Introduction
When analytic philosophers consider Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, if they consider it at all, they typically praise his work with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica or reference various aspects of his philosophy of physics, such as his mereological theory,Footnote 1 but then dismiss his metaphysics as a sin of the highest order. Anthony Quinton, for example, has remarked: ‘Outside the sequestered province of the cult, Whitehead is regarded with a measure of baffled reverence, mingled with suspicion’. Whitehead was clearly made of ‘the right stuff’, says Quinton, yet his philosophical writings have been utterly incomprehensible to the general philosophical community (1985: 52). John Passmore, who regarded Whitehead along with Ernst Mach, Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem, Albert Einstein, and Arthur Eddington as a natural scientist turned philosopher, similarly remarked: ‘Of all the scientists. . . who have converted themselves into philosophers the best-known is certainly A. N. Whitehead. There are those who would maintain that he is the outstanding philosopher of our century—even if there are others who would dismiss his metaphysical constructions as obscure private dreams’ (1968: 335). And Susan Stebbing, in one of the early reviews of Process and Reality in 1930, concluded: ‘Whether it is the product of thinking that is essentially unclear but capable of brief flashes of penetrating insight; or whether it is too profound in its thought to be judged by this generation, I do not know. Reluctantly I am inclined to accept the first alternative’ (1930: 475).
Thus, while Whitehead is often charged with creating an obscure system that remains intelligible only to the devotees of the sequestered cult, in this paper we evaluate the merits and demerits of this criticism and examine recent developments in analytic philosophy that have circled back to themes central to Whitehead's metaphysics. Indeed, we shall argue that some of the very same analytic philosophers who have charged Whitehead with obscurantism have themselves advocated positions that are clearly recognizable as central motifs of process metaphysics, including among other items: epistemic realism, a de reA-theory of time, an event as opposed to substance ontology, relative indeterminism, and a belief in an open future. Russell and Quine are of particular interest in these respects (in different ways) as is G. H. von Wright and a substantial list of thinkers who are conventionally recognized as analytic in philosophical orientation, for instance, Richard M. Gale, J. R. Lucas, Thomas Nagel, A. N. Prior, and Nicholas Rescher.Footnote 2 In relation to Whitehead's mature metaphysical views, perhaps the most important development has been the recent emergence of what can be regarded as ‘analytic panexperientialism or panpsychism’ as exemplified, above all, in the work of Galen Strawson and others. It is quite remarkable that in the matter of a decade one of the key but controversial features of Whitehead's ‘philosophy of organism’—namely, its attribution of internal relationality and some degree of subjectivity ‘all the way down’ the scale of nature to the most elemental entities—is now viewed by a number of analytic philosophers as a serious contender in liberating us from the seemingly perennial dead end known as the ‘mind-body problem’.
The result of our reflections on these matters is thus to suggest that, paradoxically, despite the criticism of Whitehead's metaphysical views in certain analytic quarters, there is in fact a discernible tradition of what might be termed ‘process philosophy in the broad sense’ within the larger landscape of contemporary analytic philosophy. We begin by considering the two most obvious candidates for comparison, both one-time students of Whitehead—Russell and Quine—and then take up a number of others who have offered criticism or embraced doctrines that are central to Whitehead's outlook.
1. Whitehead and Russell
Russell, one of the founding fathers of analytical philosophy and Whitehead's coauthor on Principia Mathematica, enthusiastically embraced Whitehead's approach to the philosophy of physics in the 1920s but said of his metaphysics that it ‘was very obscure, and there was much in it that I never succeeded in understanding’ (1956: 93). After their collaboration on Principia Mathematica, Russell, like Whitehead, turned his attention from the foundations of mathematics to the foundations of physics and advanced an ontology of events. As he said in the preface of Our Knowledge of the External World: ‘The central problem by which I have sought to illustrate method is the problem of the relation between the crude data of sense and the space, time, and matter of mathematical physics. I have been made aware of the importance of this problem by my friend and collaborator Dr. Whitehead’ ([1914] 1956: v). Russell's main maxim—to substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities—in his philosophy of science and epistemology was greatly influenced by Whitehead's novel apparatus of the method of extensive abstraction. In fact, he credits Whitehead for his awakening from ‘dogmatic slumbers’. Russell saw the method of extensive abstraction as an application of Occam's razor in physics, for one need not assume the abstract constructions as part of the furniture of the world ([1959] 1995: 77–78, 81). Points, lines, and planes, for example, are not included among the entities recognized in our ontology but are rather viewed as abstractions or ideals of pure thought that are derived from experience.
Both Whitehead and Russell believed that physics had become dislodged from its empirical foundations with the acceptance of the Newtonian paradigm, but with the revolution launched by Einstein's special and general theories of relativity at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was the opportunity to rethink the foundations of physics. Russell followed Whitehead's lead in advancing the view that events rather than substances are known in sense perception, and building from this foundation, events form the basis of a system of whole-part relations that create the space-time manifold. Developments in particle physics provided further support for the event ontology with the early quantum theory in which elementary particles exhibited a very un-thing-like behavior in contravention of classical mechanics. Nature appeared to be dematerialized at the most fundamental level, and the enduring objects of our perceptual experience were interpreted as long, monotonous events, i.e., space-time worms. Russell accordingly argued in The Analysis of Matter that without ‘an interpretation of physics which gives due place to perceptions. . . we have no right to appeal to the empirical evidence’ ([1927] 1954: 7). The metaphysical status of physics would be vastly improved by a theory of the physical world that makes events continuous with perception. What we perceive is events, and perception itself is an event triggered, for example, by light-waves or sound waves. So here is the epistemological link that Russell sought to close the gap between perception and physics. Science, he concludes, is concerned with groups of events rather than with things because ‘the objects that are mathematically primitive in physics, such as electrons, protons, and points in space-time, are all logically complex structures composed of entities which are metaphysically more primitive, which may be conveniently called “events”’ ([1927] 1954: 9).
