METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR A THEORY OF VALUE
IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF A. N. WHITEHEAD Concrete Existence as Creative Activity - [Note: Footnotes are designated in red and may be accessed by scrolling down the page to the green sections. Below are the full titles of books referred to in the footnotes. Note also that the occasional page references in bold black type are not accurate in this medium, since they refer to the paper version of this work.]
- 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
Section B:
Actual Occasions - Concrete Existence, Ultimate Reality and Creative Processes
Whitehead's philosophy is so full of a number of things - there is such a sweep of topics, so much metaphysical machinery: space-time, God, creativity, eternal objects - that unless one can find a central notion, some focal center from which to chart one's excursions, there is great danger of getting lost in this metaphysical maze and circling endlessly and aimlessly around some suburban group of concepts. Luckily, Whitehead provides many clear directions pointing towards such a central point of reference. This central concept in Whitehead's philosophy is the notion of "actual occasions" or "actual entities" 17, 18
The notion of actual occasions is at once the notion of the immediate present, part of which, at least, is our experience as we live it, and the notion of ultimate reality—the source of space-time, the laws of nature, and all of the complex abstractions with which Whitehead deals. As so frequently occurs in Whitehead's philosophy, we have in the notion of the actual occasion many seemingly opposite extremes meeting in one notion.
Perhaps this one is the ultimate paradox—the identification of the evanescent moment, the now , the ever-beginning, ever-perishing transience of the present with the ultimate reality which accounts for everything else, no matter how permanent or intricate, or noble, in the world. And yet this is certainly what Whitehead means to do. "The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future 19." Apart from the immediacy of present actuality, "there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness 20."
And this present is not only that world out there, it is also my personal experience, and yours. Every actual occasion is to itself an experience. "Each actual occasion is a throb of experience including the actual world [the world which it experiences] in its scope 21."
I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an 'occasion of experience'. I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe, ever plunging into the creative advance 22.
Our human experience consists of particularly rich and well-developed actual occasions. Since as realities all actual occasions are similar to each other, we have the road to metaphysical penetration directly within us. And not "deeply within us; some partial, hidden facet of our experience, some object to which it refers; but the experience itself, and the more direct and immediate the better - experience as directly felt, as lived-through, with all of its striving and emotion, joy and sorrow, sweat and tears - this immensely rich (far richer than we can "know") stream of living experience is itself ultimate reality, and in it we can find at least some of the secrets of things.
Let there be no misunderstanding. Whitehead doesn't mean merely that through experience we "know" or have representations of the real world. Nor, at the other extreme, is he a solipsist. Experience is reality, but so is the world out there which is experienced.
In my experience, the world "out there" is an abstraction, since it is only one aspect of my experience. But it is real aspects of the world out there - not just pictures or copies of it, but aspects of the real things themselves 23 - that are in my experience. For every actual occasion forms itself by synthesizing the world that it encounters. Indeed, it is only thus that the world exists at all - by being continuously caught and synthesized in actual occasions. Experience, then, is not an epiphenominal reflection; it is a choice set of instances of the real world-building process of actuality 24. As itself consisting of actual on-going processes, the external world is basically like our experience—self-enjoying, striving, primarily emotional rather than cognitive. It too consists of streams of actual occasions, each grasping a world, each making itself out of that world, each passing that world and something of itself on to its successors when it "perishes".
Just as I as an individual human being am not merely one occasion of my experience but am, rather, a tremendous mass of occasions related to each other in complex ways—the whole stream of very closely inter-related occasions which is my experience from birth to death, and those other associated streams of occasions which constitute my body; so also the objects of the physical world - chairs, mountains, stars - are not themselves individual actual occasions, but vast "societies" of actual occasions. What we prehend of the things out there are common aspects of a large number of occasions. We do not clearly prehend the individual occasions. So, though I experience a real world and can have knowledge about a real world, the best starting point for a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of reality is my own immediate experience. Here I am most closely in contact with a real unit of existence while it is alive and present in its full individuality. From the study of these selected actual occasions as they come along I can generalize about the nature of all occasions.
