Читать книгу Western Philosophy - Группа авторов - Страница 121

Our next extract is from the work of the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who co-authored with Bertrand Russell a famous text on the foundations of mathematics, Principia Mathematica (published 1910–13), but who went on in the 1920s (when he was in his sixties) to develop a comprehensive theory of metaphysics that was very much his own. Many previous approaches, going back to Aristotle (see extract 2, above), had classified reality in terms of substances – individual enduring subjects defined in terms of their essential attributes. Whitehead came to think that this ontology of substances gave far too fixed a picture of the ultimate nature of reality. In our opening extract, from his Process and Reality (based on his Gifford Lectures given in at the University of Edinburgh in 1927–28), Whitehead gives a very different account of reality as fundamentally involving flow or ‘fluency’ – a metaphysics of ‘flux’, as he calls it – in contrast to the traditional metaphysics of substance.

In the second extract, from his Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead takes as his particular target Descartes’s notion of substance (see extract 3 above), which he criticizes as leading to a split between on the one hand a materialistic and mechanical conception of nature, and on the other a separate private realm of ‘cogitating minds’ (compare Part IV, extract 3). In place of this, Whitehead proposes an organic conception of reality as a unified unfolding process, where our mental perceptions of the world around us are simply one aspect of the overall reality adjusting itself to another: as Whitehead puts it, one aspect ‘prehends’ (grasps, gathers in or incorporates) another aspect of reality into itself. The overall framework is thus a holistic or organic one, and ‘the organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community’. So in place of individual objects, Whitehead considers the primary unit to be the event: ‘the event is the unit of things real’. In the penultimate paragraph of our abstract Whitehead suggests that his conception of reality is supported by modern science, where the old picture of individual substances and their essential properties has given way to much more fluid notions, such as that of an ‘electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time’. In the last paragraph Whiteheads adds the interesting point that the language of modern science is nevertheless very abstract: the reports of the observer are taken account of, but the observer’s actual experience (e.g. of the colour red) is left out. Whitehead’s approach aims to resolve this duality into an organic whole made up of interlocking aspects of a single event.

Whitehead’s style is not always easy to follow, and his mode of philosophizing can seem speculative and schematic to those accustomed to the more tightly focused arguments of contemporary analytic philosophy. But his philosophy can nevertheless be located along an enduring strand of philosophical thought that goes back to Heraclitus (as Whitehead himself notes below), and has something in common with Leibniz’s ‘organic’ conception of activity as being fundamental to reality (see extract 5, above), as well as being reminiscent in part of the Hegelian idea of the world as a dynamic process unfolding over time (see Part I, extract 9). In addition, his thought has some affinities with the views of the pragmatists (see Part I, extract 10), which influenced him following his move to America in 1924. Whitehead’s ideas also illustrate a tendency that has continued to exert a strong influence on subsequent metaphysics, the wish to make our overall conception of reality more responsive to the most recent discoveries of science. Finally, the framework developed by Whitehead has been influential in leading to a distinctive brand of theology, process theology, which challenges the adequacy of the traditional conception of God as an immutable substance outside the unfolding process of temporal change.

That all things flow’ is the first vague generalization which the unsystematized, barely analysed, intuition of men has produced. It is the theme of some of the best Hebrew poetry in the Psalms; it appears as one of the first generalizations of Greek philosophy in the form of the saying of Heraclitus; amid the later barbarism of Anglo-Saxon thought it reappears in the story of the sparrow flitting through the banqueting hall of the Northumbrian king; and in all stages of civilization its recollection lends its pathos to poetry. Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system.

At this point we have transformed the phrase, ‘all things flow’ into the alternative phrase, ‘the flux of things.’ In so doing, the notion of the ‘flux’ has been held up before our thoughts as one primary notion for further analysis. But in the sentence ‘all things flow,’ there are three words – and we have started by isolating the last word of the three. We move backward to the next word ‘things’ and ask. What sort of things flow? Finally we reach the first word ‘all’ and ask, What is the meaning of the ‘many’ things engaged in this common flux, and in what sense, if any, can the word ‘all’ refer to a definitely indicated set of these many things?

