Chapter Five Value & Existence Section B

PART II

The Problems of Value

CHAPTER FIVE

Value And Existence

[Note: Footnotes are designated in red and may be accessed by scrolling down the page to the green sections.

Note also that since since they refer to the paper version of this work, references to actual pages of the thesis are not accurate in this online medium.]

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 B:

Qualifications and problems of Associating Existence and Value

The basic criticism which I made of contemporary value theory in the Introduction to this paper was that,, for the most part, it is founded on an assumption of a "bifurcation" between existence and value. 68 And in the last section of this chapter I tried to show that one of the basic weaknesses of some Interpretations of Whitehead's views on value is that they fail to make close associations between his statements on value subjects and his metaphysical notion of existence.

That Whitehead intends to make a very close association indeed between existence and value is beyond dispute 69 We cannot merely note this fact, however, and then forget it. It is my contention that, after the nature of full concrete existence in Whitehead's philosophy is understood, 70 it still remains to explore the exact nature of.the relation between this existence and value. This section embarks upon the examination of this second main problem of this study. It is concorned with (1) qualifying the meanings of existence with which value is closely associated by Whitehead, for even he makes room for abstract aspects of existence or with which it is not directly and intimately associated; and (2) setting forth the difficulties which any attempt to associate value with existence must encounter.

(1)

Whitehead does recognize an abstract aspect of existence more or less dissociated from value. "Fact" may be the best word for this aspect of existence, though Whitehead frequently uses this word in a widor sense to mean any completed existence - an aspect of the past. The past viewed concretely, however, lives on in the present to which it gives and from which it takes value. So even of the past a further abstraction must be made to reach "valueless" fact. The abstraction meant is the object of the natural sciences, "nature". For Whitehead this is not the same thing as concrete existence.

"Nature," Whitehead says in one of his earlior works restricted to the philosophy of natural science, "Is closed to mind 71." This statement is usually interpreted as meaning that along with other "mental" entities values are excluded from "nature", that is, the object of science.72 Whatever this oft-quoted statement of Whitehead's means, he does say unequivocally in an article writton during the same period, "The characteristic of physical science is that it ignores all judgments of value; for example, aesthetic or moral judgments. It is purely matter-of-fact 73."

Many commentators seem to think that Whitehead changes his mind about the exclusion of values from nature. Mr. Millard says that Whitehead "broadens" his concept of nature so that "fact and value are no longer divided 74". Lawrence says that Science and the Modern World, the first book in Whitehead's metaphysical period, "is characterized by Whitehead's thoroughgoing rejection of his earlier conviction that the problems of physical science are isolable from the general problems of cosmology" 75; and he says that to his "theory of fact" is added a "theory of value"76. Professor Urban goes much farther in proclaiming a fundamental contradiction in Whitehead's views of the relations of fact and value. He thinks that Whitehead is controlled by two incompatible ideals of intelligibility.

The first, the "idealistic", is that which dominatod the entire European tradition from Plato and Aristotle on, namely that the source of meaning and intelligibility is ultimately in the good or value. Value and mind are given the primacy in the "categorical scheme". The second, the naturalistic, springs from the notion that the impersonal is more intelligible than the personal entities and relations from which values have been abstracted, more so than the concrete wholes from which the abstractions have been made. Thus develops a catagorioal scheme in which mind and personality are derivative elements emerging from a substratum of impersonal reality, and value from that which to value free 77.

Urban claims that Whitehead accepts the former orientation in principle but reverts to the latter.