As Whitehead expanded his project in Process and Reality beyond the foundations of physics, the events of his earlier theory were modified such that they are now conceived as having internal characteristics such as creativity, subjectivity, and selectivity in addition to their external spatio-temporal, mereological, and electromagnetic properties. The events of the earlier theory are now called ‘actual occasions’; they are more like microorganisms that create themselves from the data provided by the past, themselves perishing to become data for future occasions. In this manner, Whitehead hoped to provide the foundation for comprehensive explanations in physics, cosmology, biology, genetics, physiology, and psychology. As he developed his view, it became clear to Whitehead that ordinary language is part of the problem since it fails to capture the dynamic reality of process. His main criticism of modern philosophy is the recurring issue of assuming ‘that the subject-predicate form of statement conveys a truth which is metaphysically ultimate’ ([1929] 1978: 137). This explains the necessity of his specialized metaphysical terminology. It was precisely this system that Russell found baffling, but his own thought in The Analysis of Mind appeared to be moving in this direction when he proposed to view the ontology of the world as a neutral stuff, a common ancestor, out of which both mind and matter are constructed(1921: 5–6, 10–11). Whitehead sought his solution to Cartesian dualism in a common ancestor that contains rudimentary elements of both mind and matter whereas Russell proposed to find one that is neither. In his synthesis of physics, physiology, psychology, and mathematical logic, Russell acknowledged the influence of William James but rejected the omnipresence of experience as the basis for his neutral monism ([1959] 1995: 12, 100). He wrote: ‘Under the influence of Idealist philosophers the importance of “experience” has, it seems to me, been enormously exaggerated’ ([1959] 1995: 107). It is, for Russell, an exceedingly rare and localized phenomenon in the universe.
When Russell surveyed the situation in 1921, he observed that psychology under the influence of behaviorism has affirmed a materialistic view while physics has moved away from matter in favor of events; yet, if the behaviorists are supposed to view physics as the fundamental science, they too should not assume the existence of matter (1921: 5–6). Russell claimed that the data of psychology and the data of physics do not differ in their intrinsic nature, but at this point he identified sensation as the intersection of mind and matter (1921: 142–44). When W. T. Stace criticized Russell's view of sensations as the neutral stuff, Russell responded that Stace had neglected his later view in The Analysis of Matter wherein he postulated that the ultimate constituents of the universe are events ([1944] 1971: 706–707).
The development of Whitehead and Russell's philosophical thought can be characterized by what Russell called a ‘revolt into pluralism’ ([1959] 1995: 42–50). In fact, both were part of the Cambridge movement to overthrow Hegelianism; both saw that the armchair speculation of the Hegelians was a sort of misguided megalomania compared with the stunning successes of the sciences, especially physics.
2. Whitehead and Quine
W. V. Quine was very much a central figure in the linguistic turn in philosophy that dominated the analytical agenda in the twentieth century; yet, commentators’ preoccupation with doctrines, such as the inscrutability of reference and indeterminacy of translation, has overshadowed his more fundamental goal of providing a systematic philosophy that develops our theory of the world from the advances in the sciences. In this regard, Quine has more in common with other system builders, such as Whitehead and Russell, than with the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. He claims a direct influence from Russell in his construction of a scientific philosophy, but his view of metaphysics as a generalization of science is closer to the view Whitehead embraced. Both Whitehead and Quine saw metaphysics as naturalized within science; it is simply the general end of the theoretical continuum.
Quine's task under Whitehead's supervision was to rework the Principiain such a way that it begins with a new set of primitive ideas and postulates and a theory of classes and relations instead of complex propositional functions. The end result was a streamlining of the whole work and the clearing up of confusions. This had a lasting effect on Quine's later theories in which ontological economy was his prime directive. In his doctoral dissertation, ‘The Logic of Sequences: A Generalization of Principia Mathematica’, published under the title A System of Logistic, Whitehead wrote in the foreword that ‘logic prescribes the shape of metaphysical thought’ (1934: x). One of Quine's main criticisms of the Principia was that Whitehead and Russell had treated properties in the same manner as individuals by including them in quantifiers. In this manner properties had the same referential power as individuals (1941: 145). In Quine's logic, however, one does not properly quantify over attributes or properties. This had an important consequence for the ‘shape’ of Quine's metaphysics in the sense that he refused to admit properties to his well-swept ontology. The same criticism he had made of quantifying over properties in Principia Mathematicawas also his criticism of Whitehead's metaphysics. Both Whitehead and Quine acknowledged a dualism of particulars and universals, but as regards the latter, Quine refused to admit properties in favor of what he considered to be well-defined criteria for classes.Footnote 3 For Quine argued: ‘I cannot recall seeing anything explained in terms of properties that could not be explained equally to my satisfaction in terms of classes’ (1997: 13).
When Whitehead proposed his dualism of individuals and properties in Principles of Natural Knowledge, it was Einstein's formulation of the theory of relativity that inspired him to develop a metaphysical view of the universe as a four-dimensional space-time manifold, one in which extension was posited as the primary feature of actuality and the whole-part relational property of ‘extending over’ functioned as the basic unifier of the interconnected network of dynamic events. In Process and Reality, he continued to retain the dualism of individuals and properties as ontologically basic, but his four-dimensionalism gave way to an event atomism. Instead of absorbing time into space-time, the temporal relation becomes fundamental in explaining the creative advance of nature as the process of becoming and perishing of the actual occasions.
