Michel Weber Whitehead's Pancreativism Jamesian Applications Process Thought volume VIII

Contents
AbbreviationsWhitehead .......................................................................... v AbbreviationsJames................................................................................. vi 0. Preface .................................................................................................... vii 1. IntroductionWhiteheads Reading of James and Its Context ............... 1 2. The Creative Advance of Nature ............................................................ 27 3. Panpsychism in Action ........................................................................... 65 4. The Polysemiality of the Concept of Pure Experience ....................... 91 5. Religiousness and Religion .................................................................. 115 6. James Mystical Body in the Light of the Transmarginal Field ........... 147 7. The Art of Epochal Change .................................................................. 175 8. On Pragmatic Anarchy ......................................................................... 205 9. ConclusionThe Assassination of the Diadoches............................... 243 Bibliography ............................................................................................. 277 Table of Contents ..................................................................................... 279

AbbreviationsWhitehead
ADG APG AE AI CN D ESP FR ICNV IM IS MCMW MT OCN OT PM PNK PR R RM S SMW TRE UA The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry, Cambridge, 1907. The Axioms of Projective Geometry, Cambridge, 1906. The Aims of Education, 1929 (Free Press, 1967). Adventures of Ideas, 1933 (Free Press, 1967). The Concept of Nature, 1920 (Cambridge, 1964). Lucien Price, Dialogues, 1954 (Mentor Book, 1956). Essays in Science and Philosophy, Philosophical Lib., 1947. The Function of Reason, 1929 (Beacon Press, 1958). Indication, Classes, Numbers, Validation, Mind, 1934. An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911 (Oxford, 1958). The Interpretation of Science, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1961. On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World, 1906. Modes of Thought, 1938 (Free Press, 1968). On Cardinal Numbers, American J. of Mathematics, 1902. The Organisation of Thought, Williams and Norgate, 1917. Principia Mathematica, 19101913 (Cambridge, 19251927). Principles of Natural Knowledge, 1919/1925 (Dover, 1982). Process and Reality, 1929 (Free Press Corr. Edition, 1978). The Principle of Relativity, Cambridge, 1922. Religion in the Making, Macmillan, 1926. Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, Macmillan, 1927. Science and the Modern World, 1925 (Free Press, 1967). La thorie relationniste de lespace, Revue de Mta., 1916. A Treatise on Universal Algebra, Cambridge, 1898.

AbbreviationsJames
BC CER EMS EP EPR ERE ERM MS MEN MT Letters P PP PU SPP TT VRE WB Perry Psychology. Briefer Course, 1892 (Henry Holt, 1920). Collected Essays and Reviews, Longmans, 1920. Exceptional Mental States, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982. Essays in Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1978. Essays in Psychical Research, Harvard U. Press, 1986. Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912 (Bison Books, 1996). Essays in Religion and Morality, Harvard U. Press, 1982. Memories and Studies, Longmans, 1911. Manuscripts, Essays and Notes, Harvard U. Press, 1988. The Meaning of Truth, Longmans, 1909. The Letters of William James, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920. Pragmatism, 1907 (Longmans, 1916). The Principles of Psychology, 1890 (Dover Pub., 1950). A Pluralistic Universe, 1909 (Bison Books, 1996). Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911 (Bison Books, 1996). Talks to Teachers and Students, Henry Holt, 1899. The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans, 1902. The Will to Believe, Longmans, 1897. Thought and Character of William James, Little, Brown, 1935.

0 Preface
In his review of Cliffords Lectures and Essays, William James has claimed that
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with 1 measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.

It seems to me that this mysterious unison is nowhere as evident as in Plato, Leibniz, Peirce, Bergson and Whitehead. According to the latter, 2 philosophy is indeed both akin to algebraic calculus and to poetry Moreover, the factual systematic correlation and even Wahlverwandtschaften of Peirces (18391914), James (18421910), Bergsons (1859 1941) and Whiteheads (18611947) worldviews has often been noted but rarely studied in detail. To think them together offers the possibility of activating one of the very rare possible synergies between first-rate philosophers. Their respective thought developments, albeit genuinely personal, spring from a similar radical empiricism feeding a pragmatic method making sense in the very same ontological direction. There has not only been some significant influence (direct and indirect) between them but there is also a strong compatibility of their respective visions (which does not mean at all, however, that their respective categories can be carelessly put side by side). One could speak of a process pragmatic pluralism to suggest the visionary community that was the direct by-product of the anti-Spencerian Zeitgeist, a chaosmotic mood that will be sketched during our inquiry. That community should be expanded of course
1

James review of William Kingdon Cliffords Lectures and Essays Vol. 1 (Edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock, London, MacMillan and Co., 1879) is reprinted in his CER 138. See the Abbreviations for the references to the editions I am using; I have sought to quote the most accessible editions. See the Bergson and Whitehead issue of Process Studies, edited by Randall E. Auxier (Volume 28/3-4, 1999) and MT vii, 50, 174.

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to immediate fellows: upstream to James Ward (18431925) and G. Fechner (18011887), downstream to J. Dewey (18591952), S. Alexander (18591938) and Bertrand Russell (18721970), and to more processually eccentric figures such as Philippe Devaux (19021979) in Belgium, Enzo 1 Paci (19111976) in Italy and Jean Wahl (18881974) in France. As a matter of interest, Whitehead has successively taught at Trinity College (Cambridge), University College and Imperial College of Science and Technology (London), and eventually at the other Cambridge, the one of the State of Massachusetts, i.e., the John Harvard University. Tireless polygraph, after a distinguished career of algebraist and logicist (1891 1913), of philosopher of natural science (19141923), he framed in Harvard a revolutionary ontology in anti-metaphysical times par excellence (19241947). For his part, William James has spent his entire academic career at Harvard, where he taught physiology and anatomy (1873), psychology (18761889) and philosophy (18811907)with periods where these fields overlapped. If we focus especially on the proximity existing between James and Whitehead, we are forced to acknowledge the existence of a mysterium conjunctionis between two psychic opposites: on the one hand, their late philosophical vision is basically the same; on the other, the philosophical temperaments differ slightly. Two issues ought to be distinguished pragmatism and radical empiricismand in both cases James appears to have framed his argument in dialogue with Peirce and to have made bolder claims than Whitehead, who has kept an archeological temperament of sorts. On the one hand, the pragmatic standpoint, that cannot be severed from the triple opening that defines post-modernity (spatial, temporal and psychological), has been adopted by numerous scholars in the late XIXth and early XXth century. On the other hand, radical empiricism embodies James central trait. Although it is also present, to a certain extent, in 2 Peirces phaneroscopy and in Husserls imperative to return to thing 3 themselves (Zurck zu den Sachen selbst ), James motto all experiences
1

Such a global contextualization has been attempted in the biographical entries featured by the Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond and published by ontos verlag in 2008. Peirce, Adirondack Lectures (1905), in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1931, Vol. 1, 284. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phmenologische Philosophie, Jahrbuch fr Philosophie und phmenologische Forschung, t. I, Halle, Max Niemeyer, 1913, 19.

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and only experiences (ERE) has been throughly enforced only by James himself. Peirce, like Whitehead, had too much of a systematic temperament and Husserl seemed to be increasingly concerned only with the empirical data disclosed in sense-perception and in rational data produced by ratiocination. In other words, only James relativizes the normal state of consciousness through experience. Whitehead, for one, heavily relied upon imagination with that regard. The Preface examines briefly this temperamental contrast in order to open the way to the assessment of their respective pragmatism and particularly of the ontological question of the bud or epochal theory of actualization. First, a little tiological reminder. Although James is very unlikely to have read any of Whiteheads workswhich were mainly mathematical (say logico-algebraical) until the publication of The Organisation of Thought, Educational and Scientific in 19171Whitehead has read very early James Pragmatism (1907)2 and one can speculate that he promptly devoured as well the Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and the Essays in Radical Empiricism (published in 1912, but all of which essays were written in the years 19041905). James pragmatism is also discussed in the unpublished Whitehead-Russell correspondance. For instance, in his letter to Russell of January 5, 1908, Whitehead criticizes Russells interpretation of Jamesian pragmatism:
Your article on Pragmatism does not quite convince meperhaps because the alternative you dismiss without discussion (i.e. no facts) seems to me by far their strongest thrust. You do no seem to me to touch a theory such as this: The life of sensation and emotion (I dont know the technical terms) is essentially without thought and without subdivision. Objects are only for thought; they are the form by which thought represents the alien complex of sensation. As soon as I think I perceive the landscape, I am creating for the purpose of thought the objects I and the landscapeand so on, if I proceed to split up the landscapeNow as to truththere are two essentially dis-tinct

1 2

Most papers are reprinted in The Aims of Education and Other Essays, 1929. Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, sub verso Mathematics, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, XIth edition, vol. 17, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 19101911, pp. 878-883, p. 881; reprinted under the title Mathematics, Nature of in the XIVth edition (vol. 15, London and New York, 1929, pp. 85-89); and later reprinted in ESP.

