John Dewey (1859–1952) William T. Myersi

1. Brief Vita John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont on October 20, 1859. At the age of fifteen, he

graduated from high school and entered the University of Vermont. He received his bachelor’s

degree in 1879, and for several years he taught Latin and algebra at public high schools in

Vermont and Pennsylvania. While still teaching high school (1882), Dewey began his

extraordinarily prolific philosophical writing career, publishing two articles in the Journal of

Speculative Philosophy. Having caught the philosophy bug, he entered the just-founded Johns

Hopkins Graduate School. During his tenure there, Dewey took courses with Charles Peirce and

Charles Morris, among others. In 1884 he received his Ph.D. with a thesis titled “The

Psychology of Kant.” Upon graduation, Dewey accompanied Morris to the University of

Michigan where he taught for ten years, with the exception of a one-year hiatus at the

University of Minnesota (1890). Dewey left Michigan in 1894 when he accepted the position as

Chairman of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Pedagogy at the recently founded

University of Chicago where he taught for ten years. It was during this period that Dewey’s

international reputation and fame as a philosopher of education was established. In 1904, over

disputes regarding the management of his Laboratory School, Dewey resigned his position and

became Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he remained until his retirement

from teaching in 1929. Though he was no longer in the classroom, Dewey remained in

residence as professor emeritus for nine more years.

Though Dewey is often thought of as the quintessential American thinker, he was without

doubt one of the most widely traveled philosophers. Dewey took sabbatical leave for the 1918-

1919 academic year. The first half of that leave was spent lecturing at the University of

California. From there he went to Tokyo Imperial University and delivered the lectures that

were to become Reconstruction in Philosophy. While lecturing in Japan, he was visited by some

former students from China, who subsequently arranged for Dewey to lecture in China for a

year. After securing a leave of absence from Columbia, Dewey sailed to China where his one-

year engagement ended up being extended to two. Subsequent trips took him to Turkey (1924),

Mexico (1926), and Russia (1928), each of which involved educational lectures and

consultations. In 1929, he delivered the Gifford Lectures (The Quest for Certainty) in

Edinburgh. In 1937, he returned to Mexico where he chaired the commission that inquired into

charges made against Leon Trotsky.

Dewey’s philosophical growth can be divided into three phases. His work with Charles Morris

at Johns Hopkins left a distinctive Hegelian mark on his thinking, which at first was dominated

by Hegelian and neo-Kantian idealism. Dewey’s work during this time period is perhaps most

i Department of Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, Birmingham-Southern College, Birmingham,

AL 35254, <http://www.bsc.edu>www.bsc.edu, bmyers@bsc.edu.

Dewey 389

accurately viewed as a slow extrication from his idealistic training. By the time Studies in

Logical Theory came out in 1903, Dewey had left his idealism behind and began a period of

thought largely devoted to the development of his instrumentalist methodology. During this

middle period, Dewey turned his back on most of the concerns of traditional philosophy,

especially metaphysics and epistemology, though was still writing extensively on ethics. His

primary concern during this period was to work out a method of intelligence. In 1925, Dewey

returned to a more traditional mode of philosophy with the publication of Experience and

Nature, his great work in process metaphysics. This book marks the beginning of Dewey’s third

phase, during which, in addition to his book on metaphysics, he wrote extensively on, among

other things, epistemology (The Quest for Certainty), aesthetics (Art as Experience), logic

(Logic: The Theory of Inquiry), philosophy of religion (A Common Faith), value theory

(Ethics), and political and social philosophy (The Public and Its Problems). Dewey’s last phase

was by far his most productive, seeing the publication of all of his great books. He continued

writing right up until his death in 1952.

2. Dewey’s Process Metaphysics Experience and Nature, Dewey’s major work in metaphysics, is notoriously unsystematic.

Unlike Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Experience and Nature does not begin with a

complete listing of his categories, or, as Dewey calls them, generic traits; rather, he uncovers

them through a series of long dialectical arguments. This can make identification of exactly

what Dewey takes to be generic difficult and sometimes even controversial. There are, however,

a number of traits that stand out and are readily identifiable. Before embarking on a discussion

of Dewey’s generic traits, though, a few preliminary remarks are in order.

John Dewey, like all the classical pragmatists, is a process philosopher. That is, in his

metaphysics, events are basic, while objects are characters of events. In the preface to

Experience and Nature, Dewey writes, “the foundation for value and the striving to realize it is

found in nature, because when nature is viewed as consisting of events rather than substances, it

is characterized by histories, that is by continuity of change from beginnings to endings” (LW1,

6, italics in original). In addition to being continuous and connected, however, events are also

individual. That is to say, events are both organic and plural. Thus, one plausible way of

characterizing Dewey’s metaphysics is “organic-pluralism.” As such, the categories (generic

traits) can be grouped in such a way that they point either to an event’s organicism or to its

pluralism. When organized in this fashion, a basic list of generic traits is thus:

The Pluralistic Traits:

1. The Precarious

2. Immediacy

3. Quality

4. Temporal Quality

5. Novelty

6. Selective Interest

The Organic Traits:

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1. The Stable

2. Sociality

3. Transitivity

4. Transaction

5. Potentiality

6. Tendency (need)

2.1. The Precarious and the Stable The first two generic traits Dewey discusses are the precarious and the stable. Regarding the

former, Dewey writes: [Our] existence involves, to put it baldly, a gamble. The world is a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily unstable. Its dangers are irregular, inconstant, not to be counted upon as to their times and seasons. Although persistent, they are sporadic, episodic (LW1, 43).

When Dewey says that the world is precarious, he means that precariousness is a fact about the

world revealed through experience. When one experiences the world as precarious, the world is

precarious. Philosophers and theologians have spent a great deal of time trying to safeguard us

against the unsafe character of the world. The typical way this is done is to deny the existence of

chance and, as Dewey says, “to mumble universal and necessary law, the ubiquity of cause and

effect, the uniformity of nature, universal progress, and the inherent rationality of the universe”

(LW1, 45). When one resorts to this, the world is not seriously modified. Denying

precariousness does not make it go away.

But, precariousness cannot be all there is. The stable is just as fundamental as the precarious.

Just as precariousness is essential for novelty and change, stability is essential for knowledge.

Regarding the stable, Dewey writes: Events change; one individual gives place to another. But individually qualified things have some qualities which are pervasive, common, stable. They are out of time in the sense that a particular quality is irrelevant to them. If anybody feels relieved by calling them eternal, let them be called eternal. But let not “eternal” be then conceived as a kind of absolute perduring existence or Being (LW1, 119).

The stable requires less comment than the precarious since it is stability that philosophy has

spent so much time trying to account for. We recognize stability. It is what allows prediction

and control; it allows science to be; it provides the basis for the formation of our habits. Yet

again, it is only half the story.

The fact that the world exhibits both of the traits is what allows for philosophy, for science,

and indeed, for inquiry in general. Regarding the union of the precarious and the stable, Dewey

writes: The union of the hazardous and the stable, of the incomplete and the recurrent, is the condition of all experienced satisfaction as truly as of our predicaments and problems […]. A purely stable world permits of no illusions, but neither is it clothed with ideals. It just exists. To be good is to be better than; and there can be no better except where there is shock and discord combined with enough assured order to make attainment of harmony possible (LW1, 57-58).

Like Whitehead, Dewey recognizes that the world is a place of both permanence and change. As

Dewey says “change gives meaning to permanence and recurrence makes novelty possible. A

Dewey 391

world that was wholly risky would be a world in which adventure is impossible and only a

living world can include death” (LW1, 47). So any metaphysics must include an account of both

permanence and change, and the categories of the stable and precarious are the beginning of that

accounting.

2.2. Immediacy Dewey’s well-known instrumentalism might lend one to think that Dewey believes that things

are only valuable for something else. But things are not merely passageways to other things.

Things have an immediate quality about them that shows them to be something more than mere

passing instruments. Things have what Dewey calls “immediacy.” Dewey recognizes that in

every event there is a certain self-sufficiency and immediacy that is “terminal and exclusive.”

Dewey goes on: Immediacy of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical about such ineffability; it expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to one’s self and impossible to say anything to another […].Things in their immediacy are unknown and unknowable, not because they are remote or behind some impenetrable veil of sensation or ideas, but because knowledge has no concern with them (LW1, 74).

There are a number of important ideas illustrated in this rich quotation. First, immediacy is

indicative of the uniqueness of an event. That is, an event in its immediacy is “self-sufficient,”

“ineffable,” “terminal and exclusive.” In its immediacy, an event simply is what it is, so that the

immediacy of experienced events is had, not known. Immediacy recognizes that brute

experience is not knowledge. And immediacy, Dewey notes, is what allows for consciousness.

He says, “It is a reasonable belief that there would be no such thing as ‘consciousness’ if events

did not have a phase of brute and unconditioned ‘isness,’ of being what they irreducibly are”

(LW1, 75). Thus, he notes, consciousness is a special case of immediacy.

So, an event in its immediacy is not objective. That is, an immediate event cannot be an object

of inquiry or reflection. It simply is what it is and cannot serve as an object for another. But, it

also must be noted, immediacy is transient. The immediate event passes into the past, and, as

that occurs, it becomes possible for the event to be objectified in another.

2.3. Quality One of the more striking features of Dewey’s metaphysics is his resurrection of the ancients’

belief in objective qualities. Dewey writes: Empirically, the existence of objects of direct grasp, possession, use and enjoyment cannot be denied. Empirically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humorous, settled, disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid, fearful; are such immediately and in their own right and behalf (LW1, 82).

Empirically, things have quality. Like immediacy, quality is had; it is not an object of discourse.

Dewey describes qualities as “final,” “initial and terminal,” and as being “just what it is as it

exists” (LW1, 82). Quality is immediate, so that events have immediately felt quality. It is not an

object of knowledge. Quality pervades a situation such that it binds together the events which

are a given context or situation. Thus, it is the basis of unity. Quality is novel and it is what

renders a situation relevant.

392 William T. Myers

2.4. Temporal Quality Dewey conceives of events as having temporal duration, which he calls temporal quality. In

order to describe temporal quality, some contrasts and comparisons are necessary. First,

temporal quality must be distinguished from temporal order. The latter, Dewey notes, “is a

matter of relation, of definition, dating, placing and describing. It is discovered in reflection, not

directly had” (LW1, 92). The former, on the other hand, being an immediate quality, has the

same general characteristics of both quality and immediacy. That is, temporal quality is

individual, novel, and, in experience, it is had and not known. Further, it is direct and

indefinable. To put the contrast between temporal quality and temporal order another way,

temporal order is measured time, while temporal quality is lived time.

But it is more than that. Dewey notes that “existence consists of events [… and] is possessed

of temporal quality, characterized by beginning, process and ending” (LW1, 92, emphasis

added). This characterization of temporal quality indicates that temporal quality is growth, and

it is growth that involves the phases of beginning, process, and ending (cf. LW1, 92). This

growth is a qualitative growth, not a temporal sequence. To see it as the latter is to confuse

temporal quality with temporal order. And, notice that not all endings are nice and neat

(existence is, after all, precarious); that is, not all endings are consummations: many endings

result in failure, frustration or even death. But this does not mean that such ends are not still

ends. A frustrated end is as much an end as a consummation.

2.5. Novelty According to Dewey, every event has a qualitative uniqueness that separates it from every

other event. Thus, novelty is seen in relation to quality and temporal quality. Each event, being

uniquely situated in its context, is qualitatively unique. No experience is repeatable. Moreover,

the precarious is indicative of novelty. Any situation is just as liable to be precarious as it is to

be stable. This unpredictability insures novelty (cf. LW1, 97)

2.6. Selective Interest Selective interest is the basis for individuality. Dewey notes that human individuals are a

mixture of “bias and preference conjoined with plasticity and permeability of needs and likings”

(LW1, 186). The former is indicative of the human as a creature of habit. Without selective

interest or bias, the lives of human beings would be chaotic. The formation of habits is what

lends stability to the individual and allows for self-maintenance. Being a generic trait, selective

interest is not unique to human experience—all things exhibit selective interest to a degree. In

human beings, it is the basis of human choice and the formation of habits. In nature, it is

descriptive of the tendency of things to maintain themselves within their context.

But, again, like quality, selective interest plays a greater role than simply indicating the

individual bias of a given event. It also serves as a basis for interaction. In “Context and

Thought,” Dewey writes: “But in any event that which I have designated selective interest is a

unique manner of entering into interaction with other things” (LW6, 15). So selective interest

not only points to the individual but also the manner in which that individual enters into an

interaction.

Dewey 393

2.7. Sociality Sociality is a general category of all events. It indicates that each event is a member of a

broader context which furnishes the event’s environment. Sociality also indicates that each

event both helps to determine its context and is partially determined by that context, so that the

event is intimately connected to its context. That is, sociality explicitly points to the contextual

nature of events. Its membership in that society might be one of conformation, in which case the

event aids in the growth of the context, or of disjunction, indicating that the event is at odds

with the context. The former indicates that an event is in part formed by the context; the latter

indicates that the event is also formative of that context. The event’s role depends upon the

selective bias of the event in question (cf. LW1, 187-188; also, “The Inclusive Philosophic

Idea,” LW3, 41-54).

Sociality, then, indicates the very general contextual nature of events. But, sociality, being a

general category, does not go very far in describing the relationship of one event to another or

the relationship of the event to the broader context. This relationship is delineated in more detail

by the traits “transitivity,” “transaction,” and, to a lesser degree, “tendency.”

2.8. Transitivity Events are both transitive and static. The static side of events has already been delineated in the

discussion of Dewey’s pluralistic traits, and these are indicative of an event’s individuality. The

transitive nature of events is, literally, the fact of transition from one event to the next. Thus,

like sociality, transitivity is indicative of the social-contextual nature of events, though its scope

is more specific. Transitivity refers specifically to the fact of transition from one event to

another, so it is the basis of continuity from one moment to the next. To put this another way,

transitivity is descriptive of the transition of the present moving into the past and of that past

becoming an object for the present. As an event ceases to be immediate, it becomes possible for

that event to be objectified in another. This process of moving from being immediate to being

an object for another is what is meant by “transitivity.” It is also the basis for transaction (cf.

LW1, 85-86).

2.8. Transaction Transaction indicates the depth of the process nature of Dewey’s metaphysics. An event is what

it is due to the transaction that occurs between where the event comes from and where it moves

to. Notice the importance of transitivity here. However, the event is not reducible to that

interaction. As we saw in the discussion of selective interest, the event has a particular bias

which affects how the event acts, given the event’s particular context. So, an emerging event is

a transaction in which the event moves “from which” (its given past) “to which” (what it

becomes) given the selective interest of the event. Notice the use of the phrase “emerging

event.” The process of transaction indicates that every event is an emergent. Transaction,

however, does not specify exactly what is involved in emergence. In transaction, a transition

occurs. That is, there is an integration of the past into the present, as the event becomes an

object for subsequent events. This process is one which, given temporal quality, takes time.

It is through transaction that an event’s immediate qualities emerge and that an event’s

potentialities are realized. As we will see in the discussion of potentiality, any given event’s

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potentialities are infinite. Given this, it is only when an event is specified in a particular context

that the qualities of that event emerge and a particular potential is actualized (cf. LW1, 138, 145,

207-8; LW5, 220-221).

2.9. Potentiality Given that possible interactions among events are infinite, any event’s given potentialities are

infinite as well. Thus, all relations are real, but no relation can exhaust a given event’s

potentialities. The reason for this is that any interaction with a particular event is an interaction

with that event from a particular perspective. Given the infinitude of potentialities, potentiality

is unpredictable and precarious. Because potentialities are not immediate qualities but hidden

determinates, potentiality is revealed only in transaction. But such a revelation is only partial,

given that potential interactions are infinite (cf. LW1, 27-24, 143, 241).

2.10. Tendency (Need) Tendency points to the fact that in nature there is a natural tendency or need in things to move

towards some end-in-view. Initially, this might sound like selective interest, but there is a

distinct difference. Selective interest is indicative of the bias of a particular event for

self-maintenance; that is, it is indicative of the uniqueness of the individual. It tends to remain

what it is. Tendency, unlike selective interest, is not stubborn but rather is a movement towards

an end-in-view which is determined in the course of the development of the given event.

Tendency does not point to a specific and fixed end-in-view, but rather points to the fact of the

“movement towards.” Yet, unlike the precarious, tendency is not sheer incompleteness. It

merely points to the general tendency of things to move towards completeness.

It is important to recognize that Dewey is not being wholeheartedly Aristotelian here. Dewey

does revive both the notions of potentiality and of natural ends, but with significant alterations.

For Dewey, neither potentialities nor ends are fixed. So, when we say that tendency points to the

general tendency of things to move towards completeness, such completeness should not be

construed as some pre-set end. Rather, tendency points to the fact that events move in a

particular direction, the completion of which is unfixed and unknowable until the event comes

together (cf. LW1, 58, 279).