For Whitehead, events are unique nonrepeatable particulars, and because they are nonrepeatable, they cannot be recognized. Properties (or ‘sense objects’ in his terminology) are the recognita in events. They are the things that happen again in nature. Without them there would be no recognition of events or anything else for that matter (1919: 83–85). The recurring properties that are regularly recognized in events perform an essential epistemological role, for without them knowledge is impossible. It is because properties are repeatable that they are the things that can be known, and it is their recurrence within the fluctuating processes of nature that makes science possible. The discovery of the laws of nature is due to the fact that the properties repeat themselves in a fairly stable fashion (1919: 87). This is what Whitehead called the periodicity of nature (1925: 40). As he said in Concept of Nature: ‘The constructions of science are merely expositions of the characters of things perceived’ (1920: 148). In Process and Reality, he went even further in asserting that nothing actual would be a definite entity unless it exemplified a form of definiteness that has no temporal limitations. What he now calls ‘eternal objects’ not only explain the characters of particulars, i.e., actual occasions, but they are also part of the explanation of how particulars gain the forms of definiteness in the temporal process. Every property is eternal because, whether actualized or not, each has some relevance to the temporal process as a potential ([1929] 1978: 22–23, 40).
In Concept of Nature, Whitehead rejected ‘the bifurcation of nature’ doctrine that the properties of nature are furnished by the perceiving mind, while nature itself is nothing but matter in motion, the posited cause of ‘psychic additions’ (1920: 29). He argued that this kind of bifurcation leaves us with two systems of nature: nature perceived and nature unperceived—i.e., a world of phenomenal appearances in the mind and a world of objects as the inferred causes of these appearances. For him this means that the reality of matter would remain nothing but a conjecture, and the reality of appearances would be nothing but a dream (1920: 30). Whitehead proposed to remedy this problem by viewing nature as one system of relations knowable through perceptual experience. In making this point, he wrote: ‘For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. . . .For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon’ (1920: 29); that is, properties are parts of nature rather than mere psychic additions.
Quine found much with which to agree in the four-dimensionalism of Whitehead's Principles of Natural Knowledge and Concept of Nature Footnote 4 but, as noted above, Quine substituted classes for properties in his general ontology. In Word and Object (1960), he pursued this project within the context of producing an extensional language for science. His ontology, physically speaking, is the totality of what our current science posits, schematized in canonical quantification form. Quine thought it was largely a matter of our purpose at hand that determined how the four-dimensional space-time is carved up into individuals, but however we gerrymander, the point-instants of space-time regions can be referred to as ordered quadruples of real numbers. This, of course, is where, according to Quine, classes come into the picture, begrudgingly accepted for services rendered to science.
With respect to his criticism of Whitehead, one of Quine's reasons for rejecting properties in Whitehead's ontology is that their identity and individuation conditions are unclear whereas classes meet the standard for coextensiveness, i.e., physical objects (or classes) are identical if and only if coextensive (1997: 13–14; 1981: 100–102). But it is unclear whether this principle sheds any light on the question of whether classes do all of the ontological work of properties. Whitehead thought that properties are needed to identify the boundaries of the space-time regions, without which we would have no way to make sense of where one event or object ends and another begins. Without some prior understanding of the ontological boundaries constituting the identity of any object to which Quine's principle of identity is to be applied, how could the process of applying such a principle even begin? Any application of his notion of identity could only begin after the referent denoted by the relevant linguistic sign has already been singled out and identified as the object of reference. In other words, it appears that Quine's identity principle presupposes that the task of individuating an object of reference has already been accomplished.Footnote 5
Quine said the disagreement with Whitehead over properties is the only one he could think of (1997: 13), but it was mainly Whitehead's philosophy of physics that he had in mind, not the metaphysics of Process and Reality, which he does not cite in any of his writings. Like Russell, Quine thought that Whitehead's metaphysics was obscure. As Whitehead's student, he ‘took refuge’ in the relatively mathematical material but ‘retained a vivid sense of being in the presence of the great’ (1986:10).
3. Whitehead and Popper
While Popper is not an analytical philosopher in the sense that he engaged in conceptual analysis, his critique of Whitehead in The Open Society and its Enemies is typical of widespread misconceptions about Whitehead's method and aims. Unfortunately, this critique is not Popper at his best. Like the logical positivists, Popper utterly fails to understand Whitehead; instead, he holds up specimens of metaphysics for ridicule and dismisses Whitehead as engaged in a fruitless project that had been abandoned with Kant. Popper preferred ‘piecemeal engineering’ and was very skeptical of any system building of the sort advanced by Whitehead or any other speculative metaphysicians. Although the current climate of opinion is more pluralistic, this attitude is common, even today, among analytic philosophers.
In a chapter entitled ‘Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt Against Reason’, in The Open Society and its Enemies ([1945] 1950), Popper attacks Whitehead as one of the most influential irrationalist authorities of his time. Whitehead, according to Popper, ‘owes it to Hegel that he has the courage, in spite of Kant's burning protest, to build up grandiose metaphysical systems with a royal contempt for argument’ (432). With regard to this alleged failure to argue, Popper writes:
But rational arguments [in Whitehead's work] are rare indeed. Whitehead has learned from Hegel how to avoid Kant's criticism that speculative philosophy only supplies new crutches for lame proofs. This Hegelian method is simple enough. We can easily avoid crutches as long as we avoid proofs and arguments altogether. . . . Like all Neo-Hegelians, he adopts the dogmatic method of laying down his philosophy without argument. ([1945] 1950: 433)
This has, in our view, some merit (specifically regarding the avoidance of Kant), but it is largely based on misunderstanding Whitehead's methodology. Whitehead does not argue in the fashion of analytical philosophy, but this does not mean he fails to support his conclusions with good reasons. Process and Reality ([1929] 1978), in particular, was largely developed in the manner of an axiomatic-deductive method based on the principles set down in the categoreal scheme of his chapter 2.Footnote 6 Whitehead states his position, often in the third person (much to the annoyance of Popper), but there is no doubt that the view he is advancing contra Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant is argued. For example, there is little doubt that he has argued for an event ontology over an ontology of substance, the primacy of process over being, or the primacy of organism over mechanism. As noted above, many of these arguments are developed in earlier books, such as The Concept of Nature (1920) and Science and the Modern World (1925). Whitehead's procedure of argument in Process and Reality is to draw out logical deductions from the categoreal presuppositions that are then tested with respect to their adequacy as a phenomenology of experience, as a coherent generalization of the sciences, and as a coherent account of deep common sense. With this general description of Whitehead's method in mind, what Popper should have said at the very least is not that Whitehead fails to argue or is an irrationalist refusing to give reasons for his views, but that there is some significant objection to the rational adequacy of the project—that there is a set of alternative proposals that do a better job of intellectually unifying the data of experience, deep common sense, and the results of science.