Michel Weber indefinable harmonies which constitute the whole of truth (1) the selfconsistency of thought with itselfthis is logic: and (2) the consistency of thought with the non-rational complex of sensation but this does not mean that the relation between objects should be thought of, as they are in fact, because the objects themselves are not in fact, they are merely in thought. Thus for truth the objects of thought are partly arbitrary within the limits necessary to secure the two harmonies. I am quite prepared to hear that the pragmatist position as thus sketched is too hopeless to require refutation. All I mean is that 1 I do not see how it is refuted on the lines laid down in your article.

Having said this, the temperamental contrast can be sketched with the help of the following pairs of concepts: James was a cosmopolitan USAmerican, an extravert and experimental geniuswhereas Whitehead was a British, introvert, imaginative systematiser. This contrast is only for heuristic purposes and two further points deserve to be made straight away. Primo, James entire life was crippled by mood swings that sometimes made his social life painful whereas Whitehead enjoyed teaching and gathering around him his colleagues and students (during the then famous evening at the WhiteheadsD 15). Perhaps that, when all is said and done, the two philosophers were equally lonely. Secundo, when Whitehead claimed that Plato had intuitioned all philosophical problems and provided hints (even sometimes contradictory hints) to solve them, he failed to see that Peirce had done the exact same thing only a couple of decades before he arrived in Harvard! (James and Peirce met in 1861, the year of Whiteheads birth.) Hence his famous quote could apply, mutatis mutandis, to Peirce:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of
1

Quoted by Ronny Desmets A Refutation of Russells Stereotype, in Ronny Desmet and Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. The Algebra of Metaphysics. Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum, Louvain-laNeuve, ditions Chromatika, 2010, pp. 172-173.

Prface suggestion. Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. But I do mean more: I mean that if we had to render Plato's general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or participation) of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence. (PR 39-40)

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To put it differently: all the intuitions that Peirce always tried to systematically unfold and that were put at work, usually in a more pedestrian manner, by James, perhaps gained a second systematic life in Whitehead. If it is safe enough to characterize James works as American, the fact remains that he was truly a citizen of the (Western) world, fluent in French and German, someone who was straightforward, outgoing, very eager to vulgarize science. He was equally in love with experience itself, with its intrinsic opacity and even with the danger of its off-limits intercourse. All he wrote was taped from the depths of his own experiences (some of them being borderline: neurosis, intoxications, hypnosis). On the other hand, Whitehead really appreciated the zeal for knowledge1 and for freedom2 which underlies the American ethos but he claimed to have remained a
1

Today in America, there is a zeal for knowledge which is reminiscent of the great periods of Greece and the Renaissance. But above all, there is in all sections of the population a warm-hearted kindness which is unsurpassed in any large social system. (ESP 14) Americans are always warm-hearted, always appreciative, always helpful, but they are always shrewd; and that is what makes for me the continual delight of living in America, and it is why when I meet an American I always expect to like him, because of that always delightful mixture of shrewdness and warmheartedness. (ESP 114) I do feel that if a man is going to do his best he ought to live in America, because there the treatment of any effort is such that it stimulates everything that is eager in one. (ESP 115) This is the justification of that liberalism, that zeal for freedom, which underlies the American Constitution and other various forms of democratic government. (ESP 65)

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typical example of the Victorian Englishman.1 He read French and German, but probably only in technical materials. Moreover, Lowe has aptly claimed that Whitehead was a loner with many good friends but no confidant.2 He certainly accepted the radical empiricism promoted by the life and thought of his illustrious predecessor in Harvard, but did so in a less existential manner: experiences that were out of his reach were simply imagined. Whatever relative truth James digged out through (often painful) experiences, Whitehead reached through (apparently painless) imaginative generalizations. Both philosophers had strong intuitions and were keen to expand the scope of their fields of expertise at a time when their contraction was more fashionablebut Whitehead the algebraist was always keener to frame these intuitions into a grand scheme. Both explicitly argued that science depends upon metaphysics: James since The Knowing of Things Together (1894) and Whitehead since SMW (1925). Neither had a real philosophical scholarly background: philosophy was for them primarily a matter of a dialogue with their contemporaries, an eminent Cambridge tradition promptly actualized in Harvard. Granting that it is altogether of little heuristic value to understand the James-Whitehead lineage as the genius and his epigone, the fact remains that their temperamental difference, community of vision and legacies allow such an interpretational short-circuitprovided that it remains critical. Perhaps that a well-tempered Nietzschean contrast between Dionysus and Apollo would open more interpretative doors This also brings in the issue of intuition: the concept of intuition is perhaps not fashionable anymore in philosophy, but it is a key to understand 3 thinkers such as James and Whitehead (or Einstein ). It is not just a matter
1

ESP 115. I am exactly an ordinary example of the general tone of the Victorian Englishman, merely one of a group. (ib.) Victor A. Lowe, A.N. Whitehead. The Man and His Work. Volume I: 18611910, Volume II: 19101947 (edited by J. B. Schneewind), Baltimore, Maryland and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985 & 1990, vol. II, p. 150. I believe in intuition and inspiration At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished that it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research. (Albert Einstein, Opinions and Aphorisms. On Science in Cosmic Religion. With other Opinions and Aphorisms, New York, Covici / Friede Publishers, 1931, p. 97)

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of pointing at Bergsons influence on both of them, but of naming their radical empiricism and the tropism towards systematization that animates their writings. On the one hand, both accepted all experiences as valid matters of facts, i.e., starting points for philosophical generalizations; on the other, both wrote in order to recreate these fleeting experiential anchorings in the readers mind. Unfortunately, Stebbing and Russell couldnt agree less and the reputation of our thinkers suffered immensely from these ad hominem arguments1 To repeat: although the radical empiricist premise is plain in both cases, Whiteheads is a little bit more shy with regard to its existential implementation. The concrete many-sidedness of experience is of primordial importance to him, but so is the discovery of a complete formalism. We have here a trait that is constant in the development of his thought: he has contemplated the logico-mathematical field sub specie totalitatis in Cambridge, geometry as a physical science in London, and metaphysics under the category of creativity in Harvard. Out of this journey, two speculative loci appear of particular importance: the ontological status of extension and of propositional functions.2 The question of the lure of their thought-development is more straightforward: James life and works is the product of an eschatological quest linked to his archaeological agnosticism3 (that went astray in his last years); Whiteheads is piloted by an archaeological quest correlated to his eschatological agnosticism (the same remark holds). In other words, James is animated by a constant desire to cope with the (individual) total existential risk. His philosophy is not only concerned with life as it is lived and with its pragmatic improvement, it is pursued for its Emersonian transfigurative virtue. James' own philosophical development displays with great strength that this quest is quite dangerous because it puts our entire existence (even our post-mortem existence) at risk. In XXth century parlance: neurosis has to be abolished at the risk of psychosis. At all costs.
1

Lizzie Susan Stebbing, The Notion of Truth in Bergsons Theory of Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XIII, 1913, pp. 224-256. Cf. Philippe Devaux, Le bergsonisme de Whitehead, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, vol. XV, no. 56-57, fasc. 3-4, 1961, pp. 217-236. See the interesting, but partial, analyses of James A. Bradley: The Speculative Generalization of the Function. A Key to Whitehead, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 64, 2002, pp. 253-271. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, categories, supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts (P 5455).

