Reprinted from THOUGHT
Fordham University Quarterly
Vol. XLVIII, No. 188, Spring 1973
The
agent model of the human
self
does more than the process
model
to sustain adequately the
notion
of God as a relating,
acting,
personal other.
PROCESS OR AGENT:
MODELS FOR
SELF AND
GOD
FRANK G. KIRKPATRICK
The
intention of the following essay is threefold. Under the topic of developing a
model for God on the basis of self‑models, I wish to discuss a difficulty
that I encounter in the process or organic model of the self; to develop in
outline an alternative model of the self based on a different root‑metaphor;
and to indicate the relevant implications of these alternative self‑models
for concepts of God. A crucial assumption of the essay is that our notion of
God is built up on the basis of our understanding of ourselves. Anthropology is
the origin of theology.
The above assumption will not be argued
in the essay. However, it would not be far off the mark to state that one of
the factors in the increasingly favorable response to process thought in
theological circles is its grounding in "natural theology." Although
the possibility of deriving our knowledge of God from some form of divinely
initiated revelation has not yet been ruled out by process theologians, at the
very least such revelatory knowledge (if it should occur) cannot be
discontinuous with knowledge derived from the natural world, and most
particularly, from ourselves. Process thought
34 THOUGHT
appeals
to us1 in the present because it is committed to doing justice to
two things we no longer feel can be violated by religious knowledge. The first
is the necessity of taking seriously the empirical limits of our knowledge.2
We are slowly coming to recognize that appeal to an "otherworldly,"
ontologically transcendent, supra‑empirical realm simply will not do if
we wish to validate our religious assertions. We are recognizing the logical
implications of the commitment to human experience as the locus and boundary
of human knowledge. One of the most important of these implications is that, as
Whitehead himself puts it, "God is not to be treated as an exception to
all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their
exemplification."3 Our knowledge of God must be harmonious with
our knowledge of the rest of our empirical experience. As process thought
itself claims, however, God's majesty, power, and sovereignty need not
necessarily be impugned by bringing our knowledge of him back from an ontologically
transcendent dimension.
Another logical implication of commitment to experience
as the basis of our knowledge is that since the object of our knowledge is
known as situated within the same universe of discourse as ourselves, our
relation to that object is made intelligible. We can only relate to that which
can be experienced. As long as God remains outside the boundaries of
experience, personal relationship with him is rendered ineluctably mysterious,
demanding a paradoxical leap of faith to be understood. Such a leap, while
psychologically satisfying perhaps, raises a nest of logical problems which can
no longer be dismissed by a wave of the hand of faith.
The concern for the rational problems involved in
religious knowledge is the second thing to which process thought is committed.
Just as "empiricism" has broadened to include all the dimensions of
human experience, so rationality has moved beyond the piecemeal
__________________________
1
That is, me. It is, of course, presumptuous to speak in the imperial plural
here but its use gives me a psychological security which the use of the naked
"I" cannot.
2
"Empirical" is no longer restricted to sense experience and hence
overcomes the unnecessary strictures put upon empirical knowledge by the early
positivists and linguistic analysis.
3
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New
York: The Free Press, 1969), p. 405. Note: the pagination in this edition differs
from that of the 1929 edition. Hereafter this work will be referred to simply
as PAR.
PROCESS OR AGENT 35
testing
of isolated "nonmetaphysical" propositions. Process thought has
clearly seen that if our knowledge is rooted in human experience then it must
reflect the comprehensiveness and unity of that experience. The only form of
rational thought which can do justice to experience in its completeness is
metaphysical thought. We are, thus, in a renaissance of philosophy in the grand
style and much, if not all, of the credit for this should go to Alfred North
Whitehead.
Given this commitment to the search for a metaphysical
expression of human experience, it is only natural that the principles of our
God‑knowledge be themselves rational. Logical conundrums, contradictions,
paradoxes, fallacies, and the like are no longer acceptable as signs that we
are on the right trail to the knowledge of God. We are beginning to see that
the mystery of God may not be dependent upon or lead to rational mystery. We
are less willing today to bring to our knowledge of God a preconceived set of
assumptions regarding his ontological transcendence and are more willing to be
led to that concept from a prior knowledge of ourselves and the world around
us. If this means that our notion of God may entail conceiving him as limited
in some respects, then so be it. Charles Hartshorne has noted,
If
we are to discuss the religious question rationally, we must be willing to
explore impartially the alternative ways of relating the object of worship to
philosophical concepts . . . if and where necessary, redefining or qualifying
these conceptions to remove any contradictions they would otherwise involve.4
Our
knowledge of God must no longer be bent and twisted to fit a prior conception
but rather our conception must blend harmoniously into the unified knowledge we
have of the universe as a whole. We are discovering, in effect, that God's
mystery, his power, and his significance may well be located in areas other
than those in which we have traditionally found them. Consequently, our
knowledge of these dimensions of the divine being must be revised and
reformulated.
