Whitehead’s objective in Process and Reality was to "frame a coherent,
logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our
experience can be interpreted." (1) His resulting
philosophy of organism remains thus far the single most comprehensive attempt in the
history of western thought to formulate a metaphysic based on an ontology of becoming. As
part of his overall vision of "reality as social process," (2)
Whitehead formulated a non-substantive view of personal identity. It is my intent in this
essay first to briefly describe Whitehead's view of personal identity within the context
of his metaphysical system, and then to review a number of questions that his interpreters
(both sympathetic as well as critical) have raised. My contention will be that while
Whitehead's doctrine of personal identity is systematically coherent, his failure to fully
incorporate the data of human experience ultimately renders his formulation of the concept
of personal selfhood unintelligible.
I
Because of his process view of reality, Whitehead himself rarely ever spoke of personal
identity. (3) He preferred instead, personal order:
"A nexus enjoys ‘personal order’ when (a) it is a ‘society,’ and
(b) when the genetic relatedness of its members orders these members
‘serially.’" (4) In explicating the intent of
his meaning, a broad understanding of his metaphysical system as a whole is indispensable,
along with a more detailed examination of his innovative terminology.
The term "serially" gives us a clue to the most important aspect of
Whitehead's philosophy of organism: that of succession or temporality. For Whitehead,
reality is the process of becoming itself. What is it, one may query, that
"becomes"? For the substantialist, the obvious answer is "being." For
Whitehead, however, it is but "actual entities" which are the "final real
things of which the world is made up." (5) Reality,
metaphysically conceived, is ultimately reducible to nothing other than the endless
movement of actual entities (or "actual occasions"), a process that Whitehead
calls "prehensions" (or "feelings"). In this process, three phases can
be identified, beginning with the emergence of the actual entity as a prehending subject,
continuing with the prehending activity itself whereby data from other entities are
received and then moved toward its completion as informed by what Whitehead calls the
"subjective aim," and concluding with the "satisfaction" of the entity
wherein it functions as datum for subsequently emerging entities and thereafter finally
perishing in its (immortal) objectivity. By this process of prehension, the past comes
into the present and becomes a potentiality for the future. The "present" is
therefore a "specious present" and never really is. Following this analysis of
reality, Whitehead proceeds to designate the grouping of actual occasions by the term
"nexus." Reality on the phenomenal level is thus nothing more than the universal
series (process of becoming) of interdependent nexus, each composed of actual occasions of
"general connectedness" and "mutual immanence." (6)
Personal order then, is in the first place, a societal grouping or nexus. By
"society," Whitehead simply meant "a nexus with a social order" (7)
where common elements of form are prehended (passed on) by each member (actual occasions).
Secondly, personal order is conceived to be any nexus or social order whose members are
serially constituted. This serial ordering can best be understood by the phrase
"one-way relations." (8) Within the context of
Whitehead’s ontology, the actual occasions which comprise the nexus exist
contiguously so as to form a linear process of inheritance: thus, if A, B, and C were
contiguous and linear members of a nexus, B would inherit from A, but not vice versa, and
C would inherit from B (and A, by virtue of B's previous inclusion of A), but again, not
vice versa. Such a nexus is, for Whitehead, an "enduring object." The
combination of many such "enduring objects" results in a "corpuscular
society" (the phenomenal "things" of substantive philosophies).
In order to make the jump from "corpuscular societies"—or inorganic
aggregates—to living societies (animals, humans, etc.), Whitehead’s distinction
between the physical and mental pole of each actual entity is of profound import. The
former is that aspect of an actual entity that is more or less devoid of novelty, and is
responsible, in the process of prehension, for the evolution of material reality. The
latter is the source of all creative advance in the universe as it is informed by what
Whitehead calls "eternal objects," the "pure potentials for the specific
determinations of fact, or forms of definiteness." (9)
For Whitehead, "the functioning of an eternal object in the self-creation of an
actual entity is the ‘ingression’ of the eternal object in the actual
entity." (10) In living beings, and especially in the
higher societies, a central direction appears which seemingly acts as a dominating unity
that controls the particular corpuscular society in a manner indicative of creative
becoming. In the personal ordering of human beings, we reach what Whitehead considers to
be the chief exemplification of creativity in our cosmic epoch since it is here that we
find the dominance of the mental pole as seen in the "hybrid" (conceptual or
impure) prehensions characteristic of mental originality. (11)
To summarize, "life is a passage from physical order to pure mental originality, and
from pure mental originality to canalized mental originality. . . ." (12)
It is important here to distinguish between "living societies,"
"entirely living societies," and "living persons" in Whitehead’s
descriptive categories. (13) While "living
societies" have been defined above as those groupings of actual entities which mental
pole actively contributes to the prehensive process (this would include the vegetable
world, considered thus to be "organisms"), "entirely living societies"
included, for Whitehead, the animal kingdom. Here, another distinction of import appears:
the between "entirely living societies" and "entirely living nexus."