The elucidation of meaning involved in the phrase ‘all things flow’ is one chief task of metaphysics.

But there is a rival notion, antithetical to the former. I cannot at the moment recall one immortal phrase which expresses it with the same completeness as that with which the alternative notion has been rendered by Heraclitus. This other notion dwells on permanences of things – the solid earth, the mountains, the stones, the Egyptian Pyramids, the spirit of man, God.

The best rendering of integral experience, expressing its general form divested of irrelevant details, is often to be found in the utterances of religious aspiration. One of the reasons of the thinness of so much modern metaphysics is its neglect of this wealth of expression of ultimate feeling. Accordingly we find in the first two lines of a famous hymn a full expression of the union of the two notions in one integral experience:

Abide with me;

Fast falls the eventide.

Here the first line expresses the permanences, ‘abide’, ‘me,’ and the ‘Being’ addressed; and the second line sets these permanences amid the inescapable flux. Here at length we find formulated the complete problem of metaphysics. Those philosophers who start with the first line have given us the metaphysics of ‘substance’; and those who start with the second line have developed the metaphysics of ‘flux’. But, in truth, the two lines cannot be torn apart in this way; and we find that a wavering balance between the two is a characteristic of the greater number of philosophers. Plato found his permanences in a static, spiritual heaven, and his flux in the entanglement of his forms amid the fluent imperfections of the physical world. Here I draw attention to the word ‘imperfection’ In any assertion as to Plato I speak under correction; but I believe that Plato’s authority can be claimed for the doctrine that the things that flow are imperfect in the sense of ‘limited’ and of ‘definitely exclusive of much that they might be and are not’. The lines quoted from the hymn are an almost perfect expression of the direct intuition from which the main position of the Platonic philosophy is derived. Aristotle corrected his Platonism into a somewhat different balance. He was the apostle of ‘substance and attribute’ and of the classificatory logic which this notion suggests. But, on the other side, he makes a masterly analysis of the notion of ‘generation’. Aristotle in his own person expressed a useful protest against the Platonic tendency to separate a static spiritual world from a fluent world of superficial experience. The later Platonic schools stressed this tendency: just as the mediaeval Aristotelian thought allowed the static notions of Aristotle’s logic to formulate some of the main metaphysical problems in terms which they have lasted till today.

On the whole, the history of philosophy supports Bergson’s charge that the human intellect ‘spatializes the universe’; that is to say, that it tends to ignore the fluency, and to analyse the world in terms of static categories.¹ Indeed Bergson went further and conceived this tendency as an inherent necessity of the intellect. I do not believe this accusation; but I do hold that ‘spatialization’ is the shortest route to a clear-cut philosophy expressed in reasonably familiar language. Descartes gave an almost perfect example of such a system of thought. The difficulties of Cartesianism with its three clear-cut substances, and with its ‘duration’ and ‘measured time’ well in the background, illustrate the result of the subordination of fluency. This subordination is to be found in the unanalysed longing of the hymn, in Plato’s vision of heavenly perfection, in Aristotle’s logical concepts, and in Descartes’ mathematical mentality.

* * *

The fundamental principles [in Descartes] are so set out as to presuppose independently existing substances with simple location in the community of temporal durations, and in the case of bodies, with simple location in the community of spatial extensions. Those principles lead straight to the theory of a materialistic mechanistic nature, surveyed by cogitating minds. After the close of the seventeenth century science took charge of the materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the cogitating minds …