If
the above assessment fairly reflects some of the concerns of process thought
then I am at one with it. I have no difficulty endorsing its commitment to
rationality and the empirical temper as
________________________
4
Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1948), p. 2.
36 THOUGHT
these
arise out of and refer back to human experience. The following critical
comments on process thought are not attempts to return us to the traditional
way of doing theology. Rather they are attempts to call attention to some
difficulties in this particular empirical metaphysic and to suggest an
alternative empirical metaphysic which, I believe, can do more justice to
certain aspects of human experience and, consequently, to certain aspects of a
notion of God as a personal Other capable of relating to human persons and
acting in specific ways in their history. My argument, in effect, will be that
process thought is completely adequate as far as it goes but it does not
completely satisfy the criterion of adequacy to experience. As a result, it
cannot do full justice to the particular view of God which its adherents assume
as desirable. That is, the notion of God as a personal Other (a subject) who
relates and acts is not adequately sustained by the model of the human self
entailed by process thought. An alternative model of the self, the self‑as-agent,
can, I will argue, do more justice to this notion of God than can the model of
process thought, even though both models, at a certain level of abstraction,
are compatible with each other. There will be no attempt to argue the existence
of this particular God and the force of the following argument will depend not
only upon its logic but also upon whether this particular notion of God is
"desired."5
The major difficulty that I find in process thought, as
exemplified most adequately by Alfred North Whitehead, arises out of its notion
of the self. Essentially, I feel that Whitehead's notion of the self is unable to
account adequately for my immediate experience of myself as a relatively
abiding entity who acts and who is not simply the sum of its acts. The
underlying unity of the self is dan-
________________________
5
By "desired" I do not, of course, mean that we desire a certain
notion of God and thereby justify that notion. I merely mean that one of the
appeals of process thought is that it can do justice to the more or less
traditional Christian (or biblical) view of God as a personal agent. If the
logic of process thought is unable to do full justice to this notion of God (as
I will argue) then the appeal of process thought for Christian apologetics is
diminished. This, of course, says nothing about the truth or falsity of this
particular view of God. That problem can be resolved only within the context of
experience and rational reflection.
PROCESS
OR AGENT 37
gerously
compromised in process thought. Insofar as the model of God is built on the
model of the self, it follows that the unity of God is threatened. My appeal
from the process model is to the very same reality Whitehead appeals to: human
experience. In raising this difficulty in process thought I intend to take with
utmost seriousness Christian's question to all critics of Whitehead: Is his
theory of the actual occasion
…
capable of interpreting all the kinds of real things we encounter in
experience? Does it do justice to all the facts . . . is it strong enough to do
justice to our own existence as conscious persons? Do we have more unity and
continuity of experience than Whitehead's categories allow?
.
. . Is there a kind of self‑transcendence within immediate experience as
well as self‑transcendence by way of objective immortality . . . Are we
individuals in a way which his theory does not enable us to express clearly and
adequately?6
In
establishing an alternative to the process model of the self, I will attempt to
give reasons far a positive answer to the last question.
It is, of course, no news to Whiteheadian interpreters
that there is some difficulty with his notion of the self. Whitehead himself
quite clearly intended to bring into question long‑held Western views of
the "substantial" self and insofar as these views are ingrained in us
we will find difficulty with Whitehead's alternative. The question is not
whether Whitehead offers a startling new view of the self but whether this
profoundly radical view is adequate.
The radical
revision of our language about the self away from the subject‑predicate
form is ultimately rooted in what Whitehead calls the "one ultimate
generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system."7
That generalization, reminiscent of Heraclitus, is that "all things
flow." By means of what is perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying
correspondence between two lines of poetry and an entire metaphysics, Whitehead
attempts to expound the lines, "Abide with me; Fast falls the eventide."8 Whitehead sees
___________________
6
William A. Christian, An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 171‑2.
7
Whitehead, PAR, p. 240. 8
Ibid., p. 248.
