Whitehead Chapter Two Section C

METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR A THEORY OF VALUE

IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF A. N. WHITEHEAD

Chapter Two (continued)

Concrete Existence as Creative Activity

[Note: Footnotes are designated in redaand 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

FofR The Function of Rerason

OT Organization of Thought

Section C:

Prehension and Feeling

In this section I want to consider briefly (1) the meaning of Whitehead's coined term "prehension", (2) the special meaning which he gives to "feeling", and (3) a few of the aspects and special varieties of "feelings" which he distinguishes. (1)

The products of the most concrete analysis of the actual occasion are "prehensions" or "feelings". These are the partial acts which make up the complete creative act which is the occasion. Each occasion as a whole is a "feeling", and this feeling is a synthesis of feelings. "Prehension" and "feeling" are largely synonymous terms 53, but they each emphasize different aspects of a very complex notion. So I shall give a brief discussion of each.

"Prehension" looks as though it should be primarily an epistemological term, meaning a direct grasping of experience, an act of direct awareness of what Kant called the "given", but which should perhaps in this setting be called the "taken".

The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word apprehension, even with the adjective cognitive omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive 54.

But it turns out that on the one hand acts of awareness, even when not "conscious" are only specialized forms of a more general kind of activity - like the pragmatists, Whitehead removes the absolute barrier between knowing and doing -; and, on the other hand, all activities, even those in the inorganic part of the world, are to themselves a kind of awareness (though the awareness is usually dim and emotional rather than clear and conceptual). Prehension turns out to be a term used primarily to describe all transitions from one actuality to another in the world. Human awareness of an external world is only one very special case.

As a matter of fact, in the context in which "prehension" first appears in Science and the Modern World 55, it is introduced to explain causal transmission. Whitehead says that causality becomes ultimately unintelligible when it is conceived as a relation holding between two completely discrete events, "simply located", and only externally related to each other. He objects to simple location, holding that any event must be a response to a total field. He objects to the notion that events respond indifferently to every push from without. He holds that each event must directly include within itself aspects of the events to which it responds and that it must react selectively towards these events. The process by which one event responds to other events by incorporating selected aspects of them directly into itself is prehension. The scientific notion of causal relationship is grounded for Whitehead in this process, but the causal relationship is only a very abstract view of prehension. For prehension is also a teleological process. Indeed, at least one aspect of Whitehead's notion of value is grounded directly in the notion of prehension 56.

The central emphasis in the notion of prehension is on activity. A prehension is an active process in an actual occasion which relates it to some other actuality or to some possibility. In the notion of this activity is contained, firstly, the notion of spontaneity on the part of the prehending occasion: a prehension is its act - it is not generated by that which is prehended.

Secondly, the act is always selective. Though each occasion must prehend the entire actual and possible world, it selects the mode in which it is going to respond to each aspect of that world. It can vary its response in terms of em-phasis and repression 57. It is always from a particular point of view and with a particular end in view that a prehension is performed 58.

Thirdly, this act of selective response is not merely one of reflecting or copying that to which it responds. It is, rather, an act of direct appropriation. The word "prehension" is peculiarly felicitous for indicating this aspect of the notion, suggesting as it does the word "prehensile" 59. It is through prehensions, then, that actualities are internally related to each other. Real aspects of things enter directly into the composition of other things. Thus causality becomes more than merely a way of speaking about temporal successions of independent events; the past is effective in the present because aspects of the past are really and directly in the present, and thus, also, the past and the present enter directly into the future 60. In this way too we are helped to understand how each event is more than just an isolated puff of insignificance. It is a vehicle through which the "dead" past lives on and presses against the future.

Footnotes for Chapter Two - c (53-60):

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, x 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.)

55 SMW., ch. 4.

56 See below, ch. 6, sec. B, of this paper.

57 In ch. 3 I attempt to make clear the selective nature of this response insofar as it is directed towards possibilities. The same, or at least similar, considerations apply to the prehension of actualities.

58 Events that are "contemporaneous" are causally independent of each other (indeed this is the definition of "contemporaneousness"). Because of the selectivity of prehension two contemporaneous events, even though they prehend the same actual world, enjoy that [common] past under a difference of perspective elimination&emdash;that is, prehend it differently. (AI., p. 252).

