stages of lethargy, catalepsy and somnambulism were soon undermined by Bernheim’s criticisms, consciousness is still understood as substantial. The need of a holistic approach promoting a hygiology manifested itself in two waves. One is represented by the Nancy school, which normalized hypnotic phenomena and allowed for the existence of a nebulae of states of consciousness centered on the zero-state, and actually in constructive interplay with it. The other is represented by the work of F. W. H. Myers (1841–1901), that recapitulates and supersedes all previous conceptual trajectories with the help of the vertiginous wealth of data disclosed by the works of the London’s Society for Psychical Research (founded in 1882). Myers is, in other words, one of the main forgotten actor in the emergence of radical empiricism in psychology; as such, his influence on Henri Bergson and William James should not be underestimated: according to Taylor, James’ attraction to Myers’ lay in his emphasis on growth-oriented aspects of the subconscious—not in psychic phenomena themselves.37 Neither should be forgotten James Ward (1843–1925), who coined the term “subliminal” in 1886 in the course of a discussion of Herbart38 and also had a tremendous influence on James. Not insignificant is perhaps the fact that Ward had one very important friend in common with Myers: Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), the prominent Apostle who co-founded the Society for Psychical Research (an affiliation that of course brings us back to Whitehead himself). To assess the position of a given experience on the scale of consciousness, the following four criteria are worth considering: (1) the experience’s cash-value (a necessary but not sufficient criterion), be it practical (an improved mundane efficacity) or semantic (retrospective clarification of a past experience); (2) the level of intellectual and perceptual discernment; (3) the feeling of interconnectedness and duration; (4) general qualitative features such as emotional intensity or the sense of value and novelty.39 The experience’s position on the scale would thus depend upon its direct consequences on the existence of the targeted individual, either pragmatically (a valuable behavioural change) or visionwise (a modified interpretation of past events); its intellectual and perceptual acuteness (its “sharpness” and “freshness”); the actuality’s awareness of its temporal nature and of its intrinsic dependence upon other actualities; its authenticity and intrinsic meaningfulness. The very important point is the assessment of the grade of the experience independently of, but not necessarily without, measurement. The problem is to do justice to the qualitative dimension of experience, to its pure existential tone, an not solely to its quantitative dimension, that is always

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accessed at the cost of a reductionistic working hypothesis by science. Existence is concrescing, hence private; being is transitional, hence public. Accordingly, the spectrum of vigilance can be outlined in the following series: Mystical states; Paradoxical/generalized wakefulness (hypnotic state); Consciousness-zero & rationalized mesocosm; Somnolescence, drowsiness, daydreaming; Paradoxical sleep; NREM sleep; Coma.40 We can now resume our main argument in the light of these specifications. Creativity operates unconsciously, it is rooted in the unconscious processes sustaining consciousness-zero. It bursts in the zerostate always unexpectedly. One could speak of the injection of new psychological material in consciousness-zero from the fringes. Efficacy is embodied by the power of the past (habits, customs, rituals) but also by the structural and structuring power of reason itself. From that perspective, the respective zero states of consciousness and of reason are one single reality that shares a common phylo- and onto-geny. Vision is the awareness that broadens the existence to its very limits and projects it in the scala naturae. The projection is multifaceted and multilayered (it has regional exemplifications).

4. Conclusion (and a Look Ahead) The late Whitehead understood the coming into existence and the exit out of existence (exitus et reditus) from the perspective of the fundamental experiential plenum discussed in the first section of this paper with the help of the idea of creative advance that has been analysed in section two. The vast holomovement his categories systematize (each part contains or enfolds somehow the whole) is Janus-like: existence is concrescent, aiming at the realisation of a contemporary end that is expected to foster future consequences, yet at the same time being is transitional, for existence originates from an actuality’s prehensions of the past. Existence and being are united by the principle of relativity in conjunction with the principle of process: existence generates being and being fosters new existences. The basic notion is the vectorial nature of the prehensive bond. The three main notions of efficacy, creativity and vision exploited to circumscribe (without exhausting) the meaning and significance of Whitehead’s notion of creative advance can offer the opportunity of refreshing the ethical and psychological debates. A posteriori, one can highlight that the proposed applications converge in the threefold partition of the scale of consciousness: consciousness-zero is a locus of tension between a pre-conscious awareness and a post-conscious drive. One could

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furthermore see this reading as offering, after the Eleatics, Melissus, Spinoza and, of course, Hegel, new paths to reassess the possibility of natural theology.41 All philosophical standpoints depend upon one’s attitude with regard to the scale, or ladder, of states of awareness. The Western substantialistic tradition has destroyed all ways to intuit and to think that ladder, even though our direct experience delivers evidence of variegated experiential realms. It is intuitively plain that there is some gradation among these states of consciousness, but to design a coherent argument in order to foster one linear scale is extremely difficult. According to the Whiteheadian ontological premisses, creativity is just like good sense for Descartes: le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée. Analogously, all existents (a concept far more adequate than beings) are equally endowed with creativity, all share the “strength of the sheer craving for freshness.”42 The difference is due to the synergy between creativity, efficacy and vision. There is still much conceptual work to be done on these conceptual shores.

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Notes 1. A. Einstein, “Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper,” Annalen der Physik XVII. 4-17,1905, pp. 891-921. 2. Cf. Anderson Weekes’ seminal contribution to this volume (pp. 39 sq.). 3. F. M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiæ. The Origins of Greek Philosophical Thought, edited by W. K. C. Guthrie (Cambridge 1952); W. Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos (Stuttgart 1940); J. P. Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. Études de psychologie historique (Paris 1965). 4. A remarkable theoretical exception being the cosmogonies operating through early matter/antimatter symmetry breaking. 5. Cf., e.g., Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism : the New Face of Power in America (New-York 1980); D. H. Akenson, God’s Peoples. Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster (Ithaca/London 1992); and David Ray Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton 2004). 6. See M. R. Cohen, Reason and Nature. An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (New York 1931); C. Hartshorne and W. L. Reese (eds.), Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago/London 1953); C. Hartshorne’s Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (New York/London 1941) and Creativity in American Philosophy (Albany 1984); G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge 1971). 7. B. Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (New York 1956), p. 39. 8. See C. Hartshorne, “Whitehead’s Novel Intuition,” in G. L. Kline (ed.) A. N. Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy (Englewood-Cliffs 1963), pp. 18-26. 9. A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge 1978), p. 73. 10. G. W. F. Hegel, Phämenologie des Geistes (Leipzig 1937), p. 21. According to Jean Ladrière: “Voir les choses dans leur vérité, c’est les situer par rapport au tout, saisir leur articulation à la structure universelle qui constitue l’englobant ultime à partir duquel tout doit être compris.” Les enjeux de la rationalité. Le défi de la science et de la technologie aux cultures (Paris 1977), p. 29. 11. M. Weber, Whitehead’s Pancreativism. The Basics, with a foreword by N. Rescher (Frankfurt/Lancaster 2006).

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12. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by D. R. Griffin and D. Sherburne (New York 1978), p. 348. 13. Ibid., p. 21. 14. A. N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Boston 1958), p. 4. 15 A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York 1967), p. 258. 16. A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York 1967), p. 177. 17. Needless to say that the concept of finality engaged here is an open one; its territory is not endangered by Bergson’s critique. 18. A. L. Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London 1947), pp. 274, 276. 19. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, op. cit., pp. 28, 29, 32. 20. Terminology inspired by the formulation of the “ontological principle” in Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 24. 21. Ibidem., p. 31. 22. Ibidem, p. 25. 23. A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York 1926), p. 152: “He is not the world, but the valuation of the world.” 24. Corinthians 13, 4-8. 25. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 269. 26. M. Čapek, New Aspects of Time. Its Continuity and Novelties. Selected Papers in the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht/Boston/ London 1991). An interesting complementary exemplification can be found in Heidegger’s lecture “Das Ding,” that is so strangely remnant of Whitehead’s late philosophy: “What is gathered in the gift gathers itself in appropriatively staying the fourfold. This manifold-simple gathering is the jug’s presencing. Our language denotes what a gathering is by an ancient word. That word is: thing. The jug’s presencing is the pure, giving gathering of the onefold fourfold into a single time-space, a single stay. The jug presences a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things. Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold’s stay, its while, into something that stays for a while: into this thing, that thing.” (M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated and introduced by A. Hofstadter (New York 1971), p. 174.) 27. Technically speaking, the concepts came in two waves in Whitehead’s works: in Science and the Modern World he speaks of a Principle of

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Limitation and of a Principle of Concretion (God), in Process and Reality of transcendental decision, extensive continuum and of initial subjective aim. 28. A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York 1938), p. 1. 29. Ibid., pp. 13-14. 30. Ibid., p. 14. 31. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 269. 32. A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, op. cit., pp. 14-15. 33. W. v. Humboldt, The Diversity of Human Language Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind (Cambridge 1988). 34. W. James, Principles of Psychology (New York/London1890), Vol. I, p. 288, debating Schopenhauer. 35. See our “The Art of Epochal Change,” in F. Riffert and M. Weber (eds.), Searching for New Contrasts. Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of Mind (Frankfurt 2003), pp. 252-281, and our “Process and Individuality” in M. Pachalska and M. Weber (eds.), Microgenesis: Neuropsychology and Philosophy of Mind in Process (forthcoming 2007). For a somewhat complementary approach, see for instance R. J. Sternberg (ed.), The Nature of Creativity. Contemporary Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge 1988). 36. Consider, for example, the Glasgow Coma Scale, that is based on motor responsiveness, verbal performance, and eye opening to appropriate stimuli: G. Teasdale and B. Jennet, “Assessment of coma and impaired consciousness: a practical scale,” Lancet 2, 1974, pp. 81-84. 37. E. I. Taylor (ed.), William James on Exceptional Mental States. The 1896 Lowell Lectures (Amherst 1984), p. 1982. 38. J. Ward, “Psychology,” in T. S. Baynes (ed.), Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed., 1886, Vol. XX, pp. 37-85. 39. “The subjective aim […] is at intensity of feeling (a) in the immediate subject, and (b) in the relevant future.” (Process and Reality, op. cit., p. 27) “Each occasion exhibits its measure of creative emphasis in proportion to its measure of subjective intensity.” (Ibid., p. 47) 40. To add Near Death Experience at the bottom of the scale would make explicit its problematic linearity. Let us furthermore underline that our argument sticks to a Whiteheadian standpoint and that it would be quite easy to show that this perspective is typically Western, i.e., that, volens nolens, it uses consciousness-zero as a vantage point in its quest for total

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experience. Arvind Sharma’s The Experiential Dimension of Advaita Vedanta (Delhi 1993) provides for instance a very tight argument displaying the deep partiality of such a standpoint. Of course, such a bias can be a critical one, but its impact on the hierarchy of the states is nonetheless plain. 41. The basic typology would be the following: the first step consists in accepting all the evidences (their cultural conditionement being minimally filtered) and hence to claim that there are different types of beings, including spiritual beings. If one is not inclined to claim that there is a gradation (all the way up or not) we end up with an anarchic spiritualism of sorts. Second, if there is a hierarchy or grade of finite beings, an objective spiritual ladder follows. If the hierarchy is finite there is one finite maximum, commonly termed “God” (the question is then: don’t we get necessarily a frozen picture?). If the hierarchy is infinite, there is no absolute maximum; the maximum can always be superseded and God is whatever is at the top (possibly the same entity stays at the top while becoming better). Third, God can be infinite only if it is all-embracing (God is the world—pantheism—or more than the world—panentheism), otherwise it would be limited by something, which means that nothing “else” could exist. If deus sive natura, then God is purely generic (the name we give to the Whole) and we have again a fundamentally static, closed picture (it is not a maximum towards which we can travel). Fourth, from the perspective of the meaning of our entire existential trajectory, only the infinite hierarchy is promising. 42. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, op. cit., p. 269.

IV. Psychology and Phenomenology

Truthfulness and Memory: Philosophical Notes on Trauma Michael Hampe 1. Death, Violence and Subjectivitiy The idea that the truth makes us free, that right thinking leads to health, is an old one. Someone who can see things as they are can avoid being caught up in systems of deception that cost energy to uphold, energy that could better be spent confronting the obstacles that the things, as they are, put in one’s way. But this talk about things as they are is misleading. It suggests that the facts stand. That may be correct in many respects, but not with respect to the human situation. The line between facts that people just need to accept and the things they can change, exploit or achieve is difficult to draw, for moral as well as epistemological reasons. For example, violence is a reality of human life. But hardly anyone would say that it is something we just need to accept. Violence is considered to be an undesirable form of human behavior, and its eruption to be an unfortunate occurrence. But not all unfortunate occurrences can be avoided by people. Sooner or later, every living being runs up against insurmountable obstacles. The fact that all people are mortal, but that each death occurs as a result of contingent circumstances, i.e., as an event that could in most cases, at least in principle, have been avoided: this seems to be the most unacceptable fact of human existence. It is this fact that Freud, if I understand his dictum about the immortality of the unconscious correctly, considered to be fundamentally unacceptable.1 The following remarks aim to address the difficult philosophical question of the role that facts play for people, in relation to the so-called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experienced by some war veterans. I am not pretending to write with the authority of a therapist, but rather as someone who has a philosophical interest in the epistemological problems faced by the human sciences.2 Methodically, my remarks will hinge above

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all upon the time-honored concept of truth, in view of the fact that people have differing abilities to accept the truth. Accepting the truth of our mortality, for instance, seems to be concretely impossible, if we follow Freud. Does the same hold for the truth about experiences and acts of violence? The insight that our ability to deal with the truth is limited, just as our chances for survival are limited, does not change the fact that from Socrates to Spinoza and up to Freud, the conviction has existed that people would fare better if they learned to bear the truth. The physician-philosophers of the Arabian tradition and also Spinoza carried this thought so far as to claim that the body of a person that holds true beliefs and reasons is different from that of a person that holds mistaken beliefs and thinks in fallacies. In the Islamic and also in the Indian cultural traditions, one finds the same idea in reverse: certain somatic dispositions are considered to be signs of superior spiritual abilities. The dispositions vary with different medical backgrounds and are described, for instance, in terms of the proportionate presence of body juices, or the relative movement of corpuscles. In the present-day Western scientific tradition, brain structures and neurotransmitters are considered to be the somatic pendant to certain emotional and cognitive capabilities and limitations. But since ancient times, people have been using somatic phenomena and structures as a reality test: as an indication that their appraisals of the mental and spiritual condition of a person are not fictions, but root in something “real.” Modern medical research, based on an ideology of scientific naturalism in continuation of the larger naturalistic tradition,3 uses refined technical methods to test and corroborate the idea that somatic equivalents for mental and emotional states exist. A case in point are the imaging techniques applied in recent years with enormous success in the neurological sciences. Neurology has come to be regarded as the “king” among the human sciences, as though the brain constituted human reality per se. The idea and the concomitant belief that the body, in contrast to a person, cannot lie is, however, an ancient notion common to many cultures. Today, we seem to have good grounds for accepting the plausibility of the idea that brain structures corroborate the reality of psychic conditions. But a historical awareness of the long series of similar convictions that have failed to definitively assert themselves can serve as a warning that the selfconfidence of brain research needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. Clearly, the etiology and phenomenology of the human psyche is of a complexity that notoriously transcends our capacity for insight. In physics it has often been noted that three gravitating bodies produce chaotic states that defy our competence for prognosis. The complexity of the brain is many times

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higher than that of three bodies interacting in a gravitational field. Furthermore, it is situated within an equally complex body and, as a modifiable formation, experiences a history that at the present time we are only able to describe in terms of relatively vague conceptions of individual life experiences and the world of social and cultural reality. Given the prevalent confusion and mix-up of terminologies, it can only be described as an incredible stroke of luck that, one hundred years ago, Freud not only dared to develop a theory with a coherent terminology, but did so with relative success. His concepts had a stimulating effect on individual and developmental psychology as well as on the social sciences and the humanities. He himself laid the foundation for these developments in his work on the analysis of psychological phenomena and the development of the psyche, in the context of the “small-scale” social complexities of the family and “large-scale” cultural ones. Considering the scope of psychic phenomena and their determinants, it is hardly surprising that Freud’s theory was unable to give an adequate account of the connections among all the relevant factors. And it is certainly not astonishing that a less comprehensive theory dealing with a smaller set of data probably manages to produce a better fit with the phenomena in its limited field. What is astounding, however, is that brain research, as a scientific enterprise that basically gets by without any self-contained theory at all, claims to comprehend human reality in toto. What would be the central, empirically falsifiable theoretical claim of brain research? From the point of view of the philosophy of science, brain research is essentially a collection of anatomic and physiological observations about correlations between exceptional psychic phenomena and brain lesions. Its theoretical elements are borrowed from the general theory of evolution and genetics. More formal theoretical approaches like that of David Marr4 have not been further developed. There doesn’t seem to be much interest in transparent conceptual and formal structures in this discipline. In spite of the enormous financial and personal investment in the field, it remains unclear what the scientific research community is banking its hopes on theoretically, other than the above-named claim that the reality of the psyche is to be found in the brain. Apart from the poor theoretical grounds for the assumption that psychic reality can be viewed and studied in the body, the conviction that the body cannot lie and therefore provides a privileged access to human nature is a claim that, from a psychoanalytical point of view, needs to be qualified to say the least. Take, for example, the way in which a somatic state, hysterical paralysis, for instance, can mask an emotion like aversion to one’s father. Of course the body is not lying in the same way that one person lies to another. Still, it is part of a deceptive constellation that fools