38 THOUGHT
the
difficulties of Western philosophy centering in the first line which has given
rise to the troublesome notion of "substance." It is as a reaction to
exclusive emphasis on substance, permanence, abidingness, that Whitehead
pursues the implications of the second line, "Fast falls the
eventide." Although Whitehead believes the lines cannot be torn apart, he
eventually brings the first line into the second through the root‑metaphor
of process which, on his scheme, can include the "abidingness" of the
substance metaphysics.9
In order to do justice to the flowingness of reality, the
model of process or organism is chosen by Whitehead. The problem is to avoid
conflict with the view that reality is composed of isolated, individual
substances which bear no essential relation to each other. This problem can be
resolved, according to Whitehead, only by finding a philosophical model which
can conceptualize a unified relation for reality as a whole. Inasmuch as
reality is fundamentally intuited to be in constant change, the model of
unified relation is most appropriately one of a totality internally
constituted by a unity of becoming in which all the "elements" are
in relation to each other. The most appropriate such model is that of an
organism which is dynamic and yet internally composed of entities whose
existence is not code pendent of the organism as a whole. As Whitehead says:
"The community of actual things is an organism . . . an incompletion in
process of production."10 The "parts" of this
organism, the actual entities, are themselves organic processes. Each actual
entity
.
. . repeats in microcosm what the universe is in macrocosm. It is a process
proceeding from phase to phase, each phase being the real basis from which its
successor proceeds towards the completion of the thing in question . . . . Thus
each actual entity, although complete so far as concerns its microscopic
process, is yet incomplete by reason of its objective inclusion of the
macroscopic process.11
The world under this model can now be
completely described as a
. . . dynamic process .... The coherence,
which the system seeks to preserve,
is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of
any one actual entity
____________________
9 This can be done by recognizing two kinds of fluency:
that which is the concrescence or "the real internal constitution of a
particular existence"; and that which is the transition from one existent
to another via "perishing" (Whitehead, PAR, p. 242).
10 Whitehead,
PAR, pp. 247‑8.
11 Ibid., p. 248.
PROCESS OR AGENT 39
involves
the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious
solidarity of the world receives its explanation.12
One crucial assumption
which underlies this choice of a process model to describe reality is that the
relations which obviously exist among "things" in the world, that is,
the interrelationships, the dependencies, the changes, the becoming of the
world, cannot be accounted for on what Whitehead takes to be the only other
possible model for philosophy: the model of isolated substances.
In his discussion of Descartes in Process and Reality,
Whitehead develops the category of process as an alternative to the
Aristotelian-Cartesian category of substance. Having accepted Aristotle's
definition that a primary substance is “‘neither asserted of a subject nor
present in a subject’” and Descartes' definition of a substance as “‘an
existent thing which requires nothing but itself in order to exist,’” Whitehead
is forced to go beyond the substance model in order to fulfill the task he
feels is set for the philosophy of organism, namely, to make clear "the
notion of ‘being present in another entity.’"13
Without putting too much stress on this passage in Process
and Reality, it is clear that Whitehead feels that the category of
substance entails that no substance can ever be essentially related to any
other substance since, according to Descartes, it "requires nothing but
itself in order to exist." The fact of interrelationship among entities
becomes problematic on this model. As Whitehead puts it, "the relations
between individual substances constitute metaphysical nuisances: there is no
place for them."14 The notion of substance, as Whitehead
accepts it from traditional Western philosophy, requires acceptance of an
unchanging, unaffected, unrelated "I know not what" (in Locke's
words) underlying what does change, is affected, is related, and so on.
Substance as such does not change and hence is not in process. Its existence,
therefore, represents a fundamental incoherence at the base of reality and its
philosophical elaboration will reflect that incoherence. The notion of an
enduring substance can be useful at one level of abstraction "but whenever
we try to use it as a fundamental statement of the nature of things, it proves
itself mistaken."15 The notion of "an actual entity which
is characterized
______________
12
Ibid., pp. 9‑10. 13 Ibid., pp. 64‑5. 14 Ibid., p. 160. 15 Ibid., p. 96.