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One has to leave behind oneself the old social cloak imposed by the political forces of this world and enhance one's awareness of the importance of the present moment, of its duty and visionary weights. This involves in practice the destruction of all opinions, the destruction of all lies. Besides Plato, Hume provides an early background and Huxley a powerful recent exemplification for this argument. Here is what Hume wrote in his 1758 essay:
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and the most military governments as well as to the most free 1 and most popular.

His concern is amplified by techno-scientific progress, as Huxley argued in 1946:

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms should resemble the old. Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficientand in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the sin against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editor and schoolteachers. But their methods are still crude and unscientific.2

1 2

David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government, 1758 Aldous Huxley, Foreword [1946] of Brave New World [1932], With an introduction by David Bradshaw, Hammersmith, HarperCollins, 1994).

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Hence, all social narratives that prevent liberation from the not always obvious oppressive powers have to be obliterated. Even though Whitehead is obviously, for his part, hoping for some transfigurative virtue, he remains more discrete on these shores. The basic engine of his radical empiricist speculations is formal: to question the meaning of simple obvious statements in order to attain higher orders of abstractions. What do we mean by space-time, by immediate senseperception, by simultaneity? For sure, nothing can be omitted,1 but how do we manage the wealth of data if not through discursive thinking? These are some of the questions that will be treated here. Whitehead's PancreativismThe Basics has provided tools to understand Whitehead secundum Whitehead. We now seek to bring him in dialogue with James. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types of synergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to read Whitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand the stakes of James works. In order to keep our argument tight, the book follows a triadic structure: the first three chapters adopt the vantage point of Whitehead to assess James; the next three chapters seek to understand Whitehead with the help of James main intuitions; the last three chapters provide some applications of that synergy. The general train of thought of this monograph has been established in the years 19992004, when I was a regular contributor to the Streams of William James, created and nurtured by Randall Albright, who was the leading figure of the William James Society (WJS) before the publication of the Society became William James Studies (2006). Over the years, I have contracted many intellectual debts, the most enduring ones being perhaps to Pierfrancesco Basile, Ronny Desmet and Anderson Weekes. I would also like to dedicate this book, as imperfect as it is, to the memory of T. L. S. Sprigge (19322007), with whom I have created the European William James Project in 2001, Peter H. Hare (19352008), famous for his dogmatic pluralism (!), and Sergio Franzese (19632010), whose untimely death has left an aching void in Italian process pragmatism. All three were
1

In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical []. (AI 226; cf. AI 222)

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looking forward to celebrate the centenary of the death of William James and were planning scholarly events that their departure to Hades eventually prevented. Finally, before launching our argument, it is important to remember once again Whiteheads precious warning: everything that is simple (or clear) is false but usablewhile everything that is complex (or obscure) is adequate but unusable.1 Similarly, James has claimed that the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. (PP II 369) Speculative philosophy is no easy task.

Seek simplicity and distrust it. (CN 163) Exactness is a fake. (Immortality, in ESP 96.)

1 Introduction Whiteheads Reading of James and Its Context

When Bertrand Russell visited Harvard in 1936, there were two heroes in 1 his lecturesPlato and James. Although this claim should be carefully examined in itself, the exact same could be said of his former mentor Whitehead. Precisely the same year, Whitehead wrote the following to his assistant Hartshorne, on the occasion of the publication of a Festschrift dedicated to him:
My general impression of the whole book [] confirms my longstanding belief that in the oncoming generation America will be at the centre of worthwhile philosophy. European philosophy has gone dry, and cannot make any worthwhile use of the results of nineteenth century scholarship. It is in chains to the sanctified presuppositions derived from later Greek thought. It is in much the same position as mediaeval scholasticism in the year 1400 A.D. My belief is that the effective founders of the Renaissance are Charles Peirce and William James. Of these men, W.J. is the analogue to Plato, and C.P. to Aristotle, though the time-order does not correspond, and the analogy must not be pressed too far. Have you read Ralph Perrys book (2
1

So has I. B. Cohen told H. Putnam: cf. Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism. An Open Question, Oxford / Cambridge, Blackwell, 1995, p. 6. With that regard, it is interesting to remember that in Russells 1950 essay Eminent Men I have Known, James is said to be the most personally impressive philosopher, and this was in spite of a complete naturalness and absence of all apparent consciousness of being a great man (Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays [1950], London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 181-187). Russell is explicitely excluding philosophers still alive from this assesment: Whitehead, with many others, is not mentioned at all, either because the essay was written before 1949, or because Russell was not in the mood to mention his former colleague and friend (and although in various places he has insisted on the importance of Whitehead for the development of his own thought).

Michel Weber vols.) on James? It is a wonderful disclosure of the living repercussions of late 19th century thought on a sensitive genius. It is reminiscent of the Platonic Dialogues. W.J.s pragmatic descendants have been doing their best to trivialize his meanings in the notions of Radical Empiricism, Pragmatism, Rationalization. But I admit W.J. was weak on Rationalization. Also he expressed himself by the 1 dangerous method of over-statement.

Whitehead makes three outstanding claims here. Primo, a third Renaissance is taking place in America in the XXth century; secundo, it makes plain that philosophy has to be in medias res; tertio, Peirce might be the brain of this revolution, but James is its hart. The Peircean turning-about of 1878 and its Jamesian echo in 1907 seek to undo the supernaturalism of the second Renaissance (Mersenne, Descartes, Gassendi) and to recover, volens nolens, the totality disclosed by the naturalism of Ficinus (Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae, 1482), Pico della Mirandola (De hominis dignitate, 1486), Bruno (La cena de le ceneri, 1584), Campanella (Civitas Solis, 1623) and Andreae (Christianopolis, 1619). Naturalistic humanism is back. According to the author of Process and Reality, philosophical movements articulate themselves around two main characters: the genius who inaugurates them, and the systematiser who gives form and expands the founding intuitions of the former (PR 57 and 73). Whitehead was too humble to consider himself as more than a systematiser of others intuitions, and the complete list of the thinkers he praises (in one way or another) would be quite long: the early Whitehead is particularly sensitive to the recent foundational developments in algebra and geometry (G. Peano, G. Cantor; H. Grassmann, W. Hamilton, G. Boole, G. Riemann; Leibnizs and Russells shadows should not be forgotten); his middle period especially tackles electromagnetism (M. Faraday, J.C. Maxwell), extending to Einsteins theories of relativity (including H. Poincars and H. Minkowskis and H. Poincars inflections) and the nascent quantum mechanics (M. Planck, N. Bohr); the late Whitehead also shows the
1

The letter, that was first printed in George Louis Klines A.N. Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy (Englewood-Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), is reprinted in full in Lowe II, 345 sq. The Festschrift in question is: Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop (et al.), Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead. [A Collection of Papers by Nine Younger American Philosophers, Former Students of A. N. Whitehead, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University] , London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1936.

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context

influence of contemporary thinkers: S. Alexander, H. Bergson, F.H. Bradley, C.D. Broad, J. Dewey, L.J. Henderson, W. James, J. McTaggart, G.H. Mead, T. P. Nunn, G. Santayana and J. Ward. In the background, the systems of Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Newton and Plato stand out as well. This chapter attempts to quote all the explicit occurrences of James in 1 Whiteheads corpus and to weave them into a synthetic argument. It argues from the texts themselves, factually putting into brackets previous inquiries dealing with Whiteheads Jamesian legacy. The argument unfolds in three sections: (i) general background, (ii) stylistic similarities, (iii) specific impacts.

1.1. General Background

The above list of thinkers is not exhaustive at all, and, according to the circumstances, Whitehead puts emphasis on one supreme master of thought (PR 39) rather than another. There is, however, an obvious fourfold influence on his later speculations, as he himself testified:
In Western literature there are four great thinkers, whose services to civilized thought rest largely upon their achievements in philosophical assemblage; though each of them made important contributions to the structure of philosophic system. These men are Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, and William James. (MT 2)

Let us review each philosopher.