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the person who has that body as well as others. The case of hysterical paralysis, for instance, probably involves, on the one hand, an inability on the part of the person concerned to accept his or her own emotions and, on the other, an unconscious mechanism that hides both the emotions and the inability to accept them from that person and from others. Philosophers like Spinoza and Nietzsche, as well as Freud in his Psychoanalysis, have questioned persons’ capacity for facing reality and truth, particularly in relation to their emotional lives. Deception, in their view, does not pertain exclusively to communication between people. It is not just something that occurs either as the result of an accidental misunderstanding or an intentional breaking of the rules of common understanding. Rather, it is a basic human condition that, as Nietzsche suspected, may in some circumstances even be useful for survival. This observation, that people are seldom truthful about their own states, inclinations and aversions, even towards themselves, is not just a qualification of the belief that truth and health go hand in hand. The presentation of this insight by Nietzsche in particular, exhibits a passionate commitment to the truth. Neither Nietzsche nor Freud consider the claim that succumbing to lies and neurosis is sometimes the only way to survive or to preserve one’s identity in situations of mortal distress (and that nobody is spared situations of mortal distress) to be itself a possible delusion or neurotic symptom. Rather, they regard it as a hard-won truth. Neither relativist post-modernists, nor psychoanalysts who want nothing to do with the truth and regard the technical realization of freedom from suffering as their only goal, can rightly cite Nietzsche or Freud as a reference.5 For hardly any philosopher can rival the pathos of truthfulness developed by Nietzsche,6 and Freud’s conception of the conjunction between therapy and understanding sees a direct connection between healing and scientific truth. Neither of these authors considered illness or lies, which may provide a means of survival in a situation of weakness, to be a fundamental necessity of human existence. Certainly the idea of applying this idea to their own theories, rendering them paradoxical, was foreign to them. Both considered all the more or less easily attainable conditions of health to be a real possibility for human existence too. They neither regarded their own insights as mere fictions, nor did they consider the idea of living without sickness and lies to be a mere fantasy or construction. Why is the relationship between health and truth, or suffering and deception, of interest to the human sciences and philosophy? Neither the philosophy of subjectivity nor brain research give much consideration to the fact that all living creatures try to avoid suffering, drastic

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transformations of their identity and death. It isn’t clear to me that the difference between truthfulness and deception can even become thematic within the neurological sciences. For human self-understanding, however, it is of central importance. Furthermore, the subject is usually regarded as an active agent of knowledge and action. Critiques of the subject refer to its determination by social and biological factors and by semiotic systems beyond the control of individual persons, and speak of the dissolution of the subject as an autonomous active agent (and consequently of the disappearance of a hard and fast objective reality upon which it can orient itself). The passive subject, however, as an entity affected by violence, suffering and death, is hardly considered a matter for consideration. Wellbeing and suffering cannot just be “summed up” without reference to individual persons, as utilitarian ethics would like to have it, because there is no collective being that perceives states of well-being and suffering: these states are only real in the perception of individual beings. This insight speaks against a generally deflationary strategy regarding subjectivity and factual reality. Suffering and pain are facts for a subject experiencing them. If a person is wounded in the arm or the leg and feels intense pain, it is not his arm or his leg that is suffering, nor is it his brain or society: it is the person as a passive subject. Pain is my pain, something that concerns me as a person and not merely a body part or a social role. The negative experiences of violence, hurt and pain clearly play a more important role in the individuation of persons than the performative experiences of acquiring knowledge or carrying out actions. This is particularly true for traumatic experience, as we will see. Physical suffering due to illness, and the fact of death, difficult if not impossible to accept, seem to be the bedrock—to use the language of Wittgenstein—that bends the spades of the relativistic grave diggers of the truth. The idea that everything could be constructed and deceptive, including the constructing and deceiving subjects, is, for many reasons, senseless. Not only is it a performative self-contradiction that falsifies itself. Its senselessness is most apparent in the face of the suffering and the mortality of persons, of subjects, who live in fear of being damaged, are trying to overcome damage they have suffered, or are in fear of perishing. In spite of these self-evident insights, the interrelatedness of truth, health, suffering and deception is complex, as anyone reflecing upon the subjects of violence and trauma from an epistemological point of view soon realizes.

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2 . Voluntary and Involuntary Memory The first thing to be noted in this context is that the whole process of traumatic memory—the flashbacks in which the traumatic event keeps reappearing, the associations with present perceptions that lead back to the traumatic situation again and again—contradicts the idea that truth is something manufactured. It may be that people who actively remember something construct a lot by adding things or leaving things out, perhaps without being aware of it. And it is true that involuntary memory is not necessarily always true to reality and can be schematic, even if the remembering subject has the feeling of remembering things accurately and in great detail.7 Nevertheless, empirical studies have shown that active recollections carried out on the basis of certain guidelines are less reliable than involuntary memory.8 That is why autobiographies, the product of memory processes geared to the creation of a stable self-image, are notoriously unreliable documents. However, memory is only controllable to a very limited extent. There is a passive side to it. It shares this ambivalence with the act of breathing. One can hold one’s breath and one can hyperventilate on purpose. But everyone has to take a breath sometime and, at some point, someone who is hyperventilating will faint. If we run, our breathing quickens automatically, and if we stop, it automatically slows down. Just as breathing happens by itself and has its own rhythm while at the same time being open to influence from voluntary behavior, memory seems to be ambivalent with respect to its accessibility by the will. People can remember things on purpose and learn memory techniques, but memory still preserves a quasi-natural autonomy when, for instance, one simply cannot recall a name, or when a war veteran doesn’t want to remember the corpses of the Asian people he has shot, but cannot help but doing so each time he sees an Asian face or Asian symbols. In the latter case, it is the forgetting that isn’t working. The active effort to forget is thwarted by an activity that the subject concerned cannot accept as its own, and that puts him into the passive state of being subjected to remembering. The traumatic event has happened. Is it an unacceptable truth that it has happened? Is it the real event that the traumatized person is trying to deceive himself about? Hardly. The above-mentioned Vietnam War veteran doesn’t deny having killed the persons he is remembering. According to one interpretation of traumatic memory cited by Allen Young, the traumatic event leads to a break in the biography of a person, causing him or her to become another. The person cannot accept the change, however,

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and attempts to continue living as the person he or she was before being traumatized. Then it is not the fact that a violent act has occurred that is unacceptable, but rather the fact that I am a person who was the victim of this violent act or who committed it. This is not suffering “as a result of” memories but rather suffering “from” memories that cannot be accepted as belonging to one’s own life, i.e., to the necessarily “historical reality” of a person, as Alice Holzhey-Kunz has recently pointed out.9 If we think of persons as processes, as continua of memories constituting a life history that obeys certain criteria of narrative and moral plausibility, then, according to this interpretation, the traumatic event is one that cannot be integrated into this history, a “foreign body” that can be neither removed from the “body-soul” economy of a person nor taken in as part of his or her life history. The recurrent reappearance of this “foreign body” can only be explained by the presence, in the psychic apparatus and its history, or the neurological apparatus and its history, of an element that cannot be counted as part of the person. A psychoanalyst would probably not say “person” but rather “ego,” “consciousness” or “self” here. What can be counted as part of these entities depends upon what a person can voluntarily control. Arms, legs, hands and fingers, lungs and lips can be voluntarily moved by adults. Without special autogenic training, though, no one has control of their hearth rhythm or the muscles that open and contract the veins. A person who falls ill and no longer feels his arm or his leg, following a stroke for instance, may regard these limbs as foreign bodies. They are connected with the body, yet they do not belong to it, because they cannot be commanded by the will. On the other hand, an appropriately trained person may be able to control the blood circulation in his or her limbs by voluntarily moving muscles that are normally only stimulated involuntarily. The extent to which our bodies can be controlled voluntarily, and inversely the extent to which they retain a natural autonomy, varies. There is no sharp line separating what has to be accepted as given from what can be changed. Similarly, the line separating voluntary from involuntarily memory does not seem fixed either. Memory artists and hypnotized persons can extend the limit of what experiences they can remember voluntarily. The traumatic event shifts the limit in the opposite way, in the direction of involuntariness. Similar shifts can be observed in the case of damaged sense organs. A groping hand feels something as a result of the voluntary activity of the person doing the groping. I can also retract my hand: feeling is something I can do or refrain from at will. A burned hand, however, has become oversensitive and constantly “produces” unintended perceptions that one can only accept or mask with pain medication. If an ear that is serving the purpose of intent listening is stimulated by overly loud noises, it produces a high ringing tone that gets in the way of acoustic perception.

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The same sort of thing is happening when a traumatic event leads to an unintended functioning of memory. Pittmann and Orr draw upon the metaphor of a black hole to describe this kind of autonomous memory that causes the subject concerned to suffer his or her recollections: One of the striking features of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the degree to which a past event comes to dominate the patient’s associations […] A war veteran known to us can’t look at his wife’s nude body without recalling with revulsion the naked bodes he saw in a burial pit in Vietnam, can’t stand the sight of children’s dolls because their eyes remind him of the staring eyes of the war dead, and can’t walk on his property without eying the tree line for infiltrators […] The ultimate gravitational attraction in the physical universe is represented by the black hole, a place in space-time that has such high gravity that even light cannot pass by without being drawn into it […] PTDS patients struggle to avoid thought, activities or situations associated with the trauma […] not only because they are so painful but also because they are so absorbing.10

The traumatic event evidently puts controlled thoughts and recollections out of commission, causing them to become uncontrolled and compulsive. Associations follow a trajectory that invariably seems to end at the traumatic situation. One could consider this to be a malfunction of the associative processes of thinking and memory, if one were to regard the ability to steer thought and memory associations as a criterion for their proper functioning. In psychoanalysis, however, voluntary processes are generally mistrusted as delusory mechanisms. Involuntary thought associations and memories are used in free association and the interpretation of dreams as means to undermine these mechanisms. Hence it is not possible to clearly demarcate healthy from unhealthy associations of thought and memory. The fact that intentions can be realized is, for psychoanalysis, anything but a criterion for health, truthfulness and freedom from malfunction. Guggenheim and Schneider have not only drawn attention to the similarities between free association and traumatic memory, they place them on one continuum.11 Delusory mechanisms can better be avoided when the voluntary aspect of the psyche is lowered. Hence free association and traumatic memory are both more likely to permit access to truthfulness than actively controlled memory. Is that plausible? The life history of a person as a consciously remembered string of experiences is something that can be modified. Forgetting and remembering seem to be in part dependent upon the extent to which events that are newly encountered can be superimposed upon the background of old experiences and their organizational patterns. Something that happens is evidently not immediately judged according to the possibility of integrating it into one’s life history to date. Otherwise, the latency of trauma would be difficult to explain. Evidently, something happens to a

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person first, and this is then assimilated into the life history as an experience. The difference between a “lived event” (Erlebnis) and an “experience” (Erfahrung) is not terminologically fixed in philosophy. Gadamer has observed that, thanks to Dilthey, the “lived event” (Erlebnis) replaced empirical “sensation” at the end of the nineteenth century as the elementary unit of consciousness.12 Freud, in his “Entwurf einer Psychologie” (1895), also employed the concept of a lived event (Erlebnis) in conjunction with the concept of an impression (Eindruck), writing, for instance: “Psychological experience has shown that memory (Gedächtnis), i.e., the long-term impact of a lived event (Erlebnis), depends on a factor that one calls the ‘size of the impression (Eindruck)’.”13 And finally, Walter Benjamin, in his essay about Nikolai Lesskow entitled “Der Erzähler,” compared the contrast between information and experience to that between a lived event (Erlebnis) and experience (Erfahrung), claiming that the ability to experience something is tied to the ability to tell a story (and considering both competencies to be culturally endangered).14 On the basis of these considerations, the difference between a lived event (Erlebnis) and experience (Erfahrung) could be defined as follows: “lived events” (Erlebnisse) are occurrences that have not yet entered long-term memory and cannot be actively recalled. They are the stuff of which experiences (Erfahrungen) are made: the latter are produced when events are interpreted and integrated into the body of actively recallable memories that make up the conscious life experience of a person. If this process is unsuccessful, the events are either forgotten or relegated to passive memory, where they are repeatedly relived without, however, belonging to the accessible experience of the person. They remain present in the psyche in the form of undigested information, like a virus that leads to malfunctions in the memory of a computer. It seems that the ability to remember something voluntarily depends upon the possibility of successfully assimilating a lived event into one’s experience.15 Whether or not this integration was successful only becomes apparent after a certain time (in the case of a traumatic event this is the time during which the trauma is latent). A case in point is the First World War soldier who killed an enemy soldier by hitting him in the stomach with a bayonet, but didn’t show symptoms of trauma until the two comrades with whom he had at first laughed about the death of the enemy had also fallen.16 Philosophically, the criteria according to which the integration of a lived event, the having of an experience, succeeds or fails are unclear. The technique of recalling events by establishing connections suggests that perceptions and events that can be connected to former experiences are more easily remembered than those that stand alone or are isolated. But what does “can be connected” mean? Aren’t we going about in a circle?

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Memory, after all, is the connection of a past experience to the present. Is the existence of an identical person the condition or isn’t rather the result of the connection of one experience to another? The non-substantialist theories of the person that seem most plausible today, according to which there is no individual essence of persons independent of the history of their experiences, must assume persons to be products of memory constellations and therefore cannot declare persons as such to be the criterion for the connection of one experience to the next. Persons who have a life experience make their memories by fashioning them from the events they have lived through. In doing so, they are also making themselves, because they are their life experience, even if that is not all they are, as traumatic memory shows. For the latter also somehow belongs to the person whom it, as something foreign, is causing to suffer. Traumatic memory can be understood as a calling-into-question of the unity of the person that is constituted by a connection among memories. “Something has happened to me, or I have done something, but I cannot connect it with myself as I know myself,” the traumatized person seems to have to think. It may well be that this is a thought that arises in the course of every successful psychoanalysis. But there it is evoked by the analytical and interpretive techniques of the analyst, whereas in the case of trauma, this calling-intoquestion of personal identity seems to be caused by the traumatic event itself. A conflict seems to arise between the narrative plausibility of a memory within the context of a certain concept of the self on the one hand, and the historical truth of an event on the other, as one can say following Tilman Habermas.17 At this point the weighty problem of the constitution of the unity of memory complexes arises, a problem that is also significant for the question of the unity of the person. Would complete and truthful memory have a stabilizing or rather a destabilizing effect on the psychic structure of a living person? Does connecting memories into experience possibly involve the fading out or reinterpretation of events? Could it be that the traumatic event, the violence that has been done to a person or that the person has done, is something that fundamentally disturbs the ability of a person to transform lived events into experiences and therefore threatens that person’s self-made unity? Do neurological findings show that a change has taken place in trauma victims, which neither raising their level of consciousness nor strengthening their emotional ability to accept something as belonging to their own life can quickly erase or undo, because changes in the neurological structure of a person can only be modified slowly, if at all? An answer to these questions would constitute a full-fledged theory of memory, personality and the modifiability of persons with respect to the

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different rates at which social, psychological and biological processes take place.

3. The Historicity of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Even without such a theory, this much can be said: the interconnected experiences of a life history are probably ordered and judged according to acquired patterns of thinking, feeling and acting. These patterns and judgments grow out of habits a person acquires in his or her social environment. In his book Achilles in Vietnam. Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay draws a connection between trauma and fatal contingencies in the immediate social and moral environment of a person. Shay describes these contingencies in terms of “moral luck” and “bad moral luck,” terms employed by the philosophers Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum.18 In his book, Shay focuses on the social and moral environment of the army. According to Shay, existential danger due to abuse or the breaking of fundamental moral habits results in the narrowing of a person’s social and moral horizons. In the army, failure or the serious breaking of rules by senior officers causes a soldier’s horizons to close in on his immediate fellow fighters. In the family the child ends up being all on its own. If the orientation of actions fails even within this more limited social and moral framework, a deformation of character results, in which acquired patterns of self-control, self-respect and the rules of consideration for others disappear. In the case of the soldier this means blind and merciless violence, going berserk. Shay observes this in the case of a number of Vietnam War veterans of the US Army, and he claims to recognize the same phenomenon in the hubris of Achilles in Homer’s Illias. If we abstract from Shay’s examples, we arrive at the following general description of the conditions of the development of trauma: firstly, a person acquires stability of character within a fixed social and moral horizon; secondly, an important person within this horizon breaks fundamental rules governing behavior and the generation of experience, and this is perceived as a “betrayal;” thirdly, an attempt at re-orientation within the narrower social and moral horizons is unsuccessful; this results, fourthly, in a disintegration of the moral and social habits of the person. The traumatizing arises in the phase of disorientation within the narrowed moral horizons. The breaking of the rules sensitizes the person for the trauma. In the case of Achilles, Agamemnon’s theft of Briseis is the sensitization. The

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death of Patroklos traumatizes him. In the case of child abuse, the first abuse would constitute the sensitization, the continued abuse, after the attempts on the part of the child to retreat, the traumatizing of the child. Because this process takes place without anyone having directly intended to destroy the moral orientation of the person concerned, except in the case of express maliciousness, Shay calls it “catastrophically bad moral luck.” The choice of words goes back to language used by Freud, who speaks of an “accident” in connection with “traumatic hysteria” and of an “accidental element” in etiology.19 In Shay’s terminology, bad moral luck leads to the damage or destruction of the patterns according to which a person has learned to transform events into experiences, thereby fundamentally disturbing that person’s ability to produce experiences. The traumatized person still knows the patterns for creating experience, but no longer trusts them. That doesn’t mean that this person has regressed to the state of an infant not yet able to actively create structured memories. Still, he or she interacts with the world passively rather than actively experiencing it. It is important to note in this context that Shay believes situations like this have been arising and leading to post-traumatic stress disorder throughout the history of war (and of the family), certainly since Homer described the fate of Achilles in the Illias. Precisely this timeless existence of post-traumatic stress disorder is contested by Allen Young in his book The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He draws his readers’ attention to the relativity of the traumatizing situation and the syndrome that may result from it. Young firstly points out that the rape and shooting of civilians was only traumatizing for US Army soldiers if these actions did not belong to the repertoire of what “was normally done” in their unit. Violent behavior varied from unit to unit. Moral and social conventions don’t just vary from unit to unit within an army; they vary from one culture or historical epoch to another. Already on the basis of this observation, it is hard to say if Achilles, after he was deceived by Agamemnon and forced to experience the death of his friend Patroklos, went berserk in the same sense that a Vietnam soldier did. Secondly, Young claims that the concepts of memory and of the self that are applied in the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder have only been invented since the nineteenth century. According to Young, traumatic memory is not an “object” that can be “found” in a process of discovery, it is something people “invented.”20 Before it was invented, one had “unhappiness, despair and disturbing recollections,” writes Young, “ but no traumatic memory in the sense that we know it today.”

