PART II
- 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 Reason
- OT Organization of Thought
This "definition", of course, leaves me with two new terms to explain - "creative success" and the "measure" or "measures" of creative success. I cannot find "creative success" as such used as a term, but in the next pages I shall quote a number of passages from Whitehead which seem to me to approach this notion. The following statement is a good example. "Various occasions are thus comparable in respect to their relative depths of actuality.
Occasions differ in importance of actuality 25. How can there be creative success or creative failure in Whitehead's notion of actual process? We have seen that each occasion is a creative act, but as such it is certainly in one sense always successful. Complete definiteness is achieved. A perspective is always attained on the universe giving a definite status to every actual and possible item. And each occasion feels and enjoys its own attainment of this definiteness and this perspective - that is, its own satisfaction. How then can we distinguish among creative sets and say that some are more successful than others?
First it must be noted that, although all occasions are creative acts and each achieves a definite ordering of the universe, nevertheless they differ among themselves. Indeed, each is unique. Each has its own peculiar character. Since each responds to the whole universe, this difference is explained not by what qualities it alone realizes but by the order of emphasis and rejection it gives to all the items of the universe. They differ from each other in the modes of ingression of each eternal object in each occasion and the fullness of recapture of each past actuality in each occasion, Also each occasion has a unique role to play in future process.
It is in these differences that relative creative success or failure lies. Though each occasion is, if regarded simply for itself alone, a creative success, to look on an occasion in this way is an abstraction. It is not merely creating itself but giving expression to the actualities and possibilities of the universe. Since each actuality is an achievement of value, there is more value in an occasion which preserves past actualities and encourages future actuality than in one that suppresses them. Eternal objects in themselves are not values, but there is an aspect of an actuality - God's primordial nature - which seeks the maximum realization of them all, of all possibilities 26, so even in realizing possibility, an occasion is furthering the creative activity of an important aspect of each creative process. Thus it is within the metaphysical framework as explained in the first part of this paper that we find the central meaning of importance 27.
In the last paragraphs I tried to define the central meaning of importance in relation to Whitehead's metaphysics. Now I intend to take up the individual metaphysical factors involved in this notion of importance, because it is only in relation to them severaIly that I can produce documentation for this meaning of importance in Whitehead's works. I hope that the preceding summary statement will serve to integrate the fragments and put each part in its proper setting, since in Whitehead's own writing there is a tendency for each fragment to look like a statement about the whole.
1n Section B of this chapter - on relative value - I tried to show that the basic metaphysical condition of value for Whitehead is the pulling together of what is separate and diverse into the unity of "concrete togetherness 28." I also said in that section that the things thus pulled together, insofar as they are already actual, could not be understood as completely passive in the process 29. In these statements lie the seeds of absolute value. Indeed, though Whitehead's views on value may have developed during the period of his major philosophical output to some extent, it seems to me that all of the major components are present from his first statement, in which relative value is dominant, in Science and the Modern World. For example, he says there,
I shall now give several quotations which show how emphasizing the universe which enters into the process of each occasion brings in considerations of absolute value - that is, importance.
Just how the universe contains standards of absolute value for measuring the absolute value of the achievement of each occasion remains to be taken up. So far I have tried merely to show that "...each occasion, although engaged in its own immediate self-realization, is concerned with the universe 34.
But first a reminder that "its own immediate self-realization" should not be lost sight of in considering absolute value. An occasion's own point of view isn't opposed to its importance; it is rather an essential factor in importance, for it is only in the occasion's process and success for itself that the creative striving of the universe succeeds. This is at least one interpretation of the following statement, which seems at first to conflict with what has just been quoted.
In order to see how reference to the universe determines the importance of an occasion, it is necessary to analyze out several factors in this universe. For, as the following quotation suggests, the importance of an occasion - here called its "value" intensity - is only partially its own creation. It also shares value with the rest of the universe - derives value from the past and the whole, and contributes it to the future, and to the whole.
To exist concretely is to be a creative process and to generate value. It is also to share in, to focus, to accumulate, to accentuate, to pass on, to alter, to suppress, to dissipate the value of all other existence.
Or, to find at least a partial statement of the same idea elsewhere in Whitehead's works:
Value for the universe realized in each occasion is therefore complex. Furthermore, it is intimately tied to value-for-self. And yet this whole complex of relative and absolute values comes to us as a single immediacy of feeling. We do not first feel merely relative value and then add, by interpretation, absolute value. Concrete, immediate value is both relative and absolute. The concrete starting-point of value is
In discussing relative value I made abstraction of immediate enjoyment. I shall now attempt to consider the reference to the universe in abstraction, and make further abstraction of three sub-phases in it: two of them relating to the actual universe - that is, (i) relation to the past, and (ii) relation to the future - and (iii) the last one treating of relation to the realm of possibility as actualized only in the primordial nature of God.
(i) 1 have already remarked in discussing relative value that the "actual world", the past, which each new occasion prehends, is not valueless prior to the prehension 40. It gives as well as takes on value in the prehensive process. What we are confronted with in prehending the past is a mass of values, supplementing and conflicting with each other as well as furthering or threatening our own actuality 41.
It is crucial for Whitehead's notions of absolute value that we realize that the actual world out there, even the physical world, is valuable for its own sake, not merely as it relates to our own purposes. Such departments of absolute value as morality and esthetics involve for him this realization. "By reason of this character ... the conception of morals arises. We have no right to deface the value experience which is the very essence of the universe 42." And elsewhere he says that "All the assumption of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of reverence in the treatment of natural ... beauty", and that this same assumption even helps to account for the ugliness of our industrial cities 43.
In remarking on the last two observations, he says,
A new occasion is directed towards the preservation of the past as well as towards its own individual ends. Prehension or feeling is not entirely a ruthless process of exploitation. As Mr. Goheen remarks, "concern' is for Whitehead a partial synonym of feeling 45. And Whitehead himself says of "our enjoyment of actuality", "Its basic expression is - Have a care, here is something that matters!" 46. Elsewhere he says that "values differ in importance" and that their importance depends on something intrinsic to each occasion.
Retention, endurance or reiteration of past actualities, of past feelings, recaptures and integrates their values into the value of the present actuality - thus increasing the latter's intrinsic value, its importance.
Each new occasion identifies itself to some extent with the values of past actuality, particularly with the values of the occasions which form the antecedent history of its own society. There is, thus, in this event a memory of the antecedent life-history of its own dominant pattern, as having formed an element of value in its own antecedent environment 48. Not just the pattern is recaptured but the value of the previous actualities, and these increase the importance of the present actuality.
Indeed, it is in this way, in the accumulation of the value of the past and its preservation in the present that actualities gain in absolute value, in importance. It explains, for instance, the high value of human personality.
We are absolutely valuable to ourselves and to others at least partially because we are not just isolated, fleeting, present moments, but accumulations of realized value being realized afresh in each moment of our existence 51.
An occasion is successful insofar as it recaptures and preserves more of the realized value of the past. Highly organized occasions do this better than less organized occasions. But all finite occasions must suppress some of the past so that they can emphasize other aspects of it. Only God "saves" all of the past in his consequent nature, and so, on this basis at least, God is supremely important.
(ii) .Value is generated in the creative process of becoming; and the preservation or recreation of the past increases this value; that is, increases its importance. But there ire other aspects to importance. Importance involves relation to the whole universe, not just the past, but also the future and the totality. Here I wish to consider the function of the future in determining the importance of a present actuality. "...each occasion in its character of being a finished creature, is a value of some definite specific sort 52." If the creature - the individual occasion as completed - ceased to exist with the attainment of its satisfaction, its value would perish with it. If this were true of actual occasions, however, no occasion could include within itself the value of its past, but we have just seen that Whitehead maintains that an occasion does preserve the value of the past. Also, value is associated with existence, and concrete existence is the creative process of becoming; what has become is, relatively, an abstraction. If it is no longer in the process of becoming, it is no longer fully existing. How can its value endure, then? It is for these and 'other reasons that Whitehead emphasizes that his philosophy is one of perishing as well as of becoming. To understand value and importance (as well as other aspects of his philosophy) we must understand what happens to an occasion after it has become.
I argued in Part I of this paper that an occasion does not perish altogether on reaching its completion, that some of its component feelings at least, and as feelings - that is, as active tensions holding things together in "concrete togetherness" - survive in subsequent occasions, and thus constitute the objective immortality of the occasion which thus survives its own completion 54. Thus it in not merely formal pattern that each occasion bequeaths to the future - pure forms would exercise no influence - but an active part of itself which shares in the genuine creative process of the future.
In Modes of Thought Whitehead discusses the increment to the absolute value of an occasion which comes to it through its contribution to the future under the term "expression". He seems at first to distinguish it, at least partly, from importance.
"Expressions are the data for feeling diffused in the environment 56.", so it is to the objective immortality of occasions that expression refers. But it is part of the essential activity of each occasion thus to project its influence beyond itself.
Thus expression is a factor in the importance which is intrinsic to an occasion.
Indeed, one of the main reasons why psychological interpretations of Whttehead's views on value which hold that intrinsic value for Whitehead lies in the subjective moment of satisfaction of each occasion are inadequate is that the end sought in the process of each occasion is not just subjective enjoyment but is also objective influence beyond itself. It is a real world which an occasion prehends. Its process is a real activity performed on and in this real world. Its outcome is a real fact which every future actual process must take account of. A creative process which leaves no creature as a "stubborn tact" for the future would be a dream.
Creative processes which are merely "average", which do not go beyond their own pasts, have little "expression,‚' that is, little individual influence on the future, and so are not very important 58. Insofar as an actual occasion or society of occasions has a wide influence in the future - that is, insofar as its unique feelings receive emphasis in and direct the integrating processes of occasions beyond themselves, the occasions in which these feelings originate. attain importance 59.
(iii) The importance which an occasion gains by perpetuating the values of the past and projecting itself into the future eannot be understood, however, until we comprehend the importance which an occasion acquires from its relation to the "Whole," the universe seen sub specie aeternatatis, to borrow Spinosa's phrase - as a constant metaphysical situation, in which the realm of eternal objects and the primordial nature of God are particularly significant, abstract factors.