59 An organism pouncing on, devouring, digesting and assimilating its food into its own body material is perhaps a better image to keep in mind when trying to appreciate the notion of prehension than either the perceptual act of seeing a color or the narrow causal act of one billiard ball hitting another. The latter two processes can be understood as specializations of the first kind of process, but the first kind of process cannot be comprehended as built up out of combinations of the latter kinds of processes.

60 AI., p. 259 and elsewhere.

Fourthly, a prehension is an act of synthesis. It pulls together and combines the past with the present and the possible with the actual. 61.

Finally, though cognition as it appears on the level of human experience is a very special and highly developed kind of prehension, it must be remembered that emotion is an essential part of the notion of prehension. The developing actuality has a "concern" for the objects which it prehends 62. It feels adversion and aversion towards them, identifies itself with some (the previous members of its society), approaches indifference in its attitude to others and is hostile to still others. The notion of "feeling", however, brings out these aspects of actual process more fully.

(2)

In Process and Reality, where the analysis of actual occasions is more complete and detailed, Whitehead substitutes the term "feeling" for the term "prehension" (though the latter is not completely abandoned) to designate the concrete processes that go on in an actual occasion.

Feelings appropriate the actual and possible world, now usually called the "data" and incorporate these data into themselves. Feelings are selective 63 and synthesizing functions 64, which build the unified occasion out of the ways in which they feel the data.

What is most striking about the term feeling, of course, is its extremely subjective flavor. Whitehead is aware of this peculiarity, and though he tries to overcome the difficulties which this characteristic of the term involves, he also chooses the term mainly to emphasize the subjective aspects of the process of actuality. In Science and the Modern World he was still taking a somewhat external view of actuality, looking at it at least partially still from the point of view of natural science. But in Process and Reality he is trying to explain what actual existence is in and for itself, which is his meaning of "subjectivity". "Feeling", he thinks, gets at the root of this process better than any other term. It suggests something active, something selective, something capable of tremendous variation and subtlety, something capable of combining many entities in one, something appreciative (though not necessarily conscious) - in short, it describes the concrete texture of a creative process.

Certainly, if we take our own experience as a starting point, feeling seems to be the most comprehensive term that can be applied to it. Thoughts, sensations, desires, hopes, enjoyments and so on can all be recognized as varieties of feelings. This term doesn't limit us to any one type of experience. 65 If all actuality is to be a kind of experience to itself, as Whitehead maintains, then feeling, suggesting vague emotional awareness, would seem to be the best way of describing this tremendously extended scope of experience, for "... the philosophy of organism attributes feeling throughout the actual world" 66.

But the very pan-subjectivity of the notion of feeling in common usage makes it difficult for Whitehead to extend its meaning to designate an ontological activity which is subjective in only some of its aspects 67.

Whitehead intends that feeling should refer to the objective, even the physical, activity of of the world too. He reminds us that physics has dissolved matter into energy and left us with a notion of "blank activity" as the fundamental "stuff" of the world 68. Whitehead wants to identify physical energy with feeling, and thus make feeling the basic "stuff" of the world. "The key notion from which such construction [of a "systematic metaphysical cosmology"] should start is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life 69."

This identification turns out to be not quite so simple. What Whitehead means is that feelings can function both objectively and subjectively, as we can see if we look separately at a few of the aspects and types of feeling. "Feeling" however, is meant to be the term designating the entire function of actual process, including both its objective and subjective phases; it cannot be limited in its meaning to any abstract aspect of actual process. The central step in this process of actuality, however, the step which makes it fundamentally a creative process, does involve intense subjectivity, so perhaps "feeling" is not too inappropriate a term, after all.

An actual occasion is analyzable. The analysis discloses operations transforming entities which are individually alien into components of a complex which is concretely one. The term 'feeling' wlll be used as the generic description of such operations. We thus say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings 70.

Footnotes for Chapter Two - c (61-70):

61 This aspect of actual process can better be explained when considering the phases of an occasion. See below, sec. D of this chapter.

62 AI., p. 226.

63 PR., p. 353

64 PR., p. 65.

65 Whitehead criticizes Locke and Hume for trylng to derive emotion from sensation, and says that the reverse is much nearer the truth. Emotion, he says, is much more primitive (PR., p. 21. See below, sec. D (2) of this chapter for Whitehead's explanation of sense experience, which is for him not at all primitive but a highly specialized and derivative kind of feeling.

Whitehead also suggests that the philosophy of organism is trying to put a "critique of pure feeling" in the place occupied by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He says that the former should also supersede the remaining critiques requlred in the Kantian philosophy (PR., pp. 172).

