Process philosophy is unquestionably a philosophy committed to connection. But as explicated by Whitehead, and mulled over by his followers and critics, it contains some infuriating inconsistencies. It is not my intention to subject these inconsistencies to detailed scholarly criticism so as to achieve a smoothing of the troubled waters, nor is it my intention to propose a “super-duper-process” which will submerge the inconsistencies in a startling new conception of reality. Rather my aim is limited – I wish to compare process philosophy at certain points with my own account of in- discreteness, in the hope of arriving at a pared-down conception of process which avoids some of the obvious problems while illuminating both process in general and its in- discrete metaphysic in particular. In so doing I hope I will in fact provide some pointers to a better understanding of process, though that will be something of a by-product of my central aim.
What is process? Spinoza had the right idea, says Whitehead, by giving prominence to the systematic coherence conferred by substance, which I dubbed a proto- process view. A significant difference between the two, however, is that Spinoza’s “morphological” description is replaced in Whitehead by the description of dynamic process – the preferred model for reality is not the thing but the event, and as I indicated in the previous chapter, events tend to have no determinate beginning nor end. Nicholas Rescher points out that the term “process” should be construed in the usual way, “as a sequentially structured sequence of successive stages or phases.” Accordingly it has three features: (1) It is a complex or unity of distinct phases; (2) It has a certain temporal coherence and unity; and (3) It has a structure, or generic format.262 Whitehead says “The coherence, which [my] system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.”263 Process is the core notion in a larger picture which Whitehead calls “the philosophy of
262 Rescher (2002), "Process philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2002
Edition), p.1.
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organism”, a term which captures the interconnection at the heart of the theory. The world as we experience it is made up of determinate actual entities and actual occasions, and process is their becoming actual, or their “becoming” or “happening” for short. The fundamental philosophical attractor, if you like, is not the fact of their existence as single or multiple substances, but the process by which they become what they are as diverse beings.
It is essential to this picture that everything can be in turn the material out of which the becomings of other things are fashioned, and this creative element is a crucial aspect of process. Creativity is consistent with the “promise” or optimism towards the future to be found in pragmatism, but in Whitehead it becomes the ultimate or topmost category, expressed only through its accidental embodiments and apart from these having no actuality. In this it is unlike a monistic metaphysics such as Spinoza’s which grants the ultimate a final or “eminent” reality, and often gives it the name of “God”. Actual entities and occasions are the “facts”, the most real things, and in the philosophy of organism they are its “creatures”. But creativity also has its more usual meaning of “novelty”, since an actual occasion is a novel entity different from every other, and what constitutes its novelty is the combined influence of every other entity.
Hence creativity “is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively … The many become one, and are increased by one.”264 Here is one sense in which continuity asserts itself through process, in the nested flow of history where the new creature succeeds its predecessors by some infinitesimally small increment which nevertheless embodies all its predecessors. The catch is that the new creature is not necessarily an individual particular, and its becoming does not culminate with its birth, in any conventional biological sense of “birth”. A clue to this lies in the equation or equivocation between the terms “actual entity” and “actual occasion”; as an occasion, the new creature is an infinitesimal extension of itself, and in this sense it is not independent of its predecessors.
In favouring process over fact a subtle break with past dualisms is achieved, and this is probably the most creative element of Whitehead’s theory. Spinoza’s substance monism, undifferentiated as it is, allows Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic to
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continue flourishing because its focus is on stuff, on determinate things in their thingliness, and this logic enshrines a physical-mental dualism by conferring physical status on the object, and mental status on the thought of the object – this is what Whitehead terms “the subjectivist principle”. The “concrescence”, or becoming, of actual entities allows Whitehead to combine their incompleteness with a refiguring of the notion of dualism265. Each of them is built out of two components, in a process that echoes the Hegelian dialectic, but with this crucial difference - the components are radically different, being physical and mental, and the resulting reality is a unique and irreducible amalgam of the two. The successor phase b requires its predecessor a as its causal antecedent, and a requires b as its teleological attractor. The terms “physical” and “mental” are heavily qualified, but they cannot be taken to be substances as they are not self-sufficient. To reiterate, the focus of explanation is on the boundless pluralism of experienced reality, and not the singularity or otherwise of its components.
The process refiguring of traditional dualism is most apparent in a transformed understanding of the nature of experience. Descartes’ conclusion, that objects of experience have some peculiar definiteness about them in a way unique to experience, is taken seriously by Whitehead. But the conclusion of almost everyone, that experience belongs exclusively to the mental realm, is denied by him. Allied to this is the holist assertion that “...everything is positively somewhere in actuality, and in potency everywhere.”266 The implication of this is that, like Spinoza’s conclusion that the reality of something depends on the amount of influence it receives from other things, for Whitehead the actuality of entities is a function of their “feeling” for other entities. It is as if you traverse the causal web and in getting closer to and eventually being absorbed by another entity you progressively lose “your” objectivity even as you contribute to “its” objectivity, and contribute your own subjectivity to its growing subjectivity, Alternatively, you could see yourself as contributing potential to its growing actuality. One manifestation of the growing concreteness of the entity is its growing subjectivity, its ability in turn to attract or be attractive to other entities. This is
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Summary details of concrescence in this paragraph and the next are based on Vlastos (1963), “Organic categories in Whitehead.” In George L. Kline (Ed.) Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on his philosophy. (pp. 158-67) (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall).