Here is one of the more cryptic passages of Process and Reality:
The first sentence obviously refers to conventional Platonism, which it rejects. But then the passage seems to go on to say that in his philosophy of flux Whitehead intends to "outPlato" Plato. Although it is not at all clear from the context, the last part of this passage may be referring merely to the consequent nature of God. I choose to think, however, that the passage has reference to an ideal at least of concrete finite process, the ideal of absolute value which concrete process perpetually seeks to realize, but never can, because of the limitations of finitude.
This ideal is given by the primordial nature of God. It will be remembered that according to the interpretation of this abstract factor in creative process, it is the "principle of concretion", and as such performs the function of making available to each occasion the entire realm of possibility. Eternal objects, infinite, passive, equipotential in themselves, thus acquire an urge towards realization - that is, towards togetherness in feeling. In fact, the "conceptual prehension" which they receive in God's primordial nature is the first stage in their actualization. But this tentative actualization of the whole realm of eternal objects does not give them a definite order or surmount the difficulties of their joint realization in the same actuality; it merely gives then all a total thrust towards actuality 61. It is up to the creative acti-vity of the finite occasions to achieve compatible realizations of these essences, to combine them into structures in which they can jointly receive maximum actualization. Each finite occasion realizes only some of them. It achieves definite form by "negatively prehending" probably most eternal objects, and, even those which it does prehend positively differ in their "modes of ingression": some are emphasized and constitute the peculiar definiteness of the occasion; others are relegated to its background. Insofar as an occasion gives full and joint realization to more eternal objects, however, succeeds in fulfilling more of the primordial appetition of God and in realizing more of the infinite possibility of the universe.
Whitehead's references to "ideals" in connection with importance can be interpreted in the light of the above statement. The ultimate metaphysical "ideal" is God's intent to achieve maximum and harmonious realization for every possibility.
And, "The sense of historical importance is the intuition of the universe as everlasting process, unfolding in its deistic unity of ideals 65 ." And for reference to importance through relation to the ultimate possibilities themselves, beyond God, I cite,
In the last quotation we see how the past and the future, which help give importance to the present, like this present itself acquire their intrinsic value through their metaphysical function of creating definite feelings out of limitless possibility, and thus fulfilling the purpose of God. "The purpose of God is the attainment of value in the temporal world. An active purpose is the adjustment of the present for the sake of adjustment of value in the future, immediately or remotely 67." In order to be important an occasion must in its own satisfaction further the fulfillment of all process, and must subordinate its own ends when necessary to the common creative purpose of all process. But self-sacrifice is not the dominant theme in the fulfillment of this metaphysical purpose. To a large measure the individual's ends and the universe's ends coincide.
Though the individual creative process serves the purpose of the universe, it is not subordinate to that purpose because, first, the universe is completely dependent upon individual creative processes for fulfilling its purpose, and, secondly, the purpose is excessively vague and amorphous till individual creative processes give it a concrete form and definite direction.
In the last part of the last sub-section, I attempted to analyze the notion of "creative success" which occurs in the definition of the central meaning of "importance‚" which seems to me best to fit the use of the term in Whitehead's philosophy. There is still another term in that definition which needs analysis, for I spoke of importance as a "measure of creative success". I now turn, therefore, to the notion of a "measure" or "measures" of creative success. What are the criteria which indicate the importance of an actuality? I shall not as yet discuss the actualities which are important 69, nor the more concrete awareness of importance - how we can appreciate it and make judgments of comparative value 70 - but only the more abstract problem of what characteristics of an actuality, whether we can be aware of them or not, indicate its creative success and thus determine its importance.
It is obvious that creative success is not the sort of thing that lends itself easily to the processes of measurement. Indeed, any standards applied to it must be highly tentative, for creative process is most successful when it generates radically new characteristics for itself. The characteristics of relatively successful actualities in one context, in one society, even in on cosmic "epoch" may very well not be the characteristics of creative success in another context or period. We must remember Whitehead's counsel that we retain some "residual skepticism" as to whether we have any truly "metaphysical propositions" - general principles having the same truth value for all occasions, regardless of their cosmic epoch 71. Criteria of absolute value applicable to all occasions would seem to be "metaphysical propositions" in the above sense. But, on the other hand, Whitehead does describe the general metaphysical situation applicable to the process of every possible occasion; he does describe the metaphysical basis of general value for all possible actualities, So it would seem likely that be does establish a basis for general criteria of comparative value applicable to all actualities. Indeed, he seems to say that actual process, as he has described it, requires such standards.
What are the criteria? Described generally and abstractly, they seem to be two in number, but very closely related to each other: (a) "intensity", and (b) "contrast".
"Intensity" is a term which Whitehead uses very frequently, but, unfortunately, he never defines or analyzes it. Or, what is probably nearer to the truth, the discussion centering around the term "contrast" furnishes the only adequate analysis of "intensity". This would seem to be a paradox because "intensity" suggests subjective emotion and "contrast" suggests objective pattern and form. But we have already seen bow frequently these antithetical aspects of things are brought into close relation to each other by Whitehead. "Intensity" is certainly a word having to do with emotion and affective tone. It is most generally applied in ordinary discourse to pleasures and pains and likings and dislikings and enjoyments and disappointments. It must retain, at least partially, these associations in Whitehead's use of it, But "feeling" is also generally associated with these things, and I have repeatedly emphasized the radical alterations which Whitehead makes in the meaning of "feeling" in his technical use of this term.
The only definition of "intensity" which I can find in Whitehead's writing is "Intensity proper, which is comparative magnitude without reference to qualitative variety" 73. The context here indicates that reference to "qualitative variety" is reference to contrast, and the two of them together, intensity and contrast, constitute "strength", which is said to be the "perfection of subjective form". Since "subjective form" is the contribution of the feeling process to what is felt - the new actuality given to component feelings by the feeling process within an occasion 74, I take it that intensity is one of the measures of the creative achievement of actuality. Indeed, elsewhere Whitehead says just this: "Each occasion exhibits its measure of creative emphasis in propórtion to its measure of subjective intensity 75." I gather that Whitehead means that the more an occasion saves of the feelings of past occasions, the more it gives expression to the things it pulls together in its synthesizing activity, the greater will be the total magnitude of the enjoyment it has in its moment of satisfaction. It must be remembered, of course, that this enjoyment is not merely "subjective" and epiphenominal; it is a genuine aspect of all actuality. The more successful is the creative process, the more that it is held together and actualized by it, the more an occasion is to the universe and to other actualities, then the more it will be to itself - the greater will be the total magnitude of its own self-enjoyment.
Though this constitutes an extension of the usual application of "intensity" from subjectively construed emotions to metaphysical depth of actuality, still some of the limitations of the notion of intensity as a measuring devise carry over to this expanded meaning of it. The intensity of the things which an occasion feels - the previous actualities - will be compounded out of their own intensities, indicating their creative success, and their nearness and relevance to the peculiar eharacter of the prehending occasion. The latter will not be able to distinguish these two aspects from each other on the basis of total intensity alone. Similarly, in the case of its enjoyment of its own satisfactions this will be an intense experience. Abstractly speaking its intensity will be a measure of its depth of actuality and creative success, but the occasion enjoying this intensity will have no way of comparing it with other intensities to know whether it is more or less. We must therefore turn to a discussion of the other criterion of creative success, "contrast", to see what it is and whether it overcomes some of the deficiencies of intensity as a measure of creative success.
Contrast: certainly involves relation and order, but it is not abstract relation and order but the kind of relation and order achieved in the integrating, synthesizing process of an occasion. It will be recalled that Whitehead denies that a contrast is a 'relation'. He means that whereas "relations" are abstract and universal, the way that things are together in actuality is concrete and particular to that actuality 76. It is as together in one feeling - as jointly felt and feeling each other that things enter into a contrast. Furthermore, it must be remembered that contrasts are the outcome of processes that find the items they handle not only separate but frequently opposed to each other. A contrast therefore represents the solving of a problem, the resolution of conflicts, the achieving of "adjustment" 77. But this process cannot be understood in merely psychological or biological terms, for the separateness and diversity brought into the synthesis is the separateness and diversity of metaphysical potentialities facing real actualities; and the adjustment is not merely psychological or biological but is the building of an ordered actual world out of emptiness and chaos - infinite passive possibility and partial conflicting actualities. Contrasts, then, are not just abstract orders but concrete actualities.
We are frequently interested in abstracting parts of contrasts from their contexts, but we must remember that what an occasion achieves is a total contrast organizing every item in the universe. This total contrast is called a "perspective". It is an ordering in a feeling of every item in the universe actual and potential - and this ordering is one appropriate to feeling - an ordering of emphasis and suppression.
Thus, though things are together in a contrast, and a contrast is the feeling of their togetherness, they are also ordered in a contrast. In order to be together harmoniously, some must be emphasized and some suppressed. The contrast has a total "intensity" but the significance of this intensity can be understood only by seeing the pattern of the contrast - how it orders its members, how much and what it emphasizes and how much and what it suppresses.
It is in studying the internal structure of contrasts that what looks like pure "form" and "order" gains significance, as relevant to importance and absolute value. 0ne night think that the most intense contrasts would be those which included as many items as possible, all more or less on the same level. But this is not so. Giving positive emphasis to every item in the universe is not a course open to finite actualities, and insofar as they approach it, they approach nonentity, not heightened actuality. Because the multifarious diversities of the universe conflict with each other, unless they are ordered by emphasizing some and suppressing others, they cancel each other out. In order to gain a strong, definite character, an occasion must cancel out and suppress much and order the rest hierarchically, choosing an integrating principle that will resolve some of the differences and conflicts.
An occasion confronted with the myriad of past actualities each ultimately unique in character, would be snowed under by them and achieve nothing definite in its own process unless it could eliminate some of their individual aspects and react to them as organized into large groups. It thus seems as though it reacts to the patterns of the past rather than the individual actualities of the past.
It will be remembered that it is a great part of the work of the "supplemental phases" of actual occasions to carry on this reduction process through application of the "Category of transmutation" - which is the process of abstracting the common structure of eternal objects in a nexus or society of occasions. The more developed are the occasions, the more prominent become their supplemental phases 81.