There is certainly a "broadening" and development of Whitehead's philosophical views from his "philosophy of science period" to his "metaphysical period". He may even have overemphasized the restrictions which he placed on his subject matter in the earlier period in order to focus his discussion. Still, Whitehead himself believes that he is carrying over the conclusions of his earlier work into his later writings and incorporating them into the larger scheme. If this is true, there must be a place for "valueless fact" within the framework of the metaphysics which centers around the notion of concrete existence intimately associated with value. I believe that this is true and that it is part of the claim to adequacy of Whiteheid"s philosophy that his metaphysical concepts are broad enough to make room both for the value aspects of reality and for the "valueless facts" which natural science studies. Also there are in his thought connections between these seemingly opposed concepts. I do not see either of Urban's "norms of intelligibility" allowed free expression in Whitehead's philosophy. Indeed, if Whitehead has made any profound contrlbution to the development of philosophy, it is in going beyond these traditional assumptions and in finding metaphysical notions which can combine what is true in both of them. He neither attempts to derive existence from transcendent values residing in an ideal realm of perfection, nor does he attempt to base his metaphysics on a narrow "materialism" or "naturalism". Nor does he present merely a heady and frothy mixture of these two incompatible views. In intention, at least, he is trying to integrate the major tendencies in philosophic and scientific thought, as he so clearly proposes in Science and the Modern World, and, if he can make any significant contribution to a subject like theory of value, which has been peculiarly at the mercy of unexamined traditional assumptions, it is only because to some extent he succeeds in bringing out these hidden premises, examining them, overcoming their incompatibilities, and integrating them into more adequate ultimate principles.

How than does Whitehead account for the "valueless" objects of science, within the framework of a value-charged notion of concrete existence?

The basic tenet of Whitehead is that natural science does not study actual existence but only some high abstractions.

Matter-of-fact is an abstraction arrived at by confining thought to purely formal relations which then masquerade as the final reality. This is why science in its perfection relapses into the study of differential equations. The concrete world has slippad through the meshes of the scientific net 78!

But to call scientific entities abstractions is not to dismiss them to some limbo. They are not merely "conceptual" entities; they are "real", and they never lose all connection or common character with their origin. They originate in ooncrete existence and they are genuine aspects of concrete existence. They are not antecedent and independent "'formal" conditions determining concrete existence, and they are not artificial constructs, mere useful dodges to got from one set of observations to another - but genuine realities. I have reiterated these points because they are essential to the doctrine and because they prohibit any of the old and easy solutions to this problem.

The ideas fundamental to the concepts of the world which exclude value from existence - Newtonian absolute space and time, simple atomic physioal entities "simply located", geometrical points, timeless instants, and so on - all have meaning for Whitehead. None of them is completely false, merely a pseudo-concept of outworn science; but he tries to derive them all from certain aspects of concrete existence: that is, from immediate observation, which in his metaphysics and epistemology is not merely a shadowy phosphorescence peculiar to human beings but is, rather, a particularly highly developed and active variety of concrete existence. The fallacies of "materialism" and "naturalism" are not that they believe in the reality of some or all of these entities, but that they attribute to them the wrong kind of reality &endash; fundamental rather than derivative. They mistake these entities for the concrete existence from which they are derived, according to Whitehead, by complex processes of abstraction. Or they assume that the derivation runs the other way - from these abstract entities to, say, our immediate experience. All these fallacies Whitehead calls "fallacies of misplaced concreteness" 79. One instance of this fallacy which Whitehead thinks particularly inimical to a view of natural science which will not exclude values from the world is the "fallacy of simple location" 80. This fallacy consists in assuming that an event takes place at just one point in space and time and is only externally related to all other events taking place at all other points in space at all other times. Now Whitehead admits that this and some other notions of science and common-sense are

...the most natural ideas for the human mind. It is the way in which we think of things, and without these ways of thinking we could not get our ideas straight for daily use. There is no doubt about this. The only question is, How concretely are we thinking when we consider nature under these conceptions? My point will be, that we are presenting ourselves with simplifled editions of immediate matters of fact 81.

When mistaken for concrete existence, however, these notions would rule out Whitehead's notion of concrete existence - of actual occasions, pulling together aspects of things remote in time and space into purposive, self-realizing unities. Recognized as "abstractions", however, Whitehead thinks that these scientific entitles are compatible with his metaphysics.

As I remarked before 82, one of the paradoxes of Whitehead's philosophy is that he believes that the analysis of concrete reality gets at entities which are real ingredients of this concrete reality and yet owe their reality to the concrete reality from which they are abstracted. He says,

I shall argue that among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience. there is no.element whatever which possesses this character of simple location. It does not follow, however, that the science of the Seventeenth Century was simply wrong. I hold that by a process of constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the simply located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are the minds included in the scientific scheme 83.

The only way to understand both the reality of these abstraotione and yet the primacy of the reality of concrete existence is to follow the process of the abstraction of the former from the latter. Whitehead does this in many ways and in great detail. There is not room here to discuss the detail of this process; I can only suggest its general outlines.

