To Be Refuted at Each Century: James Ward and Alfred North Whitehead

To Be Refuted at Each Century: James Ward and Alfred North Whitehead

Interview of Pierfrancesco Basile by Richard Marshall

3:AM: At the beginning of ‘Process and Reality’ Whitehead condemns a list of what he considers are dangerous beliefs widely held by his contemporaries. Could you mention some such beliefs?

PB: The notion that experience is mainly apprehension of sense-data is one such myth. It turns philosophy into a sterile enterprise, one concerned with dialectical, fictitious problems nobody, not even the professional philosophers ferociously debating them, can really take seriously. The consequence is that philosophy has become divorced from the actual concerns of science as well as from the most urgent problems of humankind. This is, I submit, a critique worth pondering. Another myth is the traditional concept of substance as the underlying bearer of properties, a concept inherited from Aristotelian logic.

3:AM: He is indeed a process metaphysician, one who holds that being and power are the same; can you sketch for us this claim as developed?

PB: Whitehead replaces the concept of substance with that of an actual entity. In the already mentioned The Principles of Psychology, a book Whitehead greatly admired, James rejects the concept of the enduring self; a human self, he argues, is a series of momentary pulses of experience, each of which possesses duration, that is to say, it lasts for a brief moment before being superseded by a novel such pulse. These “momentary selves”, as they may be called, are linked together to form unified experiential streams – the inner life of a human being, his or her soul. Whitehead now applies this model to all basic constituents of reality. This move has the consequence that actual occasions, which are the basic constituents of things, now acquire a spatial dimension. Each occasion is thus (i) a quantum of experience as well as (ii) a quantum of space-time. Can these two notions be intelligibly unified? Is Whitehead making a decisive conceptual breakthrough here, or is he simply talking nonsense? I find this question very difficult to answer.

The link, "process metaphysician", leads to this interview:

The Anti-Platonist Metaphysician

As to why the world is repetitive in its behaviour and structure, the regularities that hint at so called “laws of nature”, I am really not sure. What I find hard to take about laws of nature is how they can somehow force things to be regular. So I am rather agnostic about laws of nature, even though I concede it would be good to know why the world is so regularly repetitive.

If atomism is taken seriously, it would seem that a pointlike object with a finite mass must have an infinite density, which is absurd. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the smallest things are not so small that we are never able to observe them, even though they are not pointlike, so atomlessness is equally unsupported. We seem to be stuck. Leibniz called the problem of reconciling the indefinite divisibility of space and time with the indivisibility of atoms (he called them ‘monads’) “the labryinth of the continuum”. It’s a good rule of thumb that if Leibniz was puzzled by something, it is a genuine and serious puzzle. Modern quantum theory further indicates that there are lengths and times (so called Planck length and Planck time) which are the smallest distances and intervals that are physically meaningful, so no evidence could be given for or against atomism or atomlessness. This strongly suggests (though does not logically entail) that the smallest physical phenomena that have any effect or influence in the world cannot be pointlike but must have some finite spatial and temporal extent (though probably not a sharp boundary).

A way out of the dilemma is to give up the assumption that if a particle, event or phenomenon extends over a finite region, no matter how small, that it must have proper parts corresponding to the subregions of that region, an assumption I call the Geometric Correspondence Principle. This principle invites us to contemplate objects smaller in diameter than a Planck length and briefer in duration than a Planck time, based on the old idea that space and time are continuous. If we give up the principle, we can envisage events and objects that are without proper parts, but which extend over a finite region. They are extended simples.

The idea seems a little alien at first, but its advantages grow on one. Having toyed with the idea, I was surprised to find it in a very clear form in Kant. In his Physical Monadology of 1756, Kant was seeking to reconcile the infinite divisibility of space with the existence of physical atoms or monads. His way to do this was to regard the monads as physically simple but spatially extended. He wrote, “A monad determines the small space of its presence not via a plurality of its substantial parts, but via a sphere of influence.” Unlike Boscovich earlier and Bolzano later, who also took monads to have zones of influence, he did not take the monad to be “in reality” a little point sitting in the midst of its sphere of influence, but as it were smeared out across it or present throughout it (maybe to different degrees). I do not normally cite Kant, because I consider his critical and post-critical philosophy to have been disastrous for philosophy, but this was the young, pre-critical Kant.