METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR A THEORY OF VALUE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF A. N. WHITEHEAD   by William Hendrichs Leue CHAPTER ONE, PAGE ONE INTRODUCTION   [Note: Footnotes are designated in red and may be accessed by scrolling down the page to the green sections.   Note also that since since they refer to the paper version of this work, references to actual pages of the thesis are not accurate in this online medium.]   Write me at maryskole@aol.com to inform me of errors you may find, or for a copy of the paperback version ($18.95 plus $2 shipping) - available after September 15, 2005. Thanks.   Below are the full titles of books referred to in the footnotes.   PR, Process and Reality SMW, Science in the Modern World MT, Modes of Thought AI, Adventures of Ideas AE, The Aims of Education SmB, Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect RM, Religion in the Making ESP, Essays in Science and Philosophy F of R. The Function of Reason OT. Organization of Thought Section A: Problem of this Paper Whitehead is fond of paradoxes, so perhaps it is appropriate that this paper start with a paradox. As the title indicates, this paper has something to do with theory of value and the contributions to this subject that can be gathered from a study of Whitehead's philosophy. The paradox is that Whitehead does not have a theory of value. Whitehead has written no works directly and exclusively on the theory of value, nor even anything primarily devoted to a consideration of one of the special theoretical problems frequently found in discussions of theory of value 1. His earliest work is on mathematics and logic, and, so, can for the most part be left out of consideration in looking for his views on values. The works of what Victor Lowe identifies as Whitehead's middle period 2, are on the philosophy of science, and there is a deliberate effort on Whitehead's part to exclude considerations from these discussions 3. In his later works, starting with the publication of Science and the Modern World in 1925, there is certainly a deep and pervasive concern for values. But even these works cannot be said to concern themselves with theory of value, as that subject is usually understood. In the great tradition of philosophy, now rather out of fashion, Whitehead's arguments touch upon and ramify through almost every field of human experience. His treatment of some of them is bound to be fragmentary, inadequate and even inaccurate 4. But it can hardly be through inadvertence or lack of interest and knowledge that Whitehead fails to emphasize such a central and important branch of philosophy as the study of values. Indeed, he does emphasize values; it is just the study of value, the "theory of value", which is nowhere pursued as a central subject in his works. It is true that he does devote some attention to the special value fields - ethics and esthetics -, but even here his reports are somewhat unsatisfactory from the point of view of finding statements about the more general and theoretical value problems which are manifested in these fields. His discussion of ethics tends to be overly concrete and contextual, tracing the development of some particular ethical ideal, dealing with some contemporary practical moral issue, relating ethical issues to psychology, epistemology, sociology, the philosophy of history and, above all, cosmology and metaphysics. The sort of abstract discussion of the basic notions of ethics - such as the "good", the "right", "duty" and so on - that leads into a discussion of the nature of values in general is nowhere more prominent in Whitehead's writing. Whitehead's discussion of esthetics, on the other hand, tends to lack all concrete application. It is too general, ignoring completely most of the problems of interest to estheticians. But its generality lies in the direction of metaphysics rather than in that which has usually led to theory of value. Instead, Whitehead has frequently been charged with being overly influenced by purely esthetic considerations in developing his metaphysics 5. So neither ethics nor esthetics, the two traditional highroads to theory of value, lead to that particular kind of discussion in Whitehead's philosophy. In order to establish this assertion, however, I must explain, briefly, what I mean by "theory of value" - what sort of discussion is it which I do not find in Whitehead's writings? This explanation will not, I hope, be a digression, for through it I believe that I can discover the reason for Whitehead's neglect of theory of value. It is my contention that the omission of this subject is, to some extent, at any rate, deliberate on Whitehead's part, and, furthermore, that there is considerable justification for this omission, even on the part of one who is deeply concerned with the problems of value. As I understand recent discussions of theory of value, they have usually started from a consideration of the problems of theoretical ethics, or esthetics, or both (with the