40 THOUGHT
by
essential qualities, and remains numerically one amidst the changes of
accidental relations and of accidental qualities" is in metaphysics
"sheer error."16
Whitehead clearly recognizes that this view of substance
has completely pervaded our logic and our language and thus even to talk
without tacitly assuming substance is virtually impossible. Whitehead's
alternative view of an actual entity (which is his transformation of the
concept of substance and which, in the plural, are the "final real things
of which the world is made up"17) is a most rigorous attempt to
speak of the world without presupposing the notion of substance. The result, I
will argue, is a view of the self which is partially deficient, even though it
retains the illusion of total adequacy, primarily because Whitehead cannot
completely get away from substance‑dominated language. Whitehead argues
that "the connectedness of things is nothing else than the togetherness of
things in occasions of experience";18 that such occasions of
experience are activities in process of completion; that there are no
underlying "substances" or "subjects" which process. It
becomes impossible, consequently, to speak of the same thing twice because
there is no "thing" which undergoes process; there is only the
process of undergoing. If Whitehead wishes to remain consistent in his radical
revision of language then he must feel the full force of his own statement:
"If we cannot speak of the same thing twice, knowledge vanishes taking
philosophy with it."19
"The actualities of the Universe are processes of
experience, each process an individual fact. The whole Universe is the
advancing assemblage of these processes."20 The only
"subject" which exists in process thought is the process itself. An
actual entity is not a subject in the traditional sense. It is "a process
in the course of which many operations with incomplete subjective unity
terminate in a completed unity of operation termed the ‘satisfaction.’ The
process is what the actual entity is in itself."21
_____________________
16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p.
23.
18
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press,
1967), p. 233.
19 Ibid., p. 224. See also PAR, p. 34: "no
subject experiences twice."
20 Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 197.
21 Whitehead, PAR, p. 257.
mate
principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the
one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively."22 If
I read Whitehead correctly here, the process which constitutes reality is the
process by which an aboriginal indetermination becomes determinate. For Whitehead,
the universe is the many; a "solidarity of many actual entities." The
many are continually entering into "complex unity" through creativity
which is the principle of novelty. The present actual entity grows out of this
world of the many: in fact, it is a particular coming‑to‑be of the
universe in this particular way at this particular time. There is not a subject
which antedates the process of concrescence; rather, the subject, or
"superject" is the outcome of the process of determination of the
many into this particular novel unity. The many which is the world
disjunctively in its initial phase for any actual entity is felt as
indeterminate for that entity. “The datum is indeterminate as regards the final
satisfaction. The ‘process’ is the addition of those elements of feeling
whereby these indeterminations are dissolved into determinate linkages
attaining the actual unity of an individual actual entity.”23 Prior
to the concrescence of feelings there is no subject. There are rather feelings
that inhere in the totality of things and which, by the process of
concrescence, progressively acquire the unity of subjects. These feelings are
public and it is out of these feelings that subjective privacy is obtained. The
subject is the particular determination of what is for it a prior indeterminate
feeling of the totality. Thus the subject is the outgrowth of the process of
determination and does not exist at its origin.24
Given Whitehead's principle that the subject‑predicate
form of language is misleading for the notion of process and its implication
that no subject undergoes process but is the result of process, the difficulty
of talking about a unified subject in his system is not surprising. Two
essential problems seem to arise on this view of the self. The first is that
the unity of the self is only achieved at the end of the process which produces
the self (the satisfaction) and the
22 Ibid., pp. 25‑6. 23 Ibid., p. 174.
24 For a helpful discussion of Whitehead at this point see
Richard T. Lee, "Whitehead's Theory of the Self," Ph.D. dissertation
(Yale University, June, 1962).
second
is that up to that moment of unity it becomes extremely problematic to talk of
the self doing anything since the self as a unity does not yet exist. The
result of these two difficulties is twofold. The self cannot relate to others
until it is dead and it cannot act on others until it is dead. As Whitehead
himself says: "All relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of
actualities; and such relatedness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of
the dead by the living .. . ."25
These problems centering
around the inadequacy of the concept of the self's unity are reflected in the
following representative passages by Whitehead.
In his discussion "From Descartes to Kant" in Process
and Reality, Whitehead reiterates the four stages which comprise an actual
entity: datum, process, satisfaction, decision. Given the datum, the becoming
of an actual entity is the "addition of those elements of feeling whereby
these indeterminations (of the datum for that entity) are dissolved into
determinate linkages attaining the actual unity of an individual actual
entity."26 Note that the actual entity does not itself bring
about the dissolving into determination. Rather, indeterminations are dissolved
in order to form an actual entity. The actual entity is not the agent in this
process. Whitehead clearly says that there is no subject guiding the process.
"The operations of an organism are directed towards the organism as a
‘superject’, and are not directed from the organism as a ‘subject’."27
His own statement is that the subject is not the agent in its own creation.
