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 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.]

 

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 D:

The Phases of a Creative Process

 

Whitehead's attempt to prove that concrete existence can best be interpreted as creative activity rests finally on an attempt to follow the creative process through its internal "phases" of self-formation. This is one of the two principal kinds of analysis which he performs on actual existence in the dense middle sections of Process and Reality. It is what he calls "genetic division" - the analysis of actual occasions in their internal processes of development. The other is "coordinate division" - the analysis of actual occasions as completed, as objective data, as forming the actual world of a new occasion, as the creature rather than as the creative process. The latter kind of analysis leads to his philosophy of nature and natural science. The former leads to the ultimate metaphysical insight of ongoing existence as creative activity 1.

 

The genetic analysis of actual occasions is at once Whitehead's most ambitious and imaginative and yet most artificial and inadequate enterprise, because the internal process of an actual occasion is not really capable of analysis in the same way as is its completed product. First, it is activity; it doesn't stand still to be clearly observed. Secondly, each occasion is a unitary activity; division of it is artificial. Although it is necessary to describe the phases in a pseudo-temporal order, they are not discrete from each other in time. They happen all at once, or in an internal sort of time, a Bergsonian duré in which the parts interpenetrate and the later"phases" enter into and condition the earlier 2.

 

Finally, we can comprehend the creative process that goes on in the occasion only under a number of more familiar abstractions - emotional activity, sensation, conceptual activity, causal activity and so on. Creative process is all of these and more. Considering them individually and collectively hardly approximates its true nature. Common sense and philosophical tradition conspire to interpret each of these component abstract processes in such a way that it does not readily coalesce with the others and does not lend itself to being considered merely as a subordinate aspect of an overall creative process. So each of these instruments used in Whitehead's attempt to rationalize creative process must itself be re-worked and re-interpreted before it can perform its function.

 

In the face of all these difficulties, however, the genetic analysis of actual entities still does serve as an approach to the understanding of creative process. It is really a magnificently daring enterprise - not merely to communicate the mystic experience, the ineffable awareness of immanent creation within us and within the world, but an attempt to break through the ineffability of this experience and to rationalize creation.

 

Besides, this analysis is very central to Whitehead's cosmology and to his views on value. The observed differences between different kinds of actualities in the world - inorganic, organic and the occasions of conscious human experience - can be accounted for, according to Whitehead, mainly by the differential development of these phases within the individual occasions of each of these varieties of actuality, the "conformal phases" being dominant in inorganic things, the "supplemental phases" being tremendously developed in the occasions of conscious human experience, and so on. And, as I shall try to show in Part II of this paper, the principal distinctions between varieties of values also rest for Whitehead on the relative emphases placed on these phases in different occasions of existence 3.

 

Whitehead is not completely consistent in the number or designations of these phases. He also recognizes many sub-phases. So the whole analysis becomes extremely complex and more than a little confused. I intend to simplify it for the purposes of this paper, however, and discuss only four phases. These are called (l) the "conformal" phase (or phases), (2) the "supplemental phase" (or phases), (3) the "satisfaction" and (4) "objective immortality". The first two constitute the formative phases of the occasion 4. The third marks the moment of completion of the occasion; it is both the moment of intense enjoyment for the occasion 5 and also the completion of its creative task - the issuance of a real, concrete universe in which all other actualities and all possibility are ordered into a total "contrast"; a "perspective" on the world, every item assigned a definite status and relation to every other item. In some ways the attainment of the satisfaction marks the termination of the occasion as a creative process. It now "perishes". But it also now starts its objective life as a creature, as a part of the objective world, as a real influence in subsequent creative process. Since in order to be a genuine creative process, an occasion cannot end merely in a private enjoyment, since it is part of its creative intent to influence the objective world beyond itself, this final phase of "objective immortality" must also be an aspect of creative process.

 

(1)

 

The "conformal phase" of an actual occasion is characterized by physical feelings 6. In this phase the occasion is turned towards its past. It is receptive. Its experience is, however, not what we ordinarily think of as "sensation" or "perceptions". These are aspects of the second or "supplemental" phase. Pure physical experience, as we have seen, is something much more primitive; it is a vague emotional push. The "reception" of the actual world is registered not as "perceptual immediacy" but."in the mode of causal efficacy".7 The new occasion is feeling the influence, the "efficient causation", of its past. The experience of this phase need not be and usually isn't touched by "consciousness". Whitehead refers to this response as "instinct" and says that it is typical of inorganic occasions 8.

 

But, nevertheless, the conformal phase is an aspect of genuine creative activity. The past as fully actual creative process is"dead". It is only some of its component feelings that the new occasion can prehend 9. These aspects of the past do not collectively form a real universe in themselves because they are an unorganized "many". In order to continue to exist and to be effective in existence they must be felt by new processes which reorganize them into new worlds. It is true that they act as efficient causes partially determining the courses of these new actual processes, but only because from their own inner natures the new developing actualities prehend them and change them from something alien into parts of themselves. The endurance and causal efficacy of the past is dependent on continual recreation.