aid, occasionally, of considerations drawn from economics or other of the social sciences), and have attempted to go beyond these special value fields to a discussion of the nature and problems of value in general - not merely economic, or moral, or esthetic value. Some theories of value have gone on to set forth a more or less elaborate structure of value terms, usually arranged hierarchically in accordance with judgments based on some principle of comparative value. Some writers, such as G. E. Moore, seek to enjoin us from extending the discussion beyond the realm of value terms to other branches of knowledge, because in so doing, they say, we commit the "naturalistic fallacy" 6. Other writers, of course, have gone right ahead and committed the naturalistic fallacy, and it seems to me that it is frequently true that what they have left us with is a set of "valueless" statements in one or more of the natural or social sciences as the final meanings of all value terms. Sometimes, however, value terms seem to have crept back in undetected, or, at least, value considerations, even though they wear a "naturalistic" disguise. Perhaps these inadvertencies help account for the plausibility which these "naturalistic" theories of value frequently have 7 . Footnotes 1-7: 1 .A possible exception is his last public lecture, "Mathematics and the Good", published in Schilpp, P.A. (ed), The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, pp. 665-83. This paper, however, develops only a very small fragment of his views on values, and it is not easy to understand it without reference to his whole philosophical outlook. 2 "The Development of Whitehead's Philosophy", in Schilpp, op. cit., pp. 15-124. 3 In this group of works are "An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge", Concept of Nature and "The Principle of Relativity; with Applications to Physical Science." Also, a good many of the papers in the collections published under the titles ofThe Aims of Education: and Other Essays and Essays in Science and Philosophy date from this period, though the collections themselves were published during the later "metaphysical" period of his work. On p. 5 of the Concept of Nature Whitehead says that his conception of "nature" excluding "any reference to moral or aesthetic values". Mr. N. M. Lawrence remarks that this view of nature, as excluding value, "is one of the more short-lived of Whitehead's early convictions", and is repudiated early in SMW ("The Development of Whitehead's Epistemology," note to p. 35). I think, however, that Victor Lowe is closer to the truth when he argues that Whitehead does not contradict his earlier view of nature as excluding value considerations by his admission of values to the actual world in his later works. Lowe quotes the same page, five, of the "Concept of Nature" to the effect that, "the values of nature are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence." But such a synthesis is exactly what I am not attempting". According to Lowe, Whitehead did not during this "middle" period exclude value from nature, but only from the philosophy of nature, which he thought was concerned solely with the subject-matter of the natural sciences, especially physics (op. cit., pp. 86-7). Either view, however, justifies the procedure adopted in this paper of not giving much attention to these writings of Whitehead's middle period. See below, ch. 5, sec. B, of this paper, for my discussion of the problem of excluding values from nature, under the notion of the relation of value to existence in Whitehead's later works. 4 Paul A. Schilpp, in his paper, "Whitehead's Moral Philosophy" (Schilpp, op. cit., footnote to p. 593), refers to a letter received from a correspondent whom he describes as "Himself an ardent disciple of Whitehead". The letter said, in commenting on Schilpp's intent to write on Whitehead's "moral philosophy", "I suggest that you take as a model for your essay ... a well-known treatise on the Snakes of Ireland." On the other hand, another devoted student of Whitehead, the Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik, in his memorial to Whitehead in the Journal of Philosophy (vol. 45, 1948, # 21), remembers Whitehead primarily as an ethical thinker. For my discussion of Whitehead's ethics, see below, ch. 7, sec. B(2) and sec. C of this paper. 5 For my discussion of Whitehead's views on esthetics, see below, ch. 7, sec. B (3); and for my discussion of the charge of "estheticism", see below, ch. 6, sec. B. 6 Principia Ethica, ch. 2. Moore holds that "good" is the primary value term, and so must ultimately be involved in the definition of all value terms. "Good" itself, then, is undefinable, because it is unanalyzable into any more simple value terms. Attempts to define it must either involve circularity (if one tries to stick to value terms), or the "naturalistic fallacy" (if one tries to define it by going beyond value terms). The naturalistic fallacy is committed, for example, if one tries to reduce "good" to pleasure, or interest, or the approval of some person or group. Pleasure and activities may well be good - "good" may be a predicate attributable to them -, but none of these states can constitute the definition or meaning of "good" without destroying the independence and characteristic meaning of value statements, and so reducing them to statements in one or more of the natural sciences - that is, statements of fact, from which values are systematically excluded. 