Accordingly consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe. These aspects are aspects of other events as mutually modifying, each the others. In the pattern of aspects they stand in their pattern of mutual relatedness.
The aboriginal data in terms of which the pattern weaves itself are the aspects of shapes, of sense-objects, and of other eternal objects whose self-identity is not dependent on the flux of things. Wherever such objects have ingression into the general flux, they interpret events, each to the other, They are here in the perceiver; but as perceived by him, they convey for him something of the total flux which is beyond himself. The subject-object relation takes its origin in the double role of the these eternal objects. They are modifications of the subject, but only in their character of conveying aspects of other subjects in the community of the universe. Thus no individual subject can have independent reality, since it is a prehension of limited aspects of subjects other than itself.
The technical phrase ‘subject-object’ is a bad term for the fundamental situation disclosed in experience. It is really reminiscent of the Aristotelian ‘subject-predicate’. It already presupposes the metaphysical doctrine of diverse subjects qualified by their private predicates. This is the doctrine of subjects with private worlds of experience. If this be granted, there is no escape from solipsism. The point is that the phrase ‘subject-object’ indicates a fundamental entity underlying the objects. Thus the ‘objects’, as thus conceived are merely the ghosts of Aristotelian predicates …
The point to be made for the purpose of the present discussion is that a philosophy of nature as organic must start at the opposite end to that requisite for a materialistic philosophy. The materialistic starting point is from independently existing substances, matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications of its external relations of locomotion and the mind suffers modification is of its contemplated objects. There are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent substances, each qualified by their appropriate passions. The organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real. The emergent enduring pattern is the stabilisation of the emergent achievement so as to become a fact which retains its identity throughout the process. It will be noted that endurance is not primarily the property of enduring beyond itself but of enduring within itself. I mean that endurance is the property of finding its patterns reproduced in the temporal parts of the total event. It is in this sense that a total event carries an enduring pattern. There is an intrinsic value identical for the whole and for its succession of parts. Cognition is the emergence, into some measure of individualised reality, of the general substratum of activity, poising before itself possibility, actuality, and purpose.
It is equally possible to arrive at this organic conception of the world if we start from the fundamental notions of modern physics, instead of, as above, from psychology and physiology. In fact by reason of my own studies in mathematics and mathematical physics, I did in fact arrive at my convictions in this way. Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events.
In physics, there is an abstraction. The science ignores what anything is in itself. Its entities are merely considered in relation to their extrinsic reality, that is to say in respect to their aspects in other things. But the abstraction reaches even further than that; for it is only the aspects of other things as modifying this spatiotemporal specifications of the life histories of those other things that count. The intrinsic reality of the observer comes in: I mean what the observer is for himself is appealed to. For example, the fact that he will see red or blue enters into scientific statements. But the red which the observer sees does not in truth enter into the science. What is relevant is merely the bare diversity of the observer’s red experiences from all his other experiences. Accordingly, the intrinsic character of the observer is merely relevant in order to fix the self-identical individuality of the physical entities. These entities are only considered as agencies in fixing the roots in space and in time of the life histories of enduring entities. The phraseology of physics is derived from the materialistic ideas on the seventeenth century. But we find that, even in its extreme abstraction, what it is really presupposing is the organic theory of aspects as explained above …
Specimen Questions
1 What does Whitehead object to in the traditional ‘metaphysics of substance’, and why does he wish to substitute a ‘metaphysics of flux’?
2 What does Whitehead mean by an ‘organic conception’ of the world? Why does he think it is supported by modern physics?
3 Explain how Whitehead sees the seventeenth-century conception of a ‘mechanical materialist nature’ as leading to a dualistic split between the objective world and the conscious mind. Do you think his notion of ‘the unity of the event’ solves the problem?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 For a useful introduction, see Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). See also T. Burke, The Philosophy of Whitehead (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2000).
2 For Whitehead’s own more informal reflections on the implications of his theories, see his Adventures of Ideas (New York, NY: Free Press, 1933), and his Concepts of Nature (1920).
3 See also, C. R. Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2009); D. R. Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); E. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); J. A. Jones, Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); and I. Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead (Harvard University Press, 2011).
4 For online resources, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the life and works of A. N. Whitehead at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/ (by R. Desmet and R. A. Irvine). For a similar perhaps less demanding entry see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/whitehed/ (by G. Herstein).
5 You can find introductory philosophy podcasts and blogs with additional links at M. Linsenmayer’s website, The Partially Examined Life. Look for Episode 110, ‘Alfred North Whitehead: What Is Nature? at https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/02/02/ep110-whitehead/ (2015).
Notes
* Alfred North Whitehead, extracts (with minor modifications) from Process and Reality 1927–28; first published by Macmillan in 1929 (excerpts from Part II, Ch. 10, sections I–V), and from Science and the Modern World (first published by the Macmillan Company, 1925), Ch. 9
1 1 The reference is to the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose conception of the cosmos as a spontaneously evolving organic process influenced Whitehead’s ideas.
10 Being and Involvement: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time*
Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics (see extract 8, above) aimed finally to lay to rest the claims of philosophers to describe the ultimate nature of reality as it is in itself. Many of those who followed him continued to practise metaphysics, and still sought to provide a general philosophical overview of the world and our place in it, but the characteristic orientation of these inquiries now tended to allow a central role to human consciousness (compare, for example, Hegel’s account of knowledge