We must reject, then, along with "epiphenominalism", the whole tradition of the "bifurcation " of the world into "physical" things" and "mental" things, each substantially different from the other type. There are only actual occasions and organizations of actual occasions, all real and all basically similar, all reacting to and appropriating aspects of one another into themselves. But some actual occasions are just more highly developed than others 25.
My immediate experience, then, if I can transcend the abstractions under which I generally view it and appreciate it concretely enough, can open up to me the inner nature of what it is like to exist, that is to be real. It can reveal to me the inner processes of things, what they are in and for themselves 26.
The foregoing is meant to serve as a general introduction to the actual occasion, which is the name for Whitehead's notion of the actual existence with which value is closely associated. It can be seen from what I have said that it is an entity which is not remote from the concerns of life which lead to the problems of value. But it is, after all, with the metaphysical function of actual occasions that Whitehead associates value, so we must try to understand that metaphysical function.
As a metaphysical entity the actual occasion has some similarities to the various notions of "atomism" which have been put forth. Actual occasions are many, and they are ultimate and irreducible realities: (a) as one among a multitude of ultimate realities an actual occasion is like an atom. But it has two other characteristics which make it rather unlike any atom that has been conceived before: (b) it is not absolutely simple but rather, is highly complex, and (c) it is not passive and only externally moved but highly active, and its activity is internal to its own nature.
Of course it is these last two aspects of its complexity and its activity which are the first aspects of its metaphysical nature to commend it as capable of being closely associated with value. The principal barrier that an attempt to associate values with the usual notion of existence encounters is that value experiences are diverse (esthetic, moral, religious, more or less intense, and so on) and dynamic ( full of striving and avoidance, longing and repulsion, and so on); whereas the usual notion of something existing is of just "lying there", lumpy and uninteresting 27
Whitehead rejects the notion of simple, passive existence. For him, to exist is to be ultimately real, to be extremely complex (indeed, each existent is a complete universe), and to be almost unimaginably active. How can this notion of existence be best described? My contention is that the notion which sums up its diverse aspects most completely is the notion of creative activity 28. Each actual occasion, each moment of finite existence, is a creative act 29. And it is in this notion of existence that Whitehead finds the sources of value 30.
The first reason for holding that each actual occasion, each moment of concrete existence, is a creative act is that it alone is ultimate reality. There is nothing more ultimate upon which it depends - no underlying substance, no perfect form in which it "participates", no Absolute whose creature it is. A deep-seated tradition of Platonism in our culture which conceives the actual world about us and our own immediate experience as somehow a second-rate kind of reality at best - "mere appearance" - makes it hard for us even to understand Whitehead's contention on this point 31. But this is what he means by his "ontological principle". Anything else is real only insofar as it is a factor in an actual occasion. There are other kinds of entities - eternal objects, propositions, enduring objects, and so on - but, "The most general term 'thing' or, equivalently, 'entity' - means nothing else than to be one of the 'many' which find their niches in each instance of concrescence 32. Indeed, in his most formal statement of the ontological principle 33. Whitehead may go a little too far, because he there says that nothing has any sort of reality independently of its operation in actual occasions. It turns out that eternal objects in themselves, as bare possibilities, have some sort of being independently of their function in actual entities, even independently of God, but the conception of eternal objects as independent of actuality therefore turns out to be the notion of something which is the nearest approach to nonentity that we can make 34.
I say that because of the ontological principle, we must conceive actual entities to be truly creative in an ontological sense, for they and they alone account for there being any reality at all. They create themselves 35 and help in the creation of each other. Collectively they constitute all of reality, and individually each one is a universe—it is everything else from one point of view.
Indeed, the very complexity of each individual actual entity when com¬bined with the notion of its yet being a unity can only be comprehended if each actual entity is understood as a creative act.
- In the philosophy of organism it is assumed that an actual entity is composite. Actuality is the fundamental exemplification of composition. All other meanings of composition are referent to this root meaning 36.