1.1.1. Plato
Plato is constantly acclaimed for his numerous flashes of insight and the openness with which he systematically expands them:

This chapter constitutes an expansion of my Whiteheads Reading of James and Its Context, Streams of William James, Volume 4, Issue 1, Spring 2002, pp. 1822 and Volume 5, Issue 3, Fall 2003, pp. 26-31. See also my Whitehead et James: conditions de possibilit et sources historiques d'un dialogue systmatique, in A. Benmakhlouf et S. Poinat (d.), Quine, Whitehead, et leurs contemporains, Noesis, 13, 2009, pp. 251-268. A synoptic survey of Whiteheads references to James can furthermore be found in Scott Sinclairs William James as American Plato?, William James Studies, Vol. 4, 2009, pp. 111-129.

Michel Weber Plato's contribution to the basic notions connecting Science and Philosophy, as finally settled in the later portion of his life, has virtues entirely different from that of Aristotle, although of equal use for the progress of thought. It is to be found by reading together the Thetetus, the Sophist, the Timus, and the fifth and tenth books of the Laws; and then by recurrence to his earlier work, the Symposium. He is never entirely self-consistent, and rarely explicit and devoid of ambiguity. He feels the difficulties, and expresses his perplexities. No one could be perplexed over Aristotle classifications; whereas Plato moves about amid a fragmentary system like a man dazed by his own penetration. (AI 146-147)

hence:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. (PR 39)

Notice his derogatory assessment of the systematization of Plato (something German scholars have been prone to attempt, as he repeatedly remarked). Whitehead found the Timus, which he studied very carefully, definitively more inspiring than Newtons Scholium, for the simple reason that the former would have welcomed XXth science into its framework, 1 whereas the later could not
The difficulty of communication in words is but little realized. If I had to write something about your personality, of course I couldbut how much would remain that couldnt be put into words. So, when the rare balance of knowledge and perception appears, as in William Jamesone who could communicate so much more than mostit is

Cf. PR 70-74. Luc Brisson and F. Walter Meyerstein could be said to have followed Whiteheads vision with their book Inventing the Universe. Platos Timaeus, The Big Bang, And the Problem of Scientific Knowledge [1991], State University of New York Press, 1995).

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context perhaps an advantage that his system of philosophy remained incomplete. To fill it out would necessarily have made it smaller. In Platos Dialogues there is a richness of thought, suggestion, and implication which reaches far. Later, when we came to be more explicit concerning some of those implications, we have a shrinkage. (D 271)

This cautiousness with regard to systematization does not mean however that the whole enterprise is flawed. Whitehead is actually endowed with a systematic mind, but he attempts only to systematize his own experience for his own sake. There is, in other words, no dogmatic reductionism involved. Plato, moreover, just like James, does not provide us only with sporadic intuitions that are often apparently contradictory: they also bring hints as to how to assemble them and to bringing them together, to join their potentialities. Granted, these are sometimes as elusive, being akin to 1 cavalry charges, but the overall movement is holistic. One last issue deserves to be mentioned (not addressed): the ontological status of the eternal objects. Before and after Process and Reality, Whitehead adopts a rhetorical mode of exposition that leads most commentators to underline his Platonician stance. But in the magnum opus itself, he agrees with Heraclitus and James: because we never descend twice in the same experiential stream, no two ideas are ever exactly the same (PP I 235).

1.1.2. Aristotle
Aristotle receives both due acknowledgement for his decisive impact on the framing of the scientific mind and lament for the speculative cowardliness he showed in key matters. Yes, Aristotle settled scientific inquiries with his masterly analysis of the notion of generation [ and,] 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. (PR 209) Yes, he was the last metaphysician to have approached Gods concept dispassionately (SMW 173). But if he invented science, he destroyed philosophy (D 139) in so far as he was the apostle of substance and attribute, and of the classificatory logic which this notion suggests. (PR 209) This is exactly where the shoe pinches:

Whitehead believes that we can only partially weave into a train of thought what we apprehend in flashes. (cf. ESP 127)

Michel Weber If you conceive fundamental fact as a multiplicity of subjects qualified by predicates, you must fail to give a coherent account of experience. The disjunction of subjects is the presupposition from which you start, and you can only account for conjunctive relations by some fallacious sleight of hand, such as Leibnizs metaphor of his monads engaged in mirroring. The alternative philosophic position must commence with denouncing the whole idea of subject qualified by predicate as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language. (R 13)

Moreover, from an historical perspective, he has had a dogmatic influence on Western thought as well as a deceitful one; his ignorance of 1 mathematics did not serve him well; and his Logic was a more superficial weapon than philosophers deemed it (AI 117).

1.1.3. Leibniz
For his part, Leibniz is not much discussed in Whitehead's corpus, which basically means two things. On the one hand, his impact on the philosophy of organism is so deep that it completely fades in Whitehead's categorical landscape; on the other, Whitehead does not seem to have much sympathy for the German philosophical mindKant being a notable exception. This is after all nothing but a very personal affair: one feels at unison with some authors, and totally foreign to others. But it is probably
1

In a sense, Plato and Pythagoras stand nearer to modern physical science than does Aristotle. The two former were mathematicians, whereas Aristotle was the son of a doctor, though of course he was not ignorant of mathematics. The practical counsel to be derived from Pythagoras, is to measure, and thus to express quality in terms of numerically determined quantity. But the biological sciences, then and till our own time, have been overwhelmingly classificatory. Accordingly, Aristotle by his Logic throws the emphasis on classification. The popularity of Aristotelian Logic retarded the advance of physical science throughout the Middle Ages. [] In the seventeenth century the influence of Aristotle was at its lowest, and mathematics recovered the importance of its earlier period. (SMW 28-29) Aristotle was clearly not a professional mathematician, and he does not in his works show any acquaintance with the higher brancheshe makes no allusion to conic sections, for examplebut he was fond of mathematical illustrations, and he throws a flood of light on the first principles of mathematics as accepted in his time. (Sir Thomas Little Heath, A Manual of Greek Mathematics, New York, Dover Publications, Inc., 1963, p. 184)

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context

as well part of the political tragedy of the late XIXth and XXth centuries: there has been, alas, many conflicts involving German and British people 1 and Whitehead's youngest son Eric was killed in action in 1918. (The issue of the real or imagined hostility between individuals should be understood from the perspective of class struggles: there is no real animosity between British people and German people, only an engineered one serving the 2 interests of international capitalism. )

1.1.4. James
Out of these four philosopher-scientists, Plato and James receive special appraisal because of their intuitive capacities, orto use the concept that has a medullar virtue in Whitehead's essaysbecause of their creativity. As we will see in a moment, their style is usually closer to Whitehead's than Aristotles and Leibnizs. The two latter are actually known for their systematicity: both were aiming at a full understanding of all the details of the God/World business, and consequently rigidified their writings as much as they could. Non-contradiction was for them a major concern. Having said this, we are forced to notice that the partition Whitehead uses between intuitive and systematic thinkers does not really apply to himself. He obviously considers that he is simply improving the coherence of utterances of geniuses like Plato and James (failing to grasp the importance of Peirce), something that puts him among the systematisers or the coordinators of past achievements; but, when all is said and done, he is, as his style demonstrates, not interested in sealing an ultimate system, only keen to develop local systems as far as possible. In its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition. (PR 7). His efforts in imaginative generalization make his thought belong to both sides. This double tension really requires more development, but our short pointillist chapter will be busy only with Whitehead's explicit evocations of James (18421910). In other words, the broader question that is the
1

PNKs dedication runs as follows: To Eric Alfred Whitehead, Royal Flying Corp, November 27, 1898 to March 13, 1918. Killed in action over the Fort de Gobain giving himself that the city of his vision may not perish. The music of his life was without discord, perfect in his beauty. James Stuart Martin, All Honorable Men, Boston, Little, Brown and Co, 1950; Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, an expos of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 19331949, New York, Delacorte Press, 1983; Harold James, The German Slump. Politics and Economics, 19241936, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986.

