WHITEHEAD AND PLATO REVISITED
According to the philosopher and Whitehead scholar
Dorothy Emmet, "the best general description that may be given
of [Alfred North Whitehead's] philosophy is to say that it is
a modern form of Platonism".
Whitehead is a Platonist, according to Emmet, in the
sense in which this might be said of the Alexandrian Fathers
or St Augustine or the Cambridge Platonists or Wordsworth and
Emerson.[1] In
claiming and arguing for this view, she is but following on
from and adding weight to views expressed and argued for
already by Professor A. E. Taylor.[2] Since
the work of Dorothy Emmet, this impression of strong Platonic
connections has has been noted by
other scholars[3], and has become a modest topic of
scholarly stimulation, producing material for a number of
doctoral theses and some articles and a few books.[4] It
does seem to have gone off the boil lately, though.[5]
This paper investigates and to some extent gives a push
on to this Taylor-Emmet Platonic perspective on Whitehead,
both for appropriating Whitehead's metaphysical thought as a
whole and for making sense of a number of
the key elements. Whatever
else he is, Whitehead is a Platonist
and this is important for understanding his place in the
history of philosophy as well as understanding Whitehead
himself, even if the differences and contrasts are sometimes
as illuminating as the similarities. All in all, for
people in the tradition of Western Philosophy and familiar
with Plato, such a perspective provides an interesting and
indeed somewhat privileged mode of access to one of the more
complicated systems of twentieth century metaphysics. This impression I
hope to have re-enforced by the end of the paper.
Whitehead himself, it can first be said, owned and
welcomed the description. "The safest general characterization
of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of
a series of footnotes to Plato." (PR 39)[6] His
belief that the train of thought in Process and Reality
is Platonic however is more than just an expression of hope
that it falls within the European tradition. It consists in the
much stronger idea that "if we had to render Plato's general
point of view with the least changes made necessary by the
intervening two thousand years of human experience in social
organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in
religion, we should have to set about the construction of a
philosophy of organism...", at least of the general kind to be
found in Process and
Reality itself. (PR 39)
In respect of Plato's work, the reference is
particularly to the Timaeus. In the Preface of
his magnum opus Process
and Reality Whitehead professes to be attempting a
fusion of the cosmology in Plato's Timaeus with the
cosmology of the seventeenth century, "with modifications
demanded by self-consistency and the advance of knowledge" (PR
xiv). But there
is a general dependence on Plato's later dialogues, with
Whitehead self-consciously striving to think together notions
he takes to be contained in these works. Plato's contribution
to the basic notions connecting science and philosophy "is to
be found by reading together the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Timaeus, and the
fifth and tenth books of the Laws; and then by
recurrence to his earlier work, the Symposium." This later thought,
as Whitehead sees it, "circles round the interweaving of seven
main notions namely, The Ideas, The Physical Elements, The
Psyche, The Eros, The Harmony, The Mathematical Relations, The
Receptacle." (AI
146-147; cf. 158). Whitehead's
discussion in Adventures
of Ideas have concerned themselves with specializations
in History of these seven Platonic generalities. "The historical
references have been selected and grouped with the purpose of
illustrating the energizing of specialization of these seven
general notions among the peoples of Western Europe, driving
them towards their civilization." (AI 284) In his later
thinking he appears to have been particularly impressed by
certain assertions in the Sophist, however they may have got in there,
that Being is Power and that we cannot allow the real to be
conceived in terms of everlasting and meaningless fixity, and
that not-being is a form of being[7]. It is possible however that these texts
do not so much inspire him towards the construction of his
system as add a bit of confirmation to and an important
additional means of exposing elements of a system already
developed.
For his interpretation of Plato's writings, Whitehead
admits to being deeply indebted to the writings of Professor
A. E. Taylor, referring both to Plato, The Man and His
Work and especially in works post Process and Reality which
was already in press at the time of publication of the Commentary to A. E.
Taylor's A Commentary
on Plato's Timaeus.[8] So
it is Plato seen through the scholarly eyes of A. E. Taylor,
though not totally.[9]
The rest of this paper will be concerned with an
outline of some of the more Platonic features of Whitehead's
system of philosophy, firstly the general story and then the
key elements. But
we are concerned not just with what Whitehead has received
from his reading of Plato but what he does with what he has
received.
The general story line
There is an undeniable similarity of pattern, a formal
or structural similarity between the story told in the Timaeus and that
told to us by Whitehead in Process and Reality. As Emmet puts it, we
do have here the same general line of thought. (Emmet, 106) It
is the Divine envisagement of 'eternal objects' with a feeling
for the ingression or inclusion of some rather than others and
of some combinations and connections rather than others which
explains the order in the universe. This envisagement
explains the fact of order, the general kind of order that we
find, e.g. the number of
dimension, the ultimate statistical laws of nature, and also
the fact of evolution within the Cosmos towards more and more
subtle and complex types of ordering making possible higher
and higher kinds of happening.
Apart from the Divine envisagement of eternal objects
there would not be a Cosmos or Universe: just completely
chaotic, totally uncoordinated low level
happenings, completely unknowable.[10] As
in the Timaeus,
God accomplishes this by persuasion, like the Demiurge
persuading necessity. S/he
does this by getting Her/Himself and his/her values and
preferences and ideals felt or 'prehended' by other players in
the cosmic process. This
is responsible not only for the ultimate statistical Cosmic
Laws but also for example for the phenomenon of conscience,
the lure of the True, the Good and the Beautiful in our lives
and the lives of all in the Cosmos. God is acting,
meanwhile, in pursuit of a certain ideal of Beauty. There is, finally,
even a counterpart to Plato's mysterious Receptacle, the
matrix of becoming, in Whitehead's perhaps equally mysterious
notion of the 'Extensive Continuum'. This looks
a bit like a 20th Century mathematician's variation on the
Receptacle.[11]
So much for the pattern, the structural similarity, the
general story-line. Let us now have a
look at some of these elements in detail.
