Wordsworth and Whitehead - ​Spots of Time and Occasions of Experience

​Spots of Time and

Occasions of Experience

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Wordsworth and Whitehead

by Jay McDaniel

​"The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought; and the starting-point for thought is the analytic observation of components of this experience." - Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

"He would read The Prelude as if it were a Bible, pouring over the meanings of various passages." - Jessie Whitehead about her father*

*as cited by Mary Wyman, "Whitehead's Philosophy of Science in Light of Wordsworth's Poetry," Philosophy of Science (1956) 

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Wordsworth's Spots of Time

"There are in our existence spots of time,

That with distinct pre-eminence retain

A renovating virtue, whence--depressed

By false opinion and contentious thought,

Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,

In trivial occupations, and the round

Of ordinary intercourse--our minds

Are nourished and invisibly repaired."

- William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Twelve

From the earliest iterations of The Prelude, Wordsworth built his poem around various ‘Spots of Time’: each one a remembered moment, vividly recreated in Wordsworthian blank verse, of intense experience or apperception he had had in his life. These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life. Examples include: walking the streets of London and noticing a blind beggar, or young Wordsworth waiting, in blustery weather, for the horses to take him home for Christmas at the end of the school term — or in one of the most famous examples, even younger Wordsworth riding a pony through the lake district on a windy day and seeing a girl carrying a pitcher of water.

- Adam Roberts, Nov. 24, 2022, Medium

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Occasions of Experience

Why did Whitehead like Wordsworth so much? And why, perhaps especially, did he pour over The Prelude, which is an autobiographical poem of more than 8000 lines.

The poem contains many themes that are important to Whitehead's philosophy.

• The aliveness and spiritual significance of the natural world
• The role that memory plays in providing sustenance for life
• The primacy of experience (feeling) in revealing the concrete facts of nature
• The importance of imagination in meaning making
• The sense of divinity interfused with actuality
• The limits of a merely scientific account of things

​But I suggest that Whitehead turned to Wordsworth, not simply as inspiration for ideas such as these, but for deepening of his perception of lived experience. He knew that Wordsworth's poetry better illuminates the concrete fact of experience than does, say, a scientific theorem or mathematical axiom or, for that matter a philosophical principle. What, then, were the meanings of various passages that Whitehead poured over? They were not simply ideas to be affirmed but also, and more deeply, feelings to be recognized.

I say recognized but I might better say re-cognized, with a dash in the middle. The Prelude is an autobiographical account of Wordsworth's life from childhood to adulthood. The poet remembers past experiences, with special emphasis on relationships, the natural world, and, as he puts it, spots of time. Adam Roberts puts it well: "These spots possess not just in-the-moment intensity, transcendent acuteness and borderline-inexpressible concentration of affect — they also have the capacity to stay with the individual, to be recalled later in life." In the process of recalling them Wordsworth re-cognizes them, understanding them in a new way. The past experiences become, for Wordsworth, sources of nourishment and renewal: affective sacraments of a kind.

This, I believe, is why Whitehead turned to Wordsworth's The Prelude. The various passages were, for Whitehead, a way of dipping into the river of human feeling, human intuition, and a reclaiming the affective side of life. Later he came to speak of the entire universe as consisting of drops of experience or actual occasions of experience. He suggested that each drop is itself a momentary event, an act of prehending past drops of experience in an affective and emotional way. Wordsworth took Whitehead into the drops. Whitehead cosmologized Wordsworth; Wordsworth humanized Whitehead.

To be sure, some spots of time, some drops of experience, are more intense and important than others. Wordsworth's The Prelude highlights the intense and important ones. But all spots of time, all drops of experience, are part of what makes us human. Even the boring ones, the painful ones, the forgotten ones. The drops are the very building blocks of reality. For Whitehead we don't stand outside the drops of experience; we are the drops of experience, unfolding through time. And so are are quantum events in the depths of an atom and living cells. Even God is a vast ongoing drop of experience. Everywhere we look, within and beyond ourselves, we find spots of time.

- Jay McDaniel

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​Whitehead on Wordsworth​

Wordsworth expresses "the concrete facts of our apprehension."

Of course, Wordsworth is a poet writing a poem, and is not concerned with dry philosophical statements. But it would hardly be possible to express more clearly a feeling for nature, as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others:

‘Ye Presences of Nature in the sky

And on the earth! Ye Visions of the hills!

And Souls of lonely places! can I think

A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed

Such ministry, when ye through many a year

Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,

On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,

Impressed upon all forms the characters

Of danger or desire; and thus did make

The surface of the universal earth,

With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,

Work like a sea? . . .’

In thus citing Wordsworth, the point which I wish to make is that we forget how strained and paradoxical is the view of nature which modern science imposes on our thoughts. Wordsworth, to the height of genius, expresses the concrete facts of our apprehension, facts which are distorted in the scientific analysis. Is it not possible that the standardised concepts of science are only valid within narrow limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?

​- Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

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​About The Prelude

Wordsworth's "The Prelude" is an autobiographical long poem that describes his personal and spiritual growth from childhood to adulthood. It is often considered a seminal work of English Romanticism and is one of the most famous poems in the English language.

The poem spans over 8000 lines. It begins with Wordsworth's childhood experiences in the Lake District of England and his encounters with nature, which he sees as a source of spiritual renewal and inspiration. He then reflects on his experiences at school and his travels in Europe, which help shape his artistic and philosophical ideas.

In the later books, Wordsworth reflects on his struggles with doubt, despair, and political disillusionment, and his eventual return to nature as a source of solace and renewal. Throughout the poem, Wordsworth celebrates the power of imagination, memory, and language, and the transformative power of personal experience.

​

Overall, "The Prelude" is a complex and multi-layered work that explores themes of nature, spirituality, memory, and personal growth. It is a deeply reflective and introspective work that reveals the inner thoughts and feelings of one of the greatest poets of the English language.