66 PR., p. 268.

67 Even those commentators who are generally sympathetic to many aspects of Whitehead's philosophy find it difficult to approve his use of the term feeling. Dorothy Emmet says that it strikes far too subjective a note (Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, p. l42); and John Dewey accuses Whitehead of using an "over-subjectlve vocabulary" which makes his philosophy tend towards "ontological idealism" or "spiritualism". Dewey says that at other times actuality is described in "functional" terms by Whitehead, which he (Dewey) prefers ("The Philosophy of Whitehead", in Schilpp, op. cit., pp. 660-61).

Whitehead, of course, intends for "feeling" to have "objective" as well as "subjective" meaning. Indeed, it is not for him merely a psychological but a metaphysical term. He attempts to justify his expanded use of the term by appeals to similar uses of it by Bradley and William James (AI., p. 296).

68 MT., ch. 8.

69 MT., p. 231, (italics mine).

70 PR., p. 322.

(3)

The contributions of the notion of feeling to the analysis of concrete creative process can be best elicited by discussing the nature of a few of its special aspects and varieties. The terms I want to discuss are (a) "subjective form", (b) "physical feeling", (c) "conceptual feeling" and (d) "subjective aim".

(a)

What I want to show primarily by these discussions of aspects and varieties of feeling is that all aspects of actual process are feelings, and that feeling can perform every function in actuality. Whitehead makes many analyses of feeling. They vary greatly, but the following example reveals one of the most common analyses which he makes and is suited for the purposes of this discussion.

Category of Explanation XI: That every prehension [that is, feeling] consists of three factors: (a) the 'subject' which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the 'datum'which is prehended; (c) the 'subjective form' which is how the subject prehends that datum. 71.

At first glance this analysis seems pretty much a matter of common sense; feeling is an act of awareness in which we have a "feeler", the thing felt and the way it is felt. I feel cold; I am the feeler, the temperature of the surrounding air (or the molecular activity of the air - the data can be analyzed in different ways) is the data; and my subjective state of thermal sensations, tension sensation, and, most of all, a certain specific kind of emotional tone - "discomfort-of-being cold" - is the subjective form of the feeling. Further inspection, however, reveals aspects of this analysis that do not fit into the common sense picture. For who am I, the feeler? Whitehead admits no "substance" underlying actual process. So - the feeler is also a feeling. It is the total feeling which is this actual occasion 72. And what is the "data"? In most cases, it turns out, it too is fealing - feeling first felt by another feeler; that is, generated in other actual occasions 73. And, of course, the "subjective form" is feeling. So we are left with feeling feeling feeling (subject, transitive verb, object); and it will take more than common sense to make any sense out of this.

I start with the last element,"subjective form", because it is closest to the familiar meaning of feeling, and because, if we can see what happens to it, we will find it easier to understand feeling in the other senses.

The subjective form of a feeling is the reaction of the subject - that is, the whole occasion in which this feeling is a partial act - to the data, or, as I quoted above, it is "how that subject prehends that datum". But, then, the whole occasion is nothing but subjective form.

Thus an actual entity, on its subjective side, is nothing else than what the universe is for it, including its own reactions. The reactions are the subjective forms of the feelings, elaborated into definiteness through stages of process 74.

An actual occasion is a transformation of the vast objective universe into a moment of intense subjective feeling.

... process is the rush of feelings whereby second-handedness attains subjective immediacy; in this way subjective form overwhelms repetition, and transforms it into immediately felt satlsfaction; objectivity is absorbed into subjectivity 75.

It is only in a moment of such intense subjectivity that creative activity can be carried on. Here things are intimately together, so intimately that they interpenetrate and determine each other's natures. Subjective form is all pervasive in the feeling; it doesn't start with some bare given "sensa" untouched by the integrating process of the occasion. In order to be felt at all in the occasion, the data are transformed and "harmonized" with each other and with the developing unity of the new occasion 76. Indeed, there is nothing external in this process; even the beginning and the end of it aren't externaI to each other 77 . "... prehensions are not independent of each other. The relations between their subjective forms is guided by the one subjective aim which guides their function 78. Inside the creative process of an occasion everything is transformed, is new, is individual, is private.

The essential novelty of a feeling attaches to its subjective form. The initial data ... may have served other feelings with other subjects. But the subjective form is the immediate novelty; it is how that subject is feeling that objective datum 79.

