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
- FofR The Function of Reason
- OT Organization of Thought
In Chapter Six I discussed the most general problems of value and tried to explain the nature of relative end absolute value according to Whitehead, In this chapter I shall try to apply these conclusions about the general nature of value to a few of the more special problems with which a complete theory of value must deal, As I have said before, Whitehead does not have a complete theory of value, and it is not my intention here to construct a complete theory of value out of the suggestions which he gives, So I have selected only three of the many problems with which theories of value have dealt and shall consider these not exhaustively, but merely as examples of how Whitehead's general position on values can be applied.
In discussing the idea of progress I mentioned that Whitehead is not uniformly optimistic in his outlook on the world; that there is a frequent note of pessimism in his writing 1. Part of this pessimistic attitude may derive from his intention to take evil seriously. Philosophical outlooks tinged with idealism and evolutionism have been accused of not taking evil seriously. On the other hand, philosophical outlooks based on naturalism have been accused of ignoring both goodness and evil. There are elements of idealism, evolutionism, and naturalism in Whitehead’s thought, but he tries not to let these attitudes dull his "tragic sense". He insists on the positive reality of evil - as experienced, as embedded in the metaphysical nature of things, and even as justifying to some extent' a sense of "guilt" and sin.
But the most casual survey of the tenets of Whitehead's philosophy will disclose the major difficulties which he will encounter in establishing a principle of "positive evil". In the first place, as far as experience is concerned, he emphasizes interest and enjoyment as its dominant value aspects, and, though interests may be negatively directed towards withdrawal or suppression and enjoyments may be frustrated, such developments seem to allow at the most for the experience of only a very relative, secondary, and ephemeral sort of evil, an evil entirely subordinate to good. In the second place, his general metaphysical presuppositions seem to make a "real", "positive" principle of evil even more unlikely. He is opposed to metaphysical dualisms of all sorts, which he calls "bifurcations', and so a Manichean sort of dualism between equally real, or almost equally real, principles of "good" and "evil" seems out of the question. Although opposed to 'dualism", however, we have seen that he does hold to a qualified pluralism. It is therefore in the pluralistic nature of the world, as opposed to its aspect of oneness, that we must look for the roots of evil. Here too, however, there are difficulties, because we have already seen that real, positive goodness for Whitehead is also at least partially dependent on the pluralistic aspect of the world - since the creative process which generates value is plural in its actual operation - so the easy solution of making the monistic aspect of the world responsible for all the good in the world, and the pluralistic aspect responsible for all the evil is closed to him also.
Whitehead does not seen to be completely aware of all these difficulties which his own system puts in the way of a "strong" theory of evil. Indeed, his remarks on evil are, if anything, less well analyzed and organized than his remarks on the nature of value in general. In order to make any sense out of them at all, I find it necessary to start by making a distinction of which be never seems to be clearly aware. In discussing value in general I found it necessary to distinguish between a relative aspect of value in his philosophy and an absolute aspect. They are, as we have seen, always closely associated, yet they can be distinguished, and Whitehead himself frequently expresses their differences from each other. What is true of value in general should also be true of evil, but here Whitehead fails significantly to be clearly aware of the distinction. I believe, however, that his views on evil can be made much more significant and brought into agreement with his general value views if I impose this distinction upon them. I shall therefore discuss two kinds of meanings of evil in Whitehead's philosophy: (1) relative evil, and (2) absolute evil.
Whitehead says, "Evil is positive and destructive; what is good is positive and creative 2." Now it is my contention that while both relative and absolute evil are "positive" in Whitehead's philosophy, only absolute evil is necessarily destructive. Unfortunately Whitehead usually mentions the two together, For example, in the paragraph preceding the statement just quoted he says, "Now evil is exhibited in physical suffering, mental suffering, and loss of the higher experience in favor of the lower experience 3," I contend, however, that according to the requirements of his own system, there can be "physical suffering" and "mental suffering", which are evil for and relative to the actualities in which they occur, without "loss of the higher experience in favor of the lower experience", which would be absolute evil - evil for other actualities, for God, and for the whole. A statement defining evil in more detail but also failing to make this distinction, which occurs in Whitehead's discussion of the distinction between "minor" and "major beauty" will, I think, bring out more fully the difference between relative and absolute evil. I have already quoted the first part of this statement 4, but I repeat that part here in order to make my point.