This is the principal process needed for the formation of important contrasts.
I italicized "seems" in a previous paragraph because it is not mere pattern to which an occasion is reacting, It is "real potentiality", and I have already shown that real potentiality is always actual - is always made up of component feelings of past actualities 83. Behind the common pattern and transmitted with it are the common feelings of all these occasions. If it is a complex pattern to which the prehending occasion is reacting, a good part of the actuality of the previous occasions having this pattern is transmitted through it, and relatively little of their complete actuality is lost. The problem of preserving the feeling and value of the past is the problem of finding adequate patterns under which to prehend them. For only through ordering, them into patterns - either patterns which they themselves emphasized, or patterns not so prominent in them but which the prehending occasion emphasizes and which turn out to be more adequate for preserving the actuality of those and many other occasions outside their particular societies - can much of past actuality add its harmonized intensities to the present actuality.
The main reason that the contrasts achieved in the occasions of human experience can be so intense and contain positively and with considerable emphasis so such of the universe is that these occasions of our experience are not in direct contact with the vast reaches of the actual world but inherit their actuality through numberless occasions characterized by extremely highly developed pattern and organization. These intermediaries include not only the past occasions of our experience but all the occasions of our bodies. Our bodies, and particularly our sensory mechanisms, in Whitehead's view, do not out us off from the world but act as marshalling and organizing intermediaries which present the occasions of our conscious experience with already organized and thus intensified aspects of the world beyond us.
The more detailed dimensions of contrasts are difficult to explain. They can be most adequately understood not in a general and abstract discussion such as this but in more particular disciplines, especially in esthetics. The canons of art reveal much more concretely the complexities of adequate and important contrast. But, if we limit our discussion to esthetics we will not conceive these principles broadly enough to include the standards of all important contrasts. It must be admitted, however, that even in the most general and abstract description of these dimensions of contrast, according to Whitehead, esthetic considerations seem to be primary, and it is obvious that they have been inspired mostly by esthetic considerations 85. And Whitehead never really works them out; he just indicates them briefly, but the suggestions which he does give show a comprehensiveness and sublety that is rare in this field. The over-all principle might be described as the old formula of diversity and multiplicity in unity, but this would be a tremendous oversimplification 86. A contrast to be important must attain the proper balance in many dimensions, most of which seem to oppose one another. Here are a few of them with brief indications of how they should work together to produce intense, adequate, important contrasts.
Narrowness: is a sharpness of focus of the contrast as one type of order. This is its principle of unity. It will, of course only be adequate insofar as it is capable of internal complexity, insofar as - to use Whitehead's most abstract language 87 - it describes an abstract hierarchy of eternal objects that includes many other eternal objects in its levels and excludes relatively few. But narrowness is not sufficient for adequate contrast. Excess of narrowness to the exclusion of the other dimensions produces a thin, "vague" contrast. It doesn't carry enough of the rich multiplicity of the world 88.
Width: is the spread of the focus of the contrast, so that it raises into relative prominence a broad aspect of the world. A good contrast must be inclusive as well as exclusive. Genuine creative advance comes in achieving contrasts which excel both in narrowness and width. Excessive width brings a fuzziness of focus. Nothing stands out sharply. Essential unity is lost and unresolved conflicts among what is emphasized lower the total intensity.
Depth: it takes a good deal of penetration of Whitehead's notion of the inner process of an occasion to distinguish "depth" from "width". Depth, however, is more closely allied to narrowness than to width. It is the intensity, the force, the increased actuality which a pattern acquires through repetition. The unifying pattern does not dominate merely through its formal adequacy. It must achieve its victory again and again before it emerges sharply with a drive of actuality behind it to dominate the "shallower" tendencies of other actualities. Indeed, if a contrast exceeds in depth it will loss in width, because the mass of actuality associated with its dominant patterns will obscure the shallower diversities. Depth marks the more secure and complete actualization of a pattern, but it may also doom a society of occasions to destruction because possible alternatives are suppressed in this overwhelming conformity. This notion of depth, emphasizing concurrence of many actualities in one dominant pattern, is a significant peculiarity of Whitehead's notions on absolute values. It will be necessary to recur to it 89.
Vagueness: Excessive depth brings vagueness, loss of individual detail. But vagueness is also necessary to adequate contrasts because order needs a background and evidence of an unruly matter which it is always just barely dominating. This tension heightens the significance of order. Irrelevant detail must be eliminated, of course. There must be some distinctness of outline, cleanness of form.
Triviality: It seems, to say the least, odd to say that triviality can have a place in enhancing importance. Insofar as it gets out of hand, of course, It is the complete opposite of importance. It is lack of emphasis on any definite character. It results usually from excessive width without adequate narrowness. There is "lack of depth" and "too much incompatible differentiation‚" But there must be some triviality in order to set off what is deep and narrow. No finite occasion is completely successful in emphasizing everything. It is a better, more adequate occasion if it is somehow still faintly aware of what it has rejected and suppressed.
Indeed this pointing up of the need of a vague and trivial background to set off the sharply focused foreground shows the sensitivity of Whitehead's esthetic and metaphysical observation - and his superiority to the abstract and doctrinaire philosophy associated with older and somewhat similar philosophical schools, such as "objective idealism". Even achieved order can for him be better if it appears against the background of its failures, provided they bear just the right relation to each other.
Also the inclusion of such factors as "depth" shows that we are not dealing, when we discuss contrasts, with something merely abstract, formal, fixed, but with actuality and process and the outcome of ceaseless struggle. If contrast is considered under all of its dimensions, and it is seen how adequate contrast involves the use of all of them, then, I believe, contrast becomes the most adequate measure of creative success, that is, of importance.
In the preceding discussion of intensity I suggested that.while in an abstract way total intensity was a criterion of importance, nevertheless it would not serve any occasion very well for the purposes of distinguishing the degree of absolute value possessed by its components or by its own satisfaction 90. The question with which I now wish to deal is whether absolute values are effective within the process of an individual actuality and whether individual actualities can, to some extent at least, be aware of the absolute value, the importance, of the things they prehend and even, of themselves. I am here discussing effectiveness only as it relates to individual actualities and only insofar as it influences awareness. I shall discuss the wider issue of the general effectiveness of absolute values in process under the notions of "perfection" and "progress" in the next subsection. The issue here is primarily awareness of importance, particularly awareness of the comparative importance of things. If Whitehead's theory of absolute value is to have any practical applications, it must be capable of telling us not only what aspects of things would abstractly make them better, or worse, but also whether we, or any other actualities, are in a position to pass such judgments.
The extreme pluralism of Whitehead's metaphysics and his emphasis on flux and on the transient nature of each moment of self-awareness makes this issue a difficult problem in his philosophy. Each finite entity is primarily concerned with emphasizing the world from its own point of view. Because it is finite, its point of view is necessarily very partial and limited. It must exclude much more than it includes. It must suppress even important past actualities which are irrelevant or hostile to its own point of view. Further, the only satisfaction which it experiences wholly is its own. Even if the contrasts it achieves are relatively poor, even if the intensity it enjoys is relatively weak; how can it be aware of its own comparative value? The question remains just as acute even if it is really a rather successful occasion. How can it know its success?
There is no doubt that Whitehead believes that absolute values are effective in the process of an individual occasion, leading it to seek greater importance, and that he believes that it is part of the awareness of the real importance of things in their actual worlds and even of their own achievements. As far as the effectiveness of importance is concerned, he says,
And, for animal life, at least.
Since every actual occasion is something for itself, and this being something for itself involves at least dim awareness of its own processes, it would seem that if absolute values function in concrete processes, there should be some awareness of this functioning. And, indeed, Whitehead says that importance is a factor in even the most unanalyzed awareness.
And, assuming that the term "worth", which Whiehead doesn't use very frequently, refers, like importance, to absolute value,
We are aware of importance not merely in highly developed entities such as works of art and moral acts, but in every aspect of our experience. "Our intuitions of righteousness disclose an absoluteness. in the nature of things, and so does the taste of a lump of sugar 95." Awareness of importance permeates experience.
But how clear is this awareness of importance; how available is it for use as a criterion for judging the comparative values of things? At first Whitehead speaks of it as vague and "massive" and associates it with the part of our experience that is beyond the focus of clear consciousness.
In his last essays, however he seems to distinguish a special kind of awareness of absolute value which he calls "evaluation" and seems to distinguish much more sharply from our awareness of relative value than in Modes of Thought.
I interpret this quotation as saying that an occasion will find a basis for "evaluating" the importance of its world end itself in certain abstract factors of itself. I now turn to a discussion of what these factors are and how they work.
(a) The primordial nature of God: I explained in sub-section (1) of this section how the primordial nature of God produces the relevance of the "whole" to the creative process of each occasion and thus determines a creative success 99. Each occasion prehends, at least dimly, God in his primordial nature, and through God's primordial nature the whole realm of possibility (not merely the selected essences emphasized in its immediate past) is made available to each occasion 100; and its mode of presentation to each occasion is to put a claim upon it to realize as much of the infinity of potentialities as is possible for it. Highly developed occasions will, of course, be peculiarly sensitive to this claim of total possibility. It is man - the highly developed occasions of human experience - that is peculiarly sensitive to possibility. Indeed, Whitehead says that this heightened sensitivity is the peculiar characteristic of man that distinguishes him from the other animals 101. It accounts for the vagaries of man, his constant production of outlandish novelties; but it also accounts for man's sensitivity to as yet unrealized ideals and his awareness, dim as it frequently is, of the objective value of things, even of his own experience 102. By being aware of the claim of total possibility, high-grade occasions, at least, can to some extent evaluate the degree of realization of possibility in their worlds and in themselves.
(b) The consequent nature of God: or perhaps I should say "God's superjective nature", the term Whitehead uses to refer to the awareness in each occasion of God's consequent nature 103. This factor in each occasion presents it with a dim prehension of an unimaginably rich achieved contrast, a contrast "saving" and harmonizing the achievements of all past actuality. So, even though it must abstract from the past in order to complete its own finite process, each occasion retains some awareness of the full richness of the world and can compare even its own satisfaction with this fuller realization 104. Whitehead seems to suggest further, though it is not so clear as to how this can operate, that an occasion can be aware of the importance of its own contribution to God's consequent nature - of how significant its contribution will be to God's :satisfaction". Indeed, in his final papers, he seems to overemphasize this factor.