Michel Weber

underground influence of James on Whiteheads speculations will not be treated here: I will not comb the texts in order to reveal not-so-obvious Jamesian foundations. The fact is that when a thinker has had a long and enduring influence on another, most connections start working in the back of the mind of the writer, who does not bother mentioning all of them explicitly, or then simply quotes from memory. Let us first pin point his personal appreciation of James with six major exemplification. In one of his 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica entries, Whitehead refers the reader to James Pragmatism (1907) on the old question of the one and the 1 many. As far as we know, this is the earliest reference to James in Whiteheads corpus. It is all the more significant that it occurs in a mathematical discussion and that James book has been probably read at Cambridge, when Whitehead, while teaching applied mathematics, was apparently focusing his researches only on algebraic, geometrical and logico-mathematical issues. Science and the Modern World speaks of an adorable genius who possessed the clear, incisive genius which could state in a flash the exact point at issue. (SMW 2 and 147) In a truly crucial passage of Process and Reality, his magnum opus, he speaks of the authority of William James (PR 68; cf. our commentary infra on the introduction of the epochal theory of time). A 1936 paper claims that William James and John Dewey will stand out as having infused philosophy with new life, and with a new relevance to 2 the modern world. We have quoted supra MT 2s commendation of Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, and James; here is what is said of the latter:
1

Alfred North Whitehead, sub verso Mathematics, in ESP 278. As far as James is concerned, this question is relevant since his The Knowing of Things Together, 1895 (an essay, belonging to his idealistic phase, that is also known under the title The Tigers of India and has been reprinted in MT 43 sq. and CER 371 sq.). Alfred North Whitehead, Remarks to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, X, 1936, pp. 178-186. Reprinted in The Philosophical Review, XLVI, 1937, pp. 178-186, and later in ESP (without the first paragraph, and under the title Analysis of Meaning), pp. 122-131, here p. 123.

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context Finally, there is William James, essentially a modern man. His mind was adequately based upon the learning of the past. But the essence of his greatness was his marvellous sensitivity to the ideas of the present. He knew the world in which he lived, by travel, by personal relations with its leading men, by the variety of his own studies. He systematized; but above all he assembled. His intellectual life was one protest against the dismissal of experience in the interest of system. He had discovered intuitively the great truth with which modern logic is now wrestling. (MT 3)

Interestingly enough, Whitehead speaks of Thucydides and Gibbon in a similar fashion: all three displayed an extended practical experience allowing them to understand the deep significance of contemporary events (D 121-122 and 225). The radical importance of direct, lived, immediately given experience is, for instance, at the root of his criticism of Hume: philosophy must build on life as it is lived, not be developed independentlyand supplementedby ad hoc hypotheses drawn from 1 habitual experience. Later on, in the same book, he adds:
Harvard is justly proud of the great period of its philosophic department about thirty years ago. Josiah Royce, William James, Santayana, George Herbert Palmer, Mnsterberg, constitute a group to be proud of. Among them Palmer's achievements centre chiefly in literature and in his brilliance as a lecturer. The group is a group of
1

Hume can find only one standard of propriety, and that is, repetition. Repetition is capable of more or less: the more often impressions are repeated, the more proper it is that ideas should copy them. Fortunately, and without any reason so far as Hume can discover, complex impressions, often repeated, are also often copied by their corresponding complex ideas. Also the frequency of ideas following upon the frequency of their correlate impressions is also attended by an expectation of the repetition of the impression. Hume also believes, without any reason he can assign, that this expectation is pragmatically justified. It is this pragmatic justification, without metaphysical reason, which constitutes the propriety attaching to repetition. This is the analysis of the course of thought involved in Hume's doctrine of the association of ideas in its relation to causation, and in Hume's final appeal to practice. It is a great mistake to attribute to Hume any disbelief in the importance of the notion of cause and effect. Throughout the Treatise he steadily affirms its fundamental importance; and finally, when he cannot fit it into his metaphysics, he appeals beyond his metaphysics to an ultimate justification outside any rational systematization. This ultimate justification is practice.(PR 133)

10

Michel Weber men individually great. But as a group they are greater still. It is a group of adventure, of speculation, of search for new ideas. To be a philosopher is to make some humble approach to the main characteristic of this group of men. (MT 174)

In 1936, he also wrote:

my belief is that the effective founders of the American Renaissance are Charles Peirce and William James. Of these men, W. J. is the analogue to Plato, and C. P. to Aristotle, though the time-order 1 does not correspond, and the analogy must not be pressed too far.

There is no other published evidence that Whitehead read James before he was offered a position at Harvard: James is simply not cited anymore before the 1925 Lowell lectures (whose expansion became SMW). For his part, Paul Weiss, who has been one of Whiteheads assistant in Harvard, is convinced that he looked into James only when he settled down in the U. 2 S. Evidence cannot be found either in his personal notes or manuscripts, since they have been destroyed after his death, upon his request, by his wife 3 Evelyn. Whitehead was exceptionally comfortable in Harvard. Even though he remained a British Victorian, as he used to call himself with humour and modesty, most of his hopes for civilization relied upon the 4 ideals and the dynamism of American society. (Dwelling within the elite of the Ivy League, he was obviously not aware at all of the struggles of 5 the lower classes. ) It is not entirely clear what happened to his (rather extended) library. Some twenty-two of his books are now in the Milton S. Eisenhower

Whitehead, Letter to Charles Hartshorne, January 2, 1936, in Lowe II, 345. The quote is contextualized supra. Paul Weiss, personnal communication to the author, 08/08/2001. Lowe, A. N. Whitehead. The Man and His Work, Vol. I, p. 246. There is an ideal of human liberty, activity, and coperation dimly adumbrated in the American Constitution. It has never been realized in its perfection; and by its lack of characterization of the variety of possibilities open for humanity, it is limited and imperfect. And yet, such as it is, the Constitution vaguely discloses the immanence in this epoch of that one energy of idealization, whereby bare process is transformed into glowing history. (MT 120) Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States: 1492Present, New York, HarperCollins, 1980.

2 3 4

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context

11
1

Library (Johns Hopkins University), as a part of the Victor Lowes legacy. Among them, one can find the Longmans, Green and Co. edition (London, 1929) of the Varieties of Religious Experiencewhich he might thus have 2 read only in the late twenties.

The first thing to be said with regard to his personal edition of the Varieties is that Whitehead has most certainly read them before delivering the Lowell Lectures of 1926 (that became Religion in the Making). One of two things: either he has rediscovered Jamesian themes by himselflike 3 the idea that religion is solitariness or he has read the Varieties no later than on the occasion of writing his Lectures, which means that the volume housed in Johns Hopkins is not the first edition he has worked on. Furthermore, CN (1920) already mentions Bergson and, since Bergson and 4 James philosophical developments are so intertwined, it probably makes
1

Lowe is the author of the only bibliography of Whitehead (see a previous footnote), a work that he carried on for more than twenty years with the support of Whiteheads family. Unfortunately, he died before the completion of the second volume, that was posthumously published by a non-Whiteheadian colleague. For an inventory of his papers, consult the Alfred North Whitehead Collection Ms. 282 and 284, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University. Here is what we have been told with regard to Whitehead's copy of James's Varieties: Whitehead's copy of James's Varieties contains only one marginal comment. At the end of the second full paragraph on p. 431, Whitehead placed a vertical line next to the text that begins But high-flying speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology... Outside the line, he comments, why. He has marked many other passages of text, but without comments. (Margaret Burri, Curator of Manuscripts, Johns Hopkins University, personnal communication to the author, 05/10/2001.) Religion is the art and theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things. This doctrine is the direct negation of the theory that religion is primarily a social fact. [] Religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. (RM 16) On the cross-influences of James and Bergson, see the meticulous inquiries of Milic Capek: The Reappearance of the Self in the Last Philosophy of William James, The Philosophical Review 62, 1953, pp. 526-544; La signification actuelle de la philosophie de James, Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale, 67 anne, 1962, pp. 291-321; and La pense de Bergson en Amrique, Revue internationale de philosophie 31, 1977, pp. 329-350.