​- chatGPT

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The Prelude read Aloud

by the Faculty of English

University of Cambridge

​

The readers include thirteen members of the Faculty of English in Cambridge, including several authorities on Wordsworth such as Prof. Heather Glen and Dr Philip Connell, and on the Romantic poets more generally, such as Dr Mina Gorji and Dr Paul Chirico.

• Book First - Introduction: Childhood and School-time Dr Daniel Wakelin

• Book Second - School-time Continued Prof. Adrian Poole

• Book Third - Residence at Cambridge Prof. Heather Glen

• Book Fourth - Summer VacationProf. Angela Leighton

• Book Sixth - Cambridge and the Alps Prof. Helen Cooper

• Book Seventh - Residence in LondonDr Paul Chirico

• Book Eighth - Retrospect: Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind Dr Mina orji (and the students of Pembroke College)

• Book Ninth - Residence in France Dr Sophie Read

• Book Tenth - Residence in France and French Revolution Dr Eric Griffiths

• Book Eleventh - Imagination, How Impaired and Restored Dr Clive Wilmer

• Book Twelfth - Same Subject (Continued) Dr Christopher Tilmouth

• Book Thirteenth - Conclusion Dr Philip Connell

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​A Scholarly Discussion of

Wordsworth's The Prelude

offered by BBC's In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss

William Wordsworth’s poem, The Prelude

BBC "Sounds" - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b00899w0

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest long poems in the English language – The Prelude. Begun in Northern Germany during the terrible winter of 1798 by a young and dreadfully homesick William Wordsworth, The Prelude was to be his masterpiece - an epic retelling of his own life and the foundation stone of English Romanticism. In language of aching beauty Wordsworth expressed thoughts about memory, identity, nature and experience familiar to anybody who has walked alone among the hills. With Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London; Stephen Gill, University Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; Emma Mason, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick.

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​Some Passages from The Prelude

• ​"Oh, many a time have I, a five years' child, / In a small mill-race severed from his stream, / Made one long bathing of a summer's day; / Basked in the sun, and plunged and basked again / Alternate all a summer's day."​

• What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now forever taken from my sight, / Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; / We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind."

• "For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity."

• "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils."

• "The child is father of the man."

• "The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love."

• "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!"

• "And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused."

• "A simple child / That lightly draws its breath, / And feels its life in every limb, / What should it know of death?"

• "The earth is all before me. With a heart / Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, / I look about; and should the chosen guide / Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, / I cannot miss my way."

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​The Influence of Wordsworth

​on Whitehead

by Antoon Braeckman

​

In the "Autobiographical Notes," Whitehead asserts that he was acquainted with Wordsworth before he arrived at the university in 1880. In secondary school he read Wordsworth and Shelley during spare time. This acquaintance with Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge becomes apparent through a consideration of the different passages in which they are mentioned. In Principles of Natural Knowledge he cites some lines from Wordsworth (PNK 200); in Process and Reality he quotes Wordsworth’s well-known phrase: "We murder to dissect" (PR 140/212). In Modes of Thought he suggests that he read Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. But the most important rendering of the romantic poetry we find in Science and the Modern World. Let us therefore confine our investigation to the latter text, in order to see clearly Whitehead’s view on romantic poetry.

At the end of Chapter V, "The Romantic Reaction," Whitehead summarizes the significance of Romantic poetry: "I have endeavored to make clear . . . that the nature-poetry of the romantic revival was a protest on behalf of the organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact." Here, Whitehead stresses the importance of the romantic concept of nature. That concept entails, according to the above quotation, two characteristics: (a) the organic view on nature and (b) the understanding of nature as exhibiting an intrinsic value-character.

Whitehead elucidates the former aspect as a (romantic) reaction against the mechanical, 18th-century scientific view on nature, whereby nature is reduced to mere abstract matter, devoid of any form of subjectivity. As to the latter aspect, Whitehead argues that the English romantic poetry "bears witness that nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values." This means to Whitehead that nature, in the first place, has to do with experience, but above all with the experience of value. Both aspects of the concept of nature in romantic poetry exhibit two dimensions of one and the same intuition namely, that of the fundamentally subjective character of nature. This subjective character has to be understood as the ever-acting ground, involved in any particular instance of nature:

Whitehead’s comment on English poetry in general, and his evaluation of the Wordsworthian poetry more specifically, shows that the most valuable contribution of that poetry consists exactly in this articulation of the concept of nature. This statement can be sustained through a closer study of the similarity in concept, principles, and elaboration of Wordsworth’s and Whitehead’s view on nature.

In Wordsworth we can find the stress on the organic pattern of nature. Moreover, while interpreting its value character, we are impelled to look at nature as an agent to be qualified as subjective. Finally, the concept of an ever-acting ground which is involved in and finds expression through all particular instances of nature allows us to envisage here in nuce Whitehead’s own principle of creativity. Hence, we can conclude that if there has been an influence of Wordsworth on Whitehead at all, it will have to do with his concept of nature. I would even claim -- but this has to be investigated later on -- that the particular synthesis of the concept of nature with aesthetics in Whitehead is almost completely Wordsworthian.

* from Whitehead and German Idealism: A Poetic Heritage by Antoon Braeckman. Braeckman is a Research Assistant at the Catholic University of Leuven, Kortrijk Campus, Sahbelaan, Kortrijk, Belgium. The article appeared in Process Studies, pp. 265-286, Vol. 14, Number 4, Winter, 1985. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

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​The Poetry of Philosophy:

Wordsworth’s Poetic Vision

of Nature in Light of Whitehead’s

Cosmological Scheme

Sept. 28, 2012

by ​Matthew David Segall

reposted from Footnotes2Plato

​

The aim of this essay is to read the nature poetry of William Wordsworth in light of the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, such that the epistemological and cosmological implications of the former are brought more fully into philosophical view. According to Victor Lowe, it is probable that no other man, save Plato, shaped the imaginative background of Whitehead’s outlook quite as profoundly as Wordsworth.1 This influence makes the task of this short essay far easier, since so much of what Whitehead labored to give clear conceptual expression to in his own work was originally awakened in him by the feeling for the universe that vibrates off the pages of Wordsworth’s poetry. In this sense, the task of this essay is the opposite of Whitehead’s: to translate the basic outlines of his philosophical scheme back into the cosmic visions and archetypal visitations expressed in Wordsworth’s verse.