First, the most general metaphysical considerations relevant to this issue have already been pointed out in my discussion of "real potentiality" 84. Scientific objects are aspects of real potentiality. As such they have a half-way kind of reality. No matter how abstract, they are not merely the pure potentials which Whitehead calls eternal objects. Physical laws and entities such as simply-located particles and "space-time", geometrical entities, even mathematical and logical entitios, originate in process, and they continue to be real - operate in process - only so long as they are to some extent actual - that is, feelings.

In his earlier work on the philosophy of science, in which Whitehead distinguished sharply between "events" which were each unique and non-repeatable and "objects" which were repeatable patterns, it seemed as though objects were merely eternal objects or patterns of eternal objects. In his later works, however, it becomes evident that these objects, insofar as they are genuine aspects of actual existence, are themselves actual. They exist as feelings. While the total feeling which is an actual occasion is still unique and not totally repeatable 85, real aspects, component feelings in an actual ocoasion, do survive its completion and function in subsequent actuality. Failure to understand this metaphysical position results in the total inversion of Whitehead's metaphysics and the conclusion that not only "objects" but "events" &endash; actual occasions &endash; themselves are merely structures of eternal objects 86.

"Nature", "facts", scientific objects, then,, must be derived from concrete existence and must be interpreted so as not to destroy the interpretation of concrete existence as "prehensive unification", process, flux, value-charged, creative activity. In his earlier works Whitehead tries to derive the basic scientific entities from immediate sense experience. He does not depart from this procedure in the later works, but in them sense experience itself must be interpreted in its metaphysical setting. First, as for experience in general, it is recognized by Whitehead as in no way merely subjective and epiphenominal; it consists of sequences of highly developed actual occasions, so it is in and part of actual process, Sense experience, however, is interpreted by Whitehead as a rather highly developed spscialization within experience. It presents to us not the "given" as Hume and Kant thought, but even on its simplest level, highly developed abstractions involving not only the previous actualities which experience must prehend, but also "conceptual prehensions" which the experiencing occasions themselves provide. And so sense experience does not give us the value-charged impact of the actual world which more primitive, "physical prehensions" in the "mode of causal efficacy" give. Sense experience gives us rather a projection of abstracted aspects of this actual world upon the present world. Now, the actual present world, the occasions "simultaneous" with the experiencing oocasions, is defined by Whitehead as causally independent of these experiencing occasions., Of all actuality the on-going-present beyond an occasion is alone outside its process. This present beyond itself shares with an occasion, of course, a past which is largely common to all present occasions; and all present occasions, including the experiencing occasions seek to contribute to a common future. But the world presented to us by sense is already a somewhat abstract, simplified, conceptually ordered world. It is not a subjective dream world. Indeed, in two senses it is "closed to mind": it presents genuine aspects of the past which have been established and cannot be altered. insofar as they are past. Only the kind of collective solipsism practiced in George Orwell's"Oceania" would attempt thus to remake the past. Secondly, and this is merely an aspect of the first point, it contains certain uniform relations which all occasions, at least all in this "epoch" have developed smong themselves

Sense awareness is only one "phase" of the process of an actual occasion, but it is a starting point for a very important kind of analysis - In Process and Reality, Whitehead puts this kind of analysis almost on an equal level of importance with the kind which I have tried to describe in Chapter Two of Part I of this paper 87. The kind of analysis of actual occasions which seeks to understand their internal processes of "prehending" and "feeling" the actual and possible worlds and synthesizing them into a new felt unity, the kind of analysis which recognizes phases - "conformal". "supplemental". and so on in the indivisible croative act of the occasion, this kind of analysis Whitehead calls "genetic division". But there is another kind of analysis that is possible - a kind which is ultimately subordinate to the first since it is always performed within the process of occasions and has its final justification in what it can contribute to that process, but which, nevertheless, has a kind of autonomy -, this latter kind of analysis which Whitehead calls "coordinate division" seeks to analyze not becoming the internal process of each occasion, but what has become the finished, the actualized, the "dead" past an it is projected into the present in the experience of each occasion This is Whitehead's metaphysical rendering of the conceptual operations which science performs on experience. Science cannot grasp the internal process of creation; it studies what has been created 88.