 

And it is not in their full natures, as they were in the past, that these causal feelings enter into the new actualities, but as selected in advance to fit the needs of the new occasion and as clothed in subjective forms that reflect the reaction of the new occasion to them. The new occasion has taken over. Its "decision" rules finally over the various claims of efficient causation that are made upon it. Even when it conforms, it conforms freely. And inside its process efficient causation gives way before its own final causation. As an actual process in process of development, the new occasion is the most real thing in the world. It is rnore real than the physical causal feelings which it prehends. There are other contemporaneous occasions which are just as real as it is, but it is causally independent of these 10. It is in final control of its own destiny.

 

Footnotes for Chapter Two-d (1-10):

 

1 Whitehead attributes the discovery of "these two kinds of fluency" in the world to the Eighteenth Century, particalarly to Locke, but Locke and his contemporaries didn't see clearly that they really had hold of two notions rather than merely one (PR.,p.320).

Whitehead also refers to "genetic" and "coordinate" divisions respectively as "concrescence" and "transition'' and he says that the former is directed towards understanding things by "final causes" while the latter is concerned with "efficient causes" (Ibid., also see PR., p. 448 ff.).

 

2 I have already noted that real time is deposited by actual occasions in unanalyzable "quanta" upon their completion; see above, Sect. B (2) (c) footnote 42 of this chapter: Whitehead's "epochal theory of time".

 

3 See below, ch. 7, sec.B, of this paper.

 

4 Similar in many ways to Dewey's notions of the "instrumental" phases of an act.

 

5 Similar in some ways to Dewey's notion of "consummatory experience", particularly in his Art as Experience.

 

6 See above, Sec. C (3) (b), of this chapter.

 

7 PR., pp. 125-6, 177, 184, 189, 246, 255-79, and elsewhere.

 

8 Smb., pp. 78-82. Sometimes, however, "instinct" refers to any non-conscious feeling and so can include many feelings in the supplemental phase (AI., p. 58).

 

9 An assertion to be justified below, (4) of this section and in ch. 3 of this paper.

 

10 "It is the definition of contemporaneous events that they happen in causal independence of each other. Thus two contemporaneous occasions are such that neither belongs to the past of the other. The two occasions are not in any direct relation of efficient causation. The vast causal independence of contemporary occasions is the preservative of the elbow-room within the universe. It provides each actuality with a welcome environment for irresponsibility. ... Our claim for freedom is rooted in our relationship to our contemporary environment. Nature does provide a field for independent activities (AI., p..251." Also, MT., p.. 206.)."

 

(2)

 

The"supplemental phases" of an actual entity are concerned primarily with conceptual feelings 11. "The intermediate phase of self-formation is a ferment of qualitative valuation 12."

 

There is a tension in the occasion between the conformal and the supplemental phases. Whitehead calls these phases respectively the "physical pole" and the "mental pole" of the occasion 13. The former seeks to preserve and conform to the past. The latter seeks to develop the subjective aim of the new occasion. The supplemental phase (the mental pole) is the source of the introduction of novelty in the occasion 14. What is the real basis of this distinction between the physical pole and the mental pole? It is not a distinction between physical and psychologlcal actuality. Such a distinction would involve the "bifurcation of nature". This is a distinction within each actuality. In inoganic occasions the physical pole is dominant and the mental pole vestigial, and in some highly developed occasions of human experience the mental pole is developed much more than the physical, but both poles are essential to every occasion 15. It is not an opposition of sense to thought, or perception to conception, for all of these as we experience them belong to the mental pole and occur in the supplemental phases of the occasions of our experience. It is not the opposition between unconscious and conscious experience that Whitehead is stressing, because, though consciousness is developed in the supplemental phases of the more highly developed occasions and crowns the dominance of the mental pole over the physical pole in the occasions in which it occurs, the mental pole functions in occasions in which there is no consciousness 16.

 

The real significance of this contrasting of the physical and mental poles within each occasion is to emphasize the contrast between the roles of actuality and potentiality in each occasion as a creative process. Neither ever functions alone in a creative process. A creative process is always proceeding from a basis in achieved actuality to actualize more possibilities. It is always working on potentialities of various degrees of abstractness and moving them towards actuality. It never merely appreciates pure potentiality. What it does is to bring the two - actuality and potentiality - together in new combinations in order finally to achieve a richer actuality.

 

I want to consider the two principal sub-phases of the supplemental phase: (a) the "esthetic supplement", and (b) the "intellectual supplement". Either or both of these may be trivial in an occasion, and they are not truly separable (since perception and thought are never truly separable in experience). They enrich and inhibit each other 17.

