Section B:

Relative Value

 

In this section I intend to discuss (1) the nature of relative value in Whitehead's philosophy and its relation to his metaphysical notion of croative, activity, (2) the adequacy of this notion of relative value for explaining the many and apparently conflicting value ascriptions made by Whitehead and its superiority to other theories of relative value, and (3) the shortcomings of this notion of value and its need for a supplementation by a theory of absolute value. (1)

 

I shall commonce by stating what seems to me to be the nature of relative value in Whitehead"s philosophy, and I shall then seek to explain and defend this definition.

 

To have relative value is to be felt as a condition, ingredient, phase or outcome of a creative process.

 

I would like, first, to call attention to certain aspects of this definition.

 

(a) In Part I of this paper I tried to show that the concrete reality of an actual occasion, which is Whitehead's unit of aotuality, is to be a process, rather than a thing. The thingness of actuality is but the outcome of actuality and is real only as a phase in subsequent actual process. Process is.primary reality. Further, in order to describe this process it is necessary to transcend all of the usual analyses of process - such as Aristotle's "four causes" for while concrete process manifests these characters, it is more than any or all of them.. All reality depends on concrete process, and so I argued that process can only be adequately designated as "creative".

 

(b) Every item in reality, either actual or merely possible, functions in each ocoasion, that is, in each creative act; and not just the awareness of this functioning but this functioning itself - the reaction,, the appropriation, and the inclusion101 of each item in the synthesis of the occasion - that is, the component acts of the one creative act which is the total occasion - are called feelings. To be real. to be part of real process is to feel and be felt. Though anything that is at all real is a feeling, feelings are of many kinds, and some of them are highly abstract. Among the more concrete feelings, however, are those which relate the entity felt to the total creative process of the occasion. It is these very eoncrete feelings which constitute relative value.

 

(c) It is to be noted that even these feelings are of many kinds, that they feel each other, and that they are in process of combining into the total feeling of the creative act. Thus, some of these feelings are of entities as possible or actual "external" conditions of the new creative act (the traditional conoept of a "means" is to be found within this group), some of these feelings are of already appropriated ingredients as internal phases of the creative act, and at least one feeling in each creative act is of an attained internal harmony of all the ingredients - the "satisfaction" of the occasion.

 

(d) Value as thus defined is relative in two senses (i) it is relative to the whole occasion which is the creative act - each item's value depends on its relation to the whole creative act - as furthering it or thwarting it, as intimately involved in it or as only remotely relevant to it - and each item's value changes in intensity and character as it moves from an external condition to complete inclusion in the oocasion; and (ii) it is relative to each creative act - each item in the universe can have a different value to different occasions.

 

This then is the nature of relative value in Whitehead's philosophy as I see it. It must be conceded that it is of a very complex nature, not to be taken in at a glance. It is because of this complexity that I thought it necessary to reject the attempts to formulate Whitehead's view of the nature of value more simply - say as some variation of an interest or satisfaction theory of value. Still, I must admit that insisting that value oan be defined adequately only in metaphysical terms, and that the principal metaphysical term appealed to must be "creative activity" is quite a large jump to make at one leap from the mere inadequacy of simpler views, I must now attempt to justify this definition by reference to Whitehead's works. Since he nowhere states this view completely and yet simply, since my formulation is what I referred to in the introduction as a "constructive interpretation" on my part of what he has said, I can only justify it in a piece-meal manner.

 

I rely on the argument of Part I of this study to justify my interpretation of Whitehead's metaphysics as centering about a notion of general, ontological creative activity. The only issue here, then, is whether value must be defined by reference to this metaphysical notion. I offer the following arguments based on direct reference to Whitehead's texts in support of my contention: (a) that our most concrete feelings of existence are value feelings, (b) that it is in relation to the synthesizing of diverse entities into concrete togetherness - the process which I have described as creative activity - that prehension or feeling generates value, and (c) which is one stop beyond (b), that it is not only in relation to creative activity that things take on value; creative activity is the source of this value.

 

(a) Whitehead tells us that our most immediate and unanalyzed feelings of existence, both of our own existence and of that of the world about us, are value feelings.