The advantages of insisting on the difference of the subjective form from the objective datum, on its control by the internal process of the occasion, on its subjective and private nature, are that only thus can the thoroughgoing transformation of things which is creation - or re-creation - be accomplished. But there is always a grave danger in insisting on the subjectivity and privacy of a thing. That thing thus becomes cut off from the world. Such a result would be disastrous for Whitehead's philosophy. If the subjective form were something completely different from the objective datum, then the "bifurcation of nature" into "objective" and "subjective" entities would be reconstituted. Furthermore, the internal process in an occasion would no longer be genuinely creative, for it would result only in something local and private, not in something that made a difference for the universe. But because of the ubiquity of the notion of feeling, this disastrous consequence does not follow from Whitehead's insistence on the distinction between "objective datum" and "subjective form".

The total feeling is never just subjective form; it is all three of the aspects mentioned above 80.

... the subjective form cannot be absolutely disjoined from the pattern of the objective datum. The intellectual disjunction is not a real separation. Also the subjective form, amid its own original elements, always involves reproduction of the pattern of the objective datum 81.

"The word 'feeling' has the merit of preserving this double significance of subjective form and of the apprehension of an object 82." The subjective form is not a substitute for the datum; it includes the datum, or at least, genuine aspects of the datum. What the subjective form does is (a) to take into itself those selected aspects of the data which are suited to the needs of the new occasion, and (b) to supplement these with feeling contributed by the new occasion. Thus the data are preserved in the subjective form. If the new occasion is successful in its creative act, there will be little or no loss in the datum, but rather enrichment of it 83.

Nor does the datum reach a dead end when it is engulfed in the subjective form of a new feeling. Subjectivity is only a phase. When the creative task of the occasion is completed, its feelings, including the additions which their subjective forms have made, are reissued as objective facts which then become the objective data for new occasions.

... the reason why the origins [data] are not lost in the private emotion is that there is no element in the universe capable of pure privacy. If we could obtain a complete analysis of meaning, the notion of pure privacy would be seen to be self-contradictory.. Emotional feeling is still subject to the third metaphysical princlple, that to be 'something' is 'to have the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities'. Hence, 'to be a real component of an actual entity' is in some sense to realize this potentiality. ... The notion of passing on is more fundamental than that of a private individual fact 84.

Subjective form, privacy, is the central moment of creative process, but it is only a moment of transition between two objective phases of feeling. It accounts for the creation of the latter objective phase out of the former 85.

... every prehension has its public side and its private slde. Its public side is constituted by the complex datum prehended; and its private side is constituted by the subjective form through which a private quality is imposed on the public datum. ... But the actualities are moments of passage into a novel stage of publicity. ... Prehensions have public careers, but they are born privately. 86

Footnotes for Chapter Two - c (71-86):
71 PR., p. 35. The singular "datum" and plural "data" seem to be used interchangeably by Whitehead.

72 See below, (4) of this sub-section.

73 See below, (2) of this sub-section.

74 PR., p. 234.

75 PR., p. 235.

76 Whitehead rejects the "sensationalist principle" which holds that "the primary activity in the act of exparience is the bare subjective entertainment of the datum, devoid of any subjective form of reception. This is the doctrine ofmere sensation (PR., p..239)."

77 See below, (4) of this sub-section.

78 "This correlation of subjective forms is termed 'the mutual sensitivity' of prehension. (PR., p. 359).

79 PR., p. 354.

80 "...no feeling can be abstracted either from its data or its subject. It is essentially a feeling aiming at that subject, and motivated by that aim (PR., p. 355) ."

81 PR., p. 357.

82 AI., p. 299.

83 See below, (4) of this sub-section, and sec. C of ch. 6 of this paper.

84 PR., p. 322. I have eliminated from this quotation a very interesting analogy which Whitehead makes to certain aspects of physics. He illustrates the above point by the statement in physics that "scalor quantities" (the analogue for objective data) are derivative from "vector quantities" (the analogue for subjective emotions).

85 It is a not quite accurate image to picture Whitehead's occasions as "all windows" in contrast with Leibniz's "windowless monads". (Professor Hocking's remarks in "Whitehead on Mind and Nature," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 390). It might be better to picture an actual occasion as an extremely short tunnel with tremendous openings at either end. A manifold and disunited world flows in one end and an ordered universe is issued at the other. In the split-moment of darkness in between, a universe is created.