Popper, like many other critics, misses the highly innovative power of generalization in Whitehead's method, but what is unforgivable is his failure to see the importance of Whitehead's aim to find a unifying theory of the natural sciences akin to the contemporary quest for a Theory of Everything in theoretical physics. The main issue of contention is Popper's criterion of demarcation, namely, his attempt to separate science from metaphysics by the method of falsification. Popper argued that the falsification of a hypothesis or theory by the negative results of experimentation was the hallmark of rigorous science, and since metaphysical hypotheses failed to subject themselves to the risk of falsification,Footnote 7 they could not be considered science. Whitehead, however, never attempted any such sharp separation between science and metaphysics. In fact, for Whitehead the theoretical constructions of science and metaphysics form a continuum. We begin with observation of data. As we generalize from our experience in any attempt to gain explanatory power, we increase in abstraction. Whitehead's view is therefore closer to Quine's who argued that one could not separate the empirical from the theoretical in his holism and underdetermination of theory.
In an arresting essay entitled ‘Karl Popper on Whitehead’, Charles Hartshorne has argued deftly for the view that, with the lone exception of Whitehead's failure to consider adequately the Kantian antinomies, none of Popper's principal complaints against Whitehead hold water on critical examination. While Whitehead, like Hegel, is indeed engaged in systematic metaphysics, he never once cites Hegel either directly or indirectly although Whitehead had a strong penchant for citing historical influences. As Hartshorne reports: ‘Whitehead had almost entirely refrained from reading [Hegel's] writings and didn't care for what little he read” (1983: 307). More important, Whitehead's metaphysics is diametrically opposed to Hegel's central doctrines of necessitarianism and the unity of opposites. Whitehead's units of becoming or actual occasions indeed have past occasions as their causal grounds; yet, each occasion arrives at its exact predicative definition (a ‘satisfaction’ of the process) in such way that always involves some novel reaction to the past occasions it receives or prehends. For Whitehead, the aspect of novelty in every becoming is never exhaustively explained by the past, whereas Hegel's notion of becoming is rigorously deterministic.
Despite Popper's failures of interpretation, it is interesting and ironic to notice his arrival at positions that are core doctrines of Whitehead's metaphysics: Popper's affirmation of physical realism, his rejection of classical determinism and concomitant affirmation of the openness of the future, and most importantly his affirmation of the reality of time against contemporary defenses of eternalist accounts of relativity and entropy. Popper, like Peirce and Whitehead, affirmed a realistic theory of evolutionary process. Despite the lack of ‘egocentric particular’ expressions such as ‘I’ and ‘now’ in theoretical physics, nothing follows from this for the ontology of Popper's World 1 of physical entities. In effect, expressions in normal descriptive science such as ‘billions of years before the emergence of mammals’ or ‘this mountain range was formed over millions of years of time’ are perfectly legitimate and indeed cannot be ‘expunged’ from usage despite the lack of egocentric temporal references in theoretical physics whose purposes are expressly abstract and temporally indifferent. Attempts at expunging the use of temporal concepts in an ontologically realistic way fail for Popper for a number of reasons, among them the following: (1) physical processes really do have a time direction over and above any anisotropy, and (2) even if physical processes were completely reversible in principle—contrary to the ‘arrow of time’ as purportedly anchored in the actual world's entropy of physical process—time would not be shown in that case to be ‘reversible’ and thus to have no intrinsic direction. To say otherwise is a morass of confusion: Let S be a physical system containing a physical process P occurring at a time t. Let P be reversed at a subsequent time t*. This means that P returns to its state at time t, not that time has returned from t* to t. Any thought experiment that would posit event reversibility would in fact logically presuppose the directionality of time in its intelligible description (1977: 1140–42).
4. Analytic Panexperientialism
The theory that Whitehead advanced in Process and Reality is a version of panpsychism. The basic units of his ontology, the actual occasions, are essentially sentient although in various degrees depending on whether they comprise mineral, vegetable, or animal bodies, and ultimately, human consciousness. This view has been regarded as absurd by a majority of analytical philosophers in spite of the fact that it has a considerable following in the history of philosophy. But times have changed and so has the so-called ‘tough-minded’ rejection of this metaphysical hypothesis in the twenty-first century. Analytic philosophy is neither monolithic nor immutable. Its practitioners hold a very wide range of philosophical opinions, and no particular material doctrine or doctrines defines it, even if there are views that predominate for periods of time. Among philosophers who are ordinarily regarded as analytical in methodological orientation, one notable recent trend is the critical assault on reductionist materialist ontology and a concomitant willingness at least to take seriously, and in some cases to endorse, a panexperientialist or ‘panpsychist’ ontology. Whitehead's philosophy is not only relevant to these developments but may well offer a particular version of panexperientialism that strengthens the case for it. In this section, we illustrate this trend and discuss its relevance to Whitehead's philosophy by examining the work of analytic philosophers who have focused on the philosophy of mind and the mind-body problem. For reasons of economy we select three important contemporary analytic thinkers and their relation to panpsychist-type ontologies, but we observe that a more comprehensive survey of this trend would ideally include the work of Timothy Sprigge, Ralph Pred, Godehard Bruentrup, Gregg Rosenberg, and William Seager, among others (see Sprigge Reference Sprigge and McHenry2011; Pred Reference Pred2005; Bruentrup Reference Bruentrup and Honnefelder2009; Rosenberg Reference Rosenberg2004 and 2010; and Seager Reference Seager1995).