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Young bases this claim on considerations of Ian Hacking, who, following upon Michel Foucault, has described a whole series of anthropological categorizations, including the so-called “multiple personality,” as constructs rather than human universals that can be interpreted realistically.21 Hacking begins with the existentialist assumption that human persons are defined not only by what they have done, are doing, are not doing or will be doing, but also by their possibilities. The possibilities that persons have vary historically. “As with almost every way in which it is possible to be a person,” writes Hacking, “it is possible to be a garçon de café only at a certain time, in a certain place, in a certain social setting.”22 Human possibilities vary with concrete social circumstances, but also with changes in the way human actions and human suffering are described. These descriptions are subject to particularly radical changes. Descriptions of different human conditions and forms of suffering, as enumerated in a diagnostic manual, for instance, open up possibilities for people to describe what is happening to them. According to Young, posttraumatic stress disorder is a case in point. He refers to the typical case of a Vietnam veteran who was never involved in combat, but has a history of therapy for his psychological problems. He goes to a self-help group for veterans, acquires the habits of trauma victims and eventually develops his own history of having been traumatized, complete with the respective symptoms. In this way, writes Young, it becomes possible for him to reinterpret his disappointments and failures as a soldier and gain entry into a treatment program, in which he can live out his fantasies about the life of a soldier at the front.23 Such cases can probably not be considered completely analogous to imaginary child abuse, or to the so-called “railway spine” and “shell shock” traumas that were invented at the beginning of the twentieth century as a devious means to obtain compensation. The level of consciousness with which a trauma is invented varies in different cases. But every defined pathological condition and every classification of psychic disorders provides people with a range of possibilities for being a particular person. The idea that there is an authentic basis for what happens to a person that is not dependent upon the conceptual patterns of a society, including its medical classifications, is an illusion. It may seem plausible in the present day that the examination of the body or the structure of the brain can help differentiate between trauma that are based on real events and those that are invented or imagined. This certainly simplifies matters for insurance purposes; therapeutically, however, it does not. On the contrary, things are likely to be more complicated therapeutically. For one is now dealing with two different forms of inability to take things as they are: firstly, the

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inability to transform a lived event into an experience, and secondly the need to escape from existential difficulties by means of the invention of a story.

4. Achille’s Brain In Ancient Greece, hubris was a possibility for religious development and perhaps also for personal existential problem solving, but war trauma was not. Are we to say that Achilles’ hubris was actually and in reality a war trauma? Would it help us to learn something about the brain structure of Achilles? Let’s assume that we find a structure in his brain that is exactly analogous to that of traumatized Vietnam War veterans. That is not implausible, because Achilles was without a doubt severely disappointed by a military superior and by the death of a close fellow fighter, just as were many Vietnam veterans. But in his cultural context, he could see himself as a demigod, and interpret his own going berserk as hubris, as the transgression of human conventions and the entering into the often cruel and humanly incomprehensible realm of the gods. It was not possible for him to describe himself as having been traumatized. No Vietnam War veteran, on the other hand, has the possibility of describing himself as a demigod who has succumbed to hubris. Even a neurological diagnosis could not change these cultural differences between historical epochs. Knowledge about the body would not be decisive for the reality of the trauma. Contemporary brain research, though, has developed a tendency to interpret its findings about the causal relationships among the environment, the body and the brain, and its visualizations of brain structures, as insights into essential reality. The essence of persons, however, is no more apparent in their brain structure than in the form of their skull or the basic triplets of their DNA. Modern science has scorned the knowledge of essences since Galileo. The rejection of essences, especially human essence, is the most important lesson to be learned from modern science. In the naturalistic human sciences, however, the return to an essentialist metaphysics is disconcerting not only because it betrays the spirit of the modern natural sciences. For purported insights into the human essence have in the past always been a first step to the sorting and judging of individual persons and groups, with the well-known catastrophic results. It is obvious that insights into the brain structure of Achilles would not give us any information about his “true essence.” Achilles’ description of his own condition, or Homer’s description, in which terms like “demigod” and “hubris” play a key role, would retain its relevance for the interpretation of his emotions and his

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behavior. These terms refer to facts of the social or religious reality of the time that were just as real as the betrayal by Achilles’ commanders, the cruel death of his friend or his brain structure, the latter being a somatic reality of Achilles’ person unbeknown to himself. Today, terms like “demigod” and “hubris” have no application outside of their historical context, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were a reality for Achilles.24 Considerations such as these lead Young to make the following remarks: The suffering is real: PTSD is real. But can one also say that the facts now attached to PTSD are true (timeless) as well as real? Can questions about truth be divorced from the social, cognitive and technological conditions through which researchers and clinicians come to know their facts and the meaning of facticity? My answer is no. Does it matter, though? The ethnographer’s job is to stick to reality, its sources and genealogies; that should be enough.25

What is Young trying to establish here? Can facts be anything else but real? Isn’t it only our statements about them that are true or false? Let’s assume the suffering of Achilles was real, as real as the suffering of Vietnam War veterans. In the one case it is described as hubris, in the other as posttraumatic stress disorder. The crucial question then is: what effect do the different descriptions have on the suffering, i.e, on the suffering persons as they see themselves? If we describe the sun as a god in one case and as burning gas in the other, this difference in description is of no consequence for what the sun is. For there is no internal point of view from which the sun sees its own existence. What is said about the sun does not constitute a possibility for self-description by the sun. All truths about people, however, are also realities and possibilities for people, to which people relate. Depending upon how people are described from the outside, they feel differently, because different descriptions of them provide them with different forms of existing. A person who understands himself to be in a state of religious ecstasy or obsession has different possibilities from one who considers himself to be sick. It makes no sense to bring the somatic realities of a person as determinants of his or her existence to bear against the social or symbolic realities that exist in the medium of description. It can very well be that different self-descriptions lead to different brain structures or that persons with different brain structures tend to describe themselves in certain ways. The hope of finding a firm foundation for the conditions of human existence in the body, today above all in the brain, is deceptive. It is motivated by the attempt to resolve the discrepancies between what is true for a particular person and the truth accepted by the scientific community of a particular time, in favor of collectively accepted scientific truth. Truths that exist for a particular person, however, cannot be

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eliminated in a theory of the psyche without causing the realm of the psyche itself to disappear. References to somatic evidence of psychic phenomena always involve the danger of eliminating the internal perspective, because nothing is true for somatic structures on their own, i.e., they cannot be treated as something with an internal perspective. The recent “Manifesto” of “leading neuroscientists,” for example, stresses the irreducibility of the internal perspective, but simultaneously, in the same sentence, states that brain structures “underlie” phenomena like “sympathy” or “being in love.” “Even if we were someday to have identified all neural processes that underlie a person’s feelings of sympathy, falling in love or moral responsibility, the independence of this ‘inner perspective’ remains.”26 It remains unclear how the architectural metaphor of “underlying” is to be understood, and why it is not social conditions that “underlie” the phenomena of sympathy, being in love and moral responsibility, which are then expressed in brain structures. The temptation to abstract from the inner perspective of persons in the study of psychic phenomena, even just in order to temporarily reduce their complexity, means, phenomenologically speaking, adumbrating precisely those entanglements in which human suffering and happiness come to be. What kind of practically significant consideration of psychic phenomena could still be possible after such an elimination? If starting tomorrow we all described ourselves exclusively as brains, because we considered the findings of brain research to be the essential truth about ourselves and believed that we could abandon truths that impose themselves upon us, but do not correspond with scientific truths, then with one blow the realm of what is humanly possible would be dramatically reduced. All truths that existed for people on the level of individual epistemological judgment, or on the moral, social and perhaps even religious levels would become secondary or even disappear. Even a fictional trauma represents a reality that opens up possibilities for the person that invented it. Young dissociates himself from what is true for a particular person from his or her internal point of view and thereby becomes relevant for his or her psychological development, from the “external” point of view, not of the brain researcher, but rather of the ethnologist. Hence it becomes clear that the failure to recognize particular subjective truths is a problem that is not confined to the natural sciences. It also arises in sociological disciplines like ethnology. As accurate as Young’s observations about the different contexts in which persons have experienced and dealt with violence that cannot be erased from their memory are, his attempt to separate, from an external ethnographic point of view, what is humanly real from what is true, is off-track.

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Notes 1. “[I]t is impossible to imagine one’s own death […] So in the psychoanalytical school one ventured to make the following statement: no one actually believes in his own death or, what amounts to the same: in the unconscious, each of us is convinced of his or her immortality.” S. Freud, Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod, in Gesammelte Werke, Vol. X, (Frankfurt/London 1946), p. 341. 2. On the symptoms and treatment of psychological trauma, see G. Fischer and P. Riedesser, Lehrbuch der Psychotraumatologie (Stuttgart 2003). 3. See M. Hampe, “Natur, die wir sind,” Neue Rundschau 114.1, 2003, pp. 9-20. 4. D. Marr, “A theory for cerebral neocortex,” Proceedings of the Royal Society London 176, 1970, pp. 161-234; Vision. A Computational Investigation into Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information (New York 1982). 5. On this topic in relation to Nietzsche, see B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness. An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton/Oxford 2002). 6. Ibid., pp. 12ff. 7. D. L. Schacter, “The sevens sins of memory: Perspectives from functional neuroimaging,” in E. Tulving (ed.), Memory, Consciousness, and the Brain: The Tallinn Conference (Philadelphia 1999). 8. T. Habermas, “Autobiographisches Erinnern,” Entwicklung im Erwachsenenalter, edited by H. Filipp and U. Staudinger, Enzyklopädie Psychologie, Vol. VI (Göttingen 2005), Chs. 3 and 4. 9. A. Holzhey-Kunz, Das Subjekt in der Kur. Über die Bedingungen psychoanalytischer Psychotherapie (Wien 2002), p. 225. 10. R. K. Pittman and S. P. Orr, “The Black Hole Trauma,” Biological Psychiatry 27, 1990, pp. 469- 471. 11. J. Z. Guggenheim and P. Schneider, “Trauma,” Riss, 2000, pp. 71-80. 12. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen 1986), pp. 71ff. 13. S. Freud, Entwurf einer Psychologie, Gesammelte Schriften. Nachtragsband. Texte aus den Jahren 1885—1938 (Frankfurt/London 1987), p. 393.

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14. W. Benjamin, “Der Erzähler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows,” Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II (Frankfurt 1980), p. 444; I would like to thank Rolf Haubl for having drawn my attention to this text. 15. See T. Habermas, “Autobiographisches Erinnern,” op. cit., Chap. 1 on Butler, Erikson and Janet. 16. A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions. Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton 1995), p. 126. 17. See T. Habermas, “Autobiographisches Erinnern,” op. cit., Introduction. 18. B. Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge 1982); M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge 2001). 19. S. Freud, Studien über Hysterie, Gesammelte Werke, op. cit., Vol. I (Frankfurt/London 1951), p. 82. 20. A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions, op. cit., p. 141. 21. I. Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton 1995). 22. I. Hacking, “Making Up People,” Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 99-114. 23. A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions, op. cit. 24. On the history of hubris, see N. R. E. Fisher, Hubris. A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece (Warminster 1992), and K. Ferla, Von Homers Achill zur Hekabe des Euripides: das Phänomen der Transgression in der griechischen Kultur (München 1996). 25. A. Young, The Harmony of Illusions, op. cit., p. 10. 26. C. Elger et al., “Das Manifest. Elf führende Neurowissenschaftler über Gegenwart und Zukunft der Hirnforschung,” Gehirn und Geist 6, 2004, p. 31.

Empathy and Reliability: Albert Fraenkel as seen by his Patients Hesse and Jaspers Bernd Weidmann In many texts on the doctor Albert Fraenkel, his patients Hermann Hesse and Karl Jaspers are mentioned in the same context. They are considered as famous witnesses of his high degree of empathy.1 In his story “House of Peace” (“Haus zum Frieden”) Hesse writes about Fraenkel: “He does not want to impose his will on the different characters or oppress them, he does not intend turning a delicate person into a tough one, nor a thin person into a fat one, but he wants to make it easier for everyone to stay as he is, as ill as he may be.”2 Jaspers uses similar words in his letter to Fraenkel, in which he congratulates him on his 70th birthday: “I was of the impression that your versatility is extraordinary when paying attention to every single patient […] You were capable of living in the individual world of every single person, with his demands, opinions and aims, as if, for a moment, you were him […] You devoted yourself to each individual to the degree he needed.”3 Therefore, it is justifiable to name Hesse and Jaspers in one go. But this is only half of the truth. In the following, I would like to show that Hesse’s and Jaspers’ opinion on Fraenkel have a few things in common, but differ all the same. This becomes clear when comparing the circumstances in which both Jaspers and Hesse became Fraenkel’s patients. Born in 1877, Hesse met Fraenkel for the first time in 1909, when Hesse was 32 years of age.4 At that time he was already a famous man. In 1904, he had written “Peter Camenzind,” a novel which attracted a great deal of attention. It made him famous overnight and allowed him to rent a house in Gaienhofen on the Bodensee (also known as Lake Constance) and to start a family. This early fame did not do him any good. With “Peter Camenzind” he aroused expectations, which he neither could fulfil, nor was willing to do so. While his readers hoped for another novel written in the same pathetic and emotional style as “Peter Camenzind,” he himself was not too happy with it. His novel “The Prodigy” (“Unterm Rad”), which was published in 1906 and had been written in a relatively sober language, was

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a failure. That is why he begins to fear becoming a failure as a writer who cannot produce anything worth mentioning apart from one lucky shot. In this creative crisis, which is characterized by melancholy, he turns to Fraenkel in the hope that the doctor will be able to help him. After just a short time, Hesse is impressed by Fraenkel’s talents. On 11th July 1909, hardly a week after the beginning of his treatment in “Villa Hedwig,” he writes to his father: “He tries to get an idea of his patient’s state of mind, partly by direct questions, partly by observation, and tries to define this image as precisely as possible, until he understands his patient’s changes of mood and recognizes where enthusiasm ends and lack of enthusiasm begins […] On this basis, he is capable of comparing similar symptoms and applying his experience.”5 With little input, Fraenkel obviously succeeds in winning Hesse over and in creating an intimacy which is beneficial to the therapy, as Hesse continues: “He sees the beginning of the success or the beginning of the cure in the fact that the patient has come to trust in him, has the feeling that the doctor understands him, and that the ill person—supported by the doctor—learns to see his own state objectively and with peace of mind, which makes it easier to be above the sickness in psychological terms and to overcome it.”6 But Hesse is also suspicious of this closeness which causes him to instinctively distance himself again. He is afraid of unpleasant truths which might come to light during therapy, and this is why he does not reveal all his inner self. His justification for this reserve towards Fraenkel is the apparent intransparency of the artist’s soul in general. He writes to his father: “Of course, in cases such as mine, the exploration and treatment can only be insufficient as this method is still very new. Even the most intelligent doctor cannot fully comprehend and guess what is going on within intellectual persons with refined sensitivity and a complex individuality, especially within artists, poets etc. But the doctors—that is, Fraenkel and his assistants—find such a case all the more interesting, they hope, they will learn while treating me, and I curiously watch their attempts to adequately understand my character and way of life. From the very beginning I did not expect ‘a cure,’ I do not want to change my personality or my soul, but I hope I will learn and achieve a few things in the process.”7 To sum up, one could say: as a writer experienced in observing people, Hesse recognizes Fraenkel’s extraordinary talents at once and adapts to them. With all his open-mindedness, he approaches him in a reserved way and does not let him get too close. Fraenkel’s and Jaspers’ first encounter is completely different. In 1901, at the age of 18, Jaspers starts studying law in Freiburg, and takes the opportunity to go and see Fraenkel in nearby Badenweiler.8 Fraenkel’s

