1whiteheads reading of james and its context

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Michel Weber

Whitehead's Pancreativism

Jamesian Applications

Process Thought volume VIII



Contents

Abbreviations—Whitehead .......................................................................... v Abbreviations—James................................................................................. vi 0. Preface .................................................................................................... vii 1. Introduction—Whitehead’s 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. Conclusion—The Assassination of the Diadoches............................... 243

Bibliography ............................................................................................. 277

Table of Contents ..................................................................................... 279



Abbreviations—Whitehead

ADG The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry, Cambridge, 1907.

APG The Axioms of Projective Geometry, Cambridge, 1906.

AE The Aims of Education, 1929 (Free Press, 1967).

AI Adventures of Ideas, 1933 (Free Press, 1967).

CN The Concept of Nature, 1920 (Cambridge, 1964). D Lucien Price, Dialogues, 1954 (Mentor Book, 1956).

ESP Essays in Science and Philosophy, Philosophical Lib., 1947.

FR The Function of Reason, 1929 (Beacon Press, 1958).

ICNV “Indication, Classes, Numbers, Validation,” Mind , 1934.

IM An Introduction to Mathematics, 1911 (Oxford, 1958).

IS The Interpretation of Science, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1961.

MCMW “On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World,” 1906. MT Modes of Thought , 1938 (Free Press, 1968).

OCN “On Cardinal Numbers,” American J. of Mathematics, 1902.

OT The Organisation of Thought , Williams and Norgate, 1917.

PM Principia Mathematica, 1910–1913 (Cambridge, 1925–1927).

PNK Principles of Natural Knowledge, 1919/1925 (Dover, 1982).

PR Process and Reality, 1929 (Free Press Corr. Edition, 1978).

R The Principle of Relativity, Cambridge, 1922. RM Religion in the Making , Macmillan, 1926.

S Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect , Macmillan, 1927.

SMW Science and the Modern World , 1925 (Free Press, 1967).

TRE “La théorie relationniste de l’espace,” Revue de Méta., 1916.

UA A Treatise on Universal Algebra, Cambridge, 1898.



Abbreviations—James

BC Psychology. Briefer Course, 1892 (Henry Holt, 1920).

CER Collected Essays and Reviews, Longmans, 1920.

EMS Exceptional Mental States, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982.

EP Essays in Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1978.

EPR Essays in Psychical Research, Harvard U. Press, 1986. ERE Essays in Radical Empiricism, 1912 (Bison Books, 1996).

ERM Essays in Religion and Morality, Harvard U. Press, 1982.

MS Memories and Studies, Longmans, 1911.

MEN Manuscripts, Essays and Notes, Harvard U. Press, 1988.

MT The Meaning of Truth, Longmans, 1909.

Letters The Letters of William James, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920.

P Pragmatism, 1907 (Longmans, 1916). PP The Principles of Psychology, 1890 (Dover Pub., 1950).

PU A Pluralistic Universe, 1909 (Bison Books, 1996).

SPP Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911 (Bison Books, 1996).

TT Talks to Teachers and Students, Henry Holt, 1899.

VRE The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans, 1902.

WB The Will to Believe, Longmans, 1897.

Perry Thought and Character of William James, Little, Brown, 1935.



0Preface

In his review of Clifford’s Lectures and Essays, William James hasclaimed that

The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor withmeasure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.1

It seems to me that this mysterious unison is nowhere as evident as in Plato,Leibniz, Peirce, Bergson and Whitehead. According to the latter,

philosophy is indeed both akin to algebraic calculus and to poetry…2

Moreover, the factual systematic correlation and even Wahlverwandt-

schaften of Peirce’s (1839–1914), James’ (1842–1910), Bergson’s (1859– 1941) and Whitehead’s (1861–1947) worldviews has often been noted butrarely 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 pragmaticmethod 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 respectivevisions (which does not mean at all, however, that their respectivecategories 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 besketched during our inquiry. That community should be expanded of course

1 James’ review of William Kingdon Clifford’s Lectures and Essays Vol. 1 (Edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock, London, MacMillan and Co., 1879) isreprinted in his CER 138. See the Abbreviations for the references to theeditions I am using; I have sought to quote the most accessible editions.

2 See the Bergson and Whitehead issue of Process Studies, edited by Randall E.

Auxier (Volume 28/3-4, 1999) and MT vii, 50, 174.



viii Michel Weber

to immediate fellows: upstream to James Ward (1843–1925) and G.Fechner (1801–1887), downstream to J. Dewey (1859–1952), S. Alexander(1859–1938) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), and to more processuallyeccentric figures such as Philippe Devaux (1902–1979) in Belgium, Enzo

Paci (1911–1976) in Italy and Jean Wahl (1888–1974) in France.

1

As a matter of interest, Whitehead has successively taught at Trinity

College (Cambridge), University College and Imperial College of Scienceand Technology (London), and eventually at the other Cambridge, the oneof 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 (1914–1923), he framed inHarvard a revolutionary ontology in “anti-metaphysical” times par

excellence (1924–1947). For his part, William James has spent his entire

academic career at Harvard, where he taught physiology and anatomy(1873), psychology (1876–1889) and philosophy (1881–1907)—with periods where these fields overlapped.