 

(a)

 

The esthetic supplement is concerned with what we usually call sense experience. It is not, however, the primitive physical feelings "perceived in the mode of causal efficacy" which are central here, but a highly derivative kind of experience, "presentational immediacy". It is clear, Whitehead says, from Hume's and Kant's descrlptions of bare sensation that what they were referring to wasn't physical experience at all but something rather closer to the experience of universals. Sensations are supposed to be a feeling of "red" or of "heat", and so on. These are more like essences than physical facts 18.

 

Presentational immediacy is complex. It is not pure physical feeling but physical feelings tranformed by the contact of conceptual feeling: it is "hybrid physical feeling" 19. What happens is that the patterns of eternal objects latent in the physical feelings are brought into the foreground. These patterns are not pulled out of the blue - they are derived from the more primitive physical feelings 20. "The experlence starts as that smelly feeling, and is developed by mentality into the feeling of that smell 21." Whitehead says that the "mental pole starts with the conceptual registration of the physical pole 22".

 

The emotional feeling of the physical pole is not lost. It is carried along underneath. The clear sensation merely "objectifies" it. This has certain advantages for the promotion of creative process, as we shall see, but it also raises difficulties. The suppressed emotional push is ignored. The clear sensation is treated as a bare datum cut off from its origins. Not only is it cut off from its origins in past occasions, but it is "projected" on the contemporary world, which is the one aspect of actuality with which we are not in direct contact, causally or experientially. It takes a considerable effort of abstraction to perform this task, and only highly developed occasions can do it. Human beings, however, fail to see that these sensations are partly the outcome of their own creative operations. They regard them as absolute starting points for knowledge. This is regrettable in a way, but inevitable, and really facilitates the creative advance 23. If only we can penetrate deeply enough into our immediate experience to drag out the repressed emotional roots and see sense experience in its true perspective, the true creative significance in the world of our experience will appear.

 

The whole notion of our massive experience conceived as a reaction to clearly envisaged details is fallacious. The relationship should be inverted. The details are a reaction to the totality. They add definition. They introduce power of judgment. They exalt men above animals, and animals above vegetables, and vegetables beyond stones, always provided that they are kept in their proper relation to the soil from which they originate. They are interpretive and not originative. What is original is the vague totality 24.

 

And yet it is on the basis of these very sensations, with their emotional backgrounds suppressed, and their locus changed to the contemporary world, that science arises. It is because of the artificiality of this "empirical" starting point that science finds its world basically valueless and static 25.

 

The world as interpreted by exclusive attention to such forms of sense-perception, I will term 'Nature'.

 

These forms, qualitative and spatio-temporal, dominate this experience. They are indifferent to emotion, being just themselves, namely the vivid realization of things capable of abstraction from that instance of actuality with its cargo of emotion. Nature is devoid of impulse 26.

 

This is why the notion of existence which science finds is not a notion of creative activity and why this notion of existence tends to be "vacuous" and valueless. It is not the kind of existence with which values can be closely associated. But, then, it is an abstract kind of existence, not real concrete existence, though it is ultimately derivative from real concrete existence, and ultimately contributes to the enrichment of real concrete existence. Furthermore, Whitehead frequently suggests that modern science, especially physics, has to some extent worked beyond the limitations of this starting point and developed notions which call more directly for a reinterpretation of concrete existence in terms of creative activity. The relevance of the scientific view of the world to Whitehead's notions of value will be discussed later 27.

 

Even though clear sense experience starts by abstracting patterns from their emotional backgrounds, this process fundamentally further rather than block a creative process. For thus novel integrations can be introduced. The old vested interests of past actuality are held in abeyance. The creative act will depend for its access ultimately on recovering these and preserving them, but they are in themselves a force for conformity when they obtrude too forcefully in the generative 'phases' of the new actuality. By holding the push of past actualities in abeyance the new occasion can make their dominant patterns internal to itself - make them its subjective sensations - and can endow these perceptions with its own emotion flowing from its own subjective aim 28. In so doing, an actual occasion is not irretrievably cutting itself off from the world and retreating into a subjective dream. It is taking the first steps towards modifying through its creative activity the real objective world out there 29.

 

Footnotes for Chapter Two-d (11-29):

 

11 See above, Sec. C (3) (c), of this chapter.

 

12 AI.,p. 269.

 

13 PR., p. 280, pp. 379-80 and elsewhere.

 

14 PR., p. 380, and p. 250.

 

15 "The most complete concrete fact is dipolar, physical and rnental. But for some specific purpose, the proportion of importance as shared between the two poles, may vary from negligibility to dominance of either pole (RM., p. 118)." I quote from this book because earlier in it these two poles are described in such a way that they seem completely opposed to each other.