Eternal Objects and Platonic Ideas
'Eternal objects', for Whitehead, are forms of
definiteness, characters, ways of being definite or
determinate, qualities such as red or hard, also patterns,
also determinate ways of feeling qualities or patterns. They are what recurs
or may recur, repeatables, e.g.
the same shade of red or the same pattern may recur on or have
'ingression' in two different occasions and be recognized as
such. They are
also possibles or potentials, in two senses. On the one hand they
are possibilities: they are possible forms of definiteness,
the multiplicity of eternal objects in their various
combinations are so many different ways
for actual entities to be determined. On the other hand they are mere possibles, pure
potentials. Eternal
objects of themselves are neutral in
regard to their 'ingression' in particular actual
entities. They
may have ingression into actual entities, but as far as they
themselves are concerned they need not. Their "conceptual
recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any
definite actual entities of the temporal world" (PR 60/70 old
edition, 44 in new. For
the content of this paragraph, compare
also PR 22-23, SMW 190-193)
With respect to the words 'eternal', 'object': they are
eternal in the sense that what they are is not a product of
the actual process. They
are what they are, whether conceived
or not, whether instantiated or not, a form of that particular
definiteness and no other.
'Objects' meanwhile is a neutral word, to avoid
misleading historical connotations of words like 'Form',
'Idea', also 'universals' (cf. SMW 191, PR 44). "Objects" also
indicates the sense of givens -- givens for the subjects of
the creative process.
The class of 'eternal objects' is probably more
extensive than anything Plato dreamed of, even in the Republic. They include not
only possible objective qualities, which may become objects of
thinking. They
include also possible ways of thinking or feeling those
objects of thinking, abstract intensive patterns, the hows of feeling, as well as abstract
qualitative patterns. (Cf. PR 445-447 old edition, Emmet pp.
132-134.) That is to say, it includes determinate
ways of feeling about them and putting them together, "the
determinate ways in which the actual entity organizes its own
process of self-formation" and "the different qualitative ways
in which feelings are felt" (Emmet 133). In spite of the fact
that Whitehead was one of the greatest mathematicians of his
time and very much a lover of mathematics, there is
little trace here of any tendency to restriction or reduction
to logico-mathematical forms.[12] Dorothy
Emmet comments: "Plato represents Socrates in the Parmenides as shocked
at the thought of admitting Ideas of mud and hair into his
heaven of forms. He
might have been still more shocked at Whitehead's unrestricted
immigration policy." (Emmet 134)
On the other hand, eternal objects have no power except
they be ingredients in actual entities or occasions of
experience. All
power belongs to actual entities. This is Whitehead's
so-called 'Ontological Principle'. This is to say that
they have no power within the Cosmic Process except that they
be already physically realized as a form of definiteness
qualifying some thing or some nexus of things in the process,
or else they be conceived by something within the process, or conceived by God. "Apart from God,
eternal objects unrealized in the actual world would be
relatively non-existent for the concrescence in question. For effective
relevance requires agency of comparison, and agency belongs
exclusively to actual occasions." (PR 31)
One could perhaps find this idea already in the Timaeus: the forms
need the demiurge in order to get
copied in the cosmic process.
But there is more.
Eternal objects are far from being the completely real,
the realm of true Being.
They are not real, in no way have the status of an
entity or being, except that they be ingredient in an actual
entity or actual occasion, the happenings in which the
universe consists. Actual entities, the
pulsations of creative activity, are the only fully existent
entities. All
other entities exist only in the derivative sense of being
implicated in the existence of actual entities. (Cf. esp. PR
22, Fourth Category of Explanation.) In another sense of
Being, Being is to be defined in
terms of Becoming, rather than vice versa, this amounting to a
kind of reversal of the notion of Becoming as not fully real,
as tossing about between Being and Non-Being. 'Being' is what has
to be taken into account in any future becoming: "to be is to
be available for all future actualities".[13] In
other words, Being is the Past, the stubborn fact, what I or
anything else have to build life with or in relation to, what
I or anything else have or am given to take account of, more
or less creatively and imaginatively as the case may be. In Whitehead, then,
Being is in the service of
Becoming, rather than Becoming in the service of Being.
Even so, it is not as if the eternal objects are
somehow created by God or by other actual entities, some kind
of product of the actual process. They are what they
are whether they have ingression or not, whether conceived or
not, a form of that particular
definiteness and no other. They remain ultimate
constituents within the metaphysical scheme, not to be
resolved into other more basic constituents, e.g. God.
They are among the ideas which have necessarily to be invoked in their own right, in the
course of constructing a coherent, logical, necessary system
of general ideas in which every element of our experience
might be interpreted.
I would like to conclude this section on eternal
objects with a bit of further contextualization of this theme
in the rest of the system.
Whitehead's talk of 'eternal objects' does resonate
with Plato's eideos and idee (second e is
long) even at its most extreme, in spite
of some differences, and might well be regarded as a
Whiteheadian development of a line of thought suggested by
reading Plato. 'Eternal
objects' are also a crucial and indeed indispensable element
within Whitehead's system.
Without the eternal objects, the system falls apart,
God disappears among other things.[14] But
even if it were the case that every single element of
Whitehead's doctrine of eternal objects could be verified
somewhere in Plato's texts, the emphasis of the system as a
whole is elsewhere. The
emphasis is very much on process, and on the relationality
which results from processes depending on the total
environment provided by previous processes (and the 'eternal
actual entity' which is God).
"[T]he very essence of real actuality - that is, of the
completely real - is process. Thus
each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its
becoming and perishing." (AI 274) Every
actual thing is in its essence, reception, transformation and
transmission of energy and information from its total past
environment to its total future environment. Or, in more
anthropomorphic language, every actual entity or occasion of
experience is a more or less creative
taking into account of its total past environment, and a
giving of itself to be taken into account by the future of
that environment. Eternal
objects are ingredients in this process,
and represent the permanence in the midst of the
flux, the recurrence of the same forms of definiteness. But the eternal
objects have relevance for the process only in so far as they
already have ingression into it, either as realized or as
conceived, either within occasions in the total past
environment or as conceived by God. And in Whitehead it
is relevance for the process which counts.