If we focus especially on the proximity existing between James andWhitehead, 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 philosophicaltemperaments differ slightly. Two issues ought to be distinguished—

pragmatism and radical empiricism—and in both cases James appears to

have framed his argument in dialogue with Peirce and to have made bolderclaims than Whitehead, who has kept an archeological temperament ofsorts. On the one hand, the pragmatic standpoint, that cannot be severedfrom the triple opening that defines post-modernity (spatial, temporal and

psychological), has been adopted by numerous scholars in the late XIXthand early XXth century. On the other hand, radical empiricism embodiesJames’ central trait. Although it is also present, to a certain extent, inPeirce’s phaneroscopy

2 and in Husserl’s imperative to return to thing

themselves (“Zurück zu den Sachen selbst”3), 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 MichelWeber and Will Desmond and published by ontos verlag in 2008.

2 Peirce, Adirondack Lectures (1905), in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders

Peirce , edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, Cambridge, HarvardUniversity Press, 1931, Vol. 1, § 284.

3 Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phämenologische

Philosophie, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phämenologische Forschung , t. I,Halle, Max Niemeyer, 1913, § 19.



Préface ix

and only experiences (ERE) has been throughly enforced only by Jameshimself. Peirce, like Whitehead, had too much of a systematic temperamentand Husserl seemed to be increasingly concerned only with the empiricaldata disclosed in sense-perception and in rational data produced by

ratiocination. In other words, only James relativizes the normal state ofconsciousness through experience. Whitehead, for one, heavily relied uponimagination with that regard.

The Preface examines briefly this temperamental contrast in order to openthe way to the assessment of their respective pragmatism and particularlyof the ontological question of the “bud” or “epochal” theory ofactualization.

First, a little ætiological reminder. Although James is very unlikely tohave read any of Whitehead’s works—which were mainly mathematical

(say logico-algebraical) until the publication of The Organisation ofThought, Educational and Scientific in 19171 —Whitehead has read veryearly James’ Pragmatism (1907)2 and one can speculate that he promptlydevoured as well the Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and the Essays in Radical Empiricism (published in 1912, but all of which essayswere written in the years 1904–1905). James’ pragmatism is also discussedin the unpublished Whitehead-Russell correspondance. For instance, in hisletter to Russell of January 5, 1908, Whitehead criticizes Russell’sinterpretation of Jamesian pragmatism:

Your article on Pragmatism does not quite convince me—perhaps

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 don’t

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 landscape’—and so on, if I proceed to split up thelandscape—Now as to truth—there are two essentially dis-tinct

1 Most papers are reprinted in The Aims of Education and Other Essays, 1929.2 Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, sub verso “Mathematics,” in Encyclopaedia

Britannica, XIth edition, vol. 17, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,1910–1911, pp. 878-883, p. 881; reprinted under the title “Mathematics, Natureof” in the XIVth edition (vol. 15, London and New York, 1929, pp. 85-89); and

later reprinted in ESP.



x Michel Weber

indefinable harmonies which constitute the whole of truth (1) the self-

consistency of thought with itself—this 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

I do not see how it is refuted on the lines laid down in your article.1

Having said this, the temperamental contrast can be sketched with thehelp of the following pairs of concepts: James was a cosmopolitan US-

American, an extravert and experimental genius—whereas Whitehead wasa British, introvert, imaginative systematiser. This contrast is only forheuristic purposes and two further points deserve to be made straight away.Primo, James’ entire life was crippled by mood swings that sometimesmade his social life painful whereas Whitehead enjoyed teaching andgathering around him his colleagues and students (during the then famous“evening at the Whiteheads”—D 15). Perhaps that, when all is said anddone, the two philosophers were equally lonely. Secundo, when Whiteheadclaimed that Plato had intuitioned all philosophical problems and provided

hints (even sometimes contradictory hints) to solve them, he failed to seethat Peirce had done the exact same thing only a couple of decades beforehe arrived in Harvard! (James and Peirce met in 1861, the year ofWhitehead’s 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 Desmet’s “A Refutation of Russell’s Stereotype,” in Ronny

Desmet and Michel Weber (edited by), Whitehead. The Algebra of Metaphysics.

Applied Process Metaphysics Summer Institute Memorandum , Louvain-la-

Neuve, Éditions Chromatika, 2010, pp. 172-173.



Préface xi

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)

To put it differently: all the intuitions that Peirce always tried tosystematically unfold and that were put at work, usually in a more

pedestrian manner, by James, perhaps gained a second systematic life inWhitehead.

If it is safe enough to characterize James’ works as “American,” the factremains that he was truly a citizen of the (Western) world, fluent in Frenchand German, someone who was straightforward, outgoing, very eager tovulgarize science. He was equally in love with experience itself, with itsintrinsic 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 thegreat periods of Greece and the Renaissance. But above all, there is in allsections of the population a warm-hearted kindness which is unsurpassed in any

large social system.” (ESP 14) “Americans are always warm-hearted, alwaysappreciative, always helpful, but they are always shrewd; and that is what makesfor me the continual delight of living in America, and it is why when I meet anAmerican I always expect to like him, because of that always delightful mixtureof shrewdness and warmheartedness.” (ESP 114) “I do feel that if a man is goingto do his best he ought to live in America, because there the treatment of anyeffort is such that it stimulates everything that is eager in one.” (ESP 115)

2 “This is the justification of that liberalism, that zeal for freedom, which underliesthe American Constitution and other various forms of democratic government.”