And yet, "the analysis of an actual entity is only intellectual, or, to speak with wider scope, only objective. Each actual entity is a cell with atomic unity.37"
Each actual entity contains aspects of all others within it. Each actual entity contains the whole realm of the possible as well as all other actualities within it. The differences between actual things - such as the difference between a rock and a man - are accounted for primarily not by building up combinations of actual entities (the way different things were supposed to be built up out of different configurations of atoms, each of which was simple in itself), but rather by differences within each actual occasion in these things. Each actual entity has the universe within it, and aspects of each actual entity enter into all other actual entities. How then are we to conceive the individual unity of each actual entity? I am going to argue that the "stuff" of actuality is feeling, that each actual entity is a feeling as a whole, and that the parts of itself which survive it to enter into other actual entities are also feelings. What is the difference between the total feeling which is an individual actual entity and the partial feeling which can enter into countless occasions? My answer is that it is as a creative act, putting forth a version of the universe, that an actual occasion is one and occurs only once. Aspects of it can enter into other creative acts, but each total creative act occurs just once, issues a single version of the total universe, and then perishes. Since this act of creation is not just a subjective dream, what it has created has consequences for the world beyond itself; but as the act of creating this "hard fact" which other things must take account of, each actual entity exists but once and perishes "when" its task is accomplished 38.
Though each actual occasion is an individual existent thing, it is not primarily a something which acts - it is activity. Whitehead rejects the notion that in order for there to be an act, there must be something that acts. Such a notion, he says, leads to the metaphysics of "substance", which he rejects. There is no "substance", or, rather, there is only "substantial activity" 39.
Whether this thought is fundamentally irrational or whether language cannot be so used as to express it, as some critics of Whitehead contend, cannot be the fundamental problem of this paper. The only issue here is that this is what Whitehead means. "... the conception of the world here adopted is that of functional activity 40." "Existence is activity ever merging into the future 41."
Now, if it be granted that existence is fundamentally activity, the next question is how to characterize this activity. It cannot be identified with movement in space and time, because it is not "in time" as we usually understand that concept. We cannot call this activity which goes on inside an individual actual occasion "change", because change is something which takes place in time. Time, and space too, are among the entities created by actual occasions; they cannot therefore be the conditions governing the process of their creation 42. And yet, certainly something very complex goes on within each occasion, and we can even recognize "phases" in the internal process of an occasion 43.
Furthermore, under which general kind of activity that we recognize in the world, "causal", "teleological", and so on, can we classify the process that goes on in an occasion? The answer is, under none of them. Not because it doesn't share their characteristics - indeed, it is the source of all of these special notions of process (as it is of all abstractions), but it transcends being classified as any special type of process. It is all of them, and more.
The process within an occasion is both "causal" and "teleological". "... the occasion arises as an effect facing its past and ends as a cause facing its future. In between there lies the teleology of the universe 44." The occasion is also self-caused - causa sui 45. And, as we shall see 46, its teleological process involves not only the pursuit of ends but as the generation the ends which it pursues. Indeed, we can understand the internal process of each occasion in many ways, and yet not exhaust its full nature.
- My unity - which is Descartes' 'I am' - is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings. This individual enjoyment is what I am in my role of a natural activity, as I shape the activities of the environment into a new creation, which is myself at this moment; and yet, as being myself, it is a continuation of the antecedent world. If we stress the role of the environment, this process is causation. If we stress the role of my immediate pattern of active enjoyment, this process is self-creation. If we stress the role of the conceptual anticipation of the future whose existence is a necessity in the nature of the present, the process is the teleological aim at some ideal in the future. This aim, however, is not really beyond the present process. For the aim at the future is an enjoyment in the present. It thus effectively conditions the immediate self-creation of the new creature 47.
The process within an occasion is a private, subjective process. It is a process of striving and enjoyment. And yet it is a process which involves the whole world. The objective world is preserved through it. The actual occasion synthesizes the world, and thus makes itself.
- Thus the epochal occasion has two sides. On one side it is a mode of creativity bringing together the universe. This side is the occasion as the cause of itself, its own creative act. ...
- On the other side, the occasion is the creature. This creature is that one emergent fact. This fact is the self-value of the creative act. But there are not two actual entities, the creativity and the creature. There is only one entity which is the self-creating creature 48.
Again, we can contrast the subjective immediacy of the occasion as what it is for itself with even a wider metaphysical context. Not only does it synthesize and preserve all previous actuality; it also performs the metaphysical function of actualizing as yet unrealized possibilities.
