Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures, 1929) — Alfred North Whitehead

The process whereby an actual entity, starting from its objective content, attains its individual satisfaction, will be more particularly analysed in Part III. The pri- mary character of this process is that it is individual to the actual entity; it expresses how the datum, which involves the actual world, becomes a component in the one actual entity. There must therefore be no further reference to other actual entities; the elements available for the explanation are simply, the objective content, eternal objects, and the selective concrescence of feelings whereby an actual entity becomes itself. It must be remembered that the objective content is analysable into actual entities under limited perspectives provided by their own natures; these limited perspectives involve eternal objects in grades of relevance. If the ‘process’ were primarily a process of understanding, we should have to note that ‘grades of relevance’ are only other eternal objects in grades of relevance, and so on indefinitely. But we have not the sort of understandings which embrace such indefinite progressions. Accordingly there is here a vicious regress, if the process be essentially a process of understanding. But this is not the primary

From Descartes to Kant 233

description of it; the process is a process of ‘feeling.’ In feeling, what is felt is not necessarily analysed; in under- standing, what is understood is analysed, in so far as it is understood. Understanding is a special form of feeling. Thus there is no vicious regress in feeling, by reason of the indefinite complexity of what is felt. Kant, in his Transcendental Aesthetic, emphasizes the doctrine that in intuition a complex datum is intuited as one.

Again the selection involved in the phrase ‘selective concrescence’ is not a selection among the components of the objective content; for, by hypothesis, the objective content is a datum. The compatibilities and incompati- bilities which impose the perspective, transforming the actual world into the datum, are inherent in the nature of things. Thus the selection is a selection of relevant eternal objects whereby what is a datum from without is transformed into its complete determination as a fact within. The problem which is the concrescence solves is, how the many components of the objective content are to be unified in one felt content with its complex subjective form. This one felt content is the ‘satisfac- tion, whereby the actual entity is its particular indi- vidual self; to use Descartes’ phrase, ‘requiring nothing but itself in order to exist.’ In the conception of the actual entity in its phase of satisfaction, the entity has attained its individual separation from other things; it has absorbed the datum, and it has not yet lost itself in the swing back to the ‘decision’ whereby its appetition becomes an element in the data of other entities super- seding it. Time has stood still—if only it could.

Thus process is the admission of eternal objects in their new role of investing the datum with the individu- ality of the subject. The datum, qua mere datum, includes the many individualities of the actual world. The satisfaction includes these many individualities as subordinate contributors to the one individuality. The process admits or rejects, eternal objects which by their absorption into the subjective forms of the many feelings

234 Process and Reality

effect this integration. The attainment of satisfaction relegates all eternal objects which are not ‘felt’ either as determinants of definiteness in the data or as determi- nants of definiteness in the subjective form of the satis- faction, into the status of contraries to the eternal objects which are thus felt. Thus all indeterminations respecting the potentialities of the universe are definitely solved so far as concerns the satisfaction of the subject in question.

The process can be analysed genetically into a series of subordinate phases which presuppose their antece- dents. Neither the intermediate phases, nor the datum which is the primary phase of all, determine the final phase of determinate individualization. Thus an actual entity, on its subjective side, is nothing else than what the universe is for it, including its own reactions. The reactions are the subjective forms of the feelings, elab- orated into definiteness through stages of process. An actual entity achieves its own unity by its determinate feelings respecting every item of the datum. Every indi- vidual objectification in the datum has its perspective defined by its own eternal objects with their own rele- vance compatible with the relevance of other objectifica- tions. Each such objectification, and each such complex of objectifications, in the datum is met with a corre- spondent feeling, with its determinate subjective form, until the many become one experience, the satisfaction. 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.’ Locke’s ‘ideas of reflec- tion’ are the feelings, in so far as they have entered into consciousness.

It is by reference to feelings that the notion of ‘imme-
diacy’ obtains its meaning. The mere objectification of
actual entities by eternal objects lacks ‘immediacy.’ It
is ‘repetition’; and this is a contrary to ‘immediacy.’

From Descartes to Kant 235

But ‘process’ is the rush of feelings whereby second- handedness attains subjective immediacy; in this way, subjective form overwhelms repetition, and transforms it into immediately felt satisfaction; objectivity is absorbed into subjectivity. It is useful to compare this analysis of the construction of an act of experience with Kant’s. In the first place Kant’s act of experience is essentially knowledge. Thus whatever is not knowledge is necessarily inchoate, and merely on its way to knowl- edge. In comparing Kant’s procedure with that of the philosophy of organism, it must be remembered that an ‘apparent’ objective content is the end of Kant’s process, and thus takes the place of ‘satisfaction’ in the process as analysed in the philosophy of organism. In Kant’s phraseology at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, this ‘apparent’ objective content is referred to as ‘objects. He also accepts Hume’s sensationalist account of the datum. Kant places this sentence at the commencement of the Critique: “Objects therefore are given to us through our sensibility. Sensibility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions become thought through the understanding, and hence arise con- ceptions.” ° This is expanded later in a form which makes Kant’s adhesion to Hume’s doctrine of the datum more explicit: “And here we see that the impressions of the senses give the first impulse to the whole faculty of knowledge with respect to them, and thus produce experience which consists of two very heterogeneous ele- ments, namely, matter for knowledge, derived from the senses (eine materie zur Erkenntniss aus den Sinnen) and a certain form according to which it is arranged, derived from the internal source of pure intuition and pure thought, first brought into action by the former, and then producing concepts.” * Also: “Thoughts with-