Footnotes for Chapter 5, Section B (68-88)

68 See above, Ch. 1, Sect. C(3)(c) of this paper.

69 Millard, for example, ,says, "The identification of existent reality, actuality, and value continues throughout both Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making." Op. cit., p. 151. He has gone to the trouble of collecting a lot of passages from these works which, while they do not seem to me to establish "identity", do certainly suffice to establish close association,, and so I repeat his list to assure the acceptance of the latter point as a point of departure rather than a conclusion concerning Whitehead's views on value.

"An actual event is an achievement for its own sake" (SMW., p. 152). "The actuality is the value" (SMW., p. 155). "The organism is a unit of emergent value" (SMW., p. 157). "The event constitutes a patterned value" (SMW., p. 174). P. 17 ). "Realized togetherness is the achievement of emergent value" (SMW., p. 238). "The emergent actual occasion is the superject of informed value" (SMW., p. 238). "The actual occasions are the emergence of values (SMW., p. 256). "An organism is the realization a definite shape of value" (SMW., p. 278). "Reality [is] activity emerging into individualized value" (SMW., p. 287). "The actuality is ... the experience of value" (RM., p. 100). "Value is inherent in actuality itself (RM., p. 100). "The self-value is the unit fact which emerges" (RM, p. 101). "Each occasion .. is a value" (RM, p. 109). "One occasion,, already actual, enters into the birth of another existence of experienced value" (RM, pp. 112-13) "An actual thing is an elicited feeling-value" (RM, p. 151).

68 A task to which Part I of this paper is devoted.

69 The Concept of Nature, p.4.

70 Though Muller and Gentry think that he was here Interested primarily pn a much more limited issue, combatting the "subjectivism" of Einstein's view that space-time systems are chosen by the observer; Muller, D. L. and Gentry, G. V., The Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, Austin, Texas: Burgess Publishing Co., 1938, p. 58. Lawrence, N. M., in Sect. ii of Chap.4 of his The Development of Whitehead's Epistemology (Harvard PhD. thesis in philosophy, Jan., 1949), considers this statement at length and concludes that Whitehead here intends to establish an anti-Kantian position of "naive realism" which I suppose means that the processes of cognition do not help to make the object one of knowledge but merely reveal what is already there.

71 AE., p. 180, in an article entitled "The Anatomy of Some Scientific Ideas".

72 Op. cit., Ch. 2.

73 Op. cit., p. 260.

74 Ibid., p. 263.

75 "Whitehead's Philosophy of Language". in Schillpp, op. cit. , pp. 223-4.

78 MT., p. 25.
79 SMW., p. 75 and p. 35.

80 SMW., pp. 74-75.

81 SMW., pp. 74-75.

82 See above, p. 54, note 4.

83 SMW., pp. 84-85.
84 See above, Part I, Ch. 3, Sect. C of this paper.

85 Except perhaps in the oonsequent nature of God.

86 Some commentators have reached this conclusion, for example, Muller and Gentry (op. cit., pp. 36-7)), and Mr. Edward Pols, The Idea of Freedom in the Metaphysics of Whitehead, Harvard doctoral thesis, 1948. Pols accuses Whitehead of being, underneath all his talk of process and actuality, an "essentialist", (Ch. 3, Sect. A).

87 PR., Part IV, "The Theory of Extension", especially Ch.. 1.

88 But, I must reiterate, the process of creation and the finished creature maintain for Whitehead a close, functional relationship. So the intellectual activity which studies the latter is not opposed to the understanding of the former if comprehended in an adequate metaphysical setting. In this connection it is interesting to note that Whitehead says that Bergson is wrong in attributing "spatialization" to a distortion introduced by the intellect. Ordering the world in space and time is an achievement, not a relapse. It contributes to the adequacy with which high-grade occasions respond to even remote aspects of their environments, and it furthers the complexity of the contrasts which they achieve. PR., pp. 489-90.

Though experience is fragmentary, at least what is in its clear focus is but. a fragment of what lurks in its depths; all experiences have some highly abstract aspects in common, what Whitehead calls their "common texture"89. Immediate sensory experience does have a structure, or, at least, a texture, and this it is that gives science its foothold 90. What emerges out of the study of this texture of experience is the most general concepts of science - space-time, geometries, and, even beyond these in generality, what Whitehead calls "extensiveness" or "extensive connection".