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Michel Weber

sense to claim that if he knew one he knew the other. The story is here that it is through his personal friend, Herbert Wildon Carr, author of Henri 1 Bergson. The Philosophy of Change, that Whitehead got intellectually acquainted with the Parisian philosopher. Besides, Carr was the Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society, where he lectured on Bergson and where Bergson himself lectured probably with Whitehead attending. Whitehead joined the Society in 1915. Furthermore, there was a correspondence between Whiteheads friend and Aristotelian Society member Haldane and Bergson with regard to Haldanes book on Einsteins 2 theories of relativity, which included a discussion of PNK and CN. More than this, one could argue that he has always had time for a little bit of eclecticism and that Does Consciousness Exist (1904) might have attracted his attention at the time of its publication or perhaps when it was included in the ERE (1912). To flesh out a little bit what could appear as a purely gratuitous speculation, let us evoke the case of Whiteheads interest in theology: if one considers only the published evidence, one is forced to conclude that before the 1925 Lowell Lectures, the philosopher could not be bothered with that field. However, we learn from his Dialogues with Price that during eight of these years in Cambridge [U. K.], he was reading theology. This was all extracurricular, but so thorough that he amassed a sizable theological library. At the expiry of these eight years he dismissed the subject and sold the books. (D 13) And it is the case as well that during his student days, when he was a member of the elitist Cambridge Apostles discussion group, religious questions were discussed, together with all sorts of philosophical subject. Lowe reviews 3 that topic, but does not mention discussions of psychological concepts besides telepathy. G. Sarton, the well-known historian of science has claimed that original ideas are exceedingly rare and the most that philosophers have done in the 4 course of time is to erect a new combination of them. This could be the
1 2

London/Edinburgh, T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1911. See for instance the letter of Bergson to Haldane, Paris, 14 july 1921, to be found at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, MS 5915 / ff. 68-70. Victor A. Lowe, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 112-145. George Sarton, quoted by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Cosmological Anthropic Principle, Oxford, New York, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1986; Issued with correction as an Oxford University Press Paperback, 1988, p. 27. He has perhaps read Sainte Beuves Portraits littraires: On retombe toujours, on tourne dans un certain cercle, autour d'un petit nombre de solutions

3 4

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context

13

case in his discipline; in the history of metaphysics, however, we see every so often the daring expression of direct personal insights into the ontological texture of our world. Starting from that pure experience, the blissful philosopher attempts to engineer a novel system of thought as worthy as possible of the founding event. The problem is that attempts at rationalization will probably borrow conceptualities and/or itself spur much secondary thinking. The unmediated dialogue between experience and reason could then be broken to generate second-order speculations drifting from their shimmering experiential soil. Here lies the pathology of thought. But when speculations (first-order or second-order) are (re)directed toward the full thickness of lived experience, rationalization brings forth contrasts and intensity in experience. There is a nobleness of reason; and it is linked with the fate of normal consciousness. Perhaps any fair assessment of the impact of the borrowings made by a given author needs to be preceded by ahypotheticalanswer to these basic hermeneutical puzzlings. The remaining of this chapter intends to display the stylistic similarities between the two philosophers and the specific impacts of James on Whitehead.

1.2. Stylistic Similarities

Whitehead and James have different philosophical temperaments and backgroundsthe former remained basically an introverted British Victorian whereas the later was through and through an extrovert cosmopolitan, but a similar worldview takes shape in their works. In the first volume of Whiteheads Pancreativism, we have seen that two main features characterize the late Whiteheads style: circumambulation and constructive discrimination. Uphill, we additionally found his radical empiricism and, downhill, his non dogmatism. All four traits are also Jamesian and underline the atemporal congeniality between the two philosophers. Whitehead adopts a methodological radical empiricism and considers pluralism as a matter of fact:

qui se tiennent en prsence et en chec depuis le commencement. On a coutume de s'tonner que l'esprit humain soit si infini dans ses combinaisons et ses portes; j'avouerais bien bas que je m'tonne qu'il le soit si peu. (Bibliothque de la Pliade, 1954, vol. II, p. 466)

14

Michel Weber Fragmentary individual experiences are all that we know [] all speculation must start from these disjecta membra as its sole datum. It is not true that we are directly aware of a smooth running world, which in our speculations we are to conceive as given. In my view the creation of the world is the first unconscious act of speculative thought; and the first task of a self-conscious philosophy is to explain how it has been done. There are roughly two rival explanations. One is to assert the world as a postulate. The other way is to obtain it as a deduction, not a deduction through a chain of reasoning, but a deduction through a chain of definitions which, in fact, lifts thought on to a more abstract level in which the logical ideas are more complex, and their relations are more universal. (AE 163-4)

His motto is as well to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and 1 stubborn facts. We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy 2 of fellow creatures, and philosophy has to do justice to phenomena as they are given: you may polish up commonsense, you may contradict in detail, you may surprise it. But ultimately your whole task is to satisfy it. (AE 107) Now what exactly is given is itself a matter of debate in philosophy. Significantly enough, rather than theorizing the question, Whitehead gives a Jamesian extensive definition:
In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and

1 2

William James writing to Henry James, as quoted by SMW 3. PR 50 specifying, in a footnote, this epithet is, of course, borrowed from William James.

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience 1 in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal. (AI 226)

15

Let us furthermore note that the pragmatic consequences of concepts are 2 quite often evoked in his corpus and that the pragmatic function of reason is central in his eponymous book (FR, passim): the function of Reason is to promote the art of life. There is however only one occurrence giving his definition of pragmatism:
This doctrine places philosophy on a pragmatic basis. But the meaning of pragmatism must be given its widest extension. In much modern thought, it has been limited by arbitrary specialist assumptions. There should be no pragmatic exclusion of self-evidence by dogmatic denial. Pragmatism is simply an appeal to that self-evidence which sustains itself in civilized experience. Thus pragmatism ultimately appeals to the wide self-evidence of civilization, and to the self-evidence of what we mean by civilization. (MT 106)

Adventures of Ideas remarks that each mode of consideration is a sort of searchlight elucidating some of the facts, and retreating the remainder into an omitted background (AI 43). It would be of course a topic of its own to precisely discriminate the variations of meaning of the concept in James and Whiteheads respective minds. To exemplify the circumambulative practice in a paragraph is difficult, because it is made of waves of arguments that are, by definition, spread
1

An alternative formulation can be found in students notes taken during Whiteheads classes: You must survey all the sides of the universe, the variations in our value experience, we must look at all rare moments when we were near angels and near pigs, and the rare moments when our value notion is so indiscriminating that it is a mere throb of immediacy, a vague feeling as when we fall asleep. (Frederick Olson, Alfred North Whitehead Lecture. Student Notes 19361937, Unpublished, to consult at Harvards Pusey: HUC 8923.368.3) The polar themes of clarity and vagueness are essential in Whitehead: cf. the well-known quote of Russells Portraits from Memory and Other Essays, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956, p. 40 (You think the world is what it looks in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleepclaimed Whitehead.) Cf. the pragmatic test of SMW 50, RM 27, PR 13, 181, 337; or the pragmatic appeal to the future, pragmatic appeal to consequences and the like (passim).