(ESP 65)



xii Michel Weber

typical example of the Victorian Englishman.”1 He read French andGerman, but probably only in technical materials. Moreover, Lowe hasaptly claimed that Whitehead was a loner with many good friends but noconfidant.2 He certainly accepted the radical empiricism promoted by the

life and thought of his illustrious predecessor in Harvard, but did so in aless 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 strongintuitions and were keen to expand the scope of their fields of expertise at atime when their contraction was more fashionable—but Whitehead thealgebraist 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: philosophywas for them primarily a matter of a dialogue with their contemporaries, aneminent Cambridge tradition promptly actualized in Harvard.

Granting that it is altogether of little heuristic value to understand theJames-Whitehead lineage as the “genius” and his “epigone,” the factremains that their temperamental difference, community of vision andlegacies allow such an interpretational short-circuit—provided that itremains 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 perhapsnot fashionable anymore in philosophy, but it is a key to understandthinkers such as James and Whitehead (or Einstein

3). It is not just a matter

1 ESP 115. “I am exactly an ordinary example of the general tone of the VictorianEnglishman, merely one of a group.” (ib.)

2 Victor A. Lowe, A.N. Whitehead. The Man and His Work. Volume I: 1861–1910,

Volume II: 1910–1947 (edited by J. B. Schneewind), Baltimore, Maryland and

London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985 & 1990, vol. II, p. 150.3 “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 wasnot in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished that it turned outotherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge islimited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress,giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientificresearch.” (Albert Einstein, “Opinions and Aphorisms. On Science” in Cosmic

Religion. With other Opinions and Aphorisms , New York, Covici / Friede

Publishers, 1931, p. 97)



Préface xiii

of pointing at Bergson’s influence on both of them, but of naming theirradical empiricism and the tropism towards systematization that animatestheir writings. On the one hand, both accepted all experiences as validmatters of facts, i.e., starting points for philosophical generalizations; on

the other, both wrote in order to recreate these fleeting experientialanchorings in the reader’s mind. Unfortunately, Stebbing and Russellcouldn’t agree less and the reputation of our thinkers suffered immenselyfrom these ad hominem arguments…1

To repeat: although the radical empiricist premise is plain in both cases,Whitehead’s is a little bit more shy with regard to its existentialimplementation. The concrete many-sidedness of experience is of

primordial importance to him, but so is the discovery of a completeformalism. We have here a trait that is constant in the development of his

thought: he has contemplated the logico-mathematical field sub specietotalitatis in Cambridge, geometry as a physical science in London, andmetaphysics under the category of creativity in Harvard. Out of this

journey, two speculative loci appear of particular importance: theontological status of extension and of propositional functions.2

The question of the lure of their thought-development is morestraightforward: James’ life and works is the product of an eschatologicalquest linked to his archaeological agnosticism3 (that went astray in his lastyears); Whitehead’s is piloted by an archaeological quest correlated to his

eschatological agnosticism (the same remark holds). In other words, Jamesis animated by a constant desire to cope with the (individual) totalexistential risk. His philosophy is not only concerned with life as it is livedand with its pragmatic improvement, it is pursued for its Emersoniantransfigurative virtue. James' own philosophical development displays withgreat strength that this quest is quite dangerous because it puts our entireexistence (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 Bergson’s Theory ofKnowledge,” 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. 217-236.2 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.

3 “The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposednecessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (P 54-

55).



xiv Michel Weber

One has to leave behind oneself the old social cloak imposed by the political forces of this world and enhance one's awareness of theimportance of the present moment, of its duty and visionary weights. Thisinvolves 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 Humewrote 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

and most popular.1

His concern is amplified by techno-scientific progress, as Huxley argued in1946:

There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianisms shouldresemble 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 inefficient—and 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 David Hume, Of the First Principles of Government , 1758

2 Aldous Huxley, “Foreword” [1946] of Brave New World [1932], With an

introduction by David Bradshaw, Hammersmith, HarperCollins, 1994).



Préface xv

Hence, all social narratives that prevent liberation from the not alwaysobvious oppressive powers have to be obliterated.

Even though Whitehead is obviously, for his part, hoping for sometransfigurative virtue, he remains more discrete on these shores. The basic

engine of his radical empiricist speculations is formal: to question themeaning of “simple obvious statements” in order to attain higher orders ofabstractions. What do we mean by space-time, by immediate sense-

perception, by simultaneity…? For sure, “nothing can be omitted,”1 buthow 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 Pancreativism—The Basics has provided tools to understandWhitehead secundum Whitehead. We now seek to bring him in dialoguewith James. It will be a pragmatic dialogue looking for two types ofsynergy: to establish the relevance of a Jamesian background to readWhitehead, and to adumbrate how Whitehead can help us understand thestakes of James’ works. In order to keep our argument tight, the bookfollows a triadic structure: the first three chapters adopt the vantage pointof Whitehead to assess James; the next three chapters seek to understandWhitehead 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 theyears 1999–2004, when I was a regular contributor to the Streams of

William James, created and nurtured by Randall Albright, who was theleading figure of the William James Society (WJS) before the publication ofthe Society became William James Studies (2006–). Over the years, I havecontracted many intellectual debts, the most enduring ones being perhaps toPierfrancesco Basile, Ronny Desmet and Anderson Weekes. I would alsolike to dedicate this book, as imperfect as it is, to the memory ofT. L. S. Sprigge (1932–2007), with whom I have created the European

William James Project in 2001, Peter H. Hare (1935–2008), famous for his

dogmatic pluralism (!), and Sergio Franzese (1963–2010), whose untimelydeath 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 theinfinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relatingto every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk andexperience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experiencedrowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experienceself-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical […]. (AI 226; cf.