God, the Demiourgos and the
World Soul
As already noted, it is the Divine envisagement of
'eternal objects' with a feeling for the ingression or
inclusion of some rather than others and of some combinations
and connections rather than others which explains the order in
the universe. This
envisagement explains the fact of order, the general kind of
order that we find, e.g. the
number of dimension, the ultimate statistical laws of nature,
the ultimate physical constants.
It explains also the fact
of evolution within the Cosmos towards more and more subtle
and complex types of ordering, 'societies' and 'enduring
objects' making possible higher and higher kinds of happening,
such as dolphins and apes and human beings.
This "unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire
multiplicity of eternal objects" is termed by Whitehead the
'primordial nature of God' (PR 31). Whitehead
thinks of it as involving a decision
which is completely independent of the creatures within the
cosmic process and on which the whole cosmic process depends:
thus 'unconditioned', 'primordial'. In addition it is not entirely dependent
either on the realm of eternal objects or the nature of God
herself. There
are internal relations within the realm of eternal objects:
every eternal object is in a completely determinate
relationship of inclusion, compatibility
or incompatibility with every other eternal object. (SMW 193) This
is to say, for example, that there cannot be the ingression of
a particular shade of red and the ingression of a particular
shade of blue in the same place at the same time. The same thing
cannot be both red and blue in the same place and the same
time, nor can it be both circular and square. However, this is not
enough by itself to explain either the possibility of
ingression of particular eternal
objects into the process or the particular, contingent
orderings that we find. If
it were, we could do science in an armchair, as relations of
ideas. But we
can't, we have to go out and look. The divine
envisagement of eternal objects orders the realm of objects in
respect of their relevance for the cosmic process, gives them
an order in respect of their relevance for the process that
they did not have before. (Cf. PR 31)
Nor is it entirely determined by the Divine Nature. 'God', like
everything else, is oriented towards Beauty, but Beauty is a
circle rather than a point (see later). In deciding on a
particular conceptual valuation of the multiplicity of eternal
objects God is in a manner deciding something of Herself, as a
God with a feeling for this particular
kind of Beauty, rather than some other kind. God acts 'for the
best', but within certain limitations it is God who decides
what is best.
So it is not as if God is
just copying an already-made blueprint, an already determined
eternal living being. The
divine ordering is itself a matter of fact, a creature of
creativity, "the primordial created fact" (PR 31). God has to create in order to be God (see
later), but there is a genuine freedom in respect of the kind
of world that God creates.
There has to be a world,
but not necessarily this world.
Within the Cosmic Process, God operates as both
'Principle of Limitation' and 'Principle of Possibility'. S/he operates as
principle of limitation in so far as the divine envisagement
brings a bias to possibilities, makes certain states of
affairs more probable than others, makes certain ways of
taking account of the past within the process more likely than
others. This
brings about a 'selective limitation' on what may happen (cf.
SMW 193-164) but such limitation is
required if anything interesting is to happen at all. But s/he operates
also as Principle of Possibility and of Novelty, making
possible the realization of forms of definiteness as yet unrealized in the actual world.
(PR 31)
It is because of the Divine envisagement of
all eternal objects that we are not entirely determined by our
past, or by the crowd or other features of the environment,
that possibilities are open to us and other creatures/partial
creators that are not already contained in the process. So Divine
'causality' and creaturely freedom are not opposed to each
other: in fact, one is the precondition of the other. There is, indeed, a
continuing Divine Lure on to greater things, which operates in
the universe as a principle of unrest, moving the universe
onwards towards more and more complex and subtle kinds of
ordering and more and more interesting kinds of happenings. Thus Whitehead's
'God' fulfils the functions also of the World Soul.
The Consequent and Projective Natures of God
'God' according to Whitehead's system is
not the only player in the universe, not the only entity with
initiative and creativity.
Creativity is a feature of actual existence as such. Everything is a more or less creative taking into
account of its total past environment and a giving of itself
to be taken into account by the future of its environment. What distinguishes
God is that God is the only cosmically available and always
creatively influential actual entity.
This brings us to a whole other side to Whitehead's God
in respect of which the influence of Plato is probably quite
minimal. God is
also supremely relative.
As well as the most creative, God is also the most
receptive of entities. Like
everything else, God is both condition of creativity and
creature of creativity. By
reason of its character as a creature, always in concrescence
and never in the past, it receives a reaction from the world. This reaction is the
so-called 'Consequent Nature of God' (PR 31) which comes into
its own in Part V of Process
and Reality: God as consequent on the Cosmic Process, in
contrast to God as primordial to the Process. God meanwhile has to have a consequent nature in
order to be a bona fide actual entity. Unless required by
the metaphysical system itself, God should be conceived not as
an exception to metaphysical principles which govern actual
entities but as their prime exemplification. Which is to say that
God has to be receptive as well as
creative, in order to be an actual entity at all. Without a consequent
nature the Divine Event, so far as the system is concerned,
would be "deficient in actuality".
By the Consequent Nature of God is meant God's
'prehension' of the Universe, God's reception of the Universe
into God's own being. For
accuracy of interpretation we may
distinguish two stages in this.
Firstly, there is the immediate physical prehension or
feeling of the actual entities exactly as they are,
immediately after they happen.
There is no 'negative prehension' in God. Everything is known
and felt, down to the last detail. God is in this
sense, "the great companion, the fellow-sufferer who
understands" (PR 351). God suffers the
pains and also enjoys the joys, the joy in heaven that the
Christian Gospels speak about,
exactly as they are, though not as God's joys and pains, in
their immediacy and full detail but not in their subjective
immediacy. God
feels our anger and despair but it
is not as if God is therefore angry or despairing.
Secondly, there is the transformation of what is
received into the life of God.