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Michel Weber

over his entire corpus and do not even always use the same concepts. A rather straightforward example is nevertheless provided by the Function of Reasons definitions of the art of life (cf. pp. 4, 8, 18, 22, 26). In his Aims of Education one also finds an interesting argument for a renewed educational expertise essentially consisting of a more focused training in key disciplines: students should get acquainted with a few essential (and interconnected) mathematical tools by actually applying them to various concrete problems. By so doing, the mind grows far better than with classical training. Mechanical learning of fragments of knowledge does not bring the mastering of knowledge. Of course, he is especially concerned with the mathematical curriculum, but his argument is intended to have a broader expressiveness. By the same token, Whitehead insists on the notion of rhythm:
In approaching every work of art we have to comport ourselves suitably in regard to two factors, scale and pace. It is not fair to the architect if you examine St. Peters at Rome with a microscope, and the Odyssey becomes insipid if you read it at the rate of five lines a day. (AE 70)

This notion could furthermore be used to rebuild his entire percolative ontology: the creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private individual to the publicity of the objectified individual. (PR 151) Constructive discrimination expresses a typical mode of understanding of the nature and function of language. When carving discriminalities, we have to keep in mind the full concreteness of experience. According to Whitehead,
Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate [] metaphysical first principles. Weakness of insight and deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably. Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap. (PR 4)

With that regard, while discussing James's Varieties of Religious Experience, he insisted that the difficulty of communication in words is but little realized (see D 271, quoted supra p. 20). Plato, James and metaphysical intuitions are again in the hot seat. The existence of some nonrational remainder (VRE 456) is directly linked to the linguistic position just discussed. When Whitehead claims that he is

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it. (PR xii; cf. AI 223)

17

he has obviously in mind a dialectic similar to the one we have named with the trinomial rational/irrational/nonrational. The concept of irrational pictures the discrepancies of status of a given proposition treated in different thought systems; the concept of nonrational points at the fact that, whatever our rational efforts are (whatever the thought system), the fully-fledged concreteness remains beyond it. Logic has been shaken by the existence of formally undecidable propositions; metaphysics has still to draw all the consequences from the ultimate rational opacity of the brute facts (WB 90 and 143). His reinstatement of vagueness is already noticeable in the vague gestalts of On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology (1884) and in his insistence on the unclassified residuum in his 1890 article on psychical research (see WB 299 sq. and 137). Anyway, from a broader perspective, one has to acknowledge that to profess irrationalism per se is to claim that reason has no public weight whereas the authors here mentioned are reluctant to confer that weight only in the private sphere. The public use of reason remains fully justified. Hence the professed non-dogmatism from which Whitehead never departed, even at the speculative height that is PR:
There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. (PR xiv)

Speculative language is not glossolalia, it makes the most of what one has to transform the emotional vividness of experience into the concreteness of a shared world. Natural language is intrinsically ambiguous and intentional; it is far from being a pure logical entity, and, as a matter of fact, its countless equivocations have been very often disparaged. Of course, it is worth distinguishing the faculty of language (that can actualise itself in gestures, postures, screams, etc.) from orality, and orality from literature, and, within the literary corpus, prose from poetry... (A Porphyrian tree that can be reformed and complexified as one could wish). The same linguistic constraints do not hang over living speech and weighted writing. The former is truly eventful, its constitutive temporality explains its linearity (that can be of course modulated through repetitions and other rhetorical patterns). This chapter has been mainly concerned with the latter, which is like the systematic thunder after the experiential

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Michel Weber

lightning. Writing facilitates reflection, analysis, abstractions of all sorts. Making possible a very technical and variegated use of style, writing somewhat drags language away from temporality and linearity. Its multifarious semantic potential is directly correlated with the stylistic managing of polysemiality and interanimation. In other words, out of the three degrees of freedom that have been sketched on their way towards concreteness, style stands out as the catalyst of the semantic process. Solely style can make the reader fall under the authors spell and thereby lead him/her at the outskirts of an intuitive vision that remains nevertheless private. The intentionality opening the propositional entanglement to the world shields language from the danger of barren coherence. For instance, a dictionary does not, properly speaking, define anything; it is just a tissue of mutual cross-references. To the contrary, the efficacy of language comes from its self-effacing ability in front of what it lures us. The organization of a conceptual network revealing the ontological surplus asks a peculiar gesture made of invocatory repetitions and daring crosscheckings; eventually, it is an art of the void that is requested. That evocative capacity is a sort of implosive capacity: language has to die to give birth to meaning. If it remains there, like an apathetic screen, meaning has not been conveyed. The intuitive grasping of the power of language is a nocturnal experience that sees the revelation of its faculty of making things rise from their absence. Semantic, the function of language is also apophantic, power 1 of manifestation of total anthropo-cosmic experiences.

1.3. Specific Impacts

As far as we know, only four explicit conceptual points of contact illustrate the dialogue of Whitehead with James: the epochal theory of time, the concept of feeling, the functional concept of consciousness, and the definition of the concept of religion.

1.3.1. Epochal Theory of Time

There has beenand still ismuch fuss about the ins and out of Whitehead's adoption of an ontological atomism or epochal theory of 2 time. The first point to clarify is that he does not shift from a continuist
1

On the concept of apophansis, see, e.g., Heideggers Sein und Zeit, Tbingen, Niemeyer, 1927, p. 33. L.S. Ford, for one, has repeatedly published on the matter but, as V. Lowe remarked straight away: the result should be presented as no more than a

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context

19

ontology to an atomistic one: his early inquiries outspokenly refuse to question the mystery of the coming-to-be and passing-away; it is only when the philosopher decides to further question the conditions of possibility of genuine eventfulness that he passes the gates into the ontological field. Now, the reason for adopting a (refurbished) ontological atomism is plural but can be easily triangulated with Leibniz monadology, Plancks quantic thunder, and James interpretation of Zenos everlasting antinomies. In support of his contention that there is a becoming of continuityand no continuity of becoming (PR 35)Whitehead especially refers to James SPP:
These conclusions are required by the consideration of Zeno's arguments, in connection with the presumption that an actual entity is an act of experience. The authority of William James can be quoted in support of this conclusion. He writes: Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all. James also refers to Zeno. In substance I agree with his argument from Zeno; though I do not think that he allows sufficiently for those elements in Zeno's paradoxes which are the product of inadequate mathematical knowledge. But I agree that a valid argument 1 remains after the removal of the invalid parts. (PR 68)

Whitehead basically agrees with James reading of Zeno, but adds that if the parts that are the product of inadequate mathematical knowledge are corrected by infinitesimal calculus, then a valid argument remains. Whiteheads full answer comes with his cautious articulation of genetic and morphogenetic analyses: the former deals with the concrescing actuality and does not allow the use of infinitesimals; the latter applies to the past
logically possible history (Lowe, Ford's Discovery about Whitehead, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 17, 1977, pp. 251-264, p. 226 reviewing Fords The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 19251929, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1984).
1

Whitehead quotes Some Problems in Philosophy, Ch. X; the footnote adds: my attention was drawn to this passage by its quotation in Religion in The Philosophy of William James, by Professor J. S. Bixler. The source is likely to have been Bixlers Religion in the Philosophy of William James, Boston, Marshall Jones Co., 1926.

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actualities and provides the conditions of possibility of the infinite divisibility of actualities in transition. Curiously, he does not raise here the more fundamental issue that is the theorisation of the fitness (the matchness?) of mathematics to the concrete. Process and Reality is entirely built upon the adoption of ontological percolation. From the perspective of the postmodern significance of Whitehead's thought, the atomization of the act of experience is of tremendous importance. It seals a mutual requirement between epochality, liberty and novelty, thereby allowing a complete reformation of the oldfashioned philosophical substantialism and of its heir, scientific materialism. Independently existing substances with simple location are replaced by strings of buds of experience (Whitehead speaks of nexuses of actual entities). More precisely, the actual entities are hierarchized in societies, and in societies of societies, allowing both for the irruption of the unheard and its echoing in an ever-fluctuating cosmic tissue. As a result, the laws of physics are the mere outcome of the social environment (PR 204): The characteristic laws of inorganic matter are mainly the statistical averages resulting from confused aggregates. (SMW 110) Let us note, by the way, that James Principles of Psychology also featured a revival of the Humean thesis of the relativity and contingency of the laws of nature: The Laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other. (PP I 104)

1.3.2. Contiguism
According to Whitehead, it is obvious that pragmatism is nonsense apart from final causation. (FR 26) The problem of the meshing of the discontinuous and the continuous is vital for psychology as well as philosophy, for epistemology as well as ontology. How is it possible to categorialize the socialization of present and past actualities, of final and efficient causation, of freedom and determinism? James saw as well that novelty seems to violate continuity and that continuity seems to involve infinitely shaded gradation (SPP 153):
The same returns not, save to bring the different. Time keeps building into new moments, every one of which presents a content which in its individuality never was before and will never be again. (SPP 147-148)