AI 222)



xvi Michel Weber

looking forward to celebrate the centenary of the death of William Jamesand were planning scholarly events that their departure to Hades eventually

prevented.

Finally, before launching our argument, it is important to remember once

again Whitehead’s precious warning: everything that is simple (or clear) isfalse but usable—while everything that is complex (or obscure) is adequate

but unusable.1 Similarly, James has claimed that “the art of being wise isthe art of knowing what to overlook.” (PP II 369) Speculative philosophy isno easy task.

1 “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” (CN 163) “Exactness is a fake.” (“Immortality,”

in ESP 96.)



1

IntroductionWhitehead’s Reading of James and Its Context

When Bertrand Russell visited Harvard in 1936, “there were two heroes inhis lectures—Plato and James.”

1 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 hisassistant 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 asmediaeval 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 Perry’s 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 isinteresting to remember that in Russell’s 1950 essay “Eminent Men I haveKnown,” James is said to be “the most personally impressive” philosopher, and“this was in spite of a complete naturalness and absence of all apparentconsciousness 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 notmentioned at all, either because the essay was written before 1949, or becauseRussell was not in the mood to mention his former colleague and friend (andalthough in various places he has insisted on the importance of Whitehead for

the development of his own thought).



2 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

dangerous method of over-statement.1

Whitehead makes three outstanding claims here. Primo, a third Renaissanceis taking place in America in the XXth century; secundo, it makes plainthat philosophy has to be in medias res; tertio, Peirce might be the brain ofthis revolution, but James is its hart. The Peircean turning-about of 1878and 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). Naturalistichumanism is back.

According to the author of Process and Reality, philosophical movementsarticulate themselves around two main characters: the genius whoinaugurates them, and the systematiser who gives form and expands the

founding intuitions of the former (PR 57 and 73). Whitehead was toohumble to consider himself as more than a systematiser of other’sintuitions, and the complete list of the thinkers he praises (in one way oranother) would be quite long: the early Whitehead is particularly sensitiveto the recent foundational developments in algebra and geometry (G.Peano, G. Cantor; H. Grassmann, W. Hamilton, G. Boole, G. Riemann;Leibniz’s and Russell’s shadows should not be forgotten); his middle

period especially tackles electromagnetism (M. Faraday, J.C. Maxwell),extending to Einstein’s theories of relativity (including H. Poincaré’s andH. Minkowski’s and H. Poincaré’s inflections) and the nascent quantummechanics (M. Planck, N. Bohr); the late Whitehead also shows the

1 The letter, that was first printed in George Louis Kline’s A.N. Whitehead: Essays

on His Philosophy (Englewood-Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), is reprinted infull 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.



Whitehead’s Reading of James and its Context 3

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, thesystems 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

Whitehead’s corpus and to weave them into a synthetic argument.1 It

argues from the texts themselves, factually putting into brackets previousinquiries dealing with Whitehead’s Jamesian legacy. The argument unfoldsin 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 thecircumstances, Whitehead puts emphasis on one “supreme master ofthought” (PR 39) rather than another. There is, however, an obviousfourfold 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 arePlato, 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 theopenness with which he systematically expands them:

1 This chapter constitutes an expansion of my “Whitehead’s Reading of James and

Its Context,” Streams of William James, Volume 4, Issue 1, Spring 2002, pp. 18-22 and Volume 5, Issue 3, Fall 2003, pp. 26-31. See also my “Whitehead etJames: conditions de possibilité et sources historiques d'un dialoguesystématique,” in A. Benmakhlouf et S. Poinat (éd.), Quine, Whitehead, et leurs

contemporains, Noesis, 13, 2009, pp. 251-268. A synoptic survey ofWhitehead’s references to James can furthermore be found in Scott Sinclair’s“William James as American Plato?,” William James Studies, Vol. 4, 2009, pp.

111-129.



4 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

Theætetus, the Sophist, the Timæus, 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 repeatedlyremarked). Whitehead found the Timæus, which he studied very carefully,definitively more inspiring than Newton’s Scholium, for the simple reasonthat the former would have welcomed XXth science into its framework,whereas the later could not…

1

The difficulty of communication in words is but little realized. If I

had to write something about your personality, of course I could—buthow much would remain that couldn’t be put into words. So, when the

rare balance of knowledge and perception appears, as in William

James—one who could communicate so much more than most—it is

1 Cf. PR 70-74. Luc Brisson and F. Walter Meyerstein could be said to have

followed Whitehead’s vision with their book Inventing the Universe. Plato’s

Timaeus, The Big Bang, And the Problem of Scientific Knowledge [1991], State

University of New York Press, 1995).




perhaps an advantage that his system of philosophy remained

incomplete. To fill it out would necessarily have made it smaller. In

Plato’s 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 howeverthat the whole enterprise is flawed. Whitehead is actually endowed with asystematic mind, but he attempts only to systematize his own experiencefor his own sake. There is, in other words, no dogmatic reductionisminvolved. Plato, moreover, just like James, does not provide us only withsporadic intuitions that are often apparently contradictory: they also bringhints as to how to assemble them and to bringing them together, to jointheir potentialities. Granted, these are sometimes as elusive, being akin tocavalry charges, but the overall movement is holistic.

