Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out [draft article]

Below is a draft of a chapter I was asked to write for a book on Cambridge Idealism. It is still a bit rough in places and I’ll be continuing to update it in the coming weeks and months. I’ll be presenting some of the ideas explored in it at the International Whitehead Conference in Munich next month. Feedback welcome!

Introduction: The Whole in a Nutshell

Despite many sharp disagreements with Francis Herbert Bradley, Alfred North Whitehead asks in his preface to Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) whether the Philosophy of Organism is not, in the final interpretation, “a transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a realistic basis.”^[1] Whitehead invites us to understand his work as a critical reconstruction of the idealist view, and, more specifically, as “a massive elaboration and transformation of Bradley’s theory of feeling.”^[2] Whitehead’s title is already an obvious allusion to F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893). All is here contained in nuce: Whitehead replaces Bradley’s finite centers of appearance with an account of creative process in terms of the concrescence of individual occasions of experience, thereby pluralizing Bradley’s monistic metaphysics into an experiential cosmology offering a consistent, coherent, applicable, adequate, and revisable account of the generalities applying at least to our cosmic epoch, with perhaps a faint whisper of what holds true of all such epochs.

In obedience to Whitehead’s call for philosophy to reverse the abstractive tendency of the special sciences by exhibiting “the fusion of analysis with actuality,”^[3] this chapter seeks to understand the technical innovations of Whitehead’s organic doctrine while remaining in close contact with the concrete historical context granting his inquiry its human significance. The early 20^th century brought the decline of British Idealism alongside the rise of new methods of logical analysis. But more was at play in idealism’s wane than just a superior method. While he borrows from both the idealist and analytic schools, Whitehead’s radically novel understanding of relations distinguishes his speculative organicism both from F. H. Bradley’s mystical monism and from Bertrand Russell’s logical atomism. Whitehead processual account of relations is designed to avoid philosophical shipwreck by successfully navigating between the all-consuming whirlpool of the Bradleyan Absolute and the shattering rock shoal of Russellian analysis:

All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living—that is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming. This is the doctrine that the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those things which jointly constitute the world.^[4]

The further explication of Whitehead’s new doctrine of organic relations is enhanced by the historical treatment to follow. A review of the largely political reasons for the eclipse of idealism and speculative philosophy more generally clears the air for a renewed examination of Whitehead’s accomplishment. What Whitehead offers is not a return to naïve realism or pre-Kantian dogmatism, but a participatory descendental ontology initiated into the materialism melting intuitions of Absolute Idealism but unwilling to forego concern for the individually creative and yet relationally intimate appropriation of the dead by the living. “Descendental” is my neologism signaling the inverse of Kant’s transcendental idealist approach. Descendental realism inquires after the necessary and universal conditions of actual rather than merely possible experience.^[5] It continues the effort toward what Whitehead refers to as a “critique of pure feeling”^[6] that, as I argue below, evades Kantian epistemological antinomies by an appeal to a process-relational ontology.

F. H. Bradley was not wrong to discern that a world of actually existing rather than merely apparent finite centers of experience would entail an endless flux wherein experients pass perpetually beyond themselves and into one another.^[7]Whitehead’s organic realism turns idealism inside out precisely by affirming this relational process, thus hurling Bradley’s timeless monistic Universe into a self-differentiating creative advance, wherein “each creative act is the universe incarnating itself as one, and there is nothing above it by way of final condition.”^[8] In short, Whitehead’s doctrine of the actual occasion as “the whole universe in process of attainment of a particular satisfaction” is simply a realistic inversion of the Bradleyan Absolute.^[9]

The chapter to follow is divided into five parts. Part I introduces Whitehead’s philosophy of history before recounting the sociological reasons for idealism’s decline in the Anglophone world. Part II revisits Whitehead’s work with Russell on the logical foundations of mathematics in an attempt to elucidate the relationship between abstract pattern and concrete process. Part III introduces Whitehead’s metaphysical generalization of the function of propositions in the actual world. Part IV details Whitehead’s creative repurposing of the concept of feeling in F. H. Bradley’s idealism. Part V concludes with a brief final interpretation emphasizing Whitehead’s process theological amendments to the Bradleyan Absolute.

^[1] Process and Reality, xiii.

^[2] James Bradley, “‘The Critique of Pure Feeling’: Bradley, Whitehead, and the Anglo-Saxon Metaphysical Tradition.” Process Studies 14 (2), 1985, 253.

^[3] Whitehead, “Mathematics and the Good,” in Essays in Science and Philosophy, 113.

^[4] Process and Reality, xiii-xiv.

^[5] See my Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore, 2023). See also Daniel W. Smith, “The Conditions of the New,” in Deleuze and Guatarri Studies, Vol 1, No. 1 (2007), 3ff.

^[6] Process and Reality, 113.

^[7] J. E. Barnhart, “Bradley’s Monism and Whitehead’s Neo-Pluralism.” Southern Journal of Philosophy (Winter, 1969), 398.

^[8] Process and Reality, 245.

^[9] Process and Reality, 200.

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Posted

June 21, 2023

Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Coleridge, Darwin, Descartes, Fichte, Goethe, Hegel, Hume, imagination, Kant, Modern Philosophy, politics, reason, Religion, Romantic Philosophy, Rudolf Steiner, Schelling, William James

Matthew David Segall

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analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell, cosmology, Francis Herbert Bradley, German Idealism, Process philosophy, science

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6 responses to “Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out [draft article]”

perkwunos

June 23, 2023

I’ll go ahead and make just a couple short(er) comments now on this.