One of the defining characteristics of Romantic literature is its exaltation of the figure of the philosopher-poet, the one who unveils the way in which, as Keats put it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”2 The famous friendship and intimate artistic collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth provides an example of two minds who, while considered alone are great in their own right, considered together as a single mutually formed and imaginatively alloyed soul surely surpass the genius of any claimant of the title philosopher-poet to come before or after. According to Owen Barfield, the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth both “exemplified the contrast” and “deepened the affinity” between the poles of imagination, namely, self )–( world, or again, spirit )–( nature.3 Reconciling these two imaginative forces in one person is all but impossible, since “the finite activity of poetry, like every other motion, still requires a predominance, however slight, of the one pole over the other.”4 Coleridge had a more philosophical bent, tending toward reverential reflection upon the high station of spirit, while Wordsworth was easily charmed by the every day and more sensitive to the living depths of the natural world.Though Coleridge proved himself on occasion capable of penning the sublimest poetry, it could be said that, as a result of his philosophical tutelage, Wordsworth became the greatest of his poetic achievements. Indeed, Whitehead writes of Coleridge that, despite being influential in his own day, when considering “those elements of the thought of the past which stand for all time…[he] is only important by his influence on Wordsworth.”5

Wordsworth is perhaps the most esteemed nature poet in the history of the English language. For Whitehead, he is the chief exemplar of the Romantic reaction against the abstract mechanistic picture of nature fostered by the scientific materialism of the 17th and 18th centuries. He cites the famous line, “We murder to dissect” with qualified approval, agreeing with Wordsworth that “the important facts of nature elude the scientific method” even while he, a mathematical physicist as well as a philosopher, believes the specialized abstractions of natural science need not necessarily leave nature lifeless.6 Science can and should be reformed. Mechanistic science of the sort championed by the likes of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Laplace commits the fatal sin of bifurcating nature, isolating its objective mathematizable aspects by pealing away its sensual and moral layers, layers which found their home in a soul now entirely sealed off from the outside world. Concerning the ethereal hues of a sunset, the sweet fragrance of a primrose, or the melodies of a thrush the poets are all mistaken: from the point of view of scientific materialism, nature is “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”7 Contrary to the general thrust of natural science since its birth in the 17th century, Whitehead’s cosmological scheme is an attempt to systematize Wordsworth’s emphatic witness to the fact that “nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values, and that these values arise from the culmination…of the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts.”8 In the jargon of his metaphysics, Whitehead saw in Wordsworth’s poetry “a feeling for nature as exhibiting entwined prehensive unities, each suffused with modal presences of others.”9 Hidden within this one short cryptic sentence are the major categories animating Whitehead’s entire cosmological system, including “actual occasions,” “eternal objects,” “internal relations,” and “concrescence.”

Before moving on to unpack Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, it is important to note that his allegiance to Wordsworth and the Romantic reaction is not at all to say that he has sided with subjectivism or idealism over the objectivity of science. The danger in aligning oneself against the mathematical abstractions of mechanistic science is that one rushes too quickly to adopt the opposite extreme, elevating personal emotion and individual will to such unwarranted heights that the entirety of the visible universe is made to seem a private projection, a mere appearance dependent upon the constructive activity of my mind. Wordsworth’s absorption in living nature–“an inmate of this active universe,”10 as he put it–all but inoculated him against this subjectivist over-reaction; but there are a few occasions when Wordsworth seems almost to become infected by other strains of the Romantic bloodstream, especially those emerging in the orbit of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Whitehead strongly positioned himself in opposition to Kantian, Fichtean, and Hegelian forms of idealism which can be read as attempting to derive the concrete and contingent existence of the universe from the abstract universal categories of thought.11 Not incidentally (considering the influence of Schelling on Wordsworth through the intermediary of Coleridge), the relationship of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism to Schelling’s Naturphilosophie is far more congenial, since unlike for Kant and Hegel, for Schelling “Nature is a priori.”12 Whitehead pithily suggests that his approach “aspires to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason.”13 In Kant’s first critique, experience is either translatable into conscious rational knowledge (Descartes’ “clear and distinct ideas/representations” of geometrical space and time), or it is no experience at all. The vague but overriding feelings of nature’s creative rhythms and physical purposes always scintillating along the fractal horizons of consciousness are ignored in order to secure the certain knowledge of the rational, waking ego.14 The abyssal complexities of our aesthetic encounter with the sublime are left for the 3rd critique, the Critique of Judgment, but even here, where Kant’s powers reach their highest pitch, he pulls up short of the erotic receptivity that may have reconnected him with the animate intelligence of the cosmos. In book XI of The Prelude, as if speaking directly to Kant, Wordsworth pays homage to the “animation and…deeper sway” of nature’s soul while warning against the “narrow estimates of things” resulting from rational critique: “suffice it here/To hint that danger cannot but attend/Upon a Function rather proud to be/The enemy of falsehood, than the friend/Of truth, to sit in judgment than to feel.”15

While for Kant, “the world emerges from the subject,” for Whitehead, “the subject emerges from the world.”16 Whitehead’s conception of subjectivity is such that the order and meaning of our experience is originally given to us by the order and meaning of the surrounding actual universe. “[The subject] is not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it.”17 Whitehead’s object-to-subject account of the formation of experience may seem too strict a rule for Wordsworth’s imaginative epistemology to obey, since for the latter the senses must be free to half-create and half perceive the world, as he suggests in Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798). This reversal of the vector of experience may at times prove to be a true tension in the two men’s outlooks, a tension worth untangling if only to discover a deeper commonality.