 

16 AI., p. 58. Indeed, consciousness develops only out of a complex interplay between the two poles&emdash;a reference of physical feelings to conceptual feelings, back to physical feelings, and back to conceptual feelings. The actual story of its emergence in an occasion is too complex and tangential to the present argurnent to be developed here. See especially PR., pp. 263-67, pp. 281-86, and pp. 362-78.

 

17 PR.,. p. 325.

 

18 .PR., pp. 379-80.

 

19 PR., p. 474.

 

20 "The fact that 'presentational immediacy' deals with the same datum as does 'causal efficacy' gives the ultimate reason why there is a common 'ground' for 'symbolic reference'. The two modes express the same datum under different proportions of relevance (PR., p. 262)."

 

21 AI., p. 315

 

22 PR.,. p. 379.

 

23 AI., pp. 181-2. "In sense-perception we have passed the Rubicon dividing direct [physical] perception from the higher forms of mentality which play with error and thus found intellectual empires. (PR., p. 173)."

 

24 .MT., pp. 148-49.

 

25 "One distortion stands out immediately. Each actual occasion is in truth a process of activity. But the contemporary regions are mainly perceived in terms of their passive perspective relationship to the percipient and to each other (AI., p. 281)."

 

26 MT, p. 100.

 

27 See below, ch. 5, Sect. B (1) of this paper.

 

28 PR., p. 325.

 

29 "But throughout the whole story the sensa are participating in nature as much as anything else. It is the function of mentality to modify the physical participation of eternal objects: the case of presentational prehensions is only one conspicuous example. The whole doctrine of mentality - from the consciousness of God downwards - is that it is a modifying agency (PR., p. 496)."

 

(b)

 

The intellectual supplement, of which our human conceptual operations and knowledge are a choice example is merely an expansion of the sort of operation already introduced by sense experience.

 

In this phase the developing occasion is preoccupied with abstractions. It gets these abstractions in one of two ways: (i) either by objectifying its prehensions of vast numbers of previous actualities and representing them to itself by a common pattern which they share. Whitehead calls this process "Transmutation" 30. It suppresses much of their individual variations, but it can heighten, through the focus it gives to these actualities, their influence in the creative process. Or (ii) through conceptually prehending a pattern which does not play a prominent role in the part. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as the case may be, these two processes intermingle, so that the developing occasion frequently tries to objectify the past under a form which it itself did not emphasize. Sometimes the new form suppresses or loses the past actualities to which it is applied, but sometimes it serves better than the original form, heightens their influence and harmonizes it with that of still other actualities with which they had previously been incompatible. Then a "more adequate contrast" is achieved, and new possibilities are actualized.

 

On the level of human experience these processes are what we usually call "cognitive" 31. Its feelings are "propositional feelings" and "judgmental feelings". I cannot here go into the complexities of Whitehead's epistemology, but I want to note a couple of things about these entities. In the first place, propositions are not just abstract formal elements. They are complex entities holding together a formal pattern (in the predicate) and a group of feelings of actualities (in the subject) 32. Their "truth" is also a very complex problem33. If the pattern expressed by the predicate really is in the subject actualities, the proposition is true in the simplest sense. But this is not the primary function of a proposition. Its function is to integrate turbulent groups of conflicting feelings in the new occasion by ordering them under an adequate pattern. This is why Whitehead refers to propositions as "theories" and uses for them his often used phrase, "lures for feeling" 34.

 

The main interest which an occasion has in a proposition is not in its "truth" in the narrow sense, but in its adequacy to perform its job of integration. Sometimes "false" propositions prove to be more adequate than true ones. But generally, of course, false propositions result in a loss of the feelings which they try to objectify . It is only the inspired proposition which "values up" a previously overlooked pattern in its subject data and thus finds a pattern which does the job better than the old forms that is better than the narrowly true proposition 35. Whitehead's treatment of propositions and truth has a marked "pragmatic" flavor, but, whereas the pragmatists relate these problems merely to a psychological of biological context of problem-solving, Whitehead relates them to the metaphysical context of creating more adequate new worlds.

 

It is a paradox of Whitehead's philosophy that he holds that concrete process is most active and successful as a creative agent when it is dealing in the high abstractions of thought 36. It is through man's very ability to think abstractly, to dissociate systems of thought from concrete problems, that man makes himself the supreme finite creative agent. 37

 

Abstraction is not an artificial process. It is a natural process. Abstraction expresses nature's mode of interaction and is not merely rnental. When it abstracts, thought is merely conforming to nature or rather, it is exhibiting itself as an element in nature 38.