In the original definition of Beauty the concept of "perfection" was tacitly introduced. The perfection of subjective form means the absence from it of component feelings which mutually inhibit each other so that neither rises to the strength proper to it.
The other meaning of inhibition - the meaning which derogates from perfection - involves the true active presence of both component feelings. In this case there is a third feeling of mutual destructiveness, so that one or other - or both - of the component feelings fails to attain the strength properly belonging to the prehension of the datum from which it arises. This is the feeling of evil in the most general sense, namely physical pain or mental evil, such as sorrow, 'horror', dislike. This type of inhibition will be termed 'Aesthetic destruction'. Aesthetic destruction is a positive component in subjective form, and is inconsistent with perfection. The subjective feeling of aesthetic destruction will be termed a 'discordant feeling' 5.
Now, "aesthetic destruction" means the disruption of attained harmony. Discord - "discordant feelings" appear. But attained harmony, perfection, is not, as we have seen, the complete good. In fact, it leads to evil if pursued without the introduction of novelty 6. Pain, suffering, the feeling of discord stirs the actuality in which it occurs to seek its elimination.
The common character of all evil is that its realization in fact involves that there is some concurrent realization of a purpose towards elimination. The purpose is to secure the avoidance of evil 7.
But the point is that this "purpose towards elimination" may express itself in two very different ways. It may, it is true, lead to the suppression of one or both of the conflicting elements, thus producing diminished actuality and absolute evil, On the other hand, it may stimulate the actual process in which it occurs to seek some novel synthesizing principle which will resolve the conflict by preserving the intensities - even perhaps enhancing them - of the components which were in conflict. This is what happens when "major beauty”, which thrives on tension and dissonance, supplants the tameness of the achieved perfection of "minor beauty" 8. This is also what happens when man faces squarely and solves his personal or social problems instead of merely withdrawing from them into some inadequate and outmoded pattern of behavior 9.
Relative evil is real and positive - it is pain, suffering, dislike, abhorrence, but it may be the prelude to heightened and more adequate attainments - to increased importance -, as well as the prelude to withdrawal, lowered intensity of feelings "anesthesia", loss - absolute evil. The following quotation seems to suggest this middle position occupied by what I call relative evil.
Its [man's "soul's"] good resides in the realization of a strength of many feelings fortifying each other as they meet in the novel unity. It evil lies in the clash of vivid feelings, denying to each other their proper expansion. Its triviality lies in the anaesthesia by which evil is frequently avoided. In this way, through sheer emission, fewer, fainter feelings constitute the final appearance. Evil is the half-way house between perfection and triviality. It is violence of strength against strength 10.
Evil is also the "half-way house" between the "tameness" of outworn and fading "perfection" and a new creative success 11.
Though Whitehead makes an occasional reference to the "forms of evil" 12, it is clear that even absolute evil is not due merely to the actualization of evil essences. Absolute - that is, non-relative - evil is at least as complex a notion as non-relative good, and it is similarly tied to what transpires in concrete process. As absolute good means creative success in Whitehead's philosophy, absolute evil means creative failure. What has been achieved is diminished or lost and what could be achieved is frustrated. Thus, for there to be fundamental, non-relative evil, strife and pain are not enough. The strife and pain must produce evil results in the metaphysical sense of diminution of being. And, also, the mere production of low-grade occasions is not a sufficient condition of there being absolute evil. A stone is not evil, though it is a nexus of low-grade occasions. A pig is not evil, but a man degraded to the life of a pig is evil 13. There must be the concurrent destruction of higher-grade actuality - that is, the surviving "real potentiality" of higher-grade occasions must suffer suppression and diminution of its influence -, and the further actualization of possibilities, already at least "conceptually prehended", must be frustrated. There must be real loss, loss that is actually felt and contrasted to that might have been 14.
What happens to produce absolute evil has already been stated, an occasion reacts to relative evil - conflict and pain, by suppressing one or both - or more, since conflicts can be multiple - of the conflicting feelings, and so its satisfaction is characterized by lowered intensity and simpler contrasts. There is a movement towards "anesthesia" 15.