As Whitehead saw it, "in a living society only some of its nexus will be such that
the mental poles of all their members have any original reactions. These will be its
‘entirely living’ nexus, and in practice a society is only called
‘living’ when such nexus are regnant." (14)
Animals are organisms in which some of the groupings of actual occasions are in the form
of "entirely living nexus." It should be emphasized that Whitehead denied that
"entirely living nexus" could be social in nature, since, as Gregory Vlastos as
so acutely put it, Whitehead formulated his philosophy of organism on the central axiom
that "social relationship occur only in temporal strings; contemporaries are jointly
related via their several derivations from a common past." (15)
Thus, "an ‘entirely living’ nexus is, in respect to its life, not social.
Each member of the nexus derives the necessities of its being from its prehensions of its
complex social environment; by itself the nexus lacks the genetic power which belongs to
‘societies." (16) This leads to Whitehead’s
notion of "personal order"—an order which belongs to animals as such, who
are composed of "entirely living" nexus.
It is against this background that Whitehead’s concept of human personhood must be
understood. While animals consist of non-social, "entirely living," temporal and
continuous nexus, Whitehead insisted that
a man is more than a serial succession of occasions of experience. . . . Now an
animal body is a society involving a vast number of occasions, spatially [the
"entirely living" nexus] and temporally [the non-regnant nexus] coordinated. It
follows that a ‘man’, in the full sense of ordinary usage, is not a
‘person’ as here defined. He has a unity of a wider society, in which the social
coordination is a dominant factor in the behaviours of the various parts. (17)
As an enduring entity, Whitehead called the human being a "living person":
"In a man, the living body is permeated by living societies of low-grade occasions so
far as mentality is concerned. But the whole is coordinated so as to support a personal
living society of high-grade occasions. This personal society is the man defined as a
person." (18)
For Whitehead then, the personal ordering of human beings is not disparate from the
temporalistic reality of nature as a whole: a tree is a "living society" which
is called a "democracy"; an animal is a composition of "democracies"
of "entirely living" nexus which is called an "entirely living" or
"personal society"; a human being is a composition of "personal
societies" within a wider social environment who is called a "living
person." It is for this reason that Whitehead was in basic agreement with Hume’s
denial of the traditional substantialist notion of the self. (19)
In rejecting a transcendental self (or soul), Whitehead understood the human self to be a
serially organized society functioning within the framework of a wider social environment.
How then did Whitehead understand consciousness? He denied any metaphysical importance
to the notion and simply attributed it to the higher phases of concrescence —
subjective forms arising out of the unique serial societal orders. (20)
Later on in his career, he explicitly stated that the enduring self-identity of the soul
was nothing other than "the succession of my occasions of experience, extending from
birth to the present moment." (21) This allowed him to
maintain a real continuity between nature and life in his philosophy of organism. He
asserted, "as disclosed in the fundamental essence of our experience, the
togetherness of things involves some doctrine of mutual immanence. In some sense or other,
this community of actualities of the world means that each happening is a factor in the
nature of every other happening." (22)
It may be helpful here to draw on the clarity enabled by Charles Hartshorne’s much
more precise development of Whitehead on the prehensions of the personal order. In a
concise set of statements, Hartshorne says that "memory and perception are both intuitions
of the past. I call the one personal and the other impersonal memory." (23)
He then goes on to define, without deviating essentially from Whitehead, personal identity
as "the persistence of certain defining characteristics in a very complex bodily
society endowed with a preeminent linear society or ‘soul.’" (24)
In keeping with Whitehead’s event ontology then, Hartshorne further enumerates the
process view of personal identity as "literally partial identity, and therefore
partial nonidentity; moreover, the nonidentity refers to the complete reality [of a human
life span], and the identity but a constituent [a stage of life, or a spacio-temporal
state of being]." (25) To summarize the
Whiteheadean-Hartshornian view of the human self, personal identity would be defined as a
set of serially ordered occasions wherein the mental pole dominates the process of
prehension resulting in the possibility of both a personal memory of the past as well as a
creative advance into the future.