(c) Apart from the complex awareness each occasion has of God's function within it, its awareness of its relation to other occasions is such that it should furnish it some clues as to their and its own importance. First, as to past occasions, it feels not only their relevance to itself but their own feelings (and therefore value for themselves) to some extent. It can compare these feelings with each other. In fact, highly developed occasions have devices for focusing and enhancing the importance of the world they consider 106. And, as to its own achievement, an occasion can feel the release or suppression it gives to the actual world, and thus to its own being. When it suppresses, it must have a feeling within itself that does the suppressing, and this is a feeling of pain or suffering 107. As to its own importance for the future, the occasion feels that it has offered the future new possibilities, through the future's prehension more fully except for its (the present occasion's) suppression of some past achievements 108.
In general, the more highly developed an occasion is, the more it is capable of comparing the real importance of things in the world around it, and even of having some awareness of its own success and its own failure 109.
In this section I shall discuss two traditional notions frequently associated with absolute values and their realization in the world, These are (a) "perfection", and (b) "progress".
The frequent mention of the function of God in determining importance and the awareness of importance in the last few paragraphs may suggest that Whitehead, after all of his insistence on pluralism, on conflict, and on free, creative activity, is finally going to introduce some notion of "perfection" as the source of all value, or at least all absolute value, and perhaps also as the source of existence. Certainly along with the increased emphasis on absolute value in his later works there seems to go a shift of emphasis from the multiplicity and conflict of the universe to its oneness and mutual dependence, not, of course, that the latter aspects were entirely ruled out or even omitted in the earlier books 110. But even in Modes of Thought Whitehead seems to reject the association of importance with "the old concept of perfection", a notion which he says is "too limited and too ambiguous" 111.
Certainly the old notion of perfection has been used to mean different things. It has always meant something perfect, something as good as it can be, but there has been disagreement as to whether this "as it can be" means "absolutely" or under existing conditions, though generally the former interpretation is preferred. Secondly, there has been disagreement as to whether "perfection" could be used in a limited sense as the perfection of a certain kind of entity, a perfection of type -, or whether it must mean a general ideal for all things 112. Finally, there has been confusion over the kind of reality which perfection has - whether concrete existence is perfect, as Leibniz may have thought, or whether only the Christian God or the Platonic realm of forms constitutes perfection. Whitehead is right about the notion of perfection being ambiguous, but be himself uses the term in several contexts, and not always with the same meaning.
First he uses it to mean a certain conditioned, limited, actual state. In this sense he thinks that there is perfection, but that it has a comparatively low value. This is the notion of "perfection" which he calls "minor beauty". "Beauty" in general is said to be "the mutual adaptation of the several factors in an occasion of experience". As such, "it finds its exemplification in actual occasions". Whitehead says that "adaptation" implies an end, and he distinguishes "minor beauty" from "major beauty" on the basis of the end each seeks.
A few pages farther on he confirms my assertion that this is a kind of "perfection".
One peculiarity of this notion of perfection is that it is not a final goal. It is at most a temporary stopping place, and if tarried in too long, the consequences are positively bad. Attained perfection for Whitehead is something that it is better to go beyond. Indeed, there are "imperfect" states higher than any attained perfection.
And, "Perfection at a low level ranks below imperfection with a higher aim 116." "Perfection" here means mere harmonization of what has been given. It is an "adjustment", a peculiarly adequate adjustment, to be sure, but nothing more than adjustment.
Importance as creative success cannot be adequately expressed through the achievement of adjustment, however. First, the achievement is a local affair; while necessarily involving some relation to all reality, it emphasizes the problems peculiar to a particular society to a particular past dominated by a particular pattern. Creative activity, however, demands cosmic significance for itself. Though focused in individual occasions in particular societies, it is never merely a local matter 117. And "importance" involves reference, beyond the ends peculiar to the occasion or society, to the whole 118. Secondly, this kind of perfection seeks to ignore the fact that concrete existence is fluid process, not static form. What Whitehead says of societies of human beings applies also to "societies" in the metaphysical sense in which he uses the term.
Thirdly, it is essential to creative activity that it seek novelty and that it be free to overthrow the restrictions of the past 120.
The second peculiarity of Whitehead's notion of actual perfection is its plurality, There is not just one, but many "perfections".
Whitehead rejects summarily the notion of the actual perfection of the world,
Imperfection can be better than perfection, and perfections are plural and incompatible; but, still, this notion of relative and multiple perfection should not be dismissed too lightly. Whitehead disagrees with himself when he says, "The actual flux presents itself with the character of being merely given. It does not disclose any peculiar character of perfection 124." Since this statement directly precedes the dismissal of Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" quoted above, I presume that it means merely that there is no one, necessary scheme of perfection realized in the world. Furthermore, the immediately preceding context explains that, although we can see order in a stretch of history after it has happened, this order was not imposed on it by the past, but was internally determined as the process went along and could have been otherwise. A total and an externally imposed perfection are ruled out, but that does not mean that the well-established harmonies round in the world and achieved by the process of the world have no absolute value. If they had no such value, it would make no sense to say that imperfection may be better than perfection because it may lead to the establishment of even more adequate harmonies; for these harmonies in turn would be valueless. The real significance and absolute value (importance) of these actual but plural perfections may best be understood by seeing what Whitehead has to say about the metaphysical position of the "order" of the actual world, for what he later calls perfections are only very well-established actual orders.
The quotation, and particularly its last sentence, conveys the impression that the order which each entity tries to perfect is not merely something of value only to itself. It has an importance for the universe, Where Whitehead differs from Plato is not in the significance of these "forms" but in their source. For Whitehead they are not perfect antecedent to actuality and only shared in or copied by actuality; they are created and perfected by actuality and then passed on as the contribution of these actualities to all other actualities and to God. The sense in which an actual perfection, even though it must be, always is, and should be superseded, still constitutes a real creative contribution, with high absolute value, is indicated, I believe, by the following passage, which speaks of the permanent and abiding value of ethical codes and the ideals of particular cultures, though they seem to be completely relative and passing.
Finite actual perfection adds to the creative achievement of the world, even when, like the individual occasions which create it and which are the locus of all reality and of all value, relative and absolute; it "perishes",
But this finite actual "perfection", is not really what has most often been meant by the notion of perfection, as Whitehead himself realizes when he asserts his rejection of a general, over-all perfection. The question of the former's absolute value is really more closely related to the question of the value of survival and endurance of pattern in general in a world of flux, an issue which I must take up again in the next sub-section when I discuss the question as to what things have absolute value and to what extent 127. The central issue of this section must be the place, if any, of a single, over-all perfection in Whitehead's notion of absolute value. We have seen that he does not allow for an actualized over-all perfection; and, it must also be obvious by now that, in spite of his emphasis on God in determining absolute values and the awareness of absolute values, there is no place for a transcendent notion of perfection either. This conclusion follows, first because of the "ontological principle" which says that there is nothing which has any sort of reality which is not the outcome of concrete creative process 128, and concrete creative process produces no single notion of perfection. Secondly, although there is a unity of aim in the primordial natnre of God - the maximum possible realization of each of the infinity of eternal objects - this unity of aim cannot be called an ideal of perfection because it has no definite order or form in itself, and is only particularized into multiple forms by finite creative processes. Thirdly, the consequent nature of God, though it saves all the finite perfections that are achieved in process, and so is superior in value to any of them, is never completed and relies on finite processes to add new perfections to it, so it is not an ideal of perfection.
Therefore, we must conclude that, although Whitehead has a doctrine of absolute value, and although finite entities achieve absolute values and finite perfections; nevertheless, this doctrine of absolute values and these achievements do not appeal to any ideal of perfeetion as a fixed point for determining the comparative absolute values of things.
If there is no final perfection operative in Whitehead's philosophy, can he consistently believe in progress? Those who hold that progress is the movement of actuality towards the realization of an ideal of perfection would answer, no. They would say that without a definite goal there could be no consistent movement of actuality towards perfection. But are all the assumptions manifested in this position necessary to the idea of progress? Suppose there were at least one course of events in which it could be ascertained that the later events exceeded the earlier events in absolute value, that is, in importance. Would we not have, then, at least one instance of progress, and could we not have this instance without the notion of absolute perfection? Advocates of the notion of progress that involves perfection might counter that this isolated sequence of events showed improvement only accidentally, that its improvement would be canceled out if compared with other series of events and that progress must not be merely accidental, but must be intentional. In Creative Evolution, however, Bergson claims that there is a third alternative between a "teleological" process determined by a pre-formed end and a "mechanistic" process determined by blind causal push or by chance 129.
This alternative is the notion of an internally developing and controlled process which shapes its ends and ideals as it goes along. Not only is there development in the sense of movement from unrealized goal to realized goal, but the goal itself develops. Whitehead seems to espouse a notion at least roughly similar to Bergson's 130. Actual occasions and societies of actual occasions develop their own ideals and pursue them by their own "decisions".
It seems possible that sequences of "creative" processes, not completely determined either by the actual past or the ideal future might be even more "progressive" than the traditional notion of progress. They would permit progress in ends and ideals as well as in the realization of ends already formed. But this is not certain; there are additional requirements. First, it is necessary for progress that there be some continuity between the initial end and the end sought further on in the process. The end must not only change but also develop. Now Whitehead’s occasions may develop an end as they form themselves into sequences. Indeed, if they don't develop a common end, they do not form a sequence. They may, on the other hand, lose rather than develop or supplement the patterns of the past. In that case they would show destruction or decay rather than progress. Secondly, in order for us to be able to say that progress has taken place, the later occasions in the series must not only pursue more developed ends but must actualize them. They must be better in terms of absolute value (more important than the earlier occasions of the series, Their self-awareness must be more intense and their contrasts must be more adequate 131.
The questions I want to investigate here are, "In accordance with this 'creative" notion of progress, is there progress in the world?" "How much progress is there, according to Whitehead, and where does it occur?" "Is progress necessary or only possible?" And, "Can progress be encouraged or made more likely?"