4.1 Strawson
The publication of Galen Strawson's provocative and influential paper ‘Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism” in Consciousness and Its Place in Nature (2006) was something of a watershed event in recent analytic philosophy of mind. The paper is important for Whiteheadians because it develops a version of what might be called the ‘Non-Emergence Argument’, a central consideration in Whitehead's attack on the bifurcation of nature that permeates the modern reductionist-materialist ‘scientific’ worldview. Indeed, since Whitehead's view is properly described as both a physicalist and panexperientialist perspective, Strawson's argument is especially congenial. For, if Strawson is correct, anyone committed to physicalism should likewise embrace some form of panpsychism.
The default position in analytic philosophy of mind, perhaps most famously represented by John Searle, is that mind emerges in the history of evolution at the juncture of the emergence of the biosphere (hence, Searle's preferred label for his position as ‘biological naturalism’,1984: ch. 4). Reality is thus to be divided into a subset of entities that possess mind (e.g., humans and other animals) and a large subset of natural entities in which there is zero mind (e.g., atomic particles, carbon, and other molecules) and from which mental entities somehow emerge. Strawson points out that this latter notion is sheer dogmatic presumption. ‘There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever’ (2006: 20) for the idea that there are any entirely nonmental entities in nature; this is just presumed to be so. Indeed, the apparent reactions of atomic entities to different physical environments given in bonding and half-life radiation would if anything at least suggest some form of rudimentary mentality at the atomic level.
Not only is there no evidence for the assumption of a purely nonmental domain of nature, but the assumption of physicalism itself, when properly analyzed, logically implies some form of panpsychism. The essential argument for this implication could be summarized as follows: First, if physicalism is presumed, reality is unified and is ultimately one. Second, mentality is real; there surely exist moments of conscious experience (as in reading this sentence). Thus, the mental is in fact part of the one reality. Yet, given that reality is one and is physical, then mentality, when properly understood, must also be physical. Third, what we might call a ‘brute emergence’ is impossible, for no mental or experiential entities can arise from conditions of absolutely zero mind. Such an occurrence would be miraculous ‘every time it occurs’ and as such is rationally inconceivable (2006: 18).Therefore, the one reality is not only physical but necessarily must be mental or experiential. In effect, nature cannot be ‘bifurcated’ into sharply separate ontological domains of the mental and nonmental. There must be experientiality at the bottom of things. Strawson is thus insisting that, if we take physicalism seriously, if we are, in his terminology, ‘real physicalists’—i.e., physicalists who fully acknowledge the reality of experience—then we must embrace all of its implications even when these implications run against the grain of what has largely been taken for granted. As Strawson says in summary, ‘something akin to panpsychism is not merely one possible form of realistic physicalism, but the only possible form, and hence, the only possible form of physicalism tout court’ (2006: 9).
Strawson vigorously defends his rejection of the putative emergence of mind from zero mind:
Does this conception of emergence make sense? I think that it is very, very hard to understand what it is supposed to involve. I think that it is incoherent, in fact, and that this general way of talking of emergence has acquired an air of plausibility. . . for some simply because it has been appealed to many times in the face of a seeming mystery. (2006: 12)
Strawson thus rejects arguments from analogy with physical property emergence such as presented in Searle's famous example of liquidity as a property that emerges from visible ensembles of water molecules, each of which does not have the property of liquidity. The problem here, argues Strawson, is that we cannot understand how such an analogy even applies in the case of the purported ‘emergence’ of consciousness, where both physical and mental concepts are involved, and when the liquidity example trades only in homogenous physical concepts. As such, the notion of a transition from the ‘merely’ physical to consciousness is inherently unintelligible.
Whitehead would quite agree with this line of argumentation although there are some differences between his view and Strawson's (notice that Strawson leaves room for variation as he says explicitly that ‘something akin to panpsychism’ is the only viable form of realistic physicalism). Whitehead never used the term ‘panpsychism’, i.e., all is mind, to describe his philosophy of organism, but he did hold the view that there is nothing apart from the experience of subjects ([1929] 1978: 18, 167). In other words, if not for the experience of subjects, other kinds of entity like aggregates or possibilities (‘societies’ and ‘eternal objects’ in his terminology) would not exist since they depend on the basic class of entity, the actual occasions. The most important point to grasp about Whitehead's view is that ordinary meanings get radical new meanings in process philosophy. So, for example, in his metaphysical generalization ‘mental’ means the ability of the occasion to introduce novelty into the temporal process whereas ‘physical’ means that the occasion simply repeats the patterns of the past constituting what we perceive as inert matter. Whitehead's term for how the data of the past are creatively transformed in the present is ‘prehension’. Each actual occasion has both a ’physical’ and a ‘mental’ component. As Whitehead explains, there is a physical pole constituted by the actual occasion's prehension of data contributed by the immediately past and a mental pole that introduces novelty into the temporal process if sufficiently sophisticated. But Whitehead also holds that there are two fundamentally different types of organizations of actual occasions: organizations into mere aggregates (e.g., slabs of concrete or shards of chalk or glass bottles, etc.) and organizations into ‘personally ordered societies’ where actual occasions feed data into a dominant or ‘regnant’ occasion. In this manner, Whitehead embraces Leibniz's ‘clearheaded’ distinction between aggregates and unit occasions, and this allows him to accommodate our common sense assumptions that ‘rocks are not sentient’ while ‘horses are sentient’. At the same time, rocks are aggregated by atomic actual occasions that do have some low-grade sentience or openness to information in their environments. As such, these atomic occasions are the physical receptacles via prehensions of causal influences from the environment (consequently explaining why, for example, under certain extreme thermodynamic conditions rocks may well melt).Thus, Strawson's principle of the unity of the physical inherent in realistic physicalism is still preserved on Whitehead's model. This aggregate/active singular distinction is an all-important one, since the most widely held objection to panpsychism is that it is committed by definition to the ‘scientifically and metaphysically outrageous’ notion that ‘rocks actually have thoughts’ (McGinn Reference McGinn1982: 51). As Strawson makes the point: ‘Panpsychism certainly does not require one to hold the view that things like stones and tables are subjects of experience—this receives no support from the current line of thought’ (2006: 26).