In spite of suffering the
evils down to the last detail, God is not, so to speak, bashed
or put down by the experience.
There is a phase of 'conceptual supplementation',
seeing the evils in the light of further possibilities, ways
towards the future not envisaged among the creatures by
themselves, still hope. God
also responds, rather than reacts, always, unlike the rest of
us, and always well. But
to do so as with us the matter has first to be dealt with in
God's own life.
As Emmet notes (p. 235-236), this idea of Divine
Reception of the whole Cosmic Process allows Whitehead to do
much fuller justice to the reality and value of this passing
world than was possible to Plato. The whole cosmic
process and our lives with it are going to have "objective
immortality" in God, they live on in God. In spite of their
passing character they make a permanent, everlasting
contribution to the Divine Life, and in this way also partake
in immortality.
Beyond this Consequent Nature there is what is
sometimes termed the 'Projective Nature' of God, the flowing
back into the Universe that Whitehead talks of in the closing
paragraphs of Process
and Reality, the Divine Response, subsequent on God
dealing with it in Her own mind, making it Her own. The Divine
Persuasion which we feel is partly independent of the
creatures, partly a follow on from the appropriation of the
details of the living of the creatures into the life of God. While maintaining a
constant general character and directedness, the Divine
persuasion allows itself to be modulated in respect of its
detail by the process itself. There is an element within the
Divine Persuasion which is unconditioned and a further element
which is conditioned. God
is Creative-Responsive Love.
This receptive-responsive side to the Divine in
Whitehead's thought would appear to involve a considerable
'conceptual supplementation' to anything he may have read in
Plato. It is
determined rather by intra-systemic considerations[15], re-enforced, probably, by meditation on
experiences having to do with "the Galilean origin of
Christianity" (PR 343).
The Receptacle, Creativity and the Extensive
Continuum
The problem here is that there are two candidates in
Whitehead for the status of Whiteheadian counterpart to
Plato's Receptacle. There is firstly
'creativity' in the Science
and the Modern World sense of the ultimate substantial
activity of nature[16]; but
there is also the Whiteheadian concept of the 'Extensive
Continuum"[17]. Both
of these might be regarded as particularized by the ingression
of the forms under the influence of the Demiurge and, in the
manner of the Receptacle according to Whitehead (AI 187)
fulfilling the function of imposing a unity upon the events of
Nature, making it all the one Nature.
The source of this difficulty in the scholarship is
probably that there has been a development in Whitehead's own
thinking. Whitehead
moves, or apparently moves, from a monistic concept of
Creativity in Science
and the Modern World, to a pluralistic notion in Process and Reality.[18] In
Process and Reality
and beyond (cf. AI 150) it is the 'Extensive Continuum' which
is given the role of imposing unity on the events of nature,
making them all part of the one community, and which generally
takes the place of the Platonic Receptacle in Whitehead's
analysis.
Creativity[19] in the earlier sense of 'substantial
activity' is the passage of nature itself, something like the
Evolving Universe considered as a kind of underlying substance
which is variously qualified as the process goes along. "The unity of all
actual occasions forbids the analysis of substantial
activities into independent entities. Each individual
activity is nothing but the mode in which the general activity
is individualized by the imposed conditions." (SMW 211)[20] This
concept does provide a 'third term' to the welter of events
and the forms which they illustrate (cf
RM 77-78), and does provide some almost verbal parallels to
passages in the Timaeus
(cf. Emmet 223): it is rather like "a natural matrix for all
things, moved and variously figured by the things that enter
it, but through their agency takes on divers appearances at
divers times" (Timaeus
50c), as determined by the imposed conditions including
the divine envisagement (cf. SMW 211) or persuasion of the Demiourgos. And it is in itself
"devoid of forms", with "the things that enter and leave it"
something analogous to "copies of the eternal things moulded upon them in an obscure and
wondrous fashion". However,
the inspiration is Spinoza rather than Plato:
"The general activity is not an entity in
the sense in which occasions or eternal objects are entities. It is a general
metaphysical character which underlies all occasions, in a
particular mode for each occasion. There is nothing
with which to compare it: it is Spinoza's one infinite
substance. Its
attributes are its character of individualization into a
multiplicity of modes, and the realm of eternal objects which
are variously synthesized in these modes. Thus eternal
possibility and modal differentiation into individual
multiplicity are the attributes of the one substance." (SMW
211-212)[21]
In Process and
Reality, however, Creativity is apparently no longer the
underlying substance which undergoes modifications as the
process goes on. It
is the generic name for what everything is doing, the kind of
activity in which the universe consists, which is "being
creative" in a sense to be soon defined. That the universe is
doing this kind of thing is itself however in the way of an
ultimate general fact[22], except that it is not 'matter of fact' in
the sense of the obtaining of a nexus of events or combination
of objects nor in the sense of the existence of an entity, but
rather that without the obtaining of which there would be no
facts in either of these senses.
It belongs to the nature of things that the many enter
into a complex unity, which is also the source of novelty, new
things which in their turn become part of the many which enter
into further complex unities.
That's just the way it is. From the section on
the Category of the Ultimate:
'Creativity' is the universal of universals
characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate
principle by which the many, which are the universe
disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the
universe conjunctively. It
lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex
unity.
...The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance
from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other
than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is
at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds, and
also it is one among the disjunctive 'many' which it leaves;
it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities
which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased
by one. In their
natures, entities are disjunctively 'many' in process of
passage into conjunctive unity. (PR 21).
Each actual entity, then, including God, is a
'creature', that is to say, both a product and an instance of
creativity, as well as being a condition for further
creativity. But
there is no longer the sense of everything being modifications
of the one underlying substance.