Space, time, and space-time are, Whitehead thinks, perhaps peculiar to the region of actuality - the epoch - in which we live. There is nothing necessary to all actuality about them. They represent a common achievement of a very large group of actual occasions and facilitate communion among that group. He points to the "fact" that there are just three dimensions of space or four dimensions.of space-time, as evidence that these relations are not necessary conditions of all actuality but merely the common deposit of a certain group of actualities 91. As for the more general relations of "extensive conditions", a kind of abstract geometry - he reserves judgment as to whether actual process could go on without these "relations" 92.

What is particularly interesting from the point of view of this section is that even on the level of these ultimate abstractions Whitehead sees the evidence of the living, feeling, creative nature of concrete actuality preserved - fossil traces of life, feeling and value in the dead wastes of abstraction. Extensive relations are sequential whole-part and part-part relations. They are the barest skeleton of the concrete togetherness which holds among actual occasions. each prehending all the past occasions and then becoming one among the many prehended by each subsequent occasion. Entities such as "points" and "instincts" are developed out of extensive relations (rather than the relations being developed out of them) as non-terminating sequences of inclusions of one "area" by another, thus deriving even these notions, usually considered antithetical to qualitative flux, from an abstraction from a ceaseless process of active, selective, emotionally charged appropriative inclusion - the process which more concretely is described as prehension and feeling, and most concretely is describable as creative activity 93.

When we come to the slightly less abstract temporal and spatial relations, the prehensive character of concrete existence shows through even more strongly.

… space-time cannot in reality be considered as a self-subsistent entity. It is an abstraction, and its explanation requires reference to that from which it has been extracted. Space-time is the specification of certain general characters, of events and of their mutual orderings 94.

Whitehead tries to conceive space-time as the sort of actual relationship among events that makes it possible to think of even the remotest fact entering into each moment of the present. "It is necessary to understand that space-time is nothing else than a system of pulling together of assemblages into unities" 95. In an oft-quoted passage in Science in the Modern World he describes the rather complex functions which space-time performs, thus showing that for him the external relations which we usually think of are only part of the notion, and that it takes on a meaning compatible with prehensive unity when we see the notion whole.

Things are separated by space and are separated by yime, but they are also togother in space,, and together in time, even if they be not contemporaneous. I will call these characters the separative and the prehensive characters of space-time. There is yet a third character of space-time. Everything.which is in space receives a definite limitation of some sort, so that in a sense it has just that shape which it does have and no other, also in some sense it is in just this place and in no other. Analogously for time, a thing endures through a certain period, and through no other period. I will call this the modal character of space-time. It is evident that the modal character taken by itself gives rise to the idea of simple location. But it must be conjoined with the separative and prehensive characters. 96

But natural science as a whole, and even physics, is ooncerned with more concrete entities than merely applied geometries and space-time. It is Whitehead's contention that the older, realistic philosophical orientation of science, usually called "materialism" or, more broadly, "naturalism". is no longer adsquato to explain even science itself, He does not 'think that we should give up the attempt to explain science on a "realistic" basis, however. He suggests that his "philosophy of organism" provides a more adequate realistic explanation of the problems and paradoxes of modern science than the older materialistic or naturalistic explanation 97.

Whitehead's metaphysics allows for two kinds of time - continuous and discontinuous. Each occasion orders the world about it in a continuous time relation. But also, each occasion, since its own internal process has more the character of Bergsonian duré than that of ordinary time, 98 develops internally "out of time" and deposits, along with its more concrete contributione to the actual world, a "quantum" of time upon its completion. As for causality, the notion of prehension oalls for actual entities responding to remote conditions instead of merely to the immediately preceding state of affairs. 99

For Whitehead the philosophical position that determination runs from the concrete whole to the abstract part is not to be ignored by science, but he does not think that he is merely an old-style "vitalist," or that this contention destroys the uniformity that the scientist finds in nature. He says,

The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very character of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organisms and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an electron within a living body is different from the electron outside it by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body: that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state. But the principle of modification is perfectly general throughout nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies. 100

This quotation raises some difficulties which I cannot discuss in dotall here; but I can remark that it is Whitehead's intention to allow purposes, teleological determinations, and so on, to be effective in the natural world without upsetting the order of nature which science studies. Two ideas of his can be mentioned briefly as promoting this view: one is that even the electron is an oocasion, or nexus of occasions, and so basically similar to the more highly organized occasions characteristic of life and of human experience (so there is no break in continuity or imposition of one kind of order on a drastically different kind of order); and the other is that the influence of the purposes of the highly developed occasions on, say. electrons, is not necessarily exerted directly and in isolation from the rest of the world, but through long chains of inclusion of occasions within occasions and through more or less uniform modification of the total process of actuality.