3. Whitehead and Dewey The significant similarities between Whitehead and Dewey should already be apparent from this

brief discussion of Dewey’s categories. However, the commonalities between the two go

beyond just a few coincidental categories. Whitehead, of course, begins with the category of the

ultimate, which he calls “creativity.” While Dewey does not start with such a fundamental

notion, the work that creativity does for Whitehead is easily explainable in terms of the

Deweyan categories. Briefly consider some of Whitehead’s thoughts concerning creativity: it is

“presupposed in all of the more special categories” (PR 21); it refers to the most fundamental

character of all actuality; it is “the principle of novelty” (PR 21). Furthermore, [t]he ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively

Dewey 395

among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of ‘primary substance’ (PR 21).

It is certainly true that Whitehead’s language here does not sound very Deweyan. But notice

how the category of the ultimate functions. It points to the fact that events are one among many

(sociality); that, in spite of this, each is unique (novelty and immediacy); that they are connected

(transaction and transitivity); and that they move towards completion (tendency). Each of these

notions are explicitly put forth as categories in Dewey’s metaphysics.

Following the category of the ultimate, Whitehead introduces actual entities, “the final real

things of which the world is made up.” According to the ontological principle, actual entities are

ontologically basic: there is nothing more real than these events. Dewey is not quite as adamant

or as clear as Whitehead in making such a claim. However, there is a version of an ontological

principle that can be extrapolated from Dewey’s writings. In Experience and Nature Dewey

puts forth an ontological principle with his straightforward claim “Every existence is an event”

(LW1, 63), and “all structure is structure of something; anything defined as structure is a

character of events, not something intrinsic and per se” (LW1, 64).

Whitehead and Dewey both take events as being ontologically basic. The question remains,

however, how similar in structure are their respective accounts of an event? Whitehead

describes actual entities in great detail. While Dewey does not give a detailed account of events

per se, an appeal to the generic traits is revelatory of their basic structure. For both Whitehead

and Dewey, each event emerges out of a past that is relative to that event. It takes that past into

account by making aspects of the past event ingredient in the present. Both philosophers use the

notion of objectification to describe this process. Whitehead uses the technical term

“prehension” while Dewey simply talks of objectification. The Whiteheadian prehension is

captured in Dewey’s notion of transaction. So the beginning of every event is the immediate

past. While the event is coming to be, Whitehead notes that it is a duration, and it is subjective.

Dewey accounts for this by describing the event as possessing temporal quality and immediacy.

Whitehead describes the completion of an event as its “satisfaction.” Dewey describes this

simply as an end, noting that every end is also a beginning, indicating that the completed event

is given over to subsequent events as data. In Deweyan language, this is transitivity.

While this initial description shows that Whitehead and Dewey’s conception of events is quite

similar, the resemblance is still only on a fairly general level. If the similarities stopped here,

they might not be all that remarkable. The comparison, though, does not have to stop here, as

there is another quite remarkable similarity between the two systems. In Process and Reality,

Whitehead describes the phases of concrescence in his nine Categoreal Obligations. In Art as

Experience, Dewey describes the phases of an experience, and the descriptions are strikingly

alike.

In considering Dewey’s notion of an experience, it is important to begin with the distinction

that Dewey makes between experience per se and an experience. The former is often inchoate.

Things occur continuously, without much demarcation. Sometimes, though, we have an

experience that culminates in such a consummation that we want to say, “Ah, now that was an

experience.” What marks an experience off from others is this consummation. The entire

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experience is remembered as a complete unit. These experiences are set off from the rest of

experience in such a way “that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an

experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It

is an experience” (LW10, 41).

Like Whitehead’s notion of genetic division, an experience is divisible into phases. But, once

again, one should not conceive of these phases as distinct, temporal parts. Regarding the

wholeness of such experiences, Dewey writes: In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At the same time there is no sacrifice of the self-identity of the parts. A river, as distinct from a pond, flows. But its flow gives a definiteness and interest to its successive portions greater than exist in the homogenous portions of a pond. In an experience, flow is from something to something. As one part leads to another and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its various colors. Because of continuous merging, there are no holes, mechanical junctures, dead centres when we have an experience. There are pauses, places of rest, but they punctuate and define quality of movement. They sum up what has been undergone and prevent its dissipation and idle evaporation. Continued acceleration is breathless and prevents parts from gaining distinction. In a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so—just as in a genial conversation there is a continuous interchange and blending, and yet each speaker not only retains his own character but manifests it more clearly than is his wont (LW10, 43-4).

So just like the actual occasion, an experience is a unified whole that is nonetheless divisible

into phases. Further, an experience has a unity that is “constituted by a single quality that

pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts” (LW10, 44). In

Whiteheadian terms, there is a unifying aim that is realized in a complete satisfaction. And, like

the Whiteheadian anticipation of satisfaction, the Deweyan anticipation of consummation is

present throughout the experience (LW10, 61). Further, Dewey notes, an experience is divisible

into parts only on reflection. It occurs as a unified whole. “Yet,” Dewey goes on, “the

experience [is] not the sum of these different characters; they [are] lost in it as distinctive traits”

(LW10, 44).

In his discussion of the phases of an experience, Dewey, unlike Whitehead, does not offer a

systematic, detailed account of these phases, though he does offer a general account and some

elaborations. In talking generally about the phases, Dewey writes: A generalized illustration may be had if we imagine a stone, which is rolling down hill, to have an experience. The activity is surely sufficiently “practical.” The stone starts from somewhere, and moves, as consistently as conditions permit, toward a place and state where it will be at rest—toward an end. Let us add, by imagination, to these external facts, the ideas that it looks forward with desire to the final outcome; that it is interested in the things it meets on the way, conditions that accelerate and retard its movement with respect to their bearing on the end; that it acts and feels toward them according to the hindering or helping function it attributes to them; and that the final coming to rest is related to all that went before as the culmination of a continuous movement. Then the stone would have an experience, and one with esthetic quality (LW10, 46).

Dewey 397

Already, in this most general description, there are some remarkable similarities to Whitehead’s

account of the actual occasion. Notice that there is a kind of subjective aim: the stone has a goal

and it looks forward to getting there. It is “interested” in what it encounters on the way, and it

“acts and feels toward them” as they hinder or help the goal. That is, it prehends things

positively or negatively as these things help or hinder the reaching of that goal. And in the end,

everything is tied together in a final satisfaction or culmination.

Dewey’s elaboration on these phases further highlights his similarities with Whitehead. In a

subsequent passage, Dewey remarks that the first phase of an experience is constituted by an

undergoing. That is, it begins receptively; as Dewey says, “It involves surrender” (LW10, 59).

As the experience proceeds, that which is encountered is constantly integrated to fit with the

final goal. In his explication of this, Dewey makes a distinction between doing and undergoing.

As noted, an experience begins with an undergoing, but it quickly moves to a doing. Yet that

does not finish the story: “An experience has pattern and structure, because it is not just doing

and undergoing in alternation, but consists of them in relationship” (LW10, 50-51). That is, like

Whitehead, Dewey recognizes that the process of interaction is not simply one in which we

flip-flop between taking and making, but rather there is a genuine integration going on in such a

way that a novel unity emerges out of each interaction.

Dewey’s notion of doing and undergoing plays the same role as Whitehead’s ideas of

harmony and intensity. For Whitehead, the ideal is to have a maximal balance of harmony and

intensity: too much harmony leads to anesthesia and too much intensity to chaos. Regarding this

balance, Dewey writes that an “environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the

straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always

hostile would irritate and destroy” (LW10, 65). Resistance is Dewey’s term for the balance of

the two. Dewey goes on: Nor without resistance from surroundings would the self become aware of itself; it would have neither feeling nor interest, neither fear nor hope, neither disappointment nor elation. Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates irritation and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilized, eventuates in elation (LW10, 65-6).

And: That which distinguishes an experience as esthetic is conversion of resistance and tensions, of excitations that in themselves are temptations to diversion, into a movement toward an inclusive and fulfilling close (LW10, 62).

For any experience to reach consummation, then, it must be characterized by resistance, which

results in a balance of doing and undergoing. Again, this ideal is much the same as Whitehead’s.

Dewey’s account of the phases of an experience can be summarized as follows: The

experience begins with a receptive phase which is an undergoing. Following this, there begins a

process of doing and undergoing in which the subject integrates the experience. As the

experience comes to a close, assuming that resistance has been operative throughout, the

integration is completed, and the result is a consummation. Throughout the experience there is

an anticipation of this consummation, and the entire experience is bound by a pervasive quality.

When the generic traits are brought into this discussion, all of what Whitehead accomplishes

in genetic division can be accounted for: every event begins with and must take into account its

398 William T. Myers

past (transitivity and transaction). As the event emerges, it will encounter—or prehend—things

which will either help or hinder its goal (the precarious and stable) that it will reach given its

own interest (selective interest). The event, qua subject, is unknowable (immediacy) and is a

durational moment (temporal quality) that strives for completion (need) and is characterized by

a unifying aim (selective interest). The satisfaction of the occasion is a novel togetherness

(novelty) and the occasion is then given over to the next occasion as data (transitivity).

While the two analyses (viz., genetic division and an experience) are similar, they are

different in scope. For Whitehead, genetic division is applicable to any and every actual

occasion; they all have the same basic structure but differ in complexity. Dewey’s analysis of an

experience, on the other hand, applies to the relatively rare occurrence of a consummatory

experience. When it comes to talking about events per se, Dewey simply does not delve into

details with the same depth as Whitehead. Indeed, he would likely find such an enterprise both

unnecessary and overly speculative.

But there are other significant differences, as well. One of their primary disagreements is

methodological. In his 1937 essay “Whitehead’s Philosophy” (LW11, 146-54), Dewey notes

that while Whitehead clearly designates an empirical starting point, his method nonetheless is

primarily one of quasi-mathematical analysis. Dewey sees Whitehead as trying to co-ordinate

two methods simultaneously. He puts the dilemma like this: “Is it [metaphysics] to be developed

and applied with fundamental emphasis upon experimental observation (the method of the

natural sciences)? Or does it point to the primacy of mathematical method, in accord with

historic rationalism?” (LW11, 150). Dewey, of course, accepts only the former, while

Whitehead sees the two methods as coordinate (cf. “Remarks”).

The two also disagree over the nature and status of eternal objects. For Whitehead, eternal

objects are “forms of definiteness” that are envisaged in the Primordial Nature of God.

Regarding color, for example, Whitehead writes: “A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a

spirit. It comes and goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives, nor does

it live. It appears when it is wanted” (SMW, 87). Dewey finds this account problematic, arguing

that Whitehead’s constant use of the word “ingression” indicates that eternal objects have “an

independent and ready-made subsistence,” so that Whitehead has to invoke God as the eternal

principle by which eternal objects are selected for ingression into a given actual occasion. “The

difficulties seem to […] arise from the intermediary apparatus required in the interweaving of

elements; the interweaving being required only because of the assumption of original

independence and not being required if [eternal objects] emerge to serve functionally ends

which experience itself institutes” (LW11, 153). Thus, Dewey hints here at his own preferred

view, that eternal objects emerge from the contours of experience itself, and are not non-

temporal actualities.

Dewey 399

4. Works Cited and Further Readings

Books by John Dewey Experience and Nature. The Later Works, Volume 1: 1925. 1988. (Carbondale, Southern Illinois

University Press). Abbreviated as LW1. The Quest for Certainty. The Later Works, Volume 4: 1929. 1988. (Carbondale, Southern

Illinois University Press). Abbreviated as LW4. Art as Experience. The Later Works, Volume 10: 1934. 1989 (Carbondale, Southern Illinois

University Press). Abbreviated as LW10.

Selected Article and Chapters “The Changing Intellectual Climate. Review of Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the

Modern World,” in The Later Works, Volume 2: 1925-1927 (LW2) (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press), 221-25.

“An Organic Universe. A Review of Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality,” in The Later Works, Volume 5: 1929-1930 (LW5) (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press), 375-81.

“The Adventure of Persuasion. A Review of Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas,” in The Later Works, Volume 8: 1933 (LW8) (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press), 355-59.

“Whitehead’s Philosophy,” in The Later Works, Volume 11: 1935-1937 (LW11) (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press), 146-54.

“The Philosophy of Whitehead,” in The Later Works, Volume 14: 1939-1941 (LW14) (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press), 123-40.

“Nature in Experience,” in The Later Works, Volume 14:1939-1941 (LW14) (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press), 141-54.

“The Objectivism-Subjectivism of Modern Philosophy,” in The Later Works, Volume 14: 1939-1941 (LW14) (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press), 189-200.

Readings by Whitehead on Dewey 1937. “Remarks,” The Philosophical Review, XLVI, 2, March, 178-86. Readings on Whitehead and Dewey Frisina, Warren G. 1991. “Knowledge as Active, Aesthetic, and Hypothetical: A Pragmatic

Interpretation of Whitehead’s Cosmology,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 42-64. Sherburne, Donald W. 1992. “Whitehead and Dewey on Experience and System,” in Frontiers

in American Philosophy, Volume I, edited by Robert W. Burch (College Station, Texas A&M Press), 95-101.

Jones, Judith A. 1994. “The Rhythm of Experience in Whitehead and Dewey,” Listening, 29, 1, 20-39.

Myers, William T. 2001. “Dewey and Whitehead on the Starting Point and Method,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 37, 2, 243-55.

William James (1842–1910) Graham Birdi

1. Brief Vita William James was born in 1842, the eldest son in a remarkable family which contained his

Swedenborgian father Henry senior, the novelist Henry junior, and a sister, Alice, who became

known subsequently as a diarist. After studying to be a painter in Rhode Island against his

father’s wishes, he entered the Lawrence Scientific School in 1863 and the Harvard Medical

School two years later. He taught anatomy and physiology at Harvard from 1873–1876, was

made a Professor of physiology in 1876 and of philosophy in 1880. Throughout the 1870s and

1880s he published work on psychology and philosophy which culminated in the publication of

the two-volume Principles of Psychology in 1890. Subsequently his work was associated with

the American Pragmatist movement and its other chief founders, C.S. Peirce and J. Dewey.

James’s commitment to that movement was documented most directly in the publication of the

lectures on Pragmatism in 1907. Well known throughout Continental Europe and Britain at the

end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, he gave the Gifford lectures in

Edinburgh in 1901–2, subsequently published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. After a

trip to Britain to see his brother Henry, he fell ill on the return journey and died at his country

home in Chocorua in 1910.

2. James’s Background in Philosophy and Psychology James’s central period of philosophical and psychological work, from 1870 to 1910, overlapped

with Whitehead’s early career. The latter’s important formal work with Russell during the first

decade of the twentieth century, culminating in the publication of Principia Mathematica,

would not have brought him into direct contact with James’s philosophy, but his subsequent

interests were undoubtedly influenced by the American. Whitehead’s later work in process

philosophy and his period as a professor of philosophy at Harvard would have brought him into

close contact with his predecessor’s philosophy. The description of a party for Whitehead in

May 1945 held by the James family at their house at 95, Irving Street shows something of

William James’s continuing influence in Harvard (see Price 1954, 314-15). In his later

philosophy Whitehead was conscious of James’s work in philosophy and psychology and

shared some of James’s central attitudes, especially his criticism of traditional philosophy from

Descartes to Kant.

Nevertheless Whitehead and James approached philosophy from very different positions.

Whitehead came to his most general philosophical interests from a background in mathematics

and contemporary physics. One of his deepest metaphysical convictions was that new

i Professor Emeritus, Centre for Philosophy, Department of Government, University of

Manchester; Honorary Professor, University of Wales; Honorary research fellow at the

University of Liverpool; grabird@supanet.com.

James 417

developments in mathematics and physics entailed a radical revision of traditional philosophy

and our understanding of reality. That new conception of reality was derived from non-classical

mathematics, especially non-Euclidean geometries, and non-classical physics in such theories as

Maxwell’s field equations, Einstein’s relativity theories, and quantum mechanics. Whitehead’s

philosophy tried to make explicit the ramifications of these developments and he held that new

developments in science entailed a rejection of both ordinary conceptions of experience and of

earlier scientific theories.

James, by contrast, came to philosophy through a background in natural science and an

interest in psychology, and his initial reputation was fixed by the publication in 1870 of his two-

volume Principles of Psychology (James 1918). The Principles has been evaluated in many

ways. On the one hand, it was one of the first general surveys of human psychology to qualify

as a genuine “science of mental life” (James 1918, Vol. 1, 1). On the other, J.B. Watson and

James’s behaviorist successors regarded the work more as a systematization of “common sense”

or “folk” psychology: for them, it would require a behaviorist analysis of mind to provide a

scientific foundation for the discipline. James himself, in The Meaning of Truth (1909),

characterized his own work as “descriptive psychology, hardly anything more” (James 1978,

180).