In its ultimacy it has the same status as Aristotle's
category of 'primary substance' (cf. PR 21), but only in
respect of its ultimacy. There is no activity apart from the
individual pulsations each taking account of the ones before
and giving themselves to be taken into account by the ones
after. This is in
spite of certain analogies also with the Aristotelian
'matter', and the modern 'neutral stuff' (PR 31) and we might
say also with Plato's Receptacle. It is devoid of
forms, "without a character of its own", though always found
under conditions and described as conditioned. But it is now
divested of the notion of passive receptivity, either of
'form', or of external relations. (Cf. PR 31). It is what
everything is an instance of, in the very nature of things,
rather than some underlying Spinozistic
substance variously qualified as the process goes on.
Creativity in this latter sense does bring about a kind
of formal unity to the universe: everything is doing the same
kind of thing, creating itself on the basis of previous
creations and providing the material for further creations. But its main
function is to secure the character of the universe to be
perpetually going on: its ultimate character is that of
self-creating, other creating activity. That there is a
universe and that it keeps going on is "in the nature of
things". What the
universe is like, of course, is determined partly by God and
partly by the creatures of creativity and conditioners of
further creativity themselves.
The unity of the universe in Process and Reality
and beyond is achieved by another, almost equally difficult
notion, that of the 'Extensive Continuum'. This probably does
provide a "still closer parallel" (Emmet 223) to Plato's
Receptacle or Locus (chora),
except that it is even more abstract. It is something like
an ultimate space-time continuum before dimensionality (the
number and kind of dimensions) has been decided and the
continuum quantized or atomized by the creative process
itself. It is the
general realm of systematic relationship. It is that of which
the three dimensions of space and the four dimensions of the
space-time continuum as it actually obtains (or however many
dimensions there are according to current physics) are already
a particularization, a concretization or limitation on a more
abstract possibility. (Cf. SMW 194) But it is also that
which provides Cosmic Unity.
Everything has a place or will have a place in respect
of other events in the one expanding nexus of events. For any two events,
either one event prehends the other or is prehended by the
other, or in the case of contemporaries which are by
definition causally independent of each other, there are
events which both events prehend or are prehended by (cf. AI
195-196)[23]. Whatever,
any two events will have a place in relation to each other in
the overall community of events.
Everything is or will be somewhere in the one
community. (For
the Extensive Continuum, cf. especially PR 66-67.)
This is something like a 20th Century mathematician's
variation on Plato's Receptacle or Locus of all becoming. However, in spite of
its being even more abstract, as Dorothy Emmet points out
also, the Extensive Continuum is not entirely characterless
and structureless. There
are certain general relations between events which are
determined in advance, even prior to conditioning by the
primordial envisagement of eternal objects or by what has
already happened. (PR
66, cf. Emmet, 224.) She
also thinks that "we should beware of ascribing to Plato in
the Timaeus the
'relational' view of Space, as defining possible and actual
forms of relatedness between events, which is implied in
Whitehead's view of the Extensive Continuum." (Emmet 224.)
Beauty as the Ultimate Value: both for God and
for other actual entities in the Cosmic Process
This has already been mentioned briefly above. It is something
which connects Whitehead with Plato and the Platonic
tradition, e.g. the Symposium, e.g.
Augustine's Confession,
"I have learned to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient
and so new! I
have learnt to love you late!" (Confessions, Book 10,
Paragraph 27, Penguin Classics, p. 231). But in its character
as the ultimate value it probably also distinguishes him from
it. What the
medieval historian Etienne Gilson in one place calls "the
forgotten transcendental"[24] is in Whitehead's system given priority
over the others.
Beauty is the harmony and 'strength' of experience. Strength has two
factors: variety or 'massiveness' and intensity, with
intensity enhanced by variety via effective contrasts. The Beautiful, as
distinct from Beauty, is that the objective content of which
is such as to promote or enhance Beauty. (AI 252-253)
Evil happens in two directions, with the Good in the
middle. There is
the evil of chaos and catastrophe, too much variety and
intensity to be coped with, painful, chaotic, tragic,
meaningless, senseless, too much discord, not enough harmony
and unity. But
there is also evil possible in the other direction, the evil
of boredom and lack of fulfilment and achievement, unity,
order and harmony purchased at the expense of zest, variety
and intensity. Comparable
to Beauty versus the Beautiful, we may also distinguish
Intrinsic Good and Evil and Instrumental Good and Evil. Instrumental Evil is
features of our environment or our past which tend to make our
lives more boring and trivial or more discordant and chaotic
and painful than they have to be. (Cf. Hartshorne.)
Beauty, meanwhile, is connected with but not the same
as Truth. Truth,
or the truth-relation in the most general sense consists in a
partial identity of pattern between two objects, such that the
examination of one of them can disclose some factor belonging
to the essence of the other. Whitehead
compares this to the Platonic notion of 'participation'. (AI 242) Truth in the
narrower, more important sense, has to do with the
relationship between Appearance and Reality, or more exactly
conformation or partial identity of pattern between the
Appearance I create on the basis of the way I am being
affected, and the Reality by which I am affected. (cf. AI
265-6.) Truth in
either sense is not of itself beautiful. It may not even be
neutral. In
certain situations it may even be evil. "Thus Beauty is left
as the one aim which by its very nature is self-justifying."
(AI 266) On the
other hand, "[n]otwithstanding the
possible unseasonableness of the truth-relation, the general
importance of Truth for the promotion of Beauty is
overwhelming." (A 266) Truth
is a way of achieving Harmony, a kind of harmony within
experience between the way one is being affected and what one
creates in one's creative taking into account of it, one's
trying to make sense and meaning of it. The final stretch of
Beauty requires Truth and cannot be had without it. In the extremity of
Beauty there takes place a disclosure of Reality beyond all
words. (AI
266-267)
The whole
universe and all its ingredients are to be envisaged as a
process of attainment towards beauty, with beauty understood
as the immanent final cause of the social process, both in
detail and as a whole. The
universe doesn't exist to be logical or rational a la Hegel,
or even to be ethical: the goal is harmony and intensity of
experience. This
is not an extrinsic aim, though.