Whitehead goes even further, however. Not only causal relations in general should be reinterpreted in the light of the philosophy of organism, but the notion of physical "energy" must be seen as not just blind mechanical push.

The notion of physical energy which is at the base of physics, must then be eonceived as an abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposeful, inherent in the subjective form of the final synthesis in which each occasion completes itself. It is the total vigor of each activity of experience 101.

Indeed, it is one of the main lines of argument of Science and the Modern World that science itself still needs its "valueless" abstractions, has through its own development been forced to abandon them as the basis of an independent philosophical justification and explanation; and that for a more adequate philosophical setting science itself calls for all of the major notions which Whitehead uses to describe concrete existence, including value considerations. In commenting on the philosophical significance of the romantic poets in calling to our attention the inadequacy of the narrow notions on which science had been based, Whitehead says,

Both Shelley and Wordsworth emphatically bear witness that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values; and that these values arise from the cumulation, in some sense, of the brooding presence of the whole on its vorious parts. Thus we gain from the poets the doctrine that a philosophy of nature must concern itself at least with these six notions: change, value, eternal objects, endurance, organism, interfusion 102.

So we see that Whitehead tries to deal with the objections which science might make to a close association of existence and value. He tries to make room for the "valueless" abstractions which science studies, and yet he attempts to show their derivation from value-charged existence. In attaining this position he tries not to depreciate the philosophical significance of science. The reality of these abstractions is maintained; Whitehead is certainly not a positivist. Also, he wants to make of science a cooperating partner in the philosophical quest, so, as Victor Lowe remarks in his article on Whitehead's philosophical development, Whitehead does not follow the tendency of Bergson of making science study an aspect of reality which is metaphysically opposed to the realization of values. Whitehead's answer is not "restrictive". "His advance is towards a single unifying concept, not towards a contrasting pair of concepts, the inferior member of which is to be supplied by physical science 103. Not only is science and its objects not omitted or rejected in Whitehead's theory, but also his value theory itself may be strengthened by the careful way in which they are included. As Lowe remarks,

The advance pronto from physical theory or refined experimental results to the teleology of actual things achieves nothing. Like Whitehead, we must advance by way of a theory of the nature of the actual things 104."

Footnotes for Chapter 5, Section B (89-104)

89 AE., p. 243.

90 AE., p. 246.

91 PR., p. 442.

92 Op. cit.

93 As evidence for this paragraph I cite Whitehead's statement on p. 258 of AI. that "extensiveness" is derived from the "mutual immanence" which is the "general metaphysical characteristic of any group of ocoasiona which makes them a "noxus", and the two following quotations:

The scheme of [extensive] relationships as thus impartially expressed becomes the scheme of a complex of events variously related as wholes to parts and as joint parts within some of one whole. Even here the internal relationship [which holds between actual occasions] forces itself on our attention; for the part evidently is constitutive of the whole. Also an isolatod event which has lost its status in any complex of events is equally excluded by the very nature of an event. So the whole is evidently constitutive of the part. Thus the internal character shows through this impartial scheme of abstract external relations. (SMW., pp. 180-1).