Despite differing evaluations, one of the principal claims to fame of James’s psychology,

thoroughly deserved, was its accessibility. Readers could enjoy, understand, and recognize the

plausibility of James’s accounts in virtue of their own nature as mental agents. Although James

invoked technicalities in neuro-physiology and canvassed apparently counter-intuitive views

such as the James-Lange theory of the emotions, his work could still be read and appreciated

without a technical background. James himself was hostile to over-technical appeals in both

psychology and philosophy, and to what he regarded as an undue enthusiasm for detailed

experimental work. That hostility extended also to a dislike and suspicion of logic—a fact that,

again, highlights the significant differences in the backgrounds of Whitehead and James.

James’s chronological career cannot be divided neatly into a scientific and a philosophical

phase. Much of his early work addressed standard issues in philosophy, and the Principles

evidently mixes descriptive psychology and philosophy. Topics such as free will, the higher-

order methodology for a developing scientific psychology, the self, and the development of our

basic cognitive faculties, figure in James’s account just as do the more detailed accounts of

brain mechanisms, and of experimental results from earlier psychologists, mainly German and

French. Psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt and Jean Charcot in Europe had begun to address

empirical issues in developmental and clinical psychology in a scientific way, and their work

undoubtedly influenced James.

But at a time when scientific psychology was only beginning to separate itself from traditional

philosophical accounts in British empiricists like Locke and Hume, it was inevitable that

James’s psychology should overlap with those more philosophical interests. James himself

insisted upon division between questions of empirical psychology and those of metaphysics, but

he recognized that the two could not be kept in completely separate compartments. In the

Principles he writes: the data assumed by psychology, just like those assumed by physics and other

418 Graham Bird

natural sciences, must some time be overhauled. The effort to overhaul them thoroughly and completely is metaphysics; but metaphysics can only perform her task well when distinctly conscious of its great extent. Metaphysics fragmentary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she injects herself into natural science (Preface vi).

James recognized that sciences have to make assumptions which metaphysics traditionally

questions, but he also admitted that psychology rested on questionable foundations which

needed metaphysical support if it was to develop into a genuine science. When we talk of psychology as a natural science we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground. It means just the reverse; it means a psychology particularly fragile, and into which the waters of metaphysics leak at every joint (James 1908, 467-68).

The Principles consequently discusses traditional issues in philosophy about the relation

between mind and body, about free will, personal identity, and belief at the same time as it

attempts to develop more accurate empirical descriptions of, and explanatory theories for, those

aspects of the human mind.

James’s psychology consequently has those two dimensions: a philosophical account of the

central concepts of human mentality and a more detailed empirical survey of its central features.

The former makes more of a connection with Whitehead’s philosophical work. Although

Whitehead, like James, wished to reject traditional philosophical accounts of cognition, of

science, and of the self, he did not offer James’s detailed descriptive survey of human mentality.

Though Whitehead’s work might influence a scientific psychology it belonged more firmly to

its metaphysical background. In the period after James’s death, when behaviorism began to be

generally accepted by practicing psychologists, Whitehead’s interests would have qualified

unreservedly as philosophical rather than scientific. Like James Whitehead thought that

traditional philosophers such as Descartes and the British empiricists had made mistakes in their

basic views about mind and the relation between mind and body, but, unlike James, he did not

pursue those errors far into the territory of outlining in detail the way in which an empirical

psychology should develop. Whitehead’s own philosophical convictions, however, have a clear

similarity to James’s, and in what follows I summarize those aspects of James’s psychology and

philosophy which seem to have the closest connection with Whitehead’s views. These are: his

accounts of methods in psychology (Section 3); cognitive development, the stream of

consciousness and the self (Section 4); and pure experience and neutral monism (Section 5).

3. Methods in Psychology James’s psychological work occurred at a time of transition for the discipline. In previous

periods, psychology had been dominated by more purely philosophical writers like the

empiricists Locke and Hume. Hume aimed to provide a foundation for a science of human

nature, which included psychology, in his Treatise of Human Nature and Inquiry into Human

Understanding. He talks of his research into the “secret springs and principles by which the

human mind is activated in its operations” (Hume 1955, § 1), and develops a more subtle

vocabulary for, and a more thorough survey of, mental activity than his predecessors. The

terminology of “impressions” and “ideas” and the accounts of memory, of belief, and of

personal identity, all contribute to that research, but Hume’s account was both introspective and

James 419

philosophical. He offered analyses of impressions and ideas, belief and self identity which

focused on the way such phenomena feel to individual subjects. Such items were distinguished

in terms of the “vividness” or “liveliness” of the related imagery, and the differences we may

feel in believing or merely imagining something.

Kant later began to draw a distinction between empirical and philosophical psychology in his

Critique of Pure Reason, but the terminology he used to distinguish “empirical,” “transcendent”

and “transcendental” psychology was generally misunderstood throughout the nineteenth

century. Nevertheless Kant’s aim of distinguishing an empirical, scientific psychology from

metaphysics would have been approved by James. Kant’s position is nicely encapsulated in a

passage from his lectures on Metaphysics (L1): It is good to determine the boundaries between sciences and to depict them in a system; otherwise we are always apprentices and know nothing. For example how psychology and metaphysics are related, and whether they do not involve several different disciplines […]. The reason why metaphysics was confused with empirical psychology was that we didn’t know exactly what metaphysics was, and hadn’t outlined its boundaries. So much was included under the heading ‘First principles of Human Knowledge’ (Kant 1968, 223).

It was only later in the nineteenth century that professional psychologists began experimental

investigations of a wide range of psychological features without directly addressing traditional

philosophical issues. Those detailed enquiries concerned the normal development of human

cognitive powers, mental disorders and phenomena such as hypnotism. Jean Charcot

investigated these matters in his clinical work, while others, such as Wilhelm Wundt began to

investigate experimentally cognitive development in a way later pursued by Jean Piaget. At the

time when James was beginning to write the papers that were eventually incorporated into the

Principles of Psychology, he was influenced by these new developments and wished to

summarize them. He was aware, as were his immediate predecessors, of the underlying

philosophical principles and problems which those detailed investigations rested on, but much

of his discussion in the Principles sets those underlying philosophical issues aside. His

discussion covered the whole range of issues, from cognitive development to mental pathology.

Towards the end of his career his work in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

continues his descriptive psychology by focusing on the characteristics of admittedly abnormal

religious mystical experiences. James’s interest in abnormal psychological states was

undoubtedly influenced by the well documented mental breakdowns which both he and his

father had suffered early in their lives.

Despite his empirical interests and his recognition of the inadequacies of earlier enquiries into

psychology, James’s apparatus and methods for discussing psychological phenomena were not

significantly different from those of his more philosophical predecessors. He was perhaps more

aware of the need to clarify those methodological principles in an adequate foundation for the

new science, and recognizes this in the discussion. Throughout the Principles he wrestles with

the general problem of the relation between mind and matter but recognizes in the end that “the

relations of a mind to its own brain are of an unique and utterly mysterious sort” (James 1918,

126). But the central pillars on which he thought such a science should rest were not

fundamentally different from those which Kant had identified almost one hundred years earlier.

420 Graham Bird

Basically these approved, accepted methods were introspection, “experimental” methods, and

“comparative” methods. Experimental methods include both behavioral and neuro-physiological

data, although the latter are not specifically identified. Comparative methods refer in part to the

study of behavior, but in general incorporate more anthropological study of comparative social

forms. These three resources remained for James the central basis for a psychological science.

Of the three, he gave priority to introspection, while recognizing its fallibility and potential

subjectivity.

In the Principles the discussion of the mind-body problem focuses on the explanatory value of

various forms of materialism and idealism. James is particularly concerned with the way in

which physiological explanations harmonize with our understanding of their corresponding

mental events. He is critical of what he calls “psychic chemistry,” that is, the idea that there are

mental effects corresponding to every physical change in the brain. His principal objections to

this notion are that it is unnecessary but also unverifiable, since it requires some ‘medium’ in

which the mental changes take place. The only evident, but plainly insufficient, medium is the

physical state of the brain, but independently of that he thinks the hypothesis of psychic

chemistry is potentially absurd. In one passage he pours scorn on the idea that just as a yellow

pigment results from mixing green and red, so a feeling of yellow might result from mixing a

feeling of red and a feeling of green. In another passage he derides the idea of interaction

between the mental and physical as akin to the claim that the coaches of a train might be held

together by the feelings of amity existing between the driver and the guard. James’s preferred

solution is to suppose that all the machinery operates within the physiological sphere which then

gives rise directly to its mental accompaniments. In this way, there is no need to invoke parallel

operations in the mental sphere. Yet it still leaves a query about the relation between body and

mind at the point of interaction which James calls “mysterious.”

Similarly inconclusive are James’s more formal discussions of alternative philosophical

theories such as the “automaton” (materialist) and “mind-dust” (spiritualist) theories. He

discusses and rejects the underlying principle of continuity which both such theories invoke,

and provides good reasons for doubting both alternatives, but is less decisive in providing an

alternative view of his own. Of the “brain world” and the “soul world” and the relations

between them, he writes that “the only trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one

of understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can affect or influence another at all”

(James 1918, Vol. 1, 181). He is evidently drawn towards materialism in virtue of the

importance of physiological explanations, but also recognizes the strength of a spiritualist

resolution: I confess that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own seems to me the line of least logical resistance (James 1918, Vol. 1, 182).

He nevertheless also points towards an alternative account: [That view] does not strictly explain anything, but is less positively objectionable than either mind-stuff or material monad creed. The bare phenomenon, the immediately known, which is in opposition to the entire brain process, is the state of consciousness, not the soul […] this is certainly only a provisional halting place and things must some day be more thoroughly thought out (James 1918, Vol. 1, 182).

James 421

In the Principles James evidently did not succeed in choosing between materialist and

spiritualist theories, or in explaining how their different phenomena might be linked together.

He did not, like later psychologists and philosophers, investigate an analytic behaviorism which

would focus solely on behavioral patterns and reject any appeal to introspective methods. Nor

did he suggest a materialist theory in which brain states and mental states were treated as

contingently identical, as different aspects of one and the same physiological phenomenon. In

his psychology, the investigations into mental phenomena simply appealed to each of the basic

resources—introspection, behavior, physiology, and anthropology—as seemed to him most

appropriate, and the underlying metaphysical problem of relating mind to matter was left as a

mystery. Despite that philosophical indecisiveness the book provides thoroughly readable, lucid,

and plausible introspective descriptions of what it is like to have and exercise a mind. For

James, at this stage in the development of psychology these were the primary goals for a

scientific psychology.

4. Cognitive Development, the Stream of Consciousness and the Self It might also be said that James’s topics and apparatus for outlining the basic cognitive

development of normal humans are not significantly different from those given by his empiricist

predecessors. James certainly approved of empiricism generally and argued for what he called a

“radical empiricism.” But he claimed that his pragmatism, in its support for a philosophical

method and a theory of truth, did not entail empiricism. James employs the same vocabulary of

“sense,” “understanding,” “reason,” “memory,” “belief,” and “emotion” as his predecessors and

undoubtedly accepts the empiricist claim that the whole of our normal cognitive development

rests on the a posteriori deliverances of the senses.

But in one central respect James’s radical empiricism differed from its Humean predecessor

and claimed to improve on it. This point of difference had wider implications for his treatment

of the basic psychological faculties (e.g. memory) and of central problems of psychology (e.g.

personal identity). It also provided that further examination of the mind-body problem which

James had mentioned in the Principles. According to James, empiricists like Hume had

provided too abstract and theoretical an account of the basic human mental experience. For

them, experience consisted of simple, distinct ideas (or impressions) whose connections were

constructed by the mind or understanding. Relations between the basic elements in

consciousness were conceived, as James puts it, exclusively in terms of “disjunctive” relations

that linked the individual simple discrete “atoms” at the basis of experience. James, by contrast,

thought that this was a seriously inaccurate account of the character of our experiences and

wished to supplement the traditional view with a reference to what he called “conjunctive”

relations. In that account, experience is not like a pearl necklace which strings together the

substantial matter of experience, but more like a uniform stream in which each successive event

contains echoes of its antecedents and premonitions of its successors. Conjunctive relations are

themselves as much an aspect of experience as are the identifiable discrete units and their

separating, disjunctive relations.

James uses a number of vivid metaphors to capture what everyone will recognize as a

plausible account of that succession in the stream of consciousness. He talks of the continuous

422 Graham Bird

flights of birds interrupted by occasional perchings, or of the continuity of a bamboo cane with

its intermittent joints. The apparent atomic character of certain of the elements in the stream,

James suggests, is due to two misleading features: First, we objectify those aspects of the stream

in which we are momentarily interested, and second, we may adopt a theoretical and abstract

conception of mind which departs from a common sense recognition of its principally non-

atomic character. The former is a faulty motive which applies to all of us, but the latter is a fault

endemic to theorists such as philosophers and psychologists. These dangers in abstract

theorizing were a theme which provided for James a quite general corrective therapy for over-

intellectual philosophers and provided some support for his own descriptive folk psychology.

James’s intention is first to recall our natural acceptance of the common sense flow or stream of

consciousness and second to provide psychological descriptions, and explanations, of mental

events which acknowledge that basic characteristic.

This revision to traditional empiricism affects the detailed survey of mental events in many

ways. It brings into the description of experience and its development a dynamic element in

which memory plays a central role. The stream of consciousness which recognizes at any point

an immediate appeal to its predecessors and its successors depends on a built-in short term

memory. Similarly James’s account of personal identity, or, as he says, of the sense of personal

identity, requires that at any given point there is an implicit appeal to memories of earlier points

in the stream. James’s rejection of a substantial self identified within the stream of

consciousness forms part of his more general rejection of abstract, discrete, items, but his view

of self identity adds other points to that general idea. He is influenced by Hume’s apparent

failure to locate that postulated substantial self: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception (Hume 1978, Book I, vi, 252).

In response, James argues that Hume failed to find a substantial self because his own empiricist

“atomism” prevented him from recognizing the conjunctive relations that characterize the

stream of consciousness. Though he put forward his own view as an improvement on Hume, he

thought that it “will be recognized by the instructed reader as the ordinary description professed

by the empirical school” (James 1912, 132). James’s belief was that the imagined, but elusive,

substantial self can be replaced by a succession of elected experiences which stand for the sense

of personal identity through their recall of earlier, and anticipation of later, moments in an

overall stream of consciousness. One analogy that James employs is that of a herd of cattle

which is led or owned at different periods by one member chosen from the herd. There is no one

member of the herd which exists throughout the herd’s career, but there are those nominated

representative cows in whom the herd’s identity is successively vested. In an analogous way,

James writes that “the passing thought is the thinker” (James 1912, 37). In such an account at

least there is no need to look for, and no anxiety about failing to find, some continuous and

substantial ego which might constitute personal identity.

The philosophical theory thus built on the initial revision to a Humean atomism nevertheless

raises problems despite its initial plausibility. James recognized that his account needed more

elaboration and he sought to provide this with his apparatus of “appropriation” which relates

James 423

different members of the stream of consciousness to each other and to a subject’s body. In the

account James contrasts a “warm” and “intimate” first-hand knowledge of ourselves linked to

our bodies with a “cold” second-hand knowledge we might acquire of our past without being

able recall the relevant item. But the relations between the conscious memories and the body,

however warm and intimate, refer back to the basic difficulties of the mind-body problem, and it

remains unclear whether James intended to provide a strict criterion for personal identity or only

to describe the way in which we recognize our own “sense of identity.”

5. Pure Experience and Neutral Monism James’s psychology is directed on one side against the errors he detected in a Humean,

empiricist account of disjunctive experience, but in his wider philosophy he also challenged and

ultimately rejected a more fundamental Cartesian conception of the mind and its relation to

matter. His primary criticism of that traditional Cartesian conception, like his criticisms of

empiricist atomism in experience, was that its separation of mind and matter was too abstract

and theoretical. To think of them in a Cartesian way as separate substances—res cogitans and

res extensa—is to make the problem of their apparent unification difficult, if not impossible, to

resolve. James held two connected views about this background conception which, he believed,

required it to be amended or abandoned.

The first common-sense idea is that it is unrealistic to regard as strictly separate in our

experience those aspects which we call “mental” and those we call “physical.” All mental

experiences occur within the framework of a body, though the reference to a body may become

vanishingly small or implicit. Descriptions such as “frown” or “smile” make a necessary

reference to mentality but indicate primarily also certain sheer bodily movements. James’s idea

is that to identify a pure mental phenomenon without any physical attachments, or to identify a

pure physical phenomenon without any mental references, is impossible. Just as all mental

events refer, directly or obliquely, to a body, so all physical phenomena require an appeal to

sentience or cognition if they are to be identified or known at all. An abstract pure mentality and

pure physicality may be theoretically satisfying, but they are unrealistic as given items of

experience, and their theoretical value is limited by the difficulty of reconciling them to each

other.