 

… the primitive stage of discrimination is not primarily qualitative [that is, sense qualities]. It is the vague grasp of reality, dissecting it into a three-fold scheme, namely, The Whole, That Other, and This-My-Self.

 

This is primarily a dim division. The sense of totality obscures the analysis into self and others. Also.this division is primarily based on the sense of existence as a value-experience. Namely, the total value-experience is discriminated into this value experience and those value experiences. …

 

The fundamental basis of this description is that our experience is a value-experience, expressing a vague sense of maintenance or discard; and that this value-experience differentiates itself in the sense of many existences with value-experience; and that this sense of the multiplicity of value experiences again differentiates itself into the totality of value experiences, and the many other value experiences, and the egoistic value-experience … 102

 

And a few pages farthor on he says,

 

Our enjoyment of actuality is a realisation of worth, good or bad. It is a value experience. Its basic expression is - have a care, here is something that matters! Yes, that is the best phrase - the primary glimmering of consciousness reveals something that matters. 103

 

These passages are complicated by the fact that Whitehead is here describing the immediate experience of all value - both relative aud absolute value. Indeed, he is here trying primarily to deepen our awareness of absolute value, hence all the references to "The Whole". But even of this whole or "one" he says, "Also there are two senses of the one - namely the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many 104." But absolute value, as I have already suggested, in immediate experience of it, at least, is but a deepening of relative value 105, and the description of immediate value experience and its relation to the enjoyment of being actual applies to relative value as well. The experience of being an actuality among actualities is primarily a value-experience.

 

(b) From the very, beginning of his revolutionary analysis of concrete actuality, Whitehead associates value intimately with its internal processes. Indeed, it is obvious that concrete process is a value process before it becomes apparent that it is a creative process. Whitehead's metaphysical description of concrete actuality starts near the beginning of Science and the Modern World with his introduction of the notion of prehension. At first this notion is presented merely as an alternative to the notion of the external and indifferent relation between cause and effect, which for so long dominated modern scientific thought. It appears then first in the somewhat abstract view of existence which science must take, but even here it is plain that the notion lays the basis for a theory of value. Whitehead introduces the concept of prehension through the device of a rather lengthy quotation from Francis Bacon, which runs in part,

 

'It is certain that all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception; for when one body is applied to another there is a kind of election to embrace that which is agreeable. and to exclude or expel that which is ingrate; and whether the body be alterant or altered, evermore a perception precedeth operation; for else all bodies would be like one to another ...106.'

 

Obviously, this quotation suggests a theory of value with at least a physical if not a metaphysical basis. It does not limit value to human experience or eyes to animal life. It does not make consciousness necessary for there to be value. It says that value to necessary to every physical thing in order for it to exist at all because it can be a separate thing, have a definite oharacter, only by reacting selectively to its causal antecedents. Otherwise all things would be alike, and there would be no definite character. Actuality is linked to a value reaction of selection and rejection, approach and withdrawal, liking and disliking. From this beginning Whitehead is going to erect his whole analysis of the actual occasion, but, strangely enough, he does not do so at this point in his argument. He is in this chapter of Science and the Modern World concerned neither with the metaphysical nor the axiological implications of this quotation but rather with the more special problems of science such as induction.

 

The beginnings of the doctrine of prehension found in Bacon, however, fail to give an adequate idea of the full notion of relative value which Whitehead develops largely because they fail to present a metaphysical analysis of those things out there to which an actuality reacts and of the inner nature of the actuality which does the reacting. So there is still the suggestion, first, that those things out there may be neutral in themselves and may derive value only from their relation to the actuality which is reacting to them, and, socondly, that the values generated in the reaction of the new actuality to the world may be adventitious also to the existence of the new thing.

 

Later development of Whitehead's notion shows that these interpretations are false; the relative value which appears in the prehensivie process is essential to the existence both of the world out there to which the new thing is reacting and to its own existence. There are no fixed existents more or less externally related so that relative value can be limited to certain fixed relations between them. We can't say, for example, that relative value is merely a matter of interest - even interest expanded beyond the limits of conscious human experience to include the physical responses of attraction and repulsion among physical things.