 

The reason why abstraction furthers creative process rather than marking a departure from it, as Bergson believed, is that it is not a return to something out of process, to eternal objects in themselves 39. It is a way of pulling things together more closely and heightening their intensity 40. As such it is - paradox upon paradox - a way of increasing concreteness, of changing potentiality into actuality. For Whitehead, to be concrete, though it has the secondary sense designating immediacy, means primarily to be fully related, or, since"related", as we shall see 41, turns out to be an inadequate and misleading word for this purpose, it means to be in "concrete togetherness", which is the state that creative process strives to achieve 42.

 

Footnotes for Chapter Two-d (30-42):

 

30 PR., pp. 382-84.

 

31 PR., pp. 243-4.

 

32 PR., pp. 280-300.

 

33 PR., pp. 280-81.

 

34 Since a proposition seems to be merely the highest and best developed form of what Whitehead calls "real potentiality" (propositions are said to be entities which stand between eternal objects and actual entities, being more actual than the former and less actual than the latter - PR., p.300), I shall take up the metaphysical issues involved in their function in creative process in sec.C of ch. 3 of this paper.

 

35 "But where ideas are effective, there is freedom (AI., p.83)." "Logic, properly used, does not shackle thought. It gives freedom, and above all, balance (AI., p. 178)."

 

36 "It is a false dichotomy to think of Nature and Man. Mankind is the factor in Nature which exhibits in its most intense form the plasticity of nature. Plasticity is the introduction of novel law (AI., p. 99)."

 

37 Smb., p. 26.

 

38 See below, ch. 3.

 

39 "Abstraction involves emphasis, and emphasis vivifies experience for good or for evil ("mathematics and the Good," in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 681)."

 

40 See below, ch.3, Sect. A, "Whitehead is not a Platonist".

 

41 There is some similarity between this idea of Whitehead's and the later objective idealists' notion of the "concrete universal", but his substitution of the notion of "concrete togetherness" for the older notion of "relation" does, I think, introduce a significant differerence. See below, ch.3, sec. 5 of this paper.

 

(3)

 

The phase of the "satisfaction" is the most complex notion of all of the complex notions which Whitehead uses to analyze the actual occasion, for it designates the climax of the creative act, and here all the multiple processes which collectively make up creative activity come together in the moment of completion of the act. Whitehead gives no adequate definition of the "satisfaction", though he makes a great many statements about it which look like definitions. None of them is complete, but such persistent themes as "unity of feeling", "self-realization" and "achievement of complete definiteness" run through all of these statements 42. For the purposes of this paper I think that the latter is one of his more significant statements: "The satisfaction is the contentment of the creative urge by the fulfillment of its categoreal demands 43."

 

I shall attempt to untangle this complex and present the major themes in the satisfaction under the following headings: (a) the satisfaction as completion and fulfillment, (b) the satisfaction as subjective intensity and enjoyment, (c) the satisfaction as an actual version of the universe, and (d) the satisfaction as but one aspect of creative process.

 

(a)

 

The satisfaction is the fulfillment of the subjective aim of the occasion. "Thus the satisfaction is the attainment of the private ideal which is the final cause of the concrescence 44. "The satisfaction marks the attainment of the end which the occasion as a teleological process was striving toward. Since this end was, in one of its aspects, for the occasion to make itself a definite reality, the satisfaction marks a moment of self-realization 45.

 

But, since the subjective aim is in each occasion an aim at the satisfaction, this general way of discussing the fulfillment approaches tautology. It is necessary to see that each occasion has an individual problem to solve. It must overcome the conflicts in the world that it encounters. It can do this either by repressing one or all of the conflicting entities, or by developing a new unity which changes the conflict into a harmony while still preserving the components. The satisfaction is always a solution of its particular problem. It may be an inspired, an adequate, a routine, a poor, or a disastrous solution, but it is a solution 46.

 

(b)

 

As the experience of the solution of a problem the satisfaction is an enjoyment and a consummation. The abstractions from concrete emotional feeling that had to be made during the supplemental phases in order to solve the problem facing the occasion are now reintegrated into concrete immediacy. The occasion is suffused with emotion.

 

This aspect of the subjective side of the satisfaction reminds one of Dewey's exposition of "consummatory experience" and its relation to "instrumental" experience 47; but there are other aspects to the intense subjectivity of the satisfaction for Whitehead.

 

In the first place, the satisfaction marks the end of the process of prehending external reality and making it internal; everything is now internal, inside the occasion, clothed with its subjective form. The "vector" quality of that rushing inward from without gives way to a moment of "scalor" quality, a moment of balance, of rest in complete inwardness, complete subjectivity 48. At this moment the occasion is all inward enjoyment 49.