8 “Vermittelst der Sinnlickkert also werden uns Gegenstinde gegeben, und sie allein liefert uns Anschanungen; durch den Verstand aber wer- den sie gedacht, und von ihm entspringen Begriffe.” Translation in

the text is Max Miiller’s. 7 Cf. Transcendal Analytic, Ch. II, Sect. I (Max Miiller).

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out content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” * In this last statement the philosophy of organ- ism is in agreement with Kant; but for a different reason. It is agreed that the functioning of concepts is an essen- tial factor in knowledge, so that ‘intuitions without con- cepts are blind.’ But for Kant, apart from concepts there is nothing to know; since objects related in a knowable world are the product of conceptual functioning whereby categoreal form is introduced into the sense-datum, which otherwise is intuited in the form of a mere spatio- temporal flux of sensations. Knowledge requires that this mere flux be particularized by conceptual function- ing, whereby the flux is understood as a nexus of ‘objects.’ Thus for Kant the process whereby there is experience is a process from subjectivity to apparent objectivity. The philosophy of organism inverts this analysis, and explains the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity, namely, from the objectivity, whereby the external world is a datum, to the subjectivity, whereby there is one individual experience. Thus, according to the philosophy of organism, in every act of experience there are objects for knowledge; but, apart from the inclusion of intellectual functioning in that act of experi- ence, there is no knowledge.

We have now come to Kant, the great philosopher who first, fully and explicitly, introduced into philosophy the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning, transforming subjectivity into objectivity, or objectivity into subjectivity; the order is immaterial in comparison with the general idea. We find the first beginnings of the notion in Locke and in Hume. Indeed, in Locke, the process is conceived in its correct order, at least in the view of the philosophy of organism. But the whole notion is only vaguely and inadequately con- ceived. The full sweep of the notion is due to Kant. The second half of the modern period of philosophical thought is to be dated from Hume and Kant. In it the

* Cf. Transcendal Logic, Introduction, Sect. I.

From Descartes to Kant 237

development of cosmology has been hampered by the stress laid upon one, or other, of three misconceptions:

(i) The substance-quality doctrine of actuality.

(ii) The sensationalist doctrine of perception.

(iu) The Kantian doctrine of the objective world as a construct from subjective experience.

The combined influence of these allied errors has been to reduce philosophy to a negligible influence in the for- mation of contemporary modes of thought. Hume him- self introduces the ominous appeal to ‘practice’—not in criticism of his premises, but in supplement to his con- clusions. Bradley, who repudiates Hume, finds the objective world in which we live, and move, and have our being, ‘inconsistent if taken as real.’ Neither side conciliates philosophical conceptions of a real world with the world of daily experience,

CHAPTER VII THE SUBJECTIVIST PRINCIPLE

Ir is impossible to scrutinize too carefully the char- acter to be assigned to the datum in the act of experience. The whole philosophical system depends on it. Hume’s doctrine of ‘impressions of sensation’ (Treatise, Book I, Part I, Sect. II) is twofold. I will call one part of his doctrine ‘The Subjectivist Principle’ and the other part ‘The Sensationalist Principle.’ It is usual to combine the two under the heading of the ‘sensationalist doctrine’ ; but two principles are really involved, and many philos- ophers—Locke, for instance—are not equally consistent in their adhesion to both of them. The philosophy of organism denies both of these doctrines, in the form in which they are considered in this chapter, though it accepts a reformed subjectivist principle (cf. Sect. II below and Part II, Ch. IX). Locke accepted the sensa- tionalist principle, and was inconsistent in his statements respecting the subjectivist principle. With the exception of some lapses, he accepted the latter in the first two books of his Hssay, and rejected it tacitly, but persist- ently, in the third and fourth books. Kant (in the Critique of Pure Reason) accepted the subjectivist prin- ciple, and rejected the sensationalist principle.

The sensationalist principle acquires dominating im- portance, if the subjectivist principle be accepted. Kant’s realization of this importance constituted the basis of his contribution to philosophy. The history of modern philosophy is the story of attempts to evade the inflexible consequences of the subjectivist principle, explicitly or implicitly accepted. The great merit of Hume and of

The Subjectivist Principle 2239

Kant is the explicitness with which they faced the difficulty.

The subjectivist principle is, that the datum in the act
of experience can be adequately analysed purely in terms
of universals.

The sensationalist principle is, that the primary activ-
ity in the act of experience is the bare subjective enter-
tainment of the datum, devoid of any subjective form
of reception. This is the doctrine of mere sensation.