That background conviction led James to construct a formal picture of the underlying

character of our experience, in which the “basic stuff” of which it was ultimately composed

should be characterized neither as “mental” nor as “physical,” but in some way as “neutral”

between these two general characterizations. The doctrine became associated among later

American and British philosophers with the label “neutral monism,” purporting to identify that

fundamental non-physical, non-mental, “stuff.” James’s own term, however, was “pure

experience.” Russell in The Analysis of Mind and The Philosophy of Logical Atomism expressed

strong approval of neutral monism, as he understood it, but he, like many other critics, objected

to James’s term “pure experience.” He thought it misleading since the term “experience”

suggests, counter-productively, a non-neutral mental “stuff.” It might seem, consequently, to

reinstate a Cartesian preference for a basic inner, mental, experience, when that was precisely

what James, and Russell, had hoped to avoid.

424 Graham Bird

James’s doctrine contains, moreover, a fundamental ambiguity: should it be seen as an

ontological doctrine, or only as an analysis of experience? The former is apparent in the idea

that what is identified is a basic “stuff,” itself neither mental nor physical, but from which the

derivative categories of the mental and physical can be reconstructed. The latter is apparent in

the analytic explanation of the way in which that reconstruction can be implemented. James has

a vivid picture of a grid in which the careers of minds and bodies can both be represented by

different trajectories of the basic pure experience. In one such trajectory pure experience maps a

line corresponding to some person’s mental life; in another it maps a line corresponding to the

temporal development of a physical object. When the person experiences that object the two

lines intersect and, as we might say, the mind is in contact with the object; but both before and

after that point the two lines naturally diverge. James’s analytic thesis is that pure experience

can be used in this way to account for both mental and physical phenomena. The ontological

consequences are developed in Essays in Radical Empiricism, where James talks of our

tendency to count experiences twice over and so to duplicate reality unnecessarily. His

suggestion is that there is just one thing figuring in one context as an object or field of objects, and in another as a state of mind; and all this without the least actual self-diremption on its own part into consciousness and content. It is all consciousness in one taking and all content in another (James, 1912, 17-18, 21).

Nevertheless it is possible to propose the analytic thesis without drawing the ontological

conclusion, and this is reinforced by difficulties in the theory which were partly recognized by

James himself.

James himself makes a number of provisos about the ontological thesis. He says that despite

talking of the “stuff of pure experience,” he wants to contend that “there is no general stuff of

which experience at large is made, there are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the things

experienced.” He adds that if you ask what a bit of experience is made of, the answer can only

be that “it is made of that, of just what appears” (James 1912, 26). Or, again, he writes that it is

“a bald that, a datum, fact, phenomenon, content or whatever other neutral or ambiguous term

you prefer” (James 1912, 123). Pure experience is said to be the “immediate flux of life” as

found only in “new-born babes or men in semi-coma from drugs, sleep or illnesses, [and then is]

pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet a definite what […].” (James 1912, 93)

James’s general intention, shared not only with Russell but also with Whitehead, is to reject a

Cartesian “bifurcation” into separate physical and mental substances. Pure experience ultimately

was to be seen as of one fundamental category—neither pure mentality nor pure physicality. But

James’s intentions, however understandable, are not altogether successful. His terminology and

characterization of pure experience is misleading and unclear, but the theory also contains an

ambiguity between a weak and a strong form. The terminology of “pure experience” inevitably

suggests that the basic “stuff” is mental, even though this runs counter to James’s thesis. The

provisos already noted about the ineffable character of pure experience, that it is a that but not

any particular what, make it difficult to identify the basic stuff. In its weak form the theory

might claim, against materialists and idealists, that there is no ontological primacy attaching

either to the mental or to the physical. Such a thesis would gain some support from the noted

fact that typically mental and physical items overlap in ordinary experience. But that weak

James 425

claim does not entail the stronger conclusion that there is some other non-physical, non-mental

stuff out of which both ordinary mental and physical items are constructed, and into which they

can both be analyzed.

The doctrine may as a result emphasize not the ontological conclusion but the claimed

analytic reduction of the physical and mental into two different partitions among ordinary

experiences. This would be to give up the idea of a prior stuff which is neither physical nor

mental and to admit straightforwardly that the construction is of a physical world out of inner,

mental experiences. The result would be a phenomenalist programme of some kind in which

series of mental events, taken in one way, constitute a succession in the career of a physical

object. The requirements of the “grid” metaphor would be satisfied by recognizing that the

series of such inner experiences may also be taken in another way as a succession in some

particular mind. Understood in these terms, the basic stuff out of which the successions in

physical objects and minds can be constructed remain particular inner mental experiences.

Consequently even that retreat turns out to be unsatisfactory. It is in danger of reinstating a

Cartesian priority for the mental over the physical, contrary to the original intention; it was

never worked out in detail by James; and phenomenalist programmes subsequently have come

to be seen as highly doubtful and have certainly never been shown to succeed.

6. Conclusion: James’s Influence on Whitehead Whitehead undoubtedly found James’s philosophical views congenial in many respects and

acknowledged his influence (see Weber 2002 for a more detailed account). Whitehead

responded particularly to James’s un-pompous attitude to intellectual enquiry and strongly

approved of James’s emphasis on the basic reality of felt experience both in cognition and in

religious experience. Whitehead’s later philosophy shares with James’s one major feature and a

number of its derivative corollaries. Both James and Whitehead attach a primacy to the

“flowing” character of experience. It emerges in James’s accounts of conjunctive relations and

of the continuing stream of consciousness, and it leads in both James and Whitehead to their

criticisms of Cartesian and Humean accounts of the self. In Whitehead it emerges in the

primacy he attaches to “events” or “processes” in contrast to the traditional emphasis on

“substances” and “things.” Both regarded the characterization of such objects in experience as

abstractions from the real continuity of felt experience, and their misrepresentation as

responsible for errors in traditional philosophy. If the traditional problems arising from the

Cartesian bifurcation of mind and matter rest on such a misrepresentation, then those problems

can be seen to be unreal and artificial (Section 4 above). Similarly, skepticism about the self can

be set aside if it, too, rests on the error of supposing that the self is an actual object in the stream

of consciousness instead of a complex set of relations among events in that stream (Section 3

above).

426 Graham Bird

7. Works Cited and Further Readings Bird, Graham. 1986. William James (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul). Eisendrath, Craig R. 1971. The Unifying Moment: The Philosophical Psychology of William

James and Alfred North Whitehead (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press). Ford, M. P. 1982. William James’s Philosophy: A New Perspective (Amherst, University of

Massachussetts Press). Gale, Richard. 1999. The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press). Hume, David. 1955. An Inquiry into Human Understanding, edited by A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford,

Oxford University Press). _____. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, Oxford

University Press). James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience (London, Longmans Green). _____. 1908. Psychology: A Briefer Course (London, Macmillan). _____. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism (London, Longmans Green). _____. 1918. Principles of Psychology, 2 Vols. (London, Macmillan). _____. 1978. The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press). Kant, Immanuel. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London,

Macmillan). _____. 1968. Metaphysik L1, Vol 28 of Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, Akademie Ausgabe

(Berlin, Walter de Gruyter). Myers, Gerald E. 1986. William James: His Thought and Life (New Haven, Yale University

Press). Price, Lucien. 1954. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, recorded by Lucien Price (London,

Max Reinhardt). Russell, Bertrand. 1921. The Analysis of Mind (London, George Allen & Unwin). _____. 1956. Logic and Knowledge, edited by R.C. Marsh (London, George Allen & Unwin). Weber, Michel. 2002. “Whitehead’s Reading of James and its Context,” Streams of William

James, 4, 1, 18-22.

Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) Jaime Nubiolai

1. Brief Vita Charles Sanders Peirce was born on September 10, 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Sarah

and Benjamin Peirce. His family was already academically distinguished, his father being a

professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard. Though Charles himself received a

graduate degree in chemistry from Harvard University, he never succeeded in obtaining a

tenured academic position. Peirce’s academic ambitions were frustrated in part by his

difficult—perhaps manic-depressive—personality, combined with the scandal surrounding his

second marriage, which he contracted soon after his divorce from Harriet Melusina Fay. He

undertook a career as a scientist for the United States Coast Survey (1859-1891), working

especially in geodesy and in pendulum determinations. From 1879 through 1884, he was a part-

time lecturer in Logic at Johns Hopkins University. In 1887, Peirce moved with his second wife,

Juliette Froissy, to Milford, Pennsylvania, where in 1914, after 26 years of prolific and intense

writing, he died of cancer. He had no children.

Peirce published two books, Photometric Researches (1878) and Studies in Logic (1883), and

a large number of papers in journals in widely differing areas. His manuscripts, a great many of

which remain unpublished, run to some 100,000 pages. In 1931-1958, a selection of his writings

was arranged thematically and published in eight volumes as the Collected Papers of Charles

Sanders Peirce. Beginning in 1982, a number of volumes have been published in the series A

Chronological Edition, which will ultimately consist of thirty volumes.

William James credited Charles Peirce with being the founder of pragmatism. Peirce is also

considered to be the father of modern semiotics, the science of signs. Moreover, his—often

pioneering—work was relevant in many areas of knowledge, such as astronomy, metrology,

geodesy, mathematics, logic, philosophy, theory and history of science, semiotics, linguistics,

econometrics, and psychology. Since his death, Peirce has been made the subject of lavish

praise. Thus, Bertrand Russell writes that “beyond doubt […] he was one of the most original

minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever” (Russell

1959, 276). Karl Popper views him as “one of the greatest philosophers of all times” (Popper

1972, 212). It is thus no surprise that recently his work and his views on many subjects have

become the subject of renewed interest; this revival is animated not only by Peirce’s intelligent

anticipations of recent scientific developments, but especially because he shows how

philosophy may be responsibly applied to human problems.

Though in some ways Peirce was a systematic philosopher in the traditional sense of the

word, his work deals primarily with modern problems of science, truth, and knowledge, starting

from his own valuable personal experience as a logician and experimental researcher laboring

within an international community of scientists and thinkers. “He was the most scientifically

i Dpto. de Filosofía, Universidad de Navarra, España; www.unav.es; jnubiola@unav.es.

482 Jaime Nubiola

trained philosopher I’d ever read; in some ways much closer to concrete experimental science

than Whitehead,” Hartshorne recalls (Lieb 1970, 157-158). Though Peirce made relevant

contributions to deductive logic, he was primarily interested in the logic of science, and more

especially in what he called “abduction” (as opposed to deduction and induction). Abduction is

the process whereby a hypothesis is generated, so that surprising facts may be explained.

Indeed, Peirce considered abduction to be at the heart not only of scientific research, but of all

ordinary human activities as well.

Peirce’s pragmatism may be understood as a method of sorting out conceptual confusions by

relating the meaning of concepts to their practical consequences. Emphatically, this theory bears

no resemblance to the vulgar notion of pragmatism, which connotes such things as ruthless

search for profit or political convenience. In Modes of Thought, Whitehead notes that his own

method of philosophizing is “pragmatist” in Peirce’s sense: “Thus deductive logic has not the

coercive supremacy which is conventionally conceded to it. When applied to concrete instances,

it is a tentative procedure, finally to be judged by the self-evidence of its issues. This doctrine

places philosophy on a pragmatic basis” (MT 106; Lowe 1964, 453). Aware of possible

misunderstandings, Whitehead highlights the exact sense in which he uses the term: “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).

2. Peirce’s Connections with Whitehead When in 1898 Whitehead published his Treatise on Universal Algebra, with Applications,

Charles Peirce was probably one of the few persons who would have been capable of achieving

a thorough understanding of Whitehead’s book. In fact, C. S. Peirce was mentioned five times

in the Universal Algebra (pp. 3, 10, 37, 42 and 115) and Benjamin Peirce once (p. 172). In the

legacy of Peirce’s papers there is a handwritten manuscript of unknown date with the title “List

of Books most needed (as all would be much used they should have stiff covers or binding)” in

which appears “Whitehead’s Universal Algebra” (Peirce MS, 1574). Nevertheless, in a letter to

Ladd-Franklin of November 17, 1900, he writes: “I never saw Whitehead’s book. Dr. Frankland

offered to lend it to me when it came out, but I couldn’t read it and have not read it.” In the

course of the years 1905-1907 Peirce prepared a paper on “Considerations Concerning the

Doctrine of Multitude” in which after acknowledging his dependence upon Cantor adds: “By

the time Whitehead’s and other works had appeared, I was so engaged in the struggle with my

own conceptions that I have preferred to postpone reading those works until my own ideas were

in a more satisfactory condition, so that I do not know in how much of what I have to say I may

have been anticipated” (Peirce 1976, III, 1069).

In October of 1902 Frank Morley, the editor of the American Journal of Mathematics, sent

Peirce a copy of a recent issue, which included Whitehead’s paper “On Cardinal Numbers.” In

his answer thanking Morley, Peirce openly expressed his dissatisfaction with the general

orientation of Peano’s logistic movement, an orientation shared by Russell and Whitehead: “I

Peirce 483

have not got all his propositions worked out by my method; but I have others that he has not. I

rate Peano’s notation along with Volapuk; and Whitehead’s saying that any mathematical

proposition is incapable of clear expression in ordinary language, aided by a technical

terminology, and algebraic devices, is to my mind, downright silly.” In the Preface of his paper,

Whitehead showed an enthusiastic admiration for Peano and Russell: “I believe that the

invention of the Peano and Russell symbolism, used here, forms an epoch in mathematical

reasoning.” Whitehead was convinced that it was not possible to reach the clarity of Peano’s

ideographic symbols merely by using ordinary language supplemented by algebraic devices, but

as Lowe writes, “the subsequent history of mathematical writing suggests that Whitehead went

too far” (Lowe 1985 I, 260).

Peirce was a deep admirer of Cantor’s work on cardinal and ordinal numbers, but he rejected

Whitehead and Russell’s approach: “I may add that quite recently Mr. Whitehead and the Hon.

Bertrand Russell have treated of the subject; but they seem merely to have put truths already

known into a uselessly technical and pedantic form” (Peirce 1976 III, 347; MS 459, 1903). In a

letter of the following year, sent to his former pupil Christine Ladd-Franklin, he complained of

not having been able to prepare a review of Russell’s Principles of Mathematics, and adds: “I

feel its pretentiousness so strongly that I cannot well fail to express it in a notice. Yet it is a

disagreeable sort of thing to say, and people may ask themselves whether it is not simply the

resentment of the old man who is getting laid upon the shelf” (Peirce L 237, 27 July 1904). In

April 1906, in his “On the System of Existential Graphs Considered as an Instrument for the

Investigation of Logic,” Peirce explains that “the majority of those writers who place a high

value upon symbolic logic treat it as if its value consisted in its mathematical power as a

calculus,” but “Peano’s system is no calculus; it is nothing but a pasigraphy [an artificial

international language using mathematical symbols instead of words]; and while it is

undoubtedly useful […] few systems of any kind have been so wildly overrated” (Peirce MS

499). Finally, for the mature Peirce, “Russell and Whitehead are blunderers continually

confusing different questions” (Peirce 1976 III, 785; L 148, 8 May 1906). As Hawkins remarks,

Peirce generally regarded neither Russell nor Whitehead in a very positive light (Hawkins 1997,

115).

Despite these strong words of Peirce regarding the logistic movement of the first decade of the

twentieth century, some historians of mathematics believe that Russell and Whitehead’s

Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) is indebted to Peirce in important ways. Carolyn Eisele

holds that “many of the ideas to be found in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica

were anticipated by Peirce,” referring to Peirce’s 1867 paper “Upon the Logic of Mathematics”

(Eisele 1979, 12; cf. Lewis 1918, 85 and Wennerberg 1962, 21). In fact, the editors of the

Collected Papers, when publishing Peirce’s 1867 paper, made several notes on the striking

similarities of Peirce’s ideas to those of the Principia (Peirce 1939-1958, 3.42n and 3.44n). In

recent years these connections have been widely acknowledged. For instance, we know that

Russell learned the universal quantifier from Whitehead, and in turn Whitehead came to his

knowledge of quantification through Peirce and his students Oscar Howard Mitchell and

Christine Ladd-Franklin ( UA 115-116; Putnam 1990, 258-259; Houser 1997, 5; Misak 2004,

25). On the contrary, Peirce’s anticipation of the stroke function, which he first developed

484 Jaime Nubiola

around 1880, was not known by Whitehead and Russell until its discovery by Henry Sheffer

thirty years later, and was used in the second 1925-27 edition of the Principia (Fisch 1983, 16;

Lowe 1990, 277).