1

One last issue deserves to be mentioned (not addressed): the ontologicalstatus of the “eternal objects.” Before and after Process and Reality,Whitehead adopts a rhetorical mode of exposition that leads mostcommentators to underline his Platonician stance. But in the magnum opus itself, he agrees with Heraclitus and James: because we never descendtwice 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 theframing of the scientific mind and lament for the speculative cowardlinesshe showed in key matters. Yes, Aristotle settled scientific inquiries with his“masterly analysis of the notion of ‘generation’ [… and,] in his own personexpressed a useful protest against the Platonic tendency to separate a staticspiritual world from a fluent world of superficial experience.” (PR 209)

Yes, he was the last metaphysician to have approached God’s conceptdispassionately (SMW 173). But if he “invented science,” he “destroyed

philosophy” (D 139) in so far as he was “the apostle of “substance andattribute,” and of the classificatory logic which this notion suggests.”(PR 209) This is exactly where the shoe pinches:

1 Whitehead believes that we can only partially weave into a train of thought what

we apprehend in flashes. (cf. ESP 127)



6 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 Leibniz’s 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 influenceon Western thought as well as a deceitful one; his ignorance ofmathematics did not serve him well;

1 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'scategorical landscape; on the other, Whitehead does not seem to have muchsympathy for the German philosophical mind—Kant being a notableexception. This is after all nothing but a very personal affair: one feels atunison 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 theson 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 toexpress quality in terms of numerically determined quantity. But the biologicalsciences, 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 sciencethroughout the Middle Ages. […] In the seventeenth century the influence ofAristotle was at its lowest, and mathematics recovered the importance of itsearlier period.” (SMW 28-29) “Aristotle was clearly not a professionalmathematician, and he does not in his works show any acquaintance with thehigher branches—he makes no allusion to conic sections, for example—but hewas 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)




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— and Whitehead's youngest son Eric was killed in action in 1918.

1 (The issue

of the real or imagined hostility between individuals should be understood

from the perspective of class struggles: there is no real animosity betweenBritish people and German people, only an engineered one serving theinterests of international capitalism.

2)

1.1.4. James

Out of these four philosopher-scientists, Plato and James receive specialappraisal because of their intuitive capacities, or—to use the concept thathas a medullar virtue in Whitehead's essays—because of their creativity. Aswe will see in a moment, their style is usually closer to Whitehead's thanAristotle’s and Leibniz’s. The two latter are actually known for theirsystematicity: both were aiming at a full understanding of all the details ofthe God/World business, and consequently rigidified their writings as muchas 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 tohimself. He obviously considers that he is simply improving the coherenceof utterances of geniuses like Plato and James (failing to grasp theimportance 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 ofJames (1842–1910). In other words, the broader question that is the

1 PNK’s dedication runs as follows: “To Eric Alfred Whitehead, Royal Flying

Corp, November 27, 1898 to March 13, 1918. Killed in action over the Forêt deGobain giving himself that the city of his vision may not perish. The music ofhis life was without discord, perfect in his beauty.”

2 James Stuart Martin, All Honorable Men, Boston, Little, Brown and Co, 1950;

Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy, an exposé of the Nazi-American

Money Plot, 1933–1949, New York, Delacorte Press, 1983; Harold James, The

German Slump. Politics and Economics, 1924–1936 , Oxford, Clarendon Press,

1986.



8 Michel Weber

“underground” influence of James on Whitehead’s speculations will not betreated here: I will not comb the texts in order to reveal not-so-obviousJamesian foundations. The fact is that when a thinker has had a long andenduring influence on another, most connections start working in the back

of the mind of the writer, who does not bother mentioning all of themexplicitly, or then simply quotes from memory.

Let us first pin point his personal appreciation of James with six majorexemplification.

In one of his 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica entries, Whitehead refers thereader to James’ Pragmatism (1907) on the old question of “the one and themany.”

1 As far as we know, this is the earliest reference to James in

Whitehead’s corpus. It is all the more significant that it occurs in amathematical discussion and that James’ book has been probably read at

Cambridge, when Whitehead, while teaching applied mathematics, wasapparently focusing his researches only on algebraic, geometrical andlogico-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, hespeaks of “the authority of William James” (PR 68; cf. our commentaryinfra on the introduction of the epochal theory of time).

A 1936 paper claims that “William James and John Dewey will stand outas having infused philosophy with new life, and with a new relevance tothe modern world.”

2

We have quoted supra MT 2’s 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 ThingsTogether,” 1895 (an essay, belonging to his idealistic phase, that is also knownunder the title “The Tigers of India” and has been reprinted in MT 43 sq. andCER 371 sq.).

2 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 thefirst paragraph, and under the title “Analysis of Meaning), pp. 122-131, here p.

123.




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 asimilar fashion: all three displayed an extended practical experienceallowing them to understand the deep significance of contemporary events

(D 121-122 and 225). The radical importance of direct, lived, immediatelygiven experience is, for instance, at the root of his criticism of Hume: philosophy must build on life as it is lived, not be developedindependently—and supplemented—by ad hoc hypotheses drawn from“habitual experience.”