While cogently arguing for a temporalistic view of personal identity, Whitehead is by
no means oblivious to the arguments that endear a substantialistic view of the same.
Further, he assents to the fact that the concept itself, with all of its substantialistic
connotations,
is dominant in human experience: the notions of civil law are based upon it. The
same man is sent to prison who committed the robbery; and the same materials survive for
centuries, and for millions of years. We cannot dismiss Personal Identity without
dismissing the whole of human thought as expressed in language. (26)
In spite of these concessions, however, Whitehead did not acquiesce into the temptation
to view personal identity in substantialistic terms. In all probability, Whitehead avoided
using the phrase "personal selfhood" when referring to the human person simply
because it smacked too much of the classical concept of soul-substance and was better left
alone. For Whitehead, the phrase "personal order" was much more congenial,
pointing to the main element of process in his vision of reality.
II
Is, however, Whitehead's view of personal identity intelligible in all of its aspects.
Three dissenters will be noted. The first, A. H. Johnson, a student and personal friend of
Whitehead, expressed concerns over Whitehead’s doctrine of actual entities and its
corollary, that of personally ordered societies. Johnson notes the "vehement
objection" raised against the view that the actual entity is emergent from or
constituted by its feelings. He observes that
An actual entity is not something which exists prior to its feelings and
originates them. As a matter of fact, an examination of human experience seems to indicate
that there is more involved than Whitehead reports. It is true that a subject is built up
by its feelings. But there appears to be something which possesses the feelings, something
more than the sum of the feelings. There is a "center" which, in reacting to
other centers, has feelings. (27)
Johnson continues his query by pointing out that Whitehead’s doctrine of
"subjective aim" (by which the latter's actual entities arrive at their
satisfaction) seems to require such a possessive center. He concludes that the philosophy
of organism "seems to bear witness to a fear of substance rather than a completely
accurate report of observed fact. Why should one deny the existence of interacting,
developed entities more substantial than those discussed by Whitehead?" (28)
Johnson also chides his teacher for not taking seriously the "factor of endurance
which characterizes the human self." (29) He points out
that the one subjective aim which may guide an individual’s life for years is
testimony to this fact which thereby vitiates Whitehead’s analysis of human
experience. This is an important point. Although Johnson is concerned that
Whitehead’s anti-substantialist stance hinders the overall interpretation of his
metaphysics, he also sees a related as well as perhaps even more damaging criticism:
"The objection that Whitehead does not offer an adequate description of the human
subject applies most obviously to his analysis of adult human experience." (30)
While these protests are but two of Johnson’s rather lengthy critical evaluation of
Whitehead's doctrine of actual entities, they are representative of his basic charge
against the inadequacy of the empirical methodology employed in the philosophy of
organism.
More recently, the personalist philosopher, Peter Bertocci, has raised similar
complaints against the process view of the self. (31) In an
analysis of Hartshorne's defense of the Whiteheadian-Buddhist view of the self, Bertocci
appealed to Borden Parker Bowne’s famous dictum that "there can be no succession
of experiences without the experience of succession," (32)
and questioned how there could be unity in a linear sequence without a self-identifying
experient. Fundamentally, the issue between Bertocci and both Whitehead and Hartshorne
revolves around this relationship between the experience of temporality and
self-identifying unity. Bertocci strenuously insists that
the past doesn't come into the present! It is gone forever. . . . For I am never
in my past, but only in my present. I may say that my present is my past with the
enjoyment of a subjective aim that passes into the future, but this manner of speaking
must not seduce me into reifying what cannot be. The burning, present experience is a present
complex unity that is able to identify itself as changing and successive. (33)
The third challenge to Whitehead on his doctrine of personal identity comes from Rem
Edwards, who could be legitimately understood as a neo-Whiteheadian. Edwards’ essay
is a rather complex reformulation of Whitehead's views on God and time, with radical
consequences for the process view of personal self-hood. (34)
He begins by posing the question of why Whitehead would consider God to be an actual
entity when he had clearly specified that "God is not to be treated as an exception
to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse." (35)
Edwards’ conclusion is that Whitehead's epochal theory of time left him no