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a fuller explanation of the relationship between the a and b components mentioned above.
It will probably come as no surprise that all the difficult elements of process are related, since coherence is touted as one of the cardinal virtues of Whitehead’s system. The first troublesome aspect is the emphasis on experience, bearing in mind that “experience” here is not confined to mentality. Whitehead strongly adopts what he calls the “reformed” subjectivist principle, which is “that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experience of subjects. Process is the becoming of experience … apart from the experience of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.”267 One of the very first things I did in Chapter One was to consider the nature of experience of objects, with a progression from the ecological experience of objects and affordances to the highly abstracted nature of philosophical reflection. Whitehead’s own highly-abstract “categoreal scheme” treads an epistemic tightrope between, on the one hand, the simple-mindedly abstract, evident in the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” of which he accuses other philosophers, and an overriding respect for the reality of the things encountered in experience, which he terms the “ontological principle”, on the other. This principle is an amalgam of the concreteness to be found in unreflective perception with a methodological rationalism “broadened and extended” from Locke, who asserted that “power…is a great part of our complex ideas of substances.”
Whitehead transforms “substance” into his own “actual entity” while “power” becomes the principle that the reasons for things are to be found in their composite nature; “in the nature of God for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and in the nature of definite temporal actual entities for reasons which refer to a particular environment.” Hence everything has a reason for its existence – he summarises the ontological principle as “No actual entity, then no reason.”268 In effect, efficient and final causation are combined into a notion of basic experience, that everything actual is an experience for itself269. This is the cornerstone principle of panpsychism, that all actual things are subjects. John Dewey elaborates on some related metaphysical implications when he points out that the rejection of materialism is also the rejection of
267Process and reality, pp.166, 167. 268
Process and reality, pp.18-9.
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“the doctrine that matter is the efficient cause of life and mind, and that ‘cause’ occupies a position superior in reality to that of ‘effect’ … ’Effects’, since they mark the release of potentialities, are more adequate indications of the nature of nature than are just ‘causes’”270. The difficulty with the nature of experience, then, is not due to any apparent inconsistency but rather is a matter of understanding how this sort of reason” can be as concrete as the experience of which it is a part: but to the extent that it is, the bundling of the subjective and the objective together under the head of “experience” represents the influence on Whitehead of Leibniz, the British empiricists (particularly Locke and Hume), and of Kant.
The second troublesome aspect of process is closely related, and involves a very strong distinction between potentiality and actuality. It will already be apparent that experience is of actually existing things, though the idea of “thing” may not yet be clear. It is also essential, and this is the sticking point for many commentators, that every actual entity is independent and complete. There seems to be a puzzling disjunction in Whitehead’s process between the becoming of an actual entity, with all the solidarity and holism attendant on the becoming, and the actuality of that entity in its completeness and isolation, and this has bothered many. This distinction is especially puzzling given that the concrescence of a new actual entity usually results not in an entirely new creature but in what could be regarded as a new phase of an existing object. Whitehead is quite emphatic about the atomicity of the new creature when he says “The ancient doctrine that ‘no one crosses the same river twice’ is extended. No thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice.”271 Most commentators have opted to analyse alternative views of time in order to attempt a reconciliation272.
A third troublesome aspect of process, and again one which is closely related to the previous points, is Whitehead’s preferred mechanism for providing the stability of form and structure to be found in experience – these are the seemingly Platonic “eternal objects”, and beyond them, God. Platonic philosophy rightly appeals, he says, because it
270 Dewey (1929), pp.214-5. 271
Process and reality, p.29.
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See Sandra Rosenthal (2000), Time, continuity, and indeterminacy: A pragmatic engagement with contemporary perspectives (New York: SUNY); Chris van Haeften (2001), “Extension and epoch: Continuity and discontinuity in the philosophy of A. N. Whitehead.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 37(1), 59-79; James Felt (2002), “Epochal time and the continuity of experience.” The Review of
gets the primary philosophical question the right way around – philosophy’s business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more particular things, not to ask how concrete particulars can be built up out of universals. In other words, philosophy should seek the form in the facts: “Each fact is more than its forms, and each form ‘participates’ throughout the world of facts.”273 This commitment supplies one clue to explain the distinction between possibility and actuality, since actuality provides a terminus or limit which marks the completion of the entity and distinguishes it from an incomplete one. However it is a commitment which brings the “reformed” subjectivist principle and the ontological principle into conflict – the former says quite firmly that apart from experience there is “nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness”, while the latter suggests that only actual occasions are real; hence eternal objects, which are explicitly “pure potential”274, seem to lack the necessary reality275.
In the following sections I will look more closely at the contentious aspects of process, as these disclose some critical theoretical impasses which an in-discrete analysis may clarify. I will consider the first two, the nature of experience and the actuality/possibility distinction together. It has been relatively easy on the present exposition of process to discern a nested continuity operating in becoming, though this was noted only in passing and may yet prove to be illusory. I will need to consider the internal workings of process more closely in order to determine whether process does in fact rely on something akin to overlapping in-discreteness.