 

And yet, the final reason for the intensity of this subective experience is that the occasion is not merely subjective and apart from the world but, rather, has the world really in it. Each of the component feelings that enter into the occasion has a certain intensity of its own. When these components are brought together into the one integrated feeling that is the satisfaction, they each contribute their individual intensity to the total intensity of this feeling. That is, they do so insofar as the occasion has not suppressed them but rather harmonized them in to a "contrast" 50. It is the achievement of an esthetic harmony in and for the world that gives the satisfaction its experienced quality. "... an actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience. All aesthetic experience is feeling arising out of the realization of contrast under identity 51."

 

(c)

 

The phrase that oocurs most frequently in relation to the satisfaction is that it is "one complex fully determinate feeling " 52. The key notions are that the satisfaction is a feeling that is a unity of many feelings and that this unity is determinate. This is a "contrast". The many feelings unified are not merely the feelings in the occasion. Many of these feeling were derived from outside the occasion, it will be remembered. The "many feelings" are, indeed, the whole actual and possible universe. The occasion brings them all together in its satisfaction. To say that they constitute a unity in a single feeling and to say that they are "determinate" refers to the same thing. What the occasion prehends is a many. This many is "potential" because the ways in which it can be put together are not as yet "determined". Determinate togetherness is togetherness in a feeling . It is not an abstract relation; it is "concrete togetherness" - it is a bond of feeling - a matter of emphasis and repression. An actual entity "comes to include the universe by reason of its determinate attitude towards every entity in the universe" 53. This kind of "determination" - feeling of an order of emphasis and repression is called "definiteness" and also "gradation of actuality". It is the way the universe is together in an occasion 54; it is the way possibility is turned into actuality. It is actuality. It is what the occasion creates. It is the bond of feeling that holds things together, and it is this achieved bonding, this feeling, that the occasion passes on to the future - to other feelings which can alter these bonds and then pass on the altered feeling.

 

Whitehead tells us in Adventures of Ideas that the occasion looks upon the world that it prehends as "reality" and on its own synthesis of it as "appearance". In human experience there is often a marked change between the two, but it is the contention of Whitehead's philosophy that "appearance" and "reality" are basically the same. They are both feeling. The "appearance " of the present becomes part of the "reality" of the future 55.

 

(d)

 

The satisfaction, then, is the achievement of new actuality, a new "fact" in the world. It is generically actual insofar as it is feeling but it is not the most actual, the most real entity. This distinction is reserved to the complete creative act of which the satisfaction is but one aspect. The completely real existence is both creative act and creature. The occasion as completely actual transcends the satisfaction in two ways. (i) It includes the earlier phases (conformal and supplemental) 56. Indeed, sometimes Whitehead speaks as if the most real existence is the creative process prior to the outcome. "The 'formal' 57 reality of actuality in question belongs to its process of concrescence and not to its satisfaction 58." "Completion is the perishing of immediacy: 'it never really is' 59." I think, however, that these statements may be issued partly for their rhetorical effect. Whitehead is trying to call attention to the imminence of creative activity in concrete actuality itself, where others have seen only the creature 60. (ii) Indeed, it seems to me that not only is the consummation, the creature, part of the complete creative act for Whitehead, but also the complete creative act includes reference to the "objective immortality" of the occasion, its subsequent history as a "fact", its "effects", its "intervention" in future process 61. It might be argued that these latter entities are not part of the occasion as a creative process. But as a creative process the occasion "aims" at these future consequences; it would not be a truly creative act if it aimed only at a private accomplishment 62. And, what survives is a real part of ths occasion, some of its feelings, not just a shadowy set of eternal objects 63.

 

Footnotes for Chapter Two-d (42-63):

 

42 See PR., p. 38, p. 66, p. 322 and p.335 for samples of these statements.

 

43 PR., p. 335.

 

44 PR., p. 323.

 

45 "An actual entity is at once the object of self-realization and the superject which is self-realized (PR., p. 340)."

 

46 The consequences of this view for Whitehead's ideas on values will be discussed in ch. 6, sec. C of this paper.

 

47 Art as Experience.

 

48 "This one felt content is the 'satisfaction' whereby the actual entity is its particular individual self ... 'requiring nothing but itself in order to exist'. ... the entity has attained its individual separation from other things; it has absorbed the datum, and it has not yet lost itself in the swing back to the 'decision' whereby its appetition becomes an element in the data of other entities superseding it. Time has stood still - if only it could (PR., p. 233)."

 

49 There seems to be an issue as to whether this self-enjoyment of the satisfaction can be "conscious" or not. Whitehead, unfortunately, says explicitly both that it can't be and that it can. The denial comes first, and on the grounds that consciousness belongs only to the supplemental phases, when it appears at all in an occasion (PR., p. 130). But by pp. 407-8 of the same book Whitehead seems to have had further reflection on this point, because he here says that the satisfaction can be consciously enjoyed even by the occasion in which it develops, on the grounds that any aspect of subjective form developed in the formative phases of an occasion (consciousness is such an aspect) is carried over into the satisfaction.