This division of territory between science and philosophy was not a simple business; and in fact it illustrated the weakness of the whole cut and dried presupposition upon which it rested. We are aware of nature as an interplay of bodies, colours, sounds, scents, tastes, touches and other various bodily feelings, displayed as in space in patterns of mutual separation by intervening volumes, and of the individual shape. Also the whole is a flux, changing with the lapse of time. This systematic totality is disclosed to us as one complex of things. But the seventeenth-century dualism cuts straight across it. The objective world of science was confined to mere spatial material with simple location in space and time, and subjected to definite rules as to its locomotion. The subjective world of philosophy annexed the colours, sounds, scents, touches, bodily feelings, as forming the subjective content of the cogitations of the individual mind … There is obviously one fatal weakness to this scheme. The cogitations of mind exhibit themselves as holding up entities, such as colours for instance, before the mind as the termini of contemplation. But in this theory these colours are, after all, merely the furniture of the mind. Accordingly, the mind seems to be confined to its own private world of cogitations. The subject-object conformation of experience in its entirety lies within the mind as one of its private passions. This conclusion from the Cartesian data is the starting point from which Berkeley, Hume, and Kant developed their respective systems … Thus the question as to how any knowledge is obtained of the truly objective world of science becomes a problem of the first magnitude …

The two great preoccupations of modern philosophy now lie clearly before us. The study of mind divides into psychology, or the study of mental functionings as considered in themselves and in their mutual relations, and into epistemology, or the theory of the knowledge of a common objective world. In other words, there is the study of the cogitations, qua passions of the mind, and their study qua leading to an inspection (intuition) of an objective world. This is a very uneasy division, giving rise to a host of perplexities whose consideration has occupied the intervening centuries …

Bergson introduced into philosophy the organic conceptions of physiological science. He has most completely moved away from the static materialism of the seventeenth century … The effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature. The neurologist traces first the effects of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres, and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement. In biochemistry, the delicate adjustment of the chemical composition of the parts to the preservation of the whole organism is detected. Thus the mental cognition is seen as the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit of occurrence. This unit is the integration of the sum of its partial happenings, but it is not their numerical aggregates. It has its own unity as an event. This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of the universe of events. Its knowledge of itself arises from its own relevance to the things of which it prehends the aspects. It knows the world as the system of mutual relevance, and thus sees itself as a mirrored in other things. These other things include more especially the various parts of its own body.

It is important to discriminate the bodily pattern, which endures, from the bodily event, which is pervaded by the enduring pattern, and from the parts of the bodily event. The parts of the bodily event are themselves pervaded by their own enduring patterns, which form elements in the bodily pattern. The parts of the body are really portions of the environment of the total bodily event, but so related that their mutual aspects, each in the other, are peculiarly effective in modifying the patterns of either. This arises from the intimate character of the relation of whole to part. Thus the body is a portion of the environment for the part, and the part is a portion of the environment for the body; only they are peculiarly sensitive, each to modifications of the other. The sensitiveness is so arranged that a part adjusts itself to preserve the stability of the pattern of the body. It is a particular example of the favourable environment shielding the organism. The relation of part to whole has the special reciprocity associated with the notion of organism, in which the part is for the whole; but this relation reigns throughout nature and does not start with a special case of the higher organisms …

We can now see the relation of psychology to physiology and to physics. The private psychological field is merely the event, considered from its own standpoint. The unity of this field is the unity of the event. But it is the event as one entity and not the event as a sum of parts. The relations of the parts, to each other and to the whole, are their aspects, each in the other. A body for an external observer is the aggregate of the aspects for him of the body as a whole, and also of the body as a sum of parts. For the external observer the aspects of shape and sense objects are dominant, at least for cognition. But we must also allow for the possibility that we can detect in ourselves direct aspects of the mentalities of higher organisms. The claim that the cognition of alien mentalities must necessarily be by means of indirect inferences from aspects of shape and of sense objects is wholly unwarranted by this philosophy of organism. The fundamental principle is that whatever merges into actuality implants its aspects into every individual event.

Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the parts of our own bodies partly take the form of aspects of shape and of sense-objects. But that part of the bodily event in respect to which the cognitive mentality is associated is for itself the unit psychological field. Its ingredients are not referent to the event itself; they are aspects of what lies beyond that event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves. Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organizing a real togetherness of alien things …

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 …