4.2 Chalmers
David Chalmers's treatise The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996) is a large-scale examination of alternatives in analytic philosophy of mind that, although ultimately opting for what he calls ‘naturalistic dualism’, gives serious consideration to a speculative theory that he calls ‘panpsychism’ —a theory that is free from any obvious fatal objections and is ontologically parsimonious (1996: 303–305). Chalmers has gained some celebrity for labeling the question ‘how can physical properties alone give rise to conscious qualia?’ as the truly ‘hard problem of consciousness’. He argues that this problem is not answerable in terms of the standard materialist and dualist accounts. Consciousness is an ‘irreducible’ reality that requires a radically different approach from what the current paradigms provide. What best resolves the issues is a dual-aspect physicalist theory that is intrinsically bound up with the psychological concept of information as implied by contemporary information-theoretic physics. In effect, he argues that, fundamentally, the mind-body relation requires both physical elements and phenomenal-informational elements in a way in which ‘one is constitutive of the other’ (1996: 304–305). Chalmers holds that information is present wherever and whenever causation occurs. Such a dual-aspect theory unified through a physics of information gives us, Chalmers says, ‘a cheap and elegant ontology, and solves two problems in a single blow [the problem of physical grounding and the problem of accommodating irreducible phenomenological properties]’ (1996: 305). This is rather close to Whiteheadian theory, since Whitehead distinguishes but does not ontologically separate physical and mental poles of the fundamental constituents of conscious experience; that is to say, for Whitehead, every actual occasion occurs in such a way that there is a togetherness of physical and mental components. Moreover, Whitehead concurs in principle with the notion that information is transferred by virtue of causation since the characteristics of (at least) proximate satisfied actual occasions are positively prehended by actual occasions.
Chalmers, however, is driven to take seriously a more radical form of panexperientialism, namely, panpsychism in the traditional form advocated by some German philosophers (e.g., Lotze, Paulsen, Fechner)—that is to say, the view that experience is literally ubiquitous because information is ubiquitous. Thus, Chalmers experiments with the notion that thermostats have experiences, and he attempts to understand ‘what it might be like to be a thermostat’ (1996: 293–97). He attempts to get at analogies with our own experience and the sort he projects thermostats to have: perhaps our experience of white, black, and gray is weakly analogous to the thermostat's experience of the information-states hot, cold, and neutral, although he admits that visual spectra are far richer and more complicated than any states of thermostats we could conceive. Whiteheadians do not accept panpsychist theories that make experience literally ubiquitous. Here again we come back to the importance of Whitehead's aggregate/active singular distinction. As a macroscopic object, a thermostat no more itself has experiences than an automobile taken as macroscopic object has experiences because a thermostat like an automobile is an aggregate of atomic entities designed so that its parts—also aggregates of atoms—will function in particular ways. On the Whiteheadian analysis, a thermostat has no ‘center for a unified spontaneous reaction’, no organization into a dominant or regnant occasion, that could have thermostat experiences. There are only thermostat aggregate parts that are in fact not the ultimate mechanisms of causal agency and thus are not the sources of information transfer. Rather, the information transfer occurs at the microlevel occasions of the thermostat (and as such they are the ground of any apparent aggregate ‘causation’). Through these important distinctions between dominant and microlevel occasions and between aggregated active singulars and active singulars, Whiteheadians get rid of what Chalmers himself admits is the prima facie ‘outrageous’ notion that any macroscopic object can itself possess mentality. We see no reason to stop with thermostats on Chalmers's criterion of ‘information ubiquity.’ Why not scissors or staple guns or cheese graters? Any macroscopic object that encodes the information built into a design function would be describable as ‘loosely having experiences’ on Chalmers's panpsychist view. This does seem to us to be absurd.
Interestingly enough from the Whiteheadian perspective, however, Chalmers almost gets to the proper ‘aggregate/active singular’ distinction when he makes the following qualification of his position:
[I] would not quite say that a rock has experiences, or that it is conscious, in the way that I might loosely say that a thermostat has experiences. . . . [A rock] is not picked out as an information-processing system, so the connection to experience is less direct. It may be better to say that a rock contains systems that are conscious [Whitehead would say ‘sentient’]. (1996: 297)
Whiteheadians agree in broad principle with the ontological analysis of rocks as entities that are not themselves (as aggregated macroscopic objects) information-processing systems yet contain entities with psychological properties, namely, their constituent atomic occasions. Of course, the difference here is that Whiteheadians would generalize Chalmers's qualification so that it applies to all nonorganic aggregates, not merely rocks or mechanical objects such as thermostats.