Whitehead's position on the existence and extent of progress is complex; he is neither an unrealistic optimist nor a cynical pessimist. But there certainly is a frequent and strong note of pessimism in his utterances. He tells us that nature as a whole is neutral to ideals, therefore there cannot be any total over-all progress, only progress in special highly-organized regions.
Overthrow is almost as prominent a feature of process as furtherance of the patterns of the past. The very activity which accounts for there being any realization - the general activity of every actual entity, which Whitehead calls "creativity" is also the "principle of overthrow" 133. Indeed, so much emphasis does Whitehead frequently give to overthrow that it seems as though all progress must be not only limited in extent but also doomed to eventual termination, and the destruction of what it has achieved.
For the very laws of nature necessary to all processes in our epoch will pass, according to Whitehead, Whitehead envisions a time when the whole universe as we know it, the universe of quanta, electrons, space-time, the solar system, and all the nebulae will cease to be a conspicuous feature of actual process, and will be preserved only as an indistinct and indistinguishable feature of the faint background of events, fainter than the faintest memory, fainter than a forgotten childhood tune 134. This is hardly "onward and upward forever". Something will be going on in those remote epochs, but it will hardly concern us or our ideals 135.
Not only is progress limited in extent and duration, but at best it pursues a very halting and indirect course. Things don't get better every day; some days they got decidedly worse. He says, The term 'creative advance' is not to be construed in the sense of a uniquely serial advance 136". And, "The progress of civilization is not wholly a uniform drift toward better things. It may perhaps wear this aspect if we map it on a scale that is large enough 137."
And there is a tendency for Whitehead to conceive of progress as having a sort of "dialectical character", in the Hegelian sense, to proceed by negation and the clash of opposites. For example he says of the history of modern science as he has described it in Science in the Modern Wor1d.
The tale is an epic of an episode in the manifestation of reason. It tells how a particular direction of reason emerges in a race by the long preparation of antecedent epochs, how after its birth its subject-matter gradually unfolds itself, how it attains its triumphs, how its influence moulds the very springs of action of mankind, and finally how at its moment of supreme success its limitations disclose themselves and call for a renewed exercise of the creative imagination 138.
There is progress, then according to Whitehead, but it is severely limited in its scope and has a rather sinuous and unobtrusive character 139,
It is odd that although Whitehead seems to be pessimistic about the future of the natural world, he is optimistic about progress on the level of human experience, in art, in religion, and science 140. Human experience is the realm in which conspicuous progress can take place, because here, almost alone, as far as we know from our limited acquaintance with finite actuality, are the contrasts broad enough and the societies of occasions complex enough 141 to profit from the past - experience instead of suppressing. Physical occasions are always starting over - no complex pattern emerges clearly enough in them to be passed on with increasing emphasis and domination through successive occasions.
Progress, at least on the level of human experience, can take place. The metaphysical structure permits it. Indeed, through the push given to all possibilities - the push towards actualization by the primordial nature of God, and through the survival of partial aspects of occasions beyond themselves to form the "conformal phases" of subsequent occasions; there would seem to be factors in the universe working for progress. But there are also factors working against it: such as the ceaseless activity of the universe itself, which always has to synthesize the world afresh in each moment of existence; for, although the past is saved in each new present, the very bulk of it makes the task harder for each new occasion. True, in a well-organized society each now occasion has the past ordered for it by its immediate predecessors so as to suppress much irrelevancy; but even these intimately associated members of the society are, each of them, a little different from all the others, The variations accumulate, and, unless the pattern is expanded to include them, eventually cause it to sink into the background and no longer dominate new occasions - the society decays instead of progressing 142.
So, although progress is possible, it certainly is not necessary. The most that can be said is that there is a sort of attraction towards it. Ideals work by "persuasion", not by force. Force is always against it [the ideal]. Its victory is the victory of persuasion over force. Force is the sheer fact of what the antecedent volume of the world in fact contains. The idea is a prophesy which procures its own fulfillment 143.
The Platonic flavor of the language here is deliberate on Whitehead's part. But the individual occasion has a much more positive role to play in the realization of ideal possibilities than Plato gave it. It not only responds to potentiality but shapes it into definite forms. Indeed, final responsibility for whatever happens in reality rests squarely on the individual in Whitehead's philosophy 144. No one occasion can perhaps change much: they must cooperate in large groups. But all change - all progress and all decay - is initiated by individual occasions and carried out through a sequence of occasions, each one of which decides freely to follow the trend of its group or to rake new departures. There is nowhere else to place ultimate responsibility for whatever happens but on individual actualities. Even God is partially in their power. This follows from the "ontological principle", interpreted axiologically instead of merely metaphysically 145.
I pointed out that metaphysically Whitehead is a sort of "existentialist" because actual existence determines its own effective "essences" 146. There is also an existentialist emphasis in his notion of value, because, although the nature of things sets the general conditions of absolute value, only individual agents are responsible for choosing the better rather than the worse, or vise versa and for determining its concrete character. It is not the exaggerated existentialiam of Sartre, however, for the individual's decision is to a great extent socially conditioned for Whitehead, but, still, even when the individual conforms most completely, he is freely appropriating the past and making it his own 147.
Man, like all other actual entities, is responsible, at least partially, for his own destiny. His to choose, not perhaps to become an elephant or a god, but whether to deal adequately with the problems which beset him on all sides, or to let his society sink back into slow decay, Like Dewey, Whitehead puts much emphasis on social cooperation to attempt to work out new solutions to each problem as it arises, instead of merely falling back on the established ways of doing things, Whitehead thinks that in the case of man, at least, it is possible partially to control and encourage progress, It is man's reason which gives him this power. Indeed, in the Function of Reason, as Emmet romarks 148, Whitehead seems to conceive of reason as a "counter-entropic" agent, which enables man to achieve broader contrasts without the over-all loss of intensity which usually results 149. Whitehead says that there is an "art" of progress.
Reason, when it doesn't become too closely tied to any one set of techniques, can make the delicate adjustments necessary to keep progress going 151.
Finally, there is in one actual entity, at least, in which there is a kind of uninterrupted progress. That is God, His consequent nature "saves" all actual achievements and harmonizes them into an increasingly more adequate realization of his primordial aim, to actualize all of the infinite realm of possibilities harmoniously. Probably, this should not be called "progress", since progress is a kind of change and, according to Whitehead, there is no change within an individual actual entity 152. This internal process in God, however, may support progress in societies of occasions able to prehend it with some degree of emphasis.
Now I wish to discuss the problem of what aspects of the actual world have absolute value (or are important), and. what, if any, hierarchical relations of value hold among these aspects. I will consider (a) the general issue around which the value assignment revolves, and (b) the question of a definite hierarchy of values.
In the traditional language of metaphysics, the most general aspects of the world which vie for absolute value are "permanence" and "change''. These terms need some explanation and qualification, however, however, to make them applicable to the world as described by Whitehead. In the first place, concrete existence is essentially active - indeed, it is in a state of flux. The real individual actualities are processes which in one sense are not even "in time" but deposit moments of time by their completions. So "permanence" cannot be among the most ultimate metaphysical predicates applicable directly to concrete reality. Concrete reality is always "perishing" and being reborn. Permanence can only characterize some abstract aspect of concrete reality which "endures" through the flux, which "survives" the perishing of individual occasions, which is "reiterated" in a series of occasions. Nor can we confuse the "permanent" with the "eternal", for the former is and the latter is not "in time", So we are not, here referring to the realm of eternal objects in itself, in considering the value of permanence. It is primarily the value of what Whitehead calls "real potentiality" that we are discussing 153. "Change" also involves problems. There is no "change" within an actual occasion, for change is merely a shift of emphasis in a series of actual occasions 154. But all values are generated and appreciated within individual actual entities. So we must be asking about the value of that factor within an occasion which will account for "change" when the occasion is completed and compared with other completed occasions. This factor is novelty of emphasis within an occasion - the prominent functioning within an occasion of some pattern not present in it through its "conformation" to the past occasions of its society. It might be better, then, to ask about the comparative value of "endurance" or "survival" on the one hand, and "novelty" on the other.
Endurance - the survival and reiteration of a pattern has absolute value. "Importance depends on endurance. Endurance is the retention through time of an achievement of value. What endures is identity of pattern, self-inherited. 155" And, "The endurance of things has its significance in the self-retention of that which imposes itself as a definite attainment for its own sake 156." But, of course, as we have seen, it is not merely because it is "pattern" that endurance is valuable.
I have already discussed the function of the total past in determining the importance of an actuality 158 but now the issue is sharper - it is the degree of importance to be given to preserving certain aspects of the past, the dominant pattern of a present occasion's society. Why is this act, the absolute value of which Whitehead himself questions and certainly qualifies, nevertheless, of considerable importance? It is first, because the achievement of any definite form is a triumph at one point at least of the "eros of the universe" - the wish towards actuality given to all possibility by the primordial nature of God. It is something, something limited, something definite, instead of the yawning infinity of bare possibility. Indeed, I think that this is the "secret" of the association of "mathematics and the Good", which Whitehead thought that Plato failed to communicate and that he (Whitehead) also might not be able to communicate that both mathematics and "ideals of the Good" are finally be interpreted as modes of "limitation" which through an active ordering by emphasis and suppression achieve "value" 159. Through limitation a double metaphysical goal is achieved: infinite, empty, yearning possibility gains actual expression, as I said above, and chaotic shapeless feeling - what Whitehead calls "creativity" - gains an object, and so a focus through which to intensify itself. Therefore, secondly, in preserving achieved pattern, the feeling intensity which embodies it is preserved, Thus, preserving the achieved patterns of the past is not a little thing, because thus the past creative successes of the universe are preserved 160.
Thirdly, though "conformation" to the dominant patterns of the immediate past may be the easiest path open to an occasion, it still is not easy‚ not automatic, not passive, not necessary, As a grasp on the totality of things each occasion "perishes" with the moment of its completion, For then it becomes but "one among many". A subsequent occasion which reiterates its dominant order is taking this feeling, which is now but one among many and making it dominate and integrate the universe once again. In other words, every reiteration of a pattern of the past by a new occasion is a new creative act.