- The concept of self-enjoyment does not exhaust that aspect of process here termed 'life' [sometimes, as here, meaning the internal process of each occasion]. Process for its intelligibility involves the notion of a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion. It is the process of eliciting into actual being factors in the universe which antecedently to that process exist only in the mode of unrealized potentialities. The process of self-creation is the transformation of-the potential into the actual, and the fact of such transformation includes the immediacy of self-enjoyment 49.
And thus, also, actual process is creative in that it generates real novelties never before seen on earth, or even in heaven 50.
And finally, though the process of each occasion is an individual one of "self-creation" and a subjective one of "self-enjoyment", it is also a process that makes hard facts for the rest of the world; for what is self-created and self-enjoyed in the occasion becomes, after the occasion is completed and enters upon its "objective immortality", a new fact influencing all subsequent process and even contributing to the self-realization of God 51.
- To be actual must mean that all actual things are alike objects, enjoying objective immortality in fashioning creative actions; and that all actual things are subjects, each prehending the universe from which it arises.The creative action is the universe always becoming one in a particular unity of self-experience, and thereby adding to the multiplicity which is the universe as many 52.
And there are still other aspects to this internal process of each actual occasion on which I have not even touched. It is certainly the notion of the most involved and fundamental activity that has yet been conceived by man. Indeed, I'm not sure that Whitehead ever sees it clearly and all at once. Certainly, however, if it must be summed up in a single term, there is none better or more adequate than the one which he frequently employs himself, "creative activity".
Footnotes:
17 "Actual entity" is the more general term; it includes God, who is an "actual entity" but not an "actual occasion". "Actual occasions" (the plural is used because plurality is essential to the concept) are the finite moments of existence. Each has a proper unity of its own, yet each is internally related to the others. There is no other form of actual existence than actual entities. The whole of Part I of this paper is an elaboration of this notion.
18 Sometimes actual occasions are called "epochal occasions" (RM.), or "occasions of experience" (as in MT ., p. 206), and frequently they are referred to more loosely as "actuality" (as in PR ., p. 321), "actual existence", and so on. Then too, when certain technical aspects of actual occasions are under discussion, they are called by such terms as "concrescences", or, as in the middle and most formidable sections of PR., by the utterly repellent name of "subject-superjects".
19 AE. , p. 4.
20 PR., p. 254. Dorothy Emmet says, "This insistent note of 'present immediacy' is the answer to those who would argue that a preoccupation with speculative metaphysics must necessarily destroy interest in the vivid immediacy of life. ... For the conception of ... the concrescent actual entity means nothing if it does not.point us.:to the present as that creative moment in the passage of nature which is indeed all that there is (Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, p.278)."
21 PR., p.290.
22 MT., p. 206.
23 Some of their component "feelings"; see below, ch. 3, sec. C of this paper.
24 In a sense, because of the very highly developed powers of creative world-building which characterize conscious human experience, it is true that it tends to distort the actual world which it prehends and to substitute abstractions for the real things out there. But there are depths to our experience which are not subject to this distortion, and even its conscious surface of sense experience and conceptual manipulation, if properly understood and not mistaken for the world on which they operate, can help us to a deepened understanding and more complete mastery of the world of which we are a part. See below, sec. D (2) of this chapter.
25 The relation between "physical" and "mental" occasions is somewhat similar to that between Leibniz's "sleeping" and "waking" monads, but the similarity between the monads of Leibniz and the occasions of Whitehead cannot be pushed too far. While the monads are eternal, the actual occasions are momentary pulsations of experience. While the monads are "windowless" and only reflect what is going on in the whole world through "pre-established harmony", actual occasions are directly open to the whole actual and possible world, and actively reach out to constitute themselves out of this world.