The philosophies of substance
presuppose a subject which then encounters a datum, and then reacts to the
datum. The philosophy of organism presupposes a datum which is met with
feelings, and progressively attains the unity of a subject. But with this
doctrine, ‘superject’ would be a better term than ‘subject.’28
Note that in this
passage the feelings themselves seem to be the agents which bring themselves
together (concrescence) to form a subject. In the following paragraph this view
is borne out by the
______________________
25 Whitehead, PAR, viii. Of course, the self and the
actual entity are not the same thing exactly, the self being a nexus of
entities. My argument depends for its force on the logical point that if the
notion of actual entity is inadequate to our experience of unity and
abidingness, no correlation or connection of such entities can "add
up" to unity.
26 Ibid., p. 174. 27
1bid., p. 175. 28 Ibid.,
p.179.
statement,
“‘process’ is the rush of feelings whereby second‑handedness attains
subjective immediacy."29
The tendency of language to refer to feelings as the
agents in process thought is given more detailed exemplification in Part III of
Process and Reality, "The Theory of Prehensions." A close look
at this section will reveal most clearly some of the difficulties regarding the
unity and agency of the self on the model of process. Whitehead quite clearly
asserts on page 259 that the feelings "precede" the feeler. "The
feelings are inseparable from the end at which they aim; and this end is the
feeler. The feelings aim at the feeler, as their final cause." And, on the
next page: "It is better to say that the feelings aim at their
subject, than to say that they are aimed at their subject."
Whitehead is clearly not happy with this language but it is the best he can do
given its dependency on subject (agent) - predicate form. In order to get at
what he wants to say, Whitehead has to settle for language which depicts the
feelings themselves as agents. A few pages later, reference to feeling as agent
becomes much more explicit and frequent. "A feeling is the appropriation
of some elements in the universe to be components in the real internal
constitution of its subject . . . . A feeling is the agency by which
other things are built into the constitution of its one subject in process of
concrescence."30 The difficulty here, of course, is that the
problem one runs into when using the language of a subject making decisions
about what it shall be (thus presupposing a substance view of the self) seems
to recur at another, but equally perplexing, point when talking of feelings as
if they were subjects or agents. It would be a violation of the principles of
process to reintroduce the notion of a subject which precedes or exists in some
sense beyond its decisions, but this seems to be a distinct possibility when
referring to feelings as agents.
The way by which
Whitehead attempts to resolve this problem is through the notion of subjective
aim. Ultimately, however, it seems to run into the same problem of lacking
coherence with respect
__________________
29 Ibid. 30
Ibid., p. 270.
44
THOUGHT
to a self which aims.
Whitehead clearly wants to assert that the actual entity plays a role in its
own determination since otherwise the freedom of the entity is ruled out. All
actual entities, he declares, have some measure of self‑causation. That
which allows for self-causation is what Whitehead calls the subjective aim,
which is the immanent ground of final causation. It is by means of this
subjective aim that the actual entity feels its data so as to achieve its final
satisfaction. Since, however, the "subject" is not yet in existence,
the aim cannot be the aim of a subject. Rather, it seems to be a feeling which
aims at the subject with a certain degree of subjective intensity. As Christian
puts it, this feeling
. . . functions as the
ontological ground or ‘reason’ for the harmony of feelings in incomplete phases
of concrescence. Since unity is a condition of intensity, the subjective aim is
an appetition for unity of satisfaction. It thus gives a dynamic, teleological
unity to the whole process which constitutes an actual occasion.31
Whitehead, of course, wants to argue that the subjective
aim does not come out of the #0180CB. Every actual entity is conditioned by all
past entities. But this conditioning is never fully determinative of the novel
entity. Creativity always allows for novelty, the development of that which is
not simply a reiteration of the past. Thus Whitehead wants to say that although
the "initial stage of its aim is an endowment which the subject inherits
from the inevitable ordering of things, conceptually realized in the nature of
God," nevertheless, "the immediacy of the concrescent subject is
constituted by its living aim at its own self‑constitution . . .