The conformal inheritance of "order" then is a realization of absolute value, Further, it is .a condition for increase in absolute value, because only through structure building upon structure, society upon society, can more adequate contrasts be aohieved 161. But this is the point at which achieved order in general begins to have an ambiguous absolute value. "Another contrast is equally essential for the understanding of ideals - the contrast between order as the condition for excellence, and order as stifling the freshness of living 162." Whitehead says,
And, "You may preserve the same life in a flux of form, or preserve the form amid an ebb of life. But you cannot permanently enclose the same life in the same mould 164." There is then something which has greater importance than survival of pattern, and it is something with which survival of pattern may conflict. "Survival is not a central value of life 165." This last statement is exaggerated. Certainly survival is almost overwhelmingly important for many forms of life. Whitehead is thinking primarily of human life, and even here survival cannot be denied importance but merely demands supplementation and qualification. ".,.the life-aim at survival is modified into the human aim of survival for diversified worth-while experience 166." ".,. the aim [of life) is always beyond the attained fact 167.
What then must be conceived of as having a higher absolute value than "permanence" or "survival"? Is it novelty, novelty as such? If Whitehead were an unqualified advocate of change, of flux, of the ceaseless breaking-through of all barriers and restraints, as some of his critics make him out to be 168, the answer would be, "yes". But it isn't "yes". In the first place, novelty always threatens what has been attained. Novelty, even "good" novelty, disrupts society 169. In the second place, novelty can be merely sporadic and evanescent, The mere glimpse of a now ideal does not make it overwhelmingly important. New ideals may be glimpsed and lost. New ideals may disrupt previous achievement and yet not be realized themselves, so that their net effect is to make things worse rather than better. Whitehead questions, for example, whether Athenian society could have abandoned slavery in pursuit of the ideal of freedom without destroying Athenian culture altogether, the good aspects of it along with the bad 170. In order for the novel notion to gain high importance, it must itself become entrenched and in its turn dominate a "society",
o neither "permanence" nor "change" has the highest value. If it is necessary to choose between them, the survival of what has been achieved is probably preferable to any novelty chosen at random, on the biological principle that most variations are destructive 172. But either alone, if pursued without regard to the other, leads to lowering of actuality and 'loss of importance. The two are interdependent, and the most important aspects of the world take account of both of them.
What is required is not order in general or novelty in general, but a special combination of them both.
This requirement for high absolute value in the world seems paradoxical, as do so many, other aspects of Whitehead's philosophy; but, like so many of these other aspects, the seeming contradiction holds only so long as the component terms are thought of in their common, non-Whiteheadian senses, In ordinary thought permanence and order are fixed for all time, or are notions out of time, and change and, particularly, what is genuinely new, have no place in the fixed order, But for Whitehead an effective order, an aspect of "real potentiality", is the outcome of creative process, is itself a continuing act, a feeling, and operates in subsequent processes as an active mode of integration 175. Order is itself a dynamic thing, and so it is not so strange that it should be open to growth, or to decay if it fails to grow. And the achievement of order affects future processes in that it determines the perspective on all possible novelties presented to new occasions prehending the order. The achieved order which endures doesn’t determine the novelty which new occasions can realize, but it makes certain reaches of possibility more readily available and tends to suppress other reaches.
The aspects of the world which have highest absolute value, then, are what Miss Emmet refers to as "progressive orders", which are "always a balance on the verge at chaos" 176. It is order always in the process of being realized arid transcended, order which is never merely "stabilized". Now, even though all actual order, according to Whitehead, is transient, not all actual order shows this peculiar nature equally, so not all endurances have the same value. The order characteristic of the physical world is capable of vast endurance and very little incorporation of novelty, So its importance is relatively low. But there is also "biological", "living" order. It is here that we find the progressive orders both enduring and changing so as to include novelties. "The problem of evolution is the development of enduring harmonies, of enduring shapes of value, which merge into higher attainments of things beyond themselves 177." Whitehead says that there are two ways of attaining "stability"; that is, of attaining structures which survive through changes in the environment. One way is that characteristic of "inorganic societies". It consists of the elimination of "diversities of detail" - the structure is made stable by insulating itself against all novelty, against all variations in the environment. The physical order reacts only to mass characteristics of things, to their abstract, common characteristics. The order peculiar to living things takes an opposing line of development; it survives through "origination of novelty of conceptual reaction". It reacts increasingly to the individual details of things and preserves itself, not by withdrawal, but by actively originating end integrating into its own pattern novelties which will be adequate to the details of the environment and able to include them within the structure rather than leaving them external and alien 178. That life - which was mentioned a few pages back as incompatible with more static survival - turns out to be a name for this special kind of surviving pattern - the self -developing, novelty-including pattern.", the primary meaning of 'life' is the origination of conceptual novelty, novelty of appetition 179."
Man, of course, is the highest development known of the kind of enduring order which Whitehead calls "life". And here, he seems to. think, the order takes on a special quality, which can be called, with poetic license, perhaps, "mind" or even "soul", This is a permanence which permeates all the occasions which form the life of an individual human being. "The pattern ,,, has retreated into the recesses of the individualized activity. It has became a uniform way of dealing with circumstances; and this way is only strengthened by having a proper variety of circumstances to deal with 180." The meaning of this special kind of pattern eharacteristic of man will have to be studied further when I consider the special problems of ethics in the next chapter 181. What is important here is that, although Whitehead agrees with our well-established cultural conclusions or experiences of values that life is more valuable absolutely than inorganic nature, and that men are the most valuable finite actualities of all; he arrives at these conclusions on the basis of his metaphysical theory of absolute value, and he applies the same principles to all the entitles he judges - not using a special set for man, for example. So absolute value, or "importance", understood as .a measure of creative success, may, in spite of its remote-sounding metaphysical formulation, provide after all an adequate principle of comparative value for judging the real, intrinsic, absolute values of the world.
A prominent feature of many theories of value is a hierarchial list of "goods" or "values", arranged in the order of their excellence from top to bottom or from bottom to top, These are not "value" or "absolute value" as such, but the things which have value or are valuable. We have, seen that Whitehead's notion of absolute value provides criteria for distinguishing the comparative value of things - for example, the superior value of living things over inorganic things, and of human life over other living things. And this comparison was made on the basis of absolute value - importance -, not merely on the basis of what is valuable to ourselves. The further question then arises, "Does Whitehead expound on or even suggest a complete or partial list of the - greatest goods - the entitles in experience and in the world which are most important -, and does he arrange them in the order of their importance?"
The one extended study of Whitehead 'a views on value which I have seen, that of R, M. Millard, already mentioned on several occasions, attempts to extract such lists from Whitehead 's works. In tact, he produces two of them. The first, which he calls "categories of Importance" he claims to find principally in Science and the Modern World and Religion in the Making. Arranged in order of increasing "importance", this list is
Mr. Millard remarks that he sees no unifying principle among these things. I hope that by now I have demonstrated that the unifying principle, among these notions in Whitehead's philosophy, most of which I have mentioned, is creative activity. and that any or all of them have absolute value insofar as they mark creative success. I must admit, however, that I do not find them functioning anywhere in Whitehead's philosophy as a list, either expressly stated or merely assumed, of things which are important, I suspect that one reason Mr. Millard found no unifying principle or principle of division among them is that they are not all the same sort of thing - that is, that they are not all an the same level of abstraction, I at least, found it necessary to discuss them on different levels of abstraction in my analysis of Whitehesd's notion of absolute value. "Endurance" I found a characteristic of things that are important, but I found "contrast" and "intensity" more abstract notions - both of them the most general criteria of importance, therefore not "things" which are important. "Depth" I found to be only one of the essential dimensions of contrast. In short, this list is a hodge-podge of terms having very complex relations to each other in Whitehead's philosophy and doesn't seem to me to make very such sense as a list of things possessing high intrinsic value, and certainly, I see very little justification for the order as stated, Millard's second list, which he says that he has extracted mostly from Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought is a more elaborate scheme, which he says is largely a development in Whitehead's own thought of the earlier ideas. He calls it a list of "value realizations", Again it is arranged hierarchically and it is divided into sub-groups on a hierarchical basis.
There is doubtless some validity to this list, particularly in the relatively low position which it gives to "survival" and in its ranking of "moral goodness" and "truth" below "major beauty" 176. But still, it is open to the same general criticism as the first – that it has listed things on different levels of abstraction, and by listing them all as things which are important, obscur* the fact that some of them, like "survival" and "novelty" must both apply to a thing for it to have any real positive importance, that others, like "freedom" and "minor beauty" (perfection) are partial analyses of the conditions of importance; and that still others, like "major beauty" and "peace" are attempts to grasp the whole notion of what constitutes the realization of importance in the world rather than designations for limited kinds of things that are important.
Neither of Millard's lists, of course, occurs in Whitehead's writing, though there is some explicit mention of some of the notions in the latter part of the second hst in Adventurees of Ideas, and in the same order. I will discuss these shortly, but first I must criticize the whole notion of framing such a list from the point at view of the spirit of Whitehead's philosophy. I do not object to the fact that the author had to go beyond Whitehead's actual statements in order to construct these lists. Whitehead's remarks on values are extremely disordered and any attempt to bring order to them should be encouraged. As I explained in the Introduction to this paper 184, I too have found it necessary to go beyond Whitehead's actual statements, to present a "constructive interpretation" of his views on values, making inferences from what he has said, and arranging his statements in an order which does not appear in his works. But such an enterprise must be governed by a general awareness of the governing tendencies in a philosophy if it is to remain true to the spirit if not the letter of the author he is seeking to interpret. Elaborate hierarchies of goods, I submit, are not in the spirit of Whitehead's philosophy, First, according to my interpretation, that philosophy centers around a notion of continuous self-transcending, creative activity - a metaphysical notion antithetical to all established schemes. Secondly, the criterion of absolute value as 1 see it, is creative success; and it seems to me that according to this criterion the most important things will be those which fit into no antecedent scheme of categories, even categories of importance. It will be radically new, and only after it has been realized can its relations to other important achievements be ascertained. Millard, of course, does not find this theory of value in Whitehead 185. But still, even on the basis of his view of the nature of value in Whitehead's philosophy as tied to psychological enjoyment there would seem to be a consideration opposed to the erection of hierarchies of values, whether, interpreted as an operation of creative activity or as an individual, subjective enjoyment, there must be agreement that Whitehead associates all value realization, relative or absolute, with concrete, individual processes. There is no general "beauty" realized or enjoyed, according to Whitehead, but only this individual beautiful experience or thing. On Whitehead’s principles of absolute value, the importance of the thing in relation to the importance of other realizations or enjoyments can, I believe, be determined, but not the importance of all beauty, say, in relation to that of all truth.
