Quotations from W. H. Leue's Book   Whitehead's philosophy is so full of a number of things&emdash;there is such a sweep of topics, so much metaphysical machinery: space-time, God, creativity, eternal objects&emdash;that unless one can find a central notion, some fixed point1 from which to chart one's excursions, there is great danger of getting lost in this metaphysical maze and circling endlessly and aimlessly around some suburban group of concepts. Luckily, Whitehead provides many clear directions pointing towards such a central point of reference. This central concept in Whitehead's philosophy is the notion of "actual occasions" or "actual entities".   The notion of actual occasions is at once the notion of the immediate present, part of which, at least, is our experience as we live it, and the notion of ultimate reality&emdash;the source of space-time, the laws of nature, and all of the complex abstractions with which Whitehead deals. As so frequently occurs in Whitehead's philosophy, we have in the notion of the actual occasion many seemingly opposite extremes meeting in one notion. Perhaps this one is the ultimate paradox‚ the identification of the evanescent moment, the now, the ever-beginning, ever-perishing transience of the present with the ultimate reality which accounts for everything else, no matter how permanent or intricate, or noble, in the world.  And yet this is certainly what Whitehead means to do.  "The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future." (Aims of Education, p. 4.) "Apart from the immediacy of present actuality, "there is nothing, nothing, bare nothingness (Process and Reality, p. 254)." . And this present is not only that world out there, it is also my personal experience, and yours. Every actual occasion is to itself an experience.  "Each actual occasion is a throb of experience including the actual world [the world which it experiences] in its scope. I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an 'occasion of experience'. I hold that these unities of existence, these occasions of experience, are the really real things which in their collective unity compose the evolving universe, ever plunging into the creative advance. Our human experience consists of particularly rich and well-developed actual occasions. Since as realities all actual occasions are similar to each other, we have the road to metaphysical penetration directly within us.  And not "deeply within us; some partial, hidden facet of our experience, some object to which it refers; but the experience itself, and the more direct and immediate the better‚ "experience as directly felt, as lived-through, with all of its striving and emotion, joy and sorrow, sweat and tears‚" this immensely rich (far richer than we can "know") stream of living experience is itself ultimate reality, and in it we can find at least some of the secrets of things. Let there be no misunderstanding. Whitehead doesn't mean merely that through experience we "know" or have representations of the real world. Nor, at the other extreme, is he a solipsist. Experience is reality, but so is the world out there which is experienced. Dorothy Emmet says, "This insistent note of 'present immediacy' is the answer to those who would argue that a preoccupation with speculative metaphysics must necessarily destroy interest in the vivid immediacy of life. ... For the conception of ... the concrescent actual entity means nothing if it does not point us to the present as that creative moment in the passage of nature which is indeed all that there is (Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism, p.278)." ... The "philosophy of organism" [i.e., Whitehead's] is a philosophy of universal life - life permeating all existence the most remote, the most trivial, the most apparently inert and lifeless, as well as that highly organized fraction of existence which is the experience of man, and that other existent entity which is God. Values are essential to this notion of existence, and to the understanding of it. "... a dead nature can give no reasons. All ultimate reasons are in terms of aim at value. A dead nature aims at nothing. It is the essence of life that it exists for its own sake, as the intrinsic reaping of value (Modes of Thought, p. 184)."   ... Things are so turbulent and wild - since actuality is nothing but an avalanche of fleeting moments of process - that the universe would fly apart in a millisecond if it were not for the unobtrusive, cohesive function of eternal objects.   ... "If experience be not based on an objective content, there can be no escape from a solipsist subjectivism. The ultimate objective content of experience is eternal objects."   ... Whitehead conceives them [eternal objects] to be the one true identity amid all diversity. They bridge the gap between any two moments in the rushing torrent of actuality, and, metaphysically speaking, this chasm is as great between two adjacent actualities - say the present moment of my own existence and my existence a split second ago - as it is between actualities far removed from each other in space and time.   ... It is my contention that Whitehead believes that though the realm of eternal objects in itself may contain all of these "forms" as bare possibilities, it is actual process itself which not only embodies them but in a very real sense makes them, because the actual form and the bare possibility are not at all the same thing.   ... Commentators on Whitehead's statements on values have advocated ... four [different] interpretations, though, as far as I know, no one commentator has clearly seen all four possibilities in Whitehead. And certainly isolated statements can be found in Whitehead's writing which seem to support each of those views. People who have really made a serious study of Whitehead's statements on value questions seem to incline towards the first view - a psychological value theory. A more superficial examination of Whitehead's writings, and, oddly, enough, acquaintance with his metaphysics rather then with his observations on value, seems to favor the second view - a formalistic theory of value. Profounder students of his metaphysics generally incline toward the third value theory for Whitehead - self-realizationalist. The fourth alternative is advanced by people who observe that his value statements really do seem to contradict each other and particularly among those who observe that Whitehead seems to believe in both relative and absolute value.   ... [The] very diversity and disagreement among Whitehead's own statements and among his interpreters seems to me sufficient justification for a re-examination of his whole philosophy, including his metaphysics, to see whether somewhere some integrating concept might not be found. Why should a man who has shown so much penetration and insight into some philosophical problems make such obviously incompatible statements about values? Is it because his attention was distracted elsewhere - to metaphysical problems, perhaps? - or is it because he found in these other regions - again perhaps in metaphysics - notions which to him at least overcame these apparent contradictions and made it possible for him to acknowledge the partial truth of all of the major tendencies in theory of value because he was developing concepts which could, if pushed a little farther than when they were left in his published writing, combine them all in a new approach to the problems of value? Considerations of this sort spurred me on to the study of Whitehead's metaphysics presented in Part I of this paper, and I hope now that I can justify this excursion.   ... More detailed examination of these apparently conflicting theories of value in Whitehead's philosophy, however, will, I believe, reveal more definite and conclusive justification for my venture into Whitehead's metaphysics in search of integrating concepts for his views on values. I believe that I detect in each of these views, when it is put forward alone and out of relation to the others, similar weaknesses. They all ignore important considerations in Whitehead's metaphysics which are relevant to the understanding of the very terms in his statements which they cite as evidence for their interpretations, and they all, to some extent, at least, assume the'"bifurcation" between existence and value which, as I mentioned in the Introduction to this paper, is the metaphysical reason for the common futility of much contemporary theory of value.   Click here to move to Chapter I, Introduction Click here to move back to Table of Contents Click here to return to Reminiscences Chapter Nineteen    Write me at maryskole@aol.com