Nevertheless, Chalmers's work is salutary for Whiteheadians as it represents an example of a thoroughgoing analytic critique of the standard materialist and dualist options that envisions the need for a radically new conceptual shift calling for a much larger place for mind in nature. At the same time, from a process perspective, it is rather disappointing that Whitehead's or Hartshorne's name does not occur even once on Chalmers's 414 pages, despite the commonality of at least the very broad directions of their thought as dual-aspect physicalist theories. In particular, might reading Whitehead have helped Chalmers clarify limitations on the notion of information transfer? Moreover, while we do think that Chalmers is correct to regard the problem of qualia as a massive difficulty for materialist physicalism, we are nonetheless sympathetic to Michael Katzko's assessment that Chalmers's distinction between ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems of consciousness is problematic as it falters on a too simplistic equation of the domain of consciousness with the experience of qualia (2010: 211–12). Consciousness cannot be simply bifurcated into the tired Lockean categories of primary and secondary qualities. Whitehead's phenomenology of consciousness is indeed far richer with its inclusion of such features as temporality, continuance, novelty, intensity, functionality, and other factors that are not reducible to the mere experience of sense qualia.
4.3 Nagel
Thomas Nagel has voiced serious concerns over materialist reductionism and has wondered out loud, as it were, if some form of ‘panpsychism’ might not be a better solution to the mind-body problem than other alternatives (1986). His classic essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ (1974) was a landmark paper in analytic philosophy that challenged the notion that the materialist physicalist's purely external or ‘third-person’ perspective on our mental life could ever be an adequate approach. Nagel suggested that such an external perspective leaves out an essential reality of mental life—the subjectivity, the ‘inside’, the ‘what it is like to be in a mental state’. Moreover, he has forcefully pressed the argument that it is quite literally impossible to derive the subjective from the completely objective, the pour soi condition of mental states from the utterly en soicondition of material states. This is a fundamental difficulty with both materialist and dualist accounts. By contrast, he suggests, a panpsychist theory that posits a degree of subjectivity or pour soi openness in microphysical constituents of neural systems that could bridge the logical gap between pour soi and en soi. A successful panpsychist theory would thus possess impressive ontological parsimony and continuity. As David Griffin has pointed out, Nagel has helpfully called for recognition of both objective and subjective points of view and for recognition of the fact that an objective perspective on mind cannot abandon the generalization of the notion of a point of view (Griffin Reference Griffin1998: 151). Such generalization, however, requires our thinking in terms of ‘certain general features of subjective experience—subjective universals’ (Nagel Reference Nagel1986: 21). Whitehead's philosophy of organism might well be viewed as a global project that is deeply engaged in Nagel's suggested search for such subjective universals.
More recently, in his 2008 treatise Mind and Cosmos bearing the contentious subtitle Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian View of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Nagel argues that a purely materialist ontology cannot be the basis for a coherent account of both the emergence of consciousness and the emergence of objective value. In addition to this negative result, he speculates about two theories that are at least plausible candidates for replacing materialism and reductive narrow Darwinism (the view that natural selection and chance alone are sufficient for explaining the biosphere), namely, some form of dual aspect theory—a physicalist theory that is at once a form of panpsychism—and what he calls the ‘teleological hypothesis’, the notion that mind is somehow operative at a cosmic level and is responsible for an upward trajectory of evolutionary process toward greater complexity of organization and toward the production of value. With regard to the dual aspect theory, Nagel explicitly connects this perspective with Galen Strawson's recent work and also makes specific positive reference to both Whitehead and Hartshorne. He argues that the emergentist view of consciousness falters for the precise reason articulated by Strawson, that is to say, the emergentist analogy with physical property emergence as in the classic case of liquidity is wholly unlike the emergence of consciousness that involves ‘something completely new’ (Nagel Reference Nagel2008: 56). However, in the absence of a viable emergentist view, the ideal of intelligibility drives us to take seriously a monistic perspective that is reductive in the sense of involving fundamental entities that are both physical and nonphysical. As Nagel puts it in a way that nicely captures the gist of Strawson's reasoning:
But since conscious organisms are not composed of a special kind of stuff, but can be constructed, apparently, from any of the matter in the universe, suitably arranged, it follows that this monism will be universal. Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and non-physical—that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental. (2008: 57, our emphasis)
Here, Nagel cites Strawson's argument, but also refers to Hartshorne's classic Reference Hartshorne, Cobb and Griffin1977 paper on ‘Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature’, which Nagel describes as ‘acute and historically informed’. He then acknowledges Whitehead's philosophy of organism as fitting this monistic perspective and mentions specifically Whitehead's argument that when the abstractions of physics are taken to represent the whole of reality, we commit the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Concrete entities down to the level of electrons should always be understood as involving a ‘standpoint on the world’ (Nagel Reference Nagel2008: 57–58, n. 16). Additionally, the directionality that is part and parcel of Nagel's proposed teleological hypothesis is also congenial to a Whiteheadian perspective. This is so because Whitehead held that the thrust of evolution toward greater experiential complexity and the increasing capacity for the realization of value runs contrary to the entropic drag of physical systems that move from order to disorder; this development requires something other than chance occurrences and pressures of natural selection in order to be adequately explained. While Nagel here somewhat vaguely suggests a role for what he calls an Aristotelian notion of mind operative at the cosmic level, Whitehead is more forthright in attributing this anti-entropic directionality to the activity of deity.
Given Nagel's advocacy of time and evolutionary process, his critique of materialism and physicalist reductionism, his advocacy of the subjective as well as objective perspectives, and his serious consideration of panpsychism, Dan Dombrowski has been moved to ask the question, ‘Is Thomas Nagel a process philosopher?’ (1994). While perhaps he is in a broad sense (or perhaps he might be better regarded as a ‘para-traveler’ with the process tradition), this interpretation must be qualified by the fact Nagel does not, in the end, advocate a panexperientialist theory. In his work prior to Mind and Cosmos, he settles instead for a view similar to Colin McGinn's ‘mysterian’ naturalism (1982): there must be a naturalist solution, but we are ultimately stumped as to what it could be since all available options have some serious flaw. Despite his attraction to panexperientialism, Nagel worries that speaking of sentience or life ‘too far down the phylogenetic tree’ may cause us to wonder if panpsychists are not stretching the concept of mind too far for intelligibility. On the other hand, in his more recent work, he seems to be less reticent about a panpsychist type of alternative like that of Strawson because of the monistic pressure from the ‘ideal of intelligibility’; yet, he nonetheless considers both of his positive proposals (monistic reduction and teleology) as still too speculative and open-ended to inspire profound confidence. More confidence can be placed in the critique of the materialist and narrow Darwinian perspectives than in their replacements.