7 Ralph Barton Perry's General Theory of Value is a case in point. General value is first defined relatively and psychologically in terms of interest - it is said to be the relation between any interest and its object. But it seems to me that undefined value considerations are inadvertently reintroduced near the end of the book when Professor Perry takes up the problems involved in the comparison of values, or interests. At least one of the three criteria he introduces for the comparison of values - "inclusiveness" - is suspect (and perhaps all three are), for why should a more "inclusive" interest be better or be chosen in preference to a less inclusive interest, unless, perhaps, because it is more "valuable"? Faced with the alternatives of either defining any value term only by other value terms, thus leaving one or more undefined and undefinable and also leaving the whole system of value terms as a sort of castle in the air - not coherently related to the world of scientific fact, or, as the other alternative, transferring the whole discussion of values to one or more of the empirical sciences (where vestiges of value terms can be hunted down and destroyed at leisure); - faced with these unpromising alternatives, it is not strange that a considerable audience, already partially prepared for the acceptance of their doctrines, has been found by the extreme positivists, who claim that all value terms are "meaningless" - merely "emotive"- bird-calls and shrieks of pain, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. 8 I do not want to discuss the positivistic theory of meaning or the theory of value - if it can be called a theory of value - consequent upon it. I do not even want to discuss the modifications of this extreme position introduced by C. L. Stevenson 9 and others. My whole point here is to show that much recent discussion of values seems to drift toward a dead end. Even many of the theories which claim that values are more than merely meaningless noise still offer something rather dead and questionable, whether it be scientific facts or value essences as the ultimate nature of the ideals for which we strive and the immediate beauty which we enjoy. The trouble is, I think, that there is something wrong with the common presuppositions on which most inquiries into values have been based. If this is true, it might be better to cease looking for any common principles or conclusions of theory of value and to examine, instead, the questions which the inquiries labeled as theo-ries of value seek to answer, with a view to going even further back, to the common presuppositions of these questions. Because it is here, in ultimate presuppositions, that Whitehead seems to disagree fundamentally with the notion of theory of value as it has usually been pursued, that is as a semi-autonomous and independent inquiry. Though he has no theory of value in this sense, I think that we can ask him the questions which theories of value have sought to answer. Only we must see that he answers them in a wholly different setting from that to which we have become accustomed. What does the word "value" or "values" mean anyway? It is a notoriously equivocal word, probably as equivocal as "good", with which it seems to be at least partially synonymous. Aristotle objected to Plato's notion of the "form of the Good" on the grounds that while each kind of thing pursued its own kind of good, nothing pursued the good in general 10. Aristotle does not seem to mean that the good in general is a completely meaningless notion, but only that it does not have just one universal meaning. As for the modern use of the word "value", there is a fairly general agreement that we must distinguish between things that have value, or are "valuable," (which are called "values" in every-day speech); and the property(ies), relation(s), or whatever it may be that gives these things value. Only the latter character or characters are value or values in the essential sense of the word. This distinction is supposed to be similar to, and almost as obvious as, the distinction between red objects and the color red. Beyond this point, however, there is very little agreement. Even such a basic distinction as that between things which have value because they contribute to something else as "means" or "conditions", and things which have value in themselves, or "intrinsically", as "ends", is beset by many difficulties, is construed by different authors in many incompatible ways, and even seems to be denied agreement among fundamental significance by some authors 11. In short, there isn't much