86 PR., p. 444.

(b)

Under this heading and the next I want to consider very briefly two prominent varieties of feeling which Whitehead recognizes: "physical" feelings (or prehensions) and "conceptual" feelings (or prehensions).
A physical feeling is the feeling of a feeling as felt elsewhere. The datum is a feeling generated in a previous occasion 87.

The subjective form of a physical feeling is largely "conformal"; that is, it reissues the datum. But this conformation is never complete.

Apart from inhibitions or additions, weakenings or intensifications, due to the history of its production, the subjective form of a physical feeling is reenaction of the subjective form of the feeling felt. Thus the cause passes on its feeling to be reproduced by the new subject as its own, and yet as inseparable from the cause. ... There is a flow of feeling. But the re-enaction is not perfect 88.

Pure physical feelings are not, however, sensations. The latter are much more highly developed and belong to a later "phase" in the inner process of the occasion 89. The subjective forms of physical feelings are primarily "emotional". They are said to have a "vector quality" 90. They are feelings of "push" of something going on out there, something vaguely friendly or menacing 91. They carry more definite characters in them, but these are latent on the level of pure physical feeling. When the more definite characters become dominant on the higher level of sense experience, the original emotional push tends, in its turn, to be repressed, and that is why human beings have a hard time appreciating what pure physical feeling is like. 92

The significance of physical feeling for this discussion is that it emphasizes Whitehead's contention that the hard, static, externality which we associate wlth the actual world is an abstraction. The most immediate experience of an external world is one of dynamic, active push.

(c)

Conceptual feelings are said to be those feelings whose data are not other feelings but eternal objects. I have devoted ChapterThree of this paper to the problems of the function of eternal objects in a philosophy whose central notion is that of concrete creative activity, so I will not go into the detailed analysis of this variety of feeling.

In Chapter Three I will try to show that single eternal objects are never prehended directly 93. This means that there can be no conceptual feelings which have nothing but an eternal object as their datum. Whitehead seems to agree. As a matter of fact, it turns out that all of the conceptual feelings that he discusses are really "hybrid physical feelings". Either they are those which by a process he calls "transmutation" "objectify" mmany physical data under a pattern of eternal objects 94 ; or else, if the object of the conceptual feeling is a possibility which has not yet been fully actualized by any occasion, this object has at least been conceptually prehended in the "primordial nature of God" 95.

Only God then has pure conceptual feelings 96. The problems in relation to the genuineness of the ultimate novelty of any finite development engendered by this provision that God must prehend all possibility will be taken up later 97.

The central importance of the notion of conceptual feeling in creative process is that it provides for the functioning of unrealized or only partially realized possibilities in this process. The process is not pushed blindly toward just one goal. It can survey alternatives and choose those most relevant to its particular problem of integrating its particular feelings.

Conceptual feeling is essential to all process, not just conscious human experience 98, though it is at a minimum in physical processes which are largely conformal to their data. Insofar as actual occasions are not merely conformal but create genuine novelty, it is chiefly through their conceptual feelings that they do this 99. Conceptual feelings then account for the processes of changing the character of actuality. Though each occasion must prehend all actualities, and thus conform to them in their physical feelings, in their conceptual feelings they have much more freedom. The dominant patterns of the past when conceptually prehended may then be dismissed by "negative prehension", or their importance diminished 100. New patterns, those not dominant in the past, can be emphasized when conceptually prehended and thus made to play a dominant role in the process of the occasions which prehend them.

It is significant that Whitehead calls the subjective forms of conceptual feeling "valuations" 101. Though the datum is here a bare formal possibility, "valuation" is emotional. Whitehead calls it "appetition" 102. It is an "adversion" or an "aversion" towards a possibility for definiteness 103. It is the valuation, the subjective form which the occasion gives to the feeling and not the eternal objects felt which determines what role the eternal objects are going to play in the new occasion. By valuation the occasion "values up" or"values down" the significance of these formal possibilities 104. Since a conceptual feeling is a process within an occasion, the unity of that occasion - its creative process - controls the significance any possibility has for that occasion. Possibilities, eternal ohjects, do not control the process of the occasion 105.

Whitehead sometimes seems to speak of eternal objects as "lures for feeling". Careful reading of these passages,, however, shows that it is not the eternal objects themselves, but the conceptual feelings which function as "lures for feeling" 106.