alternatives on this matter because of his doctrine of continuous divine concrescence. As
Edwards notes,
the real difference between an actual entity [God] which concresces continuously
and a society of actual entities [humans] which concresces discontinuously is that the
experiences and activities of the former are not interrupted, whereas the experiences and
activities of the latter are interrupted. (36)
When this conclusion is wedded to the fact that for Whitehead, the epochal theory of
time was a cosmological rather than a metaphysical one, Edwards seizes the open window of
opportunity to suggest that it is not only conceivable but empirically justifiable to view
human selfhood also as an actual entity (analogous then to God) rather than a society of
actual occasions. In support of his position, Edwards appeals again to human experience:
Human experience and self-activity is the self-experience of a continuously
existing acting entity with continuous immediacy of self-enjoyment, significance for
itself, subjective aims, subjective forms, satisfactions, synthetic experiencing and
self-creativity. We exist and do our thing without sputtering in and out of existence
every fraction of a second. (37)
In contrast, Edwards rejects the Whiteheadian view of personal
"discontinuity" formulated on the epochal theory of time as one which
"really confronts us with ‘high abstractions.’" (38)
Thus, it is only when the human being is understood as a continually concrescing actual
entity that we can coherently speak of "human selfhood." (39)
It seems fairly clear that Whitehead’s effort to understand personal identity and
continuity ultimately fails before the bar of normally conceived, interpreted, and
understood human experience. While both Johnson and Bertocci point out that
Whitehead’s philosophy of becoming does not give sufficient heed to substantiality
behind the human testimony of self-unity-in-experience and self-identity, by a somewhat
ironic twist, Edwards dissents from Whitehead primarily because the epochal theory of time
atomizes reality to the extent that becoming remains unintelligible. Since it is true that
Whitehead’s metaphysical standpoint is an intuitive starting point which is any (and
every) philosopher’s prerogative, both Johnson's as well as Bertocci’s questions
may ultimately be sidestepped by appealing to such an intuition. Edwards’ critique,
however, is much more formidable. A review of Whitehead’s doctrine of actual
occasions reveals some startling disjunctions at the core of his metaphysical enterprise.
On the one hand, the various phases of actual entities, first as subjects and then as
superjects, point to the theoretical abstractions made at the heart of the philosophy of
organism which seemingly splits even the supposedly indivisible ultimate units of reality.
Furthermore, Whitehead’s doctrine of the "perpetual perishing" of actual
occasions does not appear to leave any possibility on the experiential level for speaking
about the is-ness of reality.
The two issues related to the philosophy of organism that has emerged from this
discussion are the ontological enigma revolving around the notion of
"continuity" in personal self-hood, and the epistemological/methodological
problem surrounding Whitehead’s concept of experience. Ontologically, neither
Whitehead nor Hartshorne deny the element of continuity in the personal selfhood of human
beings. Hartshorne himself is much more clear on this matter, identifying the continuity
of the self in terms of the concept of memory, whereas Whitehead himself preferred to
remain with the notion of prehension. The questions posed above by Johnson, Bertocci, and
Edwards, however, still clamor for answers. Whitehead may indeed give verbal assent to the
continuity of the human self, but his overall exposition has failed to convince both
sympathetic and non-sympathetic critics of the viability of his formulation. Edwards’
proposal appears to me to be the most suggestive within a process framework. However, as
he himself admits, the course that he has charted does involve a radical departure from
orthodox Whiteheadianism. It remains to be seen whether or not process philosophers can
satisfactorily answer these questions raised by Whitehead’s critics and eventually
formulate a more satisfactory notion of personal selfhood.
Resolution to this matter may hinge on the empirical method(s) employed in approaching
the problem. Whereas Whitehead claims that his philosophy is fully supported by
experience, one wonders whether he has satisfactorily interpreted the entire range of the
data of human experience. Whitehead has indeed done an admirable job of translating
the possible experiences across the cosmic spectrum, but in the process, his analysis of
human experience appears to have suffered. On this count, Johnson, Bertocci, and Edwards
again agree. While Whitehead deserves to be commended on his efforts to bridge the gap
between nature and human life, one wonders if he has succeeded in this task. It is still
debatable whether human experience is fully commensurable with that of nature. Perhaps the
epistemological and ontological questions are inseparable after all.
|