important agreement among writers on theory of value as to what "value", and therefore, "theory of value" is about. And yet there are some general questions or problems which seem to be characteristic of these studies. I will make a rough summary of what seem to me to be the central problems taken up in discussions of theory of value. (1) The problem of the definition of value terms: What do value terms, such as "value" itself, its derivatives "valuable", "valuation" and "evaluation", its partial synonym "good", the latter's comparative "better" and superlative "best", (several of these words have nominal, adjectival and verbal forms and differ considerably in meaning in their different forms), "perfection", "bad", "right", "wrong", "duty", "obligation", "ought", "worth", "merit", "virtue", "beauty", "beautiful", "ugly", "truth" (insofar as it is charged with value) - what do they all mean? There are many more, and each author has some peculiar to himself. There are some words like "desire" which some authors feel are merely descriptive words - in this case, of a psychological state -, while other authors claim that they are value terms 12. Whitehead himself would like to make the common word "importance" a primary value term 13. (2) The problem of the unity of value: What state, condition, quality, property, re-lation or activity, or the plural or combination of any of these makes anything valuable? What is essential and generic in itself? Is there any such entity or entities? And (is it part of the same question or is it independent?) can all value be derived from one source, or must we seek distinct and irreducible origins for esthetic value and for moral value, and perhaps also for economic value, truth value and so on? This latter problem appears most frequently and most pointedly in what I choose to regard as one of its special instances: the relation of the "right" and the "good" in ethics 14. (3) The problem of the comparison and organization of values: If one or more general notions of value can be arrived at, how are the other major, and for that matter the minor, value predicates and the distinctions between value fields to be understood and classified? How are concrete value decisions to be made? How are value judgments to be compared with each other in terms of the nature of general value? Some examples of these questions are," Why is one work of art more beautiful than another?, "Why should one be kind to stray dogs and not beat one's grandmother?", and, "which is the last two acts is worse, or better? 15. (4) The objectivity or universality of value judgments: Are there any "objective" and "universal" standards of value, particularly in the realms of ethics and esthetics - can one thing in any case be said to be better, more obligatory, more beautiful than another apart from the momentary, or even the persisting, opinion or feeling or preference of an individual, of a group, of a culture? Are there "values" which are not merely relative to some particular valuing agents 16? (5) The problem of evil: How is "disvalue" or "evil" to be explained? The problem includes moral evil but is wider. As directly experienced it doesn't mean merely lack of value but, negative value. What characteristics account for the unpleasant aspect of things, for aversion, dislike, frustration, suffering, ugliness, destruction and so on? Is evil merely lack of perfection, a failure to attain some desired, known or possible good, or is there a more "positive" principle of evil 17? Footnotes 8-17: See below, ch. 5, sec. A, and ch. 6, sec. A, of this paper for further discussion of these questions. 8 Ayer, A. J. , Language, Truth and Logic, ch. 6. Of course, the positivists do not seem to have arrived at these conclusions by a study of the theories of value mentioned above, although Ayer refers to Moore's argument that "good" cannot be defined in naturalistic terms in support of his contention that value terms are meaningless. The positivistic theory of value seems, rather, to stem from very narrow limits imposed on "meaning" as the outcome of antecedent epistemological discussions. In order to be meaningful, they hold, a symbol must either exercise a "syntactical" function - relating other symbols to each other -, or it must direct us to sense experience which "confirms" its use. Value terms and "emotive" symbols in general do neither of these things, so they must be classified as meaningless. Statements containing value terms are meaningful only if they have "syntactic" or "semantic" (or "logical" or "factual") meaning apart from the value terms which they contain. Otherwise they are, strictly speaking, "nonsense". 9 Ethics and Language, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1944. 10 Nichmachaean Ethics, bk. 1, ch. 6. 11 John Dewey seems to argue thus in his monograph, "Theory of Valuation". See below, ch. 6, sec. A. for Whitehead's treatment of this distinction. 