Science and the modern world

by Alfred North Whitehead

Further, even for self-cognition, the aspects of the parts of our own bodies partly take the form of aspects of shape, and of sense-objects. But that part of the bodily event, in respect to which the cognitive mentality is associated, is for itself the unit psychological field. Its ingredients are not referent to the event itself; they are aspects of what lies beyond that event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves. Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organising a real togetherness of alien things. But this psychological field does not depend on its cognition; so that this field is still a unit event as abstracted from its self-cognition.

Accordingly, consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe. These aspects are aspects of other events as mutually modifying, each the others. In the pattern of aspects they stand in their pattern of mutual relatedness.

The aboriginal data in terms of which the pattern weaves itself are the aspects of shapes, of sense-objects, and of other eternal objects whose self-identity is not dependent on the flux of things. Wherever such objects have ingression into the general flux, they interpret events, each to the other. They are here in the perceiver; but, as perceived by him, they convey for him something of the total flux which is beyond himself. The subject-object relation takes its origin in the double rôle of these eternal objects. They are modifications of the subject, but only in their character of conveying aspects of other subjects in the community of the universe. Thus no individual subject can have independent reality, since it is a prehension of limited aspects of subjects other than itself.

The technical phrase ‘subject-object’ is a bad term for the fundamental situation disclosed in experience. It is really reminiscent of the Aristotelian ‘subject-predicate.’ It already presupposes the metaphysical doctrine of diverse subjects qualified by their private predicates. This is the doctrine of subjects with private worlds of experience. If this be granted, there is no escape from solipsism. The point is that the phrase ‘subject-object’ indicates a fundamental entity underlying the objects. Thus the ‘objects,’ as thus conceived, are merely the ghosts of Aristotelian predicates. The primary situation disclosed in cognitive experience is ‘ego-object amid objects.’ By this I mean that the primary fact is an impartial world transcending the ‘here-now’ which marks the ego-object, and transcending the ‘now’ which is the spatial world of simultaneous realisation. It is a world also including the actuality of the past, and the limited potentiality of the future, together with the complete world of abstract potentiality, the realm of eternal objects, which transcends, and finds exemplification in and comparison with, the actual course of realisation. The ego-object, as consciousness here-now, is conscious of its experient essence as constituted by its internal relatedness to the world of realities, and to the world of ideas. But the ego-object, in being thus constituted, is within the world of realities, and exhibits itself as an organism requiring the ingression of ideas for the purpose of this status among realities. This question of consciousness must be reserved for treatment on another occasion.

The point to be made for the purposes of the present discussion is that a philosophy of nature as organic must start at the opposite end to that requisite for a materialistic philosophy. The materialistic starting point is from independently existing substances, matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications of its external relations of locomotion, and the mind suffers modifications of its contemplated objects. There are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent substances, each qualified by their appropriate passions. The organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real. The emergent enduring pattern is the stabilisation of the emergent achievement so as to become a fact which retains its identity throughout the process. It will be noted that endurance is not primarily the property of enduring beyond itself, but of enduring within itself. I mean that endurance is the property of finding its pattern reproduced in the temporal parts of the total event. It is in this sense that a total event carries an enduring pattern. There is an intrinsic value identical for the whole and for its succession of parts. Cognition is the emergence, into some measure of individualised reality, of the general substratum of activity, poising before itself possibility, actuality, and purpose.

It is equally possible to arrive at this organic conception of the world if we start from the fundamental notions of modern physics, instead of, as above, from psychology and physiology. In fact by reason of my own studies in mathematics and mathematical physics, I did in fact arrive at my convictions in this way. Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events. In physics, there is an abstraction. The science ignores what anything is in itself[itself]. Its entities are merely considered in respect to their extrinsic reality, that is to say, in respect to their aspects in other things. But the abstraction reaches even further than that; for it is only the aspects in other things, as modifying the spatio-temporal specifications of the life histories of those other things, which count. The intrinsic reality of the observer comes in: I mean what the observer is for himself is appealed to. For example, the fact that he will see red or blue enters into scientific statements. But the red which the observer sees does not in truth enter into science. What is relevant is merely the bare diversity of the observer’s red experiences from all of his other experiences. Accordingly, the intrinsic character of the observer is merely relevant in order to fix the self-identical individuality of the physical entities. These entities are only considered as agencies in fixing the routes in space and in time of the life histories of enduring entities.

The phraseology of physics is derived from the materialistic ideas of the seventeenth century. But we find that, even in its extreme abstraction, what it is really presupposing is the organic theory of aspects as explained above. First, consider any event in empty space where the word ‘empty’ means devoid of electrons, or protons, or of any other form of electric charge. Such an event has three rôles in physics. In the first place, it is the actual scene of an adventure of energy, either as its habitat or as the locus of a particular stream of energy: anyhow, in this rôle the energy is there, either as located in space during the time considered, or as streaming through space.

In its second rôle, the event is a necessary link in the pattern of transmission, by which the character of every event receives some modification from the character of every other event.

In its third rôle, the event is the repository of a possibility, as to what would happen to an electric charge, either by way of deformation or of locomotion, if it should have happened to be there.

If we modify our assumption by considering an event which includes in itself a portion of the life-history of an electric charge, then the analysis of its three rôles still remains; except that the possibility embodied in the third rôle is now transformed into an actuality. In this replacement of possibility by actuality, we obtain the distinction between empty and occupied events.