But here a problem arises in connection with absolute evil which is similar to a problem discussed in connection with the awareness of importance 16. Every occasion achieves some sort of satisfaction, and to that extent achieves positive value. Wherein, then, lies the evil? As in the case of importance, there must be reference beyond the individual actuality to the others and the whole,
Evil, triumphant in its enjoyment, is so far good in itself; but beyond itself it is evil in its character as a destructive agent among things greater than itself. In the summation of the more complete fact it has secured a descent towards nothingness, in contrast to the creativeness of what can without qualification be called good. ... 17
It takes, Whitehead says, a social contrast for there to be evil. What is destroyed is not evil to itself because it no longer is: it is evil only to others 18. But here we have an exaggeration and an over-simplification. It is true that insofar as an actuality responsible for the origination of evil lowers its own being, it also lowers its own self-awareness, and therefore its awareness at its own failure, But no actuality destroys itself completely. If it did, it could not have a baleful influence on subsequent procoss. It is also true that no actuality succeeds completely - there is failure and evil in all actualities. But it will be necessary to take a larger look at evil in order to see its general metaphysical function before returning to this question of self-awareness of self-caused evil 19. Although responsibility for evil, like responsibility for good, rests on the individual actualities which bring it about, there is no escape from evil in the world. Its roots lie in the nature of actuality. First, there is evil because actuality is multiple:
By reason of the essential individuality of the many things, there are conflicts of the finite realizations. Thus the summation of the many into the one and the derivation of importance from the one into the many, involves the notion of disorder, of conflict, of frustration 20.
Secondly, there is evil because actuality is finite. Its finitude, Its limitation, the cause of Its realization or any value is also the cause of its inevitable realization of evil, For to select and emphasize is also to reject and suppress.
The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a 'perpetual perishing'. Objectification [that is, the prehension of the past as a present actuality] involves elimination. The present fact has not the past fact with it in any full immediacy. The process of time veils the past below distinctive feeling . ... In the temporal world it is the empirical fact that process entails loss: the past is present under an abstraction 21.
Though evil is thus given a metaphysical inevitability, it 'is not made completely final and un-get-roundable, It is, rather, a condition of the realization of good, and the metaphysical situation is such that, although now evils will always arise, existing evils will probably be overcome eventually. Indeed, they mark, frequently, the early stages of the realization of a new good,
But there to no reason of any ultimate metaphysical generality, why this [the metaphysical necessity of the occurrence of evil] should be the whole story. The nature of evil is that the characters of things are mutually obstructive. Thus the depths of life require a process of selection. But the selection is elimination as the first step toward another temporal order seeking to minimize obstructive modes. Selection is at once the measure of evil and the process of its evasion. It means the discarding of the element of obstructiveness in fact, No element in fact is ineffectual; thus the struggle with evil is a process of building up a mode of utilization by the provision of intermediate elements introducing a complex structure of harmony 22.
Just as relative evil may stir the individual actuality to seek a new and more adequate synthesis; even t the individual actualities fail, and process suffers loss, perhaps for a long time, still, the existence of the evil shows that actuality did at one time rise to the level where the conflict whlch caused it became actual. Even when defeat is suffered, the actualization of the conflict is not completely lost. Subsequent process is never quite like process prior to the battle and defeat. If the conflict has been joined once, the conditions which brought it about are likely to raise it again, and next time there may be a victory.
Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil. In other words, the novel fact may throw back, inhibit, and delay. But the advance, when it does arrive, will be richer in contrast, more fully conditioned, end nor stable. For in its objective efficacy an actual entity can only inhibit by reason of its alternative possible contribution. The categories governing the determination of things are the reason why there should be evil; and are also the reason why, in the advance of the particular evil facts are finally transcended 23.
This dual role of the finite actualities, as the sources of both evil and also all the actual good in the world, is probably why Whitehead says that Christianity, (unlike Buddhism), does not make evil the necessary outcome of the fact of individual personality, "It [Christianity] derives the evil from the contingent fact of the actual course of events; it thus allows of an ideal as conceivable in terms of what is actual 24." So it is not the case that God is responsible for all the good in the world and finite actualities, including man, for all the evil, God is good. The actual world is both good and bad 25. But God gets his actual, as distinct from his potential, good from the world. He does not inherit the world's evil.