 

50 PR., pp. 127-8 and PR., p. 153.

 

51 PR., p. 427. Repeated on p. 115 of RM.

 

52 PR., p. 39.

 

53 PR., p. 71 (ltalics mine).

 

54 SMW., p. 252.

 

55 AI., p.270.

 

56 "The notion of 'satisfaction' is the notion of the 'entity as concrete' abstracted from the 'process of concrescence'; it is the outcome separated from the process, thereby losing the actuality of the atomic entity, which is both process and outcome (PR., p. 129)." See also PR., p. 323.

 

57 Meaning in and for itself as opposed to "objective", meaning in and for another.

 

58 PR., p. 129.

 

59 PR., p.130.

 

60 "Too much attention has been directed to the mere datum and the mere issue. The essence of existence lies in the transition from datum to issue. This is the process of self-determination. We must not conceive of a dead datum with passive form. The datum is impressing itself upon this process, conditioning its forms. We must not dwell mainly on the issues. The immediacy of existence is then past and over. The vividness of life lies in the transition, with its forms aiming at the issue. Actuality in its essence is aim at self-formation (MT., p. l31)."

 

61 PR., pp. 335-6.

 

62 PR., p. 38, and p. 328.

 

63 See below, Ch. 3, Sect. C for a more detailed approach to this conclusion.

 

(4)

 

I want to show (a) that "objective immortality" is an essential phase of each creative process, (b) that it is part of the real feeling of each occasion which survives its completion, and (c) that the notion of the "consequent nature of God" gives a special kind of objective immortality that makes every creative achievement a permanent gain for the universe.

 

(a)

 

"The creature perishes and is immortal. The actual entities beyond it can say, 'It is mine.' But the possession imposes conformation 64." At first glance the above quotation seems to divorce the objective immortality of an occasion from its process. After all, it has "perished" when it becomes objectively immortality. But the italicization of "and" tells us that what we really have here is another paradox. The creature both perishes and survives.

Objective immortality is essential to the notion of the process of an individual occasion itself 65. In Modes of Thought, Whitehead tells us that it is part of the teleology or "interest" of each actual occasion to seek "expression" in the world about it 66.

 

How does objective immortality function in the developing process of an actual occasion? Whitehead tells us that prehensions are feelings of the occasion as itself active in the future form within the occasion 67. And also, the occasion "really experiences the future" and thus "experiences its own objective immortality 68. Of course, the future is not yet actual, and it could not itself be a creative process if it were already completely experienced in the present. But this is not what Whitehead means.

 

What he means is that each occasion creates itself both to be a momentary all in all, the universe from a certain point of view, and to be a fact, a "potential", a cooperating process in future creative processes 69. Indeed, it is his desire to express this dual aspect of each actual entity which makes him in Process and Reality use the awkward hyphenated term "subject-superject".

 

But still, the question remains, after the inner process of the occasion ceases, how canit be concerned about what goes on in the future? The complete answer cannot be given, but, one can make surmises. Remember that time is irrelevant to the internal process of an occasion, and also, supposedly to the internal process of any feeling. The inner nature of an occasion is the inner activity of its feelings, pulling and holding. things together. That occasion as that activity is "present" not only in the moment of its formation but in every process. in which its feeling functions.

 

(b)

 

Certain it is, at least, that it is feeling, the actual stuff of the occasion, and not some dead form, that survives an occasion and constitutes its objective new occasion as datum felt with subjective form conformal to that of the immortality 70. "The feeling as enjoyed by the past occasion is present in the datum 71." It is by inspecting our own immediate experience of the moment that we can become most directly aware of the survival of feeling from the past into the present. My feeling of a "tenth of a second to a half a second ago" is feeling which originated in the immediate past, yet it survives to function in my present experience 72. Not only the continuity of my experience but the "continuity of nature" depends on this direct survival of feeling from one occasion in subsequent occasions 73.

 

There is nothing static or passive in actuality. Actual existence is a flood of feeling, forever being revitalized and added to by combining in those moments of creation which are actual occasions. Only as active, only as feeling can anything survive.

 

When we consider the process under discussion as completed, we are already analyzing an actual datum for other creations. The universe is not a museum with its specimens in glass cases 74.

 

Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. It is the enjoyment of emotion which was then, which is now, and which will be then. This vector character is of the essence of such entertainment 75.

 

The past, as feeling, is active in the present. "The initial phase of each fresh occasion represents the issue of a struggle within the past for objective existence beyond itself 76." When the past meets the present, it is feeling meeting feeling. The process of prehension is active both ways. The present growing total feeling grasps and engulfs the past feeling. It alters it to fit its own needs, but it also is forced to some extent to conform to it. The past feeling is fighting for its own preservation and for its own influence over the present.