12 And even if desire is neutral, "desirable" expresses a complicated trait of at least semi-objective and obligatory value. I mention this only to illustrate the unending complexities and nuances with which those who are interested primarily in the definition of value terms have to deal. 13 See below, ch. 6, sec. C. of this paper. 14 W. D. Ross's labels (The Right and the Good). It may appear under different labels - "obligation" and "interest", "duty" and "pleasure", "appraising" and "prizing", the "common good" and the "individual good", "timology" and "natural election" (Laird, J., The Idea of Value, is responsible for this last set). See below, ch. 6, sec. C., and ch. 7, sec. B., for my interpretation of Whitehead's answers to these problems. 15 See below, ch. 6, sec. C (5), and ch. 7, sec. C (1) for my interpretation of Whitehead's answers to this problem. 16 See below, ch. 6, sec. C (4) and ch. 7, sec. C (1) of this paper. 17 See below, ch. 7, sec. A. for my interpretation of Whitehead's answer to these questions. The classification given above is obviously a bad disjunction. It is not exhaustive, and, much worse, its terms are not mutually exclusive. Each of the problems may be merely a restatement of one or more of the others; indeed, there may be just one problem. Certainly, it would be difficult to answer any one of these questions without reference to an answer already decided upon for each of the others 18. On the other hand, it would probably be necessary to analyze each of these five problems into many simpler problems before one could even make a start on an adequate answer to it. As far as I can see, the problem as to how many questions there are which a theory of value must answer, and the problem as to just what these questions are and how they should be stated depend on the particular theory of value that one wishes to develop. So, in a sense, the answers precede the questions. My aim at this point, however, is not at precision in formulating the fundamental problems of value theory, but is merely at giving a general impression of what sorts of questions I want to ask Whitehead. Incidentally, though I suspect that the kind of confusion described above affects to some extent almost any inquiry, it seems possible that its aggravated state in the field of value theory may itself be suggestive of some fundamental weakness and lack of real unity in this whole field of inquiry. ........................ Now that I have tried to state briefly what value theory is about, I can return to the paradox that Whitehead does not explicitly develop a theory of value. I suggested that this omission in his philosophical writings is somewhat deliberate and very significant for the problems of value themselves. The reason why Whitehead doesn't seem to answer many of these problems directly and the reason why my discussion of the answers which he does give must be postponed for the most part till Part II of this paper, is that Whitehead does not start with these problems of value theory as distinct and isolated issues. He rejects the notion of theory of value as an autonomous and independent inquiry. But why does Whitehead reject the autonomy of theory of value? Because he rejects the principal assumption on which this autonomy is usually made to rest. This assumption, whether it be explicitly stated or only implicitly accepted, is the principle that there is a fundamental separation between "fact" and "value". If formulated on a metaphysical level, this is the principle of the distinction between "ontology" and "axiology". But usually, the principle is not formulated in so general a manner, if it is clearly acknowledged at all. Most often there is merely the assumption that "fact", the object of science, is, and should be regarded as, valueless. In this form the assumption seems very natural, and indeed, necessary. Whitehead himself tries to conceive the "facts" which science studies in such a way that value that value considerations will not obtrude 19. The difficulties which Whitehead finds in the assumptions of most theories of value are rather in the further steps that are taken, the corollaries, or seeming corollaries, that follow on this original assumption. These are (1) that the full, concrete existence from which the scientific "facts" are abstractions are also valueless - that value is irrelevant to the existence of a thing; and (2) that, therefore, the values of things reside solely in our subjective awareness of them and not in the things themselves. Now Whitehead rejects these notions. For him value and being, or better still, value and existence, are very closely associated 20. The process of "becoming" is also the process of the generation of values. Values cannot be studied in isolation from other aspects of things, according to Whitehead, because it is not with some abstraction, but with the full concreteness of things that values are associated. Particularly, values cannot be abstracted from existence. It is only through understanding the nature of existence and being, then, that value can be understood, according to Whitehead. An investigation of existence or being