Not even wrong? Not even Whitehead!

Responding to Massimo Pigliucci's Dismissals of Whitehead

The river and the labyrinth – part I

The river and the labyrinth – part II

Massimo Pigliucci recently shared these two articles critical of Whitehead’s process philosophy. I’m thrilled he decided to engage the work of the 20th century’s most ambitious process metaphysician. But I was rather disappointed by the shallowness of his dismissals. Granted, most of Part II is behind a paywall, so I’ll mostly be responding to Part I. This is brief, but links to a few more detailed essays explicating core Whiteheadian ideas.

Pigliucci affirms with Heraclitus and contemporary physics and biology that flux is the basic nature of things (read “thing” as a gerund, a happening rather than a fixity, which fits its original etymological meaning as an event, a gathering, a þing). But he doesn’t seem to be too interested in attempts to systematically work out what this would imply both epistemologically and ontologically (or onto-epistemically, since in Whitehead’s process-relational universe, we cannot so easily separate the special relation called “knowing” from the relations operative throughout the rest of nature).

If there are no enduring substances, only relational events (“actual occasions” in Whitehead’s terms), then presumably we need some account of how events are related (“prehensions”), how they achieve determinate character amidst an otherwise unbroken flow of becoming (“eternal objects” or real potentialities), and how anything like experience—much less consciousness—could ever arise in a world of process without an inexplicable ontological leap (“panexperientialism” wasn’t Whitehead’s word, but it fits; we could also just affirm, as he did, that all causal relations are prehensive, meaning they are “vector feelings”).

Whitehead does develop a rather elaborate metaphysical scheme, but deciding it is excessive would mean one has developed a more adequate metaphysical account of how processes and relations actually work. Pigliucci wants to affirm the basic process insight but so far as I can tell he hasn’t thought through the philosophical implications of leaving substance behind.

Pigliucci claims Whitehead never explains how experience as such might precede consciousness. It’s one thing to disagree with Whitehead’s explanation, but denying he offers one is just groundless. Process and Reality devotes enormous care to this question. Consciousness is defined as a high-grade, late phase subjective form achieved in rare occasions of experience by way of an “affirmation-negation contrast,” that is, in the contrast between a feeling of what is given in physical perception and an alternative proposal of what could be the case (or a “propositional feeling,” in Whitehead’s terms). Experience as such is mostly non-conscious. Its basic mode is the vector feelings or prehensions associated with causal inheritance. Again, you can disagree with how Whitehead works all of this out. But to say he never explains what he means is not a serious objection.

Pigliucci goes on to simply stipulate that “experience is not possible without some level of consciousness,” and offers his own physicalist IOU that declares mind is not a separate category from matter. Whitehead would agree that mind and matter are not separate categories, but knowing this would require having spent some time with his actual texts. Pigliucci’s alternative is merely a promissory note offering nothing in the way of a genetic account of how experience emerges from a wholly insentient flux. Whitehead’s panexperientialism is motivated by the evolutionary continuity that you’d think Pigliucci’s own naturalism would also demand. Without such synechism (C. S. Peirce’s term), we end up having to give some account of how mentality arises ex nihilo at some unspecified threshold of neural complexity. Strangely, Pigliucci seems to find Peirce and William James more scientific and less excessive than Whitehead: does he not realize that all three men affirmed panpsychism for scientific reasons? Peirce held that “matter is effete mind” and affirmed love as a basic evolutionary cosmological power. Even John Dewey had deep affinities with Whitehead. His approach in Experience and Nature is far closer to Whitehead’s cosmovision than it is to Pigliucci’s physicalism. “Radical empiricism,” as these pragmatists understood it, means seeking adequacy to the whole of experience, not just the sense data of consciousness. Aesthetic and even religious or spiritual modes of experience are also part of the data to be explained.

Pigliucci dismisses prehension because he claims it is not tested or constrained by physics, which, again, suggests to me he hasn’t read much Whitehead. Whitehead’s account of physical prehension is specifically intended as a detailed rendering and generalization of what physics describes as vectors, or the conformal transmission of energy.

