I have a confession: I almost never read Prefaces to books. It is usually pointless to read the preface; after all, if there is something important to be said, it will be said in the body of the work. And while some people like to read prefaces to understand the direction that the book will take or the structure of the book, I tend to feel that if you don’t have a pretty good idea of what happened after reading the book, there’s very little that could be said in a preface to change that.
I’m not sure why I read the Preface to Process and Reality last night. I had the book with me for dinner, and was preparing my notes on the first chapter when I got the brilliant idea to read the editors’ notes. I think I was curious about why there was a need for a corrected edition. After I was done reading the editors’ notes, I just kept reading through the preface. And I’m glad I did, because the Preface to Process and Reality is actually helpful.
In the editors’ notes, Griffin and Sherburne note that Process and Reality “is highly technical and far from easy to understand.” That would be a bit of an understatement. I had always assumed that this was so for two main reasons. 1) Whitehead creates much of his own vocabulary, so learning process can be a bit like learning a new language. Before one can understand the concepts, one must first understand the language, but Whitehead tends to use the new language without much explanation of the new term, why it was coined, etc. 2) These are the Gifford lecture series, so they are not necessarily organized the same as an introductory explication might be. The lectures were developed after Process philosophy had already been developed, so the book presupposes that the reader is already familiar with key process ideas.
After reading the preface, I believe there is a third reason why Process and Reality is such a difficult read: Whitehead approached his writing the same way he approached his philosophy. That will require a bit of explanation.
One of Whitehead’s main critiques of modern philosophy is that it is not holistic. It tries to answer specific questions divorced from their context. Whitehead points out that it is not possible to divorce anything from its world, such that any attempt to provide answers divorced from context will skew the answers. To this end, one of the main goals of Process and Reality is to provide a defense for “speculative philosophy.” Without spending too much time on speculative philosophy at the moment (as this will be discussed in the first chapter), speculative philosophy is essentially a way of doing philosophy that attempts to provide an accounting for the ultimate nature of things. What is reality, at the most fundamental level? This way of doing philosophy had fallen into disrepute by the early 20th century, a victim of what Durant calls the “hijacking” of philosophy by epistemology. Recovering speculative philosophy from its aura of disrepute was one of Whitehead’s main goals. But as one develops a theory of the ultimate nature of reality and tries to connect that theory to the rest of the world, one sometimes comes head to head with opposing viewpoints in the different questions which are normally answered in isolation. In writing his book, Whitehead chose to take these issues on one by one. Thus, he never really develops any of his doctrines at length. All of Process’ doctrines are developed bit by bit in the context of the particular discussion where they apply. Whitehead explains thusly:
Thus, the unity of treatment is to be looked for in the gradual development of the scheme, in meaning and in relevance, and not in the successive treatment of particular topics. For example, the doctrines of time, of space, of perception, and of causality are recurred to again and again, as the cosmology develops. In each recurrence, these topics throw some new light on the scheme or receive some new elucidation. At the end, in so far as the enterprise has been successful, there should be no problem of space-time, or of epistemology, or of causality, left over for discussion. (emphasis mine)
Without discussing the relative merits of this particular approach, I will say that it is … well, different. It can be a bit like meeting someone who is intensely interested in politics, but who never tells you what his political beliefs are. You are left trying to discover his political beliefs by the random comments he makes on world events and political developments.
In his Preface, Whitehead goes into the particular structuring scheme of Process and Reality. I will spare you those details, as they do not relate to an understanding of Process Philosophy, and as the particulars of each section will be explained within my commentary on the relevant section. I do think it is important to understand the main goals of Process and Reality. In a sense, these goals are reactionary, because Whitehead developed these goals in critique of prevailing sentiments within the philosophical community in the early decades of the 20th century. As those prevailing sentiments have largely gone unchanged, the goals of Process and Reality are surprisingly relevant today. I should point out that the goals here are largely negative. In other words, Whitehead is critical of the quoted philosophical ideas.
Goals
1) “The distrust of speculative philosophy.” I have already commented on this, but Whitehead was a major opponent of the prevailing philosophical sentiment that the ultimate nature of reality was a taboo subject for philosophy. Whitehead felt that any discipline worth doing was grounded in some form of speculative philosophy, whether those ideas about the ultimate nature of reality were explicit or implicit. He felt that by presenting those ideas explicitly, they were more accountable and could be improved through criticism, and that if the ideas were not presented explicitly, they would not go away they would simply be implicitly affirmed and thus not subjected to criticism.
2) “The trust in language as an adequate expression of propositions.” Whiteheads position, to be elaborated on more fully in the next chapter, is that language cannot be an adequate description of reality, and that in trying to make it so we expose ourselves to philosophical errors. I think the best example of this in Whitehead’s work is the fallacy that Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” which is essentially the fallacy of presuming that an abstraction is more real than it actually is. From personal experience in dialogue with others, I see this philosophical blunder everywhere. And what’s sad is that it is often not recognized as a philosophical blunder at all, even in academia.