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wife, Erna, comes from a well-respected Oldenburg family, the Thorade family, with whom Jaspers’ family is friends.9 In his autobiographic works, Jaspers describes this visit as a mere courtesy.10 Hans Saner, Jaspers’ last assistant, told me that, years ago, he had come across documents when sorting out Jaspers’ estate, describing that Jaspers’ father had sent his son to Fraenkel. He wanted the doctor to give sex education to his son.11 Be that as it may, the big difference is that Jaspers visits Fraenkel for no particular medical reason, whereas Hesse goes to see him for therapy. This visit would affect the rest of his life. Jaspers, who has always been of poor health, misses his connecting train and is therefore forced to walk the last six kilometres from Müllheim to Badenweiler. He arrives in such an exhausted state that Fraenkel examines him on the spot.12 At first, the diagnosis is devastating: bronchiectasis, a lung disease, which is fatal according to the medical knowledge of that time (Jaspers refers to a paper by Rudolf Virchow13). But Fraenkel makes it clear to him that the disease is not necessarily fatal if he is careful about the way he leads his life. As long as he follows certain rules, he can grow old and be productive at the same time. In view of this far-reaching and extensive diagnosis, Jaspers has a much closer bond to Fraenkel than Hesse from the very start. He really depends on him. After his family doctor in Oldenburg constantly declared that he had recovered, he finally finds in Fraenkel a doctor, who informs him about his real state of health and is honest with him. This causes a closeness of a completely different kind. While Hesse is free to choose his degree of openness towards Fraenkel, Jaspers hands over the responsibility for his life to him, all at once. For him Fraenkel remains an unchallenged authority whose advice he has to follow if he is to master his illness. But being unchallenged does not necessarily mean being infallible. Along with elementary lifestyle rules, Fraenkel prescribes a diet, in order for Jaspers to gain weight and strength. Jaspers perceives this diet to be nothing other than a fattening cure, which stresses him physically and mentally: “In Badenweiler I read scientific and philosophical texts, then novels, finally I turned to newspapers and became lazy without noticing it […] My spiritual life, which had just begun, waned.”14 He is not convinced of the benefit of this diet and questions its sense. Fraenkel insists on it, so that Jaspers starts arguing with him about the right therapy. Knowing that there is no alternative to Fraenkel, he believes the only possibility of therapeutic progress is to have it out openly with him. Consequently, he starts “a fight about the limits of the medical treatment.”15 Jaspers accuses Fraenkel of treating him according to the fashion of the time, by passing dubious diets off as scientific facts without questioning them. “I followed a notion of medicine which was typical for this age. The bourgeoisie tried to turn every

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event into a pleasant experience which was harmful to the spirit. The sanatoriums were designed as a universe for pleasure. This turned them into a form of spiritual life, to which a lot of seriousness and importance was attached, and which was believed to be based on ‘science,’ but carried out without any real scientific justification.”16 The youthful Jaspers is doing nothing other than challenging Fraenkel’s authority as a doctor. He sees his fight over the limits of his medical treatment as a “fight for my liberation from the authoritative form of the doctor’s science.”17 It is obvious that his behaviour towards Fraenkel is quite different from Hesse’s attitude. In terms of the Philosophy of Existence, which Jaspers would develop later in his life, one can say: his relationship with Fraenkel is a “bond created by fate.”18 From the moment Fraenkel informs him about his actual state of health, Jaspers chooses him to be his life long doctor, with all the consequences such a choice entails. Up to this point, I have described the individual situations in which Hesse and Jaspers meet Fraenkel—two situations which could not have been more different. Furthermore, I would like to show how Fraenkel reacts to Hesse and Jaspers. And it is obvious that, due to the differences mentioned above, his behaviour towards Hesse is different from that towards Jaspers. Thus, two sides of his personality come to light. With regard to Hesse, Fraenkel quickly realizes that he is not truly interested in finding out about his inner feelings, because he is afraid that the source of his poetic creativity will dry up once his spiritual conflicts are solved. By taking Hesse’s reserve seriously, Fraenkel realizes what is good for him. He sees that his creative crisis can be overcome by a playful spirituality rather than by coming to terms with traumatic childhood experiences. Hesse is supposed to regain pleasure in writing stories. This is why Fraenkel neither holds analytical sessions with him, in which there are clearly defined roles, nor starts bitter fights, but conducts casual, stimulating conversations with him, which take place partly in his home, “Villa Erna.” When talking to Hesse, Fraenkel, as if unintentionally, seeks to create a cheerful atmosphere in order to free him from his melancholy. He seems to be successful, as Hesse writes to his father: “Yesterday evening I spent several hours as my doctor’s guest, in friendly, lively conversations over dinner and a glass of good wine. In any case, this is a sophisticated human way of curing people!”19 The success of this method becomes apparent during his stay in Badenweiler itself. After just a few days, Hesse writes a literary letter to a fictitious friend,20 which he publishes three years later, in 1912, entitled “A Guest at the Spa” (“Kurgast”), in the magazine “Jugend.” With mocking wit and subtle irony, he paints a picture of the international people attending the Spa

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Badenweiler, which impressively proves how easy he finds writing again. Back in Gaienhofen, he writes the story “House of Peace,” in which he describes his stay in Badenweiler in literary form. Fraenkel appears as the character of “the professor,” an empathetic spirit, who knows his patients’ inner conflict, and consequently the writer Hesse’s problems as well, and knows how much he can or cannot ask of them during therapy. He manages to find the right degree of diagnostic strictness and human warmth towards the individual patient. In this superiority and independence, he is above everyone, not only his patients but also his assistant physicians and employees, and leaves his mark as “spirit of the house”21 on the “Villa Hedwig.” He seems enraptured, unapproachable and irrefutable. Nothing of the above-mentioned can be seen in Fraenkel’s behaviour towards Jaspers. This doctor-patient-relationship is rather characterized by existential seriousness than by a playful spirituality. Being challenged by Jaspers as a medical authority, Fraenkel has to react; shaken in his spiritual superiority, he has to make up his mind whether to defend himself against criticism of his therapy or accept it. Fraenkel chooses the latter. He allows Jaspers to question him and takes up the “fight.” Instead of feeling insulted and turning away, he patiently listens to Jaspers’ objections, even if they are obviously unjustified. By accepting that Jaspers chose him, he proves himself as a reliable partner, to whom Jaspers can turn to for a lifetime. Even though it seems as if Fraenkel, the empathetic spirit, and Fraenkel, the reliable partner, are two different personalities, there is no doubt that Hesse and Jaspers see the same person. However, they each focus on two different sides of his character. Therefore, at the end of this text, we are faced with the difficult question how the two sides are connected. Let me say this much: as empathetic spirit, who, in his superiority and independence, seems to be detached from the rest of the world, Fraenkel is at the service of all his patients alike; as reliable partner in a bond of destiny, he devotes himself to a few patients to such an intensity, that it forces him to compromise himself towards all his other patients. This contradiction cannot be solved, one has to live with it. Fraenkel lived with this contradiction by not accepting it, but by working everyday to the brink of exhaustion to make it more bearable and to ease his conscience as a doctor.22 Translated by Birgit Heintz

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Notes This is the revised version of a lecture held on the 8th October 2004 on the occasion of the memorial event for Albert Fraenkel in the Thoraxklinik Heidelberg. See my “Einfühlsamer Geist und verlässliche Existenz. Der Arzt Albert Fraenkel im Spiegel seiner Patienten Hermann Hesse und Karl Jaspers,” Albert Fraenkel. Ein Arztleben in Licht und Schatten 1864–1938, edited by P. Drings, J. Thierfelder, B. Weidmann and F. Willig (Landsberg 2004), pp. 119-154. 1. See M. Krauß, “Albert Fraenkel und die Gründung des Krankenhauses Speyerershof,” Heidelberg. Jahrbuch zur Geschichte der Stadt 7, 2002, pp. 131-141. 2. H. Hesse, “Haus zum Frieden. Aufzeichnungen eines Herrn im Sanatorium,” Albert Fraenkel. Arzt und Forscher, edited by G. Weiss (Mannheim 1964), p. 47. 3. K. Jaspers, “Brief an Albert Fraenkel vom 1. Juni 1934,” in G. Weiss (ed.), Albert Fraenkel. Arzt und Forscher, op. cit., p. 19. 4. The guest book of “Villa Hedwig” lists him from 3rd to 26th July 1909 [see R. A. Langendörfer, “Albert Fraenkel und Badenweiler,” in P. Drings et al. (eds.), Albert Fraenkel. Ein Arztleben, op. cit., p. 85]; according to the memories of Liselotte Anschütz, Fraenkel’s daughter, Hesse was already present 29th to 31st May 1909, during the three-day re-opening of “Villa Erna” after its renovation; see J. Thierfelder, “Albert Fraenkel. Eine biographische Skizze,” in P. Drings et al. (eds.), Albert Fraenkel. Ein Arztleben, op. cit., p. 72. 5. Letter by Hermann Hesse to Johannes Hesse on 11th July 1909, in H. Hesse’s Gesammelte Briefe, Vol. I, 1895−1921, edited by U. and V. Michels (Frankfurt 1973), p. 159. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. This visit took place at the end of April 1901. In a letter by Albert Fraenkel to Karl Wilhelm Jaspers, Karl Jaspers’ father, on 27th April 1901 he says: “In the middle of the week I had the pleasure of seeing your son Karl in our house.” Quoted according to S. Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers. A Biography (New Haven/London 2004), p. 242. 9. See J. Thierfelder, “Albert Fraenkel. Eine biographische Skizze,” op. cit., p. 27.

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10. K. Jaspers, “Krankheitsgeschichte” (p. 128) and “Ein Selbstporträt” (p. 21), in H. Saner (ed.), Schicksal und Wille. Autobiographische Schriften (München 1967). 11. Oral information by Hans Saner to the author on 13th September 2004 on the occasion of a Jaspers-Symposium in Klingenthal/Elsass. 12. See letter by Karl Jaspers to his parents on 27th April 1901. In Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach am Neckar. Nachlass Jaspers. From 1896 onwards, a steam engine ran between Müllheim and Badenweiler. See R. A. Langendörfer, “Albert Fraenkel und Badenweiler,” op. cit., p. 75. 13. K. Jaspers, “Krankheitsgeschichte,” op. cit., p. 123. 14. K. Jaspers, “Studium 1901-1907. Part I,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Karl-Jaspers-Gesellschaft 9 (edited by H. Saner), 1996, p. 13. 15. K. Jaspers, “Krankheitsgeschichte,” op. cit., p. 131. 16. Ibid., p. 132. 17. Ibid., p. 131. 18. K. Jaspers, Philosophie, Vol. I: Philosophische Weltorientierung (München 1994), p. 126. 19. Letter by Hermann Hesse to Johannes Hesse on 11th July 1909, in Hesse’s Gesammelte Briefe, op. cit., p. 159. 20. Ibid., pp. 154-158. 21. H. Hesse, “Haus zum Frieden,” op. cit., p. 47. 22. Wolfgang Heubner, who worked in 1901 as a stand-in for Fraenkel’s assistant in Badenweiler, writes: “In this summer, Fraenkel was busy from 6 o’clock in the morning until 10 o’clock in the evening. In the few streets of the little village, the brave horse which drew his carriage trotted to and fro. But whenever he sat next to a patient or met one in the street, he found time to patiently listen to the complaints of the depressed or even narrowminded about their physical or spiritual condition or to their troubles and fears. From time to time he complained to me about this loss of time, however, the people who confided in him, never noticed any sign of hurry or impatience. He was deeply filled with his task as a doctor, or simply as ‘father confessor’.” W. Heubner, “Albert Fraenkel,” in G. Weiss (ed.), Albert Fraenkel. Arzt und Forscher, op. cit., 1964, p. 8.

On Gadamer, Phenomenology and Historical Relativism Alon Segev I. Gadamer begins his hermeneutical discussion in Truth and Method1 as well as in The Problem of the Historical Consciousness2 by dealing with our historical existence. The fact that we are always situated in a historical context means that we cannot make use of the abstracting procedures of the natural sciences to deal with our historical situation. Gadamer takes great pain to reinstate other more appropriate attitudes, such as taste, tact, edification, commonsense, dialogue with other traditions, praxis, and application. But Gadamer is also deeply disturbed by the danger of historical relativism. In order to combat what he takes to be a serious peril, he employs phenomenological devices borrowed from Husserl, such as reduction, suspension, intention, the thing-itself, eidetic reduction and eidetic seeing, arrangement (Gebilde), and direct intuition. The realm of meaning to which Gadamer aspires is the one opened up by Husserl: it is the phenomenological field of meaning independent of the influences of both psychological subjectivity and reality. It is what Husserl calls “the thing-itself” (die Sache selbst) and Heidegger “the ontological difference” (die ontologische Differenz). In this paper, I will present two erroneous readings of Gadamer, those of Jürgen Habermas3 and Richard Rorty,4 both of which ignore those phenomenological elements in Gadamer. Habermas accuses Gadamer of conservatism and of having surrendered to traditional norms and consensus. Since Habermas thinks this could be dangerous, he suggests psychoanalysis as a precondition to any dialogue with other people and with tradition. Habermas ignores the epoché and the fact that the suspension and inhibition of tradition is much more radical than psychoanalysis. He does not realize that the consensus is not with the tradition, but with the thing-itself that is achieved through suspension of tradition. He overlooks, furthermore, that Gadamer prefers the “eccentric” language of the poet, e.g., Paul Celan’s, as a means of combating the wellworn normative use of language and the consensus. Rorty claims that the hermeneutic approach overcomes the false traditional conception of mirroring, according to which a sentence is true if

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it mirrors reality correctly. Yet, as Rorty says, it is impossible to mirror anything correctly because we are situated in a historical context of norms and perspectives determined by tradition. In Gadamer’s hermeneutics, Rorty goes on to say, consciousness is no longer a mirroring device. On the contrary, the validity of a sentence is measured by its agreement with other sentences and with our needs. Rorty can arrive at these conclusions only by ignoring the phenomenological components in Gadamer. First of all, Gadamer, following Husserl and Heidegger, thinks that mirroring is both superfluous and secondary, for we have direct access to the thing-itself; secondly, the pragmatic criterion of truth has become invalid after reality has been inhibited; thirdly, Rorty pays no attention to the unconventional use of language Gadamer prefers as a phenomenological means. In what follows, I will suggest that Gadamer uses three stages of phenomenological reduction. The first is the process of experience (Erfahrung), in which we get rid of false and unproductive perspectives that hide the thing-itself. Next he carries out the eidetic reduction in art experience and then continues on to a more “transcendental” reduction, that is, to the faculties constituting meaning. Lastly, he tries to reduce any constituting of meaning to one single insight—the insight of our finitude. My main critique of Gadamer consists of two arguments. The first is that it is not clear that the direct seeing of the thing-itself on the one hand and the praxis on the other could live together in peace. Provided that we have something like the thing-itself, why should we need the praxis in addition? It is also unclear how the perception of the thing-itself could guide our dealing with tradition: looking at something—be it even the thing-itself— could never lead us to any true or false understanding, interpretation, action, and judgment. Secondly, Gadamer claims that the final reduction carried out in art experience is designed to bring us to the last source of any meaning—to our finitude. Can the work of art provide us with this insight? But even if it could, our finitude has so many and diverse meanings that it seems futile to want to reduce it to one sole meaning. Gadamer’s claim that it brings us back to our historicity does not rescue the argument, for history too has innumerable meanings. II. Anyone who has happened to leaf even once through Heidegger’s writings has encountered his recurring slogans regarding our finite and historically determined existence, and with them those regarding our dependence on fate and revelation. Analogously, the reader who throws even a short casual glance at Gadamer’s writings, cannot miss Gadamer’s debt to the “master,” even if he avoids for a moment Gadamer’s repeated laudations of Heidegger. Heidegger sees in our historically dependent

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existence—which means being covered with the impenetrable carapace of deceiving metaphysical and logical prejudices (mostly regarding substance and endless temporality) and with the traditional misconception of our human Dasein—only an obstacle to achieving a clear insight into the core of our existence. He sees the rearing and educating (paideia) of young people as inappropriate means to relate to our finite existence, because they propagate and strengthen those false conceptions. He calls therefore for “overcoming metaphysics” and for a “new non-metaphysical beginning;” an alternative, real, and true understanding of our finite existence should spring from the revelation of Being, not from education. Apocalyptical and eschatological motives hence play a central role in his writings.5 Gadamer, on the contrary, is much clearer and more “decent” in dealing with our finite existence. Although he is not altogether cut off from those prophetic elements, he emphasizes the necessity and indispensability of educating and developing our taste and ability to evaluate and judge.6 And it is no wonder that such a philosophy, which bases everything not on logical arguments and explanations, but rather on a naïve description of the given and on a special state of mind, or basic transformation of our personality and existential attitude—whether it be epoché7 (Husserl) or anxiety (Heidegger) or shock caused by the catastrophe as in the Greek tragedy (Gadamer)—must arrive at those same mystical realms. The fact that we are historically and contextually determined causes Gadamer to discuss an experience of truth that cannot be subjected to the abstracting procedures of the natural sciences—i.e., inductive abstraction and generalization, deductive specification, enumeration, and statistics— but can only be experienced or related to through the humanities and the art experience. Because we cannot dissociate and abstract ourselves from our historically dependent existence, we cannot use the procedures of the natural sciences to deal with the meaning or truth of our life as well as with its “spiritual” expressions and products such as art, history, laws, and religion. It is rather a matter of praxis and experience, of their right application in the right place and time. Our “tools” in approaching spiritual expressions are, therefore, tact, taste, commonsense and cultural dialogue. It is, in one word, a matter of the edification (Bildung) of our non-scientific ability to judge and evaluate the truth of that wide variety of phenomena that cannot be subjected to the abstracting and cumulative procedures of the natural sciences. The rehabilitation and reconstruction of taste and commonsense through edification imply the destruction of the Cartesian ambition to trace back our historical existence to an unhistorical point of view (Hegel, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Droysen, Ranke) or to submit our historical situation to inductive procedures (Hume, Mill, Helmholtz).8

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Our historical situation—i.e., our necessary dependency on prejudices and conventions and, consequently, our limited perspectives—is by no means the epilogue, but rather the prologue, the precondition of any story to be told at all. The historically organized situation is the very start and precondition for any conception and understanding to take place. We could never have started from zero—be it material atoms or neuronal events. According to Heidegger and Gadamer, the traditional contextually organized plexus precedes any skeptical reflection and philosophical doubts and inquiries.9 We could never have started our understanding and interpretation with purely material elements, as Merleau-Ponty claims against Husserl.10 But once we have started to reflect on our condition humaine, we cannot remain apathetic to the problem of historical relativism. Gadamer is deeply concerned by the threat of historical relativism, of the loss of our personal and national responsibility, and consequently of the irrational yielding to historical fate. He puts the point provocatively: some people might suggest, having in mind the horrifying crimes perpetrated during the Second World War, that the great German philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel had become the fetish of the spirit, an escape from the demands and needs of the social reality into irrationalism.11 He mentions also the Lubbe Gesetz of 1933 and its consequences as an example of the wrong and unchecked use and application of juristic language.12 Now, Gadamer tries to combat historical relativism by employing phenomenological devices borrowed from Husserl—partly directly and partly through the mediation of Heidegger and Ingarden.13 Husserl’s discovery consists in opening up a sphere of special ideal meanings. The peculiarity of this sphere is its ontological status: it stems neither from psychological activity as inductive generalization of particulars nor from innate general ideas, but from a constituting act that takes its starting point from the sensual and ends in completed autonomic ideal meaning. Husserl arrives at this sphere of constituting meaning by suspending and inhibiting our specific psychical processes as well as the effects and influences of reality. As we shall see, Gadamer introduces phenomenological suspension into his hermeneutical circular procedure in order to filter detrimental prejudices and convictions. He then inserts it into his dealing with art experience: first as eidetic reduction and eidetic intuition—which are designed to enable us to perceive unmediated ideal entities (the thing-itself) by inhibiting extension-temporal reality as well as reality-relating language—and then by a transcendental reduction designed to arrive at the sense-constituting faculties.