In addition, some of Whitehead’s key notions were fully anticipated by Peirce. On the one

hand, many of the characteristics of Peirce’s category of Firstness strikingly anticipate

Whitehead’s “eternal objects” (Stearns 1952, 200; Hartshorne 1983, 82); Peirce’s Secondness is

equivalent to Whitehead’s “prehension,” or feeling of (previous) feeling, or sensing of

(previous) sensing, and Peirce’s Thirdness includes Whitehead’s “symbolic reference” or more

generally, “mentality.” As Hartshorne says in regards to this comparison, “Whitehead is in some

respects clearer than Peirce, in others less clear” (1983, 85). On the other hand, when Peirce

stresses the rational nature of the universe, he anticipates Whitehead’s emphatic protest against

the “bifurcation of nature,” the sharp Cartesian division between nature and mind which, in

Whitehead’s view, poisoned all subsequent philosophy (Stearns 1952, 196; cf. PR 289-90). In

contrast to many modern and contemporary philosophers since the time of Descartes, the

thought of both Peirce and Whitehead can be interpreted as largely successful attempts to break

out of the prison of our own subjectivity (Platt 1968, 238).

3. Whitehead’s Connections with Peirce When in 1924 Whitehead joined the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, ten years had

passed since Peirce’s death and the arrival of his papers at the Department of Philosophy

(Lenzen 1965). Since very little work had been done during those years with Peirce’s papers,

which were in disarray, Charles Hartshorne, then a Harvard instructor, was hired to prepare an

edition. He was soon joined by Paul Weiss, a graduate student in Philosophy, and together they

succeeded in editing six volumes published by Harvard University Press under the title

Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce between 1931 and 1936. Many at Harvard

contributed to the editing and publication of the volumes: “Nearly all the members of the

Department during the last fifteen years, as well as many others who were interested in Peirce,

have devoted much time to the often very intractable material of the manuscripts,” as the

introduction to the Collected Papers states (Peirce 1931, I, vi). Whitehead gave the editors

occasional advice about which papers and parts of papers to publish and, according to an early

plan, he was expected to contribute the introduction for the edition (Houser 1992). Hartshorne’s

view, as reported to Whitehead’s biographer, was that “Peirce had virtually no influence on

Whitehead” (Lowe 1964, 431). In a later interview with Irwin C. Lieb, Hartshorne remembered

how Whitehead “came up once at my request and I showed him an essay which had some rather

abstruse things to say about geometry. I knew that Whitehead was a geometrician. Whitehead

read it and said that it was interesting, but that some of it was too technical and, he thought,

ought to be cut. So we did omit some passages. Whitehead read several pages in which Peirce

sounded rather like Whitehead talking for instance about the ‘irrevocable past’ and the

‘indeterminate future,’ and Whitehead said to me, ‘I hope you will testify that this is the first

time I have seen this.’ When I told him that I could find some of his characteristic ideas in

Peirce he said, ‘Then I say he’s a great man. I’m bound to’” (Lieb 1970, 153).

Peirce 485

In fact, in spite of the affinities between both thinkers, the real connections between Peirce

and Whitehead are scarce. When Whitehead arrived at Harvard he was already sixty-three.

Although, as Victor Lowe likes to highlight, it was the United States which gave Whitehead the

opportunity to develop his ideas as a metaphysician, the seeds of his system had been

germinating for over a lifetime (Lowe 1990; McHenry 1989, 335). In a letter to Max Fisch of

February 9, 1985, Lowe writes “W[hitehead] knew P[eirce]’s logic of relatives when he wrote

Universal Algebra, but there is no evidence of substantial knowledge at any time of anything

else that P[eirce] published.” At the same time it should be said that Whitehead had a great

admiration for Peirce and his work. In a letter to Frederic Young in 1945, Whitehead writes:

“Peirce was a very great man, which a variety of interests in each of which he made original

contributions. The essence of his thought was originality in every subject that he taught. For this

reason, none of the conventional labels apply to him. He conceived every topic in his own

original way” (Young 1952, 276). But, it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that both

thinkers were deeply original particularly in their speculative thinking as metaphysicians.

Although it has been common for readers of Peirce’s metaphysical writings to notice a

considerable similarity to some features of Whitehead’s philosophy, an in-depth study of each

one shows wide differences between them. According to Lowe, “the more likely picture is of

paths which, though touching at certain important points, were for the most part so separate that

whoever thinks to make further explorations must choose the one and reject the other, and as he

looks back at Peirce and Whitehead, he must then be ready to reconsider the significance of

those similarities” (Lowe 1964, 430). Both philosophers seek to discover relational structures,

but their methods were quite distinct. Peirce looks for metaphysical laws founded on the laws of

logic, phenomenology and mathematics, but this is very far from Whitehead’s conception of

metaphysics as a speculative theory of process. “Convictions common to Peirce and Whitehead

have been deservedly noticed by commentators, somewhat to the neglect of the first question of

metaphysics: How shall metaphysics be pursued?—As a science among the sciences, says

Peirce. Not so, says Whitehead; it seeks truth, but a more general truth than sciences seek”

(Lowe 1964, 440). It remains true that Whitehead and Peirce agree in seeking modes of

dependence and relatedness in the universe rather than absolutes, and—as Kultgen suggested—

that in contrast to Kant both philosophers deny “even a problematic distinction of noumena

from phenomena”: reality is wholly open to us (Kultgen 1960, 288; Lowe 1964, 445). In this

sense it can be said that both philosophers are realists “in the grand manner of Plato” (Reese

1952, 225). The differences between their respective conceptions of particular metaphysical

topics, for instance, time, continuity, contingence, and God, have been studied with attention by

a small group of scholars (Hartshorne 1964, Martin 1980, Rosenthal 1996).

In a letter to Charles Hartshorne of January 2, 1936, Whitehead writes that “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” (Lowe 1990, 345). Thirty years later,

Hartshorne will rank Whitehead amongst the luminaries of speculative philosophy: “While

Whitehead’s approach certainly does not exhaust the speculative possibilities open to us […] yet

he does, with Peirce, and on the whole probably more than Peirce, represent our greatest

486 Jaime Nubiola

speculative model since Leibniz” (Hartshorne 1961, 37). In a more sober tone, I prefer to say

with James Bradley that “the significance of Peirce and Whitehead resides in their defense of

speculative reason against its critique by continental and analytical philosophers alike” (2003,

447).

4. Works Cited and Further Readings In order to gain a sound knowledge of Peirce it would be very useful to obtain the two-volume

edition of The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, edited by Nathan Houser and

Christian Kloesel of the Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992-

98). Also, the reader may find helpful the collection of papers edited by Cheryl Misak in 2004,

The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, (New York, Cambridge University Press) and the

monographs by Christopher Hookway in Peirce (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) and

of Kelly A. Parker, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought (Nashville, TN, Vanderbilt University

Press, 1998).

Only a very few scholars are experts on both Whitehead and Peirce. For the relations between

Peirce and Whitehead it is essential to read the paper by Victor Lowe, “Peirce and Whitehead as

Metaphysicians,” included in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, 2nd series,

edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard R. Robin (Amherst, MA, The University of

Massachusetts Press, 1964), 430-54. For a more recent approach the paper by James Bradley

may be illuminating: “Transformations in Speculative Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History

of Philosophy 1870-1945, edited by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,

2003), 438-48. Bradley, James. 2003. “Transformations in Speculative Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History

of Philosophy 1870-1945, edited by Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 438-48.

Eisele, Carolyn. 1979. Studies in the Scientific and Mathematical Philosophy of C. S. Peirce. (The Hague, Mouton).

Fisch, Max. H. 1983. “The Range of Peirce’s Relevance,” in The Relevance of Charles Peirce, edited by Eugene Freeman (La Salle IL, Hegeler Institute), 11-37.

Hartshorne, Charles. 1961. “Whitehead and Contemporary Philosophy,” in The Relevance of Whitehead, edited by Ivor Leclerc (London, Routledge), 21-43.

_____. 1964. “Charles Peirce’s ‘One Contribution to Philosophy’ and His Most Serious Mistake,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, 2nd series, edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard R. Robin (Amherst MA, University of Massachusetts Press), 455-74.

_____. 1983. “A Revision of Peirce’s Categories,” in The Relevance of Charles Peirce, edited by Eugene Freeman (La Salle IL, Hegeler Institute), 80-92.

Hawkins, Benjamin S. 1997. “Peirce and Russell: The History of a Neglected ‘Controversy’,” in Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Nathan Houser, Don D. Roberts and James Van Evra (Bloomington, Indiana University Press), 111-46.

Houser, Nathan. 1992. “The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Peirce Papers,” in Signs of Humanity, 3, edited by Michel Balat and Janice Deledalle-Rhodes (Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter), 1259-68.

Kultgen, John H. 1960. “The ‘Future Metaphysics’ of Peirce and Whitehead,” Kant-Studien 61, 285-293.

Lenzen, Victor F. 1965. “Reminiscences of a Mission to Milford, Pennsylvania,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1, 3-11.

Peirce 487

Lewis, Clifford I. 1918. A Survey of Symbolic Logic (Berkeley, University of California Press). Lieb, Irwin C. 1970. “Charles Hartshorne’s Recollections of Editing the Peirce Papers. An

Interview by Irwin C. Lieb,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 6, 149-59. Lowe, Victor. 1964. “Peirce and Whitehead as Metaphysicians,” in Studies in the Philosophy of

Charles Sanders Peirce, 2nd series, edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard R. Robin, (Amherst MA, University of Massachusetts Press), 430-54.

_____. 1985-90. Alfred North Whitehead. The Man and his Work, 2 Vols. (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Martin, Richard M. 1980. “The Logic of Idealism and the Neglected Argument,” in Peirce’s Logic of Relations and Other Studies (Dordrecht, Foris), 110-20.

McHenry, Leemon B. 1989. “The Philosophical Writings of Victor A. Love (1907-1988),” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 25, 333-39.

Misak, Cheryl J. (ed.). 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (New York, Cambridge University Press).

Peirce, Charles S. MS. The Charles S. Peirce Papers, Houghton Library (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA). They are quoted according to the numbering system established by Richard Robin. 1967. Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press). (L stands for “Letter”)

_____. 1931-1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1-8, edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press).

_____. 1976. The New Elements of Mathematics, 4 Volumes, edited by Carolyn Eisele (The Hague, Mouton).

Platt, David. 1968. “Transcendence of Subjectivity in Peirce and Whitehead,” Personalist 49, 238-25.

Popper, Karl R. 1972. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

Putnam, Hilary. 1990. “Peirce the Logician,” in Realism with a Human Face, edited by James Conant, 252-60 (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press).

Reese, William. 1952. “Philosophical Realism: A Study in the Modality of Being in Peirce and Whitehead,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Philip P. Wiener and Frederic H. Young (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press), 225-37.

Rosenthal, Sandra. 1996. “Continuity, Contingency, and Time: The Divergent Intuitions of Whitehead and Pragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 32, 542-67.

Russell, Bertrand. 1959. Wisdom of the West (Garden City NY, Doubleday). Stearns, Isabel. 1952. “Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness,” in Studies in the Philosophy of

Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Philip P. Wiener and Frederic H. Young (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press), 195-208.

Wennerberg, Hjalmar. 1962. The Pragmatism of C. S. Peirce (Lund, Gleerup). Young, Frederic H. 1952. “Charles Sanders Peirce: 1839-1914,” in Studies in the Philosophy of

Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Philip P. Wiener and Frederic H. Young (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press), 271-76.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) Franck Roberti

1. Brief Vita Merleau-Ponty is indisputably one of the most important French phenomenologists. Throughout

his life, he tried to think the importance of the body and the Sensible for every meaning and for

the sense of Being. His phenomenological meditation on the lived-body, his description of the

phenomena of language, art, institution, history and political life, and his thought on sensible

Being instituted a constant dialogue between Husserl and Heidegger, between classical French

philosophers such as Descartes and recent ones such as Bergson, between the sciences,

psychology, geometry, physics, biology, between every human practice such as art or political

life. What remains so original about Merleau-Ponty is his interpretation of philosophers’, artists’

and scientists’ work. He always tried to disclose the hidden sense of thoughts or experiences in

order to reveal our primitive experience of the world.

Merleau-Ponty probably discovered Whitehead’s research very early—perhaps in 1933—but

he really studied Whitehead at the end of his life, at the end of the 50’s, when his own research

led him to the limits of phenomenology, when he tried to elaborate an ontology of the Sensible.

At the beginning of his work, Merleau-Ponty was looking for a new philosophy, a philosophy

of the concreted. Such a philosophy would revise the classical theories of perception which are

either realist or intellectualist: the former explains perception as a natural and causal process,

while the latter considers perception to be a judgment or a representation. In his Projet de

Travail sur la Nature de la Perception (1933), Merleau-Ponty hoped to find a new theory of

perception and philosophy of the concrete, on the one hand in contemporary psychology, and on

the other hand in German contemporary philosophy or English and American philosophy.1 In

his first two books, Merleau-Ponty chose to describe the relationship between human beings and

nature and to explore the sense of perception; Gestaltpsychologie and phenomenology offered

him ways to surpass the ancient and classical philosophies of perception. We can presume that,

in 1933, Merleau-Ponty believed he could find what he was seeking in William James’ and

Whitehead’s work. Here Merleau-Ponty was influenced by Jean Wahl and especially by his

recent Vers le Concret.2 But neither in La Structure du Comportement nor in Phénoménologie

de la Perception, does Merleau-Ponty cite Whitehead; and his political writings, his articles on

art and works on psychology and language from 1945 to 1955 never refer to Whitehead. At the

end of the 1950’s nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty’s research became ontological. Works on

expression and institution, on the relationship between the sensible world and the speaking

world, led from phenomenology to ontology. He then investigated the sense of Being and

nature: this was the object of the courses he gave at the Collège de France from 1956 to 1960.

i Lycée de Barcelonnette, 04400 France; franckrobert1@free.fr.

668 Franck Robert

These courses were entitled The Concept of Nature. It was not a coincidence. At the end of the

first year of the course, Merleau-Ponty tried to establish a new concept of nature. After studying

variations in the concept of nature, he investigated the modern scientific idea of nature. The

course finished with a lesson on Whitehead’s idea of nature.3 In Whitehead’s philosophy of

nature, Merleau-Ponty was looking for the implicit ontology of the theory of relativity and

quantum physics. Even if his questions were based on Husserl and Heidegger’s meditations,

Merleau-Ponty did not find such an ontology in their work.

But it seems strange that a phenomenologist should read Whitehead. The phenomenological

question is the question of the sense of the phenomenon: being for phenomenology is

appearing. To describe the phenomenon as it appears requires the suspension of judgment about

reality, things and the world: no metaphysical thesis on the sense of reality is claimed.

Phenomenological reduction breaks with the natural attitude which believes naïvely in the

existence of things and the world. The transcendental attitude which breaks with the natural

attitude institutes a radical beginning. Philosophical questions become phenomenological

questions: what signifies appearing and how to describe a phenomenon as a phenomenon?

Husserl’s phenomenology is idealist-transcendantal: appearing is appearing to consciousness

which gives sense to phenomena. But idealism has difficulties in describing and taking into

account certain phenomena, such as time, the body or Nature. Merleau-Ponty thought we should

describe the emergence of meaning and of things even before consciousness gives sense to

phenomena. “Nature” is precisely such an emergence, the event of the apparaître. Nature is

physis fu/sij,: the mode of being of nature is to appear. By this phenomenological assertion,

phenomenology became ontology. Merleau-Ponty then read Heidegger and discovered in 1955

what we call the second Heidegger: the question of Being became essential for him. It is in this

context that Merleau-Ponty truly discovered Whitehead. Like Husserl and Heidegger, but in a

very different manner, Whitehead deconstructed modern ontology. This modern ontology was a

heritage from Descartes, Galileo and Newton, and contemporary science led to a criticism of the

modern ontology and science. A new conception of Being had to be elaborated.

2. Merleau-Ponty’s Interest in Whitehead Merleau-Ponty discovered Whitehead while he was working on his last ontology, an ontology

of the flesh. What is first is the “il y a,” the “there is,” only one flesh as an element that

differentiates itself into multiple folds. Phenomena and sense emerge from the flesh.

Whitehead’s ideas of nature and his metaphysical meditations about life seemed to echo

Merleau-Ponty’s research. Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Whitehead was nevertheless limited: the

notes of his course on Nature show that Merleau-Ponty read the Concept of Nature and the

lecture from Modes of Thought entitled Nature and Life. He knew Whitehead’s later books via

Wahl’s Vers le concret. His reading was strongly influenced by Wahl’s interpretation, in

particular in his decision to read together natural philosophy and metaphysical philosophy, not

differentiating, for example, events and objects from actual entities and eternal objects.

Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty wanted to break with classical ontology of the object and the

subject, with the ontology which sustained scientific thought since Descartes. To describe our

primitive experience of the world and to consider nature before the abstract bifurcation between

Merleau-Ponty 669

scientific nature and perceptual nature is one and the same thing: we should then, as Whitehead

and Merleau-Ponty thought, refuse the metaphysical categories of substance, matter, subject,

object, essence; we should develop a new concept of space and time which precedes their

separation into objective space and objective time. To view nature as a passage or process can

lead to a new idea of Being: this is what Merleau-Ponty was seeking in Whitehead’s

philosophy.

Therefore the Concept of Nature interested Merleau-Ponty: Whitehead refused every

metaphysical thesis, he tried to describe only factors of nature. Merleau-Ponty found an echo of

phenomenological neutralization. The metaphysical approach gave Merleau-Ponty an

ontological idea of what is described in the Concept of Nature: from phenomenology to

ontology for Merleau-Ponty, from description to metaphysic for Whitehead, we can note a

parallel evolution.

2.1. A New Concept of Nature Merleau-Ponty tried to understand nature as emergence, as sheer appearance [apparaître]:

Nature is not anymore natura, a nature spread out before consciousness, but is physis.

Whitehead’s idea of nature as passage and the idea of process corresponded to this concept of

nature. This conception of nature departed from modern ontology, Cartesian philosophy, but

seemed to conform to the results of contemporary physics. When Merleau-Ponty was reading

the Concept of Nature, he was trying to find the hidden ontology of theory of relativity and

quantum physics. Contemporary physics shows that nature is not at all an objective entity

spread out before us. Nature is not contemplated by a kosmotheoros which is exterior to it.

Laplace’s conception of nature sums up the idea Merleau-Ponty refused: “Laplace’s classical

conception supposed tacitly the idea of an unlimited being over nature, who can view Nature as

a Whole spread out, composed of innumerable temporal and spatial points, individualised

without non-ontological confusion. This ‘contemplateur du monde’ reigns over the world with a

system of eternal laws.”4 We can find the same criticism in Process and Reality, but Whitehead

opposed there Newton’s Scholium and Plato’s Timaeus: “The Scholium betrays its abstractness

by affording no hint of that aspect of self-production, of generation, of , of natura

naturans, which is so prominent in nature. For the Scholium, nature is merely, and completely,

there, externally designed and obedient” (PR 93). The error of Newton is the “Fallacy of

Misplaced Concreteness” which is “the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete” (SMW

51). This error was also quoted by Merleau-Ponty when he criticized intellectual and realistic

abstractions. By these abstractions in Descartes’ philosophy or Newton’s physics, the becoming

of nature is neglected. To think of nature as being concrete is to think of this becoming, the

becoming of entities and the becoming of all nature. Nature is historical and temporal.

2.2. Sense-Awareness and Passage of Nature Merleau-Ponty agreed with Whitehead that “nature is that which we observe in perception

through the senses” (CN 3). The description of nature as perceived shows the general fact of

nature: “Something is going on” (CN 49), that is to say, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “il y a.”5

This general fact is disclosed to the sense-awareness. Merleau-Ponty expressed this in French as

awakening [éveil] or sense-revelation [révélation sensible]. Nature is what appears to the sense-

670 Franck Robert

awareness which is part of nature. Merleau-Ponty found in Whitehead’s ideas an ontological

rehabilitation of the body as a center of perception, as a percipient event. Body is neither a

physical, nor a spiritual thing, but primitive meaning appears to the body, to this sense-

awareness.

What is then revealed to sense-awareness? We do not perceive all this general fact of the

passage of nature. This perception of nature is not an exhaustive perception: Merleau-Ponty

liked to cite Whitehead’s idea of a ragged-edged nature (CN 50)6. In the Concept of Nature

Whitehead made a distinction between discerned nature and discernable nature, what is

individually perceived and what is in relation to the perceived but which is not perceived in

particular. The non-exhaustivity of sense-awareness is essential for phenomenology: every

perception refers to an unperceived horizon. But, according to Merleau-Ponty, the discernible

nature is not only what is not actually perceived. It is what we cannot perceive but which is

necessary for every perception. It is what Merleau-Ponty called the invisible of the visible

which is forever unperceivable.

2.3. An Ontology of Relation Sense-awareness is an opening to a nature which is first of all a relational Totality. Merleau-

Ponty discovered in Whitehead’s thought an ontology of relations which echoed to his own

research: the ontology of the flesh, of the reversibility between feeling and felt, is an ontology

of relations. According to Whitehead, overlapping relations and extensions’ relations are

relations between terms which do not precede those relations. Those terms are not objects but

events: the distinction between objects and events was essential for Merleau-Ponty, who refused

every ontology of the object which considers positive entity to exist en soi.

Sense-awareness reveals Nature as a “complex of events.” Merleau-Ponty underlined this

idea: The unity of events, their interconnectedness, is linked to their insertion in the unity of the

percipient being.

Sense-awareness is part of the passage of nature (CN 67). This conception of nature questions

the classical opposition between subject and object: consciousness and nature should not be

rigidly separated.

The fact that nature is passage signifies that nature is constituted by events and that events

overlap one another. In metaphysical terms, as Merleau-Ponty noticed in an interpretation

influenced by Wahl,7 the term prehension translates such a relation of overlapping. This concept

allows us to think of interconnectedness, solidarity and relatedness of events or of actual

entities. The body as a percipient event is the model of such an overlapping and such a

prehension: it prehends events of nature and it is so linked to the whole of nature. Those

relations are feeling relations.

The passage of nature brings about the unity of the body and the unity of every observer.

2.4. Space and Time The consequence of the relations between events is that we cannot envision time and space as

separate, objective and measurable. We should understand space and time as undivided, as a

primitive spatialization-temporalization which is the process of nature8. This criticism of the

Merleau-Ponty 671

classical concept of time and space is the result of the theory of relativity and quantum theory.

Whitehead’s philosophy took into account those results. Contemporary physics and perception

both lead to the criticism of the idea of simple location. Merleau-Ponty remarked in his course

on modern physics that the discovery of photons by Einstein led to a new idea of things.9

Photons are corpuscles but they have also wave motions;10 their position is due to the specific

intensity of a field, as de Broglie believed.11 That is to say, they have no simple location. The

Whiteheadian criticism of simple location is also pertinent to describe perception. Perception is

in fact at once inside the subject and in the perceived thing: “The criticism of simple location

shows us the ontological value of perception. What I am perceiving is both in me and in things.

Perception is from the interior of nature.”12 Opening to the whole of nature, perception is a fold

of nature.

2.5. Nature and Life This way in which events or entities (in particular percipient events) are linked to all other

events or entities and finally to the whole of nature allows one to describe the emergence of

individual entities: the term concrescence expresses such emergence. This term was essential

for Merleau-Ponty: it led Merleau-Ponty, like Whitehead, to a meditation on life. At the

beginning of his course on the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty defined Nature from Greek and

Latin terms: “In Greek, the word ‘nature’ comes from the verb which is an allusion to

vegetable life; the Latin word comes from nascor, to be born, to live.”13 Nature is life. Nature is

passage: it is not composed of punctual instants, but it is life inside which there are durations.14

Those durations overlap each other15 and finally refer to the whole of nature. Whitehead’s ideas

of concrescence and process express this idea. If we were to describe nature as lifeless, then we

would have to describe the body, organisms and life in this way also. But this would be to forget

nature’s powers of self-production.

Merleau-Ponty’s evolution was thus parallel to Whitehead’s: the latter led to a meditation of

life when his thought became metaphysical; the former led to an ontology of life when his

meditation on nature became ontological.

The deconstruction of the classical idea of lifeless nature, led to a meditation of nature as

being alive. At the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty explored the limits of phenomenology:

Whitehead and his meditation on nature and life contributed to this exploration. Nature and life

opened metaphysical and cosmological perspectives which were not at all phenomenological.

Nature can be described as creative advance. Such activity of nature is much more effective in

nature alive than in lifeless nature, even if all nature is process and passage.16 Lifeless nature

leads to the idea of activity; nature alive leads to the meaning of this activity (MT 202-203). We

cannot understand this meaning if we accept Cartesian dualism between matter and spirit. We

should understand the universe as an organic totality whose elements are inter-related. To live is

indeed to appropriate a multiplicity which is multiplicity of nature. This appropriation rests on

prehensions and constitutes the subject itself. The constitution of the self is therefore self-

enjoyment, in which nature is gathered in an occasion of experience. But this process of

appropriation also constitutes the life of nature (MT 205-206). It is a temporal process. Much

more, it is the spatialization-temporalization of time itself. This time is cosmic time. This

672 Franck Robert

cosmic time is also linked to a cosmological conception of Being. Indeed there is a unity of

nature and a continuity of all occurrences of nature. The ontology of the flesh also presupposes

this unity and continuity of nature. Merleau-Ponty ended up his commentary of Whitehead by

insisting on this cosmological conception: every type of natural occurrences “lead[s] on to each

other” (MT 215). This meditation on nature and life sketched the ontology of the flesh.

3. An ontology of the Sensible? Merleau-Ponty’s course on nature shows how a Whiteheadian philosophy of nature can nourish

an ontological meditation which has its starting point in phenomenology.

First of all, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh was only possible once Merleau-Ponty had

criticized the classical conceptions of perception. The case is the same for Whitehead: the

togetherness of the events, the links between percipient events and other events, imply a new

conception of perception. We can find this new conception in Process and Reality. Merleau-

Ponty knew Process and Reality’s distinctions:17 perception is not only in the mode of

presentational immediacy; perception refers to thickness, history and the memory of the body.18

The past of the body and of the world is gathered in the perception in the mode of causal

efficacy. To perceive with our body is to feel the thickness of the body and of time: according to

Merleau-Ponty, the Whiteheadian idea of the withness of the body means that to perceive the

world is also to perceive one’s own body. The idea of the reversibility of the flesh between body

and world could thus find essential concepts in the theory of feelings and the conception of

perception of Process and Reality. Merleau-Ponty only guessed this at the end of his life.

As a matter of fact, the development of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the flesh was long and

complex; it was the product of various conceptual encounters in which Whitehead undoubtedly

played a significant role. This, however, is certain: if Merleau-Ponty had been acquainted with

Process and Reality, he would have been able to cast an even more critical eye on the

phenomenological tradition.

As we have seen, lots of concepts of the philosophy of nature are pertinent in describing flesh

and Being as a sensible being. Nature is not a Whole constituted in itself. There is an auto-

creation of nature and the passage of nature does not presuppose a totality which would precede

it. The flesh is auto-constituting: the flesh is creativity, creative advance. The flesh is the

element of interconnectedness, the relatedness of the multiple. But it is also from the flesh that

every perception and sense emerge. In Whitehead’s terms, we can say that the percipient event

is part of nature, and that every prehension is part of nature’s auto-creation.

There is at once unity of the flesh, unity of nature, and an auto-differentiation of flesh and

nature: phenomena or entities are the individual folds of such a differentiation, but they are also

linked to one another. So, overlapping relations constitute universal solidarity. Overlapping is

the translation of the French empiétement or enjambement which are among the most important

concepts of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. We can say that there is flesh, a universal solidarity,

because there are overlapping relations.

This unity, as we have seen, requires a new conception of time and space. There is a corporeal

and fleshly insertion of time; time and space are inseparable. There is time of nature and time of

Being which is not at all objective or natural time. The text Nature and Life was important for

Merleau-Ponty 673

Merleau-Ponty: the idea of concrescence and the fact that there is a self-enjoyment of time in

organisms were essential for Merleau-Ponty. Indeed for the French philosopher, there is a fold

of nature inside the body. This fold is the spatialization-temporalization of space and time.

This is enough to show that Whitehead (among many other authors, including Husserl and

Heidegger) could have played a more important role for Merleau-Ponty. This also shows that

Merleau-Ponty opened up a dialogue between Whitehead and phenomenology which is not yet

closed. But such dialogue could also go in the opposite direction: phenomenological

philosophy, in particular that of Merleau-Ponty, could address questions to Whitehead’s

thought, particularly his metaphysics and cosmology.

To illustrate this possible dialogue, we could suggest some remarks on the question of

essences. In his course, Merleau-Ponty asserted19 the importance of the notions of ingression

and situation in the Concept of Nature: these notions are essential when considering the relation

between events and objects and between actual entities and eternal objects. They allow one to

avoid the separation between events and objects, or actual entities and eternal objects. But in

spite of the idea of ingression, the concepts of objects or eternal objects may lead to a negation

of the process or the passage of nature. Objects are réification of what is only process. The

concept of objects seems to introduce a new Platonism,20 Merleau-Ponty remarked, here again

influenced by Wahl. Merleau-Ponty preferred his own notion of style to describe the essence of

what happens rather than the notion of objects. Style is not a positive essence. Objects are

perhaps still such an essence.

We could not really consider objects to be apart from events. But the object is already perhaps

an abstraction. Experience is at first the experience of events, not the experience of objects.

Merleau-Ponty saw that objects are nothing without events, they are the “ ‘structures’ of

events”21: there could be no meaning in nature, in the passage of nature, if there were only

events. But objects should never be seen as could be the case for eternal objects, as positive

essences, if we would like to keep the concrete meaning of our primitive experience. This

concrete meaning is sensible, and Merleau-Ponty could remind Whitehead that experience,

meaning and Being are first of all sensible.

The dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead is helpful for understanding Being as

sensible being, and for developing an ontology of the Sensible, as Merleau-Ponty tried to do at

the end of his life with his ontology of the flesh.

4. Works Cited and Further Readings

1. Works by Merleau-Ponty 1996. Le Primat de la Perception (Lagrasse, Verdier). Translated in 1964 as The Primacy of

Perception and Other Essays, edited by James M. Edie (Evanston, Northwestern University Press).

1995. La Nature: notes, cours du Collège de France, edited by DoDominique Séglard (Paris, Seuil). Translated in 2003 by R. Vallier as “Course notes from the College de France (Evanston, Northwestern University Press).

1964. Le Visible et l'Invisible, Notes de travail, transcribed by Claude Lefort (Paris, Gallimard). Translated in 1968 by Lingis as The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Northwestern University Press).

674 Franck Robert

1956-1957. “Cours inédit, volume XV. Collège de France. Cours du lundi et du jeudi. Le Concept de Nature” (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MF 12770).

Merleau-Ponty read Whitehead’s Concept of Nature, The Function of Reason, and knew indirectly of Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality, particularly through Jean Wahl’s 1932 Vers le Concret (Paris, Vrin), which was reissued in 2004.

On Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead Cassou-Noguès, Pierre. 2001. “ Merleau-Ponty et les sciences de la nature: lecture de la

physique moderne: confrontation à Bergson et Whitehead,” Chiasmi International, 2 (Milan, Mimesis; University of Memphis; Paris, Vrin), 119-42.

_____. 2002. “A l’intérieur de l’événement. La notion d’organisme dans la cosmologie de Whitehead,” Les études philosophiques, 4, 441-57.

Garelli, Jacques. 2004. De l’entité à l’événement, La phénoménologie à l’épreuve de la science et de l’art contemporain, Chapter VII (Milan, Mimesis).

Hamrick, William S. 1974. “Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty: Some Moral Implications,” Process Studies, 4, 4, 235-51.

_____. 1999. “A Process View of the Flesh: Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty,” Process Studies, 28, 1-2. 117-29.

_____. 2004. “Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty: Healing the Bifurcation of Nature,” in Janusz A. Polanowski and Donald W. Sherburne, eds. Whitehead’s Philosophy: Points of Connection (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), pp. 127-142.

Robert, Franck. 2006a. “Whitehead et la phénoménologie. Une lecture croisée du dernier Merleau-Ponty et du Whitehead de Process and Reality,” Chiasmi International, 8 (Milan, Mimesis; University of Memphis; Paris, Vrin), 2006.

_____. 2006b. “Merleau-Ponty, lecteur de Whitehead, Le concept de nature, socle d'une pensée renouvelée de l'Etre,” in La science et le monde moderne d’Alfred North Whitehead—Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, edited by François Beets, Michel Dupuis and Michel Weber (Frankfurt, Ontos).

_____. 2006c. “Science et ontologie: Merleau-Ponty et Whitehead,” Archives de Philosophie. Rodrigo, Pierre. 2002. “L’onto-logique d’Alfred North Whitehead,” Les Études Philosophiques,

4, 475-90. _____. 2004. “A. N. Whitehead: du substantialisme à la ‘tinologie’,” in Alfred North

Whitehead: De l’algèbre universelle à la théologie naturelle, edited by François Beets, Michel Dupuis, and Michel Weber (Frankfurt, Ontos), 337-352.

Van der Veken, Jan. 2004. “L’identité de la personne dans une philosophie de la créativité,” in Alfred North Whitehead: De l’algèbre universelle à la théologie naturelle, edited by François Beets, Michel Dupuis, and Michel Weber (Frankfurt, Ontos), 255-268.