and its completion depends on the self‑causation of the subject‑superject."32
Following the conditioning of the past for the emergent actual entity, it (or
as Whitehead here calls it, "the subject") "is the autonomous
master of its own concrescence into subject‑superject . . . the actual
entity, in a state of process during which it is not fully definite, determines
its own ultimate definiteness."33 That is, the actual entity,
though its final end is given to it initially by the subjective aim, can modify
and specify more determinately its own concrescence. The subjective aim has
phases and undergoes development. Thus it seems that the
_______________
31 Christian, op. cit., p. 303.
32 Whitehead, PAR, p. 285.
33 Ibid., pp. 286, 297.
PROCESS OR AGENT 45
unity
of the actual entity has been restored by the principle that it helps to
determine what it shall be (which is all we ask of a unified subject). As Christian
puts it:
The
concrescent subject works out (or we might say elaborates) the meaning
of its own idea. It progressively decides what it would mean to realize that
ideal in its physical situation . . . . The actual occasion works out its own
(relative and incomplete) ordering of the multiplicity of eternal objects. In
doing so it is conditioned but not completely determined by the past actual
world, to which it must conform, and by God, who supplies the datum of its
initial aim. In the determination of a subjective aim the spontaneity of self
causation is involved . . . though an occasion depends on God in a crucial way
it still has the freedom of self‑causation. Over and above what God does,
something remains to be done which even God cannot do. God cannot enact or even
completely determine the occasion's valuation, specification, and actualization
of its initial aim. This remains to be done by, and only by, the actual
occasion itself. 34
There is no problem here
from the point of view of the concrescence itself being partially
"free" to bring about a novel entity. The problem resides once again
in our language of subject‑predicate, and takes two forms. First there is
the question of how a nonsubject or nonagent can provide the unity which
constitutes the subject (superject). Second there is the problem of the meaning
of freedom to modify an initial aim when the subject as such does not yet
exist. The first problem is stated by Christian himself
How can the subjective form of
the initial aim be conditioned by the subject when no prior unity of the
subject exists? Whitehead says that ‘self‑determination’ is always
imaginative in origin' (PAR 374). But the initial aim is the origin of
imagination. How can the subject affect the subjective form of that feeling
which is itself the basis of the unity of the subject?35
Christian here has put his
finger on the heart of the problem. Since the subject cannot exist until the
subjective form or aim helps to determine it, how can the subject in turn help
to modify the subjective aim? The problem is compounded by the necessity of
language to find a subject. In this case the initial aim becomes the subject
but on the principles of process it cannot really be treated as a subject,
__________________
34 Christian, op. cit., pp.
317, 319.
35 Ibid., p. 313. The
Whitehead quotation is from the 1929 edition of Process and Reality.
46 THOUGHT
in
the sense of determining things, deciding things, and so on, without returning
to the dilemmas of substance philosophy. As Richard Lee has pointed out, it
would be more appropriate here to say that there is an aiming or a deciding or
a determining without anything which aims or decides or determines. There are
only two entities, the deciding and what is decided. There is no room for a
decider.36 But if this is the case, and I think it is, then language
referring to the actual entity working out its own determination is at best
misleading. It is illegitimate to smuggle back into the description of an
actual entity the notion of subject at any point prior to satisfaction, at
which point, of course, the subject perishes and achieves objective
immortality. If there is no subject which decides among potentialities at the
very beginning of the process it is hard to see how a subject can arise in the
course of the process to help decide without violating the principles of
process. Christian cautions us at this point not to assume, of course, that the
initial aim is genetically prior to the other feelings. “A genetically earlier
phase is not temporally prior to a later phase in the concrescence. Considered
in reference to physical time we would have to say that though the concrescence
‘takes time’ it takes place ‘at once’.”37 But Christian admits that
the notion of priority which is different from both logical and temporal
priority requires an "appeal to our immediate intuitions."38
Even if this appeal is successful, we are still left with the problem of how to
conceive an aim without an aimer determining it but in turn being determined in
part by the emergent aimer. As long as there is no aimer or subject it is
impossible to talk of subjects choosing and deciding, even subjects which are
disguised as aims or feelings. The most we could say on this view is that there
is concrescing resulting eventually, but not temporally, in a particular
unified determination of feelings which previously were not unified in this
particular way. Short of that final unity, language referring to any kind of
subject or agent is erroneous on the principles of process. If subject
language is introduced it threatens the coherence of the process or organic
model. The second problem is
intimately connected with this one. If
____________________
36
Lee, op. cit., pp. 139‑42.
37
Christian, op. cit., p.
317.
38
Ibid., p. 314.