…experience has a vector character, a common measure of intensity, and specific forms of feelings conveying that inten­sity. If we substitute the term ‘energy’ for the concept of a quantitative emotional intensity, and the term ‘form of energy’ for the concept of ‘specific form of feeling,’ and remember that in physics ‘vector’ means defi­nite transmission from elsewhere, we see that this metaphysical description of the simplest elements in the constitution of actual entities agrees ab­solutely with the general principles according to which the notions of modern physics are framed. The ‘datum’ in metaphysics is the basis of the vector-theory in physics; the quantitative satisfaction in metaphysics is the basis of the scalar localization of energy in Physics; the ‘sensa’ in metaphysics are the basis of the diversity of specific forms under which energy clothes itself. Scientific descriptions are, of course, entwined with the specific details of geometry and physical laws, which arise from the special order of the cosmic epoch in which we find ourselves. But the general principles of physics are exactly what we should expect as a spe­cific exemplification of the metaphysics required by the philosophy of organism. (Process and Reality, 116)

Again, you can disagree with his approach. But to claim Whitehead did not think metaphysics should be constrained by physics shows either a deep misunderstanding or a near total lack of familiarity with his work. And on the reading of some physicists, our understanding of relativity and quantum phenomena has only grown closer to Whitehead’s view a century ago. See for example this coauthored paper (in review) with physicist Timothy Eastman and philosopher of physics Ruth Kastner.

Regarding prehension, here’s a brief primer on the concept for those who want to go deeper:

Prehension is, in part, Whitehead’s reformed account of causation, his attempt to naturalize what Hume had dissolved and Kant had sequestered inside the transcendental subject. Physical prehension is causal efficacy as felt inheritance that is perceived in the body before it is ever represented in consciousness (ie, it is felt as bodily reception before it reaches conscious sense perception). Prehension is the relational key to Whitehead’s whole process metaphysics, so getting it wrong will make the entire scheme fall apart (as it does in Pigliucci’s hands).

Pigliucci claims Whitehead has no epistemology, or thinks we can do metaphysics without bothering about how knowledge is possible (or he did until I called him on it). He relatedly claims that Whitehead ignored Kant’s critical philosophy. Again, this just shows that the pages of Process and Reality have not been cracked (I count 74 mentions of Kant in that book). Whitehead was a very close reader of the first critique. He does not sidestep Kant, though he does reject Kant’s idea that all of philosophy and science should be understood to orbit around the conceptual structure of the human mind. Presumably Pigliucci agrees with Whitehead on this point?

“The process of cognition is merely one type of relationship between things which occurs in the general becoming of reality. … [Kant] asked, How is cognizance possible? I suggest to you the more general question, How is any particular entity possible having regard for the relationships which it presupposes?” (Whitehead, “First Lecture, 1924” in Whitehead at Harvard, 46-47).

While Kant argues that a merely apparent world emerges from the subject, Whitehead describes how the subject emerges from the world. This inversion is argued for with great rigor and detail, not just asserted. Kant’s critical analysis of knowledge presupposes what Whitehead diagnoses as the sensationalist doctrine, ie, the account shared by modern rationalists and empiricists alike that perception consists in bare universals (patches of color, tones of sound, etc.) given in presentational immediacy, thus entirely ignoring perception in the mode of causal efficacy. The sensationalist doctrine follows from the classical substance-quality metaphysics that Kant thought he had fully overcome. It turns out that epistemology-first philosophy does not mean metaphysically innocent philosophy. Even Kant smuggles in an ontology of an isolated representing subject, leaving us with a bifurcated picture of nature: moral freedom and private qualia on one side, deterministic causal mechanism on the other. Pigliucci quietly performs the same bifurcation in his dismissals of Whitehead and with his promissory physicalism: whatever the current paradigm in physics is gets the real world, while value, beauty, and experience are only affirmed in a secondary, sort of but not really real kind of way.

Pigliucci criticizes Whitehead’s metaphysics for not being falsifiable, which is just a category error. Metaphysics is descriptive generalization, and so not in the business of generating testable scientific hypotheses. Pigliucci should know that physicalist metaphysics is not falsifiable, either. The relevant tests are abductive and comparative, which is to say, which scheme of generic notions renders the widest range of evidence under a coherent interpretation while leaving the least out? Whitehead’s criteria for judging speculative schemes (coherence, consistency, applicability, adequacy) constitute a fallibilist method. His own self-assessment is the opposite of “self-congratulatory”: “the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly” (PR preface).

Regarding eternal objects, I admit they are controversial even among Whiteheadians. But I see no evidence that Pigliucci has even attempted to comprehend their metaphysical function.

They are intended, among other things, to help answer cosmological questions Pigliucci’s physicalism struggles to address: why this cosmic order, these fundamental constants, this graded relevance of possibility, rather than chaos? Eternal objects are bound up with Whitehead’s process theology, which Pigliucci has no patience for. Fair enough, but let us not pretend “good luck making sense of that one” is a serious argument. Theism, pantheism, and panentheism have occupied the most sophisticated and scientifically informed minds for many centuries.

Everything flows. Except, apparently, Pigliucci’s patience for anyone who asks what that might actually mean. There are other ways into process metaphysics; but shallow incredulity is not a serious argument against the 20th century’s most logically rigorous, scientifically grounded, and experientially inclusive attempt.