Merleau-Ponty 675

Notes

1 Projet de Travail sur la Nature de la Perception, 1933, in Le Primat de la Perception, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1996, p. 13. This text was written by Merleau-Ponty to obtain a subvention from the Caisse nationale des Sciences.

2 Jean Wahl, Vers le concret, Paris, Vrin, 1932 (réédition 2004). 3 La Nature, notes, cours du Collège de France (noted N.), published by Dominique Séglard,

Paris, Seuil, 1995, and Cours inédit, volume XV. Collège de France. 1956-1957. Cours du lundi et du jeudi. Le concept de nature. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MF 12770.

4 La Nature, p. 153, translation mine. 5 Volume XV, p. 157. 6 N. 154, for example. 7 Volume XV, p. 158. 8 See Le Visible et l'Invisible, Notes de travail, p. 302, transcription by Claude Lefort, Paris,

Gallimard, 1964. 9 N. 123-152. 10 N. 125-126. 11 N. 126. 12 N. 159. 13 N. 19, translation mine. 14 See N. 155-156 and vol. XV. 150, 155. 15 Vol. XV. 152. 16 N. 158, and Merleau-Ponty cites MT. 198-200 in volume XV. 154. 17 Vol. XV. 158. 18 Vol. XV. 158. 19 N. 158. 20 Vol. XV. 152. 21 Vol. XV. 152.

Jean Wahl (1888–1974) Michel Weberi

Jean Wahl was born in Marseille, France, where his father, who was professor of English,

succeeded to Mallarmé. He studied in the lycée Janson de Sailly (Paris) and, after a preparatory

year in the lycée Louis-le-Grand (Paris), he entered the École normale supérieure (Ulm) in

1907. In 1910 he became “agrégé de philosophie” (first in his year, just before his good friend

Gabriel Marcel, 1889–1973). Docteur ès lettres in 1920 with a thesis devoted to Les

Philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (translated into English by Fred Rothwell

as The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America, London: Open Court, 1925) and a

supplementary thesis (“Thèse complémentaire”) on Descartes’ concept of the instant (Le Rôle

de l'Idée de l'Instant dans la Philosophie de Descartes). He then successively taught in

secondary schools (“lycées” in Saint-Quentin, Tours and Le Mans), in the universities of

Besançon, Nancy, Lyon, and finally at the Sorbonne—from 1936 to 1967. His career was

interrupted, however, by World War II: first, by the exodus of May 1940; second, in December

when Vichy ordered the retirement of all university professors with Jewish roots; third, in July

1941 when he was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned and finally interned at the Drancy

deportation camp (north-east of Paris), from where he was released in November thanks to the

mobilization of his fmily and friends. He then left for the U.S. where he taught from 1942 to

1945 at New York’s New School for Social Research, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College

(where he created the Decades inspired by the famous “Décades de Pontigny”) and

Pennsylvania State College. After the war, he returned to France and became President of the

Société française de philosophie (1946), founding member of the Deucalion journal (1946) and

of the Collège philosophique (in Jan. 1947, rue de Rennes), and, in 1950, Director of the Revue

de Métaphysique et de Morale, a position he kept until his death. Wahl has also been visiting

professor at Chicago, Berkeley and Tunis.

Wahl was first inspired by his peers—Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Émile Boutroux (1845–

1921) and Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944)—and by William James’ and George Santayana’s

works. Indeed Wahl always looked beyond the French intellectual horizon, which is sometimes

in danger of ignoring foreign innovatory speculative ventures. Fully aware of the contemporary

debates across Continental Europe (Analytic thought, Phenomenology, Existentialism, German

Idealism and the like), he was also very keen to engage in dialogue with “outsiders” such as

English and American philosophers, but also the early Heidegger, whose reading he was already

recommending in 1927.

His books display the rare ability to renew the interpretation of well-known historical figures

and themes and of introducing new actors and fields into the French intellectual scene. Besides

his two theses mentioned above, of special interest are his 1926 Étude sur le Parménide de

i Centre de philosophie pratique “Chromatiques whiteheadiennes,” Brussels; Visiting Professor at

the New Bulgarian University (Sofia); www.chromatika.org; weber@chromatika.org.

Wahl 641

Platon, his 1929 Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (prior to Kojève’s

1947 work!) and his 1938 Études kierkegaardiennes. He has also authored The Philosopher's

Way (reviewed by Hartshorne in The Philosophical Review, Vol. LVII, N° 5, 1948, pp. 509-

511), a book that bears the typical verve we also discover in his monumental Metaphysical

Treatise of 1953 (in which Whitehead frequently appears as the white knight who saves the day)

and in Vers le concret (i.e., Towards the concrete), in which Wahl, far ahead of most of his

contemporaries, provides beautiful meditations on three complementary thinkers—William

James, Whitehead and Marcel.

Vers le concret (1932) gathers three introductory studies of authors who, Wahl claims,

provide us with similar (radical) empicist quests. In each case, it is indeed a radical empiricism

that it as work (to make sense of all experiences)—and this premise involves a biographical

consequence: we are confronted with philosophies in the making. The Preface (written in 1931–

1932) shows the unity of these sketches primarily through the importance of the Bergsonian

roots of the three respective worldviews, and secondarily with the help of the explication of the

importance of three Jamesean traits: the concept of (pure) experience (its pristine vagueness and

confusedness, but also its spiritual and emotional density), the necessary gearing of internal and

external relations, i.e., of durational and physical temporality (to allow both freedom and

determinism, existence and being), and the constitutive opacity of the concrete (its non-rational

thickness) and of the withness of the body itself.

The chapter on James (originally published in 1922), along with his correspondence

(including some letters unpublished at the time), shows the extent to which philosophy was

instrumental in his battle against illness, despair and madness. All the major conceptual issues

are evoked and their historical significance clarified (except, however, the obscure relationship

with C.S. Peirce). This is an amazing feat coming as it does prior to Perry’s Thought and

Character of William James (1935). The introduction to Whitehead (originally published in

1931) shares the same holistic concern: to make sense of the “Philosophy of Organism” through

the works of the Harvard epoch (from PNK to PR—sometimes at the price of conceptual

shortcuts) and thus to show how the intended destruction of the materialistic fallacy necessitates

the powerful concept of event that, in turn, allows the renewal of the construction of causality,

space and time. The contrast with Husserl is, however, at times rather daring. The study of

Gabriel Marcel’s philosophy (originally published in 1930) exploits his Metaphysical Diary

(1927) and is based on his confrontation of Hegel, Bradley and Bergson. Again, the key

concepts are subjectivity, embodiment and the emotional night of experience. As he works

towards the restoration of the ontological primacy of existence and grants its religious

immediacy, the special focus becomes the self-validating virtues of faith.

In conclusion, let us mention that Wahl was not only a learned and systematic thinker, but

also a published poet himself who translated poems of, e.g., Wallace Stevens and Thomas

Traherne. Actually, he held that poetry constitutes the highest of all arts and that it is

metaphysics.

In his time a towering figure of the French intelligentsia but since the seventies somewhat

forgotten even in his own country, Wahl is now being rediscovered and his books are

republished. His metaphysical insights, that match Whitehead’s and are well served by a lucid

642 Michel Weber

style and an impressive historical-critical scholarship, are once more being widely

acknowledged.

Works Cited and Further Readings There are two “Wahl Collections”: one at the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine

(Paris); the other at the Bibliothèque nationale itself. Probably the best biographical notice is

Maurice [Patronnier] de Gandillac’s obituary, published in the yearbook of the Association

amicale des Anciens Élèves de l’École Normale Supérieure (1975, pp. 38-45). See also Alquié, Ferdinand. 1975. “Jean Wahl”, Les Études philosophiques, n°1, janvier-mars, pp. 79-88. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1953. “Mystique et Dialectique chez Jean Wahl”, Revue de

Métaphysique et de Morale, 58, 4, oct.-déc., pp. 424-431. Kremer-Marietti, Angèle. 1970. “Différence et qualité”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale,

n°3, pp. 339-349. Levinas, Emmanuel with Xavier Tilliette, Paul Ricœur. 1976. Jean Wahl et Gabriel Marcel.

Présentation de Jeanne Hersch, Paris, Éditions Beauchesne. Mimoune, Rabia. 1985. La Pensée de Jean Wahl ou de la tradition vers la révolution en

philosophie. Thèse de doctorat ès lettres et sciences humaines, préparée sous la direction de Paul Ricœur, Université de Paris X-Nanterre.

Works by Jean Wahl 1920. Les Philosophies pluralistes d'Angleterre et d'Amérique [Thèse principale] (Paris,

Librairie Félix Alcan). New ed. with préface by Thibaud Trochu (Paris, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2005).

1920. Le Rôle de l'Idée de l'Instant dans la Philosophie de Descartes [Thèse complémentaire] (Paris, Librairie Félix Alcan); new ed. with Introduction by Frédéric Worms (Paris, Descartes & Co, 1994).

1926. Étude sur le Parménide de Platon (Paris, Rieder). 1929. Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris, Rieder). 1932. Vers le concret. Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine. William James,

Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel (Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin); 2nd expanded edition with Avant-propos by Mathias Girel (Vrin, 2004).

1938. Études kierkegaardiennes (Paris, Aubier, Éditions Montaigne). 1944. Existence humaine et transcendence (Neuchâtel, Éditions de la Baconnière). 1946. Tableau de la philosophie française (Paris, Fontaine). New ed. 1962. (NRF Éditions

Gallimard) 1948a. The Philosopher's Way (New York, Oxford University Press). 1948b. Poésie, pensée, perception (Paris, Éditions Calmann-Lévy). 1951. La Pensée de l'Existence (Paris, Éditions Flammarion). 1953. Traité de métaphysique. Vol I. Le Devenir. Genèse des permanences. Les essences

qualitatives. Vers l'Homme. Vol. II. Les Mondes ouverts à l'Homme. Immanence et Transcendance (Cours professés en Sorbonne, Paris, Éditions Payot).

1954. Les Philosophies de l'Existence (Paris, Éditions Armand Colin). 1956. Vers la fin de l'ontologie. Étude sur l'introduction dans la métaphysique par Heidegger

(Paris, Centre de documentation universitaire/Société d'Édition d'Enseignement Supérieur).

1957. Un renouvellement de la métaphysique est-il possible? (Cours professés en Sorbonne en 1957, Paris, Centre de documentation universitaire/Société d'Édition d'Enseignement Supérieur). New edition is forthcoming with Louvain-la-Neuve, Éditions Chromatika.

1964. L'Expérience métaphysique (Paris, Flammarion, Nouvelle Bibliothèque Scientifique).

Philippe Devaux (1902–1979) Paul Gocheti

Philippe Devaux was Professor at the Université de Liège from 1935 to 1970 and Associated

Professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles from 1941 to 1970. He has contributed

significantly to the promotion of Whiteheadian process thought in the Francophone community.

A music lover, he has also taught philosophy to the artists in residence at the Chapelle musicale

Reine Elisabeth. His first important philosophical work was in the form of his PhD dissertation

on Alexander’s metaphysical system, which was later published under the title Le Système

d’Alexander (1929). In 1930–1931, he was on leave at Harvard and Berkeley. At Harvard, he

followed the seminar of Whitehead and the seminar of C.I. Lewis.

Among his works which concentrate on Anglo-Saxon philosophy, let us draw attention to his

translation of Russell’s La méthode scientifique en philosophie, (1930) and to his article “Lotze

et son influence sur la pensée anglo-saxonne,” published in 1933. In 1939, he translated and

wrote a preface for Le Devenir de la religion. In 1955 appeared his L’Utilitarisme. Introduction

à J. Bentham et J.S. Mill. In 1958, he published another translation of Russell, Signification et

vérité (2nd edition, 1969). During this time he was also frequently visiting colleagues and

friends in the United Kingdom. In 1947, he was visiting professor at Manchester University. In

1959–1960, he was visiting professor at Hull University and London University. In 1965, he

published his third translation of Russell, L’Analyse de la Matière. Four years later, in

collaboration with Evelyn Griffin, he published a translation of a few essays of Whitehead

under the title La Fonction de la Raison et autres essais, (1969, republished in 2007). In 1970,

his translation of Russell’s famous 1905 article was included in the journal L’Âge de la Science

(“De la Dénotation”). In 1973 Popper’s La logique de la découverte scientifique (translated with

Nicole Rutten) was published with a preface by Jacques Monod. In 1974, with Suzanne Stern-

Gillet and myself he published Le Problème de la reference—a translation of an epoch-making

book by L. Linsky.

Philippe Devaux has also written original monographs, among which one can find the first

French-speaking monograph devoted to a systematic presentation of Russell, which was later

translated into Italian and Spanish—Bertrand Russell ou la paix dans la vérité (1967). He

especially clarified the rationale for the a priori status Russell gives to mathematical

propositions: their generality, he writes, “neither involves nor concerns empirical beings

[existants empiriques]” (1967, 45). He devoted his last years to a Whiteheadian magnum opus,

La Cosmologie de Whitehead, the first volume of which has just been published by Chromatika

Editions in Louvain-la-Neuve. One finds in it a mine of information on Anglo-Saxon

philosophy from 1880-1940. Because he personally knew Whitehead and Russell—arguably the

most important British philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century—Philippe Devaux

i Séminaire de Logique et d’Épistémologie, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, Université de Liège;

pgochet@ulg.ac.be.

644 Paul Gochet

was the ideal witness to recount the history of that period and especially to throw light on the

complex network of influence of the philosophical streams of the time: evolutionism, idealism,

pragmatism and neo-realism. Devaux has not only described these influences, he has made them

intelligible.

Furthermore, Ph. Devaux authored a monumental history of philosophy—De Thalès à

Bergson, 1950 (2nd expanded ed. 1955). The main original aspect of this work is to be found in

the interpretational matrix used by the author to re-animate past systems and make their

succession understandable. According to Devaux, Western thought can be seen as a succession

of four phases: primitive thinking, qualitative rationalism, quantitative rationalism and

experimental rationalism. This scheme of course allows for “regressive” phases whose meaning

and significance become clearer when situated in a larger historical context.

In addition to his purely historical work, Ph. Devaux has produced an outline of a personal

worldview, whose main concern is to preserve the balance between philosophy qua science and

philosophy qua wisdom. His Les Modèles de l’Expérience (1976) is the last book he published

in his lifetime. It gathers together, in a revised form, a few of his most representative articles

written between 1939 and 1976.

Works Cited and Further Readings Devaux, Philippe. 1929. Le Système d'Alexander, Paris, Vrin. Devaux, Philippe. 1930. L'Ordre et la vie intérieure, Bruxelles, Larcier. Devaux, Philippe. 1932. Expérience et Formalisme (Nicod et Whitehead), Bruxelles, Arch. Soc.

Phil. Devaux, Philippe. 1933. Lotze et son influence sur la pensée anglo-saxonne, Bruxelles, Arch.

Soc. Phil. Devaux, Philippe. 1950. De Thalès à Bergson, Liège, Thone/ Devaux, Philippe. 1955. L'Utilitarisme. Introduction à J. Bentham et J.S. Mill, Paris/Bruxelles,

Renaissance du Livre. Devaux, Philippe. 1967. Russell, Paris, Seghers. Devaux, Philippe. 1976. Les Modèles de l'Expérience, Wetteren, Universa. Devaux, Philippe. 2007. L'Epistémologie de Whitehead, tome I, édité par Michel Weber,

Louvain-la-Neuve, Chromatika. Gochet, Paul. 1985. “Notice sur Philippe Devaux”, Annuaire de l’Académie Royale de Belgique

(Bruxelles, Palais des Académies), 153-74. Gochet, Paul. 2006. “Philippe Devaux, découvreur de la pensée anglo-saxonne”, in Michel

Weber et Pierfrancesco Basile (sous la direction de), Chromatikon II. Annuaire de la philosophie en procès—Yearbook of Philosophy in Process (Louvain-la-Neuve, Presses universitaires de Louvain), 151-60.

principles the citizen is bound to accept any religion hisruler adopts, whether he is Protestant, Catholic, Muslim,Jew or the Devil. Hobbes, above all, abandons the ruleof law and in its place has the despotic decisions of themonarch.

BIBLIOGRAPHYThe Leviathan Found Out: or the Answer to Mr

Hobbes’s Leviathan, In that which my Lord ofClarendon hath past over (1679).

Behemoth Arraigned (1680).

Further ReadingBowle, John, Hobbes and His Critics (1951), chap. 9.