PROCESS OR AGENT 47
subject
language is inappropriate during the course of the process, then is it meaningful
to speak of a free choice among potentialities which will concresce to form a
subject? There is no quarrel with the notion that selection of feelings is
novel and thus is not entirely conditioned by the past. The question is whether
this novel concrescence is a choice among alternatives. Choice here would imply
a chooser but as we have seen for Whitehead there is only choosing. Without a
chooser, however, it becomes extremely problematic to talk of a weighing of
alternatives by someone. Thus there is no one who is free to choose. If this is
the case is there any logical difference between an arbitrary coming together
of feelings, a spontaneous "happening" of novelty, and a free,
considered decision among alternatives? That there is a novel determination is
accepted. But is novelty the same as free choice or free decision? How would
one tell whether a modification in the initial aim simply happened or was a
deliberate decision, freely arrived at? There is no subject to whom that
question can be referred. Again it seems that the most we can say on this model
of process is that there is novelty and modification but any further attempt to
locate that which modifies lands us back in the substance model. As long as one
stands outside the entity in question the problem of whether there was free or
arbitrary decision is insoluble because we have no decider and no criteria for
deciding one way or the other.
Although we have treated Whitehead's notion of the actual
entity in very brief fashion, certain elements stand out clearly, if the
preceding argument is correct. If process thought carries through its intention
to offer an alternative to substance metaphysics then it must use language
throughout which does not suggest the existence of an abiding subject who acts,
decides, chooses, and so on. That such a nonsubject language is hard to devise
and conceive is no argument, of course, that the model which demands it is
erroneous. Our difficulty may well be our tutelage to a subject‑predicate
form of language from which we should be liberated. But inasmuch as such
liberation is an inconceivably arduous task (demanding revisions all down the
line in our whole notion of rational thought - which presupposes some kind of
permanence simply in order to be
48
THOUGHT
able
to talk meaningfully from one moment to the next) and would demand not a
logical transition but a leap of intuition from a substance to a process model,
there is some ground for assuming that the process model does not do full
justice to our sense of who we are now. As I have tried to show, Whitehead
himself cannot help falling into subject‑type language even though his
"subjects" become feelings, concrescences, creativity, and so on. No
matter how you turn, the structure of a sentence demands some subject, thus
forcing even the process model to resort to at least quasi‑subject
language to describe the activity of an actual entity.
There is one final element in the process model of the
self which requires comment. Whitehead has said throughout that the actual
entity is only a subject at the moment of satisfaction, that is, at the moment
at which it achieves subjective unity. But the moment of satisfaction is also
in a sense the moment of death for the actual entity, for having achieved
satisfaction, the entity perishes. At the moment of satisfaction the actual
entity is "a definite, determinate, settled fact, stubborn and with
unavoidable consequences . . . its own process, which is its own internal
existence, has evaporated, worn out and satisfied."39 Now even
if we grant Christian's argument that the actual entity is, in its moment of
satisfaction, an unchanging subject which for a real duration, however brief,
is unchanging,40 it is still true that according to process thought
the "effects" of the entity can only occur at the end of the
satisfaction. The effects of an actual entity, that is, its action on other
entities, "its interventions in concrescent processes other than its own,"
all occur after its perishing. "Its effects are all to be described in
terms of its ‘satisfaction,’" when it is "functioning as an
‘object.’"41 An actual occasion, as Christian puts it, “cannot
exist as objectively immortal until it has ceased to exist for itself.” 42
This seems to be another way of saying, to put it crudely, that you cannot act
until you are dead. At least the effects of the actual entity cannot occur
until it perishes, becomes an object, and is prehended as datum by other
concrescing entities. This means that all relatedness ‑ which
_______________________
39 Whitehead, PAR, p. 257.
40 Christian, op. cit., p. 35.
41 Whitehead, PAR, p. 257.
42 Christian, op. cit., p. 37.
PROCESS OR AGENT 49
Whitehead feels that
substance models cannot account for‑occurs through the dead for the
living.
All relatedness has its
foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such relatedness is wholly
concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living ‑ that is to
say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living
immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming.43
Relatedness or action
upon contemporaries is quite clearly ruled out by the process model. Actual
entities do not influence their contemporaries. This is called the mutual
exclusiveness of contemporaries. The only way an entity can "be in"
another entity, which is the basic meaning of relatedness for Whitehead, is for
the first entity to perish, become an object, and be prehended.
This particular view of
relatedness among entities is logically consistent with the process model. To
be able to relate to contemporary entities would require an entity which abides
and which is the same entity now relating to this other entity, now relating to
that one. It would also imply a "substantial" entity capable of
acting here, in this way, now and there, in that way, then. Given the
abandonment of the substance model, however, relationship and effective action
cannot be ascribed to a self which related here and there, now and then. Thus
action and relation occur at death. Again this view of the self is perfectly in
accord with the process model and its strangeness is simply another implication
of giving up the subject‑predicate form of language. And again such
giving up is no sign of its falsity. But to give up our common‑sense
notion that selves do act over a period of time and do relate to contemporaries
requires more than logical persuasion; it requires a leap. The necessity for
such a leap, however, should cause us to think twice about the ultimate
adequacy of the process model for the self.