It is written into the nature of the process, what
things are after, being what they are and doing what they do
as events prehending their environment. "The many become one
and are increased by one", and the aim is to take account of
as much as is possible in the situation, in a more or less
harmonious way. The
possibilities for this in the universe increase as order
becomes more complex and higher grade entities and enduring
objects emerge, under the persuasion of the divine
envisagement.
The other great 'process' philosopher Charles
Hartshorne is rather strong on this feature of Whitehead's
philosophy. According
to Charles Hartshorne, one of the great advantages of making
beauty the ultimate value is that it is not elitist and
crosses the human non-human barrier. Thus, according to
Hartshorne[25], it is illustrated by animal enjoyment of
life and also much human enjoyment, cats and dogs enjoying the
harmonious use of their muscles, infants and young children
fleeing from aesthetic disvalue, enjoying something new
provided it is not too much and not too threatening. Thus our own
enjoyment of humour. We are after beauty,
in the sense of the harmony and intensity of feelings, neither
bored nor in a state of hopeless conflict, with boredom as bad
as conflict, which is why we go to the cinima
to be scared: it is better than being bored. This is something to
be careful of also in human relationships: boredom kills. Certain
well-intentioned people might want to make truth or
rationality or ethical goodness, the fundamental value, in
spite of much of our own living.
But, to continue the Hartshornean
rhetoric, what are children doing, what are the other animals
doing, what is the rest of creation doing, and what are we
doing the rest of the time?
And isn't the value of being good anyway partly:
1)that there is something aesthetically
good about a good will, it is not in basic discord, in principle in harmony
with oneself and other people, ethical goodness as beauty of
character, as with David Hume for example (there may well be
more Hume in all of this than Plato); and partly
2)that wicked people tend to destroy the
beauty of life, for themselves and more particularly for
others.
Thus Hartshorne on this issue.
This non-anthropocentric vision might be thought to
have certain advantages for people interested in ecology and
the environment. It
might also have some advantages for natural theologians. An interesting
corollary of treating beauty rather than goodness as the
fundamental value in the universe is that it solves Leibniz's
(and also Plato's?) problem of God having to produce the best
of all possible worlds. As
noted briefly above, Beauty is a circle[26] rather than a point, there is room of
choice. God
chooses to aim for a particular kind of beauty in the
universe, a particular way of integrating unity and variety,
harmony and intensity, and in so doing chooses him/herself as
a particular kind of God.
Also spoiling the possibility of 'best of all possible
universes' is the fact that God is not the only player in the
universe, albeit the only cosmically available and
omnitemporal player. Everything
does its little bit, to be is to have power, to play a part.
God as primordial in respect of creation might then be
compared to a Cosmic Gambler, playing for the perfect balance
between harmony and unity on the one hand and variety and
complexity and intensity on the other. S/he could play
safe, but only at the cost of variety and intensity. Or s/he could play
for high stakes in respect of variety and intensity but at the
probable cost of loss of harmony and unity. But the good thing
to do is to play for a balance, an integration of harmony,
variety and intensity, with God as determining eventually the
kind of balance, the particular species of beauty. Even this is not
certain, in so far as God is not the only player. But perhaps, as with
the philosopher of religion John Hick in another context, in
respect of the factual non-existence of hell[27], it could be made highly probable,
reliable in the long run and overall but not the how and not
the particular details. Whatever,
it will not involve the destruction or elimination of variety
- in the final state of the Reign of God there are still lions
and lambs - but the integration of unity and variety.[28]
Conclusion:
I conclude that there is enough external evidence, in
the way of what Whitehead thought he was doing and what at
least some other people in the know think that he is doing;
and that there is probably enough internal evidence, in the
way of developments in Whitehead's system of notions to be
found in Plato, for us to regard Whitehead as a modern
Platonist and consequently in respect of his contemporary
followers a founder of a new and still continuing Platonic
tradition. But of
course it depends on what is meant by calling him a Platonist. He is, or was, a
Platonist at least in the sense defined by Dorothy Emmet, of
someone who has "carried out an imaginative development of a
line of thought suggested to [him] by reading Plato", whether
or not the ideas he finds in Plato are really there. (Emmet,
103) The
evidence, in my impression, would suggest in spite of or in
the midst of important and illuminating contrasts, probably a
lot more than this. Whatever,
I think I have done enough to show that the Platonic
perspective provides an interesting and insightful way of
appropriating a large portion of another rather complicated
metaphysical world view.
It is not for the historian to determine the validity
of either world view nor even the legitimacy of attempting
this kind of enterprise, though I suspect the human need for
some such attempt still has not gone away.
[1]. Dorothy
Emmet, Whitehead's Philosophy
of Organism, 2nd Edition, Macmillan, London, 1966, pp.
102-103. Cf. also pp. 240-241:
"We may not be able completely to accept Whitehead's
views; but at any rate we can express our gratitude to him
for such a magnificent attempt to give us a "modern form of
Platonism"..." Original
edition: Macmillan, London, 1932.
[2]. In
A. E. Taylor, Plato,
the Man and His Work, Methuen, London, 1926, Sixth
Edition 1949, and A
Commentary on Plato's Timaeus,
Oxford, 1927. Footnote
1 on p. 456 of the former reads: "There is an almost
absolute equivalence of Timeaus'
analysis with that of Whitehead in his Principles of Natural
Knowledge and Concept
of Nature. Whitehead's
'objects' have exactly the formal character of the ideai; his account of the 'ingredience of objects into events'
corresponds almost verbally with that given by Timaeus of the determination of the
various regions of the 'receptacle' by the 'ingress' and
'egress' of the impresses of the forms. The 'receptacle'
itself only differs from 'passage' in being called 'space'
and not 'space-time'. If
we try to picture 'passage' as it would be if there were
only 'events' and no 'objects' ingredient in them, we get
precisely the sort of account Timaeus
gives of the condition of the 'receptacle' before God
introduced order and structure into it." Cf. also p.
190, footnote 1, p. 440.