What does this mean? It means that, though finally each occasion must feel every item, actual and possible, of the universe in a completely definite manner - that is, with its relations of emphasis and suppression to every other item established - there is along the way to the establishment of this definite outcome a state in which there are feelings which are not completely definite, trial feelings which consider different possibilities for achieving the final definiteness. These possibilities may be partially organized; they are not just simple forms, but the complete organization is not yet achieved. Thus there is "room" in which to push these possibilities about and see how they fit with the feelings which the occasion must organize. It is this half-way kind of reality which is a conceptual feeling 107.

Footnotes for Chapter Two - c (87-107):

87 "Thus a simple physical feeling is one feeling which feels another feeling. But the feeling felt has a subject diverse from the subject of the feeling which feels it (PR., p. 362).

88 PR., pp. 362-3.

89 See below, sec. D (2) of this chapter. Whitehead says that there is "sense reception" below "sense perception", and he identifies these more primitive feelings wlth Bergson's "unspatialized" and "instinctive" experience (PR., p. 173).

90 PR., p. 481. Physical feeling is the primary reality underlying the scientific abstraction of causal relationship.

91 Sometimes Whitehead associates physical feelings with Santayana's "animal faith" (PR., p..215 and 231).

92 We sometimes still feel the more primitive feeling behind the sense experience, however, as when a red cloak gives one an experience of "red irritation"( PR., p. 480), or when a green patch in a picture brings an emotion of contact with new spring grass (PR., pp. 246-7). Indeed, in AI., Whitehead says that art is successful insofar as it breaks through the artificiality of sense experience and brings the original emotional, physical feeling flooding back into conscious experience.

93 See below, ch. 3, Sect. A(2), "What is an 'eternal object'?" - of this paper.

94 PR., p. 376.

95 PR., p. 377.

96 PR., p. 378.

97 See below, ch. 4, sec. B, of this paper.

98 PR., pp. 130-31.

99 "... new forms enter into positive realization first as conceptual experience, and are then transmuted into physical experience (PR., p. 427)."

100 PR., pp. 365-66.

101 PR., pp. 368, 380, and elsewhere.

102 PR., p. 47.

103 PR., pp. 368.

104 PR., pp. 368-9.

105 "These valuations are subject to the Category of Subjective Unity [which makes all prehensions conform to the developing unity of the occasion]. Thus the conceptual registration is conceptual valuation; and conceptual valuation introduces creative purpose (PR., p. 380)."

106 PR., pp. 135 and pp. 281-2.

107 PR., pp. 131-2. In ch. 3 of this paper I shall try to explain more fully the nature of this half-way kind of actuality. It is identical with or an aspect of what Whitehead calls "real potentiality".

(d)

There remains one more kind of feeling that must be discussed in this section. I have already referred to it several times in discussing other aspects of feeling. It is the developing unity of an occasion which governs all the partial feelings. This feeling, or set of feelings, Whitehead calls the "subjective aim" or "conceptual aim" of the occasion 108.

The "subjective aim" is a crucial notion for the interpretation of actual process as creative. The physical data which an occasion feels exert pressure upon it to conform to their dominant patterns. They act on it as "efficient causes". But they do not determine the unifying principle of the new occasion. Indeed, they do not determine how they are to be prehended - with what "subjective form". These determinations are made by the occasion itself through its own "subjective aim". Thus the subjective aim is the central teleological notion in the occasion. Whitehead says that it is the"final cause" of the occasion 109. The whole process of the occason can be understood as a process of actualizing its subjective aim.

The datum is indeterminate as regards the final satisfaction. The process is the addition of those elements of feeling whereby these indeterminations are dissolved into determinate linkages attaining the actual unity of an individual actual entity. The actual entity, in becoming itself, also solves the question as to what it is to be. Thus process is the stage in which the creative idea works towards the definition and attainment of a determinate individuality. The progressive definition of the final end is the efficacious condition for its attainment. The determinate unity of an actual entity is bound together by the final causation towards an ideal progressively defined by its progressive relation to the determinations and indeterminations of the datum. The ideal, itself felt, defines what 'self' shall arise from the datum; and the ideal is also an element in the self which thus arises 110.

The central question for this discussion concerning the subjective aim is not how it comes to be actualized by setting up determinate relations among all the feelings in the occasion, but is, rather, whether this aim which functions throughout the occasion - determining at its beginning how the data shall be felt, and appearing in the finished occasion as its central form or character - itself develops during the process of its realization. I have italicized in the last passage quoted the parts which seem to say that the subjective aim does develop as the occasion moves towards its completion.