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Gadamer uses means derived directly from Husserl to suspend history and to grasp the thing-itself as “suspension,” “intention” and “intended meaning,” “objective time” and “phenomenological time,” “eidetic reduction” and “unmediated perception.” According to Gadamer, the basic motive of Husserl’s phenomenology is a moral one, namely the problem of how to become a real philosopher or an independent thinker, how to achieve full responsibility for our deeds and statements by supplying full rational justifications.14 Gadamer agrees completely with this moral ideal, but wants to underpin it with the original conception of the sensus communis.15 Since he tries to retrace the path back to Aristotle’s Ethics and the phronesis to commonsense and taste (Geschmack), he must go through Husserl’s phenomenology. In my view, among the numerous theories and authors that Gadamer cites and refers to (Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine), it is Husserl’s phenomenology that has had the greatest influence on his hermeneutics. Without it, we could not understand Gadamer’s philosophy properly as well as his constant reference to art experience. Surprisingly enough, a serious consideration of the phenomenological elements is almost entirely lacking in the secondary literature on Gadamer, with the only exception of the short but well thought out essays of Sokolowski and Theunissen.16 As already hinted above, my ambition to expose the phenomenological elements in Gadamer springs from two misreadings of him—by Habermas and Rorty—that overlook those elements and therefore lead to odd consequences.17 According to Gadamer (and here he follows Heidegger rather than Husserl), the phenomenological reduction cannot discard the fact of our being situated in a cultural and historical context. On the contrary, the phenomenological reduction is only one of many possibilities we have to live with as part of our cultural and historical context, i.e., as being-in-the-world. This means that we can never completely discard our set of prejudices, convictions, habits etc. Nevertheless, we should always strive to free the thing-itself from untrue and distorting perspectives. According to Gadamer, we achieve the suspension of false prejudices and convictions by exposing our own one-sided perspectives to the perspectives of others. We attain it through dialogue with other people and other traditions having different conceptions and opinions regarding the thingitself. The goal and the criterion of the dialogue are the thing-itself, and not the different opinions. Convictions and prejudices are made legitimate or discarded according to their agreement or consensus (Verständigung or Einverständnis) with the thing-itself. It is important to note that this consensus is neither about my convictions and opinions nor about yours. It is by no means traditional conservatism. The consensus is rather about the thing-itself, that is to say, about ideal meaning that, though being

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constituted in the tradition, is still beyond the tradition and “undistorted” by it. Only the perspectives through which we perceive it can be distorted. The thing-itself has a special ontological status—neither of empirical real existence nor of psychological subjectivity.18 We intend or mean general meaning that, having been completed, is detached from our psychical processes as well as from reality. According to Husserl, any expression— be it linguistic or mathematical—must start with psychical processes as well as with objective means as symbols to communicate and render it. But it must end in complete meaning that is above and detached from both. Otherwise we would not be able to communicate. This intention, according to Gadamer, bears necessary reference to other people. As we shall see, in the first stage of the phenomenological suspension we do not at once neutralize all our convictions and prejudices, but rather submit them to a process of examination that Gadamer calls “experience” (Erfahrung). In this process, they are either made legitimate or gradually rejected, but not all at once. Gadamer relates experience to Hegel’s use of it. He emphasizes, however, that the outcome of experience is new and fresh consensual formulation of our historical perspectives regarding the thing-itself, but never absolute knowledge, as is the case with Hegel. Any experience, in other words, opens the way to further experience. Habermas claims against Gadamer that dialogue always carries the danger of being infected with false ideology and pathological complexion.19 This means that the dialogue might be faked and the consensus might be attained by surreptitious enforcement and blackmail. The problem is, as Warnke shows,20 that false ideology does not lie simply in the debris of prejudices and unjustified convictions, but that it is sunk deeper in a silt of “polluted” language.21 For example, the use of the word “freedom” in describing fair trade and exchange of goods between the producers and consumers masks economic relations of coercion and exploitation. Habermas suggests the use of psychoanalysis as a means of clearing up and of freeing us from latent detrimental ideologies and as a necessary precondition to fair dialogue.22 The mental cure, bringing the patient to self-reflection and to the recognition of his latent distorted drives, enables him to engage in fair dialogue.23 The first and most trivial question that comes to mind at this point is whether psychoanalysis itself cannot be considered as part of a false and detrimental ideology. (As Sokolowski shows in his excellent introduction to phenomenology, there is indeed only one little step from psychology to biologism!)24 Phenomenological reduction suspends any active attitude toward reality in order to focus on ideal meaning which is neither subjective nor stems from reality (the thing-itself); for that purpose, it also inhibits the ostensive

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function of language. It turns out that phenomenological reduction is much more radical and comprehensive than psychoanalysis. This phenomenological and hermeneutical attitude cannot be dangerous after having suspended any active relation to reality!25 At the same time, psychoanalysis becomes futile after we have carried out the phenomenological reduction. Anybody who has even once been engaged in philosophical dialogue knows that it cannot take place “on the couch,” after the authoritative hierarchy of doctor and patient has been fixed prior to the discussion. The hierarchy sways only between better and worse arguments: it is never a frozen hierarchy, but a dynamic one in which the pack must always be reshuffled. Habermas’ ambition turns out to be itself infected with dogmatism. As Descartes says, commonsense (our healthy reason) is granted equally to all: le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée. At least rational people engaged in rational philosophical investigation can achieve truth without the aid of the headshrinker. Rorty’s reading of Gadamer is also based on disregarding phenomenological motives in Gadamer. Rorty holds that the history of Western philosophy shows that the aim of philosophy has always been that of reflecting or “mirroring” reality as it is. According to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, we are always situated in tradition and can never see the things as they really are: as a consequence, consciousness cannot longer serve as a mirroring instrument;26 the standard of truth cannot be the correct representation, but is rather a pragmatic matter in which truth is equal to successful conversation, so that agreement can be achieved. The value of the argument is measured by its profit: for Rorty the achieved consensus of well amalgamated different perspectives (Horizontverschmelzungen) is the sole standard of truth.27 The disregard of prominent phenomenological elements in Gadamer’s writings is the causes of Rorty’s misunderstanding of his hermeneutics. In particular, Rorty leaps over important stages in the history of philosophy. Following Husserl and Heidegger, Gadamer thinks that we do not need representation or mirroring to mediate between us and other things: it is superfluous because we have an unmediated access to the essence of things (the thing-itself).28 As a matter of fact, this thesis is so central and essential to Gadamer’s doctrines in Truth and Method and in other texts29—in fact, all his art conception is based on it—that Rorty must have skipped the bulk of Gadamer’s writings on the way to his conclusions. Representation and mirroring still play an essential role in Gadamer, yet not as the passive mirroring of reality, but as an active constituting of something as representative, as a symbol of something else. Moreover, Rorty’s pragmatic standard becomes invalid after reality has been suspended.

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Both Habermas and Rorty, ignoring Gadamer’s phenomenological heritance, brush aside the fact that communication and agreement is not the sole function assigned by Gadamer to language. Gadamer, in dealing with Celan’s hermetic poetry, gives clear precedence to poetical eccentric language as a phenomenological means to demolish the well-worn and dull traditional uses in order to arrive at the things-themselves.30 In fact, their conclusions are very similar. The difference is that Habermas thinks that consensus might be dangerous, and Rorty hails it. The turn towards psychoanalysis and pragmatism presupposes that philosophizing, understood as a serious procedure to check the validity and truth of arguments, has failed. Now, this defeatism is far away from Gadamer’s optimistic belief in the truth of the humanities and of philosophy, as well as from his pathos in defending them. Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics might have fallen short of its huge ambitions, as I actually believe it to be the case. Nevertheless, one should first have understood what is at stake. III. We know that Heidegger ties his pretentious enterprise—to ask about the meaning of Being for the first time in the history of the Western civilization—to Husserl’s phenomenology.31 In eulogizing Husserl, Heidegger has in mind the unmediated perception that Husserl had introduced in his Logical Investigations. His main disagreement with Husserl on the nature of the epoché and the agent who carries it out leads him to a different conception of phenomenology. While Husserl strives to lead every meaning back to the pure “unworldly” subject by inhibiting any relation to the world (as culture and history), Heidegger claims that putting in brackets and carrying out epoché do not exhaust the wide range of possibilities of the human Dasein to be in the world of praxis and tradition.32 This insight directs Heidegger to Aristotle. Heidegger isolates and emphasizes a dubious reference in Aristotle’s Ethics33 where he finds intellectual direct perception (nous) active in practical know-how (phronesis). Figal points out correctly that this undermines Aristotle’s distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge, but that this is the only way to approach Heidegger’s Being and Time.34 I must disagree on this point. For this pairing of the intellectual direct perception and the practical know-how must backfire also on the hermeneuticalphenomenological flank: it is by no means clear in what way the intellectual perception of the thing-itself on the one hand and praxis (i.e., hermeneutical procedure) on the other could be related without destroying each other. Could any real insightful access to the thing-itself leave even a tiny room for a practical trial-and-error method?

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It is also by no means clear how an insight into the thing-itself could lead to an understanding of something and guarantee a safe and correct application (Anwenden) of it: that is to say, gazing at something—and be it even the thing-itself—entails by no means that we understand it. Understanding something implies a wide complex of abilities and techniques: to identify similarities and to react to it properly in different situations, to be able to explain, to justify, and to give a reasonable account of what I am doing, etc. It necessitates, of course, a “sense” of reality; the way things are produced, organized or adapted reflects our sensual, physical, and mental condition and our capacities. It requires, however, no recourse to the thing-itself. And it is furthermore entirely logically and sound to assume that, even if we had something like unmediated perception of the thing-itself, we could conduct a moral and reasonable life in accordance with it without having any clue of it. In addition, after this direct intellectual perception has been joined with practical know-how, talking about our finite historical situation and perspectives (in comparison to God) becomes ambiguous: on a higher philosophical level, it will come up against the problem of solipsism. I can find, therefore, no real philosophical benefit in combining these two elements. As we shall see, Gadamer, following Heidegger, is involved in even greater absurdities, since he claims that the most basic content of direct perception is our finitude. I have no knowledge of any adequate treatment of this problematic by Heidegger, and it seems that Gadamer took this mixture of direct intellectual perception and practical know-how for granted without working out the difficulties properly.35 Now, anyone who does not lose heart and follows Heidegger in division two of Being and Time (starting from §45) knows that the praxis is by no means the end and the aim of the story. On the contrary, the hectic process of action and production should be suspended and inhibited for the sake of a clear intuition of truth. The pragmatic reading of Being and Time misses the point altogether.36 The praxis Gadamer introduced is designed to remedy severe problems in the way Husserl carries out the phenomenological procedure. And yet, overcoming our automatic thoughtless daily dealings with their gossip and chat is no less important; this overcoming is designed to combat false traditional conceptions and bring us back to the thing-itself. Gadamer commences his treatment of our historical conception by destroying the false conceptions of our historical context. Their error, Gadamer says, lies in treating history as if it were an object of natural science, as if we could remain indifferent to it, free from the traditional prejudices and perspectives that make up our finite existence.

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Gadamer rejects the application of the Cartesian method to history and the humanities.37 In Truth and Method as well as in The Problem of the Historical Consciousness, the Cartesian ideal applied to history would have two main outcomes. (1) The ambition to trace history back to one unhistorical principle or scheme. This ambition is related first to Hegel,38 and then to Dilthey, Droysen,39 Ranke,40 and Schleiermacher.41 It would lead to negating our historical situation that consists of the incessant play of known and unknown, of endless encounter with the new and reformulation of the old. (2) Inductive generalization (Hume, Mill, and Helmholz). This attitude is wrong because it irons out any peculiarity (Besonderheit) and uniqueness (Einzigartigkeit) by subsuming them under general laws.42 Encountering and coming upon the peculiarity and uniqueness make up our historical situation. Gadamer calls it “experience” (Erfahrung). It means coming upon our historically confined context through confrontation with new and foreign perspectives, which results in new and fresh reformulation of our historical perspectives of the thing-itself. Such an encounter imports and incorporates new and productive insights into our world-view and helps us to get rid of false and unproductive insights. The experience can take place only in the manner of a fair dialogue. Only if we give the new perspectives the credit of being true—of having something new to tell us—we can bring about productive reformulation and enrichment of our historical context.43 Of course, all this sounds very familiar, having being repeated and discussed ad nauseam: anybody who attends philosophical conferences knows that difference, the other, otherness and the like are the “sexiest” way to appeal to the public. The most enthusiastic representative of this trend is perhaps Sallis: bemoaning the destruction of the Jewish ghetto in Prague and its becoming a tourist site, he claims that assimilating is no less oppressive than ghettoizing people. We need therefore a “different logic,” i.e., a logic of difference!44 The other is a specific me, having a name, parents, experiences, pains and pleasures. It is therefore by no means nonsense to deal with particularity in disciplines as history, literature, psychology or sociology. Talk about the other becomes, however, claptrap if it is introduced as an a-priori law or in the name of a “logic of difference,” namely, as a principle that is indifferent and immune to the other as a specific me and you. I am therefore in complete accord with Sartre when he criticizes Heidegger for fixing the “otherness” as an a-priori principle in Being and Time.45 At least at the present point of our discussion, Gadamer is exempt of the otherness-baloney, because the other is not his goal, but the ideal and identical thing-itself: “It is the task of philosophy to find the common even

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in the difference.”46 The other can only be human expression—be it text, tradition, other people. Hence the other must be non-instrumental (we should give him and his perspectives the credit of being right), but it is still a phenomenological means. In encountering new perspectives, we can get rid of those unproductive and false perspectives that shadow the thingitself. In other words, it is not my or your private matter that we strive to achieve, but the thing-itself.47 The thing-itself rules the discussion or the dealing with the tradition, and not my or your caprices. I must admit that the talk about the thing-itself is enigmatic. The problem will not be solved, but we shall see Gadamer later providing an explanation of how we intend the thing-itself. The point is that Gadamer, while admitting our historicity, strives to combat historical relativism by introducing ideal meaning. Because we are historically situated and conditioned, our understanding commences always with prejudices and axioms. As we come to understand and interpret something, we project in advance some general meaning onto the text (or on any other human expression). Our understanding is circular, but it is not a vicious one. The particulars of the text are understood in light of the projected whole (Vollkommenheit), but they always reveal something new. They compel us therefore to reformulate and refine the projected whole. Gadamer calls this process the “hermeneutical circle”. It is the phenomenological procedure of bracketing (Einklammerung)48 our prejudices and axioms and clearing (Bereinigung)49 our sight in order to be able to direct it to the thing-itself. But the question is: what is this thing-itself? It is a general idea or meaning that we cannot lead back either to our psychological system or to reality or to God. We can try to explain what Gadamer means by it in pointing to any kind of communication and understanding. It would be impossible to communicate or to use mathematical sentences, if the meaning led back either to the subjective psychical process of the speaker or to the particular material appearance of the symbols, if it were reduced to a “private language.” I must admit, however, that it is still unclear what the philosophical gain of this enigmatic thing-itself in accounting for communication and meaning is supposed to be. Why is praxis not good enough? It should be, as I have said, a device to combat historical relativism. But one should have worked out this device better in order to use it productively. This thesis will be treated in more details as we continue in the next paragraph to the intention of meaning. IV. There are two more radical phenomenological reductions that Gadamer practices on art experience. The question is why Gadamer chooses the art

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experience to practice more radical reductions than he has already carried out with “experience.” Gadamer replies in the following passage: Husserl’s fine remark—that in aesthetics the eidetic reduction is fulfilled spontaneously, insofar as the “position,” i.e., setting [=relating or assigning real existence to something] is suspended—is only half-true. Husserl speaks there about “neutrality-modification.” If I say now, pointing to the window: “see the house there,” then anybody who follows my pointing will see the house there as the fulfillment of what I say when he looks at it. But when a poet describes a house with his words or causes us to “imagine” a house, we, on the contrary, do not look at some particular house, but everybody has “his” house-fantasy, yet even so, that “the house” is there for him. This is eidetic reduction at work. It is the generality of the house which is given with the words as a spontaneous “intention-fulfillment.” In this sense the word here is “true,” i.e., uncovering. It achieves that self-fulfillment. The positive, the set [the real existing], that is, what one can encounter also somewhere else and so prove whether our statement corresponds to it—all this is suspended in the poetic word […] The fulfillment that is achieved through the word surpasses any comparison with the [existing] something that could also be there and it elevates the said above the particularity which we usually call “reality.” It is indisputable that it does it, i.e., that we do not look at the confirming world, but we rather build up the poem world within the poem.50