1 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, Münsterberg, 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 sofar as Hume can discover, complex impressions, often repeated, are also oftencopied by their corresponding complex ideas. Also the frequency of ideasfollowing upon the frequency of their correlate impressions is also attended byan expectation of the repetition of the impression. Hume also believes, withoutany reason he can assign, that this expectation is pragmatically justified. It isthis pragmatic justification, without metaphysical reason, which constitutes the

propriety attaching to “repetition.” This is the analysis of the course of thoughtinvolved in Hume's doctrine of the association of ideas in its relation tocausation, and in Hume's final appeal to practice. It is a great mistake to attributeto Hume any disbelief in the importance of the notion of “cause and effect.”Throughout the Treatise he steadily affirms its fundamental importance; andfinally, when he cannot fit it into his metaphysics, he appeals beyond hismetaphysics 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

does not correspond, and the analogy must not be pressed too far.1

There is no other published evidence that Whitehead read James before hewas 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 Whitehead’s assistant in Harvard, isconvinced that he looked into James only when he settled down in the U.S.

2 Evidence cannot be found either in his personal notes or manuscripts,

since they have been destroyed after his death, upon his request, by his wifeEvelyn.

3 Whitehead was exceptionally comfortable in Harvard. Even

though he remained a “British Victorian,” as he used to call himself withhumour and modesty, most of his hopes for civilization relied upon theideals and the dynamism of American society.

4 (Dwelling within the elite

of the “Ivy League,” he was obviously not aware at all of the struggles ofthe lower classes.5)

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

1 Whitehead, Letter to Charles Hartshorne, January 2, 1936, in Lowe II, 345. The

quote is contextualized supra.2 Paul Weiss, personnal communication to the author, 08/08/2001.

3 Lowe, A. N. Whitehead. The Man and His Work , Vol. I, p. 246.

4 “There is an ideal of human liberty, activity, and coöperation dimly adumbrated

in the American Constitution. It has never been realized in its perfection; and byits lack of characterization of the variety of possibilities open for humanity, it islimited and imperfect. And yet, such as it is, the Constitution vaguely disclosesthe immanence in this epoch of that one energy of idealization, whereby bare

process is transformed into glowing history.” (MT 120)5 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present , New York,

HarperCollins, 1980.




Library (Johns Hopkins University), as a part of the Victor Lowe’s legacy.1

Among them, one can find the Longmans, Green and Co. edition (London,1929) of the Varieties of Religious Experience —which he might thus haveread only in the late twenties.

2

The first thing to be said with regard to his personal edition of theVarieties is that Whitehead has most certainly read them before deliveringthe Lowell Lectures of 1926 (that became Religion in the Making ). One oftwo things: either he has rediscovered Jamesian themes by himself—likethe idea that religion is solitariness

3 —or he has read the Varieties no later

than on the occasion of writing his Lectures, which means that the volumehoused in Johns Hopkins is not the first edition he has worked on.Furthermore, CN (1920) already mentions Bergson and, since Bergson andJames philosophical developments are so intertwined,

4 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 supportof Whitehead’s family. Unfortunately, he died before the completion of thesecond volume, that was posthumously published by a non-Whiteheadiancolleague. For an inventory of his papers, consult the Alfred North WhiteheadCollection Ms. 282 and 284, Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library,The Johns Hopkins University.

2

Here is what we have been told with regard to Whitehead's copy of James'sVarieties: “Whitehead's copy of James's Varieties contains only one marginalcomment. At the end of the second full paragraph on p. 431, Whitehead placed avertical line next to the text that begins “But high-flying speculations like thoseof 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, personnalcommunication to the author, 05/10/2001.)

3 “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 doctrineis 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)

4 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 WilliamJames,” The Philosophical Review 62, 1953, pp. 526-544; “La significationactuelle de la philosophie de James,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 67èannée, 1962, pp. 291-321; and “La pensée de Bergson en Amérique,” Revue

internationale de philosophie 31, 1977, pp. 329-350.



12 Michel Weber

sense to claim that if he knew one he knew the other. The story is here thatit is through his personal friend, Herbert Wildon Carr, author of Henri

Bergson. The Philosophy of Change,1 that Whitehead got intellectually

acquainted with the Parisian philosopher. Besides, Carr was the Honorary

Secretary of the Aristotelian Society, where he lectured on Bergson andwhere Bergson himself lectured probably with Whitehead attending.Whitehead joined the Society in 1915. Furthermore, there was acorrespondence between Whitehead’s friend and Aristotelian Society member Haldane and Bergson with regard to Haldane’s book on Einstein’stheories of relativity, which included a discussion of PNK and CN.

2

More than this, one could argue that he has always had time for a little bitof eclecticism and that “Does Consciousness Exist” (1904) might haveattracted 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 Whitehead’s interestin theology: if one considers only the published evidence, one is forced toconclude that before the 1925 Lowell Lectures, the philosopher could not

be bothered with that field. However, we learn from his Dialogues withPrice that “during eight of these years in Cambridge [U. K.], he wasreading theology. This was all extracurricular, but so thorough that heamassed a sizable theological library. At the expiry of these eight years hedismissed 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 elitistCambridge “Apostles” discussion group, religious questions werediscussed, together with all sorts of philosophical subject. Lowe reviewsthat topic,

3 but does not mention discussions of psychological concepts…

besides telepathy.

G. Sarton, the well-known historian of science has claimed that “originalideas are exceedingly rare and the most that philosophers have done in thecourse of time is to erect a new combination of them.”

4 This could be the

1 London/Edinburgh, T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1911.

2 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. 68-70.3 Victor A. Lowe, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 112-145.

