METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR A THEORY OF VALUE
IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF A. N. WHITEHEAD  

PART I

The Metaphysical Foundations
 
Chapter Two
Concrete Existence as Creative Activity
 
[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 ($16.95 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
FofR The Function of Rerason
OT Organization of Thought
 

Section A:

A Criterion of Creative Activity
 
 
It is my contention that Whitehead's notion of concrete existence, which is for him the center and source of all reality, can be best understood as a multitude of inter-related moments of creative activity. That is, the ontological nature of existence is to be a creative act. It is with existence as thus interpreted that value is closely associated.
 
Part I of this paper is devoted to an exposition of existence as creative activity. But there are some general problems involved in this presentation that must be discussed first. Before it can be established that Whitehead's notion of existence can be explained as creative activity, it is necessary to have a criterion of what I mean by "creative activities". As far as I know, there is no such criterion available.
 
"Creation" and "creative" are not easy words out of which to make technical philosophical terms. They appear most naturally in religious or esthetic discourses. They tend to have rather vague and emotional meanings. I am not sure that they can be completely rationalized, but for reasons which I hope to make apparent, they seem to me to be the most, if not the only, adequate terms to apply to the total nature of Whitehead's notion of concrete existence.
 
Where am I going to get a criterion of creative activity? The answer is, largely from Whitehead himself. Indeed, I think that it is a great part of the genuine significance of Whitehead's metaphysics that he tries to base it on a notion of general ontological creative activity - not creative activity relegated to just one entity, God, but creative activity immanent in every finite moment of existence.
 
Certain objections can, of course, be raised to this proposed procedure of mine. First, it may seem inappropriate to coin still another set of "categories" for the consideration of a philosophy in which there already much an abundance of "categories". But none of Whitehead's categories, though they seem to approach this notion of creative activity, are explicitly oriented towards its analysis. Most of them are concerned with the analysis of more abstract notions. Creative activity is, however, a description of concreteness it is, I think, the most concrete and comprehensive description that can be made of Whitehead's notion of reality. "Philosophy", Whitehead says, "is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness", 1 but he also thinks that philosophy is more adequate in so far as it transcends any set of abstractions and draws new inspiration from concrete experience I am trying in this paper, not merely to expound Whitehead's philosophy as he expounded it, but rather to get at the roots of his philosophy which are often obscured in his writing by the luxuriant growth of its individual branches. At least the device of setting forth a list of categorical statements is in the spirit of Whitehead's philosophy.
 
Much more serious is the objection that in going on to argue that Whitehead interprets concrete existence as creative activity (as I shall do in Part I of this paper) I will be finding in his philosophy only a notion which I have, admittedly, already drawn from it - thereby proving merely that his notion of existence is one of creative activity in the sense in which he uses creative activity, which would be some sort of tautology. But such an objection would be based on a misinterpretation of what I am trying to do. I am not trying to prove that Whitehead's notion of existence is one of creative activity, imagining that I have an independent criterion of creative activity; I am merely trying to bring out this interpretation of Whitehead's notion of existence, which is, I believe, latent in his philosophy. As a matter of fact, he frequently refers to concrete existence as creative activity..2.
 
But in his analyses of concrete process he is usually concerned primarily with some special notion - causation or teleology or knowing -, so that the more concrete notion of creative activity is lost sight of. By elaborating a set of criteria of creative activity in advance, I hope to make it plainer that many of the things which Whitehead says about reality can be interpreted as partial analyses of the creative activity which is central to reality.
 
With these considerations in mind I venture to list the following twelve "conditions" of creative activity. This list may not be exhaustive, and the individual items certainly are not mutually exclusive. Whitehead's notion of "coherence" 3 applies to them: each involves all the others for its complete explanation. Indeed, this list is not a disjunction at all, but more of a conjunction. What I mean is that Whitehead's notion of concrete existence is creative because it fulfills all of these eleven conditions.
 
Furthermore, I want to divide the list into two groups which, for lack of a better name, I will designate as "ontological" conditions of creative activity and "cosmological" conditions of creative activity. The basis of this distinction lies not in Whitehead's own notion but rather in two ways in which the notion of "creation" is generally used. In theological contexts, "to create" means to make something out of nothing. This is a difficult notion, perhaps capable of a variety of interpretations. I take it to mean that a creative process must account for the very existence of the thing created. Since existence itself is creative process for Whitehead, this condition calls for self-creation. I have expressed this ontological notion of creation in the first three "categories".
 
Secondly, in the realm of esthetics what is "creative" is a process which transcends the routine and predictable procedures. The remaining conditions in the list, having to do with characteristics of the processes of existence, analyze this aspect of the notion of "creation".
 
The ontological conditions of creation are these.
 
(1) Primary reality: a process in order to be creative must itself be the most real operative factor in reality, must be "self-caused", and must account for the reality of all other factors in the world. Negatively, there must be no other factor in the world which determines it to act or controls its action, except that it may be partially determined by other creative acts 4
 
(2) Concreteness: creative activity cannot be merely abstract or general in its operations. It must determine not just general kinds of things; but must account for the specific, concrete " thisness" of things 5.
 
(3) The existentialist condition: in order for a process to be creative, its existence must precede and account for its essence. Things must determine their own characters, structures and laws. This doesn't mean that they merely choose from a group of antecedent forms, but that they really make the forms. This will be the most difficult of the conditions of creative activity to establish as holding in Whitehead's philosophy. It does hold, however, despite his inclusion of a realm of antecedent possibility, "eternal objects", in his metaphysical machinery. 6
 
The cosmological conditions of creative activity are these.
 