[3]. Cf.,
for example, Ernest Wolf-Gazo,
"Whitehead within the Context of the History of Philosophy",
Process Studies,
Vol. 14, No. 4, Winter 1985, p. 217, "It is not an
overstatement to hold the opinion that in truth, Whitehead's
magnum opus Process
and Reality is basically a more refined and
generalized cosmological treatment of Plato's Timaeus." Also the article
"Platonism and the Platonic Tradition", by D. A. Rees, in P.
Edwards, Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (Macmillan, N.Y., 1967), Volume 6, p.
340: Whitehead as "the last and greatest of the Cambridge
Platonists". For
an earlier extensive and sophisticated treatment
concentrating on Whitehead's doctrine of 'eternal objects',
cf. J.N. Mohanty, Nicolai Hartmann
and Alfred North Whitehead: A Study in Recent Platonism
(Progressive Publishers, Calcutta, 1957).
[4]. There
is a short bibliography of books and articles and doctoral
theses (27 titles) put out by the Center for Process
Studies, Claremont, CA., of material available at the
Center, entitled "Process Thought, Plato, Platonism and
Neo-Platonism".
[5]. For instance, apart from a single paragraph
in Wolf-Gazo's preface to an
Issue on Whitehead and the History of Philosophy (P.S. 14,
4, 1985, 217, already cited), and an article by Leonard J. Eslick on "Plato as Dipolar Theist"
(P.S. 12, 4, 1982, 243-251) focussed on Plato himself, there
is no article in over twenty years of Process Studies on
the connection between Whitehead and Plato. There are articles
on Whitehead and Aristotle (P.S. 12/1, 14/4, 19/1, 19/3),
Whitehead and Locke (7/3,
14/4), Whitehead and Hegel (15/4), Whitehead and German
Idealism (14/4), Whitehead and Nietzsche
(12/1), Whitehead and Bradley (14/4), Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty (12/1), but nothing on
Whitehead and Plato. The
article by Eslick, which is
focussed on Plato, is mostly a work of exegesis pointing to
two different theisms middle
and late Dialogues respectively. The notion of a
dipolar theism along the model of Whitehead and Hartshorne provides a way of
bringing the two together.
This possibility of a Platonic dipolar theism is then
re-enforced by an exegesis of some texts from The Parmenides and The Sophist. The effect of the
article, if successful, is to moderate what might otherwise
look like a contrast between Plato and Whitehead: see later
on the Consequent and Projective Natures of God.
[6]. For
references to Whitehead, I'm adopting the conventions of the
journal Process
Studies: 'PR'
- Process and
Reality (1929), Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray
Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne,
The Free Press, N.Y., 1978;
'AI' - Adventures
of Ideas (1933), The Free Press, N.Y., 1967; 'SMW' - Science and the Modern
World (1925), The Free Press, N.Y., 1967 (but here I
will be using the Fontana Books edition, Fontana, Collins,
1975). 'SP'
will refer to the posthumously published collection, Science and Philosophy
(1948), Philosophical Library, New York, 1948. As a useful
addition to the published works of Whitehead in respect of
the topic of relations with Plato, there are some (student
recorded) lecture notes available from Whitehead's course at
Harvard in the Fall of 1934 entitled Cosmologies Ancient and
Modern, published in the Journal of the History
of Philosophy, Vol. 9 (1971) pp. 70-78, with an
introduction by the student in question Joseph Gerard
Brennan (pp. 67-70), the whole under the title "Whitehead on
Plato's Cosmology". I
will refer to this as 'WPC'.
[7]. Cf.
AI 129 "It was
Plato in his later mood who put forward the suggestion, "and
I hold that the definition of being is simply power." AI 179, "...where
the Platonic definition of 'real' in the Sophist is referred
to". Also WPC,
pp. 73-74, citing from Sophist, 247e,
"Being is an energy arising from a power... Anything
affected by anything, however slight, has existence... I
venture to state that Being is Power." Cf. the commentary
of Joseph Gerard Brennan, pp. 69-70, on the importance of
this text for Whitehead, with Brennan going on to comment,
"If Whitehead had ever heard of the suggestion that this
famous passage might conceivably be a Stoic interpolation,
he made no mention of it in class." Also SP p. 125,
referring to Sophist,
258 about non-being as a form of being. Cf.,
finally, PR, "Editors' Notes", p. 394, to p. 22, line 35,
"In the margin of his Macmillan copy, Whitehead wrote: "cf.
Plato's Sophist 247
i.e. disjunctive diversity is potentiality." The PR text in
question is the fourth Category of Explanation and gives
Whitehead's criterion for the status of an 'entity' or
'being'. "It
asserts that the notion of an 'entity' means 'an element
contributory to the process of becoming'." PR 28. The text of the Sophist is also
cited by Dorothy Emmet, Whitehead's Philosophy
of Organism, p. 135, citing both 247e and 249a and
making comparisons with ideas expressed in various texts in
Process and Reality.
[8]. Compare
PR xiv, footnote 3, also PR 42
and 82; AI, viii; WPR
68.
[9]. There
is for example no trace of Taylor's hypothesis in his A Commentary on Plato's
Timaeus, also Plato, The Man and His
Work, pp. 436-437, that the Timaeus
gives us the views of a fifth century Pythagorean rather
than Plato's own views.
[11]. For this paragraph, cf. Emmet,
105-106, 221-222, Brennan, p. 69, Bruce Epperly, "Creation and Causation in
Whitehead and Plato's Timaeus",
working paper, Center for Process Studies, Claremont, c.
1980, [PM 3:4] p. 7.
[12]. Cf. however, J.N. Mohanty,
Nicolai Hartmann
and Alfred North Whitehead: A Study in Recent Platonism
(Progressive Publishers, Calcutta, 1957), concerning an
important change between early works such as Principles of Natural
Knowledge and Concept
of Nature, and the more developed positions in the
1926 work, Science
and the Modern World, and in Process and Reality
(1929). In SMW "the world of
'objects' is ... reduced to the so-called sense-objects and
the mathematical forms" (p. 56), while perceptual objects
such as tables and chairs, and scientific objects such as
electrons are now recognized as organisms, compounded of
events. In PR the eternal
objects are classified into two groups, the 'subjective' and
the 'objective', with the latter included but not restricted
to the 'mathematical Platonic forms' (p. 82); these words
'subjective' and 'objective' refer however not to
ontological or epistemological status but to mode and
situation of ingression, it being possible for some eternal
objects e.g. sense objects such as a particular shade of
green, to function both ways (pp. 82-83). As Mohanty's extensive treatment
demonstrates, making sense of Whitehead's developing
doctrine of eternal objects is a very complicated business.