5. Whitehead and Early Cambridge Analysis
It is important that we add the following historical observation. In addition to the fact that, as we have attempted to illustrate above, a number of important analytic philosophers have themselves arrived independently at some central Whiteheadian doctrines, there is the following view promulgated in some recent historiography of early twentieth-century philosophy. Although this is largely forgotten, as noted above in connection with Russell, Whitehead was in fact an important influence on and full participant in the emergence of early Cambridge analytic philosophy. Historically, Whitehead was intimately connected to two defining features of Cambridge analysis: (1) the business of philosophy is the articulation of the proper analysis of propositions and concepts, including formal logical analysis as exemplified by the Principia, and (2) philosophy is the critique of presuppositions that are inconsistent with deep commonsense propositions that we know to be true in practice; this is in effect the core doctrine of G. E. Moore's classic and influential ‘A Defense of Common Sense’ (1925). These points of connection are argued for with particular effectiveness by Bogdan Rusu and Ronny Desmet in their essay with the telling title, ‘Whitehead, Russell, and Moore: Three Analytic Philosophers’ (2012). As Rusu and Desmet assert summarily:
The Cambridge analysts were philosophic descendants of Moore and Russell. We believe something similar can be said of Whitehead: the way Whitehead entered the philosophic scene is the way both Russell and Moore considered fundamental for the identity of the new philosophy, that is, the analytic way as exemplified in Russell's ‘On Denoting’ and Moore's ‘A Defense of Common Sense’. In fact, in the early days of analytic philosophy Russell conceived of Whitehead as an ally. . . Russell repeatedly acknowledged Whitehead as an inspiring practitioner of analytic method. (2012: 218)
Moreover, as has been emphasized in the work of Isabelle Stengers (Reference Stengers2011: 9–12) and David Griffin (Reference Griffin2001: 29–35; Reference Griffin1998: 15–21), Whitehead's metaphysical enterprise can be largely understood as a persistent effort at doing justice to the ‘hard-core’ or deep commonsense propositions we all presuppose universally in practice, such as the reality of causal influence, the existence of an external world of many entities, or the fact that at least sometimes we make decisions freely, that is, decisions not wholly determined by the past (as embodied in the introspective sense of ultimate control over certain voluntary bodily movements). As Stengers puts it pointedly, what gave birth to Whitehead the speculative philosopher was nothing other than the motivation ‘to learn to resist the power of theories that silence common sense’ (2011: 9).This motivation could be just as readily attributed to G. E. Moore's epoch-making efforts in his 1903 ‘The Refutation of Idealism’, which historians often regard as the inauguration of recognizably analytic philosophy and the earliest representation of Cambridge analysis (see Weitz Reference Weitz and Edwards1967; Urmson Reference Urmson1967).Thus, Whitehead, when taken in his chief roles as both master logician and ardent defender of deep common sense, was very much the essence of the early Cambridge analyst movement. The separation of Whitehead from the analytic tradition within the second-order discourse of analytic philosophers comes decades later when it became clear that Whitehead's metaphysical doctrines stood in opposition to the then prevailing logical atomism of Russell and the Tractarian Wittgenstein as well as the doctrines of logical positivists that have since been dismissed. Whitehead fully retained the methodological spirit of Cambridge analysis while arriving at positions diametrically opposed to the material doctrines prevailing in the analytic and positivistic ambiance of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet, if anything has been made clear from recent debates on the nature of analytic philosophy, such philosophy cannot be meaningfully identified with any particular set of material doctrines, not only because of widely divergent opinions on matters of doctrine but also because, if any particular doctrines are pressed as definitive, it has the consequence of absurdly jettisoning one or another of the paradigm-case analytic philosophers from the fold, including Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein at different junctures in their careers (Glock Reference Glock1996). Participation in the analytic tradition is to be judged instead by methodological orientations and by a concomitant intense concern with rigor and rational justification.
For the latter reason, Peter Simons has insisted that Whitehead should be counted as part of the analytic tradition broadly conceived. In a review essay, he asserts unequivocally:
I agree wholeheartedly. . . that Whitehead isan analytic philosopher. The opposition between analytic and process philosophy is an historical artifact, due to accidents of the time. Analytic philosophy is now a broad church and has been for decades. Whitehead is anything but a positivist, but he is scientific. He is anything but a linguistic philosopher, but he cares passionately about logic and language. He is anything but a mere analyzer of concepts, but he values exactness of concepts and their applications. He is in the same grand scientific metaphysical tradition as Russell and Quine, but he has a mind of his own. (2003: 666)
6. Conclusion
Of the merits of the analytical critiques of Whitehead's metaphysics, we are inclined to agree with Quinton, Stebbing, Russell, Quine, and others that his metaphysics is obscure even to those who have devoted much of their professional work to matters within its general framework.Footnote 8 Whitehead is unnecessarily obscure, as charged by analytical philosophers, but there is little merit in the other criticisms of his philosophy from those who have failed to read him carefully. Stebbing's second alternative mentioned above is closer to the truth: Whitehead's system was far too profound in its thought to be judged by his own generation. In our view, his obfuscating terminology needs to be translated into the language of common scientific or philosophical discourse, as we have attempted to do in this essay. The challenge therefore is to engage the analytic tradition rather than to isolate Whiteheadian scholarship among the faithful. But analytical philosophy, in our view, is guilty of insularity and refutation by neglect. It could benefit from sources outside the tradition so that when novel ideas are introduced to break the stale repetition of thought patterns among its devotees, they are recognized as having a history.