Still, as I indicated above 186 Millard derives part of his list from what at first glance looks like a classification of "goods" in Whitehead's philosophy that is Part IV of Adventures of Ideas, titled "Civilization". It is my contentions however, that "civilization" is a term which Whitehead uses to indicate all realization of importance in organized human life; civilization is the ideal of furthering and achieving maximum importance in life. Several of the notions which Millard lists as coordinate with "civilization" as goods, and one, "art", which Millard omits, are said by Whitehead to constitute an analysis of the idea of civilization, and so, would seem to be abstractions from "civilizatton". Whitehead says, "I put forward as a general definition of civilization that a civilized society is exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Adventure, Art, Peace 187." If this is true, they all contribute to importance, and any one important experience may be important because it exhibits several or all of them. I have referred freely to Whitehead's discussions under each of these notions all through my attempt in this section to analyze and understand the whole notion of importance. To take them up individually and define them would be to repeat what I have already discussed in great detail. Besides, several of these notions are related to particular value fields in which importance of special sorts is realized - esthetics, ethics, religious experience, and so on and I propose to discuss these in the next chapter 188.
Brief discussion of a few of these notions, however, may, prove my point that they are all essential to the understanding of the whole notion of importanoe and may also re-emphasize a few of the leading aspects of that notion. I chose Adventure‚ "Beauty" (or "major beauty"), and Peace for this purpose.
"Adventure", is, according to Whitehead, "the search for new perfections" 189. Adventure is necessary to preserve any civilization "with the intensity of its first ardour" 190. Thus "adventure" is just the manifestation on the plane of human communal life, of that quest for novelty which has already been emphasized as essential to the realization of importance,
"Major beauty" consists of the notion of "attained perfection" already discussed and labeled as "minor beauty" 191 with the addition of adventure. It is the notion not merely of achieved harmony in which existing conflicts have been resolved, but of increasingly more adequate achieved harmony achieved after reaching out to include and conquer alien and dissonant factors - harmony achieved on the basis of significant novelty, of new and more adequate principles of integration 193.
"Peace" will have to be mentioned again in the discussion of religious experience 194, but it also attempts to "got at" an essential, perhaps the most essential, aspect of all importance. Whitehead says that "peace" is the final end of civilization, "a harmony of harmonies", but, he adds the warning, it is not static 195. Stringing together a few fragments from Whitehead!s extended and rather rambling discussion of this notion may help to tndicate its nature.
Peace is then the awareness that the values ohieved by finite creative processes, even though they fade, have a permanent significance for the whole universe. The consequent nature of God is involved in this notion, but "peace" transcends it, It is the feeling that our successful creative acts are triumphs not just for us, but for the whole universe - God and every other finite occasion that ever was or ever will be.
There are, then, realizations in the world which are absolutely, not just relatively, good, which have hgh absolute value; but there is no supreme value, no complete realization of goodness. What Whitehead says of the notion of "perfect standards of conduct" applies to all realizations of goodness, for, "That is the notion of the one type of perfection at which the Universe aims." All realization of the Good is finite, and necessarily excludes certain other types 197." As we have seen, though Whitehead believes in non-relative values, his doctrine does not involve a notion of absolute perfection, either as actual or as a definite ideal form 198.
Nor is there in Whitehead's philosophy the notion of a simple, pure value essence, "Goodness", of "value", the presence of which in actual things makes them good,
We have seen that the ground for their comparability is their relative success as a creative agent of each concrete act of feeling or "society" of feelings. Values are generated in creative processes, and degree of absolute value is determined by the success of creative processes; but do these statements constitute definitions of "value" or "goodness"? "Definition" means many things, What have been pointed out are the conditions of value in general and comparative value. These conditions are found to be describable only in metaphysical terms - in terms of creative processes. In one sense these statements about the conditions at value realization are definitions, But in another they are not. They do not reveal the nature of value in itself. Mr. G.E. Moore says that "value" cannot be defined because it can't be analyzed. He concludes that value is a simple ultimate essence 200. But is there not another possible explanation of the non-definability of value? "The Good" was also indefinable for Plato.
In his theory of value, as well as in other aspects of his philosophy, Whitehead draws inspiration from Plato. But it is only inspiration that he draws, As already seen in the case of eternal objects 202, it is a very unorthodox kind of "Platonism" that Whitehead espresses. Indeed, if Whitehead has significant contributions to make to metaphysics and theory of value, it is in his new suggestions - perhaps new interpretations of Plato - not in merely reviving the alder Platonic doctrine.
In the case of the nature of value, the above quotation needs considerable interpretation, It is true that what Whitehead does is to express the "conditions" of the "evocation" of the Good, as Plato tried to do in the Philebus. It is true that he also finds value in "eomposite things", and also means by this the things in the actual world, the things that are "becoming", which are compounded out of "form" and "matter" - eternal objects and. creativity. But certainly the metaphysical position of this composite entity, and its relation to "form" at least, are very different from what Plato is usually thought to have held. Furthermore, achieved value in concrete things is the realization of "harmony" in the composition, but (a) it is not a preordained harmony but one created in the process, and (b) it is a harmony which must continue to develop, or else decay, and there is no limit to its development.
But, still, there are similarities between Plato and Whitehead on the nature of the ultimate value notions, Both try to give the "conditions" of the realization of values and for both the ultimate notion, "The Good," transcends all characterizations. Plato tolls us in The Republic that "The Good" is the ultimate creative principle in reality, accounting for the realm of forms, and, through forms, the actual things of the world 203. Again there is an analogy in Whitehead's doctrine, Whitehead finds the conditions of the realization of value in general, ontological creative activity, a notion which can never be completely analyzed. There is the suggestion that to create, to exercise the creative function is itself goodness. It is certainly the source of all concrete value.
As I have indicated before 204 we reach in these ultimate questions of the relation of existence, value, and creative activity a realm that transcends clear analysis and definite statement. Again, like Plato, as I quoted Whitehead as saying in the Introduction to this paper 205, Whitehead believes that philosophy is "mystical", in that it "seeks direct insight into depths as yet unspoken", but it is constantly trying to express these insights in "novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated.
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26 See above, Pt. I, ch. 4, Sect. fl, pp. XXX ; and below, pp. XXX of this section.
27 Miss Emmet in her article on "Importance" questions the validity of giving "importance" a metaphysical meaning. She says that there may be some connection between importance and reality, but that they are not identical, because what is imaginary and untrue can be important but is not real (op. cit., p. 237). I would reply, however, that for Whitehead the imaginary is an aspect of reality, particularly an aspect of highly developed realities, and, though some confusion in the meanings which he gives to "truth" complicates the issue, there certainly are some senses in which the "untrue" has a similar reality to the "imaginary‚". When she adds at this point, "The rest is what it is," it seems to me that I see the old passive notion of existence invoked again, the notion which accounts for the dissociation of value reality, the notion which Whitehead rejects. That Miss Emmet should appeal to it shows how deeply entrenched this notion is, even in the thinking of one of Whitehead's most understanding interpreters.
Later in the same article, she takes the position that things may be important because they are real, but not real because they are important. She says. "Our value judgments can give an insight into the characteristics of certain real things; they cannot provide a criterion of reality. We may be important, but we are not as important as all that. (Ibid, p. 244) As far as my argument at this point is concerned, I would not quarrel with this statement, because I am arguing here merely that reality determines importance, and certainly not that our awareness of importance determines reality.
28 See above, pp. XXX of this paper.
29 See above, pp.. XXX of this paper.
30 SMW., p. 278.
31 MT., pp. 12-13..
32 MT., p. 108.
33 MT., p. 141.
34 MT., p. 230.
35 MT., p. 5.
36 MT., p. 151
37 MT., p. 160 (Italics mine).
38 AI., p. 249.
39 MT, p. 98. See also, above, similar quotations from MT. Presented in the discussion of the general value presuppositions of relative value, pp. XXX. Awareness of absolute value will be discussed further in sub-section 3, pp.XXX of this section.
40 See above, pp. XXX of this paper.
41 RM., p. 88.
42 MT., p. 151.
43 SMW., p. 281.
44 SMW., pp. 281-82. Professor Hocking takes exception to this aspect of Whitehead's view;. He feels that it is essential to morality that man be able to regard the external world as valueless in itself, so that he (man) can have a realm for exploitation where he need not be restricted by the moral considerations that limit his dealings with his fellow men. "Whitehead on Mind and Nature", in Schilpp, p. 399.
45 Op. Cit., p. 453.
46 MT., p. 159.
47 SMW., pp. 152-3.
48 SMW., p. 153.
49 MT., pp. 160-61.
50 AI., pp. 209-10.
51 See below, oh. 7, Sec. C, for a criticism of this view as it relates to ethics.
52 RM., p. 109.
53 Symposium in Honor of the Seventieth Birthday of Alfred North Whitehead, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932, Whitehead's remarks, pp. 26-27.
54 See above, Ch, 2, Sec, D, pp. XXX of this paper, and Ch. 3, Sec. C, pp. XXX of this paper.
55 MT., pp. 28-29.
56 MT., p. 32.
57 MT., p. 29.
58 MT., p. 29.
59 I shall postpone discussion of the problem as to how, if at all, an occasion can be aware of this aspect of its own importance until subsection (3) of this section; see below, pp. Xxx of this paper.