The limitation of God is his goodness. He gains his depth of actuality by his harmony of valuation, It is not true that God is in all respects infinite. If he were, be would be evil as well as good. All this unlimited fusion of evil with good would mean more nothingness, He is something decided and thereby limited 26.
Considering the criticisms that have been brought against Whitehead's notion of God’s relation to evil, it may be well to explain it in a little more detail, First he does not create evil. God create any actual condition according to Whitehead. He can only cooperate with finite actuality in any concrete creative act. What his primordial nature gives to each occasion is an impulse towards the good - an impulse towards the actualization of all possibilities whatsoever. But it is up to each occasion to actualize infinite potentiality as best it can.
It is "free" in its choices. It is metaphysical necessity to which both God and finite actualities are subject to the condition that all realization involves limitations that accounts for the appearance of evil 27. God escapes evil in his own fully actual nature, his consequent nature, because his own “subjective aim" - the intent to actualize all possibility - is adequate to any actualization that occurs; he does not have to abstract from the full concreteness of the data of his physical prehensions (which are the complete "satisfactions" of every concrete process) in order to include them in his own ever-developing, ever-incomplete synthesis. The reason that he doesn't prehend evil and thus include evil in his own nature is that whatever the evil thing achieves is a good for him. He takes its offering no matter how small, though the world may curse it for its evil, He has prehended the actuality before the loss occurred, and "saved" that actuality too, so he does not, like the finite processes subsequent to the evil thing, suffer its evil. I have already answered Ely's charge that God is indifferent to suffering 28. As to his further charge that to the many "natures" which Whitehead attributes to God it might be well to add a "demonic nature" because God may "lure" us into evil in order to perfect his own contrasts 29; I think that it is clear from the above account that according to Whitehead's interpretation, God just does not have that power.
But still, though I see that God does not create or perpetuate evil, according to Whitehead, I am not satisfied that he does not suffer evil. And it seems right that he should. The evil which I think that he suffers is the evil of having to wait, when there is a creative failure in finite process, for the enrichment which would otherwise have come to his consequent nature, if the finite process had been successful, God is at the mercy of finite process for whatever is realized in his consequent nature. But, on the other hand, he can, alone among all actual entities, afford to wait; for, like the internal process of any actual entity, the never-completed development of his consequent nature is not in time: it is an ever-present, a non-terminating "specious present", like the present moment of our own experience, which reaches into both past and future, but unlike it holding all process - past present and future without end - in this Bergsonian "intuition".
1 See above, oh, 6, Sec. C, pp. XXX, of this paper.
2 RM., p. 96.
3 RM., p. 95.
4 See above, ch. 6, Sec. C, p. XXX of this paper.
5 Al., pp. 329-3O (italics mine).
6 See above, oh. 6, Sec. C, pp. XXX of this paper,
7 RM., p. 95.
8 Al., p. 331.
9 Al., ch. 19.
10 Al., p. 335.
11 Mr. Ely expresses moral revulsion at Whitehead's idea that God makes good out of evil, but he assumes that this process happens only in heaven, and so doesn't alleviate or justify earthly suffering (op, cit., p. 41). But it is rather the actualities in which suffering occurs that make good out of this evil, if any good is to be made out of it, God merely crowns their achievements by "saving" their victories over suffering, thus making their suffering, if they overcome it, more significant. It is absolute evil, what occurs when suffering is not overcome, that God "ignores", but this is another question. See the rest of this section.
12 MT., p. 94. And even here the "forms of evil" are said to be dependent on "evil things".
13 RM., pp. 97-98.
14 RM., pp. 97
15 AI., p. 329.
16 See above, oh. 6, Sec. C, pp. XXX, of this paper,
17 RM., pp. 95-96.
18 RM., pp. 97.
19 See below, pp. XXX of this section.
20 MT., pp. 70-71.
21 PR., p. 517.
22 PR., p. 517.
23 PR., p. 341.
24 RM., p. 51.
25 RM., p. 99.
26 RM., p. 153.
27 Even Mr. Ely admits this, though he later accuses God of a kind of responsibility for evil (op cit., pp. 24-25),
28 See above, note to p. XX of this section.
29 Ely, op. cit,, pp. 5O-5l.