4 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 Beuve’s Portraits lit téraires: “On retombetoujours, on tourne dans un certain cercle, autour d'un petit nombre de solutions



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 andstubborn facts.”

1 “We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy

of fellow creatures,”2 and philosophy has to do justice to phenomena as

they are given: “you may polish up commonsense, you may contradict indetail, 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 William James writing to Henry James, as quoted by SMW 3.

2 PR 50 specifying, in a footnote, “this epithet is, of course, borrowed from

William James.”




experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience

in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal. (AI 226)1

Let us furthermore note that the pragmatic consequences of concepts arequite often evoked in his corpus

2 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 hisdefinition 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 ofsearchlight elucidating some of the facts, and retreating the remainder intoan 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 Jamesand Whitehead’s 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 student’s notes taken during

Whitehead’s classes: “You must survey all the sides of the universe, thevariations in our value experience, we must look at all rare moments when wewere near angels and near pigs, and the rare moments when our value notion isso 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 1936–1937, Unpublished, to consult at Harvard’s Pusey: HUC8923.368.3) The polar themes of clarity and vagueness are essential inWhitehead: cf. the well-known quote of Russell’s Portraits from Memory and

Other Essays, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956, p. 40 (“You think theworld is what it looks in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems likein the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep”—claimedWhitehead.)

2 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).



16 Michel Weber

over his entire corpus and do not even always use the same concepts. Arather straightforward example is nevertheless provided by the Function of

Reason’s 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 inkey disciplines: students should get acquainted with a few essential (andinterconnected) mathematical tools by actually applying them to variousconcrete problems. By so doing, the mind grows far better than withclassical training. Mechanical learning of fragments of knowledge does not

bring the mastering of knowledge. Of course, he is especially concernedwith the mathematical curriculum, but his argument is intended to have a

broader expressiveness. By the same token, Whitehead insists on the notionof rhythm:

In approaching every work of art we have to comport ourselvessuitably in regard to two factors, scale and pace. It is not fair to the

architect if you examine St. Peter’s 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 percolativeontology: “the creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity ofmany things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the privateindividual to the publicity of the objectified individual.” (PR 151)

Constructive discrimination expresses a typical mode of understanding ofthe nature and function of language. When carving discriminalities, wehave to keep in mind the full concreteness of experience. According toWhitehead,

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 andmetaphysical intuitions are again in the hot seat. The existence of somenonrational “remainder” (VRE 456) is directly linked to the linguistic

position just discussed. When Whitehead claims that he is




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)

he has obviously in mind a dialectic similar to the one we have named withthe trinomial “rational/irrational/nonrational.” The concept of “irrational”

pictures the discrepancies of status of a given proposition treated indifferent thought systems; the concept of “nonrational” points at the factthat, whatever our rational efforts are (whatever the thought system), thefully-fledged concreteness remains beyond it. Logic has been shaken by theexistence of “formally undecidable propositions;” metaphysics has still todraw all the consequences from the ultimate rational opacity of the brutefacts (WB 90 and 143). His reinstatement of vagueness is already

noticeable in the vague gestalts of “On Some Omissions of IntrospectivePsychology” (1884) and in his insistence on “the unclassified residuum” inhis 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 hasto transform the emotional vividness of experience into the concreteness ofa shared world. Natural language is intrinsically ambiguous andintentional; it is far from being a pure logical entity, and, as a matter offact, its countless equivocations have been very often disparaged. Ofcourse, it is worth distinguishing the faculty of language (that can actualiseitself in gestures, postures, screams, etc.) from orality, and orality fromliterature, and, within the literary corpus, prose from poetry... (APorphyrian tree that can be reformed and complexified as one could wish).The same linguistic constraints do not hang over living speech andweighted writing. The former is truly eventful, its constitutive temporalityexplains its linearity (that can be of course modulated through repetitionsand other rhetorical patterns). This chapter has been mainly concerned with

the latter, which is like the systematic thunder after the experiential



18 Michel Weber

lightning. Writing facilitates reflection, analysis, abstractions of all sorts.Making possible a very technical and variegated use of style, writingsomewhat drags language away from temporality and linearity. Itsmultifarious semantic potential is directly correlated with the stylistic

managing of polysemiality and interanimation. In other words, out of thethree degrees of freedom that have been sketched on their way towardsconcreteness, style stands out as the catalyst of the semantic process. Solelystyle can make the reader fall under the author’s spell and thereby leadhim/her at the outskirts of an intuitive vision that remains nevertheless

private. The intentionality opening the propositional entanglement to theworld shields language from the danger of barren coherence. For instance,a dictionary does not, properly speaking, define anything; it is just a tissueof mutual cross-references. To the contrary, the efficacy of language comesfrom its self-effacing ability in front of what it lures us. The organization ofa conceptual network revealing the ontological surplus asks a peculiargesture made of invocatory repetitions and daring crosscheckings;eventually, it is an art of the void that is requested. That evocative capacityis 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 beenconveyed. The intuitive grasping of the power of language is a nocturnalexperience that sees the revelation of its faculty of making things rise fromtheir absence. Semantic, the function of language is also apophantic, powerof manifestation of total anthropo-cosmic experiences.

1

1.3. Specific Impacts

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

1.3.1. Epochal Theory of TimeThere has been—and still is—much fuss about the ins and out ofWhitehead's adoption of an “ontological atomism” or “epochal theory oftime.”