This sentence about the Indications, Classes, etc. paper I am skeptical of: “He nonetheless goes on to argue for a logically constructed notion of at least some numbers as isomorphic to logical types and so subject to extensional analysis.” Barring a more complete investigation to see if it makes sense, I wouldn’t use the special term “isomorphic” and just stick to what Whitehead himself defines, which is similarity, and say that the logically defined classes are each similar to a propositional function that expresses the intensional, qualitative numerosity. You say that the “logically constructed notion” is “isomorphic to logical types” but I think you meant to say the “nonlogical types”, i.e., the intension (which is nonlogical to Whitehead, anyways).

“Here a difficulty arises for Whitehead’s proposed pluralistic inversion of the Bradleyan absolute. If reality is a creative advance into novelty rather than an already completed eternal perfection, how can reason analyze that which in each occasion of its actualization is unrepeatably unique?” Whitehead gives us the answer! It is in his definition of determination: the unique, unrepeatable element is the actual entity’s position, which corresponds to the logical subject part of the proposition. We “analyze” this once we’ve arrived at the unique positions of each actual entity that then are represented via the values of individual variables. In my opinion, this isn’t a difficulty (except, I guess, for Deleuzeans who want it to be a difficulty so that they can say mystifying things in response).

As I’ve said, I disagree with your treatment of propositions, their truth-value, and the relation of such to the subjective form of a propositional or comparative feeling (i.e., a feeling involving said proposition as datum). I am writing a paper on that right now, though, so you’ll get a far fuller account from me soon.

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1. Matthew David Segall
  
  June 23, 2023
  
  Thanks for this. I’ve gone back to re-read Whitehead’s “Indication” paper, and then cleaned up this section:
  >>
  In an article published a few years before Modes of Thought but after Gödel’s discovery, “Indication, Classes, Numbers, Validation” (1934), Whitehead admitted that numerosity as such is a qualitatively meaningful factor in the Universe and so “lies outside logic.” He rehearses the Principia approach of constructing classes with logical definitions mapping to specific numbers (e.g., we can define the number 7 as the class of all sets with seven elements, thus abstracting the seven-ness of any particular set of squirrels or piglets, etc., that might be indicated), with these classes then being subject to extensional analysis. He now believes that this approach, along with the theory of types that had been used to avoid Russell’s paradox, must be abandoned, as these procedures left the meaning of number dependent “upon shifting accidents of factual existence,” as though arithmetic were “bound up with intension and with history” such that “a new litter of pigs alters the meaning of every number, and of every extension of number, employed in mathematics.” He then makes a fresh attempt to logically define the otherwise ambiguous “togetherness” of distinctive propositions, such mingling being necessary to produce the contentless validity or invalidity of propositional forms, which in Principia had been left up to the intuitive deliverances of experience granting us a sense of spatial and temporal order. As we’ll see, in his metaphysics Whitehead was convinced that togetherness ultimately has no other meaning than the experiential one; still, he continued the attempt to win for logic as much precision as is possible without denying the ultimately intuitive nature of mathematical pattern recognition.
  
  In the pre-Gödel Process and Reality, which J. Bradley reads as “the revision and culmination” of the Principia, Whitehead again addressed the metaphysical status of arithmetic by examining the truth-value of the proposition “one and one make two.” He cites Volume II of Principia for the proof of the proposition in abstraction from any application, but he admits “residual scepticism” about its relevance to the ambiguities of the actual world-process.
  
  ‘We hardly ever apply arithmetic in its pure metaphysical sense, without the addition of presumptions which depend for their truth on the character of the societies dominating the cosmic epoch in which we live. … There is no difficulty in imagining a world—i.e., a cosmic epoch—in which arithmetic would be an interesting fanciful topic for dreamers, but useless for practical people engrossed in the business of life. In fact, we seem to have been only barely rescued from such a state of things.’
  
  Realizing that logical atomicity and intuitive continuity are both essential for deeper understanding but are meaningless in isolation, Whitehead sought in his later metaphysics to strike a harmony between the “life and motion” of process and the “changeless world of form”: the philosophy of organism thus construes “the mathematical modes of fusion, such as ‘addition,’ ‘multiplication,’ ‘serial form,’ and so on…as forms of process.” No closed deductive logical system can ground arithmetical intuitions because, like all creative process, the operations of mathematics are constantly issuing in new forms, which themselves become components for further process stretching beyond all prior order, without thereby invalidating that order. The point is that processes of commingling include but transcend the components out of which they originate, like the vowels that bind consonant into words, or the copula binding subjects with their predicates. Whitehead philosophy of organism generalizes the relational processes evident in mathematical operations by drawing proportional analogies with modes of transition as they occur in electromagnetism, in evolution and ontogeny, and in the streams of conscious experience we each refer to as ‘I.’
  
  Reply
aramis720

July 20, 2023

I recognize the intellectual history connections between Whitehead’s system of thought and Idealism (and explicitly so for Bradley’s version thereof, as you point out) but in my reading of PR he’s quite explicit that his point is to craft a middle ground between Idealism and materialism, which recognizes equally and fully the reality of both mental and physical aspects of reality, and which is commonly called panpsychism or panexperientialism today and distinguishable from Idealism. Do you agree with this Idealism/panpsychism distinction or not so much?

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1. Matthew David Segall
  
  July 20, 2023
  
  Agreed!
  
  Reply
  1. aramis720
    
    July 20, 2023
    
    Good! 🙂
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