26 Thus still another presupposition of modern orthodoxy must be set aside. Whitehead accepts "anthropomorphism" of a sort as necessary to philosophy (to the scandal of some of his severest critics). Naturally, Whitehead believes that this anthropomorphising must be done with caution and skill. Collar buttons don't really try to hide under bureaus nor do heavenly bodies pursue each other with amorous intent. Even in fields where interpreting the inner life of others is inescapable, as, say, in child psychology, we are aware of its dangers and limitations. In extending such a procedure to non-human life and inorganic nature, Whitehead shows, on the whole, great sensitivity and judgment.Also, we mustn't jump to conclusions about the nature of pervasive psychical life. It isn't uniform throughout, and some things are better called "physical" than "psychical", because their "mental" aspects are negligible. The psychical doesn't parallel the physical; it is continuous with it in the sense of being a supplement or an enrichment of certain phases of the physical. Finally, "consciousness" is used in a very restricted sense by Whitehead; even much of human experience is not "conscious". See below, sec. D (2) of this chapter.
27 "We shall never elaborate an explanatory metaphysics unless we abolish this notion of valueless, vacuous existence. Vacuity is the character of an abstraction, and is wrongly introduced into the notion of a finally real thing, an actuality. (F of R., pp, 24-5)."
28 In sec. A of this chapter I have tried to explain what I mean by"creative activity".
29 God is also a creative act, but not the only creative act. See below, ch. 4, sec. B, of this paper.
30 As I shall try to show in Pt. II of this paper.
31 And his own frequent mention of "eternal objects", universal essences, further confuses the issue. It is for this reason that I have chosen to make Chapter Three of this paper, on "eternal objects", bear the main burden of Part I of the argument of this paper.
32 PR., p. 321. "'Actuality' means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete, in abstraction from which there is rnere nonentity. In other words, abstraction from the notion of 'entry into the concrete' is a self-contradictory notion, since it asks us to conceive a thing as not a thing."
33 PR., p. 36.
34 See below, ch. 3, sec. B, of this paper.
35 See below, pp. 54-5 of this sec., reference to each occasion as causa sui.
36 PR., pp. 223-4.
37 PR ., p. 347. Another paradox - actual entities must be analyzed in order to be understood. Analysis is possible. Indeed, Whitehead recognizes several different kinds of analyses which can be per¬formed on actual entities. But, still, this analysis does not get at something more real. The most real thing is the starting point of the analysis, not its products.
38 "An epochal occasion is a concretion. It is a mode in which diverse elements come together into a real unity. Apart from the concretion, these elements stand in mutual isolation. Thus an actual entity is the outcome of a crative synthesis, individual and passing (RM., pp. 92-3)."
39 See below, sec. C of this chapter and ch. 4, sec. A.
40 Smb., pp. 26-27.
41 MT., p. 232.
42 Whitehead has an "epochal" theory of time. Each occasion generates a "quantum of time" which it "deposits "upon its completion. Real time, then, is discontinuous, being made up of discrete pulsations which cannot be broken up into smaller units. See SMW., p. 183 ff., PR., pp. 433 ff. I cannot here go into Whitehead's theories of space and time, since they are exceedingly complex, and belong, rather, to the study of his philosophy of nature.
43 See below, sec. D. of this chapter. Since the "later" phases influence the "earlier" phases in the internal process of an occasion, as well as the earlier influencing the later, it is obvious that this process cannot be in time as we know it, where influence can run only one way.
44 AI., p. 249.
45 PR., p. 38 ff., also PR., pp. 131-2, and PR., pp. 228-9.
46 In Part II, ch. 6, sec. C, of this paper.
47 MT., p. 228.
48 RM., pp. 101-2.
49 MT., pp. 206-7.
50 See below, ch. 3, sec. C.
51 See below, sec. D, of this chapter.
52 PR., p. 89.
53 Whitehead speaks of "physical prehensions" or "physical feelings", "conceptual prehensions" or "conceptual feelings", and so on. Prehension has some claim to being the wider term, for Whitehead speaks of "negative prehensions" and says that they "exclude from feeling", thus seeming to mean that only positive prehensions are to be called feelings. See, however, below, ch.3, sec.A, pp. 112-14 where it is shown that this distinction is broken down to some extent. In the shift of meaning of "prehension" from SMW. to PR, "prehension" is first used to mean the total act of the occasion and then only its partial acts; whereas "feeling" means both the total and partial acts. The explanation of these difficulties as I see it, however, is that in PR. the term "feeling" comes largely to be substituted for the term "prehension". Whitehead, however, continues to use both terms more or less interchangeably in his later works.
54 SMW., p. l0l. (All of the italicization is Whitehead's.)