It would be an unfair reading of Whitehead, based on his reaction to much of German idealism, to neglect the extent to which his epistemology is fully awake to the creative and participatory role of the imagination in evaluating and synthesizing the facts of the actually existing world. His criticisms of idealistic accounts of perception result primarily from the mistaken prioritization of a derivative mode of perception, “presentational immediacy” over the truly primitive mode, “causal efficacy.” Presentational immediacy is a highly advanced form of experience available to conscious human beings. Dominated by the eyes (“The most despotic of our senses”18), it gives us a certain degree of reflective distance from the causal flow of cosmic vectors of inter-bodily emotion. These vectors, felt through the more original mode of perception, causal efficacy, generate the “mysterious presence of surrounding things”19: for example, the “voluntary power instinct” of the brooding Cliff that made the young Wordsworth’s hands tremble while rowing back to shore in his stolen skiff.20 Without the enlivening passion of causal efficacy, presentational immediacy becomes a fallen mode of perception, detached and cut off from intimacy with nature, her inner life reduced to the external relations of dead objects floating in outer space. Without the reflective disinterest of presentational immediacy, causal efficacy would swallow up our consciousness into the “dim and undetermin’d sense/Of unknown modes of being” that haunted Wordsworth for days after he returned the skiff to its mooring-place.21 Whitehead describes a third, hybrid mode of perception called “symbolic reference,” which plays a role akin to the synthesizing imagination, able to skillfully interweave physical prehensions with mental conceptions in order to produce heightened forms of aesthetic enjoyment and moral appetition. In Whitehead’s jargon, mental conceptions are also prehensions, or feelings, but instead of feeling concrete matters of fact, they feel eternal objects, or abstract forms of possibility. Whereas causal efficacy is “the hand of the settled past in the formation of the present,” presentational immediacy is the “[projection which] exhibits the contemporary world in its spatial relations.”22 Through the mixed perceptual mode of symbolic reference, habits of imagination are gradually acquired which bring forth the taken for granted world of every day experience.23 It is the synthesizing activity of this mode that Wordsworth refers to when he writes of how “The mind of Man is fram’d even like the breath/And harmony of music. There is a dark/Invisible workmanship that reconciles/Discordant elements, and makes them move/In one society.”24 A skillful poet is able to consciously moderate the synthetic activity of symbolic reference, “to keep/In wholesome separation the two natures,/The one that feels [causal efficacy], the other that observes [presentational immediacy].”25

It would be a superficial reading of Wordsworth to ignore the degree to which he wavers in his assigning of precedence to either the mental or physical poles of experiential reality. Just a line below his statement in Tintern Abbey about the creative element in perception, he writes of being “well pleased to recognize/In nature and the language of the sense,/The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse/The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/Of all my moral being.” He finds that his mind is not only necessarily tied to his sensual encounters with nature (as it is for Kant), but that the language of sense has birthed and raised to maturity even the purest of his ideas from out of the womb of nature herself. Elsewhere, Wordsworth writes of the way a mountain range “By influence habitual to the mind/…shapes/The measure and the prospect of the soul.”26 Further conforming to Whitehead’s object-to-subject reading of the vector of experience, he writes: “From nature doth emotion come, and moods/…are nature’s gift.”27 But it could still be asked: is Wordsworth speaking here in a psychological or in an ontological register?

Whitehead’s characterization of Wordsworth’s poetry as exhibiting a sensitivity to the interpenetrating “prehensive unities” of nature, “each suffused with modal presences of others,” is meant to classify him as an ontologically committed panpsychist. His poetry is overflowing with hymns to the Anima Mundi, with references to the “the Life/ of the great whole,” and to the way “every natural form, rock, fruit or flower/…Lay bedded in a quickening soul.”28 Even here, however, just as Wordsworth appears to fully confirm his cosmological orientation, the tension of the poles of spirit and nature begin vibrating, as if hovering in superposition. Does Wordsworth mean that all these natural forms lay bedded in his quickening soul? In the same lines from The Prelude cited above, he could be read as congratulating himself for rousing nature from her sleep: “To every natural form…/I gave a moral life, I saw them feel,/Or linked them to some feeling…/…all/That I beheld respired with inward meaning.”29 But just a few lines later, Wordsworth again reverses the vector of his experience back from the idealistic to the cosmological pole, finding his mind “as wakeful” to the changing face of nature “as waters are/To the sky’s motion,” becoming to her activity as “obedient as a lute/That waits upon the touches of the wind.”30 Perhaps Wordsworth’s tendency to waver on this issue betrays one of the key differences between a visionary poet, focused on capturing the vividness of each fading moment, and a systematic philosopher, focused on characterizing the ultimate generalities characterizing all experience.

Though it is beyond the scope of the present essay, many parallels could also be drawn between Whitehead’s conception of a dipolar divinity and Wordsworth’s visions of the World Soul, “the Imagination of the whole.” Briefly, like all other actual occasions, Whitehead’s God has two poles, an intellectual/mental and an emotional/physical. Unlike all other actual occasions, God’s primordial pole is intellectual rather than physical, consisting in an evaluative ordering of all eternal objects. This ordering serves to condition the unfolding of the universe by making relevant novelties available to the concrescence of each finite occasion of experience. These finite occasions are free to make their own decisions and evaluations, but these decisions are made amidst the set of possibilities provided by the wisdom of God. Through God’s consequent pole, the creative becoming of the physical world is taken back up into divine experience as through a loving embrace to be harmonized with God’s primordial nature. To quote Whitehead at length: “God’s role is not the combat of productive force with productive force, of destructive force with destructive force; it lies in the patient operation of the overpowering rationality of his conceptual harmonization. He does not create the world, he saves it; or, more accurately, he is the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.”31 The everlasting pulsations of divine concrescence are the macrocosmic analogy of Wordsworth’s autobiographical journey from childhood paradise, through the impairment and on to the final restoration of Imagination. “From love, for here/Do we begin and end, all grandeur comes,/All truth and beauty, from pervading love,/That gone, we are as dust.”32

Footnotes

1 Understanding Whitehead (1962), 257.

2 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819).