These extensive relationships do not make determinate what is transmitted; but they do determine conditions to which all transmission must conform. They represent the systematic scheme which is involved in the real potentiality from which every actual occasion arises. This scheme is also involved in the attained fact which every actual occasion is. The 'extensive' scheme is nothing else than the generic morphology of the internal relations which bind the actual occasions into a nexus, and which bind the prehensions of any one actual occasion into a unity, coordinately divisible. (PR., pp. 441-2)

94 SMW., p. 96. Also, "…the extension of space is the ghost of transition. It is only to be experienced by some process of transition." (MT. p. 132)

95 SMW., p. 106.

96 SMW., pp. 93-4.

97 Lawrence (op. cit., p. 324) says, "The needs of contemporary physics with which Whitehead deals are reducible to one primary need: to conceive an entity of vibratory character which will explain both the continuous character of the entities from which time is an abstraction. The wave theory of the propagation of oertain kinds of energy requires continuous time; quantum phenomena demand time quanta, discrete chunks of time." I would add also that "field relations" make obsolete traditional notions of causality.

98 See above, Part I, Ch. 2, Sect. B (c) of this paper.

99 AI., pp. 201-02

100 SMW., pp. 115-6.

101 AI., p. 239.

102 SMW., p. 127.

103 "Whitehead's Philosophical Development". pp. 89-90, in Schillp, op. cit.

104 Ibid, p. 109.

(2)

The first part of this Section attempts to deal with one of the difficulties of relating value closely to existence - the fear that such association may corrupt the simplicity and uniformity of the objects of science. Even if Whitehead is able to overcome this objection, however, there are still serious difficulties in the way of a close association of value and existence.

I have up to now deliberately used the vague and evasive phrase "closely associated with", or some variation of it, to express the relation which Whitehead makes between existence and value. This procedure has been deliberate because I did not want to label this relation as one of identity. I must now, however, take up the issue of trying to define this relation more precisely, and the first step is to consider whether or not the relation is one of identity.

Millard says, "If every actuality is a value, and value is what every actuality is, then has not the term value become so extended as to be meaningless 105?" This is a very serious objection. Insofar as existence is a predicate which applies to everything whatever, it would seem to drain value of its essential selectiveness to identify it with existence.

I propose to discuss this issue briefly under three headings: (a) the contention that existence is broader and more inclusive than value, (b) the oontentlon that it is ossential to some values that they not exist, and (c) the possibility that, even if these contentions be disposed of, still "identity" is not the relation between existence and value.

(a) The contention that existence is broader and more inclusive than value.

Are not there things which exist but are neutral as far as value is concerned? It seems to as that for Whitehead the only truly neutral entities are sternal objeots in themselves. These do not exist 106. Nor do they play any role in existence without the intervention of some existing entity even if it is only God in his primordial role 107. According. to the notion of prehension, every actuality must be taken account of by every new actuality, and this "taking account of" is not an indifferent causal reaction. It is, rather, governed by what Whitehead calls the "principle of non-indifference" -; It is selective, and the selection is governed by the ends, aims, purposes and interests of tho prehending occasion 108. Therefore, value is always determined by an existing entity, and everything which is actual has some value in the sense of being non-indifferent - to every existing entity.

But even though all existence may thus be valuable, existence seems to provide no criterion of comparative value, nor does it distinguish between good and evil - evil things exist as well as good things. In the most general sense of value," of course, the evil or bad is valuable &endash; only the indifferent is non-valuable. The notion that existence does not discriminate between good and evil or provide a basis for comparative value is (I) partially true - there is such a thing as "relative value"; prehension as described above connotes only relative value with existence; and according to this notion of the relation of value and existence, every existing entity has value for other existing entities, but the latter may individually assign quite different and conflicting values to the former 109.

But, (ii) it is not true to say that this Is the whole story. As I shall try to show below, existence can also provide a criterion of absolute value which distinguishes between good and evil and provides a principle of comparative value 110. Even for the relative notion of value, however, and certainly for the absolute notion of value, it is necessary to see that for Whitehead to exist is not a passive but a highly active state - to exist does not me an "to just lie there" - and, indeed, this activity Is only adequately described an "creative". For, though when existence is passively interpreted there are only two alternatives - an entityeither exists or it does not -, when existence is active, and especially when it is creative activity, there can be more or less of it, or it can be more or less "successful". In general, it is the assumption of the non-Whiteheadian, simple, passive notion of existence that causes the most difficulty in conceiving any intimate association between existence and value.