With these summary remarks on the process model of the
self we can now turn briefly to the resultant model of God. Brevity can be
justified here inasmuch as what can be said of the self should be directly
applicable to God, with some obvious "exceptions." If God is no
exception to fundamental metaphysical principles,44 and if the
process model is not completely adequate to our experience
________________
43 Whitehead, PAR, viii.
44 Ibid., p. 405.
50
THOUGHT
of the self, then it cannot
be completely adequate to the notion of God if that notion is built on the
model of the self.
Whitehead, as is well known, declares that God is an
actual entity.45 Strictly speaking, therefore, everything we have
said regarding actual entities would apply literally to God. However, the actual
entity which is God has some peculiarities which make the application to him of
our remarks on actual entities problematic. Whitehead does, despite his own
injunction, make God an exception if not to his metaphysical principles at
least to his statements about actual entities.
John Cobb, who is an exponent of process thought, has
pointed out some of the difficulties of maintaining that God is an actual
entity in the literal or strict sense. First, God is nontemporal. That is, he
does not perish and pass into something else. To this extent he is an exception
to the rule that all actual entities perish and pass into objective
immortality. A second problem has to do with the notion of God's satisfaction.
If God is an actual entity he cannot be a subject, that is, he cannot reach
unity, until his "feelings" concresce in a single satisfaction. But
satisfaction is correlated to perishing and God does not perish. Thus God lacks
self‑identity prior to his satisfaction which is never temporally
finished. The unity, determinateness and finality of God's satisfaction have
all to be reinterpreted in order to do justice to the notion of God as a
distinct kind of actual entity. Whitehead wants to say just enough about God
which is different from what he says of other actual entities to warrant the
charge that God is an exception to the principles of the understanding of
actual entities.
The preceding remarks are not insurmountable. Christian46
has given a satisfactory explanation of how God can be said to have satisfaction
even though it is not strictly the satisfaction of other actual entities. The
point still holds, I believe, that the lack of unity, that is, the lack of a
subject, in the actual entity prior to satisfaction is as true of God as any
other entity despite the reinterpretation required by God's exception to
certain principles. As long as the idea
_________________
45 Ibid., p. 23.
46 Christian, op. cit., p. 295ff.
of
God is fit coherently and consistently into any model of an actual entity, no
matter how revised, his subjecthood and self‑unity are problematic.
Perhaps, however, the most important exception to the
principles of understanding applicable to actual entities which the idea of God
requires centers on the problem of how he affects other actual entities, that
is, on the problem of relationship. God is declared to be causally efficacious
for other actual entities, especially through his providing the initial aim for
each occasion, which means that each new occasion can prehend God. It is
absolutely crucial to process thought that God be able to affect the world in
this way as well as to be affected by the world through his consequent
nature. (Cobb, though, correctly points
out that the separation of primordial and consequent natures of God threatens
to tear asunder the subjective unity which is required of actual entities.) The
problem arises, however, from the application of the prior principle applicable
to all actual entities that "no actual entity . . . influences another
until it has achieved a definite and specific satisfaction."47
In order to be prehended by, and thus to influence, to act upon, to relate to,
another entity an actual occasion must reach satisfaction and become objectified.
But if God is an actual entity, still in the process of becoming himself, then
he cannot affect other entities. Only perished entities can effect subsequent
entities; God is not yet perished; therefore he cannot affect the world.
A related implication is that God cannot, if he is an
actual entity, relate to his contemporaries. Relation only exists between the
objectified and the living. The only way in which he can relate to his
contemporaries is through his becoming objectified for them. But to become
objectified would entail either his perishing or some revision of the principle
of objectification such that some exception is being made to the notion of God
as actual entity.48
_______________________
47 Ibid., p. 332.
48 John Cobb has recognized these difficulties in speaking
of God as an actual entity and has accordingly revised the notion of God to
bring it closer to the notion of the person as distinct from the actual entity.
I have tried to meet this move in an appendix, arguing essentially that if a
person is constituted by an inheritance based upon special genetic relations
among the entities composing it, it is still impossible to reach a subject
since the conjoining of those elements which are not themselves subjects can
never produce a subject.
52