3 What Coleridge Thought (1971), 90.

4 WCT, 90.

5 Science and the Modern World (1925), 79.

6 SMW, 79-80.

7 SMW, 55.

8 SMW, 84.

9 SMW, 80.

10 The Prelude (1805/1970), 27.

11 Process and Reality (1929/1979), 89.

12 First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature (1799/2004), 198. Nature here is natura naturans, the generative abyss from which all finite form arises and into which it dies; this is akin to Whitehead’s category of ultimate generality at the base of all actuality, Creativity.

13 PR, 172.

14 Modes of Thought (1938/1966), p. 74-75.

15 The Prelude, 209.

16 PR, 172.

17 PR, 113.

18 The Prelude, 210.

19 SMW, 80.

20 The Prelude, 12.

21 The Prelude, 12.

22 Symbolism (1927/1955), 50.

23 UW, 184.

24 The Prelude, 10.

25 The Prelude, 238.

26 The Prelude, 125.

27 The Prelude, 218.

28 The Prelude, 37.

29 The Prelude, 37. Italics are mine.

30 The Prelude, 37-38.

31 PR, 525.

32 The Prelude, 233.

Origins & Critique: The Problem of "Feeling" in Whitehead's Metaphysics

article link

University of Alabama at Birmingham

UAB Digital Commons

UAB Digital Commons Libraries

Professional Work

Professional Showcase

2024

The Problem of “Feeling” in Whitehead’s Metaphysics

by Michael A. Flannery

University Of Alabama At Birmingham

flannery@uab.edu

Follow this and additional works at:

https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/libraries-pw

Recommended Citation

Flannery, Michael A., "The Problem of “Feeling” in Whitehead’s Metaphysics" (2024). Libraries Professional Work. 14.

https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/libraries-pw/14

This content has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of the UAB Digital Commons, and is provided as a free open access item. All inquiries regarding this item or the UAB Digital Commons should be directed to the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication.

* * * * * * *

An Observation

Historical background is always necessary to have pertaining to the origins of ideas however the datedness of yesteryear's discussion seems passe to the current force of Whiteheadian thought in process philosophy and theology.

I, like others, are not adverse to processual "feeling" all the way down into nature and the cosmos finding in it a necessary descriptor when so much of Christian thought would separate man from the animal, the flora and fauna, the inorganic kingdoms, when asserting man as unique and without peer. A Whiteheadian Process Philosopher and Theologian bears no such artificial divisions. 

Too, the early post-cursors of Whiteheadian thought over the years has only deepened with the additions of process-based panexperientialism and panpsychism to that of panrelationalism. Hence, despite the engagements of past philosophers to their contemporaries ideas and their own academic generations in context with other relevant philosophies and "noetics", we might find these discursives as but helps and aides to Whitehead's own experimentations in speaking more frankly about the voids of the current day's metaphysics. 

Whitehead's organic onus is now on the present generation of process thinkers to continue to work out the many paths and divergencies of process thought in relation to contemporaneous philosophical, psychoanalytic, and socio-cultural thought today: 1) in formalistic terms and, 2) in practical terms whereby civilizations may be aided in their language between one another.

- RE Slater, Nov 9, 2024

The Problem of “Feeling”

in Whitehead’s Metaphysics

article link

by Michael A. Flannery

Fall 2024

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When Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) left England for the United States in 1924 to serve as Harvard’s newest lecturer in philosophy, the department and university administration were delighted to have the co-author of the massive and masterful Principia Mathematica (19101913) on their faculty. Although he had an early foray into philosophy and metaphysics with the Tarner Lectures delivered at Trinity College in November 1919 (published as The Concept of Nature [1920]), it wasn’t until after he turned to the temporal and teleological ideas of Henri Bergson and formulated them into a whole system of thought that he became known as the purported “father” of modern process philosophy. With the publication of his magnum opus Process and Reality (1929), process thought was alleged to have begun, proof that academic pedigree often determines one’s fame.

But Whitehead was not the only one to introduce process philosophy. Swedish-American John Elof Boodin (1869-1950), coming as he did from the Midwest (first at Grinnell College in Iowa, then at the University of Kansas, followed by Carleton College in Minnesota) before moving to the fledgling UCLA, only recently promoted as an independent institution from its former status as the Southern Branch of the University of California, was destined for obscurity despite the fact that he already developed his own system of process philosophy. Boodin’s career as a process thinker shouldn’t be surprising given the fact that Josiah Royce, to whom Boodin was devoted, is regarded as America’s first true process philosopher (Auxier 2013, pp. 40, 63).* Armed with what he had learned from his dissertation supervisor and mentor, Boodin worked out his own process thought in A Realistic Universe in 1916, three years before Whitehead’s Tarner Lectures, four years before his Concept of Nature, nine years before his Science and the Modern World, ten years before

*Randall Auxier points out that Royce’s process philosophy can be traced to an unpublished essay, “On Purpose in Thought,” written in 1880. This was developed further in Royce’s essay, “The Problem of Job,” published in Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays Upon Life and Society (New York: Appleton, 1898). Richard Hocking (1906-2001), son of idealist philosopher and student of Royce, William Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), noted this too. He observed that Royce “expressed . . . his conviction that human existence is at once thoroughly time-immersed as a sequence of practical actions and, in its rational power, capable of grasping forms of order and lawfulness which are true throughout the relativities of the temporal flux. Royce is a kind of process philosopher” (Hocking 1963, pp. xivxv). All of these elements are more fully developed in Boodin’s oeuvre.