Eidetic reduction is a procedure that is meant to lead us to perceiving the essences of things.51 It lies on the “third floor” above similarity given in experience and inductive generalization. On the first level, we experience similarity between particulars: we find, for example, that this piece of wood floats, and that piece of wood floats as well. This similarity can be called “typicality.” We can symbolize it so: A is p1, B is p2, C is p3… On the second level, we see that different subjects can have the same predicate, and we can symbolize it so: A is p, B is p, C is p… This is empirical generalization. On the third level, we ascend to the realm of imagination— to the eidetic universals, to predicates that must belong necessarily to the subject. We achieve those predicates by playing with our imagination and perceiving the predicates without which the subject would cease to be what it is. The point is that we achieve it with no recourse to reality. Gadamer’s favourite example is the staircase from which Smerdjakow fell down in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.52 Whoever reads the book, Gadamer says, means the same staircase. It would be completely futile to look for verification either in reality—namely, to ask whether this staircase corresponds to any real staircase in the world—or in the state of mind of different readers and the author, that is, to ask whether they have the same idea or not. Because we can intend the very same meaning without leading it back either to some objective qualities or texture or to a specific psychological condition, we can translate and enjoy reading the

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novel in other languages.53 Gadamer amplifies his argument by distinguishing between the three following modes of speaking, each necessarily relating to reality. (1) Promise (Zusage): the speaker refers the person to something that is promised. (2) Decree (Ansage): the law commands the person to obey to something. (3) Statement (Aussage): as given in the court (sworn or written), should reflect the truth perfectly.54 The poetical word, on the contrary, rejects any verification or comparison with the reality. It brings the meaning forward without any recourse and regard to reality.55 These teachings of Gadamer are not unproblematic. In the first place, it is entirely improbable that we could achieve eidetic intuition only by means of the imagination. In eidetic reduction we are not conjuring up something haphazardly and arbitrarily. The thing appears in open yet strictly determined horizons and in relation to other objects. Hence I cannot see how we could carry out eidetic reduction without referring to order and organization existing in reality. Secondly, by inserting that problematic into the art experience, Gadamer must have presumed a special (mimetic) relationship between art and reality: this is taken for granted but left unexplained. As we will see toward the conclusion of our discussion, Gadamer links the art experience to reality in a very strange way: he leads the art experience back to the insight of our finitude. Thirdly, there is a wide group of belletristic works where eidetic reduction would simply never work. I mean all those works in which you cannot avoid reference to their untranslatable material elements and texture—such as the form of writing and ordering the words, the definite number of syllables and acoustic effects. (Gadamer himself took great pains to interpret Celan’s hermetic poems.) Fourthly, Gadamer presupposes here only one naïve way of practical verification through comparison with reality in distinguishing the eidetic procedure. But we have at our disposal in fact many ways to compare something with “reality” and to find out whether it is correct or not. For example, the practice I use to find out whether geographical instructions given in a map are correct is different from the practice I use to find out whether someone has understood The Brothers Karamazov, or whether the translation I read is correct. All the phenomenological components mentioned above remain in the background while Gadamer is carrying out a more radical (“transcendental”) kind of reduction. In Truth and Method as well as in The Actuality of Beauty, Gadamer focuses more upon our intention and

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constituting of this sense (the thing-itself) in dealing with art experience and adds to this the suspension of the extensional-temporal factors of reality. Gadamer arrives at his own point of view by the destruction of two false views of art experience. The first view tears art experience away from its historical context and leads the experience of it back to the (creating as well as enjoying) subject (Kant and Schiller).56 The second view leads the art experience to the object—to the material components that make up the original object or text.57 Gadamer classifies these two false views under the rubric of “aesthetic difference” (ästhetische Unterscheidung), because they detach both the subject and the object from their historical traditional context and from the thing-itself. Both views fail to explain the identity— and not the “continuity,” as Gadamer puts it wrongly in Truth and Method—of art experience, that is to say, its being intended as the same work in innumerable performances, duplicates, recordings, perspectives. They fail to allow for that identity because they first detach the “art-object” from its historical context and then lead it back either to subjective or to objective elements. They discard in this way two indispensable elements, the historical context in which the work is created (as well as received and performed) and the phenomenological intention of the thing-itself. Gadamer wants to solve the identity problem by coupling again those two opposing elements, praxis or application on the one hand and phenomenological suspension and perceiving the thing-itself on the other. He brings them together by working out the components making up “game” or “play” (Spiel). The “practical” side of the game consists in its being played and applied. We need of course a human subject to play a game and an object to be used in the game, e.g., a ball or the cards. But the essence of the game, Gadamer goes on, is neither the subject who has lost in the game his mundane role and personality, nor the object that consists of a body of rules and tools being used in the game.58 On the contrary, their very being consists in ceasing abruptly to be what they have been in the daily life and in turning into the dynamic of game. This sudden turn into the dynamic of the game is called “transformation into arrangement” (Verwandlung ins Gebilde).59 By “transformation” Gadamer means that there is no gradual change taking place on an unchangeable substrate, but a sudden loosing of the daily ontological status and its turning into an absolutely new one. The game has medial sense, as Gadamer emphasizes.60 There is neither a passive subject and an active object nor an active subject and a passive object, but an “happening.” The game gives Gadamer the chance to look into the pure meaning without tracing it back either to the subject or to the object. “We are asking instead about the being of the game as such.”61 As he also puts it, “[t]he real subject of the game […] is not the player, but the game itself.”62

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The question is as to what gives the game its identity after the substrate— be it subject or object—has been completely discarded. Here we encounter the phenomenological element of his theory: the intention of arranged meaning. Gadamer’s term arrangement (Gebilde) is borrowed from Husserl’s Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness.63 The arrangement is something that comes to stand in the endless disarranged stream of consciousness. The arrangement constitutes itself in this stream. It achieves autonomic status to which everyone has access, exactly as in the case of the mathematical sentence 2×2=4. Gadamer uses ancient Greek terminology to extend this thesis: like the ergon, it lies completed beyond the process of power (dunamis) and its realization (energeia).64 As free creatures we have the ability to conjure up something, put something forth, present it to ourselves—even as obligatory—without the constraints and the prescriptions of the causal order. We can act, in other words, without purpose of gain, profit, or advantage, i.e., purely (zweckfrei). This is the basis of Kant’s moral philosophy as well as Husserl’s epoché and constitution theory. This ability makes the game possible: we put forth tasks and goals, and their performance and achievement constitute the dynamic of the game. In this manner, Gadamer says, we bring the meaning of game to stand there as identical, as repeatable. Our intentional relating to these goals and tasks, our constituting the meaning of game, is referred to as to display (Darstellen). We intend the meaning by displaying it. The displaying constitutes the meaning of the game and shifts the attention of the players and the audiences from the object and the subject and refers them to the meaning of what is being played or performed. It brings them to share and to be led by the same meaning, by the thing-itself. In playing Oedipus Rex, for example, the performer intends to display the meaning of the story, causing the audience to direct his attention to it rather than to the performer’s personality and technical abilities. Gadamer now takes on the task of explaining how we intend and relate to pure meaning, to the arrangement instead of to its transmitters and bearers, that is, to the subjects and objects involved. To realize this end, Gadamer uses the game and the displaying. It is true that, in festivals or rodeos, the involvement and participation in the happening and the displaying are global and encompassing. They can perfectly fulfill the displaying as well as the detachment from the mundane because they are bacchantic. Gadamer’s explanation, however, does not work in all cases. In fact, it works only in a very few. In theatre performances or in concerts, the artist should be very careful and accurate in rendering the text or the notes, in the

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exercise of technical abilities (the objective elements), while the audience on its part cannot help noting technical flaws and mistakes. It is true that when we are fully absorbed in the hearing of a concert or in the reading of a book we are detached from our daily existence. What remains is only the played (das Gespielte).65 But it is also true that a good and devoted craftsman is detached from his daily distractions (profit and advances included) while he is working, as Gadamer himself admits.66 He turns to “reality” to see whether his product works, exactly in the same way as the interpreter returns to the original text and notes, though the method they use in referring it to reality is different. I am not contending that we kill time in the concert hall by counting how many notes each bar contains and how many mistakes were made in the performance. But I cannot agree with Gadamer when he claims that this ideal meaning, i.e., the thing itself, is a necessary standard that enables us to judge whether the interpretation was right or wrong. It demands rather that both the artist and the audience master the various techniques of performance as well as those of attending and evaluating. I have said above that the relation between the ideal meaning (the thingitself) and the actual performance is not a clear one. Evaluating the quality of a work of art depends on mastering a wide range of cultural praxis (e.g., respect, identification of something as art), so as to treat it and react to it properly. I cannot see what philosophical benefit there could be in introducing the thing-itself here. For Gadamer, the art experience suspends physical daily routine and makes us concentrate on phenomenological time.67 This is the time of the festival when we do not count the minutes and are not disturbed by the task to be fulfilled in the future. We are simply there, being immersed in one long-spanning present.68 Only in this phenomenological time we have access to the thing-itself and to its constitution in displaying (Darstellen). Husserl’s isolated ego has brought Heidegger and Gadamer to the historical context, to the know-how mastery (phronesis). Gadamer makes wide use of phenomenological instruments—reduction, suspension, intention, the thing-itself, eidetic reduction, arrangement, direct intuition— to combat historical relativism. This brings him first to the historical experience and to the hermeneutical circle, where false prejudices and convictions are suspended. It leads him next to deal with art experience, where eidetic reduction takes place and enables him to isolate meaning from subject and object. The identity of meaning was also a problem for Hegel, Dilthey, Hume, and Mill as well as for the aesthetical doctrines that tried to trace back the meaning either to the subject or to the object. Gadamer argues that the phenomenological reduction enables him to regain

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the identity of meaning, having lost both in the hectic round of daily life as well as in false philosophical conceptions. As we have seen, Gadamer takes the eidetic reduction one step forward to the constitution of meaning, i.e., to the displaying. This is, however, only the penultimate step of his phenomenological odyssey. I have suggested that eidetic seeing, conceived independently of reality and experience, is ambiguous. In inserting this problematic into art experience, Gadamer had to presume an ambiguous mimetic relation between art and reality, yet he fails to pay attention to this problematic. He remains faithful to his theory and insists that art experience can show us the true meaning of things in reality, a meaning that was lost in daily dealings and concerns. Let me conclude my argument by showing where this credulity leads him. V. Gadamer claims that in art experience we recognize and regain the truth of reality. His thesis begins with the receiver: not every audience can experience the truth of reality in art, but only those who are really interested. The distinction between the one who only wants fun and distraction (der Neugierde) in the theatre and the one who attends it out of pure interest is a suspicious one.69 Reasonable arguments as well as artistic truths are not the exclusive property of the intellectual elite or of connoisseurs. They must “work” and compel everybody. Gadamer uses the Greek tragedy to show how the “authentic” audience becomes acquainted with true realities. The disasters befalling Oedipus arouse within us both panic (phobos) and compassion (eleos). Overwhelmed by this tragic mood, we receive a direct perception of our finite being. The direct perception of our finitude is the most basic of all, all other perceptions of the thingsthemselves are founded on this basic perception of our finitude. As Gadamer writes, [i]t is a true [re]unification which is experienced in this excess of tragic disaster. The audience recognizes himself and his finite existence in the face of the power of fate.70

In other words, only in face of the tragic events befalling Oedipus do we experience our finitude and reunite with it after it has become lost, broken up into fragments in the hectic activities of daily life. Gadamer’s thesis is scarcely believable. First of all, no one needs to be reminded that he will pass away one day. Certainly, people suffering and dying of severe diseases must be closer to their finitude than the audience attending Oedipus Rex in the theatre. Secondly, the encounter with finitude has innumerable expressions and meanings. It is therefore absurd to want to trace it back to one single insight of finitude. This is exactly the absurdity

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of the otherness-doctrine that I have denounced above, that we cannot explain it by generalization and abstraction. It will reject, in other words, any eidetic or other kinds of reduction! Thirdly, even if all Gadamer wants to say is that in the face of the tragedy we see anew that we are finite and situated in history and tradition,71 his doctrine makes no better sense, for being situated in a historical and traditional context can be reflected through innumerable other expressions and meanings.

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Notes 1. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. I (Tübingen 1990). 2. H. G. Gadamer, Das Problem des historischen Bewußtseins (Tübingen 2001). 3. J. Habermas, “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik,” Hermeneutik und Dialektik, Aufsätze I, Methode und Wissenschaft, Lebenswelt und Geschichte, edited by R. Bubner, K. Kramer and R. Wiehl (Tübingen 1970), pp. 73-103. 4. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton 1979); “Sein, das verstanden warden kann, ist Sprache,” Sein, das verstanden warden kann, ist Sprache. Hommage an Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt 2001), pp. 30-49. 5. A. Segev, “Phenomenological Return to Religion: Heidegger and Benjamin,” forthcoming in Phenomenological Inquiry 29, and “Gadamers Begriff der Zeit,” Existetia Meletai Sophias 13, 2003, pp. 133-141. 6. A. Segev, “Logic of Question and Answer and the Limit of Phenomenological Reduction: Collingwood, Heidegger, Gadamer,” forthcoming in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. 7. “Vielleicht wird es sich sogar zeigen, dass die totale phänomenologische Einstellung und die ihr zugehörige Epoché zunächst wesensmäßig eine völlige personale Wandlung zu erwirken berufen ist, die zu vergleichen wäre zunächst mit einer religiösen Umkehrung, die aber darüber hinaus die Bedeutung der größten existentiellen Wandlung in sich birgt, die der Menschheit als Menschheit aufgegeben ist.” E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Enleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. VIII, edited by E. Ströker (Hamburg 1992), §§35, 140, my italics. Compare D. Bell, Husserl (London 1990), pp. 161ff. 8. For a concise summary see H. G. Gadamer’s Das Problem, op. cit., 2001. 9. See H. Dreyfus’ lecture on the topic: “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophy Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Experience,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79.2, 2005, pp. 47-65.

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10. See D. Bell, Husserl, op. cit., 1990, pp. 173ff. And compare H. Dreyfus, Overcoming, op. cit. 11. H. G. Gadamer, “Das Verhältnis der Philosophie zu Kunst und Wissenschaft,” Kleine Schriften, op. cit., Vol. I (Tübingen 1967), pp. 22. 12. H. G. Gadamer, “Über den Beitrag der Dichtkunst bei der Suche nach der Wahrheit,” Kleine Schriften, op. cit., Vol. IV (Tübingen 1977), p. 74. 13. H. G. Gadamer, “Die phänomenologische Bewegung,” Kleine Schriften, op. cit., Vol. III (Tübingen 1972), pp. 165ff. 14. H. G. Gadamer, “Die Wissenschaft von der Lebenswelt,” Kleine Schriften, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 194. 15. H. G. Gadamer, Die Wissenschaft, op. cit., p. 201. 16. R. Sokolowski, “Gadamer’s Theory of Hermeneutics,” The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. XXIV, edited by L. E. Hahn (Chicago 1997), pp. 223-234. M. Theunissen, “Philosophische Hermeneutik als Phänomenologie der Traditionsaneignung,” Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache, op. cit., pp. 61-88. 17. For concise and precise presentation of both readings see G. Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Cambridge 1987), pp. 107-174. 18. “Wir sagen zwar, dass wir ein Gespräch ‘führen’, aber je eigentlicher ein Gespräch ist, desto weniger liegt die Führung desselben in dem Willen des einen oder anderen Gesprächspartner.” Gadamer, Wahrheit, op. cit., p. 387. “Es ist wie beim wirklichen Gespräch, dass die gemeinsame Sache es ist, die die Partner, hier den Text und den Interpreten, miteinander verbindet” (ibid., p. 391). 19. “Der Anwendungsbereich der Hermeneutik deckt sich, solange nur die pathologischen Fälle ihrem Zugriff entzogen sind, mit den Grenzen normaler umgangsprachlicher Kommunikation. Das Selbstverständnis der Hermeneutik kann erst dann erschüttert werden, wenn sich zeigt, dass Muster systematisch verzerrter Kommunikation auch in der ‘normalen,’ sagen wir: in der pathologisch unauffälligen Rede wiederkehren.” (J. Habermas, Der Universalitätsanspruch, op. cit., p. 84.) 20. G. Warnke, Gadamer, op. cit., pp. 115ff. 21. J. Habermas, Der Universalitätsanspruch, op. cit., p. 99. 22. Ibid., p. 87. 23. Ibid., p. 95.