 

But, though the past feelings can survive and influence subsequent process, sometimes through countless creative acts, this kind of objective immortality is doomed eventually to fade. As the creative process goes on to ever new stages, the prehension of the remoter past gets fainter and fainter. The bonds of the old feeling come looser, or else it is merely that they hold together an ever smaller portion of the actual world which the new occasions encounter. A feeling's influence finally become indistinct and merges into a vague background of the dim remote past which exerts only a faint influence on each new creative act.

 

(c)

 

But there is still another variety of objective immortality awaiting each occasion, an objective immortality in which the full immediacy of its satisfaction is preserved without abstraction, without selection being made from it, and without fading - an everlasting immortality. This is the immortality given to each finite creative act in the "consequent nature of God."

 

God, like each finite occasion, is an actual entity. As such he is a creative act. One difference between God and finite occasions is that in him conceptual valuation comes first. This is his "primordial nature". It prehends all possibilities, and, since it has no special, limited point of view, it does not have to make any "negative prehensions" 77.

But God must rely on the finite creative processes of the world to get his physical prehensions. These he integrates with his conceptual prehensions to attain his own "satisfaction". This is his consequent nature. Since his subjective aim is unlimited 78, his satisfaction is never completed. It is always immediate, present, living, full enjoyment - an everlasting present.

 

And since his conceptual valuations include all possibilities, whatever finite actualities create can be prehended by him without abstraction. So the full immediacy of the satisfaction is preserved forever in the consequent nature of God without fading, as it does in subsequent finite process 79. God thus "saves" the world. God exercises a "tender care that nothing be lost" 80.

 

Thus every creative act achieves something of permanent value for the universe. And insofar as the individual creative act prehends, though dimly, this destiny, it is filled with a sense of its individual worth 81.

 

And this immortality of finite achievement is not a kind of cold storage in a celestial attic. For, as God's creative act is never finished,this immortality is a perpetual direct participation of the individual finite actuality in the creative activity of the universe 82.

Finally, since the universal relativity that pervades Whitehead's system applies even to God; God's consequent nature must be prehended by each new finite occasion. And so, though its direct influence in the world may fade and new actualities arise which largely ignore its having once existed, through God's consequent nature and its subsequent prehension back into the world - God's 'superjective nature" - it retains a perpetual activity and freshness even for the finite actual world.

 

This completes the account of concrete creative activity. It remains to describe certain abstract factors in concrete creative activity in order to see, first, how they participate in and further this process, and, secondly, how they do not control the process and thereby rob it of its true creative nature 83.

 

Footnotes to Chapter Two-d (64-83):

 

64 See below.

 

65 "The point to remember is that the fact that each individual occasion is transcended by the creative urge belongs to the essential constitution of each such occasion. It is not an accident which is irrelevant to the completed constitution of any such occasion (AI., p. 249)."

 

66 MT., p. 29.

 

67 AI., p. 248.

 

68 PR., p. 328.

 

69 "An actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding over its own immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its function of objective immortality. It has become a'being', and it belongs to the nature of every being that it be a potential for every 'becoming' (PR., p.71)."

 

70 This doctrine seems to be in direct opposition to Whitehead's position in his "middle period" when he was writing on the philosophy of science. In The Concept of Nature he holds that it is only "objects" which are universal patterns, that "can be again!".

 

Dorothy Emmet, while recognizing that Whitehead means in his later works that feelings themselves survive and are prehended by subsequent occasions, takes exception to this theory. She thinks that "some difficulties" in Whitehead's philosophy would be cleared up if Whitehead would abandon this view and return to his earlier position (op. cit., p.128 and pp. 159-60. In ch. 3 I will try to show that Whitehead is right in holding that "feelings" survive, and that many more "difficulties" would follow from the abandonment of this doctrine. Epecially, the whole notion of concrete existence as genuinely creative process would have to be given up.

 

71 AI., p. 236. And on the preceding page he says that "there is continuity between the subjective form of the immediate past occasion and the subjective form of its primary prehension in the origination of the new occasion."

 

72 AI., p. 233.

 

73 AI., p. 236.

 

74 MT., p. 123.

 

75 MT., p. 229.

 

76 AI., p. 256.

 

77 See below, ch. 4 , Sect. B. of this paper.

 

78 See below, ch. 4 , Sect. B. of this paper.

 

79 PR., pp. 523-32.

 

80 PR., p. 525.

 

81 PR., p. 531. See below, ch. 6, Sect. C of this paper.

 

82 This is what Whitehead means by "the kingdom of heaven" (PR., p. 531).

 

83 These abstract factors are "eternal objects", considered in the next chapter, and "creativity" and "God", considered in ch. 4.

 

 

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