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Religion in the Making, and eleven years before his Gifford Lectures that would become Process and Reality (1929), his magnum opus.

As with any major system or theory, differences over origination, emphasis, definition, interpretation, and consequences are common among its adherents. At the time, Boodin identified himself a creationist, which he defined as someone who believes in “the occurrence of new forms, characters and stages under the guidance of an actuality which controls and animates the course of history.” As interpreted, “creation is epigenesis or emergence (in recent terminology) together with control from a higher level” (Boodin 1934c, p. 14). On the other hand, Boodin considered Whitehead a preformationist, meaning “that evolutionary development is latent in the process so that later forms and stages are really an unfolding or making explicit what is already present in the earlier stages of the same history” (Boodin 1934c, pp. 14, 43-45). By definition, however, both were process thinkers, although the term process philosophy per se came into common use by its own independent route.

Here some sorting out of terminology is helpful. While process philosophy is generally associated with Whitehead, he actually never employed the term, preferring to call his system “the philosophy of organism.” In fact, the theme of this essay examines Whitehead’s proposal whereby in “place of the Hegelian hierarchy of categories of thought, the philosophy of organism finds a hierarchy of categories of feeling [emphasis mine]” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, p. 166). Process philosophy as a general term referring to being as becoming in a constant holistic relational interaction of change appears to have first been used explicitly in Wilmon H. Sheldon’s America’s Progressive Philosophy (1942) and elaborated upon in his Process and Polarity (1944). Sheldon did not use this phrase as a synonym for the philosophy of organism, though he regarded Whitehead as one of several of its greatest proponents (this included Dewey, a pragmatist who, as we shall see, opposed several of Whitehead’s formulations); instead, Sheldon developed his ideas independently of Whitehead (Rescher 1996, p. 23). However, it was Bernard Loomer who applied “process” to both branches of philosophy and theology. Here Looomer made it plain that in using “process philosophy” he had “reference in this case to the general Whiteheadian orientation” (Loomer 1949, p. 181). Although Loomer knew of Sheldon’s work, he probably emphasized Whitehead’s process philosophy because he saw process as “a theory which Whitehead has already exemplified” (Loomer 1944, p. 67). Here is how process philosophy became synonymous with the

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philosophy of organism. Bolstered by Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) at the University of Chicago with his evangelizing zeal for process (he preferred “neoclassical”) theology under his own interpretation of Whitehead, whom he knew and had worked with, by the 1950s the almost exclusive identification of process philosophy and theology with Whitehead was complete. In any case, given the etymology of the phrase, process philosophy casts a wide net that captures a broad genus of kindred thinkers whose specific species of beliefs can vary widely. None of these early proponents actually used the phrase.

Initially, Boodin offers little critique of Whitehead only to provide a fuller assessment by stating, “When theory goes beyond experience, it belongs to the world of fiction, albeit a useful fiction if it leads to further experience” (Boodin 1934c, p. 487). Eventually, he accused Whitehead of perpetuating a kind of fiction—and not a particularly useful one—by singling out his tendency to abstraction, over generalization, conflation of mathematical truths with causal explanations, and his overambitious metaphysical constructions (Boodin 1943). Of particular concern for Boodin was Whitehead’s use of “feeling” in his metaphysical system:

Whitehead . . . attributes little importance to sense-quality. Instead, he stresses feeling. His language of feeling is as fluctuating as the feelings. He sometimes uses feeling in the psychological sense of feeling tone. In this sense, it is a fusion of a large mass of organic sensations, especially from the autonomous system. This is an emergent fact as much as the sense-qualities which we use to characterize external things. While feelings are an important revelation of our life in nature, they are certainly not less organic than the more specific sense-qualities. Together with the specific sense-qualities, the feelings constitute the immediate awareness of our life in nature. They are more massive and in that sense richer than the specific sense-qualities. But that is no reason for putting them on a different metaphysical basis. Sometimes Whitehead uses feeling for our whole immediate awareness of nature. This immediate awareness he calls prehension, as contrasted with apprehension. Prehension suggests active seizure; and feeling, instead of being an emergent, becomes an efficient cause in nature. As all nature is organic for Whitehead, feeling becomes the efficient causation in nature. And since reality is conceived as dynamic, feeling becomes reality, and Whitehead is brought by his own route to the mysticism of Bradley. Feeling, as one type of the emergent actualization of nature—the florescence of life's activity—becomes the whole of reality. Such ambiguity will give the philosophers much material out of which they can make a living and will no doubt be perpetuated [emphasis mine] (Boodin 1934a, pp. 157-158).

Boodin’s last pithy comment was a prescient observation on his colleagues’ easy slide into the hypnotic gaze of the noetic idea.

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Like Boodin, University of Arkansas philosopher Daryl H. Rice refused to fall under Whitehead’s spell. Rice accuses Whitehead of “reductive vitalism” (1989), but not before pointing out that Whitehead’s use of “physical feeling” is deceptive because it doesn’t refer to physical reality in any meaningful way, but as a “psychical reality” (Rice 1984, p. 123). Instead, Whitehead universalizes “physical feeling” to show the relativity and continuity of events in nature. Here we have Whitehead’s philosophy of science in the service of a metaphysics of feeling and emotion. In other words, the universal relativity and continuity of the events of nature are raised to the level of a metaphysics of feeling and emotion. This is carried to questionable lengths in Whitehead’s moral philosophy where “the ought” is reduced to an æsthetic sense (see Schlipp 1951, pp. 561-618).

Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme applies “feeling” to so many things that it seems to lose coherence and all meaning. It can refer to an actual occasion as subject, to an actual occasion as object, to the apprehension of object by subject, and to the affective tone washing over the act of apprehension. We have a feeling that “feels” so obfuscatory that “Feeling seems to become what Hegel claimed became of his notion of the Absolute in the hands of some of his contemporaries: the night in which all cows are black” (Rice 1984, p. 123). Whitehead restricts feeling to “subjective form” and as such it cannot be passed on from subject to subject because it is solely internal. Whitehead’s “feeling” becomes a word spaghetti of incomprehensibly slippery usage (Rice 1984, p. 124).† There is nothing in process thinking that requires “feeling” of this sort. It is a muddle of Whitehead’s own making in his effort to understand “the whole of reality” and thus extends feeling “by overturning our thought expectations and beliefs” (Baciu, 2023, p. 67). Here the extension of feeling to inanimate things is rightly regarded with extreme Kantian distrust, but is nonetheless indispensable to Whitehead’s “actual occasions.”

Careful to keep substance out of his metaphysics, Boodin admits that since “we are concerned only with the dynamic world as it appears in our experience, . . . we must assume that reality is what it is known-as” therefore banishing “the fictitious [Kantian] thing-in-itself” (Boodin 1916, p. 28). Kant’s mistake was to assume that we link things with our intellect arbitrarily when, in fact, we are selective in that “our conjunctions tally with the conjunctions of qualities as

†Whitehead’s awkward handling of feeling is exemplary of his entire philosophy. Process and Reality, supposedly Whitehead’s grand metaphysical statement, has been called “almost the most unintelligible essay in philosophy ever written” (Urban 1939, p. 617). Many who have tried to digest its contents would agree.

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ascertained in our experience” (Boodin 1916, p. 91). Furthermore, rather than mere subjective additions as Kant would have it, things “come to figure in the contexts of our interests” (Boodin 1916, p. 93). These relations are not abstractions. In good Jamesian fashion, “Terms and relations are pragmatic. They are our emphasis in the service of the dominant interest for the time being. The real units of reality are neither terms nor relations, but energy systems from which the terms and relations are intellectual abstractions” (Boodin 1916, p. 94). For Boodin, human experience is comprised of constancy—invariable associations, permanent will, the dominant tendency, the ruling passion—and change—shifting contents and values, new experiences, unforeseen obstacles, and pleasant surprises (Boodin 1916, p. 176). Process must entail flux and that implies constancy on the one hand and change on the other. Indeed without flux growth, creativity and novelty would have no meaning. Whitehead forces energy systems into an odd context of “feeling” that seems unwarranted and unnecessary unless one subscribes to the equally unwarranted and unnecessary panpsychism or its pragmatized twin panexperientialism as some Whiteheadians have done (Griffin 2001, pp. 94-128]; Mesle 2008, pp. 93-94). This merely presses an abstraction into the service of an a priori metaphysic. Nothing in process thought requires this.

Whiteheadians will no doubt insist that the ubiquitous use of feeling avoids the dreaded bifurcation of humanity and nature but Boodin’s metaphysic was just as averse to bifurcation (Boodin 1925, pp. 50-51, 252-261, 265; Boodin 1934a, pp. 148, 170-171). Whitehead’s background and achievements in mathematics, alluded to earlier, secured his Anglo-American status, but it could be a detriment too. Boodin suggests that Whitehead made the same error as Samuel Alexander (1859-1938) by treating abstract mathematical concepts as real-world attributes. This is confirmed in Whitehead’s conflation of “value” all the way down, like Alexander, “into the elementary constituents of the universe” (Urban 1951, p. 325). While this was ostensibly an effort to head off the bifurcation of nature and experiences, it seems dubious to do so by employing such mathematizing abstractions as reading value all the down. Boodin was too close a reader of Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) not to know that mathematics simply comprises “pragmatic conventions contributed by the human mind and relative to the needs of descriptions” (Boodin 1925, p. 87). Perhaps Whitehead’s confusion stemmed from such a concerted effort, along with his colleague Bertrand Russell, to create a notation system in Principia Mathematica that would provide “the perfect language” for clarifying everything. This involved trying to fill in every

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ambiguity or ambivalence and caused serious problems (Grayling 2019, pp. 342-344). In the end, it fell under the weight of its own imposing objective by worsening a problem it sought to solve.

Famed pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952) and political scientist/philosopher Arthur F. Bentley (1870-1957) recognized the “linguistic chaos” to which logic and epistemology had fallen and attempted to clarify things in their Knowing and the Known published two years after Whitehead’s death in 1949. Dewey and Bentley called for consistency in terminology and “firm names” based upon observation that could be generally accepted by logicians and epistemologists working in the field (Dykhuizen 1973, p. 311). Their project was clearly not served by Whitehead’s neologisms, special word usages, and unusual linguistic applications. Dewey was not overly critical of Whitehead in public, choosing to emphasize those things with which his own philosophical thinking most agreed. But privately both he and Bentley knew Whitehead had problems. Like his fuzzy use of “feeling,” Bentley told Dewey in a letter dated May 1, 1942, "that Whitehead “is always trying to read the universe in mentalistic terms.... My irreverent feeling is that he [Whitehead] empties a pillow case full of feathers, and you waste a lot more time than is necessary in huffing and puffing them away. He worries me” (Ratner and Altman 1964, p. 101). Dewey explained his motive in not fully challenging Whitehead’s ideas: “I didn’t mean to indulge in anything like a wholehearted defense of Whitehead,” he told Bentley on December 3, 1944, “In fact, I think his thought is slippery—but the slipperiness is of a kind in which I think the alternatives are either to leave him alone or engage in a highly technical discussion—in our case I favor the first alternative” (Ratner and Altman 1964, pp. 344-345).