 

First, the things out there to which the new actuality reacts prehensively are themselves the outcome of prehensive processes; they exist really only as prehensions, or feelings, even in their "objective immortality". Therefore, if prehension or feeling generates value, they must be full of value even as prehended by the new actuallty. They do not just suddenly take on value in the new act of prehension. Prehension does not merely grasp its object externally; it appropriates aspects of the real inner nature of the things out there, or, to use Whitehead's alternative and more developed terminology, what is felt (the object of feeling), is itself feeling. The subjective forms of the feelings of the new thing add their own contributions of liking or disliking, and these value contributions enhance or diminish the function of the previous actualities in the new thing, but these previous actualities also contribute their own feelings to the new actuality, including some of their own intensities of feeling 107. A new occasion does not derive all of its value from the relation of its one moment of "satisfaction" to an utterly alien world. Every actual component contributes its own share to this final intensity. "All intensive quantity is merely the contribution of some one element in the synthesis to this one intensiveness of value 108." Indeed, considering Whitehead's meaning of "objective" as applying to whatever comes from the object (of a feeling) there is genuine "objective value" according to him, and this objective value contributes to the "relative value" within each occasion.

 

Secondly, there is no fixed interest or set of interests, or pleasures or enjoyments at the other pole &endash; in the new occasion &endash; by relation to which value is contributed. The new occasion develops internally; it is an on-going process, the end of which (the satisfaction) is indeterminate till it is made. The process is - (what other word can describe it?) -creative.

 

Thirdly, this process which lies between the things out there and the inner satisfaction is not merely a subjective reaction to or reproduction of those things out there; it is a real appropriation of them.. The external is made internal. And this "external" is the whole actual world. It must all be digested, made internal, and then "harmonized" - that is, synthesized - into a new world. Since the occasion is such a complex process of appropriation and synthesis, even after the external world has been prehended and made internal, there are phases of multiplicity of partial integration in the occasion. These also do not merely derive all their value from their relation to the satisfaction towards which they move, but also contribute value to this satisfaction.

 

The intensity of satisfaction is promoted by the order in the phases from which concrescence arises, and through which it passes; it is enfeebled by the "disorder". The components in the concrescence are then "values" contributing to the satisfaction 109.

 

For when they conflict, the phases cancel out each other's value, The synthesis which the occasion is making is not merely a private matter; it is a real synthesis of the real world, including the real feelings of that world. Each occasion is the creation of a cosmos. Insofar as it is successful it gives expression to the strivings and achievements of that world, and thus enhances its own fulfillment.

 

It is then the feeling of things as not merely external aids and threats to internal self-enjoyments but the feeling of them as intimately involved in a world-building process of creation that gives them value. Because this creative process is started anew in each manifold moment of existence it is as yet a relative value that it gives to things, but still the relation is to nothing less than creative activity.

 

(a) There remains the hardest of all the steps in the argument to comprehend. Indeed, It is questionable whether It should be introduced here or In the next section, for it is the basis of absolute value as well as of relative value. But it is therefore as necessary to an exposition of relative value as to an exposition of absolute values, so I must Introduce it here.

 

The preceding argument still leaves a gap, a gap commom to all relativistic theories of value, perhaps. It is said that to be valuable is to be prehended or felt as contributing to a creative synthesis. But why should such a relation bestow value on an item, unless creative synthesis is itself valuable?

 

In Part I 110 I tried to show that for Whitehead existence is feeling, and feeling is a process of pulling together what is multiple and separate into what is one and in "concrete togetherness". This is particularly obvious in the case of eternal objects, for in themselves they are completely discrete and related to each other only as presenting the possibility of relationship. Existence, realization, moving from the possible to the actual pulls them together, not merely in structures and

 

Footnotes for Chapter Six, Section B:

 

101 .Or rejection, in the case of "negative prehensions".

 

102 MT., pp. 150-51.

 

103 MT., p. 159.

 

104 MT., p. 150.

 

105 .See sbove, Sect. A. of this chapter, p. 260.

 

106 .SMW., pp. 60-61, from Section IX of Bacon's Natural History.

 

107 See above, pp. 64-9 of this paper, the discussion of "subjective form".

 

108 RM., p. 103.

 

109 PR., pp. 129-30.

 

110 Especially in ch. 3, Sect. D.