2 The first point to clarify is that he does not shift from a continuist

1 On the concept of “apophansis,” see, e.g., Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit , Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1927, p. 33.

2 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




ontology to an atomistic one: his early inquiries outspokenly refuse toquestion the mystery of the coming-to-be and passing-away; it is only whenthe philosopher decides to further question the conditions of possibility ofgenuine 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, Planck’s quanticthunder, and James’ interpretation of Zeno’s everlasting antinomies.

In support of his contention that there is a “becoming of continuity”—andno “continuity of becoming” (PR 35)—Whitehead especially refers toJames’ 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

remains after the removal of the invalid parts. (PR 68)1

Whitehead basically agrees with James’ reading of Zeno, but adds that ifthe parts that are the product of inadequate mathematical knowledge arecorrected by infinitesimal calculus, then a valid argument remains.Whitehead’s full answer comes with his cautious articulation of genetic andmorphogenetic analyses: the former deals with the concrescing actualityand 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. 226reviewing Ford’s The Emergence of Whitehead's Metaphysics, 1925–1929,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 tohave been Bixler’s Religion in the Philosophy of William James, Boston,

Marshall Jones Co., 1926.



20 Michel Weber

actualities and provides the conditions of possibility of the infinitedivisibility of actualities in transition. Curiously, he does not raise here themore fundamental issue that is the theorisation of the fitness (thematchness?) of mathematics to the concrete.

Process and Reality is entirely built upon the adoption of ontological percolation. From the perspective of the postmodern significance ofWhitehead's thought, the atomization of the act of experience is oftremendous importance. It seals a mutual requirement between epochality,liberty and novelty, thereby allowing a complete reformation of the old-fashioned philosophical substantialism and of its heir, scientificmaterialism. Independently existing “substances” with simple location arereplaced 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 theunheard 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 thestatistical averages resulting from confused aggregates.” (SMW 110) Let usnote, by the way, that James’ Principles of Psychology also featured arevival of the Humean thesis of the relativity and contingency of the lawsof nature: “The Laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits whichthe different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactionsupon each other.” (PP I 104)

1.3.2. Contiguism

According to Whitehead, “it is obvious that pragmatism is nonsense apartfrom final causation.” (FR 26) The problem of the meshing of thediscontinuous and the continuous is vital for psychology as well as

philosophy, for epistemology as well as ontology. How is it possible tocategorialize the socialization of present and past actualities, of final andefficient 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




have extensively (no pun intended) used myself. Whitehead’s technicalanswer lies in the asymmetrical structure secured by vector-likerelationships. His more intuitive conceptualisation lies in his extended useof the concept of feeling. Transitions are felt relations.

On the occasion of the examination of Bradley's notion of “feeling,” aconcept that expresses for him “the primary activity at the basis ofexperience,” 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 tolapse 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 boththe interdependence of all actual entities and their idiosyncratic atomicity.Referring to Bradley’s “inclusive whole,” he qualifies that naked awarenessas 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 inthe continuation of the aforementioned issue of the ontological conditionsof possibility of a total cosmic processualization. Whitehead has done hishomework here:

The two modern philosophers who most consistently reject the

notion of a self-identical Soul-Substance are Hume and WilliamJames. 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 reconstruction—the replacement of the entitativeconcept of consciousness by a functional if not a serial one—has to take

place in order to interpret the continuity evidenced by our experience. The



22 Michel Weber

death of the Cartesian Ego is evoked in length by Whitehead. Although “itis an exaggeration to attribute a general change in a climate of thought toany one piece of writing, or to any one author” (SMW 143), he goes on incomparing 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 examplethese two sentences from his essay: “To deny plumply that

'consciousness' exists seems so absurd on the face of it—for

undeniably 'thoughts' do exist—that 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 furthercritically 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




entity. In this sense, a function is an entity. Obviously, this is not what

James had in his mind. (SMW 144)

What James’ argument lacks, says Whitehead, is a clear definition and asharp analysis of the concept of substance that is discarded. But Whitehead

is identifying here a “blind spot” laming as well his own writings: onecannot find in the Whiteheadian corpus a discussion of the proximity anddifferences existing between the shades of meaning of the Greek andMedieval concepts of substance and of the Modern one. The Greek conceptinsists 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 isdirectly correlated with a theological hypothesis (God as an independentexistent 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 becauseof the bifurcations it installs. Now, some scholars have argued that it istotally illegitimate to apply the criticism designed for the Modern conceptto the Greek or Medieval one, that could be read, it seems, in a “process”fashion.

1 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 speciesof 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 Modernconcept. 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

1 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 ofWilliam Norris Clarke, s. j.: The One and the Many. A Contemporary Thomistic

Metaphysics, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.



24 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 atypical one for two main reasons. First, the vast majority of philosophicaltexts use the understanding of the author’s peers to contrast and sharpen a

personal vision.

When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch—urges

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 somethinkers, 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? Thesimplest 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 thatmisleading claim—that is totally foreign to Whitehead’s corpus. As Lowesays: “Whitehead did not call his pluralistic metaphysics a panpsychism,and was not happy when his student—myself for one—did so.”

1 A more

sophisticated assessment of that crucial question is postponed until section6.2.2.

1 Victor A. Lowe, “The Concept of Experience in Whitehead’s Metaphysics,” in

George L. Kline (ed.), Alfred North Whitehead , op. cit., pp. 124-133, p. 126.

1whiteheads reading of james and its context

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