One of those “technical” issues was Whitehead’s background in mathematics. He simply tried to do too much with it. Einstein, like Poincaré, admitted his descriptions were useful abstractions without any direct physical significance for his space-time, but Whitehead sets out to give an account of nature in which, as Boodin explains, “abstractions are conceived as extensive abstractions. Even event-particles with their point-instants are conceived as contained in nature.” Not surprisingly, Whitehead has difficulty showing how these can be extrapolated from “events” in any reasonable sense. Boodin, therefore, concludes, “The spatial, temporal, and physical points do not possess the character of extension and inclusion. Whitehead admits that ‘the creative advance of nature,’ which is his expressive characterization of concrete reality, is ‘not serial.’ But it is easy to see that Whitehead has left himself no other locus for such entities, so he has to include

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them within nature. He has set himself to deal with nature as closed to mind. There is to be no bifurcation into subjective and objective. Nature is to be self-contained to a theory of nature. He did not leave the least hole through which he could chuck embarrassing entities” (Boodin 1925, p. 316).

All Whitehead had to do is admit mind—and by extension feeling—as a part of nature instead of shoehorning it into “occasions” or painfully demonstrating how points, instants, and point-particles can be abstracted from events. These “are not contained in the same sense as adjectives or as the objects of science. They can only be considered as part of nature if we regard the instrumental function of mind as part of nature” (Boodin 1925, p. 317). In the end, Whitehead’s effort to root out any and all ambiguity in his metaphysical system, attempting to avoid bifurcation at all costs, paid the ultimate price of mentalizing nature. Of course, mind as a part of nature is not the same as being nature. The latter is groundless panpsychism. Dewey recognized this in Whitehead, accusing him of “converting continuity of functioning into identity of contents” of which “he is very guilty” (Ratner and Altman 1964, p. 342).

Again, this difficulty, in part, resides in Whitehead’s mathematizing everything. Bentley noticed the same problem in Whitehead that Boodin had. Although not in the published version of his essay “Specification” that appeared in the November 1946 issue of The Journal of Philosophy, his draft, shared with Dewey the year before, pointed out that “the logical technical examination of the mathematical methods is always legitimate; but the logical carryover of goals, tests, and standards is something else. In this process of trying to make logic run mathematics, the logic [of Russell, Whitehead, et al. (brackets in the original)] has advanced (i.e., weakened itself) to the three-valued or multi-valued forms,‡ and it has tried to make probability developments oriented to the old scheme; it has had many offshoots. (Consider hypostatizations. Consider concept as a norm around which the wording circulated. Consider pure quality assumed to be capable of mathematicised treatment)” (Ratner and Altman 1964, p. 466). But Dewey explained to Bentley that Whitehead’s “ultra-mathematical organizations” were only part of his problem: the heart of it was “the same as Bergson’s starting from Newtonian physics,” both were struck by the significance of temporality, but with the new physics, Whitehead attempted to apply his “temporal

‡A reference in logic to what is sometimes called 3VL or many-valued systems (MVL) that include true, false, and one or more additional values (e.g., provisionally true or false, heuristically useful, etc.).

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constructions” with relativity and space-time “to mentalize his Reality” (Ratner and Altman 1964, pp. 102-103).

Of course, this looped back to Whitehead’s mathematized metaphysics. Boodin saw this better than Dewey: “The theory of relativity raises the whole question of the relation of mathematics to the real world. Einstein and Whitehead both assume the validity of the mathematical concepts of continuity and infinity, which have played such a large part in modern physical description ever since the invention of the differential calculus. They belong to the scientific method of the Newtonian era to which we owe the foundations of the physical sciences. But like the Newtonian concepts of time and space, they are purely artificial concepts. We have no evidence that nature ever has the constitution symbolized by the concepts of continuity and infinity. That nature makes no leaps is one of those a priori dicta, like nature abhors a vacuum, which we have come to distrust. So long as there was no evidence to the contrary, the Newtonian framework of science naturally compelled conviction. But we have seen how the conception of absolute spaceunits and time-units was shattered by” the new physics (Boodin 1925, p. 307). In effect, Whitehead, in following Einstein, was putting new wine into old wineskins.

It may seem that we have come a long way from Whitehead’s use of “feeling” in his metaphysics, but it is really a significant red flag to all the problems attending his philosophy, problems noted by so many. This is why Boodin’s comment concerning his colleagues’ eagerness to thrive on ambiguities such as Whitehead’s use of “feeling,” even when ostensibly rooting them out, should give pause. It is important to note that the problem is not with process thought per se, the problem is with Whitehead’s construction and presentation of it. Boodin avoided Whitehead’s complications in three ways: first, by letting most of the moral and teleological work of his metaphysics to be carried on the shoulders of cosmic immanence (Flannery 2024); second, by a frank humility and fallibilism, admitting that it is “Far better to confess honestly our ignorance and pray for light. This confession does more to honor God than a pretended wisdom” (Boodin 1934b, p. 163); third, by avoiding Whitehead’s sweeping generalizations, namely, his parallelism that “saves the principle of continuity at the price of making an assumption (i.e., that every material change is accompanied by a psychological change [more mentalizing]) for which there is no evidence. [Julian] Huxley appeals for support to A. N. Whitehead and quotes, ‘Each event is a reflection of every other event, past as well as present.’ This is mysticism and would make science

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impossible. Whitehead ignores two fundamental principles: the principle of specificity or the emergence of new qualities under specific conditions, and the principle of levels which emphasizes the discontinuity of organization in nature” (Boodin 1957, p. 111). If the Whiteheadian reply is that event means something else here entirely, then we’re back to the linguistic chaos bemoaned by Bentley and Dewey.

In the end, disputations of the kind instigated by certain aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysics—from his ambiguous use of feeling to his mathematical conflations and mentalizations—will probably have influence only within the rarefied atmosphere of the philosopher’s lecture hall. And for good reason. Perhaps our philosophers—whoever they may be—need to have the same “genius” as good leaders in other more commonplace endeavors, in Walter Lippmann’s words, to leave behind them “a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal successfully.”

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