is a metaphysical inquiry. It is then in Whitehead's metaphysics that we find his significant statements about values. To say that Whitehead's statements about values are contained in his statements about metaphysics is, of course, to say that he has a "metaphysical" theory of value. But to say that he has a metaphysical theory of value is not to describe, or even to limit very closely, the exact nature of his theory. For, after all, from the point of view of one who is convinced of the inescapability of metaphysics, as Whitehead is 21, all theories of value must be "metaphysical" theories in the sense that they rest on metaphysical presuppositions, whether the proponents of those theories are aware of or acknowledge these presuppositions or not. The acceptance of a gulf be-tween "fact" and "value" is itself a metaphysical assumption, even when it is formulated on merely epistemological, even semantic, grounds. Whitehead seems to take the position that since all theories must have metaphysical presuppositions, those which do not acknowledge them differ from those that do only in being much more likely to have inadequate and inconsistent metaphysical assumptions 22. There have, of course, been theories of value which were frankly "metaphysical" and even metaphysical theories of value which postulated a close association between value and reality. Such is the tendency of the whole group of writers known as "objective idealists", and some of the later members of this group published discussions oriented towards theory of value 23. Especially when Whitehead's philosophy is approached from the point of view of questions of value, there seems to be some similarity between it and the general type of philosophy known as objective idealism 24. But there are also conspicuous differences, and these differences constitute the peculiar contribution of Whitehead to metaphysics and to theory of value. Whitehead's departures from objective idealism are the reason why, though most of the objective idealists now seem a little remote and "old hat", Whitehead's philosophy is fresh and exciting. These differences, as far as values are concerned, center around the fact that the kind of being with which Whitehead links value is not, primarily, timeless, eternal being but temporal, perishing being 25: that is, becoming, concrete immediate existence, here concrete immediate existence, here and now, grasped most directly in the specious present of our own fleeting moments of experience. Old associations link the notion of "metaphysical value" with the remote, the abstract, certainly with something that takes very little account of every-day occurrences and none at all of my momentary experience. So we have another paradox - this theory which reflects the isolation of value problems from the objective aspects of things, particularly their metaphysical aspects, yet seeks to locate the source of value in our immediate and direct experience. Therefore, though Whitehead has no theory of value in the sense of an autonomous and semi-independent inquiry devoted entirely to the answering of questions - about values in isolation from all other questions about things, he is deeply concerned with these problems and does have something to say about them. But it is only in the context of his metaphysics and cosmology that we can find his views on these questions. But in this context we find a great deal on values. His metaphysics, indeed, his whole philosophy is deeply charged with values - moral, esthetic, religious, and all kinds of concerns. The "philosophy of organism" is a philosophy of universal life - life permeating all existence the most remote, the most trivial, the most apparently inert and lifeless, as well as that highly organized fraction of existence which is the experience of man, and that other existent entity which is God. Values are essential to this notion of existence, and to the understanding of it. "... a dead nature can give no reasons. All ultimate reasons are in terms of aim at value. A dead nature aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value 26." But merely pointing out that Whitehead rejects the "bifurcation" of existence and value assumed by most studies of theory of value and that he approaches the problems of value with the assumption that there is a very close association between the nature of existence and the nature of value is not enough to justify a study of Whitehead's philosophy oriented towards theory of value. If Whitehead has something significant to say on this subject, it cannot be merely the negative statement that most studies of value start with false or inadequate assumptions. It must be shown that, on the basis of his assumptions, Whitehead has some significant positive contributions to make to the study of the problems of value. It is towards the explanation of these positive contributions to the theory of value which a study of Whitehead's philosophy can make that this paper is directed. Because of the considerations discussed above, however, it