[13]. Charles Hartshorne,
introduction in Philosophers
in Process, edited D. Browning (Random House, N.Y.,
1965), p. xix. Cf. PR, p. 22,
"...every item in its universe is involved in each
concrescence. In
other words, it belongs to the nature of 'being' that it is
a potential for every 'becoming'."
[14]. For a defence of
the necessity of Whitehead's doctrine of eternal objects
within his system, see Mohanty,
Op. Cit., pp.
92-101. This is
not to say that people cannot develop a Process-Relational
Philosophy without eternal objects. This latter is
exactly what the process philosopher Charles Hartshorne manages. On the question of
Universals, Hartshorne is a
variety of nominalist. For his view on
Whitehead's eternal objects and his approach to universals,
see Creative
Synthesis and Philosophic Method (Open Court,
Illinois, 1970), Ch. IV.
[15]. Cf. PR 31-32: "The non-temporal act of
all-inclusive unfettered valuation is at once a creature of
creativity and a condition for creativity. It shares this
double character with all creatures. By reason of its
character as a creature, always in concrescence and never in
the past, it receives a reaction from the world; this reaction is
its consequent nature.
It is here termed 'God'; because the contemplation of
our natures, as enjoying real feelings derived from the
timeless source of all order, acquires that 'subjective
form' of refreshment and companionship at which religions
aim."
[17]. Cf. Emmet, pp.
223-4. Emmet regards this as susceptible of
"a still closer parallel", while also noting some
differences.
[18]. For a more sophisticated discussion of
'Creativity' in Whitehead and various interpretations and
modifications of the notion in Whiteheadian
scholarship and the Whiteheadian
process-relational tradition, see John R. Wilcox, "A
Monistic Interpretation of Whitehead's Creativity", Process Studies,
Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 1991, pp. 162-174. I'm not sure I
agree with his own development of Whitehead. Part of the
argument for it is the difficulty of understanding "how the
past can have a role in shaping the present, if the past is
truly perished. It
seems that it may play a role only through the agency of
something that by its very nature extends into the present"
(p. 172), e.g. Creativity.
But the whole question has to do with the meaning of
'perishing'. 'Perishing'
means ceasing to have subjective immediacy rather than
ceasing to have power or ceasing altogether to be. Whitehead's is a
revisionist metaphysics in which perishing is passing away
but also passing into another kind of power and another kind
of being, a passage from self-creation to other-creation. See especially
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and Philosophy
(Philosophical Library, N.Y., 1948), pp. 125-126. Cf. Mohanty, Op. Cit., p. 80. However I cannot
claim to have given the matter the attention that Wilcox or
other equally sophisticated interpreters of Whitehead have
given it.
[19]. The technical word 'Creativity' is introduced
in Whitehead's next major work (the following year) Religion in the Making
(1926), (Cambridge University Press, 1926) with the definite
article attached, 'the creativity'. It occurs
first in a summary presentation of his "metaphysical
description", which includes a footnote reference back to Science and the Modern
World (1925): "For the application to science of this
description, cf. my Science
and the Modern World." (RM 76). "The creativity"
continues to retain a unity, e.g. RM 79, "Accordingly, the
creativity for a creature becomes the creativity with the
creature, and thereby passes into another phase of itself." He does make the
point that we ought not to conceive it as an actual entity,
"For its character lacks determinateness."
(RM 80) On the
other hand, he has already said this much in Science and the Modern
World: "The general activity is not an entity in the
sense in which occasions or eternal objects are entities."
(SMW 211). So
probably not too much should be made of this.
[20]. Cf. SMW 132: "But the whole point of the
modern doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms
from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus
cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental to
nature. It also
requires an underlying activity - a substantial activity -
expressing itself in individual embodiments, and evolving in
achievements of organism."
[21]. Cf. SMW 152: "This adjustment is thus the
adjustment of the underlying active substances whereby these
substances exhibit themselves as the individualization or
modes of Spinoza's one
substance."
[23]. This phraseology is meant to allow for the
possibility noted by Whitehead in AI 196: "...if A and B are
contemporaries and P is contemporary with A, then it is not
necessarily true that P is contemporary with B. It is possible
that P may be earlier than B, or that it may be later than
B. Thus even
the occasions in the past of A are not wholly in the past of
B."
[24]. Etienne Gilson,
The Elements of
Christian Philosophy (Doubleday and Company, New York,
1960), p. 174.
[25]. From notes taken of Hartshorne's
lectures at the University of Leuven,
Belgium, in late 1978.
[26]. Compare Charles Hartshorne's
use of the 'Dessoir-Davis
Circle', in Creative
Synthesis and Philosophic Method (Open Court,
Illinois, 1970), Ch. XVI The
Aesthetic Matrix of Value, especially the diagram on p. 305. He uses it also in
Wisdom and Moderation
(SUNY Press, Albany, N.Y., 1987), p. 3. My exposition of
Whitehead on Beauty is strongly inspired by some lectures of
Hartshorne on Whitehead's
philosophy during his stay at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in late 1978. Hartshorne has his own version of
process philosophy. However,
he did study under Whitehead, knows Whitehead's system
intimately, and when setting out explicitly to expose
Whitehead's views as he was here, he is usually regarded by
fellow process thinkers as a good witness.
[27]. John Hick, Evil and the God of
Love (Fontana, Collins, 1966), Ch.
XVII. This is
to go beyond classic Whitehead process thinking on the
question, however.