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24. R. Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (New York 2000), pp. 112ff. 25. Compare M. Theunissen: “Gadamer gibt vom traditionsaneigenden Verstehen eine rein phänomenologische Deskription. Zum ‘hermeneutischen Phänomen’ wird es in dem starken Sinne, dass es einer Reduktion verfällt, die Seinssetzungen einklammert. Dies verrät übrigens, wie unangemessen es ist, dass Kritiker gewöhnlich so tun, als ginge es Gadamer um eine Sanktionierung der Tradition. Phänomenologisch reduziert ist Verstehen in Wahrheit und Methode auch infolge einer Beschränkung auf die bestimmten Traditionen, an denen jemand schon vor der Reflexion seines Tuns gearbeitet hat. Von alledem zeugt Gadamers Bekenntnis zur transzendentalen Phänomenologie Husserls.” (“Philosophische Hermeneutik,” op. cit., p. 62.) 26. R. Rorty, Philosophy, op. cit., pp. 357ff. “We must get the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of our speech altogether. To do that we have to understand speech not only as not externalizing of inner representations, but as not a representation at all. We have to drop the notion of correspondence for sentences as well as for thoughts, and see sentences as connected with other sentences rather than with the world. We have to see the term ‘corresponds to how things are’ as an automatic compliment paid to successful discourse rather than as a relation to be studied and aspired to throughout the rest of discourse” (ibid., pp. 371372). 27. R. Rorty, Sein, op. cit., pp. 46-47. 28. Gadamer defines theoria as being with the thing-in-itself without the mediating subject. See Wahrheit, op. cit., 129ff. 29. Especially H. G. Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen: Kunst als Spiel, Symbol und Fest (Stuttgart 1979). 30. Compare Gadamer on Celan: “Who am I and Who are You?” and Other Essays, translated and edited by R. Heinemann and B. Krajewski, with an Introduction by G. L. Brunes (Albany 1977); A. Segev, “Optimism and Pessimism in Gadamer’s Celanbook,” Phainomena, Vol. 51-52. 31. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübigen 1993), p. 38. 32. For detailed discussion of phenomenology and the epoché see A. Segev, “Logic,” op. cit. 33. Aristotle, Ethics, 1141a 16-20 34. G. Figal, Heidegger zur Einführung (Hamburg 1996), pp. 56ff. 35. See H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit, op. cit., pp. 129ff.

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36. For example, R. Brandom’s, The Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, Mass., 2002) and Dreyfus, Being-In-the-World (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 37. H. G. Gadamer, Das Problem, op. cit., pp. 10ff. 38. “Aber bedeutet die geschichtliche Seinsweise unseres Bewußtseins nicht eine unüberwindliche Grenze? Hegel löste das Problem durch die Aufhebung der Geschichte im absoluten Wissen.” (Ibid., pp. 18ff.) 39. Ibid., pp. 20ff. 40. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit, op. cit., p. 213. 41. H. G. Gadamer, Das Problem, op. cit., p. 25. 42. Ibid., pp. 12ff. “Das wahre Ziel der historischen Forschung ist—selbst dann, wenn sie allgemeine Erkenntnisse benutzt—viel eher, ein historisches Phänomen in seiner Besonderheit und Einzigartigkeit zu verstehen. Was die historische Erkenntnis interessiert, ist nicht zu wissen, wie sich Menschen im allgemeinen entwickeln, sondern im Gegenteil, wie dieser Mensch, dieses Volk, dieser Staat das geworden ist, was er oder es ist” (ibid., p. 13, my emphasis). 43. “Nur an anderen lernen wir uns selbst wahrhaft kennen. Darin liegt nun, dass geschichtliche Erkenntnis nicht notwendig zur Auflösung der Tradition führen muss, in der wir stehen. Sie kann sie auch bereichern, verändern, bestätigen, kurz, zur eigenen Identitätsfindung beitragen” (ibid., p. 4.). 44. J. Sallis, Stone (Bloomington 1994), pp. 26-27. 45. J. P. Sartre, L’être et le néant—essai d`ontologie phénoménologique (Paris 1943), p. 304. 46. H. G. Gadamer, Die Aktualität, op. cit., p. 15. 47. “Jede Begegnung mit den anderen bedeutet daher ‘Aussetzung’ der eigenen Vorurteile, ob es sich dabei um einen anderen Menschen handelt, an dem man sich kennen und begrenzen lernt, oder um die Begegnung mit einem Werk der Kunst […] oder mit einem Text: es ist immer noch etwas mehr verlangt, als das andere zu ‘verstehen.’ Es handelt sich nicht nur darum, dass man den anderen ‘versteht’—es liegt immer auch eine weitergehende Zumutung darin. Wie eine unendliche Idee ist darin eine ‘transzendente Kohärenzforderung’ impliziert, die im Ideal der Wahrheit liegt.” (H. G. Gadamer, Das Problem, op. cit., p. 5; my italics.) 48. Ibid., p. 52. 49. Ibid., p. 49. 50. H. G. Gadamer, Über den Beitrag, op. cit., pp. 76-77 (my translation).

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51. I am following here the presentation of R. Sokolowski, Introduction, op. cit., pp. 177-184. 52. H. G. Gadamer, Über den Beitrag, op. cit., pp. 75ff; Die Aktualität, op. cit. 53. H. G. Gadamer, Über den Beitrag, op. cit., p. 76. 54. Ibid., pp. 74ff. 55. Ibid., pp. 75ff. 56. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit, op. cit., pp. 87ff. 57. Ibid., pp. 91ff. 58. Ibid., p. 108. 59. Ibid., pp. 116ff. 60. Ibid., p. 111. 61. Ibid., p. 108 (my translation). 62. Ibid., p. 112 (my translation). 63. E. Husserl, Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (Tübingen 2000), pp. 486-490. 64. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit, op. cit., pp. 116ff. 65. Ibid., p. 117. 66. Ibid., pp. 129ff. 67. “Was sich da vor ihm abspielt, ist für einen Jeden so herausgehoben aus den fortgehenden Weltlinien und so zu einem selbständigen Sinnkreis zusammengeschlossen, dass sich für niemanden ein Hinausgehen auf irgeneine andere Zukunft und Wirklichkeit motiviert. Der Aufnehmende ist in eine absolute Distanz verwiesen, die ihm jede praktische, zweckvolle Anteilnahme verwehrt.” (Ibid., p. 133; my italics.) 68. Ibid., pp. 128ff. A. Segev, “Gadamers,” op. cit. 69. H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit, op. cit., p. 131. 70. Ibid., p. 137 (my translation). 71. “Die eigentliche Erfahrung it diejenige, in der sich der Mensch seiner Endlichkeit bewußt wird […] Eigentliche Erfahrung ist somit Erfahrung der eigenen Geschichtlichkeit.” (Ibid., p. 363, my italics.)

Max Scheler on Love and Hate: A Phenomenological Approach Helmut Maaßen It is a cause whereby anything proceeds from that which is not into that which is (Plato, Symposion)

A short look into the usage of the phenomena covered by the term “love” reveals its complexity. Some philosophers assume that love is a powerful emotion, as in Platos’ Phaedros, where love is a response to beauty and value; for Aristotle, love is a relationship, while for Kant “practical love” is the highest form of love, because it is without strong emotions unlike “pathological love.”1 In the twentieth century, Max Scheler wrote on emotions: The Nature of Sympathy was published in 1912; its second part is entitled “Love and Hate.” Scheler is one of those philosophers who attributed a strong power to emotions; furthermore, he considered them as basic elements for ethics and for the theory of knowledge. Scheler begins his book with an examination of sympathy—yet only to conclude, suprisingly enough, that an “ascent” from sympathy to love is not possible: “One of the gravest errors of almost the entire school of British moralists—he wrote—lies […] in seeking to derive the facts of love and hate from fellow-feeling.”2 Love, according to Scheler, has to be understood not as a feeling, as a reaction to something or as an “effect,” but as an “act” and a movement.3 Love is creative, it moves the lover as God moves the world according to Aristotle. Love, above all, is a spontaneous act and it remains so even when given in response.4 In acting like this, love in the literal sense is an emotion “which lead us out of and beyond ourselves.”5

1. Scheler’s Concept of Value Scheler focused his studies on human feelings, love and the nature of the person. For him, ego, reason and consciousness presuppose the sphere of

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the person. He denied the possibility of a pure ego, pure reason or pure consciousness. This comes close to the notions of Russell and Whitehead: “Our Experience of actuality is a realization of worth, good or bad. It is a value experience.”6 The human heart is the seat of love which accounts for the essence of human existence, not a transcendental ego, pure reason or the will. Feelings and love have, according to Scheler, a logic of their own, quite different from the logic of reason. Scheler is quite similar in this to Blaise Pascal. There are five value ranks which can be felt by humans. They are feelings of body, feelings of needs, feeling of life, feelings of the person and of the Divine. This spectrum is situated in man’s order of love (ordo amoris). Experiencing these different values does not mean for Scheler that one ascends them, but that each value experience has an inner “leaning” towards higher values. This explains the surprising fact that Scheler starts his book with a detailed analysis of sympathy and then states that “love and hate cannot be derived from fellow-feeling.” The “preferring of values,” as Scheler calls it, can be done intuitively, even without specifically willing something. If a child, for instance, spontaneously hugs its mother rather than playing with toys, it realizes a higher value than that of play.

2. The Concept of A Person A human being cannot be understood like an object nor defined like an object, because he or she is a centre of action; thus, one can only try to grasp the human acts. Later Scheler would say: “If you have the ordo amoris of a person you have that person.”7 This acting and grasping of values is to some extent phenomenologically describable, although at the same time it transcends our perception and can only be felt; in Schleiermacher’s own words, “understanding is a divinatory act of a loving achievement of unity.”8 The qualities we feel in objects constitute an “emotional a priori.” It is this emotional a priori that allowed him to construct his own theory of knowledge.9 The difficult order of the foundation of values has been discussed in detail by Reiner Wiehl.10 Phenomenology—understood as a form of radical empiricism—has two meanings: first, identity of empirical knowledge and a priori value experience; secondly, the founding of all empirical experience in the a priori value experience.11 This is the reason for Scheler’s vacillation in his analyses of human value experience, starting from lower to higher values through experience and from higher a priori

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values down to lower ones. Phenomenology enables a direct knowledge of a priori values—all knowledge has to go through the eye of this needle. This kind of phenomenology includes desymbolisation. All symbols of science, civilisation etc. have to become immanent through experience and thereby lose their character as symbols. This is a form of phenomenological reduction, different from Husserl’s. Scheler distinguishes his form of knowledge from that of the sciences. Scientific knowledge is Leistungswissen, knowledge in sight of an achievement, the knowledge of love is Heilswissen, knowledge in sight of salvation. Regarding the knowledge of human beings, Scheler wanted to reject two theses, both implying that our knowledge of other human beings is not direct but indirect. To assume that we use analogy with our own facial expressions to read another man’s facial expressions to understand what is going on inside him would be almost absurd. Even babies can grasp the meaning of our facial expressions without the faculty of syllogism. Therefore it can be stated, “that any kind of rejoicing or pity presupposes, in principle, some sort of knowledge of the fact, nature and quality of experience in other people, just as the possibility of such knowledge presupposes, as its condition, the existence of other conscious beings.”12 Reproduction of feeling and fellow-feeling have to be strictly distinguished. In reproduced feelings, the other’s feeling “is given exactly like a landscape,” but such visualized feeling “remains in the cognitive sphere, and is not a morally relevant act.”13 In this kind of reproduced feeling, “we can remain quite indifferent to whatever has evoked it.” A vivid example for this kind of “visualized feeling” would be torture.14 Something quite different happens in fellow-feeling. It involves “intentional reference of the feeling of joy or sorrow to the other person’s experience.”15 Fellow feeling is thereby not a cognitive act but happens qua feeling. In the basic notion of fellow-feeling, four different relationships can be distinguished: (1) immediate community of feeling (the same sorrow “with someone”); (2) fellow-feeling “about something” (rejoicing in his joy and commiseration with his sorrow); (3) mere emotional infection; (4) true emotional identification. Scheler describes the fellow-feeling of parents who have lost their child and stand beside the corpse. Both feel sorrow, but it does not mean that A feels sorrow, B feels sorrow and both know that they feel sorrow. “The sorrow, as value-content, and the grief […] are here one and identical.”16 In

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this way, one can only feel mental suffering, not physical pain or sensory feelings. It is not my intention to describe in detail the other forms of Scheler’s analysis of fellow-feeling, but this might suffice to clarify his method of analysing feeling and its basic notions. Even a child feels the feelings and thinks the thoughts of those who form his social environment and there is one broad roaring stream of life, in which he is totally immersed.17 In fellow-feeling, something similar happens to the adult, and this “emotionalfact” is the basic notion of value experience in Scheler.

3. Love and Hate Only love opens up the world of essences and values. However, love does not arise because of certain aspects of the beloved, but is caused by the beloved and does not disappear if certain qualities of the beloved disappear, such as beauty or power. Love and hate differ from all other acts including sympathy. They “are in no sense relative to the polar co-ordinates of myself and the other.”18 One can love and hate even oneself, but one cannot have fellow-feeling for oneself. One might say “I pity myself” or “rejoce to find myself so happy today,” but a closer analysis shows that there is always an element of phantasy, a third person standpoint in giving the above statements. Love and hate on the contrary do not even need “objects” of love. “For the primary orientation is towards values, and towards the objects discernible, through those values.”19 While fellow-feeling like sympathy are social dispositions, love and hate are not; there is “little necessity for it to relate to the group. ”20 One might hate a group and one can still love certain individuals of that group. Therefore antisemitism, germanophobia etc. are quite consistent with love for individuals out of those groups. “Love and hatred afford an evidence of their own, which is not to be judged by the evidence of reason.”21 Scheler goes on to say that love and hate cannot be defined but only experienced and afterwards exhibited: “love is a movement, passing from a lower value to a higher one, in which the higher value of the object or person suddenly flashes upon us; whereas hatred moves in the opposite direction.”22 The experienced values in acts therefore can be put in an order of preference; when the value experience occurs, “we can prefer Beethoven to Brahms,” without choosing anything.23 If one assumes love to be a reaction to something, you “have failed to recognize its nature as a movement” caused by itself.24

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Scheler concedes that there is of course an awareness in love of the positive value of persons or things loved, but “upon the values already acknowledged as ‘real,’ there supervenes a movement, an intention towards potential values still ‘higher’ than those already given and presented.” Therefore Scheler agrees with Plato25 that love is a creative force and not a reaction. “Hatred, on the other hand, is in the strictest sense destructive, since it does in fact destroy the higher values.”26 Love of art can be a “gushing” over the piece of art, but in the experience of art, “we are concerned throughout with an extra human element.”27 To love a human being is to experience a transcendental “reality,” a value over and above human experience. Augustine describes a similar experience when he states in his Confessiones: Da quod amo: amo enim. Et hoc tu dedisti.28 In spite of having denied the possibility of defining love earlier on, Scheler later gives a definition of love: [L]ove is that movement of intention whereby, from a given value A in an object, its higher value is visualized. Moreover, it is just this vision of a higher value that is of the essence of love. In its ultimate nature, therefore, love is not just a “reaction” to a value already felt, such as “happiness” or “grief,” for example, nor is it a modally determinate function, such as “enjoyment,” nor yet an attitude to a pair of previously given values, such as “preference.” Though all preference is based on love, inasmuch as it is only in love that the higher value flashes out and can thereafter be preferred.29

Scheler refers to biblical stories to illustrates the priority of God’s love in our experience. In the parabel of the Prodigal Son,30 the astonishing realization of his father’s love for him brings about the overwhelming repentance of the son. Jesus first shows Maria Magdalena his love and then says: Go, and sin no more!31 If this is the case, Scheler’s approach to the experience of love is quite similar to the classical ascent of love, with his vacillation of ascent and descent. For him the ascent of love is only possible if you have experienced a higher step of the ladder: every ascent of different forms of human love has prior to it a descent. This idea comes close to the Lutheran notion of God’s love which will be given to us, without having to do anything for it. This love can only be experienced, the experience and acceptance of God’s given love is called faith.32 To put the experience of love in Scheler’s words: For in love there is no attempting to fix an objective, no deliberate shaping of purpose, aimed at the higher value and its realization; love itself, in the course of its own movement, is what brings about the continuous emergence of ever-higher value in the object—just as if it was streaming out from the object of its own accord, without any sort of exertion (even of wishing) on the part of the lover. We may take love to consist in the mere fact that a value already present beforehand comes to light at this point (as though love

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Helmut Maaßen simply opens our eyes to such higher values, whereas hate closes them); or regard it, on the other hand, as a mere “occasion” of the promotion and deliberate cultivation of these values, by education, for instance; or we may suppose it to create the new values effortlessly, out of itself. But all such attempts to confine this basic phenomenon to an either-or are but crude and inadequate characterizations, serving only to obscure the thing itself. For love is not present in any of these cases. It can certainly be said that true love opens our spiritual eyes to ever-higher values in the object loved. It enables them to see and does not blind them (as is suggested in a most foolish proverb, which obviously thinks of love in terms of a mere impulse of sensual passion).33

Having experienced love one realizes that love is certainly not blind, because it “sees” beyond what is visible. This concept of experiencing values suggests that it makes no sense to teach values or to educate people “in values.” They are not cognitive functions and fall out of the framework of cognition.