is not possible to proceed at once to the elaboration of these contributions. First the metaphysical context in which his views on value are imbedded must be explained. Unfortunately, familiarity with Whitehead's metaphysics cannot be assumed. The commentators on his philosophy differ widely among themselves, and, I must admit, there seem to me to be grave difficulties in some of the interpretations which each of them make of aspects of Whitehead's metaphysics which affect his views on values - for example, there are difficulties with almost all of what has been written on Whitehead's notion of "eternal objects". It may be that when his philosophy is looked upon from the point of view of the problems of value, new light is thrown also on his metaphysics. I have therefore devoted Part I of this paper to a discussion of those aspects of Whitehead's metaphysics which are essential to his notions of value. I have kept this part as brief as possible; in order to place the major emphasis in this paper on his views on value (Part II), but the novelty of what I seemed to find there, and the disagreement at certain points of my interpretations with those of the commentators which I have read have made it impossible for me to omit or too stringently to abridge this section 27. I believe that Part I is not merely a digression or a preliminary concern of this paper. As I see it, it answers one of the two main questions into which the subject as stated divides. It will be remembered that the subject of this paper is "the metaphysical foundations for a theory of value" in Whitehead's philosophy. Since Whitehead does not have a theory of value as that term is usually understood, and since even the significant things which he has to say about values are somewhat fragmentary, I am not attempting to expound "Whitehead's theory of value". The primary concern of Part I is with the nature of the existence with which value is closely associated in Whitehead's philosophy. The primary concern of Part II is with the nature of this "close association", an unsatisfactorily vague designation which must be further specified. The most significant contributions which Whitehead has to make to the study of the problems of value will follow rather directly from the specification of the relations which value bears to existence in his philosophy. My preoccupation throughout is with the metaphysical roots of Whitehead's notions of value. Footnotes 18-27. 18 For example, an answer to question (3), I think, must always presuppose an answer to question (4). Any attempt to classify values as better or worse must appeal, implicitly at least, to some universal standard of value. Many authors of "relativistic" theories of value would not admit such a dependence, but I think that some of their theories break down at this point (See above, note 8 to the discussion on p. 3, and below, ch. 6, sec. C (5) of this paper). 19 See below, ch.5, sec. B, of this paper. 20 I say "existence" rather than "being", because the former is the word which Whitehead prefers to designate the ultimate ontological state. "... the being of a res vera is constituted by its becoming ...", and, "... it belongs to the nature of a 'being' that it is a potential for every 'becoming' (PR, pp. 252-3)". To "become" is to exist; to "be" is merely to be a factor in existence. It is not with the abstraction of being but with the concrete reality of becoming that value is intimately associated. Indeed, there may be some abstract kinds of being that are valueless. 21 And as I am. 22 On p. 50 of AI., Whitehead criticizes the Utilitarian principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number" in the light of his own metaphysical principles, and shows that, unless some definite metaphysical assumptions are made, the phrase is hopelessly vague in its meaning. He suggests then that even a stalwart positivist like J. S. Mill must have been working on some unacknowledged metaphysical assumptions when he offered this phrase as meaningful in itself. 23 As, for example, Bernard Bosanquet's Principles of Individuality and Value. 24 Though Whitehead frequently denies any direct knowledge of Hegel ("Autobiographical Note", Schilpp, op. cit., p. 7, and "Symposium" on his seventieth birthday, p. 25), he admits in AI. that he has been influenced by Bradley, a later objective idealist, and there are in his metaphysics, and even in his theory of education, echoes of the Hegelian "dialectic". 25 God is a source of value for Whitehead, it is true, but only in so far as he is actual. God is also partially in time. See below, ch. 4, sec. A, and Ch. 7, sec. (4), of this paper. 26 MT., p. 184. 27 Indeed, in the actual writing of this paper, I found that I had to go back after finishing Part II and rewrite Part I so as to reduce it to but one-third of its original length, in order to bring the total length of the paper within the prescribed limits.   Click here to move to Introduction page two Click here to move back to Table of Contents    Write me at maryskole@aol.com