Hence his use of the concept of contiguity in a radical empiricist way (e.g., ERE 108, PU 359 and MT 175 but also WB 246), that is implicitely introduced when Whitehead socializes his epochal actualities, and that I

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context

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have extensively (no pun intended) used myself. Whiteheads technical answer lies in the asymmetrical structure secured by vector-like relationships. His more intuitive conceptualisation lies in his extended use of the concept of feeling. Transitions are felt relations. On the occasion of the examination of Bradley's notion of feeling, a concept that expresses for him the primary activity at the basis of experience, the connection is established with James:
I may add that William James also employs the word in much the same sense in his Psychology. For example in the first chapter he writes, Sensation is the feeling of first things. And in the second chapter he writes, In general, this higher consciousness about things is called Perception, the mere inarticulate feeling of their presence is Sensation, so far as we have it at all. To some degree we seem able to lapse into this inarticulate feeling at moments when our tension is entirely dispersed. (AI 231)

The concept of feeling occupies a decisive place in Whitehead's lexicon. Feelings are the internal-external (vectorial) relationships that grant both the interdependence of all actual entities and their idiosyncratic atomicity. Referring to Bradleys inclusive whole, he qualifies that naked awareness as an experience itself in its origin and with the minimum of analysis (AI 231). The proximity with the Jamesian concept of pure experience is plain obvious.

1.3.3. Consciousness
The renewal of the concepts of consciousness and ego-soul is of course in the continuation of the aforementioned issue of the ontological conditions of possibility of a total cosmic processualization. Whitehead has done his homework here:
The two modern philosophers who most consistently reject the notion of a self-identical Soul-Substance are Hume and William James. But the problem remains for them, as it does for the philosophy of organism, to provide an adequate account of this undoubted personal unity, maintaining itself amidst the welter of circumstance. (AI 186-187)

In other words, if you allow the destruction of the substantialistic platform, a difficult conceptual reconstructionthe replacement of the entitative concept of consciousness by a functional if not a serial onehas to take place in order to interpret the continuity evidenced by our experience. The

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death of the Cartesian Ego is evoked in length by Whitehead. Although it is an exaggeration to attribute a general change in a climate of thought to any one piece of writing, or to any one author (SMW 143), he goes on in comparing Descartes' Discourse on Method with James Does Consciousness Exist:
No doubt Descartes only expressed definitely and in decisive form what was already in the air of his period. Analogously, in attributing to William James the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy we should be neglecting other influences of his time. But, admitting this, there still remains a certain fitness in contrasting his essay, Does Consciousness Exist published in 1904, with Descartes' Discourse on Method, published in 1637. James clears the stage of the old paraphernalia; or rather he entirely alters its lighting. Take for example these two sentences from his essay: To deny plumply that 'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of itfor undeniably 'thoughts' do existthat I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. (SMW 143)

As usual, Whitehead is very level-headed in his reading. He further critically remarks:

In the essay in question, the character which James assigns to consciousness is fully discussed. But he does not unambiguously explain what he means by the notion of an entity, which he refuses to apply to consciousness. In the sentence which immediately follows the one which I have already quoted, he says: There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. That function is knowing. 'Consciousness' is supposed necessary to explain the fact that things not only are, but get reported, are known. Thus James is denying that consciousness is a 'stuff'. The term 'entity,' or even that of 'stuff,' does not fully tell its own tale. The notion of 'entity' is so general that it may be taken to mean anything that can be thought about. You cannot think of mere nothing; and the something which is an object of thought may be called an

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context entity. In this sense, a function is an entity. Obviously, this is not what James had in his mind. (SMW 144)

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What James argument lacks, says Whitehead, is a clear definition and a sharp analysis of the concept of substance that is discarded. But Whitehead is identifying here a blind spot laming as well his own writings: one cannot find in the Whiteheadian corpus a discussion of the proximity and differences existing between the shades of meaning of the Greek and Medieval concepts of substance and of the Modern one. The Greek concept insists on what is permanent in change (basically, it is the question of the ousia); the Modern one insists rather on what exists/stands by itself and is directly correlated with a theological hypothesis (God as an independent existent unaffected by time). Whitehead does not really distinguish between these two concepts and mainly attacks the modern one from the perspective of its neglect of time (fallacy of simple location) and because of the bifurcations it installs. Now, some scholars have argued that it is totally illegitimate to apply the criticism designed for the Modern concept to the Greek or Medieval one, that could be read, it seems, in a process 1 fashion. This point made, let us go on:
In agreement with the organic theory of nature which I have been tentatively putting forward in these lectures, I shall for my own purposes construe James as denying exactly what Descartes asserts in his Discourse and his Meditations. Descartes discriminates two species of entities, matter and soul. The essence of matter is spatial extension; the essence of soul is its cogitation, in the full sense which Descartes assigns to the word cogitare. (SMW 144)

Following James in this, Whitehead thus focuses only on the Modern concept. He concludes:
The reason why I have put Descartes and James in close juxtaposition is now evident. Neither philosopher finished an epoch by a final solution of a problem. Their great merit is of the opposite sort. They each of them open an epoch by their clear formulation of terms in which thought could profitably express itself at particular stages of knowledge, one for the seventeenth century, the other for the twentieth

See, e.g., Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence, London/New York, George Allen and Unwin Ltd./Humanities Press Inc., 1972, or the last book of William Norris Clarke, s. j.: The One and the Many. A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.

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Michel Weber century. In this respect, they are both to be contrasted with St. Thomas Aquinas, who expressed the culmination of Aristotelian scholasticism. In many ways neither Descartes nor James were the most characteristic philosophers of their respective epochs. I should be disposed to ascribe these positions to Locke and to Bergson respectively, at least so far as concerns their relations to the science of their times. (SMW 147)

The debate between Descartes and James is not a final one, but rather a typical one for two main reasons. First, the vast majority of philosophical texts use the understanding of the authors peers to contrast and sharpen a personal vision.
When you are criticising the philosophy of an epochurges Whitehead, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch. (SMW 48)

Second, in opposition with the dogmatic trend discoverable in some thinkers, the debate, as it is settled by Descartes, James and Whitehead, remains open. There is one remaining question that ought to be treated: quid of the possible influence of Jamesian panpsychism on the late Whitehead? The simplest answer is: since there is no such thing as a Whiteheadian panpsychism, trying to specify James impact at that level would be like probing a conceptual mirage. It is mainly Hartshorne who has made that misleading claimthat is totally foreign to Whiteheads corpus. As Lowe says: Whitehead did not call his pluralistic metaphysics a panpsychism, 1 and was not happy when his studentmyself for onedid so. A more sophisticated assessment of that crucial question is postponed until section 6.2.2.

Victor A. Lowe, The Concept of Experience in Whiteheads Metaphysics, in George L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead, op. cit., pp. 124-133, p. 126.

Whiteheads Reading of James and its Context

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1.3.4. Definition of Religion

James heuristic definition of religion is well-known:
Religion [] shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual man in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. (VRE 31)

Whitehead has meditated that text (to which he refers in his Dialogues: cf. supra) and so he writes in RM:
Religion is the art and theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things. This doctrine is the direct negation of the theory that religion is primarily a social fact. [] All collective emotions leave untouched the awful ultimate fact, which is the human being, consciously alone with itself, for its own sake. Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. [] Religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. (RM 16)

Both Whitehead and James discard religion qua institution as the object of their thoughts. This does not mean that religious institutions are not worth debating: it is simply another debate, a far more embarrassing one, that is further qualified as subsidiary. Religion qua social construct does not have the depth of meaning that religiousness has. What furthermore strikes the reader is the common insistence on solitude. But what exactly happens then to the all-embracing interconnectedness both authors argue for? James understanding of the homo religiosus is the topic of chapter 5.