4. Ordo Amoris The concept of the ascent of mankind through love, explored by St. Augustine,34 is modified by Scheler. For him we have as much to go up the ladder as down it, so to speak: through the experience of divine love, we descend the ladder to the lower forms of love, love of human beings for other human beings, love for nature or for other “objects” of love. The heart leads us into the realm of values with its own logic. The heart possesses, within its own realm, a strict analogon of logic, which it does not, however, borrow from the logic of the intellect. As the ancient doctrine of the nomos agraphos can already teach, there are laws written into it which correspond to the plan according to which the world, as a world of values, is built up. 35 A human being is for Scheler in the first instance an ens amans, and only secundarily an ens cogitans or ens volens.36 The analysis of love reveals the creative movement of the heart, which leads to higher values. These values are ordered according to the order of love, indicating higher and lower values. The evidence of these values and their order, the phenomenological knowledge of values, cannot be proved or disproved through the empirical, but the other way around. In this sense, phenomenology is fundamental to the empirical.37 Scheler’s ordo amoris culminates in the experience of a highest value, a vision of God. The highest possible experience, human beings are capable

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of would be to love the world like God does, to experience the coincidence of the human act of love with that of God.38 Once can therefore say that the ordo amoris is the core of the order of the world and that is the order of God. The human being is situated in this world order.39 Love signifies approval and, as Josef Pieper writes, “the most extreme form of affirmation that can possibly be conceived of is creatio, making to be.” Hence, our own love mirrors the creative love of God, which bestows on us the divine word of approval. Love therefore is, in Pieper’s words, a way of turning to another and saying, “It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in this world.”40

To Conclude Martha Nussbaum has pointed out that James Joyce dealt with the emotion of love not by ascending into higher spheres but down to earth, to every day life in his Ulysses. According to Joyce, real love is to be found in every day life, in the inconsistent flawed emotions of common loving and living. He turns Diotima’s, Augustine’s and other ladders upside down.41 I leave it to the reader to decide which path one should take; not, however, without a piece of consolation—as the Beatles used to sing, All You Need Is Love…

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Notes 1. I. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Part II. XVII. 2. M. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, translated by P. Heath, with an introduction by W. Stark (London 1954), p. 140. 3. Ibid., p. 141. 4. Ibid., p. 142. 5. Ibid., Introduction XL, XLI. 6. A. N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York 1968); see also B. Russell, Portraits from Memory and other Essays (New York 1963), pp. 39-40: “It was Whitehead who was the serpent in this paradise of Mediteranean clarity. He said to me once: ‘You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep’.” 7. M. Scheler, Ordo Amoris, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. X [= Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, Vol. I], p. 348: “Wer den ordo amoris eines Menschen hat, hat den Menschen”. 8. See H. G. Gadamer, Hermeneutik I. Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen 1999), pp. 191ff. 9. See R. Wiehl, “Schelers Phänomenologie der Gefühle und die Aporien der Phänomenologie,” Metaphysik und Erfahrug. Philosophische Essays (Frankfurt 1996), pp. 234-273. 10. Ibid., pp. 240-243. 11. Ibid., p. 141. 12. M. Scheler, Sympathy, op. cit., p. 8. 13. Ibid., p. 9. 14. “The cruel man owes his awareness of the pain and sorrow he causes entirly to a capacity for visualizing feeling! […] Cruelty consists not at all in the cruel man’s being simply ‘insensitive’ to other peoples’ suffering […] It is chiefly found in pathological cases (e.g. in melancholia), where it arises as a result of the patient’s exclusive preoccupation in his own feelings, which altogether prevents him from giving emotional acceptance to the experience of other people” (ibid., p. 14). Scheler distinguishes brutality from this: “In contrast to cruelty, ‘brutality’ is merely a disregard of other peoples’ experience, despite the apprehension of it in feeling” (ibid.).

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15. Ibid., p. 13. This comes quite close to Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen, § 287: “Wie bin ich von Mitleid für diesen Menschen erfüllt? Wie zeigt es sich, welches Objekt das Mitleid hat? (Das Mitleid, kann man sagen, ist eine Form der Überzeugung, daß ein anderer Schmerzen hat.)” The passage can be translated as follows: “How am I filled with pity for this man? How does it come out what the object of my pity is? (Pity, one may say, is a form of conviction that someone else is in pain.)” 16. Sympathy, op. cit., p. 13. 17. Ibid., pp. 109-111. 18. Ibid., p. 150. 19. Ibid., p. 151. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 150. 22. Ibid., p. 152. 23. Ibid., p. 153. 24. Ibid. It might be useful to realize at least a vague similarity to Spinoza at this point. I think that Scheler’s criticism of Spinoza’s definition of love and hate (“Amor vel tristitia est Laetitia, concomitante idea causae externae,” Ethica, ordine Geometrico demonstrata, Pars III, Deff. 6 & 7) is unfortunate, as R. Wiehl has indicated. 25. It is “a cause whereby anything proceeds from that which is not, into that which is” (Platon, Symposion 205a). 26. M. Scheler, Sympathy, op. cit., p. 154. 27. Ibid., p. 155. 28. Augustine, Confessiones XI, 11: “Give me what I love, for I do love [standard English translations insert an ‘it,’ which exactly misses the point Augustine is making]. And this too is thy gift.” 29. M. Scheler, Sympathy, op. cit., p. 152 30. Luke 15:11-32. 31. John 8:11. 32. M. Luther, De Libertate Christiana, especially section 12. 33. M. Scheler, Sympathy, op. cit., p. 157 34. Augustine, De Quantitate Animae. For a short and brilliant elaboration of the Christian ascent of love see M. C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge 2001), pp. 527-556.

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35. M. Scheler, Ordo Amoris, op. cit, p. 362. 36. Ibid., p. 356. 37. See R. Wiehl, “Schelers Phänomenologie der Gefühle,” op. cit., p. 241; M. Scheler, Ordo Amoris, op. cit., pp. 395ff. 38. Scheler, Ordo Amoris, op. cit., Vol. X., pp. 347. 39. Ibid., p. 356. 40. J. Pieper, About Love (Chicago 1974), p. 168. 41. M. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, op. cit., pp. 679-714.

About the Authors George Allan is professor of philosophy emeritus at Dickinson College. His Ph.D. is from Yale, 1963. He was on the Dickinson faculty from 1963 to 1996, and was academic dean from 1974 to 1995. He has published three books exploring the ontological foundations of social value (most recently, The Patterns of the Present: Interpreting the Authority of Form, 2001) and two books on philosophical and educational issues regarding the liberal arts (most recently, Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon, 2004). Allan has published numerous articles in metaphysics, social philosophy, philosophy of history, education, and philosophy of education, usually from a process or pragmatic perspective. Pierfrancesco Basile received is Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Bern (Switzerland). He has been a research-fellow of the Swiss National Foundation (SNF) and has pursued post-doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and at the Center for Process Studies (Claremont, California). He is the author of Experience and Relations. An Examination of Francis Herbert Bradley’s Conception of Reality (1999) and of several essays on the origin of analytic philosophy, British idealism and Whitehead’s philosophy. Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., is emeritus professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1968 and taught at Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois (1968-1974), and at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1974-1982) before becoming Chairman of the Theology Department at Xavier in 1982. He is the author or editor of nine books and over seventy-five scholarly articles. His latest book publication is titled Christianity and Process Thought: Spirituality for a Changing World (2006). John B. Cobb, Jr. is emeritus professor of theology at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University. His advanced studies were at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He also taught at Emory University. He is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Process Studies. Among his books are A Christian Natural Theology (1965), Christ in a Pluralistic Age (1975), The Liberation of Life (1981, with Charles Birch), For the Common Good (1989, with Herman Daly), and Postmodernism and Public Policy (2001).

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Authors

David Ray Griffin is emeritus professor of philosophy of religion at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University and codirector of the Center for Process Studies. He is the author of 31 books, including Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom and the Mind-Body Problem (1998), Reenchantement without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (2001). His most recent book is Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (2006). Michael Hampe is professor of philosophy at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (Zürich). He works on seventeenth century philosophy (Spinoza and Hobbes), pragmatism and philosophy of science. His recent publications are: Naturgesetze (2005), Erkenntnis und Praxis (2006), and Die Macht des Zufalls (2006). John W. Lango is professor of philosophy at Hunter College of the City University of New York. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University. He specializes in metaphysics and ethics. Concerning metaphysics, he has written articles on the philosophy of time, the theory of tropes, and the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. He is the author of Whitehead’s Ontology (1972). Concerning ethics, he has written articles on nuclear deterrence, armed humanitarian intervention, preventive war, and just war theory. He is one of the editors of the forthcoming book Rethinking the Just War Tradition. Helmut Maaßen, Ph.D., teaches at the K. v. Galen Gymasium (Kevelaer, Germany). He has published Gott, das Gute und das Böse in der Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads (1988) and edited (with Michael Hampe) Materialen zur Whiteheads Prozess und Realität (1991). Leemon B. McHenry is a lecturer in philosophy at California State University, Northridge, California, USA. He has published Whitehead and Bradley: A Comparative Analysis (1992), based on his Edinburgh Ph.D. thesis, and wrote two chapters of Victor Lowe’s Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work, Volume II: 1910-1947. His papers on Whitehead, W. V. Quine, William James, F. H. Bradley, George Santayana and Timothy Sprigge have appeared in Process Studies and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of more than a hundred books in various areas of philosophy and his works have been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. Alon Segev is Max-Planck fellow and visiting lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Heidelberg. His areas of specialization

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are phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer), Hegel, Hume, and the philosophy of religion. He has published articles on major Continental philosophers such as Heidegger, Hegel, Gadamer and Benjamin. Michel Weber holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research program mainly consists of developing the activities of the three networks he has created with his peers: the “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes,” the “European William James Project” and the “Whitehead Psychology Nexus.” He is editor of the “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes” Series (ontos verlag), co-editor of the “Process Thought” Series (ontos verlag) and of the Chromatikon: Yearbook of Philosophy in Process (Presses universitaires de Louvain). Anderson Weekes received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has published essays on Whitehead’s philosophy and is Secretary of the “Whitehead Psychology Nexus.” Bernd Weidmann studied Philosophy, German and English at Heidelberg University. He has published on Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. He is editor of Existenz in Kommunikation: Zur philosophischen Ethik von Karl Jaspers (2004) and co-editor of Albert Fraenkel. Ein Arztleben in Licht und Schatten 1864–1938 (2004). Reiner Wiehl earned his doctorate in philosophy in Frankfurt am Main. He has been an assistant instructor in the philosophy department at the University of Heidelberg, before being called to a chair in philosophy at the University of Hamburg and to a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. Wiehl’s publications include “Einleitung in die Philosophie A. N. Whiteheads” (1971, a long introduction to the German translation of Adventures of Ideas), Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Creativity (1990, edited with Friedrich Rapp), Metaphysik und Erfahrung (1996), Zeitwelten. Philosophisches Denken an den Rändern von Natur und Geschichte (1998), Subjektivität und System (2000).

Analytical Table of Contents Contents.......................................................................................................................5 Preface .........................................................................................................................7

I. Process and Universals Process Philosophy and the Problem of Universals Reiner Wiehl ...........................................................................................................13 1. What is Process Philosophy?............................................................................................ 13 2. Types of Universals and their Ontological Referents................................................... 18 3. Processes and Subjects in Modern Philosophy ............................................................. 21 4. Universals as Possibilities ................................................................................................. 26 Notes ......................................................................................................................................... 30 Appendix: Translator’s Notes .............................................................................................. 31

Abstraction and Individuation in Whitehead and Wiehl: A Comparative Historical Approach Anderson Weekes....................................................................................................39 1. The Abstractness and Transcendence of Universals.................................................... 42 1.1. Universality and the First Type of Transcendence................................................................... 51 1.2. Universality and the Second Kind of Transcendence .............................................................. 53

2. Two Ways of Distinguishing Concepts and Intuition................................................... 57 3. Peculiarities and Problems of the Traditional Theories of Individuation ................ 64 3.1. Plato’s Theory of Individuation in the “Timaeus” ................................................................... 65 3.2. Intuitionistic Theories of Individuation .................................................................................... 67 3.3. Logicist Theories of Individuation ............................................................................................ 69

4. Whitehead’s Theory of Individuation ............................................................................ 81 4.1. What is the Eminent Mode of Access to Individuals for Whitehead? .................................... 85 4.2. What Constitutes Individuality for Whitehead? ....................................................................... 93 4.3. Does Whitehead’s Theory of Individuation Fall in the Blind Spot of Our Analytic Matrix?99

5. Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 105

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Analytic Table of Contents Appendix: The Finitude of Mentality and God’s Infinite Mind................................... 111 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 112

II. Nature and Subjectivity Prehension John B. Cobb, Jr. ..................................................................................................123 Whitehead, Hume and the Phenomenology of Causation Pierfrancesco Basile ..............................................................................................137 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 137 2. Whitehead on Hume’s Empiricism............................................................................... 139 3. Hume’s Account of Causation ....................................................................................... 142 4. Whitehead’s Critique of Hume...................................................................................... 144 5. Hume on the “Vulgar” Notion of Causation ............................................................... 147 6. Towards a Metaphysics of Experience ......................................................................... 149 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 152

Subjectivity, System and Intersubjectivity Joseph A. Bracken.................................................................................................159 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 173

Maxwell’s Field and Whitehead’s Events: The Adventure of a Revolutionary Idea Leemon B. McHenry.............................................................................................177 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 177 2. Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Field .................................................................................. 178 3. Einstein’s Concept of Space-Time................................................................................. 180 4. Whitehead’s Ontology of Events ................................................................................... 181 5. Assessment of Whitehead’s Unified Theory ................................................................ 185 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 187

III. Ethics and Civilization Morality and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts David Ray Griffin..................................................................................................193 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 193

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2. The Widespread Denial of Moral Realism................................................................... 194 3. The Failure of the Kantian Approach .......................................................................... 195 4. Naturalism-sam and the Denial of Moral Realism ..................................................... 197 4.1. Sensationism .............................................................................................................................198 4.2. Atheism .....................................................................................................................................199 4.3. Materialism ...............................................................................................................................201

5. The Inadequacy of Naturalism-sam for Science ......................................................... 203 5.1. Sensationism .............................................................................................................................203 5.2. Materialism ...............................................................................................................................205 5.3. Atheism .....................................................................................................................................207

6. An Alternative Naturalism ............................................................................................. 208 6.1. Panexperientialism ...................................................................................................................209 6.2. Panentheism ..............................................................................................................................209 6.3. Prehensive Perception ..............................................................................................................210

7. Conclusion: A Moral-Scientific Naturalism ................................................................ 210 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 212

Can Specific Rules be Deduced from Moral Principles? John W. Lango......................................................................................................221 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 221 2. The Problem of Support ................................................................................................. 222 3. Deduction in Ethics.......................................................................................................... 223 4. The Problem of Alternativity ......................................................................................... 226 5. The Deduction of Rules from Principles ...................................................................... 227 6. Obligation and Necessity................................................................................................. 229 7. Some Illustrations ............................................................................................................ 231 Appendix................................................................................................................................ 234 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 236

Ethical Quantities Nicholas Rescher ...................................................................................................241 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 247

The Wand of the Enchanter George Allan .........................................................................................................249 Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 261

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Creativity, Efficacy and Vision: Ethics and Psychology in an Open Universe Michel Weber ........................................................................................................263 1. The Void and its Heirs .................................................................................................... 263 2. The Creative Advance of Nature................................................................................... 267 3. Ethico-Psychological Openings...................................................................................... 270 3.1. Ethics......................................................................................................................................... 271 3.2. Psychology................................................................................................................................ 273

4. Conclusion (and a Look Ahead) .................................................................................... 276 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 278

IV. Psychology and Phenomenology Truthfulness and Memory: Philosophical Notes on Trauma Michael Hampe .....................................................................................................285 1. Death, Violence and Subjectivitiy ................................................................................. 285 2 . Voluntary and Involuntary Memory........................................................................... 290 3. The Historicity of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.................................................... 295 4. Achille’s Brain.................................................................................................................. 298 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 301

Empathy and Reliability: Albert Fraenkel as seen by his Patients Hesse and Jaspers Bernd Weidmann ..................................................................................................303 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 308

On Gadamer, Phenomenology and Historical Relativism Alon Segev .............................................................................................................311 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 329

Max Scheler on Love and Hate: A Phenomenological Approach Helmut Maaßen.....................................................................................................335 1. Scheler’s Concept of Value............................................................................................. 335 2. The Concept of A Person ................................................................................................ 336 3. Love and Hate .................................................................................................................. 338 4. Ordo Amoris ..................................................................................................................... 340 To Conclude .......................................................................................................................... 341 Notes....................................................................................................................................... 342

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About the Authors...................................................................................................345 Analytical Table of Contents...................................................................................349 Process Thought Series ...........................................................................................354

Process Thought Series PT1: PT2: PT3:

PT4:

PT5: PT6: PT7: PT8: PT9: PT10: PT11: PT12: PT13:

Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics, 2004 (339 p.; ISBN 3-937202-49-8; hardcover 89€). Jason W. Brown, Process and the Authentic Life. Toward a Psychology of Value, 2005 (700 p.; ISBN 3-937202-73-0; hardcover 119€). Silja Graupe, Der Ort ökonomischen Denkens. Die Methodologie der Wirtschaftswissenschaften im Licht japanischer Philosophie, 2005 (362 p.; ISBN 3-937202-87-0; hardcover 98€). Wenyu Xie, Zhihe Wang, George Derfer (eds.), Whitehead and China. Relevance and Relationships, 2005 (220 p.; ISBN 3-937202-86-2; hardcover 87€). Gary L. Herstein, Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Cosmology, 2006 (215 p.; ISBN 3-937202-95-1; hardcover 87€). Edward Jacob Khamara, Space, Time and Theology in the Leibniz-Newton Controversy, 2006 (180 p. ; ISBN 3-938793-26-0, hardcover 69 €) Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism. The Basics, 2006. (278 p. ; ISBN 3938793-15-5 ; hardcover 84€) Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism. Jamesean Applications, [forthcoming in 2007]. Alan Van Wyk and Michel Weber (eds.), Creativity and its Discontents. The Response to Whitehead's Process and Reality, [forthcoming in 2007]. Michel Weber and William Desmond, Jr. (eds.), Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, [forthcoming in 2007]. Nicholas Rescher, Essays in Process Thought, 2006. Ross Stein, Chemical Becoming. A Process Exploration of Molecular Transformation and Its Catalysis, [forthcoming in 2006] Maria Pachalska and Michel Weber (eds.), Microgenesis: Neuropsychology and Philosophy of Mind in Process, [forthcoming in 2007].