But Whitehead himself is not altogether clear on this crucial point 111. We cannot, after all, get a very clear look into an actual occasion in process of development. What we see is the completed occasion whose subjective aim, like everything else about it, is fully developed. But Whitehead's whole notion of teleology, including his agreement with Bergson that "finalism" is no better than "mechanism" would have to be dropped if the subjectlve aim does not develop during the process of its realization in the occasion.

There is certalnly some identity between the subjective aim while it is directing the integration and the subjective aim as attained unity of the pattern; and the stressing of this essential identity may lead to the impression of their complete and total identity 112.

Secondly, Whitehead refers to the subjective aim as a "lure for feeling", which gives the impression that it is there, fully formed to begin with, and just gathers the other feeling in the occasion around it 113. But in the last part of this section I discussed this phrase "lure for feeling" as it applies to conceptual feelings in general. The same considerations hold for this use of it. Also, the whole discussion of eternal objects in Chapter Three of this paper is relevant to this issue, since it shows that no form, no unifying principle in actuality springs fully completed from the limbo of pure possibility into actual process. Finally, Whitehead's occasional reference to God, as providing each occasion with its subjective aim 114 will be answered in Section B of Chapter Four of this paper when I take up the whole problem of the function of God's primordial nature in actuality.

On the other side of the question, there is a good deal of evidence for my contention that the subjective aim develops during the process of the occasion.

This doctrine of the inherence of the subject in the process of its production requires that in the primary phase of the subjective process there be a conceptual feeling of subjective aims. This basic conceptual feeling suffers simplification in the successive phases of the concrescence. It starts with conditioned alternatives, and by successive decisions is reduced to coherence. ... In each phase [of integration within the occasion] the corresponding conceptual feeling is the 'subjective end' characteristic of that phase. The many feelings in any incomplete phase are necessarily compatible with each other by reason 115.

My interpretation is that the subjective aim at the outset of the occasion is not at a definite pattern but rather at the goal of the occasion. This goal is the achieving of the best universe possible under the existing conditions. This possibility can only be generally defined in advance. Only the creative effort of the occasion will determine what really can be achieved. The aim is (i) at maximum self enjoyment, (ii) at the maximum realization of possibilities of the same thing -, and (iii) passing on to future creative processes achieved actuality which will help it in its pursuit of the same ends 116. Only through completion of its actual process can the occasion give determinate character to this aim.

Whatever the difficulties involved in understanding concrete actuality as creative process, Whitehead says again and again that this is the way he means to interpret concrete existence. In attempting to analyze this process, the impression almost invariably arises that the various factors, both external and internal, found operating in it somehow determine the process. Such an interpretation however, no matter which factor or factors it takes as performing the determination of process, distorts Whitehead's essential intent, and tends to substitute for creative activity a return to some sort of notion of efficient causation.

The doctrine of the philosophy of organism is that however far the sphere of efficient causation be pushed, in the determination of the components of a concrescence - its data, its emotions, its appreciations, its purposes, its phases of subjective aim - beyond the determination of these components there always remains the final reaction of the self-creative unity of the universe [which is the individual occasion]. This final reaction completes the self-creative act by putting the decisive stamp of creative emphasis upon the determinations of efficient cause 117.

Footnotes for Chapter Two - c (108-117):

108 It is "subjective" in that it constitutes more than anything else what the occasion is for itself,.and it is "conceptual" in that it is concerned with a new and unique character which it actualizes. But this last point needs discussion in this section.

109 PR., p. 134.

110 PR., p. 227-8 (italics mine).

111 As Mr. Pols points out, op. cit., pp. 143-54.

112 See PR., p. 389.

113 PR., p. 114.

114 As on p. 343 of PR.

115 PR., p. 341.

116 "In its self-creation the actual entity is guided by its ideal of itself as individual satisfaction and as transcendent creator. The enjoyment of this ideal is the subjective aim by reason of which the actual entity is a determinate process (PR., p. 130)."

"The subjective aim, whereby there is origination of conceptual feeling, is at intensity of feeling (a) in the immediate subject, and (b) in the relevant future (PR., p. 41)."

"The aim is at the enjoyment belonging to the process (MT., p. 208).

"Thus there is the urge towards the realization of the maximum number of eternal objects subject to the restraint that they must be under conditions of contrast. ....the subectlve aim is the selection of the balance amid the given materials (PR., p. 424).

117 PR., p. 75, (italics mine).

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