(b) The contention that some values do not exist. Prominent among lists of values are usually ideals, aims, and goals and satisfactions not yet attained. Common-sense psychology informs us that enjoyments and sati.sfactions once attained quickly lose their attraction, and that lack and need are the greatest spurs to activity. And many studies of value emphasize the ideal character of at least some values and also the value to be derived from making actual what is not yet actual. In answer, first, it must be remembered that according to Whitehead's metaphysics even the conceptual awareness of an entity &endash; say an ideal or end-in-view, is a kind of actuality - as a "conceptual prehension" it is a feeling 111, and, secondly, the issue still remains as to whether these ideals and so forth, which certainly are valuable, give or take value to or from more concrete existence. According to Whitehead they owe their partial existence to some concrete existences, and they are valuable only in the setting of the concrete existences.in which they function 112.

(c) The possibility that "identity" is not the best description of the relation between existence and value, even if Whitehead can answer the above objections.

In the proposition, "Existence is identical with value", there are three entities to be defined and understood: the two arguments of the relation - "existence" and "value" -, and the relation "is identical with" itself. I have already emphasized that the "existence" which is meant is, primarily, not what has been, accomplished fact, but what is becoming, the process, the activity, of actualization.

As for "value", what is meant is not just value (or "values") in the derivative sense of those things which have value, but the primary sense of that which gives them value, the common vhatever-it-is that makes valuable things valuable 113. The great difficulty here is that philosophical tradition interprets all predicates as universals, entities which in their own proper nature are not existents, but which - to use Whitehead's term - "ingress" into existing things. Thus we have the seeming impossibility of identifying existence with the non-existent. "Value" here can mean neither actual things which have value nor a universal property or properties in the usual univocal sense. Both Plato and Aristotle recognized a transcendent sense-of "goodness" or value which, for Plato, was beyond the forms, and, for Aristotle, a "transcendental" term - an equivocal term predicable under all of the categories. I am not going to explore either Plato's or Aristotle's meaning of value in general, but, if there is a meaning of "value" in Whitehead's philosophy which is identical with "existence", it may be similar to the sort of entity which they called "The Good".

In the next chapter I am going to explain two meanings of value in Whitehead's philosophy, neither of which is equivalent to this transcendent good, though what Whitehead calls "importance" is certainly closely related to it 114.

As for "identity", logicians point out that it has a variety of meanings, or, that there are a number of relations erroneously called identity: such as the relation between the symbols in a syntactic definition, or the relation of the propositions connected by co-implication or equivalence. For terms to be identical, however, they must refer to the same entities. Since the entities which both "existence" and "value" in general refer to do not fit any easily recognizable type of entity, however, it is difficult to know whether they are identical.

Since the meanings of value which I shall be discussing in the next chapter - "relative" and "absolute" value - are not equivalent to the transcendent notion of value which may be identioal with existence, I am not going to aasert identity with existence for them. I am going to assert, rather, that existence is the source of value. I will try to specify this relation "is the source of" for each type of value - relative and absolute, but I acknowledge that it is beset with even more difficulties than the relation "is identical with" as.far as making its meaning absolutely clear. It is, however, in the Whiteheadian - and, of course, the Platonic - tradition to push rational analysis and explanation as far as possible, and then,, and only then, if it seems necessary, to go beyond reason and rest in a poetic intuition. "Existence" as creative activity is not completely analyzable, but Whitehead goes remarkably far in analyzing it 115. The relation of ecistence to value, even when it is specified as the former being the source of the latter may likewise not be completely analyzable, but I shall try to explain it as far as possible 116.

Footnotes for Chapter Five Section B (105-116)

105 Op. cit., p. 152.

106 See above, Part I, Ch. 3, Sect. C, of this paper.

107 See above, Part I, Ch, 4, Sect. B, of this paper.

108 See above, Part I, Ch. 2, Sect. C, of this paper.

109 See below, Ch. 6, Sect. B, of this paper.

110 See below, Ch. 6, Sect. C, of this paper.

111 See above, Part. I, Ch. 2, Sect. C (3), pp. XXX of this paper.

112 See below, Ch. 6, Sect. C(4)(a), and Ch. 7 Sect.C, pp. XXX of this paper.

113 See above, Ch. 1, p. X of this paper.

114 See below, Ch. 6, Sect. C, of this paper.

115 See above, Part I, XXXX, of this papor.

116 See below, Ch. 6, Sect. B, pp. XXX and Sect. C, pp. XXX of this paper.

Move to Chapter Six.