(4) Cosmic significance: a creative act, though its "focus" may be extremely limited, must have consequences for the universe as a whole. It cannot be a completely isolated, local and momentary thing 7.
 
(5) Causation: to be a creative act does not mean to be independent of causal sequences. Since creative activity is to be understood as immanent and continuous in actual process, it must include causal relations within its scope. A creative act is a causal agent. It is partially determined by antecedent creative acts, and itself partially determines subsequent creative acts. Causal relations are highly abstract views of a series of related creative acts after they have been completed 8.
 
(6) Teleology: a creative process must be an end-seeking activity. It not only is directed towards the realization of ends and achieves and enjoys such realizations, but it also generates the ends themselves. Whitehead takes seriously Bergson's equation of "finalism" and "mechanism" in Creative Evolution and so insists that a genuine teleological process not only pursues and realizes ends but also formulates, changes and develops the ends which it pursues 9.
 
(7) Freedom: a creative act must be free in two senses.
 
(a) It cannot be completely determined in its character or in its existence by entities external to itself 10.
 
(b) It must be positively self-caused 11.
 
(8) Novelty: there must be something genuinely unique and new about each creative act. The most significant kind of novelty is certainly novelty of character, and each creative act must display some novelty of character. But this novelty may be so slight as to be unrecognizable. Even when a creative act seems only to preserve the dominant character of its immediate past, however, it still displays novelty in that it is perpetuating that character and making it apply to the novel situation of the present 12.
 
(9) Subjectivity: a creative act cannot be merely something for other entities. It must also be something to and for itself. It is "experience" to itself, and this experience is primarily affective and volitional. In some primitive way at least, it must experience interest, purpose, adversion, aversion, pleasure, pain, frustration, enjoyment, anticipation and similar "emotional tones". "Consciousness" is not a necessary aspect of this subjective experience 13.
 
(10) Objectivity: a creative act must generate something of significance to others; it cannot be merely subjective, or epiphenominal. It must affect future creative process 14.
 
(11) Differentiation: a creative act seeks internal diversification within itself and it enriches the future by adding a new item to the "actual world" which the future encounters. Creative activity increases and enriches the factual content of the world 15.
 
(12) Synthesis: each creative act is essentially an act of synthesis. It appropriates and reissues the entire preceding actual world and the entire realm of possibility in a new, comprehensive, completely definite, and organized structure - every creative act makes a universe, an organized "perspective" of all previous actuality and of all possibility 16.
 
I have tried to indicate in the notes in which sections of the subsequent discussion of Part I of this paper these various conditions of creative activity are discussed. It has not been possible in the space available to treat each of them fully. Nor did it seem expedient to treat them in serial order. I have, rather, taken up several important notions in Whitehead's metaphysics and tried to show how each contributes to the development of the notion of general ontological creative activity .
 
Footnotes Chapter Two-a (1-16).
 
1 PR., p. 30.
 
2 PR., p. 89 , RM pp. 92, 98, 101-2, MT., p. 206, etc. On the last page cited, he says, "Process for its intelligibility involves the notion of a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion."
 
3 See above, ch. 1, sec. C, of this paper.
 
4 See below, sec. B ( 1) of this chapter. Whitehead's "ontological principle" seems to fulfill this condition. Also, sec. B of ch. 3 and sec. B of ch. 4 to eliminate the claim of eternal objects and of God to this metaphysical role.
 
5 See below, sec. B of this chapter and ch. 3, sec. C.
 
6 Ch. 3 of this paper is devoted to the explanation of how this condition of creative activity is fulfiiled in Whitehead's metaphysics.

7 See below, sec. C & sec. D (4) of this chapter and ch.3, sec. C. of this paper.

 
8 See below, .sec. C & sec. D (1) and (4) of this chapter and sec. B of ch. 5 of this paper.
 
9 See below, sec. C (paragraph on "subjective aim") , sec. C of ch.3, and sec. C (4) (on "progress") of ch. 6 of this paper.
 
10 Classes of such entities would be the past, the future, the contemporary world, the realm of the possible, ideal perfection and God. See below, sec. D (l) of this chapter, sec. C of ch.3 and sec. B of ch. 4 of this paper,
 
11 See below, sec. B of this chapter.
 
12 The problem is to construe the essential novelty of creative activity in such a minimal way that it can apply not only to the heightened moments of human experience but also to the apparently repetitive existences of the physical world. See below sec. D (2) of this chapter and sec. C of ch. 3.
 
13 See below, secs. C and D of this chapter.
 
14 This condition is just one aspect of condition (4), cosmic significance. The latter condition is broader, however, including the significance of the creative act for its predecessors and for God as well as for its successors. See below, sec. D (4) of this chapter.
 
15 See below, sec. D (3) of this chapter, sec. A of ch.4, and Sec. C 2) of ch. 6 of this paper.
 
16 Thus, the universe is not created just once, but over and over again in each moment of actuality. What stands out in each creative act is some limited pattern, but no created fact is really isolated; each calls for an adJustment of the totality of things in order to exist at all. See below, sec. C (l) and sec. D (2) of this chapter and sec. C of ch. 3.
 
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Move to Chapter Two Section B.