3) “The mode of philosophical thought which implies, and is implied by, the faculty-psychology.” Ok, this takes a bit of explaining, and I may not be doing justice to the idea. The “faculty-psychology” is simply the idea that the mind is composed of separate “faculties”, (hence the name.) So people who have this view will think of the “emotions” as distinct from the “intelligence” as distinct from the “will”. One of the things that I’ve written consistently, (although, to be honest, I’ve struggled trying to explain how it is so,) is that mind is inseparable from all that it does. One cannot have a mind devoid of intelligence (however primitive that intelligence might be,) or a mind devoid of emotion or will. It is a contradiction in terms. I’ve dealt with this idea briefly in my blog here, in a little piece I called “the Philosophy of Data”: http://calebjohnson.org/blog/?p=383
4) “The subject-predicate form of expression.” At the risk of defining Whitehead’s views through someone else’s work, I am going to make a book recommendation here, at this point, to emphasize Whitehead’s point. The subject-predicate form of expression is critiqued very well in a book by Martin Buber (a Jewish Rabbi) called I and Thou. Buber’s point, (and I think probably Whitehead’s too,) is that we have a choice: we can view the world either as I and IT (where the world and other entities in it are things.) Or I can view it as I and THOU (where the world and the other entities in it are other experiencing subjects.) Most people probably have a hybrid view, where they view the world mostly in an I and IT way while reserving “I and THOU” for their dealings with other human beings, particularly other human beings with whom they enjoy close relationships. But Whitehead is critical of the entire I and IT scheme, because his philosophy teaches the doctrine that all actual entities have experience at the most fundamental level, and are thus subjects not objects. (Actual entities will be defined in a later chapter.)
5) “The sensationalist doctrine of perception.” This is a primarily empiricist epistemic doctrine, although you do sometimes see the sensationalist doctrine of perception conceded by rationalists as well. In a nutshell, the sensationalist doctrine of perception is the idea that all that we perceive in the world comes to us from our five senses, and that without this sensory input we have no idea of a world. The conclusions of this doctrine of perception find their ultimate explication in Hume, who points out that we can therefore have no idea of causation or of an external world, and the idea reached a further apex when Santayana pointed out that it leads, not only to solipsism, but to “solipsism of the present moment”, where we can have no idea of time. (See Whitehead’s goal #9) Whitehead was critical of the sensationalist doctrine of perception, viewing the information received through the senses as being derivative of a more fundamental mode of perception. More later, as this is a big idea. =)
6) “The doctrine of vacuous actuality.” As far as I know, Whitehead coined the term “vacuous actuality” to describe the prevailing sentiment. In a way, this is connected to goal #4. But I’m getting ahead of myself. A vacuous actuality is a piece of “dead” matter. By dead I don’t mean that it was alive and died, I mean that it is lifeless, never had experience in the first place. Picture a clump of iron ore. Most of us don’t view iron ore as being a subject that has its own internal emotional makeup and experience of the world. So that view would be a “vacuous actuality” - an actuality devoid of all experience. Whitehead didn’t believe this was a possible metaphysical state for any actual entity.
7) I’m going to skip # 7 because I think it is pretty well covered by goal numbers 1 and 4 and 6, and simply relates to a particular expression of those views by Immanuel Kant. (Think his numena and phenomena divide here, which leads to a deal of agnosticism about the ultimate nature of things.) All you need to know was that Whitehead was ‘gainst it. =)
8 ) “Arbitrary deductions in ex absurdo arguments.” Take a statement, any statement. I like “the sky is blue.” How do you prove it? One way is ex absurdo. You negate the statement, and when the negated statement is proved false, you presume the truth of the original statement. “The sky is not blue” = false. Ergo, the sky is blue. Ding ding ding, we have a winner. The problem can sometimes come in as a result of using language as if it has precise mathematical meaning rather than being an approximation of reality. You may get an ex absurdo argument that is logically meaningful, but has no real alignment with reality. See goal # 2
9) “Belief that logical inconsistencies can indicate anything else than some antecedent errors.” For this, lets go back to the sensationist doctrine of perception. What was Hume’s solution to his empiricism which denied that we can have any idea of causation or an external world? Did he become a solipsist, as his worldview would logically dictate? Of course not. He presented a dual scheme wherein he admitted that his doctrine was true, but at the same time admitted certain ideas “in practice”, in order to make life workable. Whitehead would say that when Hume’s worldview had reached the point where Hume himself could not agree with the logical conclusions of his doctrines, Hume should have realized that there was an antecedent error in his argument (in this case, the idea that sensation is our only means of perception.)
Ok, this section is done for now. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to work on the first section of chapter one tonight. One thing I need to be very clear on though: I am NOT an expert on Whitehead. This series represents my efforts to understand Whitehead and to put his ideas into my own words. Please do not take my explication of Whitehead as the authority here. I’m just an undergrad student, and while I hope to eventually go on to graduate work in the field, these notes are not definitive statements on Whitehead’s positions, they merely reflect my current understanding.
Filed under: Philosophy, process and reality, process philosophy, Whitehead |