by modern physics?3 Explain how Whitehead sees the seventeenth-century conception of a ‘mechanical materialist nature’ as leading to a dualistic split between the objective world and the conscious mind. Do you think his notion of ‘the unity of the event’ solves the problem?
Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 For a useful introduction, see Nicholas Rescher, Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). See also T. Burke, The Philosophy of Whitehead (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2000).
2 For Whitehead’s own more informal reflections on the implications of his theories, see his Adventures of Ideas (New York, NY: Free Press, 1933), and his Concepts of Nature (1920).
3 See also, C. R. Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2009); D. R. Griffin, Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); E. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); J. A. Jones, Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998); and I. Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead (Harvard University Press, 2011).
4 For online resources, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the life and works of A. N. Whitehead at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/ (by R. Desmet and R. A. Irvine). For a similar perhaps less demanding entry see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://www.iep.utm.edu/whitehed/ (by G. Herstein).
5 You can find introductory philosophy podcasts and blogs with additional links at M. Linsenmayer’s website, The Partially Examined Life. Look for Episode 110, ‘Alfred North Whitehead: What Is Nature? at https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2015/02/02/ep110-whitehead/ (2015).
Notes
* Alfred North Whitehead, extracts (with minor modifications) from Process and Reality 1927–28; first published by Macmillan in 1929 (excerpts from Part II, Ch. 10, sections I–V), and from Science and the Modern World (first published by the Macmillan Company, 1925), Ch. 9
1 1 The reference is to the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), whose conception of the cosmos as a spontaneously evolving organic process influenced Whitehead’s ideas.
10 Being and Involvement: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time*
Kant’s critique of traditional metaphysics (see extract 8, above) aimed finally to lay to rest the claims of philosophers to describe the ultimate nature of reality as it is in itself. Many of those who followed him continued to practise metaphysics, and still sought to provide a general philosophical overview of the world and our place in it, but the characteristic orientation of these inquiries now tended to allow a central role to human consciousness (compare, for example, Hegel’s account of knowledge as a gradual historical progression towards full self-consciousness: see Part I, extract 9, above). In the early twentieth century the German philosopher Martin Heidegger reintroduced the fundamental question of ‘Being’ as the chief topic of philosophy. In his monumental work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), Heidegger insisted that the question of being must be prior to all other philosophical inquiries. In this he was partly harking back to Aristotle’s notion of a general metaphysics of being qua being, a general ‘ontology’ mapping out the fundamental categories of being, over and above the detailed descriptions of the particular sciences (see introduction to Part II, above). ‘Ontological inquiry,’ as Heidegger put it, ‘is indeed more primordial, as over against the ontical inquiry of the positive sciences’.
But Heidegger’s metaphysics focuses on a special kind of being, that characteristic of the human subject. His approach to philosophy forms part of what has come to be known as existentialism – an approach which starts not from the objective definitions or essences of things, but from the immediate predicament of the existing human being as he or she confronts the world (on this conception, as the famous slogan has it, ‘existence is prior to essence’1). Heidegger’s ontology thus gives pride of place to our own understanding of ourselves as existing beings in the world, ‘the understanding of oneself which we call existentiell’. Heidegger’s special (and untranslatable) name for the existing human subject is Dasein (literally ‘There-being’). We are, prior to all neat objective classifications and comfortable explanations, simply there; we find ourselves thrown into the world (Geworfenheit or ‘thrownness’ is, as Heidegger puts it, the ‘characteristic of Dasein’s being’).
This characterization of the human predicament is far from a comfortable one. In common with other existentialist philosophers, Heidegger traces the vulnerability and alienation, a kind of vertigo,2 that arises from the awareness of our raw existence in the world. But he also offers an account of our relationship to the world that is in a certain sense less alienating than seeing the world around us in terms of the abstract mathematical category of ‘extended substance’ (see above, extract 3). For Heidegger, the world is encountered in fundamentally human terms. In our dealings with the world we come across ‘gear’ or ‘tackle’ (Zeug): ‘equipment for writing, sewing, transport, measurement …’ We encounter a room ‘not as something between four walls (in the geometrical, spatial sense) but as equipment for residing’. The being of objects is thus a function of what Heidegger calls their ‘readiness-to-hand’ (e.g. a hammer exists not as an object with abstract physical properties, but in the context of its use and function, in terms of our human concerns). This practical slant to Heidegger’s ontology makes it importantly different from those rather austere earlier metaphysical systems which had aimed to delineate the objective essences of things in abstraction from the human perspective (compare extracts 3 and 4 above). To exist as a human being is, for Heidegger, already to be involved in specific projects and concerns; Heideggerian metaphysics thus turns out in the end to be not an abstract study of being, but rather an enterprise where understanding and valuing are inextricably intertwined. In coming to terms with the world we are drawn into a practical community of other involved agents, and thus into ‘solicitous concern for others’ – what Heidegger calls Sorge, or ‘Caring’.
The question of Being has today been forgotten. Even though in our time we deem it progressive to give our approval to ‘metaphysics’ again, it is here that we have been exempted from the exertions of a newly rekindled ‘battle of the giants concerning being’. Yet the question we are touching upon is not just any question. It is one which provided a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside from then on as a theme for actual investigation …
Inquiry, as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some way… We always conduct our activities in an understanding of being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being, and the tendency that leads us towards its conception. We do not know what being means. But even if we ask ‘What is “Being”?’, we keep within an understanding of the ‘is’, though we are unable to fix conceptually what that ‘is’ signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague average understanding of Being is still a fact …
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