G.A.J. Rogers

See also Foundations of State; Law; Natural Law;Political Philosophy; Religion, Philosophy of

WHITEHEAD, Alfred North (1861–1947)

Alfred North Whitehead was born in Ramsgate on 15February 1861 and died in Cambridge, Massachusettson 30 December 1947. He entered Trinity College in1880 with a scholarship in mathematics; in 1884 he waselected fellow in mathematics with a dissertation (nowlost) on Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity andMagnetism and started teaching mathematics and math-ematical physics. In 1910 he resigned his lectureship andmoved to University College London for a year, and thento the Imperial College of Science and Technology,where he taught the same subjects until 1924, when hewas invited to join the Philosophy Faculty of HarvardUniversity. Emeritus in 1937, Whitehead continued towork at a slower pace until his death. He was crematedand his ashes scattered in the graveyard of Harvard’sMemorial Church, where a service was held for him on6 January 1948.

The development of Whitehead’s thought can bedivided into three periods which placed emphasis respec-tively on LOGIC, EPISTEMOLOGY and METAPHYSICS. Theexamination of his three ‘canonical’ epochs reveals thatWhitehead respectively contemplates (1) the logico-mathematical field sub specie totalitatis; (2) geometry asa physical science; and (3) metaphysics under thecategory of creativity.

Before perusing these epochs, let us say a word of hislasting philosophical outlook, which is characterizedby a constant desire to question the meanings of ‘simple

obvious statements’ and to reorganize general ideas inorder to attain higher orders of abstractions – whilebeing critically aware of the limitations of language.This broad perspective is nourished by a twofoldtension: towards, on the one hand, a radical EMPIRI-CISM, and, on the other, a complete formalism. Theformer is essentially made of PLURALISM and intercon-nectedness of events; the latter had various guises duringhis career. His formalizations remained indeed open tothe conceptual revolutions of his time: the earlyWhitehead was particularly sensitive to the recent foun-dational developments in algebra and geometry; hismiddle period particularly tackled electromagnetism(including the nascent quantum mechanics, as in Planck,Einstein and Bohr) and Einstein’s relativities; the lateWhitehead also shows the influence of contemporarythinkers such as S. ALEXANDER, H. Bergson, F.H.BRADLEY, C.D. BROAD, J. Dewey, L.J. Henderson, W.James, J. MCTAGGART, G.H. Mead, G. Santayana and,of course, B. RUSSELL (the intertwining of Russell’s andWhitehead’s thoughts being a subject by itself). In thebackground, the systems of Aristotle, Descartes, Galileo,HUME, KANT, Leibniz, LOCKE, NEWTON and Plato standout as well. (Both lists are not exhaustive.)

A Treatise on Universal Algebra (1898) constitutes hisfirst book. It is largely founded on a thorough investi-gation of Grassmann’s calculus of extension(Ausdehnungslehre, 1844), HAMILTON’s Quaternions(1853), BOOLE’s algebra of logic (Symbolic Logic, 1859)and Riemann’s Manifold (‘Über die Hypothesen, welcheder Geometrie zu Grundeliegen’, 1867). Furthermore, asits title displays, Leibniz’s shadow (under the guise of the‘Ars combinatoria’) leads him to the quest of a ‘univer-sal calculus to facilitate reasoning in connection withevery province of thought, or of external experience’(Treatise on Universal Algebra, p. 5). (Let us note thatRussell’s and Couturat’s Leibnizian inquiries have yet tocome.) His thesis is that mathematics (in its widest sig-nification) is not simply the science of number andquantity, but a highly efficient universal engine of inves-tigation of the possibilities of thought and reasoning.Whitehead’s algebra avoids the restriction of variablesto symbols for particular numbers (cf. also his interestin projective geometry) to elaborate a fully fledged logicof propositions (‘the sole concern of mathematics is theinference of proposition from proposition’). The plannedsecond volume never appeared, being factually replacedby the co-authorship of the Principia mathematica(1910–13).

‘On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World’(1906) is a cautious comparative study of five logicalconstructs describing the possible ways of conceiving apriori the structure of the physical world. It is writtenwith the reformed symbolism of the forthcomingPrincipia (itself based on Peano’s conventions).

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Whitehead looks for nothing less than the ‘fundamen-tal relations’ acting between ‘ultimate existents’. Themonograph launches the heavy criticism of NewtonianMATERIALISM that will mainly occupy his next epochs andintroduces various other forthcoming features as well(e.g. the ‘theory of interpoints’ that anticipates his‘method of extensive abstraction’).

Russell came up to Trinity in 1890 and followedWhitehead’s lectures. In 1903 he published ThePrinciples of Mathematics and soon discovered the pos-sibility of a synergy between his planned second volumeand the second volume of the Universal Algebra thatwas still in the air. As a result, the authors decided tounite their efforts. Principia mathematica’s bold pro-gramme of deducing mathematics from a set of logicalaxioms stems from the above-mentioned works plusPeano’s theory of natural numbers (Arithmetices prin-cipia novamethodo exposita, 1889; Formulario di math-ematico, 1895), Cantor’s transfinite arithmetic(Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannichfaltigkeitslehre,1883) and Frege’s foundational inquiries (Grundlagender Arithmetik, 1884). According to Russell, Whiteheadespecially contributed the treatment of ‘apparent vari-ables’ (sect. IB), ‘identity’ (sect. IB), ‘cardinal arithmetic’(pts II and III), ‘convergence and limit of functions’(sect. VC) and ‘quantity’ (sects VIB and C). He con-cludes: ‘In most parts of the book, there was, in the end,very little for which either had sole responsibility’(Russell, pp. 137–8; for a non-technical introduction tothe Principia, see Whitehead’s Aims of Education orRussell’s Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy,1919). On the whole, Whitehead was especially activein parts II (where he was responsible for the blunder onthe restriction of the number of individuals), V and VI.

Thanks to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, it is nowaccepted that logicism – understanding of arithmetic(and much more mathematics) as an extension of deduc-tive logic – is mistaken. However, Principia mathemat-ica remains an intellectual landmark of the twentiethcentury, not only for its famous Theory of Types, butalso as the final break away from the Aristoteliansubject-predicate logic.

Let us mention An Introduction to Mathematics(1911), an intermediate work of vulgarization insistingon the empirical basis of mathematics. It constitutes astraightforward introduction to the methods and appli-cations of mathematics (broadly understood). Writtenfor the layman, it is nevertheless very instructive ofWhitehead’s lasting philosophical outlook.

The fourth volume of the Principia was supposed tobe written by Whitehead alone. In order to be ableproperly to discuss the geometry of the world, helaunched around the year 1905 a series of new inquiries,that were to culminate in a personal reassessment ofEinsteinian relativity (i.e. the replacement of the real cur-

vature of space–time by multiple time systems). In otherwords, the completion of the Principia was simply post-poned and Whitehead began his journey in epistemol-ogy. The genesis of non-Euclidean geometries (Gauss,Lobachewsky, Bolyai, Riemann, Helmholtz) hadoccupied Whitehead during his entire life; now he wenton to exploit philosophically the concepts of ‘field’ and‘vector’ as well.

The years 1911 to 1924 saw the publication of threebooks of similar inspiration: An Enquiry Concerning thePrinciples of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Conceptof Nature (1920) and The Principle of Relativity (1922).Their goal was to be useful for mathematicians, scien-tists and philosophers. Throughout their development,the basic questions remained: what is ‘Nature’ (i.e. theobject of perceptual knowledge); how are time andspace rooted in direct experience; what shape could(should) the simplest generalization take from immedi-ate evidence? The answers took the form of a carefulstudy of the presuppositions of modern SCIENCE, withspecial attention given to Newton, Maxwell, Lorentz,Minkowski and Einstein. Whitehead insisted on thenecessity of satisfying both science and common sense.Hence the two main features of his epistemology: thesystematization of the concepts of event and object,and their instrumentalization by the ‘Method ofExtensive Abstraction’, which constitutes a skilled gen-eralization of the instinctive procedure of habitual expe-rience in the light of the Fregean definition of cardinalnumbers with equinumerical classes. Both features resultfrom his denunciation of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, i.e.of the Galilean dichotomization between nature assensed and nature as postulated by science and of theLockean bifurcation between primary and secondaryqualities. Substance-oriented physics, dualistic in essence,is obliterated by an eventful physics at three comple-mentary levels: extension does not express disconnectionany more but connectedness; instants are replaced bydurations; and absolute space is replaced by a rela-tional/connectionist account of spatio-temporality.

In the Preface to the second edition of the Principlesof Natural Knowledge (dated August 1924), Whiteheadwas already stating that he hoped ‘in the immediatefuture’ to embody the standpoint of his epistemologicalinquiries ‘in a more complete metaphysical study’. Andhe did this in a rather revolutionary way. What beginsto matter indeed is the intelligence of the ontologicalconditions of possibility of the ‘creative advance ofnature’. The full heuristic answer will be given byProcess and Reality (1929); but three other works areworth presenting as well – Science and the ModernWorld (1925), Religion in the Making (1926) andAdventures of Ideas (1933).

Science and the Modern World embodies perhaps thefirst ever critical historico-conceptual study of the devel-

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opment of modern science, starting with the Greeks,overviewing 2,500 years of techno-scientific strug-gles with ‘stubborn facts’, and devoting special atten-tion to the Einsteinian upheaval and nascent quantummechanics. It also constitutes Whitehead’s earliestcareful exploration of the everlasting ontologicalproblem – how to understand the ‘coming-to-be andpassing-away’ of actualities? Here he underlined hisspecial indebtedness to S. Alexander and C.L.MORGAN. The pure phenomenological standpoint ofhis previous period was not satisfying any more,leading to a deepening of the event/object polaritywith the actual occasion/eternal object polarity. Onthe one hand, the pure phenomenological continuoustransition is atomized in ontological units of experi-ence; on the other, the quasi-Platonic notion of eternalobject embodies potentialities. Moreover, the axiom-atization of the process of actualization asks for athreefold immanent ‘principle of limitation’ workingtogether with a transcendent-immanent ‘Principle ofConcretion’ – God – grounding value and order in aneventful universe. The discussion of the CONCEPT OF

GOD occurs thus in a totally dispassionate context,independently of religious or even ethical concerns.What matters more is the ‘ontological priority’ offlux over permanence and the grounding of actualityin a ‘sea’ of potentiality.

Religion in the Making resumes that task by namingthe three ‘formative elements’ implicit in Science andthe Modern World: creativity or substantial activity,eternal objects or pure possibilities, and God or thePrinciple of Concretion. The Timaeus categories areobviously still haunting his mind (Whitehead exploitsa threefold categorialization somewhat similar toPlato’s in the Timaeus). Anyway, it is the concept ofreligion that is on the hot seat here, especially from theperspective of the correlation of the history of religionwith the general history of knowledge. Process andReality (being the GIFFORD LECTURES of 1927–8)disrupts this threefold Platonician framework byrecentring it around the concept of ‘creativity’.

Although Process and Reality constitutesWhitehead’s most imposing work, undoubtedly theacme of his speculations, it was – and is still – badlywelcomed and drastically misunderstood. As a matterof fact, the lectures were a debacle, and the bookitself is usually fragmented in order to make it seizablefor hurried readers. It consists of five strictly interde-pendent parts: I, ‘The Speculative Scheme’; II,‘Discussionsand Applications’; III, ‘The Theory ofPrehensions’; IV, ‘The Theory of Extension’; and V,‘Final Interpretation’. The first part shelters thefamous ‘categoreal scheme’ that is ‘practically unin-telligible’ apart from the investigation of the entirebook. Part II mainly studies the classics and Kant

from the perspective of its reformed subjectivism. PartIII analyses ‘genetically’ the coming into existence ofnew actualities. Part IV analyses ‘co-ordinately’ thebeing of actualities (and defines straight lines withoutreference to measurement). Part V reinterprets theontological system so far adumbrated, starting withthe rebalancing of the God/World relationship.

The ill success of Process and Reality seems to havesuggested a renewal of the expository style of Scienceand the Modern World. Adventures of Ideas elucidatesthe categories of Process and Reality with the help ofa vast picture of the major ideas haunting civilizations.We have here not only a PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY insist-ing on the concept of persuasion, but also an assess-ment of the impact of the scientific worldview onEuropean culture, and a renewed exposition of theONTOLOGY of process. According to the philosopher,a civilized society is to exhibit the qualities of TRUTH,Beauty, Adventure, Art and Peace.

BIBLIOGRAPHYA Treatise on Universal Algebra. With Applications

(Cambridge, 1898).‘On Mathematical Concepts of the Material World’,

Philosophical Transactions, ser. A, vol. 205 (1906),pp. 465–525.

(with Bertrand Russell), Principia mathematica(1910–13; 2nd edn, 1927).

An Introduction to Mathematics (London and NewYork, 1911).

An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of NaturalKnowledge (Cambridge, 1919; 2nd edn, 1925).

The Concept of Nature [Tarner Lectures] (Cambridge,1920).

The Principle of Relativity. With Application toPhysical Science (Cambridge, 1922).

Science and the Modern World [Lowell Lectures](New York, 1925).

Religion in the Making [Lowell Institute Lectures](New York and Cambridge, 1926).

Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect [Barbour PageLectures] (New York and Cambridge, 1927).

Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology(Cambridge and New York, 1929; corr. edn, ed.David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne,1978).

The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New Yorkand London, 1929).

The Function of Reason [Louis Clark VanuxemFoundation Lectures] (Princeton, 1929).

Adventures of Ideas (New York, 1933).Modes of Thought (New York and Cambridge,

1938).Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York, 1947).

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Other Relevant WorksThe Axioms of Projective Geometry (Cambridge,

1906).The Axioms of Descriptive Geometry (Cambridge,

1907).The Organisation of Thought, Educational and

Scientific (London and Philadelphia, 1917).(Ed. with an Introduction by Allison Heartz Johnson),

The Interpretation of Science. Selected Essays (NewYork, 1961).

Further ReadingCobb, John B., Jr and David Ray Griffin, Process

Theology. An Introductory Exposition(Philadelphia, 1976).

Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, The Search forMathematical Roots, 1870–1940. Logics, SetTheories and the Foundations of Mathematicsfrom Cantor through Russell to Gödel (Princeton,2000).

Hampe, Michael und Helmut Maaßen, Materialenzur Whiteheads Prozess und Realität, vol. 1,Prozeß, Gefühl und Raum-Zeit; vol. 2, DieGifford Lectures und ihre Deutung (Frankfurt amMain, 1991).

Harrell, Martha, ‘Extension to Geometry ofPrincipia Mathematica and Related Systems II’,Russell, vol. 8 ns (1988), pp. 140–60.

Lowe, Victor Augustus, Understanding Whitehead(Baltimore, 1962).

———, A. N. Whitehead. The Man and his Work,vol. 1, 1861–1910; vol. 2, 1910–1947 (Baltimoreand London, 1985, 1990).

Nobo, Jorge Luis, Whitehead’s Metaphysics ofExtension and Solidarity (New York, 1986).

Palter, Bob, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science(1960).

Price, Lucien, Dialogues of A. N. Whitehead, withan Introduction by Sir David Ross (Boston andLondon, 1954).

Russell, Bertrand, ‘Whitehead and PrincipiaMathematica’, Mind, vol. 57, no. 226, (1948), pp.137–8.

Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), The Philosophy of AlfredNorth Whitehead (1941; 2nd edn, New York,1951).

Sherburne, Donald W., A Whiteheadian Aesthetic.Some Implications of Whitehead’s MetaphysicalSpeculation, with Foreword by F.S.C. Northrop(New Haven, 1961).

Woodbridge, Barry A. (ed.), A. N. Whitehead. APrimary–Secondary Bibliography (Bowling Green,Ohio, 1977).

Three main sites are especially devoted toWhitehead’s thought:

http://www.alfred.north.whitehead.com;http://www.ctr4process.org; andhttp://www.espt.de, accessed November 2004.

Michel Weber

See also Ancient Philosophy; Cambridge Philosophy;Common Sense Philosophy; Mathematics,Philosophy of; Newtonianism; Phenomenology;Religion, Philosophy of; Science, Philosophy of;Space and Time; United States, Relationship with

WHITEHEAD, John (pseud. Philaretius:1740?–1804)

John Whitehead studied MEDICINE at Leiden, gaining anMD in 1780. He was licensed by the College ofPhysicians in 1782. He wrote several books on med-icine and some tracts on disputes with Methodists; alsoa biography of John WESLEY. He published two booksof philosophy: An Essay on Liberty and Necessity(1775), using the pseudonym of Philaretius; andMaterialism Philosophically Examined: Or, TheImmateriality of the Soul (1778). In this second book,Whitehead attacks the claim that thought might be aproperty of matter, using the standard arguments.

BIBLIOGRAPHYPhilaretius [pseud.], An Essay on Liberty and

Necessity (1775).Materialism Philosophically Examined: Or, The

Immateriality of the Soul Asserted and Proved, onPhilosophical Principles; in Answer to Dr.Priestley’s Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit(1778).

John Yolton

See also Religion, Philosophy of

WHITELEY, Charles Henry (1911–98)

C.H. Whiteley was born in Hull on 6 August 1911 anddied in Birmingham on 19 May 1998. He was educatedat Hymers College in Hull and at Queen’s College,

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