60 PR., p. 514.
61 See Part I, Ch. 4, Sect. B of this paper.
62 MT., p. 68.
63 MT., p. 70.
64 MT., p. 141 (Italics mine).
65 MT., p. 142.
66 MT., p. 115.
67 RM., p. 100.
69 See below, sub-section (5) of this section.
70 See below, sub-section (3) of this section.
71 PR., pp. 300-01.
72 SMW., p. 256.
73 AI., p. 324.
74 See above, Pt. I, ch. 2, Sect. C, pp. XXX, of this paper.
75 PR., p. 75.
76 See above, Pt. I, ch. 3, Sect. C, pp. XXX, of this paper.
77 Mr. Goheen emphasizes that Whitehead's notions of value are like those of John Dewey in that they emphasize value as the resolution of conflict and the attainment of "adjustment (op. cit., p. 449)".
78 MT., p. 13.
79 RM., p. 113.
80 PR., p. 485.
81 See above, ch. 2, Sect. D, pp. XXX, of this paper.
82 PR., p. 483.
83 See above, Pt. I, ch. 3, 8ect. C, on real potentiality.
84 PR., p. 172.
85 See below, Ch. 8, pp. XXX, of this paper.
86 The following brief account is taken mostly from pp. 169-72 in PR., and chs. 17 and 18 of AI.
87 Explained in Sect. C of ch. 3 of Part 2 of this paper.
88 1 think that perhaps Whitehead would criticize some of the dominant tendencies in contemporary graphic art as differing from excessive "narrowness" in his sense of the term.
89 See below, sub-section (5) of this section, the discussion of the comparative importance of survival and novelty; and. it is also relevant to the notion of progress, and other discussions in this paper.
90 See above, p. XX, of this section.
91 AE., pp. 62-3.
92 RT., p. 39. And, of course, even survival is not without importance.
93 MT., p. 6.
94 MT., p. 149.
95 MT., p. 165.
96 MT., pp. 11-12. I have already noted the use of "interest" in the context of this statement as linked with importance rather than merely with relative value (see above, p. Zg, of this paper).
97 AI., p. 210.
98 "Immortality", in Schilpp, op. cit., p. 685. As I indicated in a previous section (above, p. 24, of this paper) it has been suggested that Whitehead is putting forward an entirely different theory of absolute value in these final essays, in which absolute values are identified with eternal objects in themselves – the World of Value being construed to be the realm of eternal objects. I do not believe that this is so. I believe that the World of Value is the primordial nature of God, and that, although the terminology which Whitehead chooses to introduce here (apparently for the purposes of popular exposition) is oversimplified from the point of view of his previous discussions, it, nevertheless, does not necessarily conflict with the earlier and fuller statement of his views. The function of the primordial nature of God (or World of Value) in the awareness of importance will be discussed itself in the immediately following paragraph.
99 See above, pp. XXX. of this section.
100 RM., p. 103.
101 MT., p. 36.
102 MT., pp. 36-7.
103 See above, Pt. I, oh. 2, Sect. D, pp. O3- 17 and oh. 4, Sect. B, pp. VVXX, of this paper.
104 This is probably what Whitehead is saying on p. 98 of RM . It is important to note, however, that awareness of God's consequent nature is not an awareness of achieved "perfection". Indeed, an occasion may achieve something new, something not prominent in God's consequent nature, in which case this standard of its importance would not help it so much.
105 "Immortality", In Schilpp, op. cit.. p. 698.
106 Smb., p. 63.
107 See below, ch. 7, Sect. A, on "evil.".
108 PR., pp. 424-25.
109 See Sect. A, on "evil", of ch. 7 for further remarks on this subject.
110 Victor Lowe says that Whitehead told his students in the Thirties that in Process and Reality he leaned too far towards pluralism, and that his work should be compared with that of Alexander, who leaned too far towards monism. Lowe offers it as his own opinion that in Modes of Thought Whitehead conceives of the world somewhat more monistically than previously, that there is a "tendency" to refer "importance" to the "ultimate unity" and the contrasting notion of "matter-of-fact" to "finite individuals", but that even in this book Whitehead is very far from going over to monism ("Whitehead’s Philosophical Development", in Schilpp, op. cit.. p. 120).
111 MT., pp. 117-18.
112 I would say that Aristotle emphasized perfection of type and Plato emphasized general perfection, but "Platonism" with its emphasis on particular archetypes certainly emphasizes perfection of type. Whitehead says that the concept of an ideal "peculiar to each actual entity is Platonic" (PR., p.128), but Whitehead interprets this ideal in his own non-Platonistic way.
113 AI., p. 324. I shall postpone the discussion of "major beauty" to the next subsection; see below, p. X of this paper.
114 AI., p. 329.
115 AI., p. 351.
116 AI., p. 339.
117 See above, Pt. I, ch. 2, Sect. A, pp. XXX, of this paper.
118 See above, sub-section (1), pp. XXX, of this section.
119 AI., pp. 333-34.
120 See above, Pt. 1, ch. 2, Sect. A, pp. XXX of this paper.
121 AI., p. 332.
122 AI., p. 331. (Italics mine).
123 PR., p. 74.
124 Ibid.
125 PR., p. 128 (Italics mine).
126 AI., p. 375.
127 See below, sub-section (5) of this section, pp. XXX.
128 See above, Pt. I, ch. 2, pp. XX.
129 New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1911, ch. 1.
130 See above, Pt. I, oh. 3, particularly Sect. D.
131
Whitehead does believe that this kind of progress is possible.
He speaks of the "creative advance" (PR., p.
52).
132 AI., p. 53.
133 See above, Pt, I, ch. 4, Sect. A, pp. XXX of this paper.
134 PR., p. 139.
135 See above, p. XXX of this section for considerations about the lasting achievements of process, and below, p. X of this section,
136 PR., p. 32.
137 SMW., p. 1; but not too large, judging by the considerations of the preceding paragraph.
138 SMW., p. 299.
139 I think that Dorothy Emmet in her book on Whitehead, (Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, pp. 211-12) expresses very well the limits of progress in Whitehead's scheme. "This view clearly does not regard what we loosely call the process of evolution as single and unilateral, Nor does it support the notion of a 'progress towards one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves', as it were en bloc. Instead, we have to conceive of the creative process as the gradual building-up and decaying of innumerable types of order. In Whitehead's cosmology, the types of order which arise and decay depend on the dominant characteristics of the entities which build them up. There is no reason why one order should be better or worse than the last, unless perhaps we might say that, from having. the opportunity of building as it were upon the ruins of its predecessors, one epoch may achieve a subtler type of order than another. In this sense, possibly, we might speak of a 'progress', not as a metaphysical necessity, but as made possible through the types of order in the world building upon each other.
140 Particularly since he is opposed to the metaphysical dualism that might make their destinies independent of each other.
141 "The Universe achieves its values by reason of its coordination into societies of societies, and into societies of societies of societies (AI., p. 264)."
142 See above, Pt. I, oh. II, Sects. C&D, & ch. 3, Sect, C.The inevitable "broadening" of the "narrowness" of a pattern spreads the intensity out and waters it down until everything is at a uniform low level and nothing stands out clearly. Whitehead seems to think of this tendency as analogous to the principle of "entropy" in thermodynamics.
143 AI., p. 53.
144 See below, ch. 7, Sec. C, pp. XXX for a criticism of Whitehead’s notion of individual responsibility.
145 See above, Pt. I , ch.2,Sect.B, pp. XXX of this paper.
146 See above, Pt, I, ch, 3, Sect. C, pp. XXX of this paper.
147 Sartre maintains that the individual is completely unconditioned when he makes a free choice, (Existentialism, New York, The Philosophical Library, l947).
148 Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism p. 218.
149 See sub-section (2) of this section, p. XXX.
150 PR., p. 514.
151 See below, pp. XXX of this section, for a discussion of the proper balance between change and order.
152 See above, Pt. I, ch. 3, Sect. C,, pp. xxx of this paper.
153 See above, Pt. I, ch. 3, Sect. C, of this paper.
154 See above, Pt. I, ch. 3, Sect. C, of this paper.
155 SMW., p. 278.
156 SMW., p. 137.
157 Ibid.
158 See above, sub-section (1) of this section, pp XXX.
159 "Mathematics and the Good", in Schillp, op. cit., especially, p. 674.
160 That preservation of pattern is not valuable merely because "form" is valuable, but because it is the preservation of some sort of actual achievement is, I think, indicated by such statements of Whitehead's as, "Truth and Beauty are the ultimate grounds for emphasis and for prolongation (AI., p. 309)."
161 See above, subsection (4b) of this section, p. X.
162 PR., p. 514.
163 MT., p. 109.
164 SMW., p. 269.
165 FofR., p. 2.
166 MT., p. 43.
167 AI., p. 102.
168 That is, of course, the critics who do not make him out to be an advocate of static order, of eternal forms, of the rigid mathematical and logical predetermination of all occurrences.
169 Smb., p. 71.
170 AI., p. 14 ff.
171 AI., p. 81.
172 AI., ch. xix.
173 PR., p. 513.
174 PR., p. 515.
175 See above, Pt. I ch. 3, Sect. C, of this paper.
176 Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, p. 217.
177 SMW., p. 137.
178 PR., pp. 154-56.
179 PR., pp. 156.
180 SMW., p. 290.
181 See below, ch. 7, Sect. C, pp. XXX, of this paper.
182 Op. cit., p. 175.
183 Op. cit., p. 322.
184 See below, ch. 7, Sect. B & C, pp. XXX of this paper.
185 See above, ch. 1, pp. XXX.
186 See above, ch. 5, Sect. A, pp. XXX, of this paper.
187 P. X of this paper.
188 AI., pp. 352-53.
189 Ch. 7, Sect. B, of this paper.
190 AI., p. 332.
191 Ibid.
192 See above, pp. XXX, of this section.
193 AI., p. 324. I do not quote directly because Whitehead's statement is particularly dense here.
194 See below, ch. 7, Sect. B, pp. XXX, of this paper.
195 AI., p. 381.
196 AI., p. 367 ff. (Italics mine).
197 AI., p. 375.
198 See above, sub-section (4a) of this paper.
199 RM., p. 103 (italics mine).
200 Principia Ethica, ch. 1.
201 AI., p. 190.
202 See above, Pt. I, ch. 3, of this paper.
203The Republic, bks. 6 & 7.
204 Ch. 5, Sect. B, pp. XXX, and ch. 6, Sect. B, pp. XXX.
205 Ch. 1, p. X.
Move to Chapter Seven A.